As usual, Doc Searls has helped me clarify something that’s been bothering me lately.

Despite the fact that Hammock Inc. uses, and will continue to use, the term “social media marketing” to describe aspects of the services we offer clients, I’m expecting a major “bust” in the prefix “social-” in a couple of years.

My problem with the word “social-” in the context of online marketing and media is the same as my problem with the term “Web 2.0″: When something means anything, then it means nothing.

Personally, I prefer the terms “conversational media” or “conversation media” over the term “social media.” Conversation implies communication among individuals. To me, “conversation” captures the tools individuals now have to express themselves online: everything from blogs to photo-sharing and book-marking. I think the word “social” implies (at least to the marketers and media companies) that new forms of self-expression platforms are merely “the next” iteration of “audience” — they miss the transformative nature of individuals (customers) who are equal players in the marketplace.

Doc Searls is interested in this phenomenon as part of his work involving the concept of “vendor relationship management” — a mirror concept to the notion of “customer relationship management,” in which the buyer is empowered with equivalent tools and knowledge to that of the seller — and who, one day, will be able to leverage that knowledge in the marketplace.

Here’s the “quote of the day” from Doc:

“One more thing, and this is personal too. I am not anybody’s “capital.” You or your company may call me an “asset” or think you have “acquired” me, or “own” me as a customer. But I am and wish to remain a free, sovereign and independent agent of my own soul. There is no price on that. But there is far more value in it than anything you can measure with the economics of transaction alone.

If you’re not following this, don’t worry. One day, you will. But by then, the whole social-hypen thing will be a quaint notion from the early 2000s.

Via inquisitr.com, I learned that something called Yahoo! Glue has launched. According to Duncan Riley, Yahoo! says Glue was tested in India and was so successful, the U.S. version has been cranked up. I only mention this because last week I mentioned another product called Glue — watch this video to see what it does. Don’t confuse the two glues. The Yahoo! one is less than impressive upon my first glance (but then, I’m not a user of the service it appears to be knocking off.) On the other hand, as I mentioned in my previous post, I’m finding that my early sniffing of Glue (from the company, Adpaptive Blue) is making me high on it — and now there’s an iPhone App version.

I especially like Adpative Blue’s Glue because I finally get to explain what the term “semantic web” means with an easy-to-understand example of a service that begins to fulfill the long-held promise of that concept. While I mentioned it in my earlier post, I plan on posting a demo later to explain what “semantics” (in this use of the word) are all about.

Steve Rubel is my friend. Not just a digital friend who I know in a virtual online way. But a real, live friend I know in an offline, physical-world, tangible sort of way. Whenever we can, we even get together to drink Kool-Aid from the same garbage can. However, as with any friends, we sometime disagree.

This post is a response to his post yesterday predicting the end of tangible media by 2014 which I figure was written after he got into a bad batch of Kool-Aid invisible grape.

My response is in the form of an allegory:

A long time ago, some early cave-dwelling humans wanted to post a record of the great sabertooth tiger hunt they had that morning, so they drew pictures in the sand. Soon, a smart cave-dweller said, “ugh” which can be loosely translated, “We need a more permanent and tangible medium with which to communicate with those in our social graph,” so he invented painting on the wall of a cave.

Soon, the idea of drawing cave pictures to communicate led to the invention [...snip...] of the eight-track tape recorder and the rest is history.

The end.

Sparknotes explanation: People still draw pictures, but not on cave walls unless they are graffiti artists, and I’m still trying to figure out how to get some songs off an eight-track recording I have.

Long explanation: I’m thinking of writing a book on the topic, so you’ll have to wait for the Kindle download version.

As for Steve’s long bet. I think it’s pretty safe to bet against Steve as long as the definition of “decline” is firmly established.

Here’s a short bet for Steve: The Titans will beat the Jets next Sunday.

