Tim discusses why he loves hackers and why eTech is important. It’s working at the edges. He distinguishes between received vs. original/created knowledge and how eTech is all about original knowledge.

The work hackers do is not done not for the money, but for the technology that matters. Tim goes through history describing how inventors throughout time have been hackers, including Archimedes. Tim speaks of the passion that drives hackers. They believe in themselves and what’s possible.

These are the areas that are interesting to Tim. These are the things that are small tomorrow, but may be big tomorrow.

• Developing world’s use of technology
• Space
• Open Source
• Sensors and Ambient Computing - moving beyond keyboards to sensors doing the data collection
• Reality Mining
• Connecting you life to the web
• Phones as controllers
• New interfaces
• Information visualization
• Body Hacking and wearable computing
• Personal robotics
• Open source vision and machine learning
• Brain hacks/imaging
• Personalized geonomics - 23 and me as social
• Synthetic biology - building new organisms
• Collective intelligence such as digital democracy, coding against corruption, prediction markets, ensemble learning
• Green

Tim ends with a poem called The Man Watching

The Man Watching

by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

Via http://www.cdra.org.za/

Don’t choose the easy path. Find a hard problem and try to solve it!

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, Why I Love Hackers, Tim O’Reilly

Ian Kennedy, from Yahoo, spoke about new things at MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog announced an About Me widget and the public release of it’s API. He showed a number of examples of sites using the API to enrich their environments

• Blog Juice - pulls in recent Tweets from visitors
• Raven social Network members - pulls in data from MyBlogLog - also available as a wordpress plugin
• Everwas - popular tags
• Meetspace - people around you from m.mybloglog.com

UPDATE: Video

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, mybloglog api

Beth Kanter is a trainer, blogger, and consultant to nonprofits and individuals in effective use of social media. Beth discussed how social media can be used to help social causes. She describes how she does large experiments to find out what works.

She has raised over $200,000 to help Cambodian children. She won the America’s Giving Campaign which was based on number of donors and focused on how new web tools can drive the result. She has learned what works and what annoys donors.

Her example is to jump right into asking her network what the strategy should be using her blog.

Strategies for success:

• Make it personal - “It’s about why the messenger cares” She describes why she cares about Cambodian children
• Stories with Faces - This helps drive people up the ladder of engagement to scale. Story example: Why is this Cambodian Orphan wearing a creative commons t-shirt?
• Network Weaving - Use the three R’s relationships, rewards, reciprocity
• Fun, Humor, Easy, Urgency, Competitive Spirit, Passion. Beth describes how she used Facebook to tell people what she wants for her birthday 51st Birthday Challenge donations, use Youtube with Kids video, Twitter challenge, Facebook challenge that she had tagged as evanglists, Twitter rallies
• Make it competitive
• Say Thank You in creative ways
• Include Paypal as payment mechanism

UPDATE: Slides from presentation

| View | Upload your own

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, social causes, Beth Kanter

In Digital Podcast 41, we connect with Wizzard Media’s CEO Chris Spencer to talk about podcast based advertising. As Chris puts it, how else can you advertise on an iPod.

We cover some of the history of Wizzard and how they have brought together some of the most popular podcast hosting companies such as Libsyn and SwitchPod, and built a podcast advertising network to go with it.

The show focuses on podcast based advertising and in particular we discuss the two advertising campaigns Wizzard is running for the US Navy.

 

 Digital Podcast 41 [56:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1585)

The first of those ran on 20 podcasts with wide distribution and focused on recruitment. The current campaign is much more focused and is running on 7 podcasts. It focuses on recruiting medical personnel.

We get into some good detail about how the process works, what Wizzard does and what podcasters have to do to make it all work. We talk numbers and Chris tells us how different ads support different CPMs, depending upon their placement and whether they are audio or video. Videos commands the highest CPMs running $5-7 to $20-35 depending upon whether it’s a pre-roll or a mid-roll. Audio runs at lower CPMs that range from $3-5 to $15-25 depending upon placement.

