Full Circle Associates

I continue to have blog problems, making "live blogging" a bit of a challenge here at Northern Voice 2007 . But things seem to be up at the moment, so here goes my "not-quite-live-blog posts" from this morning. First is Anil Dash's keynote. Live blogging caveats (spelling, completeness) apply.

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Anil Dash

Hopped up on caffeine and a new Yorker.
It’s really an accident of timing that I’m standing here and you aren’t. I started blogging earlier. There are many people in this room I’ve learned from and from whom I’ve stolen ideas.

Offer some touch point that he’s observed in blogging. anil@dashes.com
Blogs have changed my life. That’s something I used to shy away from saying. You don’t talk about technology in that way. That idea of change is powerful and important. I wanted to tell the story. My title is chief evangelist. I mumble it at boarder crossing. Not preaching, but a witness.

What can you do with a book?
A few years back talked to a classroom of junior high students. The teacher asked, what can you do with a book. Read it. Write it maybe. What can you do with the web? You create.

If you think about things that impact our lives, music, band in high school but few do records and touring. But this has fundamental affect.

Two traits: Persistence and Awareness

How is this different from other tools and media

Persistence – something you create with lasting value. Important because so much of our communication is emphemeral. Email, IM, text messages. When you close that window, that information goes away. The messages we get from people we care about doesn’t have meaning over time. We are treating as disposable things that are most precious

Google can find you. From preservation of personal communication to finding of public. Half of today’s traffic is from posts older than one month. There are things that are meaningful over time. We need to honor that over time. Persistence. And why blogs are distinct.

You’ve seen these boring classic blogs. With the date and permalink, we are seeing a social contract. A date stamp is a social contract. When I’m at the blog, it has some accountability. People who have never heard of this, isn’t this the same as geocities? 100 million people made pages, but few went back, few had friends, family or customers view the site over time. There was no implicit way of saying there will be more information here. An ongoing basis. Continuous conversation. A change from the web page of the past. This is a place you can come and expect more from me. I will stay in touch.

That idea is one of the great and unfulfilled promises we make. High school graduation “we’ll keep in touch.” We intend to preserve loose ties. Opportunities. I was introduced to my partner from an informal friend. Those loose ties provide us with valuable opportunities. At a fundamental level that is how we judge what matters: what persists and has meaning. My uncle from India came to the states for a visit in 2001. We took him to Washington DC. He asked how ld the building was. I said 15o years old. He said we have things that are 450 years old in the living room. Heirlooms, hand me downs have so much resonance and meaning. A great pop song from the summer I learned to drive. They have incredible resonance. They seem trivial. Music. How your kids watch the same moving over and over again. Importance that they trust it is going to be there. That the movie has a different meaning over the states of our lives. We had abdicated that on the web, that we can have a meaningful connection with media on the web like we do with other media in our lives. The books we carry as we move because they were given to us by people we care about. There are few websites I can go to and say “I remember where I was when I first saw this site. “ Or I want to read it over and over again.

That is too important for us to give up. We care too much to give up on the web as something disposable.

Every time we throw away messages, when we throw away an old phone. Do I loose all those messages or do I transfer them. The assumption that things are disposable. A text message where friends tell me they are engaged. Too important. This shift to making persistence part of our digital lives. Blogging has brought this to the whole world. When we started talking about moblogging, and what to use the camera on your phone for. Send it to the web on Flickr or a blog. They are valuable.

One of the things that took a long time to reconcile, it can even be commercial and business communications that are valuable. What changed my mind is about 10 years ago we had an ATT maudlin, manipulative commercial. A guy on a biz trip on a plane, Rocket Man music, missing his family. His family trying to go through their lives on the road. He opens up suitcase and barrette in his case. Tears. Early 20s rolling my eyes. My hard nose biz partner is choking back tears! He is going to remember it. It resonates. We all have times, even on YouTube top 10 videos there are always commercials there. Meaningful things can be small things. We want to look back on them and say “remember when.” Even in the context of business to be worth remembering.

The web can be this too. The people in this room have the ability to make experiences on the web meaningful. Story of business, friends and family on a private blog. Probably the highest goal to make something that meaningful.

