Do you 'get' blogging?

I had lunch with a good friend of mine today. My studies had ensured we hadn't spoken for a while and it was nice to be able to catch up on all the news from the world of real estate. As often happens these days the conversation turned to the Internet and he made the comment that he just wasn't excited about blogging. It's a comment I completely understand.

Around the middle of this year, I hadn't blogged a word. I knew about blogs at an intellectual level but that's as far as it went. My first post questioned how a small business could make use of a blog. I was openly skeptical.

The funny thing is that just a few months later I'm blogging like crazy and am excited about it. There's so many ways a blog can be used at both a personal and business level. If you want an some ideas visit Andy Wibbels.

What I've discovered about blogging is that it's an experiential learning process. Simply reading this post or Andy's blog will never explain blogging properly - or well. Blogging can only be understood by doing and being.

I hope my mate (and a bunch of other friends too) take up blogging. There's two reasons I have for this wish. Firstly. he'd make a damned fine blogger. As a thinker he's first class and his blog would be useful for his team, his customers, and his colleagues. Secondly, there are very few bloggers in the WA real estate market. By starting now he could steal a march on the competitors and be a real leader in the industry.

Now the test will be to see whether anyone has read my blogging tips on commenting.

Web trends

Couple of useful sites for measuring how your blog is performing.

Market Leap

Alexa

My blog hasn't even made it onto the radar screen yet. Ah well, best I keep it quite.

Trulia Real Estate Search - Jobs

Trulia Real Estate Search - Jobs: "We are looking for a very talented communicator and social networker to act as the Community Evangelist for Trulia among the real estate 2.0 community. That means that you should already be active in various social networks - for example, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Yelp, Active Rain, Trulia Voices, etc. Ideally you actively contribute to your own blog, and have a list of blogs that you love to read regularly. You should have an opinion on how technology is affecting agent marketing and ideas on how to help agents better market themselves online. You will be a Trulia Voice in the community, and must be passionate about technology and how technology is affecting real estate. "

Now this is a job that appeals. Only problem it's in the US.

When porn turned parody turns into farce

Here it is, one of the biggest jokes circulating the Internet today. As reported on the Lessig Blog, social bookmarking site, Digg, has removed what they call "adult content" despite all of the content of the video having been previously shown on the Fox News Network.

Cool work Digg, nice to see you becoming the new world censorship authority. The world needs another one - not!

UPDATE: As of last night Digg has done the right thing and removed the restriction.

A real Web 2.0 real estate platform

I posted yesterday to Twitter that I thought realestate.com.au was so Web 1.0 - it's flat out boring and feels like it's been produced by a monopoly media company - hmmm. That aside, take a look at Zillow. Now here's a real estate platform - and note the word platform not portal - that provides the interactivity that makes a site worth visiting. Take a poke around and see how it provides people with "ownership" of their information and the way people can add value to the site and to their own experience by publishing information that's relevant to their own circumstances.

Is Zillow coming to Australia any time soon? Perhaps the API platform allows this to happen now. Someone who's a bit techie might be able to tell me.

Google search the platform

By allowing Google to track my web browsing, Google becomes a more effective knowledge management platform.

Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? The crowd. | Buzz Machine

Jeff Jarvis sets out the case for people who contribute to a platform being rewarded for their contribution, possibly beyond just being able to conduct a free search. He says,

The thing that’s new about this new world is that we don’t just consume. In fact, the act of consumption is now an act of creation. There are so many examples. When I search on Google, I am finding stuff for me but when I click, I am adding to the wisdom of the crowd that makes Google more effective for every searcher who follows me.

While I'm not convinced that we should be sharing in Google's ad revenue that they might pick up when I do a search and click on a paid link, Jarvis goes on to make the point that our individual actions create collective value.

When I consume content and want to save it on Del.icio.us or other such services, that’s an individual act. But the tags we create together yield amazing wisdom of the crowd that can be useful in helping people discover content, in organizing the web around topics again, in improving search results, and even in improving ad performance.

I contend that, power-users of sites such as Google, Flickr and YouTube aside, most people's payoff from participation on a platform is better search, a chance at accidental fame, and faster access to information. At least that's the payoff I'm happy with, but then again I may be too easily satisfied.

Why would anyone buy Office?

Why would anyone buy MS Office when you can download Open Office free - works great - or use Google Docs online, again free? The only reason I still use Word is the integration with EndNote, a programme that handles all my academic citations.

What is Web 2.0 | Tim O'reilly

There are many who argue about the definition of web 2.0, but it was Tim O'reilly who claims to have come up with the terminology - and it's stuck. More than just a simple definition, which would do the concept injustice, O'Reilly sets out a meme map that provides a visual clue of the complexity of the ways people and businesses are collaborating on the net.