Chris explains how the revenue share works. The advertising agencies get their 15% off the top and then Wizzard and the podcasters split the rest 50-50. Wizzard pays the sales force and covers the costs of setting up and running the campaign.

Wizzard published that they supported over one billion downloads last year from the over 8,500 podcasts that use their hosting services. Some have questioned how that could be, so we ask Chris to help us verify those numbers and to understand how 8,500 podcasts produce so many downloads. Chris explains how they count downloads and filter out the spiders and bots. He says that there are some blockbuster podcasts that do really high volumes and just as in other media forms there is a long tail of podcasters, so looking at mean based average per podcast just does not make sense. It’s the old 80-20 rule once again. Chris also clarifies that some recent problems with reporting to podcasters has nothing to do with how the count their download figure.

Chris ends the show by providing some tips for podcasters - The one to remember most is that if you think you want to advertise in your podcast someday, start tagging them now so that ad inserts are easy to do and you don’t have to go back and re-edit your catalog.

It’s good to see organizations like Wizzard taking up the flag and promoting podcasting. Wizzard along with a few others is taking the risk to build the platforms that we need to scale the downloadable media business. We wish them well on their mission to help marketers advertise on an iPod (or a Zune for you Zune fans.)

Technorati Tags: Wizzard Media, podcast advertising, podcast hosting, downloadable media

It’s good to see brand marketers are working to produce some interesting work that ties TV together with online social communities. This post from Dave Deal titled Listening through communities shows off efforts by Levi and Kraft Crystal Light.

It’s great to see marketers start to understand why community matters, and it’s why we’re seeing investment in sites like these. Both are nicely designed sites that offer the promise of community.

The problem is that huge brands like these need to be attracting the attention of large audiences to make their marketing efficient, and trying to create large, new communities from scratch is both high cost and high risk.

In the physical world, you don’t try to create another shopping mall so people can come to your store, you take your store to the existing shopping mall so you can tap into an existing community. The mall shoppers are not going to go to a remote store in large numbers because it’s too much hassle.

By that logic, brands should not expect people to leave where they are now to travel to these new spaces. If the people are hanging out in MySpace and Facebook, why not build community there, or at least make that a major part of the your community building effort?

I looked, but could not find ways these sites link into MySpace/Facebook. If they are not built to connect to these huge social networks then they are making a mistake. Perhaps they are, but I couldn’t find out how. It would be interesting to find out if they have plans to connect into these communities.

I looked to see what others thought about the build versus join question. The question has been asked and debated in some depth. While there seems to be a strong leaning towards “it depends”, I think you have to go with the economics of community building.

Building large communities from scratch is hard, costly and risky. Anything you can do to lower the cost (hassle, time, etc) of connection and participation is incredibly important to building community. A well thought out strategy that makes it easy for people to connect to these new spaces from their existing hang outs will reduce the cost and risk of community building.

The social web is a distributed community with people in lots of places and increasingly they expect the content to come to them. RSS, embeddable players, and Facebook apps are training people that they can get what they want, wherever they want it. And that place is where they hang out now. Start there, and then give them a good reason to come visit your place.

If brand marketers don’t start getting this, they will spend lots of money and end up with lots of disappointments.

Technorati Tags: brands, community, social marketing, Levi, Krystal Light, Razor Fish

Or maybe I should call it a CinchCast. Cinch is a new service from Blog Talk Radio that makes it extremely easy to record a podcast and produce the necessary RSS feeds. Just call 646-200-0000, record your CinchCast and you will find an RSS feed all ready for you at http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/YOURPHONENUMBER.

Here’s the mp3 it made for me:

 

 Digital Podcast CinchCast [1:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (337)

And you can see the RSS it created for me here.
http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/5628245193

While I was a little disappointed in the sound quality, I found the experience so simple and easy that even my Mom could do this.

Ease of use breakthroughs like this open up whole new possibilities. Need to record that interview you’re doing, call Cinch. Need to report from the field, call Cinch. The instantaneous nature of it is fantastic.

I’m excited to see this. Kudos to BTR and their new VP of Product Development, Kris Smith of Croncast fame.

