Case-Notes from the Artsy Asylum

Video as Bonding Tool

Not every online communication and community building moment is about connecting with potential networking buddies who will lead to clients and customers and commercial success.

Some of the most poignant times for me lately, and ones that use new media in a way I didn't expect it to be useful to me, involve the videos my elder granddaughter and I made when she and her mom were staying at the parental abode a few weeks ago.

It turned out that Kelsey liked to make videos, and the flipcam was right up her alley. The image here is from a video we jokingly call "the spoon"

She talked off camera about potential things we could discuss in future videos, including how kids feel about their families; about how cancer is scary for people of all ages; how moms having babies change things for grandmothers and children but make us worry and think about our relationships and where we'll fit in the picture after the baby comes too.

In short she had many good ideas.

There is a real potential for youtube, Viddler and flickr to develop into tools that are not simply places for showing photos and videos. They're serving - for me at least - as a tool for encouraging dialogue.

Part of my current dialogue is a video of my new granddaughter and Kelsey's baby sister, Emma. It's just another way of sharing who I am with my community. This teeny baby and her very big sister are a big part of my life, and connecting with them from the start - and then leaving something behind to document that and for them to have always is a tremendous priority.

Nana loves you, girls. . .

Twittering Lightly through Spring

You'd think someone in Grandbaby 2.2 mode could have managed more tweets than this in April. Cancer fatigue syndrome aside, I'm seriously slacking.

Click on image to get full size display of the usage I've made of twitter in the year since I began tweeting.

Do you use tweetstats? Did you know that going to http://tweetstats.com and entering your twitter name could get the graph for your twitter use too?

It's a great little goodie that Damon Cortesi aka twitterer dacort put together for us with love plus his techie know-how and who knows what else - like gum and shoestrings maybe.

It would be interesting to see if Damon could monetize this, so I asked myself how much I'd pay for more stats - like who's talking to me and what's different in my followers / followees or conversations this month versus last month given that what we have is an aggregate of all conversations since the beginning of tweetdom - or in this case since I started using twitter a year ago. My answer was really that it depended on what kind of information was offered.

I wonder how interesting it would be to see more about who it is we used to be talking to at 3AM vs those we talk to now after midnight (obviously the west coasters but are there more differences?)

Granted, I've got a social science background and used to produce monthly statistics reports for the employment and training program I monitored, so I'm a stats junkie. But the graphing available to us now is just so rich it's fascinating.

Beyond our curiosity about who's talking to who, what tools they use and when, Damon has written about how this kind of tool can be used to identify spam twitter accounts here. I could seriously spend a lot of time just looking and graphing and looking and thinking. It's probably time to donate via the button on TweetStats too.

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end note: Recently I saw that Lawrence Simon aka Second Life's Crap Mariner had referred to my writing as a "fire hose" I don't know if that means he was still following me on twitter after my surgery when I was updating and thanking people - or not. That red line on the graph is kinda dramatic, even for a communicator.

Dear God: I want a Grandchild and Lifestream Filters. . .TODAY!

Could it really be possible that this glut of information overwhelming me could me managed? Without going back to school to learn to be the techie that creates that new killer app that does it?

Please, I don't have enough time or energy to get to doctors' appointments. I'd be on the laptop during reconstructive surgery to try to figure this all out. Maybe some of the young geeks can manage it for me because I'm frankly overwhelmed with information.

And Ian Kennedy from everwas.com seems hopeful - somewhat. But he sums up my problem as if he was reading my mind:

" It’s like . . In a matter of weeks we’ve gone from “Wow! I can find everything here!” to, “Crap! Over 600,000 results for the phrase Serendipitous Discovery? How can I find the one reference I’m looking for?”

"The huge opportunity ahead is a filter to bubble up the things you need to know without missing anything you want to know."

Oh please God, let this be possible!

• Web 3.0 Will Be About Reducing the Noise - TechCrunch
• Lifestreaming Services Need Better Filtering - Lifestream blog

What Ian says about what's happening at MyBlogLog has merit, though good lord I HATE that it was bought by Yahoo and I now have to jump through Yahoo hoops when signing in.

But maybe they're on the right track - or the totally wrong track - someone help me out here:

"We’re trying a few things out at MyBlogLog that vector results based on how you have tagged yourself on your profile. Right now, in a user’s New in My World feed, it’s a straight, chronological feed based on items that match your tags."

What do you think? Is there HOPE for information overwhelm? I've about reached my limit.

link  The Lifestream Filter Will be the Next Great Algorithm War

Upscoop Sifts Your Contacts

When writing about how you let your friends know what  social networks you participate in I could only tell you so much in one article. But there's more.

Including - upscoop - a service which identifies which friends are part of what network.

This puts the burden of finding you on your friends.

