Category Archive

My Social Graph

I’ve been really thinking about my online profile and the links I have. It’s intriguing to play with the Google Social Graph API even though it’s only useful if you’re trying to build a social app (which - well - everyone is).

I’ve also looked at lots of tips on blogging, especially a recent post from Chris Brogan on Ten Secrets to Better Blogging. I’ve only just started blogging recently, but I know I’m being a little haphazard about it.  I’m probably not even following it for this blog.

I’ve also been looking into my social networks and who I follow and who follows me. I love social networks and I love interacting with them. Twitter and Friendfeed are where I get a lot of information from. The thing is for some reason I constantly feel under pressure to make a difference to people’s lives through my interaction.  Twitter is slightly different, but… why can’t I just be me?  Am I being me or not?

Friending is a currency

Links were the currency of the early noughties, and now friending has become the major currency we’re all trying to achieve.  Things like XFN and microformats have sprung up to help us connect with each other and Google is obliging so that we can get at that information. So, now it’s not just the HTML links we have pointing to our content, it’s also the virtual connections between me and somebody that we have on the web that matters.

So, it’s becoming all about getting “as many friends as possible”.  Having 100,000 friends on MySpace wasn’t (and still isn’t) impossible, but calling them friends is quite blatantly wrong - at least, if you’re primary use of the web is as a businessman.  It smacks more of a marketing strategy and something (shock horror) viral and insipid than of a social network.

Being in Business

Being in business, I am attempting to make money (doesn’t have to be a lot, just enough). In some ways, I find that it’s odd mixing my online business activities and the idea of “friending” with my business. It makes it all the more personal, and less about business.

In some ways, my online profile is me and it’s separate from my business. That separation is blurred now, with LinkedIn and others who force me to portray myself in terms of business.  Facebook is different in that it allows me to be me and gives me a semblance of control over who and what people see of me, and it’s much more personal.

The funny thing is that the people that make a lot of money out of the social networks are the network owners, the people who run the things.  Now, in an equivalent of a dot-com boomtime, we’re in a social-network boomtime, where the VC money is going into things that are about “building communities” around a topic.

Who Am I?

So I come back to my original question. Who am I? Am I the businessman on LinkedIn or am I the friendly guy on Facebook?  Am I the stream of random thoughts on Twitter or am I the stream of life information on Friendfeed.

One things for sure, I don’t think any of these things mean that anybody else can truly know who I am.  The funny thing is, I’m not sure that I always know either.  Maybe the interactions on social networks are part of what shape me?

What do you think?

I was thinking the other day how all websites are basically the “same old same old”. They are all “let’s put some navigation up and make sure people know where they’re going” type of thing. The structures are similar and the ideas are similar.

Well, I got bored of my Vida Innovation website about a year ago and just stuck a few things up there and ignored it - and then removed most of the content and turned it into a virtual business card.  It wasn’t core to my business as most of the work my company brings in through through networking both online and offline (mostly offline actually).

So, thinking about the new web 2.0 stuff and how it’s “all about content” and that’s great, I decided to try to think what a website for a company would look like if it’s trying to be innovative and web 2.0-ish.  Basically, all the stuff on a website is content.  If you take it that there are different types of content (photos, blogs, pages etc) then you have a content types.

Once you have content types, how do you arrange them? Well, web 2.0 seems to be all about allowing others to arrange content and tagging is a big thing.  But what if you were to tag all your own website content, so that others could find information out.

Tagging is useful in that respect, so I built a very simple Tag Cloud for my website:

Vida Info Cloud

I built it very quickly and it has an admin backend to CrUD content and tags for that content.  It’s not user-generated tags, but I don’t really care.  The principle is the same as for this wordpress blog, so that people can find content.

The other thing is that the navigation is basically linked to a tag, and not to specific pages. So it’s really really simple to update.

I suppose it’s basically a blogging tool for a company website.  But instead of directing the user, the user is allowed to find their own path.

Told my friend Nigel Crawley and he said that at opentech the Guardian had unveiled their new site structure, all based around tags.

Now, I’m sure it’s not the perfect UX, but who cares?  I like the system so much, that the tag cloud will become my main company site for the foreseeable future, just to see if it produces results.

Your thoughts and comments would be appreciated. Currently, it needs work on design, but I liked the idea so much, I had to get it up on the web.

After reading Andy Piper’s blog I found one of his delicious links very intriguing:

Ten Questions Not To Ask A Social Media Panel

It’s basically asking difficult questions around the subject of how Social Media is seen in the advertising/marketing world.  Things like “How do you plan a Social Media Campaign?” and “What’s a friend worth?”.

All really valid questions, but it does raise some interesting points. The best part of the article is the comments though.  Why? Because they bring more pertinent information out about the state of the market and how executives and corporates see the Social Media world.  Especially F100 companies in the US (and therefore FTSE100 in the UK).