Via Twitter and Scripting News

Technorati Tags: cinch, cinchcast, Blog Talk Radio, phone call podcast, mobile podcasting

We want to know what you think makes a podcast great. Tells us why you listen or watch your favorite podcasts. We’re using a social polling technology from Sodahead to give everyone a chance to say what they think makes a podcast great.

Poll Answers“

Technorati Tags: podcast, podcast poll, social polling, sodahead

I believe that a lot of money will be wasted on social media initiatives and to make sure we don’t waste too much I think we need to build a framework for managing performance on the social web. I hope this podcast can be the start of a conversation about online performance measures and management as it relates to social media.

The hype and growth surrounding the space means that everyone is rushing in to connect with the huge audiences that are possible with successful social networks. Budweiser, Coke, Fast Company and many other brands have been deploying big new social networking initiatives. Facebook applications are being built right and left. Open Social means that even more social applications will be built for the other big networks as well.

However, while social networks like Flickr and cool Facebook apps are fun and social they may not generate significant commercial returns. Leading media and brand marketers know they need to be embracing social media, but risk falling into the same trap if they don’t focus on success and doing it in a way that makes sense for the social web.

My conversations with digital media executives lead me to believe that forward thinkers know they need to be managing distributed media across the social web and that they need more than just embeddable video players. They tell me they need guidance about what works beyond the BS they hear from vendors, how to measure performance and how to embed that into development processes so that future projects benefit from what’s already been learned.

There is lots of good thinking going on about how to measure performance on the web and some are even thinking about measurement in the social web. However, many are still stuck using traditional broadcasting or Web 1.0 models to define success and those measurement models are not going to be adequate for defining success and driving performance on the social web.

We need to rethink performance measures and the way we collect data from the social web.

 

 Digital Podcast 40 [12:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (547)

I thought it would be useful to provide some opening thoughts about how measures for the social web might be different and appreciate any feedback. To start, we need to identify what’s different about the social web.

From a long list of things that are different a few stand out to me as really important.

• User Contributions - On the social web, we have users producing content right and left. In addition, they are providing insight. Insight into themselves and insight into what is popular. This means that content with potential can, with some skill, be filtered and identified much more effectively.
• Distributed social media - The paradigm has changed from users seeking content to content seeking users. We see this new paradigm everywhere with downloadable media, embeddable videos and widgets that deliver content, services and more to users in a highly distributed way.
• Expectations that everything is free - The huge surge of low cost content supply means that users are willing to pay less and expect more to be free.
• Shifting business models - We are seeing the beginning of a major shift in business models from those that are based upon the economics of impressions to ones based upon the economics of community.

I believe that these changes shift performance measurement from being rather linear in nature to something that is more recursive in nature. By recursive, I mean that we are measuring a repetitious cycle where a change in one measure drives changes in other measures and is thus much more difficult to pin down. If we are not careful and discrete about measuring this kind of process the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies as well - the mere act of observing a phenomenon changes its nature.

Below is a simple illustration of what I’m talking about (note this is just illustrative and not all inclusive). In the impression based business model of broadcast, revenue was driven by linear function of reach multiplied by frequency and by CPM (cost per thousand impressions). That same business model was largely the model that drove Web 1.0 business models which were based upon uniques, page views and CPM models. This same model can be extended to commerce based businesses as well by adding click through rates, conversion rates and price per purchase.

In the social web, I think there is a recursive process of users, engagement, user contribution, viral impact, visitors, and conversion spawning more users as the cycle continues over and over again in a recursive manner. In addition, I think that the units of revenue measurement will shift from CPM to RPU (revenue per user) because we are now not just getting paid for advertising, but also for lead generation, potential direct sales and other ways of monetizing users.