Admittedly, I sign up for lots of web “social media” services. But I don’t sign up on far more than those I do. Sometimes I’m asked how I decide what shiny new web thing to register on.

Here’s how: I have to answer “yes” to at least two of the following questions.

Do I respect the judgement of someone recommending the site?
Is it something that seems “new” and not merely another version of something I already do?
If it is another version of something I already do, is there a compelling reason to have an alternative?
Is it something that relates specifically to a unique passion I have?
Is it something that challenges me to think in a new way?
Is it something that I believe will be of benefit — or perhaps, threat — to the clients I work with?
Is it something unique and different, but simple enough to be understood by people who aren’t geeks?

Here are a couple of things I’ve started playing with recently:

Glue: I’m actually very intrigued by the concept of Glue and believe it gives a glimpse of “what’s next” in the type of “social web use” I find most fascinating. Like “networking” sites, it utilizes the concept of “following” and “followers.” However, with Glue, you don’t go to a specific URL to check in with the actions and opinions of your friends — You discover them whenever you land on a web page about a book, movie, songs, TV shows, wines, stocks and gadgets any of your friends like, or merely have viewed. See, Glue is not a website, rather it is a Firefox “add-on.” Some fascinating things about the service: The item, a book for example, can be visited by one of your friends on any number of websites — Amazon.com, Powells, BN.com — doesn’t matter. When you land on any number of sites that sell the same title, your friend’s avatar shows up — a nice semantic trick. Like any networking thing, the service is more helpful the more people you know sign up. I don’t know yet, but it also may get a bit noisy when you start following too many. And as with any social networking service, you may want to follow different people for unique reasons — i.e., you may value someones taste in books, but not stocks or wines. However, those issues won’t become clear until enough people use it. Before signing up, I recommend you watch this screencast that does a great job demo’ing Glue. If you use Glue, follow me — I’m “rexhammock” there.

Loopt: Back in 2005, there was a company called Dodgeball that got acqhired by Google (actually, it was the transaction that inspired the term acqhire.) The concept had something to do with your mobile phone serving as a means for you discoverinh others you may know who are nearby. As I had neither the desire nor device to use the service, I decided it made no sense. (From the support they’ve given it, apparently Google didn’t either.) However, as I’ve become more fascinated with GPS-enabled devices, I’ve become a bit more warm to the possibility of having something that might alert me to an awareness of friends (or enemies, for that matter) who may be close-by. Loopt is sorta like that — with additional bells and whistles you can learn about here. I’ve just signed on.

Something common about both of these services. They both enable “passive” web activities — visiting a website, for example — to be social gestures. Glue, for example, doesn’t even require a user to “bookmark” something to share it — you just visit it. And Loopt doesn’t even require that. You just click an App button on your iPhone and your posse knows where you are. If Twitter is “micro-blogging,” then these services offer their users the opportunity to do some “Chance Gardner* blogging.”

*One of my favorite movie characters of all time. Chance Gardner is deemed brilliant by others — merely by his being there.

When I discuss the topic of “wikis,” I often discover that media people — especially business media people — think a “wiki” is something “like Wikipedia” and not, necessarily, what it actually is — a platform for doing a wide variety of collaborative activities in a wide variety of contexts.

However, I just heard the CEO of a business media company here — of one of the biggest business companies in the world — describe a very astute understanding of the platform.

During a session on “the Internalization of Business Media Companies,” (that, sorry, I’m not blogging), David Levin, CEO of United Business Media, said, “”We use an internal wiki to run a global company.”

As described, the United Business Media corporate wiki provides employees to share “best practices” across global and vertical organizations within the company.

“A richness comes out of that,” said Levin. “It’s all self-organizing.”

For example, if a new conference works in one market or one company, the “case” is written up and shared on the wiki.

Levin said there is an “inherent desire” on the part of employees to share with others in company what’s working.

Sounds great, but I’d love to hear one of those employees describe the wiki.

