Disruptive Conversations

My thoughts are certainly with the families of all those affected by this horrid tragedy. I'm flying home to NH from Orlando tonight and I do have to admit that this event will definitely be in my thoughts.

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Each year the IABC Chairman honors one or more members of the association who have made selfless contributions and worked hard behind the scenes to enhance the association’s image, facilitate member development and benefit the communication profession. The award recognizes members who have demonstrated initiative and leadership at the international level through serving on committees, speaking at seminars, working with students, assisting with conferences, or writing articles for professional journals. Any current IABC member who has belonged to the association for at least five years is eligible for the award.

Gibson said, “In thinking about who I wanted to honor with the Chairman’s Award, I looked to my ‘Four I’s of IABC’ (international, influence, inspiration & individual). I wanted to select someone who was helping the association be more international, who had influenced and inspired me personally, as well as other members, the profession and beyond, and who took individual initiative to make things happen, rather than sitting back and waiting for others to make a difference. Neville Hobson, ABC, embodies all those things.”

The award statement goes on at some length. It's great to see Neville get this recognition and I'd say he definitely deserves it.

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Technorati Tags: neville hobson, pr, iabc, awards

Right now we are living through a grand experiment in blurring the lines between personal and business lives.... between "friends" in the traditional sense, "friends" in the local community, "friends" we've met online and "friends" who are co-workers (and in some cases "friends" who are vendors, customers, etc.).

Sure, those lines have always been blurred in some fashion. Many times the people we work with are some of our closest "friends". For many people who work in jobs in a local community, the intersection of their "friends" between employees, customers, and people they know in the community is very high. The same people come into their store that they see at a local sports game... or see at the local school... or go to the same church with... or see at a local bar.

For others, the intersection may be quite smaller. Co-workers may be far away. The job may have little or no connection to the local community. Family may be scattered all over the region, country or globe. "Friends" may be fewer or may be farther apart - or may be more online. In larger communities, especially, you may go to a church on the other side of the city and have kids in a sports league in another part of the city and your office may be in yet another part of town.

The degree of the blurring has a lot to do with the size of the local community you live in and the degree of your connection to that community. You may not attend a church... or play in a sport (or have kids that do)... you may not have kids and not have the school connections.

The point is that we've typically have different groups of people with whom we've shared different pieces of information. We know people in different "contexts" and share information with them in that context and often that context alone.

This is particularly true with the divide between our "work" and "personal" lives. Sure, we've always shared some parts of our personal life inside the walls of our "work" environment. We've talked to our co-workers... gathered at water coolers or in break rooms or cafeterias. Some people have shared very openly about what they are doing and we've learned much about their overall personality. Others have remained very private and shared virtually nothing. To some degree, we all have a facade that we construct that is how we appear to our co-workers.

The wall between work and personal lives has been there.

That wall is being demolished, though, along with all the other walls, in the new world of social media. We typically have only one Facebook account... we have one Twitter account... we have one MySpace account... and so on. We add "friends" who we know in various contexts to the same account.

Think for a moment about who you have added as Facebook "friends" (assuming you use Facebook). I know my list contains at least this:

• people who have been long-time friends in the traditional sense of the word
• people I know through activities related to VoIP/communications
• people I know through activities related to information security / VoIP security
• people I know through activities related to marketing / PR / communications / blogging / podcasting
• co-workers from my current employer
• co-workers from previous employers
• several industry analysts
• developers / programmers I know from various projects
• people I met while living in Ottawa, Ontario, and Burlington, VT
• people with whom I was involved starting up a curling club in VT
• a couple of extended family members
• an increasing number of people I grew up with back in the 70s and 80s, some of whom are probably wondering what in the world it is I do now
• people I've met at various conferences and became friends with
• a few people from Keene, NH, where we moved this summer
• other people I've met randomly in some context and become friends with

It's a diverse list of people... and yet they all see the same information in my Facebook NewsFeed. They see the same status updates... they see the same photos I post... the same Notes I import... the same del.icio.us bookmarks... the same videos I create.

The many different contexts are blurred into one.

Now maybe this is a great thing... we all get to learn more about each other - and the person behind the facade that we construct for each context. Or maybe are we learning too much. Where is the line?

Going back to my original question at the beginning... within Facebook the "25 random things about me" meme seems to be going strong in recent weeks, at least among the people to whom I am connected on Facebook. You know, it's the "here are 25 things about me that most people don't know". We went through a whole string of memes like this out in the blogosphere a few years back and now and then they keep surfacing.

Anyway, the few posts I have had time to read in Facebook lately have actually been quite fun to read. I've learned a lot about some of the folks... remembered old stories... learned new ones. Some have been discreet in the info shared... and some have been more revealing than I would personally be.

It's that latter bit that got me thinking about all of this. What if the person sharing the "revealing" information is a co-worker? Do we understand yet how (or if) this changes our relationships? Do I gain more respect learning of a serious childhood illness now overcome? Do I lose respect for that co-worker when I learn of the drunken binges they go on each month? What if I don't like their politics or religion? Does any of this change the way I interact with the person? On one level, how can it not change my views of that person? - but can I/we move beyond that?

Have our "culture" and "conventions" caught up with the degree of information our tools now let us share?

Where is the line between information we share with co-workers and our "personal" lives? Is there even a line? Or is the very concept of such a line just a quaint anachronism of another era?

P.S. For my own part, I assume there is no line and continue to follow the mantra: "Never put online (anywhere) anything you would not want to appear on the front page of the New York Times." Perhaps that limits my "openness", though...

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Technorati Tags: facebook, socialmedia, social media, culture, privacy, friends, microblogging

I had a couple of people ask me what DRM is all about and why it matters. So here's my take on why DRM for music matters to me.

"DRM" is "Digital Rights Management" and if you want the gory details Wikipedia has a lengthy article but essentially DRM is "copy protection" in either software or hardware form that restricts your access to some digital media to only "authorized" devices/programs/computers/etc.

In the context of iTunes, it is the software that restricts you to only being able to play purchased music on specific computers or devices. When you buy a song from the iTunes Music Store (that has DRM), you can play that song only on computers that are authorized through your iTunes Music Store account. If I recall correctly, you are limited to 5 computers. If I have a new laptop or iPod or whatever, I have to authorize that device before it can download and play the music.

Proponents of DRM for digital music files, primarily the music companies, promote DRM as a way to ensure that artists (and those companies) get paid. Their fear is that without DRM people will just wildly copy music all over the place and the companies and the artists won't be paid. And to a certain degree this is probably a valid fear.

The problem is that to a user DRM is often a royal pain-in-the-neck.

If I have a physical CD that I rip into online music files on my system, I can then move those files to any other server, to another disk, to another music player, to another laptop. There is no DRM and I can just move those digital files around the same way that I could a physical CD. It makes it trivial when you find that all your music is filling up one system and you want to move it to another and have music play out of that system instead of the one you are using now.

With DRM-restricted music, you can't always do this. You have to authorize the new system. When I went to sync a new iPod to one of my systems, I had issues where it couldn't download the music because it wasn't authorized, etc., etc.

It makes me not want to buy music online.

Or, at least, DRM-restricted music. After having so many headaches recently with moving some music around when I was trying to free up room on a system, I decided that for a future purchase I was going to find DRM-free versions, even if it meant going out and purchasing the physical CD and ripping the CD into MP3s. Then, of course, I discovered the Amazon MP3 Downloads. Same basic prices as iTunes (cheaper in many cases) and without any DRM.

I own the digital music files and I can do with them whatever I want to do.

I can move them around. I can put them on different music players in my house.... basically everything that I can do with a physical media like a CD (or tape or album for those who remember such things). And yes, those who are unethical can of course copy them and give them to other people. But the point is that the digital media is now mine to do with as I wish exactly like the physical media is. I am in control.

I have therefore almost no incentive to purchase from the iTunes Music Store when I can get it from Amazon (unless, of course, the music is exclusively available in iTunes).

Steve Jobs wrote about this back in February 2007 when he wrote this:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Today, it seems, Apple has reached that state... they said that 8,000,000 songs will be available DRM-free now and all 10,000,000 songs will be available soon. You will need to pay a bit more (and that extra 30 cents probably goes to the record companies) but at least it is mine and I can play it wherever and whenever I want.

That is why I was so pleased with the Apple announcement.

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Technorati Tags: apple, itunes, music, drm, amazon

2008 turned out to be a great year on so many different fronts... despite all the larger economic challenges. I had hoped to write up a longer end-of-year retrospective post, but alas, here it is, the end of the last day of the year.... That fact, in and of itself, speaks volumes about what a year 2008 was - A blur!

I think the single biggest thing I want to say right now as 2008 draws to a close is simply this:

THANK YOU!

Thank you to all of you who have continued to read my various posts... who have provided comments... who have answered the many questions I've thrown out there... who have challenged my viewpoints and forced me to defend - and refine - my positions... who have commiserated and rejoiced... who have sent me email suggestions... who have met up with me at conferences... who have generally just participated in this larger community. I've met some amazing people throughout the last year, learned an incredible amount and had a lot of fun along the way.

Thank you.

The community around this wacky industry in which we work and play continues to awe and inspire me. It's a privilege to be part of it and I look forward to working with many of you even more in 2009.

Happy New Year to you all!

[1] And for those unfamiliar with REM, here's the song I'm referencing in my title.

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That's been one of the big debates circulating through the Twittersphere / blogosphere since Loic LeMeur kicked off the conversation over the weekend. I haven't had the time to weigh in, but Neville Hobson put up a good post about two search sites: Twitority and Twithority. (And yes, there are two web sites that do almost exactly the same thing that have a one-letter difference in their domain names!)

In my own brief testing, I rather liked how TwitHority provided a two-column view of results by ranking and results by time. Nice to see. On the other hand, I liked how Twitority (no H) provides a Technorati-like way to search by degree of authority (although I have to wonder what they set a "lot" at, as it never turned up results for me).

Personally, I do like the option of being able to rank search results by number of followers. Yes, I understand that the number of followers is meaningless in so many ways... and that it can also be gamed by someone who, for instance, sets up tons of bogus twitter accounts. I realize that it's a very imperfect measurement. Still, it is a measurement that's out there. And the fact remains that if someone tweets something about you or your product/brand/service out to 10,000 people, odds are pretty good that it will potentially be read by more people than if someone tweets it out to, say, 20 people.

We'll have to see how these sites work out... but in my mind I'm glad to see someone trying to help us make sense out of all the data out there.

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Technorati Tags: search, twitter

I admit that I'm still a bit cautious about using either. I understand some of the arguments for using such systems instead of just the "regular" comment system of your blog platform... but I'm not yet convinced it's worth doing. Scott's review is very helpful, yet raises these questions:

• Comment Spam - As Scott notes, human spammers will get through most anything. Part of my question is what do you get with Disqus or IntenseDebate that you don't get with, say, Akismet?
  
  
• Community - One of the more compelling arguments for using a system is that it will help create a "community" among those who frequently comment - yet Scott seems to indicate that this isn't terribly useful so far. So what, then is the value of such a system?

I guess my other concerns include:

• Load Time - Are there any metrics out there on what, if any, time is added to the load time of using a blog comment system? One of my concerns right now across all my blog sites is that by including all these various other services, I'm increasing the amount of time it takes to load the page. Look at the right columns of this page... content in some of the blocks there is loaded via pulling RSS feeds, which adds to the display time.
  
  
• Availability - How "available" are these systems? i.e. what assurances do I have that they'll be up and running? What happens if they are not available? Will people still be able to leave comments? Will the post still load?

Obviously I need to do some more digging and research. But I guess I'm still not clear on the exact problem that Disqus and IntenseDebate are trying to solve. Now I don't deal with zillions of comments on this site, so perhaps I'm simply not the target audience.

Regardless, I'm still watching and monitoring... and I'm very glad to see articles like this that help differentiate between the different systems.

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Technorati Tags: blogging, comments, disqus, intensedebate, socialmedia, tools

Today, as the folks at Twitter announced in a blog post, they have released "Twitter Name Search" which allows you to search on a name. If you go to the URL, http://twitter.com/search/users, you'll get the search box shown on the right. Enter a search string and you'll get back results ranked by the number of followers that each person has.

You can also simply click the "Find People" link on the top of the Twitter web interface and instead of only being able to invite people to Twitter, the first tab now shows the search interface:

Now the search feature does have a few limitations. As Ev noted in his tweet, it searches only the Name field (although I found it also searches the "Username"). So you are, of course, limited to searching on what people put in there. For instance, I searched on "RJ", did not find the person I was looking for (our CTO) and then noticed that in his Twitter profile his "Name" field is the same as his Twitter username - which doesn't include "RJ". So naturally I won't find him.

