Conversationware

With young children you sometimes worry about education. 

Well, beyond just the paying for it, you also wonder if ‘the powers that be’ can possibly keep up.

For instance I heard on the radio the other day that the establishment is worried about plagiarism by students from the internet. It reminds me of how worried they were when calculators came out (in my time), but eventually they worked out that machines weren’t going away and stopped worrying about basic math being practiced by older children with calculators.

Older children moved on to more advanced subjects.

I think we’re going to have to stop worrying about information - facts? - available on the internet, when discovered by older students. Why bother learning things by heart when the facts are available on wikipedia.

….arguable perhaps?

Meantime, I hope there are classes being planned on blogs, wiki’s, RSS feeds, linking, tagging.

Scott Karp talks here about why he, historically a very literate person, doesn’t read books anymore. He finds Networked thought much more powerful.

Me too.

Blogging and linking are a kind of thoughtful shorthand for ideas. If I don’t understand the squiggle - I click through, read the linked material - and then click back to continue the reading. Multiple people’s thoughts are then combined and blended and leveraged.

It’s just like you, as the single pupil in the class, having dozens of lecturers in front of you all building on each other’s ideas. No wonder that’s more powerful than a single linear, non-interactive ’broadcast’ by a single professor to 150 students. 

This video is worth another airing - it’s been watched 1.5 Million times so far.

RSS is a completely radical communications technology.

Communication is already valuable, and yet how much more valuable is it when automated?

Somehow though when you try to explain it to people there is often a muted response. (In case you are a fellow enthusiast, showing is much more effective than telling).

Nevertheless, I feel the tide is just about to come in.

One of the leading protagonists of this world changing technology is Newsgator, and today they started to give away their RSS Readers, for free. Some cracking solutions they have too.

Sometimes things you read ‘chime’, and today is one of those days. I think it’s called synchronicity (by Carl Jung) which is ironic in some respects.

I was reading a long exposition on the effects of technology (all driven by RSS) on journalism, over on the Publishing 2.0 blog.

As an aside, I like reading journalism blogs, because it’s fun when journalists argue in written form. They know how to wheedle a point. And if all else fails, they express their anger in the most delightful way.

From the comments, it is clear that the panic isn’t far from setting in, and disruption is in full progress, illustrated by one of the comments on media’s digital future: he says

“I feel a rather pertinent point is being missed out: who is going to pay for it?
The product is being given away for free, advertisers are looking for more targeted audiences and the powers-that-be do not want to spend to invest.”

And summarises

“Before this revolution really kicks off, we should be looking at defining what we expect of journalists and others in this move to a fully digital era.”

Here is the evening news: The revolution already kicked off, and amusingly for me the commenter would seem to have answered his own question. (Does any Journalist who doesn’t run a blog miss the point?)

Advertisers are looking for more targeted audiences, and importantly, in the last few years Google has introduced a radical concept.

You can start to measure the results of money you spend on marketing -you can’t do that with print advertising.

Completely unheard of only a couple of years ago, but this has resulted in the quickest growing company ever created. Advertisers will pay Billions to have their message played to people.

Google turnover

• 2005 - $6B
• 2006 - $10.6B
• 2007 - Extrapolated to $17B

Whilst Advertisers pay per person vaguely interested (voluntarily clicking), Paul Sweeney illustrates the next point, that those being advertised to are also happy to be more closely targeted - a win win.

Knowing what people are interested in looks like it will pay off big time - and who knows how much having that better picture of the audience might just mean.

That’s where Newsgator are placing their bets, as along with a number of other good reasons, Jeff Nolan explains that discovering the ‘reader’s attention is a key driver to making the client software free. (APML has also become part of the plan)

I admired the company the first presentation I got about 15 months ago, Synchronisation is a great strategy as RIM proved all to well.

So, this is just another good decision, and (one of?) the original investors agrees.

It’s too grand a title, and too big a conversation. But things ARE changing on the Interweb.

Blogging, multimedia presentation, Google Adwords, RSS - this is the web marketing future. This company called Pepperjam does several things that most other companies don’t find natural.

They walk the talk.

The founders video on the front page tell you so much more than just the content - its the passion, the attitude and its the dogs doo-dahs.

Yes it’s a little in your face, and Brits might find this a little unsettling but even they’ll (we’ll) get the hang of it sooner or later.

 The web isn’t new, but Pence Per Click Management is.

PepperJam’s growth rate of over 450% last year, and 550% this year shows that.

But I’m betting this growth isn’t just the service they give their clients, but that they live their dream in public.

Encouraging your employees to use Facebook?

That’s bucking the trend wouldn’t you say? It is being reported that up to 70% of UK’s employers are banning access according to the linked article.

In that context, there is a great interview from the CEO horse’s (Jeremy Burton of Serena) mouth, over at the ‘For Immediate Release’ podcast site. When getting to the site, scroll to the player for 16th November. (24 mins)

 At ‘face value’ (sorry) it sounds like a very ‘new age’ ‘new media’ thing to do, but actually, the interview does enable Jeremy to put things very succinctly, articulately even, and it does make sense.

Mostly.

The situation first came about by banning emails on a Friday, a practice I haven’t experienced personally, but applaud none the less. And having banned (internal?) email, staff found a way around it and thus, experiencing a richer form of communication and relationship bulding, the ‘missing link’ was discovered by all.

It’s no suprise that almost anything enables better relationships and conversation than does email, but I still have this feeling that Facebook is merely a signpost, rather than an eventual destination. This year’s Second Life, if you will.

