“We see things as we are, not as they are…” Isaac Asmiov
BBC NEWS | Technology | Net phoning starts to win friends
A Skype survey said:
Almost half of those questioned said they knew that they could make cheap phone calls via the net using so-called voice over IP (Voip) technology.
Other operators are also looking to reduce prices and encourage consumers onto VoIP.
A sea change? or is this purely a cost driven exercise? If so why are Telcos not responding in other ways?
Following up on some thoughts from last night.
I notice Suw has published her mindmap notes from last nights talk and her own notes on the event at Strange Attractor.
Suw takes issue with Johnnie’s view on speakers:
I disagree, however, with Johnnie’s dislike of having speakers. Yes, having speakers stand up in front of an audience does create an us-them dichotomy which is especially false when you are in a room full of your peers, but in an ideal world that’s because the speaker knows something the audience doesn’t, and the audience wants to find out what. As a speaker, I don’t feel that I seize the authority to stand up in front of people talk about the stuff I talk about, I feel that I am granted grace to do so by the audience and that I had better damn well say something interesting.
On this point I agree with Suw that a speaker doesn’t seize authority and I also agree with Johnnie that engagement and involvement are what more speakers should try and do. Its difficult when you are brought up on a diet on lectures and yet move into a world of blogging. Perhaps when I get up next to do a talk I should remind myself of this.
The aspect of authority itself though is most telling. The different definitions of authority being traded with both Johnnie and Adriana using the same dictionary.com reference to multiple meanings of the same word - just like blogging offers you multiple views of the world. Authority comes when we allow it to, whether internally from being the author of your own life to giving legitimacy to speakers, bowing to greater experience.
The emergence of this authority in blogging and of etiquette and behaviour modes is fascinating - at one point someone (apologies as to who) said that we have a means of dealing with other people, its called politeness. Well yes but then as James pointed out subversion is fun too.
So is questioning and so is storytelling. Right now blogging is interesting and fun and cool and disrupting and as Alastair Shrimpton and others suggested, going to be so not cool when it hits the real mainstream and yet still full of authority because we will give it to ourselves as affirmation and to others as little dances, with passion and with enthusiaism.
The blogtrain is running, some have seats, some will stand, but we are all going to get there, because the network and linkages are king.
It reminds me of the old adage ‘content is king’ - is it more so now that personality with content and linkages are king? Or is it interativity - the ability to have somenthing to do when you get to the endof that link i.e. post comments in a blogging context?
This is one conference that actually has me thinking more after the event than during it and that’s good. Maybe it engaged me more than I thought, maybe it affirmed and empowered me more than I thought.
The one thing i wanted to say last night and didn’t manage to get it out was that people long to make connections, and last night I made some relationship connects and some intellectual connections.
If I had a moodometer on the blog it would say VBG.
Still, Grokster has turned out to be the kind of friend that assures the worst enemies. Among those enemies is a Supremely false distinciton between creativity and technology. I don’t know how we’re going to unf**k this one, but I’m sure it will take a very long time. And that tech can’t do it alone.
The most worrying point I have seen is one made by Cory Doctorow:
…what today’s decision will kill is American innovation. Chinese and European firms can get funding and ship products based on plans that don’t have to comply with this decision’s fuzzy test, while their American counterparts will need to convince everyone from their bankers to the courts that they’ve taken all measures to avoid inducing infringement. This is good news if you’re an American corporate lawyer but not if you’re an inventor creating a new way to enjoy content.
Its not that I don’t support European firms (or Chinese ones for that matter) however innovation breeds innovation. Anything that could slow this down is bad news.
Marc Canter isn’t too happy either:
This totally effects the fuure of DLAs (digital lifestyle aggregators.) I want to store my music, video and photos - the content I BOUGHT and access it from anywhere I go.
We want to provide the tools to do that.
We’ll ask all our users to agree to terms which say “I understand that the copyrights laws forbid me from illegally distributing content I haven’t paid for.”
But we sure as hell will protect our fair use rights!
So to what limits can our customers ’share’ the music they’ve legally purchased?
That’s the question.
Legal and political arguments are all interwoven in this decision, not to mention aspects of the right to intellectual property versus the commons.
I wonder if this decision will ultimately affect blogging and user created content?
And before I forget (as I have for a while) my old colleague Stuart Smith has a page up at the new Woodholmes site. And he complained about my photo :).
He certainly manages to be inquisitive and positive, managing to get his fingers into a number of different pies and undertake a phenomenal amount of work - lecturing at the Chinese Embassy is one of his more interesting gigs! Whilst I am keenly aware the grass isn’t always greener, Stuart certainly gets out and about and gets to do some exciting stuff.
