I don’t normally advertise jobs for folks, so please consider this a special occasion for some friends that have a unique social site in stealth mode in the bay area.
I really believe this company has something that no one else has yet to release so there’s really an opportunity for the right people to help craft.
I’ve posted two jobs reqs for the qualified marketing folks that can meet these roles as VP of Marketing and Community, as well as Business Development VP or Director.
If you’re the right person for this job, please forward your resume to Jobs.passionatestartup@gmail.com. Feel free to reference that you heard about the role here at my site.
I just met Scott Johnson at Web SIG last week, another attendee just emailed me and let me know that Jotspot just announced they got acquired by Google. Wow congrats to both JotSpot and Google.
I wonder what’s next for Google? They’ve got nearly every possible application available out there, maybe they should buy a podcasting company, or SecondLife, or oh I dunno.
Tomorrow, I’ll be heading out to China to fulfill the trip to tie back my Americanized Owyang family to our roots. In a recent post, I told how the Owyang Family Returns to Roots using Internet (Part 1), you can get the background info there.
During the trip We’ll be taking pictures, recording, and will eventually share our thoughts on the group blog that I created called Ouyang Homecoming. (FYI: that’s the more common spelling)
Shel Israel recently let me know that this is a story that seems appropriate for his upcoming book Global Neighborhoods, which is going to tell how the world is smaller from the web, as well as how communities are starting to form using the internet. This is so true, as members from this trip (and the hundred others that are not going) met using google searches, or using wikipedia to reunite. Some folks who have joined our community just share the surname, or their mother or father has a relation to the name. Without the web, we never would have reunited so easily.
Trip Goals
- Bring the 22+ Owyangs to the home village of Dailian
- Meet and Greet cousins that are still living there (there is a book with the family tree)
- Document the ancestral landmarks
- Pay my respects to the grave of my Great Grandmother, attempt to find my great great grandfathers grave.
- Build relations with Dailian, retrieve copies of the family books to bring back to share with others
- Document the trip
I know that Dailian village is expecting us, I’ve been there twice, and I’m very appreciative of what my ancestors did to bring us here to the land of opportunity back in 1880s (That’s not a typo). To learn more about modern day ZhongShan (Dailian is minutes from this hub city) you can check out this video.
After visiting the homevillage, we’ll head to Hong Kong, and then off to Japan to visit my cousin who is teaching English in Okayama which is near Osaka.
I’ll be offline for most of the time going forward, I’ll check in here and there, but for the most part I’ll be off the grid. I’m disappointed I’ll miss any upcoming events from Citizen Agency, Podtech Vloggies, and any other Social Media events I was invited to, we’ll catch up on my return.
I’d be curious to hear from you. What have you done to capture or learn about your family roots? Have you visited your home town and village where your family immigrated from? I believe the internet will really help folks find their roots.
I’m very surprised at Nielson banning blogging and all recording from their most recent conference. Steve Rubel questions is blogging should be banned all together at conferences, he learned from Greg, who questions the irony of no CGM at a Nielsen CGM conference. There’s other conversations on Techmeme on this.
I’m often invited to conferences (at no charge, and sometimes as ‘press’) to blog about the event. I take presentation notes (sometimes at great deal), add my own thoughts, and take pictures to tell the story. This builds an archive and links the community of those who attended, blogged about it, and helps to spread the word about the knowledge gained and learned.
Steve writes the following:
“I see both sides of this issue, but I agree wholeheartedly with Greg. On the one hand if you let bloggers write about a customer conference in detail, there’s little need for anyone to pay to attend. However, on the flip side, if you allowing blogging and people take you up on the offer, it’s highly likely that you will generate excitement that boosts customer attendance next year. This is especially true if the conference, um, is in part about blogging.“
For conferences that I wish I did go to, but wasn’t able to attend, I often read what’s written by those who attended via blogs. I can guarantee you I don’t walk away with nearly as much value, information, connection than those that attended would have.
