Today, Yahoo! announced the release of Fire Eagle, a service that, according to Search Engine Land, “is intended to be something of a ‘clearinghouse’ or ’switchboard’ for location and help users ‘manage location’ across the internet and on mobile applications.”
Those of you who know what this means, raise your hands. Okay. That’s what I thought. Actually, I’m not blogging about what the service does. I’m blogging about Fire Eagle’s logo. I’m outraged! Yahoo! would infringe on the Tennessee Titans’ famed “flaming thumbtack” logo. While I’m sure that Yahoo!’s designer intentionally meant to make their logo look like a flaming thumbtack and with the Titan’s designer’s, it was just good ol’ dumb luck, I still think consumers may be confused by the remarkably similar flaming thumbtack images.
To protest Yahoo!’s blatant disregard for my home team’s copyrighted logo, I have decided that when I attend Titans games, I will not use Fire Eagle to manage my location across the internet and on mobile applications.
Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape (at age 22), Opsware and Ning (translation: the smartest guy in the room), is joining the board of FaceBook, according to TechCrunch.
Andreessen, of course, has a unique position in the history of the Internet. His entrepreneurial success is also well documented. However, it was not until he started blogging that I realized what a great thinker and writer — a communicator — he is. (Although, like others, he has slowed down his blogging recently.)
I hope Andreessen’s joining FaceBook’s board sends an “openness” message regarding the future of FaceBook. Andreessen’s company, Ning, offers a platform for setting up a FaceBook-like community for your club, church, cause or company. In the past, I have perceived Ning as competitive to what I thought the longterm plans of FaceBook were. Granted, I can understand how the two could be complimentary — FaceBook is focused on macro-community, Ning is focused on micro-community. Obviously, my understanding (translation: speculation) means nothing as Andreessen and Zuckerberg are the only two minds that really had to be melded on this.
Fortunately, because Andreessen blogs, we can understand a little of how his mind works regarding the ways in which social platforms need to work together. On May 14, for example, he wrote about Ning’s integration of two “social” initiatives from Google, Open Social and Friend Connect. (They also support other initiatives like “Open ID.”)
Here’s a quote from that May 14th post:
“From a strategy standpoint, we want to enable maximum flow both into and out of Ning networks and the rest of the web. It should be as easy as possible for users to get from elsewhere on the web into a Ning network, and likewise as easy as possible to flow from a Ning network to anywhere else on the web — and ideally, while taking their social context with them. We think this makes strategic sense for two key reasons:
First, it’s good for users, and whatever is good for users is good for a service like Ning. We think that’s obvious.
Second, you don’t get lots of flow into anything on the web without having lots of flow out to the broader web.
Having someone on FaceBook’s board who advocates that point of view is a good thing for FaceBook — and the rest of us who develop tools and content designed to build community.
If you look at the comments following that FriendFeed post, you’ll note that my friend (and I don’t mean that just because we said so on FaceBook) Dave Winer commented that he, “Totally agree(d) with this.”
Because so many people have learned that it’s important to listen to Dave (even when they disagree with him) his FriendFeed comment about my “tweet” led to a robust disussion that still lingers 17 hours later.
Which leads me to the topic of comments: A small group of the people who read this blog are currently obsessed with trying to understand where “comments” fit into conversational media. Even those of us who think we at least have a grasp of social media — who know its role in de-centralizing “content” — are fascinated (and some, upset) that comments on our blogs are now becoming de-centralized.
It fascinates me that some bloggers, who more often than not, are using their blog to comment on items they read elsewhere, are becoming upset that comments about their posts are taking place elsewhere.
As for me, I love that comments are finally being recognized as the treasure they are.
I don’t care where the conversation takes place. I want to understand it and embrace it.
Why I find all of this fascinating: You know that kid who loves tearing apart physical things to understand how they work. The one who can actually put the stuff he or she tears apart back together again. “She should be an engineer when she grows up,” people will say about that kid.
I wasn’t that kid.
