Trust in mass media is down because of something much more fundamental. We've found ways to connect one to another - there is a new model which places trust in new places - in each other, in the edge - not the centre.
It's not just mass media and banks that have fallen out of favor. How is this growing lack of trust impacting your organizational model? Do you have a strategy?
One thing is certain, you aren't going to push your way back to a trusted position.
I'm liking the new copyright policy found at whitehouse.gov: Copyright:
Pursuant to federal law, government-produced materials appearing on this site are not copyright protected. The United States Government may receive and hold copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.
Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Basically, everything put up by Federal workers is released to the public domain. Do whatever you want with it... Which has been the law of the land since forever. Anything contributed by non-Federal government workers is Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution. Which is basically, do whatever you want with it but give credit to the authors.
This is the model for all publically funded entities going forward. (I'd hate to be a publicly funded organization on the wrong side of this issue.) We've turned an important corner, and from my vantage it feels kind of nice.
It was just a couple of weeks ago where I walked you through adding your Twitter friends to FriendFeed using a third-party tool. Yesterday, FriendFeed added this capability directly to the tool: Find and subscribe to your Twitter friends on FriendFeed. The following screencast walks you through the process.
FriendFeed is a great way to organize your Twitter followers into groups. Its aggregation and filtering capabilities allow you to follow many more people without losing them in the noise. If you've been waiting to get started because of the difficulty of building your network on yet another service this tool will make the transition much easier for you. I hope you'll give it a try.
NOTE: This is my first screencast where I have rendered it in HD. If you watch it in HD on YouTube: Friend Feed Twitter Import (click on the HD in the bottom right corner of the video.) it really is quite nice. I'm thinking most people will watch it as an embed and not in HD, however. I'm considering abandoning HD rendors in the future. Let me know if you have any thoughts on this.
Two contrasting and very interesting graphs of what people were doing on the Internet during yesterday's inauguration. The first shows how Google searches dropped precipitously at the moment of the swearing-in and through President Obama's speech:
The second graph shows how the conversation on Twitter exploded:
This is so cool to see. It shows how we stopped doing a solitary and personal thing like searching, and gathered around with our friends in conversation. I'm guessing we'd see similar graphs at all sites where the conversations were actively occurring: FriendFeed, Ning, MySpace, Facebook...
I always bristle a bit when people say that the Internet is isolating us. That's so far from the truth as to be laughable.
This story is being a reported a lot of places: Google Giveth, and Taketh Away: Google Video, Notebook, Catalog Search, Jaiku, and Dodgeball to Shut Down:
A number of Google services just announced that they are about to shut down. The Google Video team announced that it will shut down uploads in a few months, while the Google Notebook team announced that it is stopping development (the service will continue to function, however). According to Danny Sullivan, Google is also closing Jaiku, a Twitter-like micro-blogging service that was bought by Google before it even launched, but which has lingered in invite-only mode ever since. Google Catalog search, which made shopping catalogs searchable, will also be closed soon.
I actually think Google is smart to be shuttering these services. If you looked at the data (the traffic, etc.) you couldn't justify running them. Google certainly has the resources to run these forever if they wanted. That's not the point. They are making a sound business decision, and for that they should be applauded.
There are a lot of us that need to be more like Google. Many of us continue to offer services long after we have any justifiable reason. Running a tight ship, even if your budget isn't an issue is just smart. If you've been wanting to focus a tad more here's your chance to follow the leader and jettison your baggage. You know you have some...
This NY Times editorial over the weekend got me to thinking: The End of the Financial World as We Know It . What happens when we come to the end of the IT world as we know it? It's going to happen someday.
This whole problem of being too big to fail is of interest. Don't we have the same problem in IT? With Microsoft being rumored to being close to laying off 17% of its workforce I started to think of what a catastrophe it would be for them to fail. What if Cisco were to fail? Throw Oracle into the mix?
Now I don't think for a minute that this is possible, but we've seen stranger things of late. With 90% of U.S. business running MS software, the tubes dependent on Cisco, and the data buried in Oracle, can you imagine the crisis that their failure would precipitate? My guess is that we would be seeing a bailout. They're too big to fail. I'm thinking that the government made a mistake not breaking-up MS when it had the chance.