[Note: I now (see comments) realize that the feature being reported today is not the two-week old one I thought it was, but a new, very similar feature that allows you to point to an exact timestamp on a YouTube video.]

When I saw on my RSS newsreader this morning that TechMeme was pointing to a story on TechCrunch about YouTube enabling users to change the “time code” parameter on embedded videos*, I thought the feed was messed up. Granted, I’ve started focusing most of my tech-blog watching to the weekends, but I swear that news sounds familiar.

Oh, wait, now I remember: Two weeks ago the feature was reported by the Google Operating System blog and spent several hours on Techmeme. However, I assume that on that day it got lost in all the stories about Web 2.0 companies laying off employees. (Not that RexBlog is where you should be getting your breaking tech news, but even I mentioned (and used) the time-stamp parameter setting feature on a post about Pacman Jones a couple of weeks ago.

Deja vu or not, it’s a nice feature.

By the way, here is a list of several ways you can adjust the parameters when you embed a YouTube video.

*Translation for the non-geekish: In other words, if you’d like to embed a video on your website or blog, but have the clip begin at a specific spot in the video rather than at the beginning, you can simply change a tiny bit of code to that “copy and past” stuff you use to embed it. If you’ve followed me this far, here’s the code you change: “#t=2m15s” ['m' and 's' mean seconds and minutes, so just change the numbers to the spot where you want the clip to begin]. Also, a work-around hack has been available for a long time using splicd.com.

Wow. All in one day, I learn that the Facebook platform is dead, Blogs are passé and RSS is only used by 11% of people (or some percentage of those who know what it is).

Here’s my response: 1. I have no idea if the Facebook platform is alive or dead. I’ve got left-over MREs from Y2K, however, so I think I can survive its demise, if it should occur. 2. Asking people if they use RSS is like asking people what size air filter goes in their car. RSS is now entrenched in the infrastructure of the sharing web. It fuels widgets, it automates blog posts, it enables all sorts of gizmos and thingees that the average web user would never recognize as RSS. Nor should they. Web users should click on a button that says, “bring me information about this topic or from this source.” How it gets delivered will probably involve RSS, but who the heck cares.

And about that post that is transparent flame bait, the one about blogs being so 2004. Here’s a surprise for you: I agree. I started blogging in 2000, before anyone normal thought it was alive. I’m fortunate, because had I waited until someone explained to me what blogging was going to become, I doubt I would have started. And if I thought blogging meant writing why and how lots of bloggers think blogs should be written, I would have seriously considered never again using the Internet.

Three things I didn’t know when I started blogging that had I known would have prevented me from starting:

1. When I started blogging, I didn’t know blogs were going to be tools used by marketers.

2. When I started blogging, I didn’t know blogs were going to become a mass-media platform that have all sorts of metrics that measure eyeballs and incoming links and who’s on top.

3. When I started blogging, I didn’t know that people were going to get paid to tell others how to write blog posts and their first advice was going to be, “You should write every headline with phrases like “how to” and “three reasons why” and every post should be in bullet points.

What I’m about to say is not about the blogging format that is being used by media companies or individuals who want to have a publishing platform or a marketing channel or an SEO strategy. Bless you, all. But what I’m about to say is addressed to individuals who don’t want to “blog” or “publish” or be a “media,” whether mass- or mini-. It’s just for people wondering whether or not they should have something on the web where they can share recipes or rant about being mis-treated by an airline.

While I don’t think it’s important for people to have a blog (I do and, well, it’s going to stay around for a while), I do think it’s important for everyone to recognize the need to have some form of identity online. A base. A place where they can point people when the time comes for them to have a seat at the table of all that takes place in their world — and the world.

This blog is the online base of my identity. However, if I didn’t have a blog, I think I’d at least have a tumble log like those you can set up at Tumblr.com in about two minutes. The cool thing about those is that you don’t really have to write anything, you can just post links or videos or whatever. And then, when you need to, you have a place to rant when you get treated badly by some airline. (Here’s mine.)