But looking back, I was obsessed with tearing apart virtual things to understand how they work. I was never interested in how my television worked, but I was extremely curious about how programs were written and produced. I was never really that interested in printing presses, but I can’t remember a time I didn’t wonder about how reporters gathered news and editorial decisions were made. I was also fascinated with what today I’d call group dynamics and how teams and clubs and cliques came together and grew or fell apart. I was an organizer of groups and a conversation “moderator” decades before I even realized that groups and conversation need to be organized and moderated. I was fascinated with why fans become fans and what “loyalty” is all about. I was that kid.
For almost 20 years (back to the CompuServe days) the online world has provided me (and many others like me) with an amazing laboratory in which we get to tear apart the flow of information and the creation of conversation and community in an attempt to understand how they work. For some of us, that’s like being a kid in a, well, info-candy shop.
I’ll admit. I’m not merely doing this for fun. I have a business that allows me to apply what I learn in this laboratory to improve our internal conversations and community — and to incorporate what we learn into improving and enhancing the products and services we sell. But, I think it’s also apparent that I still have a child-like curiousity about the ways in which people use technology to share with one-another and to spread information — and create community.
The most important thing I’ve learned is this: It’s not about the technology. I know so many people who are “afraid” of something because they think it’s “technology.” Frankly, technology developers don’t help things by creating products that are driven by features and functions than by ease-of-use. It still amazes me that after 30 years, so many professional marketers don’t understand why Apple has a cult following. “Cool” is what marketers think Apple is all about. “Not corporate” perhaps, you know, that I’m a Mac, I’m a PC thing, perhaps. As a Mac-tard since 1984, I’ll tell you why Apple has a cult following. They make products for people who don’t give a rip about technology. They make products for users. And even though they don’t say it anymore, their products are for the “rest of us” who don’t really care how the technology works, we just want the technology to disappear so we can listen, read, write, create, share, buy, sell, etc.
I’m obsessed with what’s taking place here. But I’m obsessed as a user and “content” creator and “community” builder and participant.
The Important Part: In the current issue of BusinessWeek (and online), Heather Green and Stephen Baker have written a great overview of where “social media” (not just blogs, but all the conversational media and social networking tools and platforms out there) are today as it relates to business. Not, as over-reported in the technology blogosphere, about the business of social media. And not about the tools and features and investment opportunities and anything else gee-whiz that’s going on. This BusinessWeek story is about how all these activities and connections and conversations that are taking place online are changing the way business is conducted.
The Take-Away: The article may not be eye-opening to a crowd who spends all day reading tech-blogs and camping-out on Twitter, but it’s a great article to forward to a “C-Level” person at your company or organization who you think could benefit from a high level view of what is transpiring — from a “media brand” they know.
The Less Important Rambling: Over the past three years, I’ve gotten to know BusinessWeek writers (and bloggers) Stephen Baker and Heather Green pretty well. I haven’t actually met them face-to-face, but we’ve shared conversations about Heather’s wedding, Stephen’s book and a myriad of other “important” and trivial matters. We’re “friends” on all those online networking things you’ve ever heard of (and many you probably haven’t if you’re not a Web 2.0 wonk). Because of that, it may seem weird, but I actually know more about what Stephen and Heather are up to than many acquaintances — and friends — I know “off line.”
For example, because we follow each other via Twitter and Facebook, I knew they recently worked on updating a story from May, 2005 with information and insight that has emerged during the past three years. In that second link, they’ve literally annotated the first article with contemporary statistics and knowledge. That’s a brilliantly creative reporting technique that I’ve never seen before as it uses visual cues from the Word document “change tracking” feature so readers can easily see where the new information has been inserted.
If it weren’t Saturday morning of a three-day weekend, I might be tempted to keep rambling, but I have much less important things that are beckoning me at the moment.