I recently had the opportunity to sit in a marketing meeting with a large clothing retailer in the UK.  It was an odd meeting as they were being sold a marketing campaign around real metrics (100k+ people) with the aim of “getting more email addresses”.  In other words, sending an email out with a 50% off voucher, and “send to a friend” emails.  The aim was to increase the number of people they could spam to.  How very 1990s.

The interesting thing is that this ideas is self-perpetuating for the marketing company (not the brand).  If you get a whole load of email addresses in one campaign, you’re going to do the same campaign the next time.  What happens when email becomes less important?  What happens when all the important conversation is on Facebook, or worse, distributed over different social networks?

The conversation then turned to Facebook because the key demographic fits the Facebook profile.  Their question was “How do we use it?”.  I think there’s a fundamental flaw in that exact question.  In the end, I advised the company not to even go near thinking about engaging with Facebook (or any other Social Media) unless it was going to change it’s entire marketing approach. Why? Because people are far less easy to fool directly (on a 1 to 1 basis), rather than as a crowd.   Social Media works at the 1 to 1 level.

Social Media is not to be used, it’s to be engaged with.  It’s not to be controlled, it’s to be released.  It’s not for trying to get more “customers” it’s for trying to create brand advocates.  It’s higher risk, but with much higher reward.

Brands and Companies need to realise that Social Media is not a “strategy” that is either easy or non-disruptive to their organisation. There is no easy way to start a “campaign” - and as the blog post says, there’s no guarantee that there is such a thing as a “campaign” in Social Media.

So, how do you incorporate Social Media into your brand or company? I think I’ll leave that for the next blog.

I was asked by a guy I met at minibar to write a portfolio of some of the work I’ve done.  I thought I’d share it with you as I quite liked it.  Not trying to blow my own trumpet, but it might help some people to figure out what I do - oh and I’m looking for work at the moment:

First things first, portfolio of work.  The thing I did at Mashed - Travel Streamr.  It is integrated with fireeagle, flickr and lonely planet.  OpenID is not currently implemented, but that wouldn’t be hard.  Other things (lots of “proof of concept” ideas) built with rails:

• Dead Parrot Images
  • Amazon S3 integration proof of concept.  Works fine
• Snaptoki
  • Developed with Nigel Crawley - he’s the friend I’ve been talking about and he’s setting up Web Ambient as a company
  • Nigel and I developed a mobile java application (using processing) that auto updates a website with a “snap”- very simple idea, but again it works
• Shadow (not visible online)
  • Completely architected and developed a rails solution for fully managing an employee’s first 6 months in a job. Included various information gathering + mentoring involvement and messaging systems.

Other non-rails things I’ve done:

• VITES
  • What the company I developed it for call a “Next Generation Web Platform”
  • Full development language involved and developed in perl
  • Fully architected the solution based on the business needs of the company.  Consultancy and development took a total of 3 months
  • The solution was developed for the company’s clients and is sold for almost 2x the cost of development per solution
  • VITES has been running almost unchanged for 2 years on several multi-million pound systems
• Honda/IYG Phonetics
  • Developed a C#/ASP.NET intranet application to allow Honda to input data from any of their marketing campaign
  • The system took information from the internal Honda catalogue via XML and generated custom forms for each campaign.
  • The system was developed in 12 weeks, and produced a 4x improvement (300%) over the system it replace
• Isuzu
  • Fully developed the technical backend (although did not choose the hosting solution) for the current Isuzu website
• 24: The Game (Sony Computer Entertainment Europe)
  • Fully developed an XML driven backend including integration with mobile services, that integrated with a Flash marketing campaign.
  • Required a system to generate SMS, and also generate a unique code for a mobile service
  • Campaign was award winning
• PG Tips
  • Developed the technical specification and managed the outsourced development of the PG Tips Cuppa Club Website
• Craik Jones
  • Was Head of Technology for a design agency for 3 months at the beginning of 2008. Covering paternity leave of head of technology
  • Developed pitch work alongside the design part of the agency for Gordon’s Gin
• Gap
  • Consultancy on how to use Facebook for their brand

And then, of course, I’ve done many many websites (either direct or through design agencies), including for Unilever (Knorr, PG Tips), Gap, Audi, Sony BMG, Department for Education and Skills and many many many other companies.  Also have done fun things like SLorpedo. I have run my own consultancy for 7.5 years and the only reason I’m looking for work is that 2 design agencies decided to fail to pay my company (for reasons best known to themselves) and took 80% of my business within 1 week in September 2007. Also, having spent some time in the design agency world, they are now working mainly with companies that outsource to India, and as such, my company is less competitive. What they don’t question is the quality.

So, any work, ideas or suggestions as to where to look for work, would be fantastic.

I’ve never written down my work like that - it looks more impressive!

Went to Minibar on Friday and took my eee pc 900 (black) with me to see how it could help me. Wrote a blog on the way home, but have only just remembered to upload it… here it is:

Minibar June 27th 2008

Had a really great time at Minibar this evening. Not only did I hear about something very interesting from Channel 4, but also spoke with some great people.