Also, if I didn’t have a blog, I’d be sure to have a LinkedIn account or a Facebook account where I could do lots of what I can do on a blog, but also network with lots of people who also may or may not have blogs but can do all of the same things you can do with a blog. Also, I think every company should have blogs for every product and service and person in your company — even if you don’t call them blogs. But don’t think of them as being “ads,” but more like places to explore the passions you share with your customers.

It was fun being a blogger back when it was not about beating someone else’s metrics. It was fun being a blogger back when you thought the only people reading it were those you told personally about it. It was fun blogging back when you didn’t know it was something that had to be monetized. Of course, if you’re like me, you’re still living back when and blogging is still fun.

Which reminds me: One of the reasons I like Twitter is that you can instantly block anyone who tries to tweet using bullet points.

[Note: This post is generating a little more traffic than normal, so I need to encourage you to actually read what this post says, before reacting to the subject line. I remain a true-believer in many of the actual approaches that the regrettable label Web 2.0 is hung upon. But I think the label Web 2.0 and the "gold rush" mentality it has spawned is long overdue for a correction.]

I am lucky.

I became a blogger in 2000, early enough to remember when blogging and bloggers were a small group of people who were passionate about the phenomena and dynamics of online community and personal expression and conversational media and the technologies that underpin them. Back then, “social media” was not a business. Indeed, back then — and I’m an expert on this topic — venture capitalists wanted nothing to do with anything new that had something to do with “content” or “community” on the Internet. Recall, this was 2000, the year Google introduced Adwords and four years before Google rolled out Adsense, the two juggernauts that slam-dunked (to the tune of about $20 billion in gross revenues this year) the business model proof of concept of search advertising — especially within the context of tightly focused, narrow-niche online communities with plenty of content perfect for “contextual advertising.”

Frankly, it was the “freedom from business model” nature that first drew me to the nascent tech blogging community.

In my case, I was also drawn to bloggers back then because they (we) were not giving up on the web despite the near-deafening drumbeat of news about lay-offs and failures that, from about 2000-2002, made it appear the Internet was about to be unplugged.

As I mentioned in a post the other day, I call that time the F’d Company era, because of the website that caught the zeitgeist of the period — an online forum where very scared dot.com employees spent a portion of their day speculating what shoe would fall next.

Bloggers, however, were focused on something else. It was all about, “Hey, check this out. This is kinda cool.” It was about discovery and hanging out and talking about how cool it was not to have to spend lots of money on hardware to do stuff that a few months earlier would have cost tens of thousands.

It was a time where the DNA of today’s social networking sites was established: The inclusion of RSS and a bias against anything that is “closed” or “walled” were just two of the foundational concepts codified (figuratively speaking) during those couple of years when the VCs were convinced nothing of true value could come out of all of this goofy blogger stuff.

It took until about 2003 for people to even start attaching the word “business” to “blogging.” In June, 2003, I attended a conference in Boston that claimed then (and the website still exists) to be the first business event for blogs. Click through to that link and you’ll get a sense of the innocence of those times. Yet, as you’d expect, there was lively debate and lots of disagreement. But I can’t recall there being VCs in the audience — but a few were likely there as Blogger.com had been purchased by Google a few months before. (My post-conference post from June 11, 2003.)

Soon, however, blogging and business became intertwined. And money started flowing from VCs to anything with an RSS feed. And then all this cool stuff became something about marketing rather than changing the world. And then, in October, 2004, all the cool things people were doing got an incredibly awful name: Web 2.0, which meant anything, so therefore meant — and still means — nothing. And then everything once more (in Web 1.0 fashion) began to be about startups and VCs and debates about whether or not one is worthy of being taken seriously if they live outside a 30-mile radius of Sand Hill Road.

