chieftech’s blog

The Engadget site is taking a break from comments for a while, which appears to have renewed the debate about the relationship between comments and blogs elsewhere - like on Mashable and WebWorkerDaily. It is of course somewhat ironic that this has stimulated so much discussion, in comments.

This is a contrast to other people in my personal blogosphere like Luis Suarez and Andrew McAfee who have both recently promised to renew their efforts to engage with the people that comment on their sites.

Now, this isn't a new debate for me and I remain firmly committed to comments here on the Chieftech blog, even if I am a little tardy in replying sometimes.

But I think it is worth revisiting this issue in this case, in respect to the problem of comments on high volume sites. The basic argument appears to be that if you are really popular, then switching off comments is ok because it is too impractical to manage. I have some sympathy with this, however, I think this is really a symptom of a different problem:

• Have you ever actually sat down and thought about what you want to achieve with allowing people to comment on your site and how you will engage with a community of that scale?
• If you are suffering from trolling or too much bad behaviour, then perhaps its the community (or lack of) around you blog that's the issue?
• If you are literally overwhelmed by comments or spam comments, do you have the right comment management tools in place or alternative method for people to contribute without commenting?

I've said before that there are no rules for using social media. There is nothing wrong with using social technologies for publishing (rather than conversations). But a blog that doesn't support conversation is just a Website, even if its written frequently and in a conversational style. I don't have a problem with that.

Perhaps what is more important, if you are running a site for profit or some other outcome other than personal learning, does turning on or off comments support that goal?

Hat tip to Luis for starting the debate again for me... :-)

Mark Nash proposes a nice little social media triaging system (Critical > Delayed > Rejected).

It reminds me that I blogged about being ruthless with RSS feeds back in 2007, but since that time the volume and access to different information and activity streams has definitely grown. Unfortunately it is also a reminder that our personal information practices that ultimately define our ability to control information overload continue to lag.

I wrote another piece about living with email, touching on similar issues. While the technologies are different, the common themes are:

• Information overload is as much a result of poor information managament practices as it is about the volume of information created by the technology.
• Individuals can't deal with information overload on their own, it requires collective effort (there are a number of dimensions to this).

Unfortunately, at least in an organisational context, until we start taking information work more seriously I think many people will continue to find information overload an issue.

In the meantime, remember that its ok to be ruthless with your social activity consumption.

Hmm. I'm trying to work the significance of this research (if any). However, more data is good, right?

I can't but help think that their perspective is all wrong, rather than anything else. I get the impression that social networking and social media is thought as something out there beyond the walls of the organisation, rather than something that is in fact everywhere. Does this explain why they are surprised that these tools are being used for collaboration within and between organisation, not just between companies and their customers?

Their main conclusion is the "need for stronger governance and IT involvement", but again I wonder if in fact what they mean is that these new technologies have a broader impact beyond marketing and therefore need involvement from across the organisation to determine how to best integrate them into business as usual.

I come back again to the Headshift/Dachis Group's Social Business Design model - focusing on governance and IT involvement is just a symptom, when what is needed is new perspectives to management.

Hat tip to Oliver.

Who needs OtherInbox?

Anyone who can't keep up with their email

OtherInbox is great for people who shop online, interact with friends on social networking sites, subscribe to mailing lists and newsletters, try new software and websites, and more. It’s even perfect for recruiters listing job openings or real-estate agents with properties for sale.

This sounds really, really good! While I try to use RSS as much as possible, I still find social networking and social media notifications waste a lot of time and space in my inboxes.

But I'm not sure I want to hand over my email password. And I'm sure corporate IT managers are going to really love this once they bring in support for Outlook, POP and IMAP mail services.

Thoughts?

Learn one thing about Twitter: it is a unique medium of 140 character
or less communications. It's like the haiku of the real-time Web. If
what you have to say is often longer than those 140 characters, maybe
you're using the wrong medium.

Dig this. When you're at a large conference with (say) 20 people live
tweeting every interesting sentence from every speaker, are you
thinking about your audience? I seriously hope not, because you're
often delivering them a bundle of jumbled thoughts. And when you start
retweeting each other, and then people not at the conference start
retweeting *that* everything stops being real-time and becomes
wrong-time. We don't yet have filters and interfaces that can make
sense of this stuff.

Dig this too. There are alternatives. While celebrations of YouTube
and Twitter happen at dedicated events, you're overlooking less-used
social technologies with great features, like Viddler and Posterous.
Look at my last few Posterous posts: they were from a conference I
attended. But instead of burying my nose in my BlackBerry for two
days, I listened and took notes, and when I saw something worthy of
250 or so words, I wrote a short post for Posterous and pushed the
info to Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Xanga, Plurk, and more. What's up.

Experiment with Web 2.0 technologies. Think about your audience. Do
what's valuable for your community. Engage.

This was worth quoting in full. Mark Drapeau raises some good points. There is no doubt social media is changing how with interact at conferences and other events. But now that we've had a bit of time to experiment with Twitter, which was fine, perhaps it is time to step back and look at what actually works best?

It all started on July 6th and since then we’ve had 2,400 people on the plinth - remember the laughs, the tears and the just plain nakedly outrageous. One & Other, here are your best bits…

This video of highlights from One and Other in the UK made my morning. Go on, take a break for 4 minutes and watch it. Hopefully you'll see, this wasn't simply a remake of Big Brother style reality TV. Its something quite different.

BTW There are a few moments that probably aren't safe for work, if you work for philistines that is ;-)

The online production was also a Headshift project.

