Skip to content

Technology and Society - 6. page

Anyone you know care about society?

As a society and democracy, we don’t need newspapers, but we do need journalism.  Please send Clay’s article to anyone who reads or writes for newspapers.  We all need to start thinking about how to preserve journalism through the internet revolution instead of hiding from it.  Oh, and this too: most of a local newspaper is not journalism.

Thanks to Clay Shirky for a cogent, scary, realistic analysis of this issue.  Via Barry Ritholtz.

PS: I hope the universities know that the internet is coming for them too.

Business Social Media Technology and Society | moore |

Dan Pink discussed the sad state of employee incentives at TED

Fantastic video from Dan Pink about motivation in the workplace.  He examines the science of motivation, and knocks business for not adapting new methods of encouragement for the new, right brain type problems that face us.

This quote pretty much summarizes the talk:

There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse,  is that too many organizations are making their decisions,  their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science.

You can see a transcript of the talk by clicking on the ‘Transcript’ link on the right hand side of the video.  It’s actually pretty cool–clicking on a sentence and it updates the video to that part.  It’s not linkable, though–FAIL.

A few takeaways:

  • If/then rewards work well for simple tasks…they concentrate the mind and narrow your focus.
  • From a study by the FRB of Boston, “once [a] task called for ‘even rudimentary cognitive skill’ a larger reward ‘led to poorer performance'”
  • Management is not a tree, it’s a television set.  We invented it.
  • Atlassian used to give their engineers autonomy at least a few times a year to choose what they work on (FedEx Days), and now gives workers control over 20% of their time.  (Joel has something to say about Atlassian too.)
  • Autonomy, mastery, purpose are what people are looking for (once money is taken care of)
  • Results only work environment–people can work when they want, as long as they get their work done.  Here’s a stub wikipedia article about ROWE.
  • Encarta vs Wikipedia–who won?  The encyclopedia that leveraged people’s desires to work, not the one that paid them.

Now, my thoughts.

  • First, watch the whole video.  It’s only 18 minutes and is well worth your time if you are an employer or an employee (which covers most of us, I think).
  • ROWE reminds me a lot of college, especially higher level classes.  No one cares about when you do the work and I don’t remember being required to be at classes, but the results (passing a test, turning in a paper) were very important.
  • He only talks about the autonomy component of the new ‘motivation trilogy’ (autonomy, mastery, purpose).  I wish he’d chosen to talk about ‘purpose’ because to me that is the hardest bit–someone needs to do grungy jobs.  I guess granting workers autonomy is pretty revolutionary too.
  • “once money is taken care of” is a huge elephant in the room that he again does not address.  When the work is high value add, it makes sense to take money off the table (software developers are very lucky in this respect).  But what about a worker at Target, for example?  A Target store can’t afford to pay someone enough to take the money issue off the table, but can probably benefit from the ‘motivation trilogy’
  • The whole Encarta vs Wikipedia example that he gives is great, but he ignores the fact that Wikipedia has very few paid employees and that Wikipedia only won because of volunteer labor.  It’s not a solution that scales across a society.

Overall, in general, a thought provoking talk (expect nothing less from TED).  I would say that he is describing the future of work as consulting.  You are paid for what you know, the problems are fuzzy, answers are unexpected and at times unclear, and results arrived at matter far more than hours put in.

Is the future of work consulting?  If so, the business world is about to be upended, because, to borrow Dan’s phrase, “the operating system of business” isn’t designed to handle a workforce of consultants.  Heck, society isn’t either.

[tags]work, employment, gtd[/tags]

Presentations Technology and Society Video | moore |

StackOverflow and Community

“Hey, have you heard?  StackExchange is the new faq/forum.  It’s the cat’s pajamas, with SEO friendly urls, lots of web 2.0 features (including a realtime wysiwyg editor) and social goodness baked in.” — Dan, trying on his hipster hat

If you’re a programmer, and you use the google to look for answers to your programming questions, you’ve probably seen stackoverflow.com pop up in the search results.  This site, started as a collaboration between Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood last year, is a better way to do question and answer sites, aka FAQs.  It opens the FAQ asking and answering process to anyone with a browser, has anti spam features, some community aspects (voting, editing answers, reputation, commenting, user accounts), and great urls.  And, incidentally, a great support staff–I emailed them a question about my account and they responded is less than 24 hours.