Interesting article in the NY Times today about scionspeak.com, a new marketing effort by Toyota. It also provides the current state of a non-blogosphere “trend story” about where social media marketing is today. From that vantage point it’s a good story for tech bloggers and social media marketing types to gauge how those from the real world perceive what it means to be a trendy social media marketer:
1. Being a trendy social media marketer means you’re not considering setting up a “Facebook for [Your Brand or Product Category Here].” You know that your customers don’t “belong” to you, even if they are “members.” (Unless, of course, you’re Nike or Apple.)
2. Trendy social media marketers are supporting current customers, not “future” ones.
3. Trendy social media marketers work for clients whose products have tiny market shares and whose customers like being “misunderstood,” “quirky,” “hip” or “superior.”
4. Trendy social media marketers work for clients who have customers who use the word “freaking” as an adjective.
5. Trendy social media marketers recognize that mainstream reporters love Flash websites.
Quotes from the article:
“The Scion Speak campaign is aimed not at future Scion owners but at current ones. StrawberryFrog says that it wants “to reduce Scion’s investment on conquering new customers and increasing the passion for the brand among its core fan base…At least some Scion owners who have created their own coats of arms seem pleased with the results. A Scion driver, writing online as Monsterslovecandy, created a design that included a harlequin pattern, crossed wrenches and a phoenix, and wrote on a fan Web site, “I think it came out freaking sweet.â€
It’s true, I’m not a fan of the term “content marketing” and would never apply that term to the work I do. That said, I really like some people who are evangelizing the use of the term “content marketing” who have honored this blog with a high ranking on a new list of bloggers who write about what they believe the term describes (more on that in a minute).
So since I’m an accidental (but appreciative) “content marketing” blogger, I’d like to use this new authority to explain fully why I don’t like or use the term “content marketing” except when a potential client is using it to describe something they’d like to hire my firm to do. (The same is true for “Web 2.0″ or any other term I may accidentally be associated with.)
See, I have a problem with the word content when used to describe what I create. I believe using the word “content” voluntarily to describe what I do insults the talent, skill, creativity and craft that goes into the media my colleagues and I create and manage in collaboration with our clients. I believe the term “content marketing” makes it sound like I’m marketing a service to shovel out some commodity created primarily to fill up space or time. Creating “content” is not what we do. Helping tell brand stories. Adding value to products. Encouraging loyalty or involvement. Educating. Activating. Those are the things the talented individuals at our company do with and for the talented individuals who are our clients. “Generating content” is absolutely the least valuable of all the services we provide. And I say that knowing the “content” we create is consistently judged to be among the best “content” created by people at companies like ours.
Longtime readers of this blog know my go-to muse on the topic of the term “content” is the philosopher Doc Searls who summarizes everything I believe when he says (and I’m leaving it precisely in his vernacular), “Stop calling everything ‘content.’ It’s a bullshit word that the dot-commers started using back in the ’90s as a wrapper for everything that could be digitized and put online. It’s handy, but it masks and insults the true nature of writing, journalism, photography, and the rest of what we still, blessedly (if adjectivally) call ‘editorial.’ Your job is journalism, not container cargo.”
End of rant.
I need to be very clear: I have nothing personal against my friends and industry colleagues who want to use the term “content marketing” to describe a business category. I don’t use the term — but I’m not leading any faction that’s “anti-” anything. I’m for whatever anyone can do to let marketers know there are companies out there who can help them create and manage media used in building brands and creating communities. And I’m honored that my weblog is ranked #13 on the new Junta 42 Top Content Marketing Blogs. And I’m (big surprise here) enough of a self-promoter to encourage people to go there and “vote” (hitch) this blog up the list. And I’m also enough of a search-engine geek to know that if the marketplace wants to call the business I’m in “content marketing,” then I’m not going to try to hide from the term when potential clients are searching for it. So, “content marketing” searchers, head right over to Hammock.com if you’re looking for a company that can help you solve any editorial or graphic design or video or online content marketing needs you may have. Anything not involving container cargo ship content, in other words.