According to Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, the difference between a market and a gift economy is that the former is based on scarcity while the latter is based on abundance. And he says a gift economy fosters what Robert Putnam called ‘social capital', that is, it forms connections between people.

Nett is a technology magazine targeted at Australian small and medium businesses, although I think this short introduction to the gift economy is as a good as any. I like the focus on scarcity versus abundance in the quote above. Some of you might realise that the idea of the gift economy is important in social media (which I suppose is why this topic popped up in Nett magazine).

However, I think the concept of scarcity versus abundance can also help with understanding how to apply social computing successfully inside the enterprise. This has less to do with building social capital and more to do with adopting an attitude that 'bits' are plentiful and a resource to be used, not constrained - it also means you can afford to fail. Obviously it follows that if you adopt an IT abundance strategy, you'll need the right systems to support an IT abundance approach.

Social capital inside organisations is still important too, but the ecosystem of public good is different from the dynamics of the closed "internal organisational good" ecosystem. You can support that internal gift economy with an abundance approach to IT, which is how you build internal social capital.

Free wasn’t what I expected. Its not a manifesto for simply giving everything away. Instead its a broad discussion of the economics of free and the disruptive business models that the Internet has created. As part of this, the book also looks the motivation for people to participate without compensation and behavioural economics, including the inherent conflict this creates for organisations that deal in content and intellectual property (like the media, gaming and music industries).

Free is written by Chris Anderson, editor at Wired Magazine and the author of The Long Tail. Fundamentally, if you accept his arguments, Free comes down to set of business model that depending on your viewpoint either take advantage of the Internet or force you to change how you market your products and services because of it. These are:

1. Direct Cross-subsidies
2. Three-party markets
3. Freemium

On the Internet, the first two models are really an extension of traditional marketing techniques - e.g. advertising on television and radio. However, the popular Freemium model is really one that has come of age in the digital Internet era. The Freemium model is particularly evident in the software industry and can be seen as a distinct variation of the direct cross-subsidy model - instead of a cross-subsidy across products purchased by a customer, a minority of premium customers pay for the majority of free customers. This is not as unfair as it sounds, since the overall scale of the user base actually benefits those premium customers but ensuring a better, well supported and scalable product.

A fourth market is non monetary markets. In a way this is a challenger to all of the above business models, if critical mass is achieved. Wikipedia is the classic example, but Anderson also includes file sharers under this banner. Unfortunately non monetary markets reflect the nature of the beast - Anderson says he doesn’t condone copyright infringement, but that in effect it would appear a non monetary digital market trumps any other kind of digital market. This is very much in the vein of Negroponte’s classic, Being Digital.

The only defence against non monetary markets appears to be related to identifying needs that the market can’t serve, such as convenience. For example, in Anderson’s view paying a small fee for a music track from a site like iTunes is much easier for the vast majority of adult users, who lack both the time and patience to deal with P2P. Alternatively, companies are faced with the choice of adopting this market as part of their business model. For example, make your profit on live events but tap into non monetary markets as a low or no cost way to promote your brand.

In this respect Anderson acknowledges that there is a fundamental different between selling things that are made atoms versus bits in the digital world. This is positioned essentially as the difference between the scarcity of the physical world and the abundance capacity of the digital environment. To be successful we need to reconcile both and the challenge is that we are a point of transition, trying to work what will be free online, what people will pay for online and how to draw a line between that and the physical world where traditional rules still apply.

Personally I thought this was a great book - the ideas above have certainly got me thinking about not only the bigger picture of the impact the Internet is having, but even my business model as a consultant (I’m actually already a participant in the free-based economy). However, I think there are still lots of unanswered questions:

• How will we manage this transition so that society isn’t too badly affected in the process?
• Applying the concept of the Long Tail (Anderson’s earlier book), how will people on the tail make a living or will this just create a new kind of digital economic divide?

These aren’t arguments against change, just a statement of the issues and challenges ahead of us.

Also, on the theme of abundance versus scarcity, I would also like to see someone write about the idea of applying the digital abundance idea inside organisations in relation to Enterprise 2.0 (a kind of “Free Enterprise 2.0” - maybe I’ll talk about this in another post one day).

As part of his own promotion of the book, Anderson did release the whole book online so it could be read gratis. Unfortunately that promotional period has expired so you can’t access the free text version of Free on Scribd anymore, but a free audiobook is still available for download.

On 6 July 2009, participants at Reboot Britain (www.rebootbritain.com) were invited to make their own idea of what would help to reboot Britain, in Lego.

Why? The idea is that building with the hands prompts different ways of thinking ... ideas emerge ... the process gives a voice to the regular delegates at this grand event with big-name speakers ... and everyone is drawn to view each others' interesting, clever, pretty models.

Make yourself a cup of tea and view the slideshow.

David Gauntlett, University of Westminster - www.makingisconnecting.org

I watched some of Reboot Britain's live feed last night... but as that and even the Twitter stream fade, this hands on social media is an interesting memory from the event. However, to the point above about giving 'regular' delegates a voice, Julian Dobson comments in his blog that all this participatory media (Lego or otherwise) means "bog-all out there in Britain's Twitterless wastes". I have some sympathy for his point of view, but this issue of cathedral and bazaar is not a new one. Technology is enabling more people to see inside the cathedral at least, but the onus is still on those where ever they participated to go out, share and create their own bazaars where they are really needed. Its also very easy to say that social media doesn't have any impact on real people or real issues if you haven't actually given it a try - as I imagine some people would say about the Lego, why would I want to represent my ideas in little plastic building blocks? Because if it comes to nothing, it hasn't cost you anything either.