They - if they know about upscoop and are willing to give the program access to their friends lists - just let upscoop sift through their lists from various sources. Then upscoop provides an alphabetized list of friends links to their pages on whatever social networking sites they are registered with

Nifty? Yes. A little on the privacy-invading side?

Probably, There's a lot I don't know but it may go too far.

I think I'll stay with my practice of just showing icons with links to all my social sites for the time being, and I'll keep  a couple of aggregators running for the really nosy out there just in case.

That way you won't have to find upscoop to find me.  . . . But it was kinda nifty watching upscoop work.

Can Twitter Be Explained In Plain English?

From Lee and Sachi Lefever comes this great video that explains the basic appeal of the micro-blogging platform twitter - in essence what it is about it that is interesting as one first gets into it.

 

Then in the a perhaps even more interesting comment section of Twitter in Plain English viewers discuss what it is about Twitter and the video that piqued their interest

On the other hand, Dean Shareski a well known tweeter who has risen to the top of the tweeterboard as @shareski totally disagrees with the simple presentation. He writes in his blog:

"I know, he can’t share it all in the time constraints of that format, but I’d have to say that if I didn’t know what twitter was, I’d watch that video and say, “that sounds stupid”. That’s how I‘ve always felt about any explanation."

The thing is - I agree with both points of view. Twitter in Plain English tells the basic story of twitter. And twitter works just that simply for some people - and probably for most of us in the beginning that's exactly how it functioned, and how it hooked us.

Even Lee Lefever's introductory story of how person A follows person B and learns about their taste in sports or books hints at something about how twitter goes beyond what one would initially expect and  - like a virus we're not protected against - quietly and without warning deepens our involvement.

There's the hint in even the most simple explanation that we may hear about other people too, thus expanding our network, our base of friends, our caring about other people we have never met.

So the power of twitter is really in seeing the potential and acting on that. It's in the connections and the sharing that comes after the snippets we share. It's in the follow through. And continuing the conversation.

That story might be a bit much for Commoncraft to take on in the In Plain English series.

But it could be a Commoncraft play in three acts, showing the trickle down effects of the twitterspere.

I'd love to see that story. It might feature some of my twitterfriends, sitting at a long table extending out into the distance. The conversation would just keep going and the ideas would keep flowing. Because that's the way it is in real life too. It happened to me.

photos by Bill Reynolds, taken in Austin TX in February 2008.See more at flickr

The Problem With Social Media is The Social Part

The problem with the bloggosphere, and the twitterspshere - and all the Social Mediaspere is that it's personal.

And the good thing about the bloggosphere, and the twitterspshere - and all the Social Mediaspere is that it's personal.

When you start sharing your life, your dislikes, your favorites, your tags, photos of your events - well, people respond. They identify with you - and you with them.

And then it gets messy. They get hurt. They reach out to you when you're feeling lousy. They confide in you when they are in pain. They collaborate with you on projects, ask you to write chapters for their books, and generally get entangled in your lives. You make real connections that go way past the virtual world.

This week a couple of things happened that drove that home to me. I went to Austin for meetings and came home leaving behind friends to whom I felt a real connection. The kind of connections I hadn't felt in years.

A day later one of them was stricken with an illness we don't yet understand and which has her unable to do anything except rest and try not to be scared to death.

At the same time I was hearing about my friend in Texas  I was opening a box from another online friend from California. She'd packed an elegant lunch-pail for my convalescence.

And there's just no way to show you this except to show you a video of me and the lunchbox in real life. because like it or not, our online friends are our real life friends. We care about them, and cherish them. It's the power and the reality of social media.          (photos above courtesy of Kim Haynes).

Pulver Media Breakfast features Frozen Peas for the Fund

Always great to meet new people and see old contacts. It was one of those days at the Jeff Pulver Social Media breakfast in DC on Thursday Feb 7th.

And of course frozen Peas were on the menu

QIK | Streaming video right from your phone.

Death Comes Unscheduled: Learning News in a New World

It's not just Second Life that makes me blink and sit back stunned at what just happened. It's that increasingly my real news comes from you

Sean Taylor of the Washington Redskins died overnight at age 24 after having his femoral artery injured in a shooting during a deliberate attack at his home Sunday

What makes this newsworthy for a blog about creativity and social media is that I learned the news via my blog feeds before any local or national news sources.

The news networks were in their overnight loop of constant rehashing of whatever yesterday's pre-selected pieces were, while you in the new media sphere were carrying the story.

You literally bring the news to me in the middle of the night, wherever I am.

Bloggers reminded me that Taylor made the Pro Bowl in 2006 and despite missing two games with a knee injury this season, he was tied for the lead in interceptions in the NFC with five. Video of all this was easy to find, to share,

Sometimes I don't like the news that you bring me via twitter - where I learn about a divorce, a setback, an illness. And sometimes I don't like it that a blogger relays news about the tragic and senseless death of a young man.