The vital question of things for me, ‘Personal versus Business communications’ was discussed briefly, but despite the answer “that it gave the CEO something to talk to the despatch guy in the lift about”, I don’t think that this subject has been put to bed yet.

Have a listen though, a few decent pointers to be had

Serena looks like an interesting company. Mashups are this year’s workflow?

I caught sight of a post by chip griffin, arguing that the stuff he saw at the defrag conference - which seems to be a collaboration technology show - wasn’t compelling enough to replace email.

Email is simple and ubiquitous, so why replace it. I think that’s a contentious point - and probably purposefully so. These bloggers eh, always stirring the pot. As if I didn’t come across his missive through RSS.

But Chip looks from the point of view of a user - and I happen to agree with that point. Complicated isn’t good.

My own view is that email is great when it’s one to one, and when the extent of the interaction is easily defined. Question - Answer - Done.

But Email can go horribly wrong where there are multiple parties, or where an ongoing conversation is required.

So - what problems are there with email? Here’s a few I can think of, feel free to suggest more.

1. Where can I look to see progress around a topic that involves a few of us - where can anyone look to see progress? I know….lets send another email and ask.
2. Email is fraught with the following problem: If I email you with a  question about the project and you haven’t responded - who’s responsibility is it that the action didn’t get done? It’s mine of course….but email blurs the lines and makes it difficult. “He didn’t get back to me” is something you hear over and over
3. Email hides what is important, and gives you what is urgent (your newest emails) instead.
4. If someone joins the conversation late, where can they look to get up to speed

Have I missed anything?

In short, I don’t think the email problem is actually a myth, but just what we do about it isn’t exactly clear. I thought it was going to be SharePoint - but from what I read, the jury is still out there too.

There are no shortage of new innovative companies looking at the issue. Anything topic based catches the eye. From that acquisition of Parlano, perhaps Microsoft still think there is more work to be done around collaboration too.

It has been on my mind for a while that communications professionals aren’t communicating very well. How many Communications people and companies in the UK are using RSS, and may heaven forbid Blogs - or am I not looking hard enough?

Appropriate notification is a serious communications issue, as is information overload. RSS is relevant to people and companies. So, can you be interested, and work in, communications without considering new technology? Are your clients wondering how committed you are to keeping their business at the forefront.

I picked up on this, being reminded by the linked post, that communications technology companies aren’t using communications technology. It’s not just me then.

Times are changing, and it looks like its a variable as to how quickly people and companies are trying to keep up.

I suppose it is a question of critical mass adoption, as when Text Messaging only really took off in the UK once networks linked to each other. It meant that you could be confident that whoever you sent the message to would receive it.

Presumably when RSS readers outnumber non-readers we’ll see the adoption speeding up. Is there a tipping point, and when might that be?

Most technologists know the Rogers adoption curve, but it doesn’t show the pace vs overall penetration of technology. I’d expect the adoption to creep along a horizontal time path very low, and then a steep increase towards the right.

Where are we on the adoption curve I wonder, still in the early adopters stage?

I’m an advocate of Gmail, with instant messaging, voice and voicemail built in - this coupled with desktop notification is significantly more useable for me than collections of web and client software from other vendors. Especially impressive is the ability to pick up gmail (and voicemails) on your mobile There is now a meebo-like web embedding of a group web chat facility,

The integration of a RSS reader with the email is more than convenient and with feedburner joining the ranks, I can see all of these things eventually supplementing the google desktop search tool to deliver me a very personalised search and delivery of tailored information.

Google has provided google docs, online hosted documents for groups to share, be updated and notified about. The aquisition of Jotspot hasn’t really hit yet, on the surface at least, but I’m looking forward to some basecamp type project collaboration from that, and now with google aquiring Zenter, we can have online slideshows and presentations too.

Youtube is starting to get quite useful, and I didn’t even mention google maps yet, which apart from giving me a quick, and slick, way to calculate journey times, has now gained a user business review facility

People question whether it is right to trust all your information to google, in the same way we trust banks with our money. But when I used Google Checkout to pay for a new laptop recently, instead of paypal, it occurred to me that many of us already do.

Where’s our unified communications Google? I know we can get voicemail through the mobile email, but surely that’s only the start.

Someone I was speaking to recently said that companies don’t need blogs if they’re using message boards - and it wasn’t the first time I’d heard that.

Instinctively though, I felt there was a difference in terms of how companies could engage (have conversations) with a wide audience - with current blog technology in the early stages at least.

Having a scout around my favourite ‘principles of blogging’ sites, I found Tom Chandler doing his usual excellent job of articulating just why blogs are better, with other links around the subject.

It’s interesting that companies worry about blogging, and yet allow a ‘free for all’ within their message boards. Perhaps its just that anything new = automatically bad until proven otherwise.

Another favourite blogging (copywriting) site The Copywriters Crucible pointed out this youtube video, with poor sound, but very ‘new-media’ funny.

RSS is abit like having your paper delivered when normally the local shop is sold out

Here is another video, this time an RSS primer to pass on to all our laggard friends and families who haven’t been playing with readers yet.

The video is pilfered from these Common Craft people.

I wanted to experiment with including a You Tube video in a post, so here it is. The one I chose to use as an example, so you may have already seen it, is a backgrounder for Web 2.0 technology. Reviews were mixed :-), but it’s relevant at least.

This is thanks to a plugin for wordpress found here. It was the plugin that I most easily understood - which is as good a reason as any to recommend it.

All I need to do now, is work out how to create and post demo videos to you tube.