There are several key components to what O'Reilly claims are the core of web 2.0. I'll set these out as follows:

1. The web as the platform. The days of packaged software is over - move what you do onto the web.
2. Data.

   The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces.

3. Harness collective intelligence. Sharing through wikis, blogs, and tagging makes us better and smarter both individually and collectively.
4. End of software release cycles. The constant beta and learning from customer behaviour. Software is being constantly updated and improves with greater usage.
5. Simple, light programming. Think RSS, loose coupled, and co-operating.
6. Software above and beyond the device. Get your product onto any device - a computer, mobile phone, i-pod, fridge, skateboard - you name it.
7. Create a rich user experience. Back in the day we had Word as a "rich" experience, but on a desktop. Now we can have the same experience on the web with Google Docs
   

What Enterprise 2.0 is all about

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Are You Ready for Web 2.0? | Wired

Are You Ready for Web 2.0?: "Web 2.0, according to conference sponsor Tim O'Reilly, is an 'architecture of participation' -- a constellation made up of links between web applications that rival desktop applications, the blog publishing revolution and self-service advertising. This architecture is based on social software where users generate content, rather than simply consume it, and on open programming interfaces that let developers add to a web service or get at data. It is an arena where the web rather than the desktop is the dominant platform, and organization appears spontaneously through the actions of the group, for example, in the creation of folksonomies created through tagging."

The article went on to explain how there are many web 2.0 skeptics and show-cased some of the new software companies producing platforms providing new ways of mixing and compiling information so as to be more useful to users.

The web 2.0 validator

This blog (the one you're reading now) only scored 13/66 using the Web 2.0 Validator.

How does your site stack up?

Lessig on free culture

Having just finished reading Lawrence Lessig's book, Free Culture, I thought it would be an idea to attempt to summarise it in some way here. No need.

In a video of Lessig speaking at TED found on his blog, he outlines the major points of his thesis; the law isn't always (almost never?) based on common-sense and copyright laws as they are turn our children into pirates and deny millions access to culture in ways that utilise modern technologies. Whilst some argue that Lessig's ideas don't make commercial sense - possibly that he's so far left as to be anti-business/anti-copyright - this is far from my impression. Rather Lessig is pro-copyright in a way that recognises the new realities and new possibilities brought to us with the Internet.

Not 2.0? | O'Reilly Radar

Not 2.0?: "More immediately, Web 2.0 is the era when people have come to realize that it's not the software that enables the web that matters so much as the services that are delivered over the web. Web 1.0 was the era when people could think that Netscape (a software company) was the contender for the computer industry crown; Web 2.0 is the era when people are recognizing that leadership in the computer industry has passed from traditional software companies to a new kind of internet service company. The net has replaced the PC as the platform that matters, just as the PC replaced the mainframe and minicomputer."

"The net has replaced the PC as the platform that matters" for me is the crucial piece of this story. O'Reilly here points to the societal shift that is leading to a demand for these new Internet based services. I wonder, would web 2.0 a meme if we still had dial-up? I doubt it.

Digital Rules | Rich Karlgaard

Forbes.com: Digital Rules By Rich Karlgaard: "The World’s Worst Disease It is not AIDS or Avian Flu. It is a monstrously flawed idea. The sickest thinking and the source of human misery throughout the ages is based on a belief that: 1. The earth is running out of resources 2. People consume more than they contribute 3. Wealth is a zero sum distribution game"...more.

Sharecropping the long tail | Nicholas Carr

Sharecropping the long tail: Nicholas Carr

Carr argues here that the aggregation of trivial items from individuals is creating massive value for businesses such as MySpace and Facebook (combined the two sites account for 17% of all page views in November 2006) and suggests the explosion of web content has been brought about through a drop in the cost of producing and consuming the content. He suggests that, consistent with the long-tail theory, it is value rather than content that is being concentrated.

A couple of quotes from Carr:

"...putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very few."

"It's a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial.It's only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale - on a web scale - that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy."

What Carr appears not to mention is the fact that YouTube, a user generated content site, does not make claim to the ownership of content. Instead, YouTube displays the content on the basis of a license. I argue that part of the value equation for sites such as YouTube is the way the site brings producers and consumers of video into proximity to one another in a common space. Shopping malls have been doing this for years and much of the value in a shopping mall is that shops bring shoppers and shoppers bring shops. There's no need for the shopping mall to own anything other than the means by which the two are brought together.

Time's Person of the Year: You | Time

Time's person of the year: you : Lev Grossman

In 2006, Time magazine awarded "you" the Person of the Year award. They did this in recognition of the new reality of web 2.0 and the manner in which people around the world were sharing all manner of information for free.

"The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.

We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom."

The economic value of user contributions to Internet sites | Oreilly

The economic value of user contributions to Internet sites: Andy Oram

Useful starting point where the author points out that many Internet businesses have huge valuations with only small amounts of physical assets on their balance sheet.