They’ve done a good job of generalizing the platform, and now you can create your very own.  There are a wide variety of stack sites: real estate, your pressing Yoda needs, small business, space exploration.  Here’s a list.  I love the fact they are charging for this software–$129/month for a 1M pageviews is not very much for software that lets you build your community and lets your community share knowledge.

And that’s the key.  Like most other social software, what you get out of a stack site is highly correlated to what you put into it.  If, like the folks at Redmonk, you create a stack site about a topic on which you have expertise and publicize it where you know interested people will hear about it and spend time answering questions on it, I imagine you have a good chance to build a community around it. And once you get to a certain threshold, it will take on a life of its own.  But you need to provide that activation energy–it’s an organizational commitment.
If, on the other hand, you create a stack site and don’t have a community which can get excited about it, or don’t do a good job reaching out to them, you end up with an abandoned stack site (worse than an abandoned blog, imho).  I’m hoping that Teaching Ninja won’t be in this state for long, but right now there’s only 3 questions and no answers there.

The proliferation of social software infrastructure sites (I’m looking at you, ning) has made it easier than ever to create the foundations for communities online.  But, you need to have people for community software to have any value!  Because it is so easy, getting others involved is not a case of ‘if you build it they will come’ (if it ever was).  There are too many competing sites for other’s time.  Software can make it easier and easier to build the infrastructure around community, but it’s the invisible structures (bonds between you and your users, and between them) that will actually create ongoing value.

If you’re looking for an outward facing FAQ site and willing to invest the time in it, a stack site seems to be one of the best software platforms for building that right now.  (I have some qualms about who owns the data, but it seems like they are planning export functionality.)  Just don’t believe the hype: “The Stack Exchange technology is so compelling, sites can take off right away.”  No software can make a social site ‘take off right away’.

[tags]no silver bullet for community,ask yoda,stackoverflow,community[/tags]

Business Social Media Technology and Society Useful Tools | moore |

Boco: Colorado’s SXSW?

I spent yesterday at boco.me, a one day, one track conference in Boulder Colorado. The focus was on three different areas: food, tech, and music.  Apparently, South by Southwest (SXSW) has a similar multidimensional focus.

I was looking forward to meeting people from different spheres with different interests, and it certainly delivered that. Most attendees I talked to were tech people, however. Many thanks to Andrew Hyde and company for organizing this. I hope it’s the first of many.

Before signing up and actually before the conference, I did not have a very good idea of how much I was getting.  It was actually quite affordable: $99. For this modest price, attendees received:

  • entry to a concert: value $15
  • $30 worth of dinner at one of Boulder’s many fine restaurants
  • happy hour with beer and wine and apps
  • three sessions with about six speakers per session
  • three breakout sessions
  • a free T-shirt
  • a thank you note from Andrew(!)

Boco was, to put it mildly, a hell of a deal.

The conference had, as first year conferences tend to, a few flaws. The things I would change were:

  • allow users to ask questions of the speakers
  • have the breakout sessions be a bit more organized–they felt very ad hoc.

What follows are my notes from yesterday.  Here’s what the Daily Camera had to say.

First up was Rachel Weidinger (her slides are here). She mentioned the “big here and long now” and talked about tools that make our here bigger–“handheld awesome detectors”.  The tool that excited me the most was the Good Guide. This site offers what I’ve been looking for for a long time, which is detailed information on products, so that price and marketing are not the sole guides when you purchase something off the cuff. This guide has an API so that third-party developers can access their data. Oh, and Rachel is also looking for someone to build snake detecting goggles.

Next, Mark Menagh spoke on the differences between eating organic and eating locally.  I paraphrase, but he said that folks who eat organics are pessimists who want rules to prevent bad things from happening to their food and locavores are optimists.  He also emphasized that this November, Boulder voters are going to be asked to extend the Open Space sales tax ( till 2034! [pdf]) and that while we do that, voters should let the county commissioners know how they feel about GMO crops on open space land.

Then, Justin Perkins, from Olomomo Nut Company discussed some of the similarities he had noticed between building a band fanbase, as he did in the 1990s, and building one for a local food company, as he is doing now.  I can tell you from experience that his nut products are quite good.  He talked about engaging users in the product so that they feel it’s part of their story. Takeaway quote: entrepreneurs “have to be consistent and persistent as hell”.