Taking notes and sharing it in public is only one small part of why to attend a conference. The real benefits are making your own observations (not just from the angle of the blogger) the non-verbal communication, and the tremendous amount of networking that happens in person.
For those conference organizers that get blogging and invite bloggers, awesome, you can invite me and I’ll record it for you, (see all my posts tagged ‘conference’ or ‘events’, please note this is only a partial list as I have a previous blog with many events and conferences archived).
For those that ban blogging, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to harness community, word of mouth advertising by using social media tools.
Posted on October 28th, 2006 in:
Video
The first episode of Airwolf, the whole thing. The music, the sound effects, it all brings me back to when I would sit on the red pillows on the green carpet in front of the TV with the wood siding. Stringfellow Hawke, Dominic, Archangel, cool.
I’m getting ready for a two week vacation, and I won’t have much internet access while in Asia. In fact, I won’t be able to even update my subscriptions on iTunes.
I’m constantly amazed how the web is the delivery platform for so much media. iTunes has really become the digital marketplace for media, part of the reason why Tower Records is dying, and some folks think CDs are heading the way of the dodo. iTunes offers movies, TV shows, Games, all at varying prices, I can see this being such a profit center for them.
I’ve downloaded ‘Bejeweled’ a puzzle game that my wife will like, a bunch of video podcasts from Rev 3, downloaded all of Brian’s Edgeworks podcasts, a few podtech, rocketboom, and made sure my usual FIR, Web 2.0 show, Buzz out loud, and Jaffe content is updated.
Content Recommendations Needed
I’m looking to you for recommendations, what other content do you suggest I download? My focus is social media, marketing, web, geek. On the entertainment side, I love viral type videos, short films. Although I like a variety of music, I’ve yet to find a great ‘Chill’ podcast, any suggestions?
So who do you listen to? Give me some suggestions.
I’ve been watching the online data storage space very carefully, interesting to see how Linden has gone with Amazon’s S3 service. By reading his reasoning, it seems more of a solution to fill bandwidth needs rather than massive storage data.
If you’re not sure why Online Data Storage matters, read my 40 points on the future of Online Data Storage.
Or read more of my posts tagged on “Data Storage“.
I was invited as a panelist at the Blog Business Summit from Maryam, but my current schedule is just too busy, I can tell that I missed a great event.
For starters, the relevant conversation of Blog Audience Measurement at the Blog Business Summit with Tris and Andru is exactly the conversation I need to get involved with. Check out Joe’s breakdown from the discussion, he brings forth some of the tactics discussed.
We know that we can measure some parts of blogs, read my thoughts on Signs of a Healthy Blog: Resonation: 1) Analytics 2) Trackbacks 3) Comments 4) Benchmark changes 5) Qualitative evaluation.
Just yesterday, I had a conversation with some Silicon Valley Marketing Managers around Social Media and using in a Community Marketing Strategy. I gave examples of what different companies are doing, how the tools have been used, and provided strategic assistance and tactical examples of the specific strengths and weaknesses of each tool. They get it, understand the concepts and are ready to deploy
The one questions that I could not ask was: WHO is reading blogs, WHO is listening to podcasts, and WHO is in Secondlife.
While we can all agree that it may likely skew towards early adopters or tech savvy folks, (awareness and tool barriers may keep it like that) we don’t know their demographic information. How old are they, where do they work, what do they do, etc.
Other than putting up a survey (like Guy Kawasaki did for his advertiser Federated Media) would it be even feasible or even accurate to apply this to other consumers bloggers, podcasts, Secondlife?
As an industry, and as a Community Manager myself, we’ll need to answer the “Who” question.
In the recent past, there’s been quite a bit of discussion around bloggers that are being paid to blog, but don’t reveal their professional connections, which may motivate them to blog. The two worse cases are PayPerPost, a service that pays bloggers to talk about products (disclosure is not required) and the Walmart Flog that was created and written by PR firm Edelman.