"The phenomenon of building a business on user-provided data is not completely new (for instance, a colleague reminded me that Zagat’s has done it for years), but the Web, and particularly Web 2.0, makes it a significant factor in the economy.

The economic aspects of aggregating user-provided content has been noticed; in fact, it has been criticized as a “concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few.”"

Thesis statement

I've spent the last 4 hours defining a thesis statement for my final essay. I've come up with

"Does the Internet enable new means of creating economic value from information?"

I'm a slow writer, huh?

Folksonomies Tap People Power | Wired

Folksonomies Tap People Power

Daniel Terdiman

Useful summary of the ways in which tags and folksonomies work, particularly commenting on the way tags on delicious tap into the power curve.

"The job of tags isn't to organize all the world's information into tidy categories," said Stewart Butterfield, one of Flickr's co-founders. "It's to add value to the giant piles of data that are already out there."

In a broad folksonomy, Vander Wal continued, there is the benefit of the network effect and the power curve because so many people are involved. An example is the website of contemporary design magazine Moco Loco, to which 166 Delicious users had applied the tag "design."

Conversely, Vander Wal explained, Flickr's system is a narrow folksonomy, because rather than many people tagging the same communal items, as with Delicious, small numbers of users tag individual items. Thus many users tag items, but of those, only a small number will tag a particular item.

"You don't have quite that capability of the power curve," said Vander Wal, "but you do have that ability of adding metadata to an object."

Order Is in the Eye of the Tagger | Wired

Dave Weinberger writes about the ways in which we order our world. He claims we are either lumpers or splitters, referring to the way in which we tend to divide or combine information to achieve our objectives. Weinberg uses the example of the way in which we might arrange a linen closet - combining sheets but separating them from towels - in order to make finding an item easier later.

Weinberg wrote the book Everything is Miscellaneous.

Microsoft's employee blogging policy

It's really very simple - blog smart.

Talking from the inside out: The rise of employee bloggers

Employee_Blogging.pdf (application/pdf Object)

When the Blogger Blogs, Can the Employer Intervene?

The New York Times: TOM ZELLER Jr.

Citing an example of a Technorati employee who posted to his private blog. The employee was simply asked by his manager whether he thought the post was appropriate. Raises questions about where the personal starts and where does work finish, particularly as it was a satirical piece. The article also hints at the dark side of open blogging policies, such as Sun Microsystems. Sure they may empower employees but it also gives management a way to monitor what is being said by an employee - particularly when the policy requires employees to blog under their real names.

Goodbye Bounded Entity! How Employee Blogging Transcends and Alters Organisational Boundaries

Bounded entities - those discrete organisations that have artificial communication walls - are a thing of the past when employees begin to blog. Employee blogs alter internal boundaries and utilise the power of individual social networks. They are a force of mobilisation of action across functional and geographic lines.

Worth noting that PR is a function of management and leadership and it's something that must be managed rather than controlled when employees blog.

Policies compared: Today's corporate blogging rules

Link to Policies compared: Today's corporate blogging rules

The insignificance economy

I was going to write an essay on the insignificance economy dealing with the way insignificant information is compiled and aggregated to produce customer value. It appears though my idea isn't so revolutionary. Dave Weinberger has already written a book about it so it looks as though I'm not going to be the one to come up with the next cool phrase on the net.

His book? Everything is Miscallensous


I'm still going to write the essay.

Groundswell (Incorporating Charlene Li's Blog): Blogging policy examples

Groundswell (Incorporating Charlene Li's Blog): Blogging policy examples: "One thing that I discuss in my report on corporate blogging is the need for policies, one for a company to provide guidelines to its employee bloggers, and the other for the blogger – a “code of ethics” to build trust with readers. Please keep in mind that these are sample policies – every company and blogger will have to modify them to meet their own needs."

The link here provides a sample code of ethics and blogging policy and is well worth the read for people considering a corporate blog.

Danah Boyd on Social Networking sites
Mp3 audio

Persistence - what you say stays around. Conversations in a park disappears once the conversation finishes.

Search-ability - people can be found eg marketers, teachers, authority. People go to physical places to avoid people such as these. Can't escape online

Replicability - People can copy and paste conversations to a more public environment.

Invisible audiences - in real spaces we modulate our voices but online this tends to change

People have 'friends' online as a way of imagining the audience of friends - gives a sense of our audience. How can people be simultaneously cool to parents and friends online?

How are people creating who they are in an online public world?

Social networking becomes the primary place of public 'hang out' for teenagers in the US because there are less places in public for young people to hang out in the real world.

Be an avid commenter

One of the best ways to get a feel for blogging is to be an active commenter on other people's blogs. Many people read blogs without commenting, and this is often called "lurking". Not a bad thing but it doesn't teach you much.