Channel 4’s Matt Locke presented about Channel 4’s new initiative 4IP. They are setting up a pilot fund of £50m to find companies that are innovating around the digital world and public service broadcasting.

They are looking to fund innovation and they want to know what would Channel 4 be putting it’s money into now if it was started today, and not in 1982. How would it engage with entrepreneurs and the public?

Matt then introduced some innovative businesses that Channel 4 have already started supporting. These seem to focus on niches and on generating revenue within the social space.

schoolofeverything.com is an interesting concept as a website. It puts together those who have something to teach and those who have something to learn. The hope is that people will learn across the internet from each other. Interesting idea, but I was a bit stumped byt he business model.

Then, EC1 came along to present about their applications for things like bebo and myspace for a niche area - goths and emos. Interesting idea, but poorly presented unfortunately, although there was a definite space in there to gain the attention of a group that likes to use social networks, andＩwas wondering why mobile wasn’t mentioned more. Surely that’s a growth area still.

And finally, Techlightenment (who didn’t introduce themselves very well) presented their Bob Dylan viral marketing piece. It is very cool (and if you haven’t seen it it’s here) and they told us that Bob Dylan’s music company paid for it, to generate interest in Bob Dylan. Apparently, it worked, with 3x more searches on Google for Bob Dylan. Impressive, but definitely a point - don’t do this kind of thing unless you’re being paid for it! Too many rubbish virals get sent ou that don’t have any relation to anything important and are just self-indulgent publicity stunts that generally backfire. This one though, was cool.

Met Benjamin and Jof as well. Had long conversations about Eastern Europe, startups and got told I’m only 2 more startups from statistical success. Which is nice.

Also met some Ruby ond Rails guys which (short term) is good for me as I’m looking for some fill in work at the moment, to tide me over before my startup starts cooking, so hopefull that’s going to produce some leads for some work. If not, I’ll be begging for someone to get me some work via twitter/blogs and everything else!!!

James Andrews was there who was part of Mashed08 Team Bob. He’s an RoR guy and we had a long chat, and I’m going to get him and Nigel Crawley in touch, as I think there’s some real possibilities for collaboration there.

Signing off - long post - will try to cut it down. Writing this on the train on my new EEE PC 900 (not the atom one - couldn’t wait any longer!) and I’m finding it surprisingly fantastic for getting my thoughts down.Ｉwrote notes throughout the minibar by holding it in one hand and typing with the other. Just a shame I wasn’t live-blogging (no wifi) or you could have seen it!

Not for the first time I’ve had a client come back to me with a note saying that another company has “not understood” what my proposal was.

Over the past 7 years, I’ve been engaged by many clients asking for my expertise in how to develop robust and scalable database driven websites.  This, of course, is the life-blood of many SME IT consultancies and I think I’m pretty good at it. However, there are problems with this.

It’s turned from being a market where an opinion with experience is valued, to one where the budget is king.  The outsourcing of projects to India has brought about the downfall of many small companies because they can produce much more for much less.  Experience of architecting and developing these solutions is cast aside to ensure that the bucks are taken care of.

So, when I’m engaged to propose a solution, I have to be very careful about what I propose.  It’s turning into a situation where unless I propose the right solution for the client’s preferred outsourcing partner, that the outsourcing partner can quite happily turn around and suggest a different solution and the company will go with them.  The upshot is that my proposed solution ends up being prefixed with “disappointing” or “over-budget” or “confusing” when it was anything but.

It’s a cut-throat world out there, and I readily understand that.  Client behaviour of this sort isn’t new or particularly complicated to understand.  The issue is that to produce the kinds of documentation and implementation plans required for another company to be able to deliver against that appears to be beyond the budget and understanding of a client to pay for.  So you are left at the mercy of “other consultants” to ratify what you are proposing.  Unless you can (of course) get the development work off the client too, but then, to do that, you’d have to be charging the same as the Indian outsourcing companies already established.

So then, why not just become another one of them?  Because, being British, we are born to be entrepreneurial and creative, and the idea of being “one of them” isn’t my cup of tea.

Next business please…

I’ve realised that Twitter is a great little tool.  I’ve spent some time trying to streamline my life through cutting down on wasted time in work.  So that means:

• Checking email only every hour (and not clicking on “check for new mail”)
• Stopping twittering so much - at least, not just sitting and watching it waiting for something to respond to
• Scheduling time and calls into my day so that things don’t get left
• Looking into getting a virtual assistant (still looking)
• … other stuff

This has done wonders and I’ve got so much more done in the last couple of days, that I’m now a lot happier with where I am.  Still no work, but I’m much more in control of my time and I don’t feel that I’m just drifting through work any more.

However, I realised that I missed something doing this.  I’ve twittered a lot less, and I’ve read twitters a lot less too.  This is great for my time management, but not so great for my keeping up with the world.  Why?