Awareness

Awareness is the one that is a little more invisible. It is about notification. Knowing something is going on. This doesn’t seem like a problem. Who is saying “I need more email.” We may get too much notification. Awareness – too much notification and you don’t have awareness, you may have less.

We get email about things we don’t care about. CC-ed emails we don’t care about. Carbon copies in emails is an act of aggression. Covering my ass but not directly addressed to you. I do it and I feel bad, but there is almost never a time when it would not be better letting it go or being more direct. Shotgun approach. I’m tying to kill this habit. These are a pain before we even talk about spam. The timing of interruption disrupts our lives. This is the least important information I can get right now. I’m waiting for a flight confirmation and you are saying the convenience of our chron job on your email news letter script server is more important. That’s not good enough. I don’t intend to be rude to my coworkers. When I send email I don’t intend to have others drop everything. But I’ll be waiting for an important email and I get this unimportant stuff. It makes me nuts. It is not their intent to infuriate me. I should get that information when I need it, when I can act on it. Disciplined thoughtful communication vs the convenience of the sender. Even without intent we are rude. Most of US and Canada vs UK – there they text me before they call. See if Im free. Gradual threshold of communication. Let me see if you are free first. That slides into absurdity too. There is something to be said to being a little more accommodating to one another.

I’m a huge fan of the WII. I get paid to sell blogs, but this machine, it is so fun. The TIVo and iPod. Technology people get excited about. They give us more control. I can shift the time of that TV show, download podcasts, I’m not interrupted by ads, station breaks, this is the play list I want to listen to. At a visceral level, the wii is something you point at the screen. Tactile, hands on feeling of control. It is a sign that we are at a threshold of what we are willing to tolerate with rudeness, interruption, others’ convenience. Control. That’s a change. It is just happening. It is new. It really hasn’t happened on the web yet. We are just about ready. The primary tool is feeds. How many of you know what these are? Impossible to use still. Yet 2/3rds know them. That you need many ways to fix it is a problem, but that you know about them is a tribute to the value of feeds. 3-4 years ago people did not know what they are. Feeds represent control over notification. Awareness without interruption. See what and when I want. A social contract that is a promise, not a threat. A timestamp is not about “oh god there is going to be another post” but information if and when I choose to go see it. We need to use as a framework about how we want to apply these technologies, where we want to go next.

It is no coincidence that all of these consumer devices can also read feeds. The tools of control go to people who recognize that control of awareness is important

Combo of Persistence and awareness

Persistence is what makes and experience meaningful.

Awareness: keeping the lines of communication open. A contract here honored respectfully of time and attention

Combination of the two is a relationship. I’m lucky I get to talk about this. Almost cringe when I put this up there. Some people roll their eyes. You should see them in Germany. It’s a really important idea. We don’t have tools that help keep relationships alive on the web. A company email is not the same as a comment on my blog.

Blogs let you maintain a relationship on the web. What was missing. Return of what the web was intended to be. A read/write medium. The promise from day one, before the hype and dot coms. We’d all be talking to one another. To form communities and find people with like interests. The future was weird and complicated, but it did happen.

Now we can make change happen. If someone has a trusted, persistent relationship with open lines of communication, we say lets do something great. I started putting together examples and amazing stories, but instead what to open it up to others to tell their stories about how the web has made changes in your life.

A few to start… This is a really simple, low tech, interesting site “Donors Choose” lets people make donations to specifically sponsored resources in your local school. You can raise fund for your kid’s classroom. Local, direct. Largely online. But they did not succeed in getting out their message. They started to blog. Then wait, what actually people connect with is your blog is your identity online. They started giving widgets for people to put on their blogs. This is the school I’m sponsoring. Help me make a difference, make a change. Doubled the contributors. To me this seemed like an extraordinary recognition that the model is no longer come to our big gala, but instead taking it to where you live, where your identity lives online. Produced measurable results and let go of the ego that “everyone has to come to us. “