The search also doesn't always seem to be complete. I did a search on "Udell" expecting to find both Jon and his wife Luann but was surprised to find that only Jon (and three others) appeared, yet Luann clearly has "Udell" in her Name field. In a couple of other searches that yielded a number of results, the ranking wasn't always exactly in the right order, as shown in the image to the right. One wonders if the Twitter folks are sorting into "buckets" of accounts that have similar numbers of followers and then giving those results back.

Regardless of these issues, which will no doubt be fixed as Twitter works on the newly-released functionality, it is great to finally have this feature and be able to do some searching of the Twitter namespace.

Naturally I'd like more... :-) For instance, I'd love to be able to search on the location field so that, for example, I could find the names of all the Twitter users within my region - or within a region that I'll be visiting at some point in time. It would also be great to be able to search on the bio or website fields....

Ah, but for the moment we can try the Twitter Name Search and see who we can find... (Thanks, Twitter, for adding that in.)

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Technorati Tags: search, twitter

As a long-time fan of design in general, I was pleased to learn from my Twitterfeed (I'm sorry, I don't remember from who!) of the "50 Most Beautiful Icon Sets Created in 2008" on the Noupe blog. Some very cool icon sets in there... many/most free and others commercial.

I love to see the range of creative ideas people come up with...

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Technorati Tags: design, icons, lists

Forgetting for a moment Facebook's draconian Terms of Service (which can be summarized quite simply as "ALL your content belongs to us - forever and always." (I wrote about this a year ago or so.)), let's say you do want to import in posts from your blog. This is quite simple (once you can find the Import tab):

Click on the "Blog/RSS" link, enter in the URL for your feed and... ta da... your blog posts start being imported as Notes into Facebook. Now all your friends who view the world through the lens of Facebook can also see the content you are writing outside of the Facebook walls.

But what if you have more than one RSS feed you want to import?

Oops.

No can do. You get exactly one "Blog/RSS" feed to import.

So what if you are someone like me who writes in a half a dozen different places (also here and here)? Sorry, but you're out of luck.

Your options are really to either: 1) only import one of your various blogs, which is what I have been doing to date; or 2) create an aggregated feed of your blogs and import that.

For #2, you then must go off and create that aggregated feed using Yahoo Pipes, Friendfeed or any of the zillion other services out there. I recently decided to look at this again and immediately thought of my FriendFeed feed at friendfeed.com/danyork since I already use that service to aggregate my online writing.

The problem is that the way I use Friendfeed is as a giant fire hose that aggregates everything I write or publish publicly online. This includes duplicate items such as my twitter and identi.ca feeds (which are usually, but not always, the same). Pointing Facebook to my Friendfeed feed would wind up with all sorts of duplicate material entering Facebook (especially as someday in here I'll sort out the Facebook <-> Twitter infinite loop I've created and get the interconnect happening there again).

Now in Friendfeed you can "hide" certain items from a feed from someone else... but I've not figured out a way in Friendfeed to do that in a feed of your own. So, naturally, my kludgey solution today was to:

• Create a second Friendfeed account and keep it a private account.
• Subscribe it only to my main Friendfeed account.
• Hide the various things in my main feed that I don't want to see (i.e. Twitter, identi.ca)
• Take the resulting RSS feed from this second Friendfeed account and give that to Facebook to import.

Ta da... blog-only aggregation accomplished in about 5-10 minutes of mouse-clicking.

But what a kludge! (And yes, I could have probably done this even simpler in half a dozen other sites...)

Wouldn't it be so much nicer if Facebook was like Friendfeed and let you import any number of RSS feeds? Take a look at this view of my Friendfeed page:

All the nice orange RSS icons are for various different feeds I'm importing. Why couldn't Facebook do something like that? It would be great if they would... and probably would result in more content being brought into Facebook (and helping in their continued battle for world domination. :-)

What do you think? What do you do if you have more than one blog or feed you want to import into Facebook? Or do you only have one blog? Or are you avoiding importing anything into Facebook because of their hideous Terms of Service?

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Technorati Tags: facebook, rss, feeds, friendfeed