Twitter is acting like my virtual office. Whenever I’ve been in an office, there are emails that go round and conversations over the water cooler that happen that make your day a little more interesting.  I’ve realised that Twitter acts like that for me.  Which is great!

So, I’ve decided to work out a way to incorporate Twitter as my virtual office water cooler. It’s where I keep up with what’s going on with my friends and where I find out about new and interesting things.  I’m not sure exactly how to manage it in terms of time, but we’ll see.  Maybe I just need twhirl to add in a “text-to-speech” thing for it, and I can just “overhear” what’s going on instead of having to converse.

I’m currently in the process of getting a startup off the ground. It’s not easy, and as the technical person in a team of 3, and with the main part of the startup being internet based, then I have to do a lot of work before the other members of the team can get out and sell.

So I’ve spent quite a lot of time developing a prototype.  As no-one can ever be certain that a startup will work I’ve also had to spend a bit of time making sure I can earn money if this startup fails (for whatever reason).

I’ve had several interviews for work recently and even blogged about some of my experiences in Experience is obviously overrated which was an exciting and frustrating time. Well, I’ve just received feedback on another interview.

This time, the role was for what you might call a “head of technology” role for a marketing agency.  They work with corporate clients in the UK, and are looking to expand their offering by taking on someone with experience in this area, who can take the bulk of the technical decisions but also get their hands dirty.

Now, I thought that this could be my fallback position. I spent the first 3 months of this year at Craik Jones pretty much doing the role that this other company were recruiting a contractor for.  It wasn’t fantastically paid (then nothng in New Media is) but I loved being there and the atmosphere was great.  I am experienced in this exact role.

So, I have the interview over 2 weeks ago, and through various HR people being on holiday and agents being on holiday and a whole mess of a situation, I get an email back stating that I’m too experienced for the role.  To quote the email:

“However, I have spoken to them and whilst they felt you did a very good interview they thought that your experience was too senior for what they were looking for.” (emphasis mine)

On one hand I’m not experienced enough, and on another hand my experience is too senior.  I do however, do a very good interview (it can’t have been that good then!). I know the two jobs I’m equating are not the same, but they’re not that different either.  One person explained it very well when he said “you don’t get contracts because you don’t have a standard career path”.

So, I appear to be stuck in a situation where my experience of running a business, managing clients, finance, new business development and all of the stuff that goes along with essentially running a small consultancy means very little in the world of contracting.

If I’m not going to be able to get a contract (by being too inexperienced, experienced, senior, junior) then my only hope is that the contract market changes to allow “former small business owners with significant experience in web consulting” to get contracts (any companies wanting some experienced help would be much appreciated), or my startup has to work.

I know which I’d prefer. Watch this space!

Oh - and I’m not going to tell you any details of the startup until it’s launched, but we are looking for angel investment of around £50k at the moment.  Any investors interested, please get in touch!

It was well received and generated a lot of discussion.

It was based on this blog post:

http://padajo.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/internet-infinite-feedback-loops/

It generated a lot of discussion around twitter.

The talk is in PDF format here: How to break the internet

Update: The presentation is now on slideshare - How to Break the Internet

Arrived after a slightly stressful journey (mainly because I got up late and hadn’t thought about what I might need).

But here, and meeting a whole load of people I remember!

I like Web 2.0. It’s a great idea and a fantastic buzzword. It allows me to seem “in the know” to people who are only just beginning to get Web 1.0.

But the problem is that Web 2.0 seems to have a slight identity crisis, certainly within the business world. A lot of discussion has happened and is happening around the idea of revenue and cash flow for web 2.0 businesses.  This comes on the back of Twitter securing $15m funding for continuing to grow it’s business, when there are many in the business world who are asking where the business model is.

This article in the FT a few days ago, it suggests that most financiers are at the very least unsure about why they should invest in a company.  Web 2.0 to them is about social online behaviour, and so far, very few of the recent startups has shown enough promise to start making money.  Twitter, for example, is being backed because of the strong early adopter user base it has grown very quickly.  The interesting thing is that there’s still no obvious business model, even now and it’s been going a while.

But maybe the key is that it is changing our online behaviour.  It used to be just about email and phone, then came online ads, and now it’s about putting out your online personality.  This will create groups (I don’t want to use the word “crowd” here) that can then start to become the next business communities.  So maybe, Twitter will just become a community around which business is done.  What business and how much that will make for the users or for Twitter is unknown, but Dell and others are beginning to use Twitter to get information out there about their businesses.

Some of the other businesses that are touted as Web 2.0 are Slide (how it’s worth $500m I will never know) and Ning. Because all of these businesses start with open source software and tend to be beta versions at launch, then the technology tends not to be the valuable part.  The value appears to be in the number of users that they can get as quickly as possible.  So making something that is “useful” and/or “fun” for a large number of people appears to be how to make a Web 2.0 startup. Monetisation is not the key.