And then in June, 2005, it got a Bible: TechCrunch, a medium so powerful that web developers soon began to equate success with getting mentioned by it — and for good reason as more and more VCs who had no idea what was going on began to use TechCrunch as a filter for finding new ideas.

One more thing happened in June, 2005, that put those collective things called Web 2.0 into the mainstream: Apple — recognizing they had been handed a billion dollar branding present and endless free content for potential purchasers of iPods people thought they needed to retrieve, store and play them — began to incorporate podcasts into the iTunes platform. In other words, they turned iTunes into the equivalent of an RSS newsreader for audio files.

Within a couple of years, South by Southwest Interactive went from being a conference where a few hundred people discussed CSS compliance issues to a mega-convention where several thousands of people attend sessions where accountants discuss IRS compliance issues. (Okay, that was a joke. In addition to the “surprise, you’re an accidental entrepreneur” sessions, SxSW still draws lots of purist geeks who wouldn’t be caught dead at an event where ideas are pitched to VCs — unless in a parody fashion.)

The upside of the end of Web 2.0

Fortunately, the Web 2.0 Bust isn’t technically a financial market bust in the way the dot.com bust was, or the way the stock market is. The 2001-02 dot.com bust was a classic market collapse in which widows and orphans lost money on a wide array of publicly traded, but vaporous, companies that had imaginary revenues, or none — nada, zilch. (Unfortunately, widows and orphans have now lost all their money in conservative, safe investments, like real estate and bank stocks.)

The only people losing money in the Web 2.0 Bust are VCs and angel investors and individuals who have poured heart and soul and savings (and friends and family savings) and credit-card debt into starting the 20th knockoff iteration of Facebook they hoped would be mentioned on TechCrunch.

More importantly, Web 2.0 Bust will result in many good things: It will once more convince a lot of smart young people that they should pursue careers in other fields — that they should take their incredibly smart minds and find cures for cancer and develop alternative fuels and teach math to inner-city children.

Advice to journalists and bloggers: Don’t be F’d Company 2.0

During the past year, I’ve sorta drifted away from reading TechCrunch and its many imitators. I still subscribe to the feed of Techmeme, but feel certain that will also end if it becomes a Chinese torture drill of drip-drip-drip daily stories whenever a small company lays off a few employees.

Over the next few months — and longer — the easy thing for tech bloggers and journalists to write about will be business retrenchments and failures. Believe me, there will be plenty of layoffs and closings.

But that’s not going to take you anywhere. It’s not what your advertisers want. It’s not what your readers are interested in. Among your readers, there are those who still believe that we’re still in the midst of something that will change the world. That opportunities still exist. The discoveries have not yet been made.

There are still those who believe that hunkering down only makes you equivalent to the traditional media you were supposed to replace.

Cool new technology and creative web ideas are not going away. People are still doing cooler stuff than you can imagine.

Web 2.0 may be busted. But Cool 2.0 is just getting started.

What is Cool 2.0?

I’m not sure. But I feel certain it can’t be explained in less than 140 characters.

Bonus links:

Dare Obasanjo “TechCrunch Turns into F’dCompany 2.0” - Another observation regarding how sad it is that TechCrunch is serving up a steady diet of schadenfreude.

Louis Gray: “The Valley’s Proponents Become Its Critics in Hard Times” - I’m thinking the same thing Louis is thinking.

With this innovative video/transcript archival feature chronicling last night’s Veep debate (and last week’s first debate), the New York Times is displaying what a news website of record should be: The definitive spot where news-related media is collected, curated, analyzed and then organized in various ways that allow individuals to search and easily find everything they need to make up their own minds. For more of their interactive campaign features, visit here.

Sidenotes: Information design wonks will love the elegance of the interface of the video archive — the timeline especially. And on the business side, note that the archive has a single sponsor who gets lots of visibility thanks to the lack of noise on the page.

(via: waxy.org/links)

Poor Steve Jobs is like the U.S. economy, rumors of his demise keep being greatly exaggerated.

