Here’s a first for me. I got an automated call from the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce announcing the availability of important roadwork information on a website. No phone number for more information, no explanation of how to access the information for those without access to a computer. Just a website.

While it goes to the heart of the value and pervasiveness of web access, there are elderly folks in my neighborhood who don’t have computers and others who rarely use them.

Has this happened in your community? Is it common in Silicon Valley? In communities outside the Bay Area?

communities, Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce, Technology

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The Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives (an Eastwick client) held a conference on the business benefits of social networking. I watched the first hour or so on Ustream (another Eastwick client), during which Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText (yes, another Eastwick client) and Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester (no, not a client) provided terrific insight into how companies are deriving value from social networking and how other organizations can get started. Wish I could have stayed on for the whole conference. A couple of takeaways:

From Mayfield: four solution areas to define the use of social networking: collaborative intelligence (instead of email to exchange information), participatory knowledge base, project management, business social networks.

From Owyang: the POST approach. Understand the People first, then define the Objective, then develop the Strategy, and only then decide on the Technology. Also understand the real objective of a social network: listening, talking, energizing, supporting, embracing.

Owyang’s slides are available on Slideshare.

The entire presentation will be available on Ustream.

communities, Forrester, Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives, Jeremiah Owyang, POST, Ross Mayfield, Slideshare, Social Media, social networking, SocialText, Ustream, Web 2.0, Writing

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I’ve written before about the need to find trusted sources on the net, including here and here, and the good news is it appears to be the trend.

In Revenge of the Experts, Tony Dokoupil of Newsweek, writes:

“In short, the expert is back. The revival comes amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web. ‘People are beginning to recognize that the world is too dangerous a place for faulty information,’ says Charlotte Beal, a consumer strategist for the Minneapolis-based research firm Iconoculture. Beal adds that choice fatigue and fear of bad advice are creating a ‘perfect storm of demand for expert information.’”

Dokoupil quotes another expert, Jason Calacanis: “‘The wisdom of the crowds has peaked,’ says Calacanis. ‘Web 3.0 is taking what we’ve built in Web 2.0—the wisdom of the crowds—and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.’”

But Dokoupil seems to put a dark spin on this: “It comes, after all, during dark days for the ideal of a democratic Web. User-generated sites like Wikipedia, for all the stuff they get right, still find themselves in frequent dust-ups over inaccuracies, while community-posting boards like Craigslist have never been able to keep out scammers and frauds. Beyond performance, a series of miniscandals has called the whole ‘bring your own content’ ethic into question.”

As if democracy and expertise are mutually exclusive. As if expertise and elitism are the same thing. As if any real democracy exists in an ideal state. As if anything less than an ideal Wikipedia model, with contributions by anyone on any topic (which was never really the case), is undemocratic.

The article’s brief history lesson notwithstanding, it’s counterproductive to equate democracy with unlearned, uncontrolled, unmediated, and without a fee. For democracy to flourish, there must be controls and trust to prevent tyranny from the one or the many. And there must be trusted experts who delve deep into and report on topics the rest of us don’t have time for. And whether it’s a mountain of inaccurate information or manipulated search results, we have as much to fear from an absence of expertise and trusted sources as we do from elitism.

The desire for expertise and trust shouldn’t be seen in any way as a failure of a democratic web or even of the wisdom of crowds, which I never thought referred to a single crowd of all people with Internet access. Communities are alive and well on the web, and just as they have served democracy well offline, they can serve democracy well online.

Charlotte Beal, communities, Craigslist, democracy, elitism, Iconoculture, Jason Calacanis, Newsweek, politics, Social Media, Tony Dokoupil, trusted sources, Web 2.0, Wikipedia

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It’s nice to be reminded of where much of our sense of value comes from. In “Value of anything is a matter of perception” (in India’s Economic Times by way of Katie Paine ), Devdutt Pattanaik explains that we value things based on measuring scales, or “maya,” and much of our maya today comes from marketing.

Which is why advertisers have been so powerful, and why Giovanni Rodriguez wonders about how they will continue to be the gatekeepers of a product’s value in the post-2.0 world. He points to this instructive scene from Madmen (a show, I admit, I’ve never watched).