Jemima Kiss points out that it’s not simply enough to look at the finances of a business.  Web 2.0 is still young as an industry (if indeed it is a separate industry to the “normal” web) and these businesses springing up are less about the traditional and more about the innovative side of business.  Maybe Web 2.0 is the future of all business and maybe it is going to be much more disruptive than even we are seeing now.

My opinion is that Web 2.0 companies are here and here to stay and I like them.  I still fail to see how Twitter is going to make a lot of money (and certainly not out of it’s current user base) without someone there creating a micro-payment model (of some sort) on top of it.

The key to a successful Web 2.0 company appears to be finding the right angel to invest at the start (if needed) and the right VC to fund it after the initial launch, and the right company to purchase after a short-ish amount of time.  It’s less about the business model and more about fashion.  Maybe the business model is more like that in that it’s more of the web’s “luxury item” than previous companies were. Luxury and fashion may be the way to view Web 2.0.

I’ve found that the readers of my twitter stream are wide and varied. My twitter stream is consumed by various applications, including the twitter facebook status application to update my facebook status from twitter and I have many comments (especially from people at my church) who think I twitter too much and I’m always top of their mini-feed!!!

So I thought (for all those people that read my twitter posts but aren’t on twitter) I’d do a quick intro to twitter.

What is Twitter?

It’s what’s called a microblogging application. These applications allow you, in a short amount of characters, send a status update, or in the words of twitter “what are you doing right now?”.

But “What I’m doing” is obvious

As my friend Bezzer says, there is only one answer and that is “I am twittering” but that’s just going a bit far and too literal.  Basically, it’s an opportunity to tell people who might want to know what you are actively engaged in at that moment. So you could be “walking the dog” or “thinking about my friend” or any number of things.  Bloggers people often use it to say they have created a new blog post.  It gets very interesting and bizarre finding out what people are doing!

Why twitter so much?

Well, twitter only matters when you have friends who twitter as well.  Twittering in isolation is dull (believe me, you don’t want to know what you were doing last year).  It’s much more interesting finding out what people around you are doing.  So letting them know is fun for them.  But to know that, you have to follow people.  Once you start to follow people (calling them your friend is a bit wrong) you start to receive their updates into your friends stream.

Finding people to follow

It’s simple really - search for people. The BBC news has a twitter stream you can friend. Not only that but you can track twitter and get a message every time someone uses a certain phrase.  So if you want to find people that talk about premiership football, you might track premiership. You will then get messages from people who twitter about that and can follow them if you like what they say.

Twitter via a client, Instant Messenger (IM) or mobile phone

The thing is, if it’s all on the net, you never view it unless you go to twitter. This gets tedious after a while, so the best way to view tweets is through a desktop application like twhirl. You can also get and send tweets direct to your mobile phone as an SMS or via IM through Google’s IM platform gtalk.

Then, you will receive tweets from other people (those you folow) sent directly to you, and you can twitter very easily, without having to go on the net.

What’s the @ and the # all about?

If you see someone’s twitter and want to respond, you just put their twitter username in and put and @ at the start. So instead of it being a true twitter, it’s more like a comment on another person’s twitter. Putting a # in front of a word means you’re talking about a specific subject.  It just helps in searching.

Official commands

There are other commands that help with twitter, and these are defined in the official commands.  Take a look!

Want to know more?

Probably the easiest thing to do is to setup an account, download twhirl, find someone on twitter (like me), and follow them. Then, start answering the question “what are you doing right now?”. It’s really very simple.  I may even follow you back!

I was just chatting with my mate James Ogley (a curate in the Church of England down in Bursledon and also a SuSE evangelist) and we were just trying to figure out if it’s possible to create a feedback loop.

While it may or may not work (or be socially/internet responsible) it is something that should be considered.

If networks such as friendfeed did something like auto-post comments to another social network, and then that network auto-posted those comments back to friendfeed you could end up with a feedback loop very easily.

The thing is, has this been done, and if it hasn’t how do you stop it happening?

Every post must have a unique URL against as an identifier of course, but if when you pull a post from somewhere else it gives it a new unique URL, then what’s to stop it being a perfect feedback loop?

I’m not suggesting this is a good idea as it’s likely that at least one of the networks online would be overrun and brought down because of it.  However, maybe there needs to be a more robust solution for handling posts posted in one place being sent to another.  Maybe a post should only have 1 unique URL.

The problem is, that if you use a multi-posting client like twhirl then one post to twhirl can create 3 identical but essentially unique posts elsewhere.  Which one is the master post?

This could be a problem folks…

Over the past few years, I’ve watched and been a part of several social networks. My favourite (currently only) is twitter.  I have developed lots of friendships over the years, some entirely online, and some I’ve made online and continued in real life.