Cindy O’Keeffe spoke about her experience fighting the GMO beets on Boulder County Open Space land.  I had heard about this issue before (Mark also discussed it), but she gave a good overview of the issues, and she had a compelling story about her personal journey from detached global environmentalist to local leader opposing the GMO planting.

Rick Levine, an author of the Cluetrain Manifesto (read it if you haven’t!) and now chocolatier, gave an overview of the Cluetrain ideas, and then talked about his new venture into high end chocolates, including some of the physics of chocolate.  Seth Ellis, his company, have shiny candy bar wrappers that he claimed were home compostable.  When talking about the Cluetrain and his experiences in technology, he offered up the observation that while he had been really interested in technology, his really great moments were talking to people.

The Autumn Film, a two person Boulder band, talked a bit about their experiences in music creation at this time.  Takeaway: music used to be “work hard, get lucky, hit it big”, but the industry changes have now just made it “work hard, hit it big, work harder”.  You can check out some of their music for free (well, you have to give them some of your personal information). Then, one member of the band performed.

I enjoyed the first breakout in which five of us gathered outside and discussed a wide variety of topics.  It was great to have a framework for getting to know the other conference participants.

Amber Case led off the second session by talking about cyborg anthropology–basically the idea that humans extend themselves via their tools, and that the malleability of current tools (think iphone) far exceeds the malleability of previous tools (think hammer).  Several of the other attendees found her ideas fascinating, but I wasn’t as astonished.  I guess I have thought about this topic, though certainly not with the rigor that Amber has.  (reading Snow Crash is no thesis.)  She did have some neat pointers to other work going on in this field: human-blender ‘communication’ and hug storage. Humorously, her email sig reads “Sent from my external proesthetic device“

Rich Grote and Dave Angulo then talked about what makes an online influencer–relevance, audience, access and one other thing I forgot to write down.  They are working on a company, which I was unable to find a link to, to leverage online influencers for marketing purposes.  It reminded me a bit of what Lijit presented on in June at the BDNT.  They also talked a bit about Dunbar’s number, which is the “theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships”.

Scott Andreas discussed his experiences building social software for non profits.  The takeaway for me was that when you have a cohesive group and you provide them social software, it can enrich the community.  The most important thing is that the community (and their norms) exists and is enforced outside of the software.  He also talked about Sunlight Labs, an open data source about the US government. Also, Andrew Hyde mentioned at this time the idea of floating your revenue through Kiva.  I certainly am not earning a lot of interest on my business savings right now, and using the funds to do microloans could be a great social good.  I would be a bit concerned about loan losses, though (98% loan repayment is a bit worrisome).

Sean Porter of Gigbot gave a breakdown of the live music industry ecosystem.  There’s a lot of middlemen between the fan and the band when it comes to concerts–ticketing agencies, promoters, management.  He started down the path of explaining how much of the ticket price you and I pay each of these folks get, but didn’t go all the way; if he had, I think his presentation would have been much stronger.

Ingrid Alongi talked about how she learned about work life balance, and techniques for maintaining it.  Good ideas in there–having a status meeting with coworkers while on a bike ride was probably my favorite, though.  Incidentally, she was laid off on Monday and had found a new job by the time she talked on Friday

Grant Blakeman and Reid Phillips (the latter being a member of The Autumn Film) talked about the new music business models.  Takeaway quote: “things always change”.  Sounds like Abe Lincoln. They are building tools that allow musicians to use some new media to market and connect with their fans. I enjoyed their insistence on musicians retaining control of their work, and using new technology to facilitate that.  It reminded me of this great article by Joel Spolsky where he talks about how your business should never outsource core business functions.  Fan interaction seems a pretty core part of the band business, so I doubt it should be outsourced.

Ari Newman of Filtrbox talked about the realtime web: how we’ve reached a technology tipping point and that Twitter and its open API pushed the real time web into the forefront, but that it is larger than the Twitterstream.  Ari also mentioned how the real time web actually isn’t all that real time–even if the technology delivers news to your computer in half a second, if it is not in front of you, it doesn’t matter.  Maybe he should collaborate with Amber on some goggles that would push realtime news to you all the time 🙂 .  He had real neat slide effects, too.  I chatted with him a bit and it was great to hear stories of his old sysadmin days–Linux on a Mac 8500!

The second breakout session was over lunch.  Was really interesting to talk with Ryan and Angie of Location 3, a Denver interactive agency, as well as Andrew Hyde, Ef, Rahoul(sp?) and Dan Kohler; wide ranging discussion and not too focused.