Oh, and another thing: if you haven’t fallen asleep yet, you must actually be interested in “content marketing” (or custom media, customer media, custom publishing, customer media, conversational media, conversation marketing, etc.) so let me also point you to a new weblog on Hammock.com called Custom Media Craft. It’s tightly focused on the “crafts” used in our development and management of brand story telling. Oh, wait. Another term for another post.
Last night’s post-primary coverage reminded me of something. Actually, it reminded me of many things. But, the first thing that came to mind was November 8, 1994. It was the mid-term election and for an association client of Hammock Inc., a group of us helped coordinate an online election-night forum on CompuServe — a quaint little online service that used to make buggy whips. A hundred or so participants from around the country — all watching TVs at home — were chatting away about the coverage they were viewing and their response to it.
That experience led me to appreciate the enjoyment individuals have in experiencing live events in a shared-way — even if it’s from the cheap seats way up in some dial-up text-only bleachers. That night, I realized that a news event — or any type of event, say a sporting contest — is no longer merely the topic of water-cooler talk the next morning, it’s a potential real-time community gathering. A giant couch filled with friends and foes who are witty or idiotic, but who all together give an additional dimension to the event.
Since 1994, I’ve participated — and hosted — many such online gatherings, primarily among a small group of friends or colleagues. Often the gathering is done via Instant Messaging or Internet Relay (IRC) if the group is comprised of tech-savvy participants. In the past, I’ve discussed on this blog how live events can be experienced in a completely new way when such “back channels” are available so that friends — or even strangers — can interact with one another about what they are both observing or participating in.
Last night, I had an I-see-the-light moment on Twitter when I realized that it has become — for a small segment of the world, at least — a giant real-time peanut gallery for experiencing events. I’ll admit, my additions to the conversation were mostly goofy or rude comments about what was taking place — sorta like watching the State of the Union Address on Comedy Central, but not funny. Others, however, were providing insightful and informative data (@patrickrufinni, for example).
While I’ve occasionally used Twitter for comments about sporting events, this is the first time I’ve jumped into the deep end of posting tweets on Twitter at a blistering pace. (Which is something I often un-follow people for doing.) My tweets were not worth reposting here as they — this can be said about Twitter in general — lose their meaning out of context.
However, I do know this. Using Twitter sure beats screaming at the TV.
Sidenotes: Twitter sure could benefit from having a feature that allows the creation of “groups” for topic-specific tweets. Also, the folks at Politweets.com are using the Twitter API to isolate and display tweets that include the names of candidates. A little bit glitchy but a very creative example of how Twitter can be used for something other than a confusing stream of unrelated chatter.
Note: I’ve also cross-posted this on my “People Page” at Hammock.com.
I apologize for the jumpiness of
this video I grabbed to demo how my
screensaver uses a stream of photos from my
Flickr-contacts’ photos generated by
Dave’s software, that can found at
at FlickrFan.org.
Dave Winer often describes himself online as a “media hacker.” And today, he’s releasing a new product called — at least for now, FlickrFan. It is quite a cool media hack. And by hack, I don’t mean anything malicious, but I mean, something that’s a result of being able to experiment with technology and content one enjoys and understands in ways others may not.
In this case, the product is a simple desktop tool (Mac only now) that builds on some of his earlier developments related to RSS and OPML and Radio 8 (an early desktop RSS newsreader/blog editing tool). I don’t claim to have any understanding of how it does what it does, but having used it for the past 24 hours, I can tell you what the result is: It streams photos from your Flickr contacts — or other designated sources like the AP photowire — onto your HDTV while it’s in the screen-saver mode. It works also as a screen saver on a Mac.
As your contacts update their Flickr photo stream, your screen saver becomes a constant slideshow of images from your friends. I must admit, while I have lots of Flickr contacts and even subscribe to an RSS feed of them, viewing them as a screen saver provides a much more serendipitous means of discovering what your friends are up to. I added a brief demo of what’s showing up on my FlickrStream — and before you ask, fimoculous is my friend who posted shots from the cool party.
