Net Squared Innovation Fund Award
Have a vision of social change? Using a new or existing technology tool to turn your vision into reality? Nominate your project for the NetSquared Innovation Award.
The Net Squared Conference is being held on May 29th-30th in San Jose. The conference is focused on 20 social change projects that use technologies, tools and communities of the social web to create sustainable societal change. Net Squared has created a Technology Innovation Fund to financially support projects selected by the NetSquared Community.
If you or someone that you are aware of is working on a social impact project using technology you should consider nominating the project for a NetSquared Innovation Award.
Britt Bravo, Community Builder for NetSquared and Non-Profit and NGO Contributing Editor for Blogher explains that they are looking for projects that:
- Use the power of community and social networks to create change
- Use existing/newly developed technology tools for social impact
- Have a plausible financial model
- Have a clear way to measure success
- Exhibit extraordinary leadership, passion and resourcefulness
- Exhibit a passion for social change
The project guidelines are here and online submissions are being accepted until April 6th 2007, noon PST. On April 9-14 all the projects that have been nominated will be voted on by the public on the NetSquared web site.
On April 16th the top 20 projects will be announced and those 20 NetSquared Featured projects will receive an all expense paid trip to San Jose for the NetSquared Conference.
You can see the most recent projects that have been submitted here.
Tags: NetSquared, NetSquared Conference, NetSquared Innovation Fund Award, Media 2.0, Non-profit, Non-profit tech, innovation, Britt Bravo
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SplashCast
Blog buddy Marshall Kirkpatrick, Director of Content at SplashCast emailed me last night that SplashCast is going live today. Marshall has a player on his site and of course there are lots of details at the SplashCast launch site. It is a major innovation in that you will be able to create your own channels of streaming video, audio, music, and narration and make it available for anyone to play on their web page or blog.
What is unique about SplashCast is it is not an online video sharing site, it is a service that lets you play dynamically updated channels of content on your web page, blog or social network page. Second of all, it is a mix media service where you can combine video, audio, music and text and narrate your own story. And lastly, it is a syndication service so that when you create a channel and add new content, all those "tuned" to your channel get the updated content.
Check it out…Marshall has as an intro to Spashcast and the signup is here. They are unveiling it at DEMO, today. And of course, the SplashCast Blog has the latest. And leave it to Jeneane to add the splish to the party.
Other places to read about it: MacWorld, Somewhat Frank, Designed to Inspire, Technically Speaking, Allied
Tags: Marshall Kirkpatrick, SplashCast, MacWorld, Somewhat Frank, Designed to Inspire, Technically Speaking, Media 2.0, Tags: Jeneane Sessum
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Inter-tainment: Surfin’ USA
According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project "surfing for fun" is something that two-thirds of all Internet users do online; it follows using search engines and emails and ties with reading the news. Given the inherent reluctance that people might have in admitting that they surf for fun…the Playboy Effect, as in "I only read the articles" it is possible that the entertainment value of the internet may even be understated.
Translating this into numbers, 40million people said they were "surfing for fun" which is up from 25mm in November 2004. A new report by Jupiter Research says that online consumers spend 14 hours per week online which is equal to the amount of time that they spend watching TV. The report, "US Entertainment and Media Consumer Survey" written by Barry Parr says that in 2005 TV use increased and consumers are now spending the same amount of time on line.
Other media such as magazines, newspapers, and books according to Parr, are being displaced by TV and the Internet. 37% of the 14 hour crowd report that they are spending less time reading because of their Internet activities. So, the lesson for advertisers does not really ever change: fish where the fish are…and they are online. And the consumer is controlling the information. The strategy is "pull, don’t push" here.
Technorati Tags: advertising, media, TV, web surfing, Pew Internet,
High Tech/ High Touch
An article in the WSJ entitled, "The First Online War Honors Fallen
Troops with Web Tributes" caught my eye this morning. I thought it was
going to be about blogging and although it mentions military blogs it is really about the power of the web to immerse us totally in the reality of events by giving us access to the people experiencing it, who touch us so deeply that we become emotional participants, rather than spectators in these events.
It is one thing to read about the number of casualties in the war in Iraq (2,000 as of last week). The article mentions web sites that show maps of where the dead soldiers are from, and web sites that "sort" them by age, but the emotional engagement really begins on the sites that show their faces. We can, of course become engaged in this manner by reading magazines, newspapers, and watching TV. But, as the WSJ says,
"If you want to have your heart not just touched but ripped apart, visit the Moving Tributes section of Legacy.com, a Web business that hopes to become a national online clearinghouse for obituaries… is a free service that allows families
and friends of dead soldiers to create short multimedia memorials… {and} narrate a
personal remembrance"
The result is not just photos of the dead soldiers, but you are sharing the "the living room photo albums of lives ending early." Emerson wrote, Genius is saying what is in your heart because it is in everyone’s heart." Visit this site, you will feel what is in the hearts of these families…in your heart. High tech/high touch.