The third set of sessions was more informal.  Half of the speakers did not follow their topics on the program…

First, Emily Olson, from Foodzie, discussed how she had turned her passion (food) into a job (Foodzie, among others).  Her main points: pay attention to what you do in your free time–that’s an indication of your passion; find a mentor; be willing to work for free, especially at first; don’t try to find the one true vocation.

Dan Kohler, of Renegade Kitchen, discussed how to not have your blog/website suck.  He had 3 people up on stage read 3 different posts, and critiqued them.  Takeaway–“put your voice into” your blog.  I have a pretty vanilla voice on this blog, but part of that is due to professional concerns; however, Dan made the point that really, if you do drive some people off with the tone of your blog, the people you have left will be fiercer fans.

There was a panel on where the local music scene was heading, moderated by Sharon Glassman, a local bluegrass musician, and featuring Jason Bradley and Ira Leibtag.  I stepped out during this panel, but I do remember Jason Bradly discussing how “lots of people live in a box” in reference to his bringing an accordion to a bluegrass jam (and the reaction of the other players).

Brad Feld discussed the startup visa movement.  The idea is anyone who wants to move to the United States and start a company would get a 2 year visa; it would be automatically renewable for achieving certain goals (raising more funding, employing a certain number of people).  The founder would have to show proof of funding.  More information here.  I like anything that gets more smart folks to move to the USA.

Elana Amsterdam spoke on her experience turning a blog she wrote into a recipe book, and stated that her experience showed how you could really build a full fledged business out of a blog, using your passion and the blog as a platform to publish.  She also recommended “Write the Perfect Book Proposal” by Jeff Herman.  Updated 10/4: I asked a friend in the book publishing business about this book and she said: “Yikes. Any book that says “it’s easier to get published than you think” makes me want to hurt myself. Proposals aren’t about capturing a publisher’s attention. They’re about showing your expertise, your marketability, and just plain having an idea that fits within what a company actually publishes.”  For what that’s worth…  I think that she’s absolutely correct, for certain kinds of blogs.  I know that Eric Sink did the same thing with “Eric Sink on the Business of Software”, a fine book that has a collection of blog posts at its core.

Finally, Lilly Allison, a personal chef, spoke about eating seasonally and consciously.  She is using the web to extend her reach (and her brand!) as a personal chef–if you sign up, she’ll send you meal weekly plans with in season menus.  I signed up and will let you know how it goes—I do have lots of food from my CSA (here’s a list of Colorado CSAs).

There was a third breakout session, but I had to run some errands, so I missed it.

Then, it was happy hour time.  Off to the Boulder Digital Works, above Brasserie 1010.  It’s a beautiful space in downtown Boulder, and I talked with some of the incoming students who are doing the first 60 week advertising certificate.  In addition I had conversations on a variety of topics from the success of boco to how to scale a custom chocolate business to whether presenting at BDNT helped business (answer, indirectly, yes) to what to do with consulting requests that interfere with your core business (with the Occipital folks)

At the end of happy hour, we gathered into groups of four.  I had dinner with with Scott Andreas, Dan Kohler, and Jen Myronuk; a fine meal at Centro and then to a concert at the Boulder Theater: Paper Bird.

All in all, a fantastic conference.  It was eclectic and not as focused as other conferences I’ve been to, but for that reason alone has value.  I get bored if I only educate myself in one dimension.  Thanks again to the boco team, and here’s hoping that next year is as good, if not better.

Business Conferences Social Media Technology and Society | moore |

Samasource: Outsourcing as social enterprise

One of my clients (Twomile Heavy Industries) is building a large website.  He is involved in the non profit technology world (NTEN, CTNC, etc), and ran across Samasource, which is a social enterprise to bring outsourcing work into the developing world.  And not just Bangalore–they have work centers in refugee camps. They will be providing some testing services for this project.

Samasource offers a wide variety of services, all via screened partners.  I seem them as a cross between Odesk (which an interviewee touchs on here), Elance (which I joined, mostly to see what kind of jobs are available) and Kiva (which I learned about via Andrew Leonard).  See Samasource’s take on comparisons to Odesk and Elance in their FAQ.

What a great idea!  Very ‘the world is flat’.  This type of social enterprise overcomes my main objection to Kiva, because Samasource could provide a cost savings to their clients; compare that to Kiva, which provides no monetary return to lenders.

