News from the Blogs and Social Media Forum - 17th May
12.00 am
The conference is in full swing with some interesting comments and quotes already emerging... Here's a snapshot:
- According to Christopher Barger (Blogger in Chief at IBM), IBM has 20,000 'internal' blogs of which 2,000 are active. Active means they have more than 3 posts.
- Loic Le Meur reminded us (lest we forget!) that Typepad has 15 million blogs worldwide - and just 130 staff (all of whom blog). He predicted the "end of traditional marketing" and announced that "we are moving into a period of word of mouth marketing".
- Raymond Jordan of Johnson & Johnson produced, to my mind, the Quote of the Day with: "Blogging is moving from cult to culture". In a world of soundbites, that was a corker.
- ConfusedofCalcutta (aka JP Rangaswami) gave a rollicking speech about corporate comms through the eyes of a social software innovator. He calculated the social cost of implementing ICT projects to be nine times that of the implementation cost. In other words, people over pixels. [hey - that's a good soundbite!]
We've just had an open session where we got to meet and argue with people of all persuasions. Excellent start!
3.30pm
Lee Bryant has just done his Headshift session - which I missed (sorry Lee) - and Alec Muffet of Sun Systems has also completed an entertaining show about being Sun's first blogger, who was then subsumed into a massive corporate blog - but isn't bitter because now everyone gets what he was on about (Alex prefers companies to be "more than 40% geek").
Blogs and Social Media Forum - May 17th
On Wednesday Simon Grice and I will be attending this Conference in London - which etribes is also sponsoring. It's billed as a 'conversational' event, rather than the usual them-and-us scenario - which we figure matches the etribes ethos and should lead to some genuinely interesting debate. I'm looking forward to seeing Johnnie Moore, who was most entertaining at Our Social World and Ben Hammersley, who turned up there in a dress. Interesting people, journalists.
Pageflake, anyone?
The gowing popularity of AJAX is spawning a heap of new personal publishing solutions - such as Netvibes and Pageflakes. The basic idea is to let you create your own homepage and access it without having to sign in. It's a neat concept for those of us who have password-dementia or click-burnout.
Most etribes Life customers tend to use their LifeSites as their homepages and we obviously encourage this. That said, watch out for our forthcoming etribes StartPage™.
May mashup* - Personal Publishing: Beyond Blogging
Like 150 other interested folk I attended mashup* on Tuesday evening at the Commonwealth Club in London. Simon Grice introduced the topic with a simple, yet effective message: "in the past, only the big cheeses to could publish. Now, we're all big cheeses". This was exemplified by Myspace's Jamie Kantrowitz who explained how the biggest cheese of all is empowering 70 million little cheeses to publish themselves online (ok - enough of the cheese analogy).
Tom Bureau explained how CNET's Gamespot encourages it's members (from the sounds of it, completely madly fanatical gamers) to become the 'authority' on a given game. Once they have proved themselves, CNET either commissions them to edit lead articles on the game or employs them straight off. Little cheeses proving how big they could be, given some culturing (sorry!).
Anyway, we knew we could rely on Marc Canter to stirr up a hornets nest by invorking the God of The Barrier Free Internet to call down it's harpies of doom on Myspace. Why can't other personal publishing systems post onto Myspace and visa versa? When will the interfaces we opened up? Is the answer the Structured blogging initiative? Nobody was sure - but it was one hell of an interjection.
Latterly the BBC rejected claims that they were dumbing down by spending £100 million on creating a user-generated content platform - citing evidence of their hugely popular online forums and radio call-in shows. The argument presumably being that they've already dumbed down.
Chinese "Back Dormitory Boys"
Like half of China I laughed myself silly when I saw the Back Dormitory Boys. If you've not seen them yet, they are worth a look. Two Chinese art students who decided to mime their favourite Backstreet Boys song into their webcam, then post it to Google Video. They have become huge stars in China and now have a major advertising deal. Even their room-mate (who's sitting behind them in the video, playing video games) is a celebrity.
My guest post on Cybersoc.com
Robin Hamman asked me to guest on his blog - cybersoc.com - this week. I think I offered some light relief among the more heavy duty posts, but I hope I also made my point: the Internet shouldn't be the domain of an elite and we shouldn't forget about the 90% of the population who don't know their blogs from their wikis... Anyway, here it is:
An online community consultant by trade, Luke Brynley-Jones has advised many of the UK's largest non-profits about their online communications. Part of the team behind etribes, he recently oversaw the launch of etribes Life - their new personal publishing service. This is Luke's personal view of the world behind the scenes of a social software start-up...
I have to admit to being a little apprehensive when Robin asked me to guest-blog this week. When I saw the list - I was the only expert I hadn't heard of! It felt like the time I was asked to speak at the Institute of Librarians. What could I possibly say that they would find of interest? (And in that case, visa versa). That said, I think I do have an interesting story. Since Cybersoc the blog was born a year ago, the Internet, society and my life have changed radically. So, here's my take on it all.
Our man in the street
I view the Internet is very much from a dumb user perspective. And I don't say that lightly. I'm the kind of Internet user who finds Outlook too complex to manage; who can't spell flicker correctly; and who spent years wondering why Philip Seymour Hoffman would write a blog called Scobleizer. When Simon Grice asked me to join etribes in 2001, my role was to be Our Man-in-The-Street in the office, if you get my drift.
Formally Launching etribes Life
Although it sometimes feels like etribes Life has been around longer than I have, its actually only three months since we launched the Beta version at Les Blogs in Paris. So, it's probably about time we formally launched it for real! We were going to wait until the next mashup* - but that's now happning in May - so we jumped the gun and issued our Press Release today (see below). We'll be announcing new developments every week from here on - so I'll make sure I keep my site posted, so to speak.
Kicking off the etribes Partner Programme
We are formally kicking off our Partner Programme for etribes Life. This is a win/win setup that aims to give companies, publications and member organisations the opportunity to offer their customers a free personal website (or blog) using etribes Life. We're also throwing in a healthy revenue share and a reduction on subscription fees for customers who sign up to one of our paid-for service levels. Current etribes Partners include 118118.com, TakeSport and ABCTales.com.
If you're interested in joining our Partner Programme - contact me.
- Posted by lukebj on 17/03/2006.
- 3 comments
mashup* hits a high note today
Our discussion event on converging technologies - mashup* - proved a great success last night. The numbers swelled from an initial 100 to nearly double that and we were treated to a terrific discussion about the future of digital identity and reputation and the control (or not) of these by the GYM club (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft).
We are already receiving registrations for the next one... which is in the planning pipeline. To sign up - visit the mashup website linked above.
mashup*
For anyone interested in converging Internet technologies (or "mashups"), there's an essential event happening in London on 8th Feb.
Simon Grice is hosting mashup* - an informal gathering of high level Internet folk with the aim of discussing the phenomena of converging systems and services - from blogs to personal digital identity, via wikis and map-mashups.
etribes is sponsoring the event - so if you're in this space... do come along.