There is more the product does — i.e., it backs up your Flickr photos and it provides a desktop folder where you can drop photos that are automagically posted to Flickr and it will create a Twitter tweet when you add a photo to your Flickr account. But for now, I’m just enjoying the way all those photos from my friends are just showing up on my screen saver.
By the way, I have a Mac mini set up with a HD projector in our office conference room. I’m already thinking of ways we will be using photos from Flickr.com/hammock in that room using FlickrFan.
Following USA Today and other newspapers owned by Gannett, the Nashville Tennessean is in the process of relaunching its website with new “social media” and personalization tools. It even has a catchy new Web 2.0ish slogan: “Powered by You and The Tennessean.
Observation: Pluck recently announced plans to develop features for SiteLife that utilize Facebook and OpenSocial APIs, leading, in theory at least, to some far and distant promised land where one can centralize and manage ones identity and online activities with a little more ease. Did I say far and distant?
Opinion: My favorite online version of the Tennessean continues to be m.tennessean.com, the stripped down mobile version.
“OpenSocial is a set of common APIs for building social applications on the web. These common APIs mean that developers only have to learn once in order to start building social applications for multiple websites, and any website will be able to implement OpenSocial and host social applications.
Later today, I’ll jump back onto the this thread. This is a significant — and long anticipated move. And one I’ve been looking forward to personally. I’ll explain why later.
Later: Okay. I’m back on the ground and in the office. I haven’t read everything that’s erupting on this topic, however, one of the key players in this news, Marc Andreessen, provides the inside information. (It’s a bit geeky, however. If you don’t know what an open web API or “container” or “app” is, you may get a little lost).
Quote:
“Open Social is very practical. Many standards die an early death because they are too complicated and hard to implement. Open Social is what you want in a standard — it’s expansive enough to do useful things, but limited enough to be very easy to implement, both for containers and for apps.
Rather than add to today’s noise from those blogging on this development, I’ll point back to a rather long post I wrote related to the subject in July in which I said, “I predict Marc Andreessen is the guy who can ‘bring everyone together’ on this topic. He’s got the track-record, insight, clout, incentive and, well, if you’ve read his blog, the ability to communicate why interoperability is in the best interest of all players — and users.”
Dave Winer says, “Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don’t work….When Google makes their announcement on Thursday, the question they should be asked by everyone is — How much of my data are you letting me control today? That’s pretty much all that matters to anyone, imho.”
Marc Cantor says, “Lets get a whole BUNCH of these kind of APIs and then platforms like PeopleAggregator (Marc’s company) can support them ALL!…It’s great to see Ning, Xing, Plaxo, LinkedIn and hi5 on the list…The more the merrier! Now we just need MySpace and Bebo and along with Orkut - we’re really starting to rock!…So there you have it - the future has arrived and it rocks. Thank you Google (and I have to admit I never thought I’d be saying that.) Now what about Apple?
Speaking of Jeff Jarvis (see previous post), I am looking forward to participating in Wednesday’s “Networked Journalism Summit” that Jeff and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism (Jeff heads its interactive journalism program) has organized with a grant from the MacAurther Foundation. The summit is designed to “bring together the best practices and practitioners in collaborative, pro-am journalism.” (I’m hoping it’s like a pro-am golf tournament as I’d like to be paired with a really good pro.)
The premise of the summit:
“…even as journalistic organizations may shrink, along with their revenue bases, journalism itself can and must expand and it will do that through collaborative work. The internet makes that collaboration possible and we’ve barely begun to explore the opportunities it affords. A year or two ago, the point of such a meeting might have been evangelizing this idea. But in that time, a number of great projects in collaborative, networked journalism have taken off. So now is the time to share the lessons — success and failures — from these efforts and to determine what’s needed to move on to the next goals. By bringing together about 150 practitioners from all sides, we hope that the meeting itself can spark new partnerships and projects.”
In a minute, I’ll recall a couple of reasons why you don’t want your pre-launch startup to be reported first in the New York Times, but before that, I must lament that a group of folks brilliant enough to create all those incredible Google products aren’t out finding cures for cancer and instead, are re-skinning an RSS newsreader and calling it sliced bread.