So if not advertisers, then who will create our maya? A-List bloggers? Unfortunately, the answer is yes for a lot of readers who confuse popularity with trust. Let’s face it, much of the blogosphere has degenerated into an ad-revenue-driven popularity contest.

I’ve written before about my fear that the net will be overwhelmed by algorithm-induced popularity and merely continue the job television started (despite such potential) of delivering the worst content to the greatest number of eyeballs. But the A-List phenomena, rather than simply signaling a failure of the blogosphere, demonstrates our rather desperate need for maya (which is also demonstrated by the increasing sway of celebrities, who hold the power of maya by virtue of their mere popularity, not their talent, deeds, values, or taste – all of which explains the meteoric rise of mediocre people).

Still, I think (OK, I really really hope) that we will eventually replace mere popularity with better mechanisms for finding trusted sources and developing our sense of maya. Blog aggregation is one mechanism. Sites like the Huffington Post bring together multiple points of view around similar themes, with some sense that the contributors have been screened by a known and trusted source. Social networking sites also hold potential, as our conversations with some trusted people lead to connections and conversations with other trusted people, and a maya, grounded in personal (and more humanistic) values, emerges.

In the end, though, it won’t be my aging generation that realizes or fails to realize the potential of social networking. I doubt it’ll be the 30 somethings who are just coming into their own. We are all just witnesses to the creation of a platform, and like the witnesses to the birth of the automobile and television, we can’t grok its path.

In the meantime, it’s important not to lie down on the tracks before the popularity train wreck, and remember that not all popular ideas are good, and good ideas are often unpopular, and it will take individuals (and serious debate), not algorithms, to make the distinctions.

A List, Authenticity, blog aggregation, Blogging, communities, future, Giovanni Rodriguez, Huffington Post, journalism, Madmen, maya, popularity, PR, Social Media, social networking, Web 2.0, wisdom of crowds

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In the spirit of today’s move, I’ve cleaned my desk (well, the part of it that shows) and am keeping close tabs on the office via ustream.tv. Once the office closes, I’m going to start moving things into a new shed we assembled in the backyard.

As a remote employee living in Santa Rosa, I’d also like to offer up the top 10 things I’ll miss not working in Eastwick’s Mountain View office:

10. More time with dogs
9. Pizza for lunch
8. Drinks and karaoke after work
7. Getting questions answered by shouting over the cubes
6. Most jokes told at staff meetings
5. Help with IT issues
4. Peninsula eateries
3. Views of the bay
2. Learning a foreign language during the commute
1. More time with great people

Blogging, communities, Eastwick, Social Media, Technology, Web 2.0, Writing

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From Newsweek via Edge, the serious:

Life 2.0 – “A new generation of scientific mavericks is not content to merely tinker with life’s genetic code. They want to rewrite it from scratch.” A look at Synthetic Genomics.

And the serio-comic:

Our Synthetic Futures by Rudy Rucker – “What might happen if we repurpose biology to our own ends?”

“But, feckless creatures that we are, we may cast caution to the winds. Why would starlets settle for breast implants when they can grow supplementary mammaries? Hipsters will install living tattoo colonies of algae under their skin. Punk rockers can get a shocking dog-collar effect by grafting on a spiky necklace of extra fingers with colored nails. Or what about giving one of your fingers a treelike architecture?”

Worth reading these.

communities, Edge, Environment, genetic code, knowledge, Life 2.0, Newsweek, politics, Rudy Rucker, Synthetic Genomics, Technology

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At the TED conference, EO Wilson made his TED prize wish, “I wish that we will work together to help create the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity: the Encyclopedia of Life.”

According to edge.org, the wish has a chance to come true: “Five major scientific institutions, backed by a $50 million funding commitment led by the MacArthur Foundation, announced the launch of a global effort to launch the Encyclopedia.”

From the Encyclopedia of Life website:

“Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.”

What a wiki!