A month ago, Bloomberg (the news service, not the mayor) mistakenly published his obituary and this morning, a “citizen journalist” on CNN’s iReport.com, posted a false report that Steve Jobs had a heart attack.

Jobs has been puny-looking and mysterious about his health recently, so there was enough truthiness in both the obit appearance and the fake rumor to make Apple shares fall — something they’ve been doing a lot of recently.

Or perhaps, it was the report this morning that jobs (the kind people are paid for) are what is having a heart attack is what made the stock slump.

Whatever, I think we all need to declare Steve Jobs’ health rumors a no-fly zone. If you see a report related to it, turn off your computer and TV for 30 minutes before reacting.

Sidenote: There is actually a name for a high profile — and harmful — malicious use of a user-contributed platform. It’s called a Seigenthaler incident and it refers to a series of events that began in May, 2005, involving a hoax article on Wikipedia. That unfortunate event led to lots of analysis and to tightening the requirements for individuals who edit Wikipedia. I feel certain today’s hack will lead to some re-thinking of such policies at iReport.com & CNN, as well.

Today, Dell’s Small & Media Business (SMB) online marketing group launched a Facebook “community and guide” (translation: page) designed to help educate small business owners on “how to harness the power of social media to reach and serve their customers.” Dell is calling the Facebook “community and guide” Social Media for Small Business.

According to Dell, the Facebook group/community/page will include:

Guides on how to use blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
Screencast introductions to social-media tools
A discussion board
Best-practice sharing including a featured small or medium business of the week
Deals and news from Dell Small and Medium Business

According to this post by J.J. Davis, “early adopters” — I guess that means fans — will receive $100 in Facebook ad credits.

Earlier this year, Visa launched the Visa Business Network application on Facebook.

[Note: Dell is an advertiser in a magazine published by Hammock Inc., however, I discovered this news via, well, Twitter. How else?]

Technorati Tags: dell, facebook, small business

Due partially to some Ike-related distribution glitches, but primarily to some panic buying on the part of locals, there is a gasoline shortage in Middle Tennessee. Many stations have plastic bags over pump hoses and those with supplies have lines of cars backed up for blocks. It has a very early 1970s gasoline embargo feel to it.

One thing Nashville has is a lot of active users of Twitter all over the region.

So about an hour ago, I suggested in a tweet that anyone who knows of a gasoline station with a supply, post it on Twitter (called a tweet) and to include the closest thing Twitter has to a “tag,” - a # , hashtag - #nashvillegas.

Here’s the result: A real-time, updated list of gasoline stations with gas:

Where is gas available in Middle Tennessee?

Sidenote: This Nashville phenomenon is a great study in the power of rumors to drive market-behavior. While gasoline is available all around us, the word-of-mouth engine is suggesting it will be days before our supplies are re-stocked, which leads, of course, to more panic buying.

During the days preceding the landfall of Hurricane Gustav, I pointed to an online community and wiki developed by individuals, many of whom were veterans of the post-Katrina online efforts building on their previous experience and information. That effort has now evolved into Hurricanes08.org and includes:

The Hurricane Information Center: A social network utilizing the Ning platform. The site is aggregating information and content from many sources, including Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and an array of news sources and RSS feeds.

HurricaneWiki.org: This wiki — a great model for any agency that needs to put together an easy-to-edit evolving repository of information — is based on the earlier Gustav wiki which built upon the work of earlier efforts like The KatrinaHelp wiki and TsunamiHelp.

The wiki has a growing list of directories of all types of Ike-related information including weather tracking services and lists of bloggers, Twitter-users, news-media and government agencies who are providing on-going coverage of the storm.

The folks at the new Blogs.com included RexBlog on a list of popular CEO Blogs . When I saw the list, all I could think of was back when my children were young, hearing Cookie Monster sing, one of these things is not like the other things .