My good friend Victor Brilon was interviewed by David Dalka (of the create value blog) talking about the Nokia N800 internet tablet. One of the very cool thing about the N800 is it’s a linux powered tablet that you can fit in your pocket, that is an entirely open platform for developers. I’ve actually got a VPN client on it that enables me to access corporate mail when I’m out and about, with 8 hours of battery life I often find myself using it in airports when i’m trying to save my laptop battery 
Monthly Archive for April, 2007
Do yourself a favor and go watch some pop tech pop casts, interesting people include Kent Nichols of ask a ninja, Chris Anderson author of the Long Tail and lots of other folks I should probably know.
It’s almost poetry or some kind of koan to be pondered.
Dodgeball founders leave google and that leaves Dodgeball probably dead. Then why did Google buy Dodgeball exactly? Not for the founders…they left. Not for the tech.
UPDATE: They announced this via Flickr
That is crazy, I swear dodgeball is one of the few mobile apps (twitter, jaiku) that i’ve got any value out of. I have the same questions as Kottke, WTF did google buy dodgeball?
Dodgeball IMHO is one of the best “text based interfaces” i’ve interacted with, so simple, so easy, and easily one of the most useful social networking tools. I think we should lobby for google to sell it to Yelp.
Even more interesting to me is that one of the guys is going to join Area/Code, one of the few companies out there developing ARG’s (Alternate Reality Games) and Big Games, I told you that’s going to be big
I guess I missed all the hoopla around the web 2.0 expo, and somehow am not going to it. So instead I built my own web 2.0 application, think of it as Digg for T-shirts and it’s built on an open source tool called Pligg.
Pligg is essentially an open source, php/mysql version of digg.com, which is as easy to install as wordpress. It’s got some really interesting features like creating automated submissions via importing rss feeds, and even a tool to help you share adsense revenue with members of the site. In that way they’ve actually improved on digg in the fact that revenue shareing is already built into the system, meaning top users will actually get compensated for their participation in the site. I wonder if smaller more focused digg like sites will start drawing people away from digg (it really has an awful category system).
Anyway, the t-shirt digg or Tdigger is an extension of my annoyingly successful t-shirt blog tcritic.com (I say annoyingly because it is far more popular than experiencecurve in a much shorter space of time). Anyway, I seriously suggest you take a look at the features that basically only took a few hours to put together.
It is the simplicity of twitter that makes it successful and makes it malleable enough for people to do what ever they want with it without the constraint of what it was “designed for”. Take for example what i will call Confessr, it’s really just a web based interface to a twitter account meant for anonymous confessions, brilliant.
In a brilliant post on nform.ca, information architect Gene Smith of the Atomiq.org blog outlined the 7 building blocks of social software. This pulls together the work of various people including Matt Webb and Stewart Butterfield and provides a framework that I think is valuable in thinking about social software.
The 7 building blocks are:
- Identity - a way of uniquely identifying people in the system
- Presence - a way of knowing who is online, available or otherwise nearby
- Relationships - a way of describing how two users in the system are related (e.g. in Flickr, people can be contacts, friends of family)
- Conversations - a way of talking to other people through the system
- Groups - a way of forming communities of interest
- Reputation - a way of knowing the status of other people in the system (who’s a good citizen? who can be trusted?)
- Sharing - a way of sharing things that are meaningful to participants (like photos or videos)
The article also presents a graphic demonstrating how social media sites have different emphasis, and act in different ways.
One aspect that I think is maybe missing from this model is the concept of equity, maybe social equity but that might be redundant. I think potentially reputation may accounts for some of the equity participants build in these social networks, but it doesn’t quite cover some of the key motivations in social networks. Think about yelp or myspace, the way you build equity in those networks is through collecting, collecting friends on myspace, collecting reviews and friends on yelp (sure reviews are contributions and they are part of your reputation). I think the way people build equity and reputation in social networks is what makes a community sustainable, it’s almost the equivalent to the concept of corporate culture or “the way we do things around here”. Analysis of corporate culture may provide a nice parallel when thinking about social networks and communities. Believe it or not the analysis of corporate culture is not as dry as it sounds and involves, heros, myths, stories, norms, and values.
I don’t know about you but i’ve worked at companies that believed they could “create culture” by telling the right stories, providing hero figures, instilling values etc. There are some that would say creating culture is not possible, but possibly you can influence it. Is Tom a heroic figure of myspace? Brookers on youtube? Nish on Yelp? Is the elite badge on yelp a symbol that is creating culture?
On the topic of corporate blogging, should companies grow corporate bloggers organically or should they just hire a superstar blogger? Recently Microsoft hired famed blogger Hugh MacLeod from Gapingvoid and it really started me wondering. Clearly he’s not being hired as a shill/spokesperson, he is a very creative, subversive, change agent, and this seemed to happen very organically because of some cartoons he did about microsoft.
I guess the other question is why would you hire a blogger beyond the mundane diarist… change agent, idea generator, instigator, consultant, conversation starter?
Thoughts?
Big Wheel? Check. Very Steep Hill? Check. Thousands of people? Check
I found out about this San Francisco tradition via an awesome web site that documents inexpensive things to do in San Fran. Anyway, I caught a few minutes of the video on my N95, Nokia’s new super smart phone or Multimedia Computer. The quality on youtube is pretty compressed, i’ve got the raw footage here (about 40 megs) (right click and save as) if you’re interested.
Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like, upload your friends pictures and write an explanation of why they need to get laid, rinse and repeat. getthemlaid.com
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