This one is near and dear. Kristen’s blog on Vox, a social community. A woman in CA had started a blog, never blogged before, started at the invitation of a friend. What should I write about? No idea what a blog could be. Vox had a question of the day, a prompt to write about. It was “what were you like as a kid.” The story started boring, about the Three Amigos, and then it takes a turn. She goes from telling about a movie, to how her father played the song from the movie on his guitar. She had lost that connection. Her father started reading her blog, then tells her he stopped playing guitar because he was depressed. A conversation they were not having F2F. The prompt from outside ended up being something that reconnected her with her father. Profound thing to see. Sometimes I help come up with questions of the day. It might be silly to know what movie you liked as a kid. Kids today watching “Cars” 10 times a day. These become meaningful things in our lives. We need to have a place to have those conversations. We are geographically spread out. We don’t have places to meet. The third place that wasn’t home or work has evaporated. We have this on the web, the ability to reconnect. I will keep in touch again. Reach back out to, with a low threshold, easy to get into.

Those were stories I heard recently that changed my mind about blogging. Evan as passionate as I am, still skeptical. But see it has the ability to make real change. These are the things that talk about potential, guideline for all of us.

Q: In talking about blogs to make change, what is your viewpoint on the way communities form and the bridging of the gap between the conversation on the blogosphere how to move from conversation, connecting, relationship into more of getting things done. Absence of change of activism in last 50 years.

A: Rephrase: how do we make the efforts in blogging right now in politics be more effective, more from getting people elected and more about better governing. I don’t know enough about political blogs in Canada. IN US polarized, unpleasant and I think ineffective. The thing that happens is people want to play to the crowd, speak to those who already agree with them. Every election is decided by swing voters, people in the middle with an open mind. You don’t get a lot past that momentum with strident blogs. First there will be a reckoning, making it more expansive.

Darren: Non partisan bloggers association. Their thing is discussing issues in non partisan, non inflammatory, non partisan way.

Anil: The best community I’ve seen is Dialog Now – enabling conversations between Indians and Pakistanis. Moving to see there was such willingness to have the conversation, hungry for it instead of being dragged to it. You will see a change in the states, all presidential campaigns have blog for raising money and getting elected. The one that could impact change is the ones where they respond to how governance will work THROUGH this community AFTER we are elected. Hopefully will happen this cycle.

Q: Mike from Australia. I love reading feeds, but use Google reader, should I feel guilty about marking all as read?

A: The worse thing I can imagine is making things unbold. That sounds like hell. Don’t just mark all read, unsubscribe. They are not going to know and you can always add it again later.

Q: The way I come out it, it is like reading a newspaper. DO you feel guilty if you don’t read all the paper. The Atlantic Monthly probably has a centerfold we have never read! Or read a blog of a person who filters things (Robert Scoble.)

Q: Mac; you seemed to have articulated a purpose for Twitter, with the idea of persistence. If you build uip this huge amount of data, doesn’t that present a problem of volume and usefulness.

A: I wrote a bit about Twitter, an application that provides a buddy list for text messaging (IM, SMS). Sounds dry, but pretty fun little tool. When I discovered it I was ready to hate it. Group SMS? What happened was the low threshold. Stuck in airport, told friends, got recommendations and a record. That is why it is useful. Persistence. Same problem with sifting into what matters and search is not the answer. A combination, social search, social network filtering, friends list AND search will probably provide the right filter. Now it is ok to have a lot of stuff stored. Inexpensive. Emergent benefits from a big set of data, but not sure where it will go with social aspects of search beyond delicious, etc.

Comment: Not particularly related to blogging. A guy in KM, David Snowden, started to make his way into org field. He has a methodology called “narrative and sense making” – blogs and blog content can be anonymized into data points and filters/tags to see how things are changing through large aggregated conversation. At the research level people are making advances.

Q: Your writing is very thoughtful. Comes across well on the page. Do you edit stuff, just post it up.

A: I edit like crazy. I used to just posted stuff up there. I don’t feel I have the luxury of just throwing stuff up there any more because of business. I regret a lot of the rants I used to do. They are briefly satisfying, I don’t think they equip me well on the long term. They are on the record. I like it. It makes me try to do better. I’ve never deleted any posts. I have done quick and hasty “oh I should not have said that. Sorry.” I do make extensive use of private posts on Life Journal and Vox. Spoiled by posting just for friends and neighbors.

Private vs public posts? 1:1 I know more about Vox, but about 30% of posts are private and 1/3 of typepad blogs are private. People post more publicly when they know they can post privately as well.