I feel like I’m missing something, but why would it take that brain trust to come up with something anyone using an RSS newsreader could do in less than five minutes? In fact, I did it last week in about 45 seconds. Realizing that it’s a productivity brickwall to visit all the “update” pages my social network keeps buzzing me with, I did the following:
1. I added a folder to my RSS newsreader (I use Netnewswire as it synchs with Newsgator.com which has a wonderful iPhone interface at m.newsgator.com).
2. In that folder I added the RSS feeds from the following: “Tweets” from those I follow on Twitter, Status updates from Facebook friends and new photo posts from my Flickr friends. The screen grab on the left shows how my friend feeds are displayed — that’s a photo of Robert Scoble and his son, Patrick, flowing along my river of flickr friends.
3. There’s no #3, I just did #1 and #2 and I now have the ability to keep track in one place (actually three, if you count Netnewswire, Newsgator.com and m.newsgator.com) of activities of friends in my social network. (I could add YouTube updates, etc., however I haven’t found a way to do LinkedIn updates without creating an email to RSS feed hack. Also, if I wanted to head in a different direction, I think I could hack something using lijit.com or tumblr.com that would work in much the same way and also integrate as a Facebook app, as well. But hey, I don’t want to show off.)
Now, if I — a user, not a developer — can aggregate all of those feeds into a newsreader in about 45 seconds, why would I want another newsreader to do that? Moral of this chapter: if you’re brilliant enough to create Google Maps, Gmail, et. al, move on to inventing a flying car or something.
Chapter 2. Shades of Odeo
Over the years, whenever I see an article in the New York Times about a pre-launch startup created by some really smart and successful peopole who did incredible things at a previous job — I cringe. The last place you want to be floating a pre-beta startup if you’re previously successful is in the New York Times.
I call it the Instant Company curse, named for a New York Times Magazine cover-story by that name by Po Bronson (thank you, NYTimes.com newly-free archives) that appeared on July 11, 1999. It was about how a VC (one already mentioned in this post) funded some can’t miss tech-gurus who, with Po Bronson tagging along, created epinions.com. (While something exists today by that name, it has little to do with the startup in the article — and a google search will probably turn up lawsuits still bouncing around some courts related to it.)
Then, there was the time the very-same reporter who wrote today’s article did a feature on some guys creating a business that was going to be the eBay of podcasting. Needless to say, the world didn’t actually need an eBay of podcasting — and then, well, iTunes started supporting the whole attachments to RSS feeds thing, and the rest is history. I think the founder of Odeo (oh, that was the name of it) learned his lesson and, next time, he waited until it was well up the adoption curve before talking to the New York Times about Twitter.
Anyway, today, I thought of those pre-launch articles about epinions.com and odeo.com when I read about “FriendFeeds.com.”
Moral of this chapter: A John Markoff article about your pre-launch startup is not money-in-the-bank. Come to think of it, money-in-the-bank is not money-in-the-bank if there are easier ways to solve the problem your startup is supposedly solving.
Today, Yahoo! announced the release of Fire Eagle, a service that, according to Search Engine Land, “is intended to be something of a ‘clearinghouse’ or ’switchboard’ for location and help users ‘manage location’ across the internet and on mobile applications.”
The Important Part: In the current issue of BusinessWeek (and 
It’s true, I’m not a fan of the term “content marketing” and would never apply that term to the work I do. That said, I really like some people who are evangelizing the use of the term “content marketing” who have honored this blog with a high ranking on a new list of bloggers who write about what they believe the term describes (more on that in a minute).
Following USA Today and other newspapers owned by Gannett, the Nashville 
Speaking of Jeff Jarvis (
I feel like I’m missing something, but why would it take that brain trust to come up with something anyone using an RSS newsreader could do in less than five minutes? In fact, I did it last week in about 45 seconds. Realizing that it’s a productivity brickwall to visit all the “update” pages my social network keeps buzzing me with, I did the following:
