Disruptive Conversations

If you listened to my report into today's For Immediate Release podcast #403, you would have heard me speak about a new Internet domain, ".tel", and a bit about what it means for communicators. Over on my DisruptiveTelephony.com blog, I wrote a lengthy review of the .tel domain that probably goes into way more detail about any of this than many of you care. Still, the post is over there for those interested - and I would encourage you to read the comments as well because someone from Telnic, the company behind the .tel domain got involved as well as someone from a domain name registrar also providing a lengthy reply.

To provide a quick summary, the ".tel" domain is a new top-level domain (TLD) that is designed to be very different from other current TLDs. Rather than be used to point to websites, it is designed to point to contact information. As that contact information is actually stored in the DNS system, it is potentially available much more quickly than through a traditional web-based directory. A key point is also that OWNERS of a .tel domain are the ones responsible for updating the contact info. You can do that on your own local site... so it has the potential to be a massively distributed directory. You can see an example of how this can look at danyork.vip.tel (my page in their beta program).

Now I have a few problems with the idea, which I've described in my post but for communicators of the PR/marketing form there are a couple of points to consider:

1. Brand protection in a new TLD - The most obvious concern is that this is a new top-level-domain. Will your brand (or that of your clients) be protected in this new TLD? Will you be able to get yourcompanyname.tel?

One question is - do you care if you you get this domain? (See my point #2 below.) If you don't, you can stop reading now and go read something else more interesting. If you do care, you should consider that the .tel launch is now in the first of three launch phases:

• Sunrise - Started yesterday (Dec 3rd). Owners of registered trademarks may apply for .tel domains (at a high cost).
• Landrush - Starts February 3rd. Anyone can register for any available domain - at a premium cost.
• General Availability - Starts March 24th. Anyone can register for any available domain at a "typical" cost.

More information about each phase can be found on Telnic's Launch Information page. So if you are a communicator associated with a trademark-protected brand, you may want to consider whether you want to go in on the Sunrise period and apply for your domain. Or you may want to wait it out. (Or, as was recently voiced to me, you may just view all of these new TLDs as yet-another-attempt to extract money out of you.)

2. Should you care? Will it succeed? - This is honestly a tough one to answer. Global directories have been tried many times before and haven't really succeeded. I have questions about whether this .tel effort will succeed. I think the potential is intriguing... but I do have to wonder if the technical issues can be overcome.

The question really comes down to this - if it does succeed, or at least do well enough to be useful, do you want your company/brand to be visible at brandname.tel? Or do you see this as yet another attempt to build a directory that probably won't work and you'll just wait and see? Ultimately, each of you have to make that choice.

Beyond my post and the excellent comments left to it from someone at Telnic and a domain name registrar, I'd also recommend listening to the Squawk Box episode where we interviewed Telnic's Justin Hayward (.tel part starts around 17:50).

I think we'd all like to see some kind of better way to find people online... the question is really just whether this is it. (What do you think?)

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Technorati Tags: .tel, telnic, DNS, internet, domains, domainnames, icann

Having had several people send me links to various postings of the "cell phone popcorn" video (like this one) where it purports to show several people simultaneously ringing cell phones and thereby popping corn through the microwave transmissions coming from the phones, I admit to having wondered how real this risk was or whether this was some clever trick.

Turns out... no risk whatsoever. It was a hoax done in the name of "viral marketing".

The perpetrator? None other than the maker of a Bluetooth headset.

As shown here in the embedded video (at least until CNN requests YouTube to take it down), the CEO of the company responsible is very happy with how well the video has "succeeded":

Essentially they dropped popcorn into the scene and then digitally removed the existing kernels. They do this in several scenes with different people speaking different languages.

Now the CEO claims that it was all meant to be "hilarious" and that "people found it to be funny" and that it wasn't at all meant to be "scary".

Huh?

So if I understand correctly, the central premise is NOT "Cell phones can fry your brain like they do this popcorn if you hold them up to your head - so buy our headset and stay safe" but that it's just a "joke"?

I'm sorry, but knowing the kinds of forwarded email messages that I keep receiving from people over the years, I think there WILL be a lot of folks out there who will be scared by this and will promptly forward this to all of their friends. (And after having been online for 20+ years, I've pretty much given up trying to point the forwarders to sites like Snopes.com. It doesn't seem to matter... people just hit "Forward" without really thinking about it.) And like most of these hoax emails that get forwarded, the person forwarding it will usually NOT go back and send out a message to everyone receiving it saying that is a hoax if they figure it out... and so the original email gets forwarded on to others who forward it on...

And the reality is that with the long memory of Google, such hoaxes will live basically forever - and long after the original video may be taken down, it will by that point have been reposted and remixed onto other sites.

Do we really need more urban legends floating around out there?

Do we really need more people scared? [1]

I'm all for viral videos that are fun or amusing, but there's a line somewhere in there that this video seems to cross. It kind of reminds me of the Turner Broadcasting hoax two years ago where there were devices under bridges that looked like bombs... again, it wound up scaring a lot of folks. Now, granted, that was something completely different in that it was a physical advertising gimmick versus an online video. Still, there's a line there between what is a good marketing campaign and what sows unnecessary fear.

Did this video go too far? Will it cause people to be unnecessarily scared? Or do I simply not have enough of a sense of humor to appreciate it?

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[1] And yes, I do realize that there are multiple different studies out there weighing in on the different sides of the debate about whether there are in fact serious concerns about radiation impacts from having your phone next to your head. But do we really need videos like this out there scaring people more?

Remember those music videos you used to watch when MTV first launched? C'mon, admit it... I'm sure you do. If you grew up in USA in the 1980's, MTV was definitely part of our collective experience and probably most of can recall videos from that era.

Now, we can watch them. (and newer ones, too, of course)

Yes, indeed, MTV has released thousands of music videos in full form and from what I can see without any advertising at - http://www.mtvmusic.com/.

I have to agree with CrunchGear that perhaps the coolest aspect is that you can embed the videos and share the links. So here are a few that may take some of you back a few years...

This was perhaps one of my favorites (but then again, I'm a student of the German language):

And who could forget "Major Tom"? (Although I admit to being more partial to the German version...)

And whatever you do, STOP this video before you get to the chorus or it will infect your brain for the rest of the day:

Of course, some songs of the era are just classics (no matter what concerns we may have later had over the lyrics):

And no list would be complete without, of course, "Money for Nothing", which I do recall hearing OVERPLAYED so many zillion times in the mid-1980s... but the lyrics definitely go with this blog post:

Ah, what fun... many more await you at www.mtvmusic.com/... what are your favorites?

Me? Now that I went there yesterday night I think I'll be avoiding it for a while... way too easy to get sucked in!

Technorati Tags: music, videos, musicvideos, mtv

What are the benefits of microblogging within a corporation or enterprise? What value does it bring? How can it be used? And how do these new tools like Yammer, Present.ly, Laconi.ca and others measure up?

Over on a Voxeo blog, I went into lengthy detail on all of those points in a post called "Yammer, Present.ly, Laconica and pushing enterprise microblogging into the cloud". I basically laid out:

• The benefits and use cases we've seen for corporate microblogging within our company over the few weeks we've been trying it out.
• Our experience with using Yammer - the positive and negative aspects and how it does and does not compare with Twitter.
• Some thoughts about how Present.ly compares to Yammer.
• Some thoughts on how the open source Laconica could be used to build a corporate microblogging service.
• Some thoughts on the wide range of companies leaping into the space right now.

Along with some general thoughts on what to think about when investigating these solutions and some pointers to the great work done by Laura Fitton and Jeremiah Owyang among others.

This was also somewhat predictably the topic of my weekly report into the For Immediate Release podcast today.

Rather amusingly, on the same day I published my review, the New York Times came out with two articles on the same general theme - one as an "article" in the main site and one as a blog post:

• Popularity or Income? Two Sites Fight It Out (the article focusing on Twitter vs Yammer)
• Will Microblogging at Work Make You More Productive?

The comments on the NYT blog post make for interesting reading. Obviously we at Voxeo are not alone in experimenting with Yammer.

I'm sure lots more will be written in the months ahead about corporate microblogging - and I'm sure I'll be writing more on it here. Meanwhile, please do enjoy my review of the tools and please do let me know what you think (either here or there). Have you tried Yammer? or Present.ly? or Laconi.ca? Or one of the other options? Do you see a role for microblogging within an enterprise?

Technorati Tags: microblogging, twitter, yammer, present.ly, laconi.ca, voxeo

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So there I was this morning in the usual daily routine of having breakfast and reading the comics in the daily newspaper (yes, I still get a daily paper - two, in fact), when the world of social media landed in the comics. There in the "Zits" comic strip, Jeremy and his friend Pierce are gasping at the thought that students actually passed notes on paper in the time "B.T.", as in "Before Twitter"! I admit to laughing out loud and getting perplexed looks from other household members.

You can see it for yourself (click on the image):

And I would have loved to embed the comic here, but I definitely respect copyright notices and the notice on the page for the comic is very clear (my emphasis added):

© 2008 Zits Partnership. This feature is presented with the permission of King Features Syndicate, Inc. and is furnished solely for personal, non-commercial use. Redistribution in whole or part prohibited.

That last part would indicate to me pretty clearly that I can't just go and embed the graphic in my post, which is too bad, as it would be a lot more interesting for readers to see the comic in the context of my commentary here. But between someone applying stock copyright terms and probably someone else's desire to have the page viewed "on the property", it means viewers here have to go over to that site to see the comic. Some will... some won't. It's just annoying.

Now if they provided "embed" codes for the comics like you have for, say, YouTube videos (or most other video sharing sites), the publishers would be able to ensure they gather statistics but they would also get the added publicity of having their comic strip embedded on other sites and increase the number of people who have seen the strip.

But I digress...

My main point today was merely to point out that it was fun to see a mention of Twitter on the comic pages today. I'm sure there will be a lot of readers of the comics who won't have a clue what this means... but for those of us who do understand, we can laugh along. (While simultaneously realizing again why some schools are futilely trying to ban cell phones.)

Technorati Tags: twitter, social media, copyright, zits

On today's Squawk Box at 11am US Eastern time, there will be a topic that continues to fascinate me - the use of "new media" (or "digital media" or "online media", etc.) by election campaigns. Listeners to my weekly Thursday FIR reports will know that I have been mentioning this on several of my recent reports. Here, in the US, the Obama campaign in particular has been very active in new media, with news just yesterday that they have sponsored ads in an XBox 360 racing game. Both campaigns here in the US have been very active with Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and more... the site TechPresident.com has perhaps done the best job writing about this usage (and includes stats as well).

Join us at 11am US Eastern time today to discuss all of this. Or if you can't join at 11am, check out Alec Saunders blog at http://www.saunderslog.com/ later today to listen to the episode.

P.S. And since Squawk Box is hosted by a Canadian, Alec will be talking about some election campaign they have been having up there... in fact, they seem to be voting today... although we wouldn't know that here in the US - we're just their geographic neighbor, after all.

Technorati Tags: squawk box, politics, technology, obama, mccain, 2008presidentialcampaign

As you can see in this screen capture, I am using the WordPress iPhone app and it IS working to post to the Voxeo blog site that runs WordPress MU... However, as shown in that image, the app is confused about the names of the different WPMU blogs. It gave all four of them the same name, even though I went to different urls. I can though post to the different blogs. It is just a UI issue in the app. Maybe in the next version. Pretty cool, I have to say.

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UPDATE (a few minutes after posting the text above): Now I posted this blog entry from the TypePad iPhone application, since this Disruptive Conversations blog runs on TypePad versus WordPress or WordPress MU. A couple of thoughts on that experience:

• Using the TypePad iPhone app is clearly for just jotting a quick note and sending it up to your blog. Presumably I'll get better at iPhone typing, but still, I can't see me writing a length post.
• More to the point, I didn't see any way to either control formatting in the iPhone TypePad app. Now perhaps I can enter raw HTML... I didn't try that, but I'm not really keen on that given the limited input capability on the iPhone.
• Similarly, I saw no easy way to enter links... the links in the text above were added when I writing this text in MarsEdit and editing an already-published post.
• I did not have any image formatting choices that I could see... I couldn't align the image on the right (as I did here) or change the scale. The image was inserted at the top of the post with my text below it.
• The TypePad iPhone app cropped my image to be square. Now, when I was adding the photo to my post in the app, I could "move and scale" the application, but there seemed to be no way to scale the screenshot down so that the whole screenshot would fit in the area. Everytime I scaled it down, it would pop back up to its full size (and maybe this is just because I'm an iPhone newbie).

Now those are issues with the TypePad app for the iPhone, but it looks like the WordPress app for the iPhone has similar issues. (Now maybe I need to learn more about what other options there are... perhaps I am missing some way to access other commands.)

Having said all this, it's definitely very cool to have the option to post from either TypePad or WordPress to my various blog sites. I don't see me using it too much when I have another option available... but I could see it being great for posting to the blogs while traveling.

What do you all think? Have you used either of these apps? Are there commands I'm missing?

Technorati Tags:
apple, iphone, typepad, wordpress, wpmu, wordpress mu, blogging

Ten years ago today, an action of mine fundamentally changed my life.

I didn't know it then, of course.

Sometimes there are days and times when you know - in the moment - that your life is undergoing a severe change. Usually those moments are new beginnings... an engagement, a wedding, the birth of a child, the day you moved to a new place... or started the job you always dreamed about. Or they are new endings... a death of a parent, child or other loved one, the final granting of a divorce, the ending of a long-held job, an accident or serious injury... whatever the case, you know at the end of the day: I am not who I was when this day began.

Other life-changing moments - perhaps most - are far more subtle... the day passes as a perfectly normal day and it is only later, perhaps much later, upon reflection that you realize that that particular day was so important.

Ten years ago today was one of those latter moments for me.

So what happened, you say, that was of such grand and momentous importance?

Simply this... an article of mine was published in an online magazine.

That's it. I wrote an article. It was published. No big deal, really. Now granted, this was 1998, the time before today's era of ubiquitous self-publishing via blogging. Sure, you could run your own website (I did), but that wouldn't necessarily get you traffic and get your ideas out there. "Search" was still emerging and larger websites were still where the traffic and audience was. So having an article published in a larger website was still a bigger deal then. But in the end, that was still all it was.

Yet I had no idea then how much writing one little article would change the course of my life - and in many ways bring me to where I am today.

Remarkably, ten years later, the article is still online. Even more remarkably, perhaps, it still remains at its original URL. (Or at least the URL I added to my page of articles a good number of years ago.)

The article, "Creating a Linux Certification and Training Program", was published in the October 1998 issue of the Linux Gazette which, if my memory serves me correctly, came out on October 1, 1998. In the piece, I laid out the reasons why I thought a certification program was needed to expand the growth of usage of the Linux operating system, the requirements I thought were necessary for such a program and ended with a request for those interested to contact me or point me in the direction of where such discussion was happening.

As I chronicled over the next months through a series of Linux Gazette articles and summarized in the last piece one year later (note: most of the links don't work anymore), the response to that article led to connections with some amazing people and was one of the threads of action that led to the creation of the Linux Professional Institute (LPI), today the leading vendor-neutral certification for Linux professionals giving literally tens of thousands of exams each month around the world.

The creation of LPI involved a huge number of people, an incredible amount of effort and time, uncountable numbers of email messages, raising over a half-million dollars in sponsorships (thank you, dot-Com era!), presentations at conferences around the world... and more exposure to the scientific side of test development than I ever would have even remotely imagined would exist. Someday perhaps those of us involved early on will sit down and write more about the history of what happened... in retrospect it was remarkable in so many ways. And while my own thinking evolved considerably from where it was in that first article, it was the starting point for one thread of what became LPI.

On a personal level it took me from managing the training side of a small IT training center in Bedford, NH, to suddenly being employed by Linuxcare to build LPI and be LPI's first President. From traveling occasionally around New England to traveling globally 2-3 weeks a month speaking at conferences and attending meetings. From being just a regular Linux user to coming to know the CEOs and senior leaders of the leading Linux companies and eventually joining the board of Linux International. From reading the Linux-related news sites to either writing for them or begin written about in them. It was a crazy, insane, yet incredible time. And while I was only involved with LPI really through sometime in 2001 (and then a bit more briefly in 2005), my work there directly led to the offer to work for e-smith in Ottawa, which then was acquired by Mitel... which then led ultimately to Voxeo, where I've been for the last year now.

All coming out of... one... little... article.

Which is why when someone asks me for advice about whether they should publish something online, or start a blog, or launch into a new venture, I usually do encourage them (providing their content is decent) to go ahead and do it. Begin it. One never knows where something you start may take you. One of my favorite quotes has always been one attributed to Goethe:

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

And while that quote turns out to only very loosely be from Goethe, the sentiment is one I definitely agree with. There is power in starting. In beginning. In taking that first step. In putting forward ideas knowing that while they may be applauded they may also be shredded (or perhaps worse, completely ignored).

It seems somewhat bizarre to me that that article was published now a decade ago - although perhaps not when I look at the gray now in my hair and beard. (Hmmm... how much of that came from LPI? :-) ) It led to some amazing times, some great friendships that are still there today... and did fundamentally change the path my life took in some wonderful ways. Ten years later, I'm still very glad I wrote that piece. I'm thankful and honored to have met and interacted with so many incredible people (way too many to thank/recognize in a simple blog post). I'm thrilled to see that LPI has grown and thrived in ways that many of us would never have imagined at the beginning... and I look forward to seeing what it may become over the next 10 years.

Amazing what can happen sometimes........ what will you begin today?

Technorati Tags: lpi, linux, certification, writing, danyork, dan york

Would you like to go to the Web 2.0 Expo Europe in Berlin in October? Or a conference about online video in Los Angeles in November?

If so, simply send in a video to the For Immediate Release Listener Contest and you'll be entered to win! Shel and Neville are holding this contest and giving away these conference passes. (Note: It's the conference pass only - no travel or hotel.)

It's simple to enter... just "create a video that conveys a thought, a concept, an idea in an imaginative way". Upload it to one of the zillion video sites out there and send the URL in to FIR. That's it!

More info is on the FIR contest page... let's see what you can do!

Technorati Tags: fir, forimmediaterelease, socialmedia

As someone who has been involved in public speaking, training, PR and other aspects of marketing/communication for close to 20 years, I've come to appreciate that the manner in which you dress does have an impact on how you are perceived by your audience. Working for much of the 1990's in the suit-and-tie culture of Boston, I've also watched the changing fashions for men... as suits have given way to first "business casual" and now seemingly to simply "casual". Not everywhere, of course, but in general.

Still, I admit to being a bit surprised when I saw the news conference last week in New York City announcing the Google Android handset made by HTC and operating on T-Mobile's network. Here you had top executives from Google, HTC, T-Mobile USA and T-Mobile Germany all sharing the stage... and what's missing?

Now, granted, the main force behind the press conference is Google with its very casual San Francisco Bay Area culture. And when the two Google founders took the stage at the end of the conference, they were predictably casually dressed.

But T-Mobile? (a.k.a. the mobile subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom?) And HTC out of Taiwan/Asia?

Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised given the success of Apple keynotes... :-) Or some of the recent Microsoft product launches I've seen... or for that matter many of the conference keynotes I've seen recently.

Still, I admit to finding it an interesting sign of the times. Four high-level executives at a New York news conference (the land of lawyers and finance)... all wearing what looked to be close to suits - but without ties.

I know that ties are still worn in many industries and in many regions of the world. But I somehow wonder if their time is limited. I recall reading earlier this year that the industry association for tie manufacturers shut down. (Two links: here and here.) You see ties increasingly rarely... perhaps it's only a matter of time before more manufacturers either close or are absorbed into larger ones.

Count me as one who laments the fading of the tie. Sure, in many ways they are silly pieces of fabric that you would loop around your neck. Sure, if you didn't have the right size neck collar on your shirt, wearing a tie could be uncomfortable. Sure, it was one more thing you had to do to get dressed in the morning. (and how many of us always got the tie right the first time we tied it?)

But still, there was something about wearing a tie... putting one on marked the transition into "work mode"... just as taking one off at the end of the day marked the transition out of work and into a more casual time. There was also something about the degree of "respect" you were showing for whomever you were meeting. You were getting "dressed up" for them... not just meeting them in regular everyday clothes.

I think it's sad, in many ways, to see the fading. Is it a pendulum swing? Will the next generation rebel against the total casualness of many business environments and bring back the tie? Or will the necktie simply join the formal hat as a vestige of a bygone era...

[I, of course, work out of a home office where wearing a tie would admittedly be a bit ridiculous. But even when I travel and speak at conferences, I've found myself more often wearing the jacket-and-black-shirt motif versus a necktie. I do, though, have something like 50 ties lurking in a closet...]

Technorati Tags: fashion, culture, neckties, ties