Last night we held the Blog Bling Mixer at Thinkspace in Redmond for a pretty good crowd. Peter took some good photos and put them up on the official Thinkspace blog.
Plenty of cool people turned up, and I think we struck a good balance of structured and unstructured time at the event.
Steve and I presented some quick tips at the beginning, just to kick things off, and then we had volunteers present the two “most-requested” blog tips over the projector to the group at large.
After that, we broke out into smaller groups where people could ask questions or share any kind of tips they wanted to. I wasn’t part of every conversation but it seemed to work out pretty well for everyone there.
All in all, it was a good event. Thanks Peter for letting us host it in such a nice office space.
Forum One Communications runs the excellent Marketing & Online Communities Conference, and we’re excited that we’ve been chosen to present at their upcoming event in New York. I’ll be posting my session details very soon, but here is some general information about the event.
If you can attend, use this discount code, and save $300.00: mocthree
Register here.
The Marketing & Online Communities Conference is an invitation-based event held at the exclusive Tribeca Grand in New York City on November 5th, 2008. The conference will bring together thought leaders from the marketing and online community sectors to discuss marketing challenges – and unprecedented opportunities – in online communities.
Online communities offer many unexplored relationship-building opportunities for marketers. They also present several significant hurdles: marketers are often uncomfortable with new and unproven community marketing models, brand managers are tasked with quarterly progress, while also trying to build long-term relationships, and online communities are concerned about marketing efforts detracting from the community’s experience and culture.
If you are an agency seeking to better understand the possibilities of online communities, a brand manager looking to engage in community-building activities, or a community expert seeking to expand marketing relationships, this conference will be of value.
I had a chance yesterday to talk with Kevin Marks, who works as a developer advocate on Google’s Open Social project. When Open Social first turned up on the scene, a lot of attention was paid to its ability to host applications and essentially “compete” with Facebook’s developer API.
Now that we’ve all had time to see how Open Social has moved forward, it’s becoming clear that supplanting Facebook’s application ecosystem is not what Open Social is really about. So the question is: what is it all about?
I asked Kevin to explain Open Social to someone who has heard of it, but doesn’t really understand how it fits in to the whole picture:
Right now, I’m hearing about the Nine Inch Nails Year Zero album and all the cool things that went in to creating the album experience for NIN fans.
For example, they printed the top of the disc with a particular type of thermal ink. When you buy it, the disc is completely black. When you pull the disc out after playing it once, it looks completely different - the black has faded away to reveal matrix-like secret codes on a while background.
The interaction of “real life” and online social behavior is not new, per se, but it is interestingly persistent.
We’re also going to hear from Jesse Alexander (who has asked us not to liveblog the HEROES spoilers he’s sharing) about how real-life play and gaming are used to tie in to Television and the HEROES franchise.
A theme that I keep seeing here is that it is becoming increasingly important to reach your audience with an element of play, and in a medium other than your first medium (if you’re online, get out in real life. if you’re on TV, get out in social media AND real life).
Kevin Marks of Google’s Open Social has an interesting perspective on social network registration, namely, that collecting data for the sake of collecting data is a problem not only because it’s a little bit “evil,” but also because people will lie.
For example, when you ask people for their zip code without providing an obvious benefit, you’ll generally find that the most frequent two codes entered are for Beverly Hills and Schenectady. Why does every site have so many users from California and New York?
Because those two zip codes are: 90210 and 12345.
So it becomes a problem when people are repeatedly asked to create new trust relationships with multiple networks, especially when the data collection serves no obvious immediate purpose.
Tom Carden from Stamen Design is doing a good job of condensing his 3-hour talk on the future of web-native location applications into about 15 minutes. Let’s see if I can condense the bigger-than-life size ideas into a blog post for you.
Contrary to Brady’s contention that mapping is dead, Carden thinks that mapping is an essential component of the way location technologies are developing.
Key to all of this is managing user expectations. Google maps is a kind of “year zero” in terms of mapping. Now that we have a set of baseline expectations for all mapping services, we’re starting to move towards standardizing user expectations (if I understand this correctly).
In the future, we are likely to expect all our mapping tools to be:
embeddable
linkable
You bet I am expecting that. I think where we’re heading with every type of web app (location aware or not), is complete portability.
I think that when we can chunk web content of all kinds, ebed, mix, match, and keep the link back to the source intact (a la YouTube and video), we’ll be really getting to an important new era in web applications.
I’m at Microsoft Research’s Social Computing Symposium in Redmond listening to people give their 30-second pitches. What that amounts to is passing the microphone and letting everyone pitch their expertise and explain how it ties in to “social computing.”
I didn’t really have a solid definition of social computing going in, and now I have even less of one. Social computing seems to encompass practically anything you do with (or without) a computer.
The main four themes for the two-day event here are Location, Play, Boundaries, and Social Objects.
People have proposed talks about everything from why buildings in Second Life inevitably looks like buildings in real life (which is a good question - it’s not like there’s real physics at work…) to talks about what your Facebook profile and online identity tells people about you.
Word on the street (OK, in MediaPost) is that Google is starting some very smart experimentation in e-commerce revenue solutions to bring in new revenue.
I think that’s a really smart move. As many successful online people like Brian Clark and Yaro Starek will tell you, you’re going to make a lot more money by actually selling something than by just trying to serve a lot of ads.
As we start getting ready for the Blog Bling Mixer on the evening of October 23rd, I’ve started to throw ideas around in my head as to what tips I’m going to be sharing with people.
The mixer is meant to help people of all skill levels, so some tips will be geared at beginners (like how to add polls to your sidebar) and some will be aimed at more advanced users. Here I’m going to share one aimed at more advanced users: how to create a custom sidebar style.
What is a custom sidebar style?
Not everyone can go mucking about in their stylesheet directly, but chances are you can. In WordPress, for example, you can actually access your stylesheet right from the dashboard interface.
Ars Technica already has a fairly thorough review of NPR’s new beta “NPR Community,” so for the nitty-gritty on how it all works, I’ll let you read their post.
The NPR Community reminds me a lot of the New York Times social experiment dubbed Times People that debuted several months ago. At the time, I called it a new social network, much like Ars refers to NPR Community as a new social network.
In retrospect, I’d change my verbiage: these are not new social networks.
Last night we held the Blog Bling Mixer at Thinkspace in Redmond for a pretty good crowd. Peter took some good photos and put them up on the official Thinkspace blog. 