Some of these measures are new so here’s the short argument for each measure:

• Visitors - Without new visitors there is no growth. Separating visitors into new and returning and identifying where they come from is still important.
• Conversion - if we are shifting from impression based business models to community based business models then we need people to become users or members. This can be a simple measure and extended to capture how much information the new user provides.
• Users - Users do more than visitors. They consume and they produce - which is essential for scaling on the social web. Tracking users usage by signup cohort to understand how sticky the user experience is can provide insight into the durability and scalability of the site. You want to know if people will return and increase their usage over time.
• Engagement - The experience needs to be compelling enough for users to produce good stuff and to return to do it again. Simple measures like time on site, page views and loyalty still matter, but getting deeper into understanding how much of the capability you are providing (both on and offsite) get used and which parts drive engagement becomes important as well.
• User Contribution - The more users contribute, the more the content scales and that drives the potential for viral impact and if they provide insight into themselves or into attractive content that can be leveraged into RPU. There are lots of interesting measures that could be developed her fro both measuring the content the produce and the insight users provide.
• Viral Impact - Who can doubt the ability of viral content to drive trial and traffic. Measures for this are probably different depending up on the nature of the business and include bookmarks, email forwards, trackbacks and the spread of embedded widgets
• RPU - Revenue per User is what matters in a community. We want to look at total revenue whether it comes from impressions, clicks, actions, leads or any other source and the how much we can drive per user will determine how much cost we can absorb to attract and convert visitors into users and realize an attractive ROI.

The list could go on to look at cost drivers and how they are different on the social web, but that will be another discussion.

I believe that once we embrace these kinds of measures and embed them into our management processes we will see social media marketing shift from being a stream of fun (and maybe expensive) experiments into a community based business model that will result in more deeply committed fans, increased brand strength, better sell through, new revenue sources and higher ROI.

If you see good posts about measuring performance, have suggestions or feedback please leave a comment.

Technorati Tags: social media, social web, online performance measurement, measures, measurement, online measures, social media measures

In Digital Podcast 39, we interview David Bloom. David is Associate Dean and Chief Communications Officer at USC’s Marshall School of Business. I met David at an event USC’s Marshall School hosted during the Los Angeles Technology Week. David described some the social media initiatives being used by the University to communicate with potential students, students and alums.

The USC Marshall School of Business is an important part of the University with programs that run the gamut from undergraduate to graduate business programs. USC Marshall has over 5,700 students, numerous graduate programs and 70,000 alumni. The University has been very active in using social media to enhance their communication programs and we thought the world ought to know more about how large organizations can use these new tools to engage and activate their respective community’s.

David was kind enough to spend about an hour with us describing how USC Marshall is using social media, how they manage the process and decide what to pursue. USC Marshall is on YouTube with USCMarshall channel, it’s on iTunes with it’s own podcast channel and it’s adding social networking capabilities to it’s website. We discuss some of the ways they are coordinating communications across the channels to maximize the returns from the long tail of PR. We also have a great discussion about objectives and the decision making processes as it relates to social media.

David’s experience with communications for both businesses and universities provides a unique perspective on the opportunities and the challenges of using social media for communicating and building communities. If you are interested in using social media for corporate or not-for-profit communications and PR this is the podcast for you.

 

 Digital Podcast 39 [53:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (545)

Technorati Tags: USC, Marshall School of Business, social media, David Bloom

Yahoo told Microsoft to pony up a few more bucks if they really want the deal to go through. I hope for both Yahoo and MS that MS gets a clue. Microsoft has been hit hard in the market since the Yahoo bid with it’s stock down from $32 to $28 which is about a $30 Billion drop. The street is smart enough to know this deal is a bad deal, I hope MS gets the message. Although if I was some big fund with a bunch of Yahoo stock I’d be pushing hard for a sale, so Yahoo better get a clue about what it needs to do to stay independent. If these guys don’t get a clue Google will clean up big time.

If Yahoo wants to survive here are five things that would make some sense:

1) Either announce some grand social strategy that takes advantage of things like flickr or announce that that all these money losers are up for sale/spin off/close down.

2) Start thinking of advertisers as customers and make employees understand they are at Yahoo to make $$ for shareholders.

3) Hire someone who knows how to manage a sales force for sell through. Yahoo has way too much remnant inventory and sell through will all drop to the bottom line and be good.

4) Decide it’s ok to be a really successful media company and get rid of the Google envy.

5) Fire the Panama team and announce that they will partner with best bidder.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Microsoft