Check out Wilson’s wish video. His five grave threats to biodiversity (HIPPO):

• Habitat destruction, including climate change caused by greenhouse gases
• Invasive species, such as fire ants and pathogenic bacteria and viruses
• Pollution
• Continued human Population expansion
• Over-harvesting: driving species to extinction by hunting and fishing

biodiversity, communities, ecosystem, edge.org, Encyclopedia of Life, EO Wilson, HIPPO, knowledge, TED, Web 2.0

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A long two weeks: stomach illness, aborted vacation, DSL modem dead and wretched support from AT&T, both cars in the shop, daughter’s cavity extending all the way to the nerve. But also a conversation with an illegal immigrant sending his meager hourly wage to six daughters in Mexico, along with Don Imus, Virginia Tech, and 127 170 (so far) dead today in Iraq.

My discomfort is always relative and contextual, and certainly not always bad. It exposes weakness, and demands reexamination of habits, expectations, and values. One of the things I like about emerging technologies is that they create discomfort. I was approaching 30 and settling into a career as a college English teacher when the first IBM PC hit the market, and I have been regularly forced out of any form of comfort zone ever since.

And in today’s discomfort, I see issues we continue to be unable to resolve: the right of free speech versus choosing to exercise that right in a public forum with offensive speech targeted at the innocent; our inability to distinguish between the sometimes very creative expression of darkness (think Tim Burton) and the expression of darkness that foreshadows violence.

And I wonder what else we don’t see. I have rarely questioned the notion that the PC and the Internet are fundamentally subversive technologies that empower the disenfranchised. But today I wonder if we are merely redistributing power and money into the technology haves and the technology have-nots. Interesting conversation here. Says Stowe Boyd elsewhere on the changes brought on by Twitter and other web flow apps:

“And as we learn to accommodate a flow style of social interaction and network-based viral information movement, our thoughts about time, attention, and connectedness will change. We will train the neurons, like jugglers do, and we will shift toward a sort of attention field rather than focusing on one thing at a time. That’s how jugglers do it. We will see our consciousness change, and then our ethos.”

But it isn’t “we.” It’s only some of us – at least for many years to come. So are we seeing the evolution of a new form of all-embracing human consciousness (or hive mind)? Or a passing passion? Or a disconnect that will lead to a new long-term class struggle?

Well, if it’s discomfort I like, I’m very happy today.

AT&T, Communication, communities, Don Imus, free speech, Iraq, offensive speech, politics, Tim Burton, Twitter, Virginia Tech, web flow apps, Writing

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The very disturbing events around Kathy Sierra have many of us commenting on anonymity and hate (Seth Godin, Giovanni Rodriguez). My compassion for Ms. Sierra is great. In college far too many years ago, I was once threatened, and although nothing came of it, I was never able to walk by the spot where the threat took place without slowing down, looking a little more closely at the bushes, and having my imagination run off. When I read Ms. Sierra’s article, that incident immediately came rushing back. With the level of threat Ms. Sierra has experienced, I fully understand when she says, “I will never feel the same. I will never be the same.”

I’m also concerned for what this says about the prospect of sustaining the type of open online communities most of us envision.

Writes Ms. Sierra: “I do not want to be part of a culture – the Blogosphere – where this is considered acceptable. Where the price for being a blogger is kevlar-coated skin and daughters who are tough enough to not have their “widdy biddy sensibilities offended” when they see their own mother Photoshopped into nothing more than an objectified sexual orifice, possibly suffocated as part of some sexual fetish.”

Of course, most of us don’t consider it acceptable, but in a large open community, what’s left after “most” is still a very large group. It’s there, too, in every other form of community: our neighborhoods, schools – including elementary – towns, pubs, even places of business and other organizations. Some people cannot stop from turning their fears, ignorance, and intolerance into hate, and turning that hate into some form of action. While such intimidation exists, each community is severely impacted and is often permanently altered as individuals leave or new rules, often unpleasant ones, are imposed in an attempt to thwart the intimidation.

What will the effect be on the blogosphere? Can widespread condemnation redeem this community and allow things to go on as before? Yes, for a time. But as the power and scale of this community continue to increase, so will the number of incidents – along with, necessarily, the anger and frustration of those condemning the behavior. The result? Even less civility, intelligent voices silenced, fragmentation, a retreat to private communities? Today I have no answers.

Communication, communities, Giovanni Rodriguez, Kathy Sierra, Seth Godin

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