Anyhow, I’ll try to update when I’ve actually engaged with the folks that Samasource led us to, but it was such a cool business model I had to give them a shout out.

[tags]social enterprise, outsourcing, developing world[/tags]

Business Jobs Technology and Society | moore |

Solix website launch

I was able to help launch a revamped website on Monday.  Solix Biofuels is an algal oil producer moving from R&D into production. I’m not really a biology person, but I did enjoy reading about their technology.  To my layperson’s eye, algal energy sources seem much more sustainable than crop fuel sources.

It’s been a while since I’ve been the prime mover behind a deployment–there’s always a bit of nail biting when you finally reveal work to the world–but this one was fairly smooth.

[tags]solix,site launch, algal energy, oilgae[/tags]

Technology Technology and Society Web Applications | moore |

GWT encryption options

I was looking for an encryption package for GWT.  A client had some mildly private information that they wanted to encrypt in transmission.  Now, of course, this is ultimately futile.  Anyone who wants to get at this information can, because we send the source code (however obfuscated) that decrypts the information to the client.  To borrow Corey Doctorow’s words, the attacker is also the recipient.  But, sometimes just making getting the information inconvenient is good enough.

I looked at a couple of encryption options.  There’s are a couple of nice javascript libraries that do encryption: Gibberish-AES and javascript.crypto.library, but they hav no GWT hooks (and javascript.crypto.library is released under the AGPL which has some unclear legal ramifications).

However, there is a project from about two years ago that does Triple DES encryption and is written in pure GWT.  It’s even called gwt-crypto.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t been maintained recently.  I was able to download the files, apply a fix (for issue #1) and move some files around in such a way that it works.

Here’s how you use it:

on the server:
TripleDesCipher cipher = new TripleDesCipher();
cipher.setKey(Constants.GWT_DES_KEY);
try {
enc = cipher.encrypt(String.valueOf(value));
} catch (DataLengthException e1) {
e1.printStackTrace();
} catch (IllegalStateException e1) {
e1.printStackTrace();
} catch (InvalidCipherTextException e1) {
e1.printStackTrace();
}

On the client, make sure you inherit the module:
<inherits name='com.googlecode.gwt.crypto.Crypto'/>
Then:

TripleDesCipher cipher = new TripleDesCipher();
cipher.setKey(Constants.GWT_DES_KEY);
String dec ="";
try {
dec = cipher.decrypt(enc);
} catch (DataLengthException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (IllegalStateException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (InvalidCipherTextException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}

I just use a constant DES key, which is not all that secure.  I’m sure you could do something more secure like hashing the request time, filename and some other secret key, but you need to make sure that both the server and the client agree on the key, otherwise you’ll not be able to decrypt the info.

Update 6/13: I got permission from the project owner to update the google project, so I’ve done that.  You can download the new gwt-crypto jar there.

The modified gwt-crypto jar file is here.  I’m hoping the administrator will let me at least check in the changes I’ve made so that it works on GWT 1.5.3 (can’t speak for GWT 1.6).

[tags]gwt,tripledes encryption,hiding in plain sight[/tags]

GWT Technology and Society | moore |

Where does the cloud live?

The network is becoming more and more essential to my every day life.  Sun was right!  But I haven’t put much thought into what the cloud actually is.  Luckily, First Monday has a paper about that very topic.

“Where is the Cloud: geography, economics, environment and jurisdiction in cloud computing” gives a nice overview of aspects of cloud computing that I have not spent much time thinking about. It isn’t too in depth, but gives a nice overview of cloud computing from a non technical perspective and a good look at how the pleasant abstraction of cloud computing actually intersects with the real world.

In addition, there are lots of interesting factoids in the paper, including “Collectively, the data centers in the U.S. consume electricity on level with a sizeable city — equal to the energy consumption of Las Vegas”, “Google has submitted a patent for water–based data centers that would use energy generated by the ocean to power and to cool the servers, with the ships housing these data centers positioned in international waters”, “The Canadian government has a policy forbidding public–sector IT projects from using U.S.–based hosting services to avoid U.S. laws like the USA PATRIOT Act” and “in January 2008, Amazon Web Services was storing 14 billion units of data, varying in size from a couple of bytes to five gigabytes, and handling 30,000 requests to its database per second”.