(P.S. Last time I blogged him the site hits went up tremendously - wonder if this is still the case?)
Today I had the pleasure of meeting John Moore in the flesh!!! Its the first time I’ve met someone through blogging and I thoroughly enjoyed the meeting.
John was fascinating to listen to and it felt very refreshing to talk to someone who is on the same wavelength in terms of their thinking - stimulating conversation, dare I say intellectual and theoretical is a true pleasure. In discussion about Intellectual Property rights, John was talking about the creation of ideas being a social event, not an individual one, a kind of dialectic, which I certainly can say to have occured for me: my brain has been buzzing all evening.
I also got to meet John’s fellow collaborator in Mutual Marketing and also Beyond Branding author Tim Kitchin and briefly Malcolm Allan another Beyond Branding author, and Luke (whose surname I’ve forgotten) who is part of the Medinge group (forgive me if I got that wrong). I was quite amused passing around my copy of Beyond Branding as they had yet to see it (as was remarked several times - “Publishing is a funny business!” ).
I have unofficially been offered the post of PR consultant on the book. My first thought in collaboration with John was to have a competition to see how many of the authors you can meet at the same time. A variation on this is how many can you get to sign the book itself, although this will probaly prove more difficult as I think I’m the only one (besides John) who has a copy 
BTW I did keep threatening to get John to sign it but never did so the competition is wide open!
The other good point about today was that I got to read two more chapters (although ironically not by anyone I met today) of the book. I particularly enjoyed Alan Mitchell’s chapter on Brand Narcissim, here is some text taken from the website (also in the book):
According to the American Psychiatric Association’s reference bible DSM IV, the narcissistically wounded personality tends to display some or all of the following attributes:
1) a grandiose sense of self-importance;
2) fantasies of unlimited success, power and brilliance;
3) a belief that one is superior, special and unique;
4) a constant seeking for attention and admiration;
5) a preoccupation with how well I am doing and how favourably I am regarded by others.
A personality disorder? Or a brand manager’s job description? You take your pick, because the similarities are striking. After all, ‘Look at me! Look at how wonderful and attractive I am!’ is the fundamental agenda of advertising, direct marketing, public relations, sponsorship, and so on: no brand ever got successful by being a shrinking violet.
It reminds me of a number of people I have known within senior management.
Oh and because I absolutely adore this book - please go and buy it, not because it will make the authors rich (ha ha), but becuase it has interesting and profound things to say. Tell them I sent you and then I can make the PR role official
UK readers can order it here from the publisher at the discounted price of £20.
Another older posting (well earlier this month anyway) from Dave Pollard on Social Software. I have to say without being too cohernet, that I agree wholeheartedly. While I often see calls for taxonomies and classification, I can never see how one can agree on what goes where. I mean I have difficulty fitting my posts into my Categories, so how anyone else would guess that i have filed this under networking isn’t obvious (other than its at the bottom of the post ):
What does this mean for the networking components, the ‘connecting people-to-people’ aspects of social software tools? It means that each of us needs to be able to represent our networks our way, and let the software draw the bridges, connect the dots between them. It means, just as there must be no standard taxonomy to which all our blogs must conform, there must be no standard, mandatory directory format for our networks. The Dewey decimal system of knowledge taxonomy sucked. The old hard-copy Bell phone book sucked (and still does). The last thing we need is to replace these old, inflexible, restrictive tyrannies with new ones.
Joi Ito starts this conversation by elaborating that he has used his blogging, his reading of blogs and his (in)famous chat channel to recruit.
What I can see emerging is a way to amplify the strength of weak ties. (I knew this before, but it’s becoming more crisp to me now.) IRC allows me to see the style and personality of many of the people online. Blogs help me see what their interests are and focus is. LinkedIn provides a professional context for referrals. I think that supporting the process of developing your assets and character and finding a job that best suits you will be one of the single most important benefits of social software. I know I’ve been ranting about Emergent Democracy and about level 2 and 3 in Maslow’s hierarchy of Needs, but I just realized that social software may be most important in addressing level 1, finding the job that brings home the bacon. I know this is stupid of me and everyone is saying “doh” right now, but this, to me, is a big “ah ha”.
I recently hired two people who were IRC regulars. I felt very comfortable after “getting to know them” over the last few months on IRC. Of course face to face meetings and interviews were essential, but the time spent with them on IRC really added to my ability to judge their character. I realize now that I am actively recruiting from my network of weak ties on the Net and also using the Net to meet interesting people to connect with others who might be good collaborators for those interesting people. The Net has always been a big part of my arsenal of networking tools, but I think it’s reaching a whole new level.