Chris Heuer lead a roundtable last night focused down on the topic. We had some brief conversations about this at the Social Media Club on Monday, and it’s great to see such a focused conversation on it. Michael Arrington encourages folks to talk about this as it’s an issue that could unravel the trust and intention of the free web, those damn humans. You can check out Chris’s recap of the event.
If someone promotes a product or company, and is on their payroll, disclosure is required, often a simple disclaimer at the footer of a post or in a permanent location on a blogroll is sufficient.
I’m blogging live from Hurricane Electric, a web hosting company in Fremont CA who is hosting this Oct meeting of Web SIG. There are four wiki companies here; JotSpot, Socialtext, Atlassian, and Wetpaint. I was very happy to finally run into Zoli, I’ve admired his thoughts and viewpoints from his blog for quite some time.
Moderated by Peter Theony
Twiki.org and Structuredwikis LLC
- Audience Poll
- 80% are using wikipedia
- 50% are wiki editors
- Ward Cunningham was founder
- A wiki is always in motion
- Wikis have been around since 1995
Ben Elowitz from WetPaint
Rich user experience, niche communities, aimed at consumer space.
Many of the wikis encourage embedding of images, and code snippets to YouTube and other video sites
Jon Silvers: Atlassian Software Software
First: The Ending
- Sharepoint is the leading indicator
- Believes that open source will continue to grow
- Real time collaboration
- Consumer social networking
- Evolve or perish
Why is everyone talking about Wikis?
- Thousands of organizations now use them
- Before Web 2.0 there were wikis
- Traditional enterprise software models are broken
- Killer App
Primary Product is called Confluence
18000 customers (correction: 1,800 customers)- IBM Developerworks runs on confluence, SAP Network, Accenture
- Growing at 20%
Dr. Jonas M Luster: SocialText
- Downloaded model to download from sourceforge.
- Gave kudos to the other wikis on the panel
- Metaphor of Cars and Wikis. Like cars, wikis help to power movement and transportation.
- Social text is trying to be the car, the middle ground of really good collaboration.
Scott Johnston: JotSpot
Purchased by Mercury Interactive (Update: This is out context, Scott’s previous company was acquired by Mercury, thanks Scott for the comment)- How to make a mainstream wiki
- The core principle is the edit button!
- Office 2.0 = Collaboration
- Has page types/templates
- Has a family template (I’ll have to check that out)
*Panel Discussion*
Discussing Challenges: Wikis in the past, a shared workspace
Ben: Consumer Space challenges: Awareness is an issue, which is the foundation for adoption
Jon: Workplace issues: the challenge of getting wikis adopted at the workplace is key as you may need privacy and permissions. They discourage folks from segregating information as it’s not natural to the whole purpose.
Barriers is that IT must install it. Now with this bottom up install approach, is that anyone can get involved and start it.
Jonas: Discusses how awareness has arose from etech article. Relates to linux strategy.
Where are we on the hype curve for wiki adoption?
Most folks in this room are wiki savvy. By general business users awareness is low. Where there are self claimed wiki experts suggests hype.
What are the reasons for wiki consolidation?
When wikis are small it’s easy to garden them. As wikis grows moderations will be needed.
What challenges can wikis fix?
Email is an awful way to perform collaboration. Version control is a standard feature., tracking makes it easy. The next evolution will be putting workflow into wikis
Case study for wikis are used to replace wikis
What about wikis for the intranet?
Wikis enable anyone to contribute value without being a developer or coder. It can self regulate
What kind of challenges need to be solved in the future
Awareness is now an issue but websites now can change. Great experiences need to happen.
Question and Answer
1) Discussion about legal usage of changing webpage.
2) how many wikis vendors will survive? It’s unknown.
3) Outdated information is out on the web, and overflow of information.
4) Group participation to define a “Wiki”. The best answer, as voted by the 4 panelists was the answer involving “by the people, for the people”. My answer would have been “Community Knowledge
Event Format
I would love to see the next web Sig have more focus on web presentations with a richer and deeper involvement with the vendors.