What I’ve seen before, but I’m noticing more and more is something I like to call spamship. What this is is a person making a cursory link between themselves and yourselves on a social network.  The better ones at it make an attempt at a conversation, but there are enough out there who are just setting up profiles to gather “connections”.  The worst ones are those who think that the number of friends on a network somehow signifies either popularity or value or expertise.  It’s rubbish.

An added extra that has emerged is distributed spamship which is even more annoying.  Someone “friends” you on one social network, and then “imports” their friendships from that network into another network.  What happens if you’re on both networks? You’re automatically joined to them there too.

It makes the idea of friendship less and less useful and more and more annoying. It is friendship spamming and it’s something that I don’t like. The only beneficiary is the person who is doing the spamming as you end up with pointless connections that have zero value to you elsewhere.

I like the idea that twitter uses of followership. Where you choose to follow a person, and they can follow you, if they want. There is no need to reciprocate if you don’t want to. Twitter puts me in control of my own friends and means that I don’t have to follow anyone I see as a spammer that chooses to follow me.

What will emerge in the future is that followership is going to become a much better guide to expertise, popularity or value than the number of friends a person has.  I know this isn’t new, but it is going to emerge.

We need to organise our lives around something. The internet allows us to have massively connected networks but we just can’t cope for long periods with so many relationships. We will have to focus our time and energies on certain niches and networks whilst staying aware of the outside world.

Spamship will decline as networks mature.  We will need to be more in control of our networks than we are currently, but there will always be a need for openness and collaboration, and we shouldn’t stop people who wish to watch/follow from doing so. We’re all open for collaboration.

It’s amazing to me that I can still have the “What is Web 2.0?” conversation, even with people who’s business it is to know something about the web (web designers, techies, IT directors).

There is no definitive answer here (or it wouldn’t be asked), although there are characteristics that a lot of Web 2.0 businesses share.  The most important thing to remember is that “being Web 2.0″ appears to be about open collaboration.

It’s not about sharing. There seems to be a misconception that if a company opens up it’s API and it’s data that there will at some point be a reciprocity just because you’ve opened up the data. That’s just not true.

Some examples might be in order here!

Collaboration is the correct term. The big companies have realised this and will often only open up the data it holds if it’s going to have some return benefit to itself.  Google Maps is a case in point, as Google realised that it could give away the maps, with an API, so long as it was branded Google. It meant that everyone had access to a mapping system for use in their application, but that everyone knew it was Google’s Mapping system. Mashups were born!  That meant that more people used the system, and built systems on top.  Google Maps became a platform and meant that it was a key collaborative component for other people’s systems.  Google is about selling advertising, and the more people that use it’s maps, the more likely it is that people are going to see their adverts.

Twitter is also a platform. It’s essentially a message queuing (MQ) system in the background and people use it to send messages to each other and to systems that use it.  You can get the data off twitter via RSS and via their API.  It integrates with mobile as well, in that you can have messages sent to your mobile. Not only that, but you can get data sent via Instant Messaging through GTalk which allows you to send info back to twitter too.  Because of all this ability to use twitter to send messages, people are beginning to twitter-up their house.  It’s not obvious where twitter makes their money, but it’s certain that if twitter disappeared, there could be problems for some web applications

There are many other web 2.0 companies and applications, including flickr which allows you to share photos with others.  It’s the platform that people use, and you can build on top of it.  But you always know it’s flickr.

I haven’t even touched on Web Services, RSS, blogging, podcasting, User Generated Content (UGC), virtual worlds etc.  There are many different web 2.0 technologies that facilitate collaboration.  It’s important to note that the companies using these technologies are in business for a reason, to make money somewhere, somehow.  They have realised the importance of these technologies for creating collaborations, but their aim is to increase value for their business.  It’s not enough just to blog or create a system for UGC to be called “web 2.0″.

So the answer to “What is Web 2.0?” is open collaboration. The technology is not the important part of it.

I’ve just been through 2 interviews for contract roles in the past week. They are more senior contract roles than I have gone for before as I believe my skills and experience warrant going for those roles, and it seems that I am at a disadvantage.

The disadvantage? That I’ve run my own business for 5+ years.  (Note: I stopped doing that specific business when I had 2 clients fail to pay at once.  Took one to court and won, the other I almost took to court, and they paid up).

Why is running your own business a problem?

Well, it seems that if I’m going for a “Project Manager” (PM) role, then there is an expectation that you will have on your CV “Project Manager”.  I have “Owner/Manager” for my own business on my CV.  I really don’t like lying on my CV.

So for some reason, in the brain of the interviewers I’ve come across recently, that somehow means that my “skills” are not specifically for that role, e.g. Project Management.  I would argue that I’ve run a business (that survived for more than a few months!) and that means I must have PM skills to do that, and that I’ve cut my teeth in much more challenging situations. I can point to specific experience of managing various projects and what I’ve done in certain situations as well, but these don’t necessarily correspond to what they want.