[tags]cloud computing,first monday[/tags]

Technology and Society Web Applications | moore |

Boulder New Media Breakfast Notes: A Presentation by John Jantsch

I went to the second Boulder New Media Breakfast last week (this will be a monthly event, but this particular talk was delayed by a week due to weather).  It was interesting–a 15 minute networking session over bagels and coffee, then an hour presentation.  The catch is that it started at 7:45 in the morning–so you still had a full day left when you were done.

It was an interesting presentation and crowd and I think I’ll attend in the future.  It was a much smaller crowd (30-40 people) and  far more focused on marketing than the typical group I attend (New Tech, BJUG, CU Colloquia [which incidentally is having an interesting talk on “leveraging social networks in information systems” on Apr 7]).  I talked to a couple of people who were PR folks interested in technology, which isn’t my typical networking group.  I also talked to a fellow named Joe, who often asks hard questions, but always wears the great hat, at the Boulder Denver New Tech meetup.  I also got a chance to talk to Dave Taylor (of elm and Ask Dave Taylor fame [who answered a tough question well enough it got emailed around to me])–it was interesting to talk to him about his move from software developer to strategic business consultant.

After the networking, we all sat down for a presentation on reputation management by John Jantsch.  The following are my scrawled notes from that presentation (any sentences that start with I are my thoughts).

Notes:

Lots of people use the internet to do research for products and services.  36% of people think more positively of companies with a blog.  I don’t know how many people think less positively of such companies.

As a company, says John, you need to have a policy on digital conversations.  Such conversations with customers will happen, so you need a policy, and HR is the right department to produce one.  He discussed three types of conversation: person to person (like Dell customer service reps answering questions on forums), thought leaders (like a blog from a industry heavy weight who happens to be employed by IBM) and company communication (like an official blog from the USPS).

John also mentioned that it may make sense to, in the same way that sales folks sign non compete agreements, to have  customer service reps that interact through social media sign such agreements.  After all, if someone is the face of the company, and then they switch jobs, do they (and their new company) have a right to all the followers on twitter that were acquired through the original company’s hours?  Who owns the facebook profile?  I never have liked non competes, but the idea follows logically from the personalization of customer service on company time.

Another concept that is important is transparency.  Given the proliferation of digital communication, transparency into a company is here–now the question is, how can you influence it.  The best way to influence it is to host your conversations as much as possible.  In addition, be proactive in responding to issues (ie, customer complaints).

As a company, you need to have coherence in your branding across your internet presence.  Just as the website used to be ignored 10 years ago, facebook profiles are now often ignored and grow up from the ranks.  This leads to lack of message and branding consistency.

Now John moved on to cover some tools that are useful.  Most of the tools are free, but he did mention a few paid services.  The following are free alert services that help you search for keywords in various areas of the internet:

He referred to twitter as a “stream of sewage” and stated that tools to filter that stream were needed.  (As an aside, this video commentary on the twittersphere is hilarious.)   Twitter has a location specific search options (in advanced search) that you should definitely leverage for competitive analysis.

John also talked about making sure that your online presence is high quality.  This is not only done by making sure your website/blog/facebook profile/twitterstream/etc/etc are updated regularly and with good content, but also by taking advantage of tools that aggregators like search engines provide.  For example, if you have a local business that appears in Google’s local search, you can add update the entry using the local business center.  This lets you claim the listing, add pictures and verify other information.  Other search engines have analogous processes, and it is well worth your time to try to stand out.  I don’t quite know what will happen when everyone does this updating–the value of accurate content will remain, but having a picture won’t be enough to stand out.

Then we went into a question and answer period.  One person asked for examples of good corporate users of twitter. John gave these examples: Dell, radian6.

Another person asked about the personal/business divide: if you’re running a small business, do you want to provide info in your twitter stream (or other digital media) that identifies you as a person (“I like to tele ski”) or just have it focus on business issues.  John answered that the line is still blurry and being defined.  I personally try to keep my blog focused on business, but I think it depends on what you’re selling.  If I were selling socks, tales of adventures in my socks would be appropriate.  Since I’m selling software services, you probably don’t want to hear about the killer desert hike I went on last year.

End notes

I really enjoyed the breakfast and encourage anyone with an interest in digital media to try it out.  The next presentation (at the end of April) will be a presentation by Terry Morreale on personal digital security (I believe).

[tags]boulder new media breakfast,twitter,duct tape marketing,it’s at 7:45??[/tags]

Presentations Technology and Society Useful Tools | moore |