One of the things I want to do with this blog going forward is more how-to posts. Short and quick things that show you how to do something new. It won't be my sole focus, but it does seems to be an activity that makes sense for this format. Plus, these sorts of posts have been very popular in the past-- just giving you more of what you seem to want.
That said, here's a quick tip to help you find your Twitter followers on FriendFeed. As you know, I'm a big fan of FriendFeed, but for a lot of people getting started can be a bit of a hurdle. It can feel like a ghost town until you get your network constructed. So let's fix that. This nifty little utility, Twitter-to-FriendFeed Contact Sync is designed to help you find your contacts from Twitter that are also using FriendFeed.
The way it works: first you enter your Twitter user name and password. I know, trusting your password with a 3rd party site is risky. I don't, however, use a password on these social networking sites that I use anywhere important. Neither should you. If you use the same password on Twitter as you use at your bank-- THEN DON'T DO THIS SORT OF STUFF. Don't be stupid, okay?
Once you've given it your Twitter info it goes to work mining your Twitter friends. Depending on how many friends you have this can take from a few seconds to several minutes to complete. The result is this list of your friends:
Then you enter your FriendFeed subscription info and remote key. If you don't know your key it will find it for you-- couldn't be easier. It mines the two lists and brings you back these two lists showing which of your friends are using both services:
Then just look down the list, and choose who you'd like to subscribe to. You'll still have some other work to do in FriendFeed getting your new subscribers into their correct lists, but that's a topic for another day. Hope this helps you to begin to either get started with, or to enjoy FriendFeed all the more.
One of the most common things people ask me about social networking is, "How do you keep up with it all? I can barely handle my email..." They then go on to explain how they just don't have the time. To which I say, "If you're a knowledge worker you don't have any choice. You're either in the flow or you're irrelevant."
Basically, what you are seeking are tools to aggregate and intelligently filter your various syndication feeds, your personal flow. This idea of flow is one coined by Stowe Boyd: Overload, Shmoverload
Flow Strategies:
1. Time is a shared space -- your time is truly not your own
2. Productivity is second to Connection: network productivity trumps personal productivity
3. Everything important will find its way to you many, many times: don’t worry if you miss it
4. Remain in the flow: be wrapped up in the thing that has captured your attention
That said, there are several options to help you stay on top of the so-called onslaught of information. We have some new tools that are not only easy to use but very powerful. I've actually got this down so well that I'm wanting more stuff: feeds, conversations, workstreams... I'm constantly on the hunt for new people, new thinking, new sources of data, new ideas... bring it on!
Wired recently highlighted these Lifestreaming tools: 6 New Web Technologies of 2008 You Need to Use Now
Sites like FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and Digsby serve as social-network-activity aggregators. They're like virtual funnels. Dump in all the notifications, feeds and updates from your various networks, and the services will bring it all into one master stream, relieving you of the responsibility of visiting a dozen or more sites to learn what your friends are up to, what they're listening to, who they're snogging and so on. Controls let you dial back the flow by sorting and filtering the flow, pruning it down to only what matters most.
Many such services have emerged, but FriendFeed, an elegant and simple site designed by a crew of ex-Googlers, is our favorite.
I use three flow tools. FriendFeed is the most important. It serves as my intelligent aggregator. Besides being a place to have meaningful conversations, it allows me to create virtual workgroups. I still use Yahoo Pipes to aggregate and filter a few feeds, but most can be more easily handled in FriendFeed using lists. The two other tools I use are Google Reader and Feedly. Feedly is a social front-end to Google Reader so you might actually say I'm just using one tool: Google Reader becomes the data repository, and Feedly provides the interface-- done right. It's really quite simple.
There are new tools for aggregation and filtering coming every day. This is an area still in its infancy. I know of no two people who do it the same way. These are things you must experiment with, and tailor a solution that works for you. These tools do not require any great technical skill to use. It's basically a case of picking something and choosing to "be the ball."
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I think that's a wrap on my freerange enterprise posts. Did I miss anything?