One of the issues seems to come down to not being able to point to specific experiences that correspond to the interviewers situation. Case in point in the last interview was discussing booking engines.  Now the company requires someone to project manage a booking engine development from requirements through to deployment. Now, I have experience of doing the above process with simple websites, social networking sites, content managed websites, intranet productivity tools, project tracking systems, XML databases, multiple integrated systems… and I could go on. But because I haven’t specifically done a “booking engine” (at least, not in the type of way that they want) then somehow I am unaware of what is involved in that process and that marks me down.

Another issue that has come to light is my apparent ability to remember processes (yes that’s ability to remember).  I have been told in each of the last 2 interviews that I have explained very good processes for doing different tasks for the role.  In one interview I was told that they could have easily got the processes I was putting forwards out of a book - and as they’d asked me to produce a hypothetical approach document, surely that’s a good thing! Apparently not. I get the impression that they asked me questions and expected answers based on my experience and not on hypotheticals.  If that’s what you wanted, then ask for that.

The problem is, that when you’ve spent time being a business owner, you build skills up at very many different levels. The PM role, for example, is a big part of owning a business.  So is sales, account/client management, financial (invoicing etc) and legal. If I go for an interview, I expect an interviewer to at least understand that I have well-rounded skills beyond just what I’m interviewing for.  The fact that I may or may not know all the buzzwords for a specific role does not disqualify my other experience.

I have a suspicion that I’m not actually going to be content in what I do until I’ve got another new business to get my teeth into.  My skills appear suited for entrepreneurship and startup and not for climbing any corporate ladder.  Not that I wouldn’t take a job if offered (starting a business is not easy), just that it’s difficult to see what I would be happy doing.

I know this is a rant. Maybe it’s just that I’ve come across 2 poor interviewers, but the people that know me, know what I am capable of, and that understanding can never come across in an interview. Maybe interviewers should take more notice of overall business experience and less notice of the buzzwords they are waiting to hear.

Wooohooo!

I’m going to BarCampLondon4! I’m really looking forward to it, having been to BarCampLondon3, and on a reserve ticket that time too (I really need to work on my timing).

Having said that, I only received an email saying I was first on the list and to reply by the end of the day.  It was sent at 4:10pm on a Friday, so I’m not sure if I had 50 minutes to reply or 7:50 to reply.  I hope he’ll take 2 hours!

Well, now to think of a talk…

Maybe my blogging over the next 2 weeks will help me! At the last one I did 101 uses for twitter which brought forth 75 uses in 30 minutes.  Maybe I’ll do a follow on talk.

If anyone who’s going (or isn’t) wants me to expand on anything on my blog, please let me know and I may do a talk on that instead!

http://www.instigatorblog.com/5-quick-tips-on-pitching/2008/05/14/

I’m an entrepreneur who loves to think big, but sometimes, I really need to knuckle down and work.

Maybe the above link will help me!

Problem isn’t necessarily the idea, but finding the VCs that I have an issue with. Maybe I just don’t move in the right circles?

One of the things I dislike about online “communities” is that there is often a nastiness that comes along with the interaction. The fact that you don’t have to meet a person to be in a dialogue with them means that you can pretty much say what you like. The gloves are off.

One of the things I really like about online “communities” is that there is often an openness and honesty that comes along with the interaction. You find out a bit more about the real person and some friendships can be created and massively enhanced because of the interaction.

It’s an inherent contradiction that the openness of the internet allows both openness and nastiness.  The worst part of this is that people online will often make assumptions about a person’s ideas or beliefs, and act on that understanding. The reaction of others can often taint a person online, especially in the age of “search” where nothing online gets hidden.

You can’t change other people, you can only change how you react.  If you don’t like the idea of the community being that open, then don’t become a part of it. Dialoguing is sometimes useful, but there can often become a point where it just brings both down in the estimation of everyone who views the interaction.

Reputation Management is a term that has started to appear because of this openness.  I first heard it about 2 years ago in relation to online, where a person in one of my online business networks started offering a service to get a person’s Google search results changed. It meant that things that were undesirable (including negative comments) were pushed down the list and replaced with a more positive view of that person, but the negative things could not be eradicated. It’s spin for the internet generation. Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, is an interesting case of poor reputation management in the fracas with his girlfriend.  Internet spin gone wrong!

I like the idea of reputation management, but I also find it slightly disingenuous. Part of what attracts people is the “warts and all” interactivity of the net. The fact that people/companies with spare cash can in some way portray a positive view of themselves is good sense in a business world, but a person with no skeletons is much more scary than a person with a few. In my view, it’s a balancing act.

What I much prefer is to be able to find other people’s views of a person (or company). If their view of that person is positive then I am going to be more favourable to that view than of the person’s “spin”. Kind of like an Amazon rating for people.

The problem with an amazon rating is that there are many types of people on the internet. Books are different, because the content of the book means that only certain types of people are going to read it. Books on C# will be read by techies. Mills and Boon by women of a certain age.  So the ratings are going to be from people with similar interests.  People are a different matter. They are a part of different groups and have different aims.  So how do you judge their rating?