But I'd rather hear it from someone I know and trust.

Which makes me wonder about the future of old media, while I take a minute to remember Sean Taylor.

Who Are You Here? Who Are You There?

Are you willing to verify your identity? Geoff Livingston blogs about it in Opening Identity

"Now more than ever companies, marketers and consumers are concerned about demonstrating identity.

Several recent events have driven that home:

• Second Life and IBM’s initiative to open Second Life avatars so they can be used in a wide variety of virtual worlds"

Geoff also did this great video I've added below to get you thinking.

Since he brings up those two little words "Second Life" - you new this was coming - I have a question.

Are you willing to verify your identity with a trusted third party to assure that those you do virtual business with that you are who you say you are?

Laura Thomas of Dell, Jeff Barr of Amazon, Mitch Wagner of Information Week, writer Aliza Sherman, and dozens of others who take part in the vibrant business community of Second Life have adopted transparent identities that say: "I'm here and I'm who I say I am".

Others aren't so nuts about the idea

Asking a question related to being transparent about who we really are, and even where you can contact us, was met with a notable lack of enthusiasm when I brought it up in - of all places - a discussion about “Persona and Identity Transparency” in Second Life last Friday.

The reaction to my question showed a rather overwhelming opinion favoring “in world” reputation as far outranking any need for transparency of identity in what we might call the real world. Granted, parts of the Second life community are insular and many longtime residents resent suggestions that things might be done differently by a fresh wave of users.

It’s probably safe to predict much ado and an uphill battle to make sure we’re all reading from the same ethics book no matter what world we're dealing with.

And that's not even opening the can of worms about allowing pseudonyms on facebook.

So what's your stance? You know where you can find me. I'm Tynan Clary on Second Life - but that's only because they wouldn't let me be Susan Reynolds.

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Days of Digital Connections

How do I do business primarily with a laptop while perched on a bed or sofa, or sometimes using the more beefy equipment in  the office/studio that's about 20 feet from my bed? 

Honestly sometimes I don't know - but it's an amazing new world.

Just to share with those who think it can't be done, here’s what my "scheduled" time looks like for Tuesday Nov 20.

Click on the image to increase size.

When I'm not scheduled to do something, I'd do my email, write blog entries, make a couple of facebook scrabble moves, networking and keeping connections stronger, and communicate some quick bits via twitter.

I might even get to eat lunch.

At some point my son is arriving for 3 weeks leave from his air base and it would not be the time I’d schedule a full afternoon and partial evening in meetings or events.

But using the kind of technology that's available to us I'm not leaving the house

The first three events will help me do what I do better and understand the world in which am I operating more and more often - and appropriately, all three are being held using Second Life.

Related to the shared office I've opened in Second Life. the appointment is to talk about the concept and space, and is being held "in world"as we say in Second Life, as well.

More interestingly, and totally not necessary to attend, is the Salon. Come on! A salon no less! When I looked for a page to which to refer my readers the favorite definition was from Answer.com because it made ma just laugh

"A periodic gathering of people of social or intellectual distinction."

I'll admit that I see this salon as educational and networking related - but OK, it does not relate directly to business. but more like one of those things in which I'm interested and which I hope I can attend. Kind of meaning to get to the CIA-FBI ice hockey game that's held near my real world home; sometimes we can fit things in and sometimes we cant, but we try.

At the same hour . . .

Like everybody, I could stand to clone myself because the schedule shows Blogging expert Liz Strauss' weekly open house - which is not in Second life but held ON the blog comments section at successful-blogger.com. We’ll get her into Second life eventually - she's currently stuck on picking a name.

Attending both a salon and an open house concurrently is a trick only attempted ny the brave, or those who use Virtual Worlds and web 2.0 without a net.

In essence these are things I’d not be able to attend in person, and all interacting with people I’d never get a chance to interact with on any regular basis. In short, if it were not for the Virtual World my own world would be a much smaller place.

I'm not saying that twitter, blogs and Second Life are for everyone.

Some people have the luxury of flying to events at which they rub shoulders with people that will help them in their business.

Some easily pick up the phone and reach Steve Nelson, EVP and CSO of the digital marketing agency, Clear Ink. producer of the SL segments for network TV show The Office, who is presenting at the SLBC (Second Life Business Communicators) meeting thanks to Linda Zimmer.

Others run into Rex Hammock and Loic LeMuir at conferences and geek parties.

But that's not me. I live in Washington and though I've picked out a melon next to Redskin Joe Theisman and sat at the pool with Mark Felt (Watergate's Deep Throat), but it's a totally different world than the one I find myself today.

So now the digital and virtual worlds are my entrance ramps and I'm taking full advantage. Joining me takes a couple clicks of the mouse, not an airline ticket. And I like having company at stuff that I do.