Blogs are all about conversation. A blog post is a conversation starter and a great post stimulates lots of comments. Often people who comment are in fact commenting on other people's comments; and that's one of the cool parts about blogging.

Some sites allow anonymous comments, others require you to enter your name (there's no need to use your real name), your email address (this helps authenticate you as a person), and sometimes a web address (this is where you put your blog address - it helps drive traffic back to your blog). Some sites are a bit more painful, requiring you to register as a user first. If it's a beaut blog it's worthwhile doing.

So there's the tip for today. Be an avid commenter.

You know what to do next.

eclecticism » Blog Archive » Of blogging and unemployment

eclecticism » Blog Archive » Of blogging and unemployment: "“Good. That means that as it’s your site on your own server, you have the right to say anything you want. Unfortunately, Microsoft has the right to decide that because of what you said, you’re no longer welcome on the Microsoft campus.”"

Microsoft fires worker over weblog | Seattlepi.com

Microsoft fires worker over weblog: "Michael Hanscom began keeping an online journal, commonly known as a weblog, several years ago. He started his job as a contract worker in Microsoft's print shop last year. Last week, he mixed the two. This week, he's looking for a new job, after becoming an unwilling case study in the fine line walked by corporate employees who write about work in their personal weblogs."

CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere

CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere

Poster claims that there has been more instances of human rights violations committed through the apparatus of US government than has been caused by terrorists. He states that terrorism is used as a propaganda exercise as a way to deflect attention away from the government abuse of a mainly imagined dangerous enemy. Possibilities for new forms of human empowerment are given up in order to retain existing power structures.

Commodification brings the questions of the possibility of democracy through the Internet down to already existing structures that do away with future possibilities. That is to say the interests of content providers and telecommunications companies become paramount rather than opening up possibilities of new forms of governance that might do away with existing structures.

Politics for this modern perspective is then the arduous extraction of an autonomous agent from the contingent obstacles imposed by the past. In its rush to ontologize freedom, the modern view of the subject hides the process of its historical construction.

What the fuck did that last sentence mean? Perhaps I'll understand by the end of next decade.

The Internet is a decentralised communication system brought together by disparate and conflicting forces that now produce frictionless reproduction and dissemination of information. What will the effects of these be on society, Poster asks.

Wrong question he says. The Net dematerialises communication and transforms the position of the person engaging in the communication. The Internet is what Germany is to Germans - it makes them Germans. Unlike a hammer which doesn't make people hammers but drives in nails.

Some people use the Internet like a hammer - as simply a way to get things done; to replace other forms of communication such as the post. Is there a new politics on the Internet, he asks. If there is a public sphere on the Internet who populates it and how? What interactions occur on this space that exists only in electrons (my word, not his).

The old public spaces, such as the Agora and the town hall have given away to TV which isolates people. Where then is the public space if television has become the medium of political influence? The public, he argues, has been replaced by publicity.

Quoting other scholars, Poster opines that the public space is everything which is not private. With the conception of private space now being confined to what is said inside the home, this poses problems.

For Poster, the Habermasian view of the public space where real people meet to have real dialogue and come to real consensus cannot stand against the new forms of communication presented through the Internet. The disembodiement of subjects and the manner in which machines play a crucial role in the line of communication poses too many problems for Poster to accept Habermas' notion.

Poster observes that the Internet has created new forms of decentralised conversation, new collectives of people, new ways to undermine the power of the state, new ways to view property; and yet he notes that theory has not caught up with this development despite society creating this new form of democratic engagement.

"The "magic" of the Internet is that it is a technology that puts cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms, in the hands of all participants; it radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, filmmaking, radio and television broadcasting, in short the apparatuses of cultural production."

Poster believes that the creation of the subject and discourse on the Internet is part of the same dynamic process.

Politics will need to be re-thought to accommodate the disembodiment that occurs on the Internet. A new form of leader will necessarily need to emerge.

My next job

I think I'd enjoy working for a human rights organisation such as bridges.org

6500 words to go

Yep, that's right, 6500 words to go before the end of semester and I can't find the motivation to write a single word.

I guess I could write a paragraph and that would be one paragraph less.

Termination and unfair dismissal

Termination and unfair dismissal is a pdf from DoCEP which deals with unfair dismissal cases in Australia. What is important is the Federal governments Workchoices legislation excludes many businesses from regulation under this Act; however Unlawful dismissal is covered across the whole of Australia. Unlawful dismissal is what I will be the focus of my next essay; although not from a legal perspective.

Blogging rights

Blogging rights (link requires subscription)

Privacy International complains about Gmail

Privacy International lodged a complaint with a number of privacy regulators around the world about targeted advertising in Gmail.