Ross Mayfield then comments:
Ross Mayfield’s Weblog: Social Networks, Jobs & the Third Place
Hiring someone is an act of trust. What Joi is getting at is how social networking models can augment trust.
Recall that trust is greater at the bottom of the model (see its table). Private, referral based, networks provide what Joi calls context for his hiring decision — but fundamentally its the referrer putting their social capital on the line for the recruit. That and a Physical meeting may suffice in most cases, but first impressions often fail no matter what your interview process is.
There are also some interesting comments about how people come to get jobs, usually through people they loosely know. This of course validates the M. S. Granovetter, ‘The strength of weak ties : A network theory revisited’ in Sociological Theory (1), 1983. Although I have seen this in action I have never yet felt its effect. I’ve either got a job through no ties or through strong ties.
Can social software aid the process of ‘tie’ building? Undoutably, in fact it already does. I know I have built ties with a number of peopl on my blog roll.
Can it augment trust? Again I say, ‘yes’. Although I don’t expect anyone I converse with to ‘offer’ me a job, it does help me to develop a network of people who can help me, whom I can help and perhaps most importantly enrich my thinking on the world.
Iunctura Daily — Center for Strategic Relations
Use networking to grow new business relationships
Networking is so powerful for building business relationships, I highly recommend it. However, in this global economy it is difficult to reach out to oversea contacts. With the Internet this become eaiser than every (and very cost effective.)
I’m currently a member of both Ryze and Ecademy. (These sites are strictly for networking, but you may find the same in your trade group or private topical website like Applying Strategic Relations.) It’s important for you to understand how these online communities work, how you can benefit from them, and what is expected of you as a member.
Online networking isn’t selling, it’s matchmaking. You are not involved in a networking group to sell your product to those individuals in the group, but to build relationships that extend your customer base. It is more valuable to you that group members refer you to their customers, than to buy directly.
Give a full description of what you have to offer. People what to help your business be more successful, so in turn you can help them be successful. But how are people going to know what you offer if you don’t describe it fully. At least cover who, what, when, where, and why in your profile.
Fully describe your most ideal prospect or project.
More useful stuff from Iunctura - nothing stunning but it does get the point across. I think if I was using this site as a sales tool for a business it would certain focus more and not be quite so jumping but then the only thing I am currently selling is me. And you all want to buy that don’t you? Comments definitely expected
First Monday: The Augmented Social Network: Building identity and trust into the next-generation Internet“The ASN is not a piece of software or a Web site. Rather, it is a model for a next-generation online community that could be implemented in a number of ways, using technology that largely exists today. It is a system that would enhance the power of social networks by using interactive digital media to exploit the transitive nature of trust through the principle of six degrees of connection. As a result, people will be able to inform themselves and self-organize more effectively — in non-hierarchical, rhizomatic social formations — leading to more opportunities for engaged citizenship.”
A very interesting read. probably blog more on this whenm I have taken it all in.
The Doc Searls Weblog : Tuesday, August 5, 2003
World of beginnings Mike Taht has a fascinating essay inadequately titled The inner workings of the Internet mind. He launches the piece with a revisitation of Phillip Emeagwali’s ideas, which expand on what Lewis Frye Richardson was imagining in 1922
And from the Mike Taht essay:
Pre-blog/pre-google there it would sit, unlistened to, unread. Oh, if you posted to usenet news, you might get a group of people that were already interested in what you said, but just to the web? Nothing. If you were a newspaper columnist you had readers in syndication, but outside that? Nothing. It’s a bigger world than that now.
In it, everyone’s talking, and few are listening. When a conversation takes place (people comment on other sites) the amplitude of a thought wave rises above the background noise. Strange attractors (champion bloggers) redirect and reflect and amplify the thought. Ultimately a search engine listens in, and the conversation is stored in global long term memory. Sometimes a thought gets amplified so loud that it makes a jump from the internet to conventional media - I’ve been really struck lately, by how often the economist picks up on a web trend two-three weeks after it passes by in conversation.
Visualize yourself as a cluster of competing thought-waves, as lightweight and as transparent as an atom, amid other clusters of competing thoughtwaves… a one of 6 billion hyperballs within the hyperball surrounding the earth… think about the parts of you you’ve pushed into cyberspace, and how much you depend on the part of others. Think of how your ideas would have spread in the days of the Conestoga wagon, or in the days of city to city phone service.
It never ceases to amaze me, the profound things I get to read by looking at weblogs. Go read for yourself.
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