Technorati Tags: Iraq_war, web, emotions
Typepad
Typepad has become the source of dissatisfaction for many bloggers lately…and the subject of many blog posts that express the dissatisfaction. Business Blog Consulting has three such posts which highlight the problems and offer positive suggestions including a "business class" of service and limiting new subscribers until the infrastructure can support it. I believe they are promoting with a buy one give one offer…why promote a flawed product? I think they should consider ending promotional offers and closing subscriptions and fix the issues.
This should become standard company policy and is good business sense. We all know what happens when we over commit…..things don’t get done right and no one is happy. Further, we lose the trust and confidence that our clients and customers had in us. The equity that we worked long and hard to earn is diminished…and value decreases much more quickly than it increases. Mostly no one is bashing or trashing Typepad….bloggers are asking that the issues be acknowledged, addressed and fixed. There are exceptions.
On top of the infrasctructure problems summed up by Raving Lunacy, "When it takes longer to post than it does to type"…and the lack of crisis control communication from Six Apart, there is the problem in the trenches of customer support. You state your problem and everything you know about it in an email. They respond with a request for more specifics. You give them the information that they say they need thinking that they intend to provide a solution, they then reply with a request for more information…sometimes they then refer you to the "how to" section of the instruction manual which you have all ready tried, you wonder why they asked for the additional information…you try and point this out…they then ask different questions. It is an endless loop, seemingly designed to avoid providing a solution with the illusion of support in the form of questions.
What a waste of everyone’s time. And I am not blaming the customer support staff….this too is an infrastructure problem; get more support staff, train them to own and solve issues and reward them for solving issues not writing emails. Customer satisfaction is directly related to employee satisfaction….something is not working here.
As Toby Bloomberg posted on Diva Marketing , " Growth without a plan that includes customer communications can cost you significantly in terms of good will and lost customers." Typepad needs to align people, strategy, and technology….Mihaly Csilszentmihaly, the father of Flow, wrote in Good Business that, a valuable product or service is one that customers perceive, rightly or wrongly, make them happy. No one is very happy with Typepad right now…the product or the service.
Technorati Tags: Type_Pad
No. I Don’t Have Time to Read Blogs
I was talking to my lawyer yesterday about what lawyers call my "high conflict" divorce case. Yes, we are divorced but instead of that judgment being the end of the conflict, it became the basis for my ex to escalate the conflict. This is, of course a whole other blog that is under development but this post is about people completely impervious to blogs. My lawyer started talking about the client/attorney relationship in an unusual manner for lawyers that I have actually worked with, as opposed to law professors, friends who are attorneys or those whose blogs I read…he talked in terms of client service and was pondering why, despite what their firm thought were great results in some case, the client did not express gratitude or otherwise provide positive feedback. Well, I could have given him quite a guest lecture on the topic based upon my personal experiences,and experiences of friends and family in the quagmire of the family court system; and I could filter the personal experiences with my marketer’s lens. However, I politely suggested that there was a lot being written about this topic on the web, specifically by lawyers who blawg. I suggested he might want to check out the {non} billable hour or In Search of Perfect Client Service or The Greatest American Lawyer for their insightful and innovative thinking about the practice of law.
When there was silence on the other end of the phone, I inquired as to whether or not he read blogs. His answer? No, I don’t have time to read blogs. My thought of course was: Do you really have time to not read blogs? And I know I am at one extreme with my the answer to all of life’s mysteries can be found in the blogosphere attitude….but c’mon, you want to know why, despite winning a case, your clients seem dissatisfied? Have a conversation with them…and listen; add some empathy. There you go…good start. You are in the service business….did you serve their needs? You say you "won" the case…did you have a discussion with them to define what "winning" the case was so in the end you could agree that you had won. Oh, stop billing your clients for your mistakes, especially when it is because you didn’t listen…ok, I may be going too far.
The New York Times has an article today on blawging lawyers that quotes Scott Turow, "when people think of law, you think of jails and
marshals and corporate executives. But the reality is…it’s all words, and lawyers are verbal people, both in terms of the
written stuff and the spoken stuff." The law is about words…your clients are about words.
But maybe here lies one of the problems in having conversations with clients…the same New York Times article quotes another blawger, Denise Howell, "blogs demystify the law without costing outrageous
sums; lead to more open, frequent and occasionally informed discussions
of politics, law and occasionally morality; and help forge links
between practicing lawyers, law professors, law students and the real
world.
So, one of the problems that I see in client/attorney relationships is that attorneys don’t really want to "demystify" the law for their clients…and certainly not without collecting "outrageous sums". Second of all, in the link being forged above, the client is conspicuously absent from the list.
Bill 0′Reilly Declares Blogs Garbage
"I don’t read them, I mean it’s so outrageous", O’Reilly said on his show on July 18, 2005. Then last night on the Factor he attacks blogs calling them ideological weapons and smear campaigns as reported by Think Progress and Crooks and Liars. OK, Bill so I do watch your show because I believe it is important to hear opposing viewpoints. I have not read your book for kids. I am assuming (risky I know) based on interviews you have given about your book that you advise kids to be informed. I know that is the advise I give my own kids who frequently ask me why I watch your show since I frequently don’t agree with your opinions. Although, I would also advise my kids not to settle a lawsuit if the accusations were false. Hmmmmm?
So tell me, if you don’t read blogs, please explain to everyone how you know that they are "garbage"? Not to make an extreme comparison or anything, but wasn’t this the same premise upon which the Nazi’s burned books? Let’s declare the ideas we disagree with as garbage to protect others from reading them.
So, I say to Bill 0′Reilly: Your premise is garbage. You should read blogs to designate them garbage. I watch your show and and have personally heard you rant about the uninformed who express opinions. So, I believe I must request that you please take to heart your claim to be "fair and balanced" and at least read a blog or two, or just "shut up". (I also tell my kids not to say "shut up"….)
Marketing Person Not a Geek
Toby Bloomberg at Diva Marketing conveyed a discussion she had regarding Blog Tags with Stowe Boyd from Corante. Toby’s point was that as a marketing person not a geek, tagging was a challenge. Boyd’s point was that she should get over it and that not knowing how to do something was not "a badge of honor".
Well tagging is way up there on my list of things I know I need to understand but in spite of an ongoing search for a simple enough explanation, still don’t understand. Also on list, HTML. I too would say that I am a marketing person, not a geek. But, in my defense (and Toby’s also, should she chose to accept the defense) I don’t believe that my non-understanding of modern Geek is worn as a badge of honor. I wish I could just look at some of the this and just get it and get over it….I just don’t. It’s a brain thing.
Conversely, over at Creating Passionate Users a recent post with the title, You are a marketer, Deal with it directed engineers and product designers to "get over it"….no more it’s Geek to us badges regarding marketing. In another post, they direct the spotlight on all of us and ask, Who’s in charge you- or your brain? They then go on to say, "Everyone should know how their brain really works, because it–not you–is running the show!" Much of what they write about is about dealing with that. Ok, maybe my "it’s a brain thing" sounds a little lame when viewed in this light. Can I just whine a little and say there are just certain things that are really hard for me to understand?
OK then…so back to tagging and wouldn’t you know it but Rashmi Sinha wrote a cognitive analysis of tagging and explains it as a 2 stage process: The first stage is the "computation of similarity" between the concept and the"candidates" for related semantic concepts. The second stage is the decision regarding which category is the right one which involves various cognitive processes and much angst. However, Sinha’s theory of tagging is that the really great thing about tagging is that it eliminates step 2. You simply take your concept, subject, or object…and then do a kind of Freudian free association list of concepts, subjects or objects that come to mind, write them down and call them tags.
I get it…but I still don’t get de-licio-us.
2 Cool Sites From 2 Cool Sites
Even with RSS and aggregators, there is still too much information for me to process and use. In my email was Inter Alia Weekly Research, which always has great information to help manage the overload. This time, a site called memeorandum which takes daily news articles and links to the blogs that are talking about the the stories. Then from Seth Godins Blog came a reference to Emily Chang’s e-hub which is a constantly updated reference to everything new in blogs, social software, folksonomy, design and well, just everything.
Bye Bye Vonage
Vonage has 749,999 subscribers as of today. I tried..I really tried to make it work. It seemed to make SO much sense…I told my friends about it. I told lots of people about it. I overlooked the problems with getting my phone number switched over…after all it was new and they eventually made it right with service credits. I overlooked the problem with my alarm system. I overlooked the continuing impossibility of getting technical support. But, the router problems which of course left us without not only phone service but also Internet access that were still all too frequent after a year finally made it impossible to continue. Hello, Charter!
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