You have to find people who know that person for the same reason as you may want to. In business that’s quite simple - to use their services or find out about them as a prospective client. That’s why businesses try so hard to get testimonials from their clients. However, they control those testimonials and what you see.  You never, ever see the bad bits.

When you are in an online community with someone, you have the opportunity to find out another person’s reputation from their interactions with others. Most communities have a friends list, and you can find those connections to you.  It’s the idea behind LinkedIn, because you are constantly working through your contacts to find other contacts, a partial trust has appeared, but there’s no rating. I like this approach to a point, but it attracts the wrong type of people in my view. People with a big contact base (sales people generally) mean you end up with a bunch of people all trying to get the biggest number of contacts.

In the end, the best way to manage a business reputation is for a company is for it to be the best it can be and to be clear about what it does. The community around it will then speak out loud about it, and the nay-sayers will be available but will be just noise.  That kind of reputation, where the negative is available, but outweighed by the positive says more about that company than any kind of management of what is visible.

Lots said… need to work!  I’ll probably talk about the idea of followership in my next blog… this one’s got too long!

A twitter conversation between me and (mostly) Prokofy Neva

paul: thinking: You are a product of the communities you inhabit

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet hell no, not me : )

garethj: @pjnet Communities are defined by the people that inhabit them

paul: @garethj communities self-perpetuate types of people

paul: @Prokofy those communities may require you to be belligerent and annoying to others in the community - it’s a “type”

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet does it make you feel innovative and clever to typecast people?

paul: @Prokofy - you’re arguing my point about communities in http://www.mixedrealities.com/?p=189…

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet I simply don’t believe in prescribing Social Darwinism for others, imagining up little deterministic scenarios for “communities”

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet most of the time, there isn’t even any such thing as a “community.”

paul: @Prokofy you are the kind of person that encourages people to find out about stuff

paul: @Prokofy not sure what you’re getting at - I think you’re confusing my thoughts with something else

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet no, I’m responding directly to your your tweets. You said people r defined by communities. I say, no, they aren’t & they don’t exist.

paul: @Prokofy communities don’t exist? People are defined by the communities they inhabit - it’s a choice which communities we join

paul: @Prokofy even an anarchist is part of a community no?

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet no? I realize that’s just awfully clever, gosh, you are a product of what you rebel against but no, I’m not a social Darwinist they pretend that they create, empower, link, blah blah “communities”. They don’t. It’s a vast fiction -fake friends list isn’t a community.

paul: thinking that lots of people can’t see the other part of this twittering about

paul: @Prokofy you choose what you believe - you choose what you follow - i haven’t mentioned social darwinism at all

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet I absolutely refute any such determinist and all-encompassing notion of human nature, as “dictated by its community”

paul: @Prokofy I’m not just talking about online though - in fact, the thought came from thinking about offline communities

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet this is one of the deep, deep, corporativist, nay, fascistic fallies of Beth Noveck and Clay Shirky’s group fetishizing and groupism

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet they would have you defined online as always and everywhere “in a group” that grooms and conforms you to norms. No thanks!

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet no, you just practice it : )

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet no, that’s just your doctrine. People aren’t defined merely or even especially by communities. Many other factors are at play.

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet it’s a basic tenet of the Western liberal idea that the individual is unique and free and not subject to these restrictions

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet but I do realize that you simply don’t believe this; you may not even understand it.

paul: @Prokofy blog your thinking and I’ll comment

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet I just did : )

paul: thinking that it’s far easier to be rude and unsociable if you’re an avatar and hiding your true identity

paul: @prokofy We don’t live in isolation. We all live in communities. All different. All individual. Soc. Darwinism is about conformism - th …

paul: @prokofy link to the blog post? Haven’t yet seen it

paul: pjnet enjoying being challenged by @prokofy

I just found this a bit weird. It was an off-the-cuff thought that I was musing over, and the conversation got hijacked and rude very fast.

The conversation was interesting though. There’s a wikipedia page on Social Darwinism.

I do think however that we are changed by the communities we interact with. It’s all about which communities we choose to be a part of.  They can be big or small, and can have big or small influences. But you can’t be a part of a community without being changed in some way by it.

According to everything I read at the moment, traditional marketing agencies (offline, online, digital etc) are doomed.  I don’t agree.

The business model of throwing money at an agency to get a revenue from sales will change. The talent for advertising and marketing will also not be focussed on several main companies/groups, but will in the end transfer to a bunch of smaller much more loose knit collaborations. The winning agency will become the agency that embraces community.

I read recently that there is more advertising budget from blue-chips going into starting and maintaining social networks (both internally and externally) and all that goes with it. However, I think that’s the right area, but a misguided proposition.  I suspect it’s been sold-in by agencies without a full understanding of what they’re doing.

Companies will never be able to build big social networks, because they aren’t trusted.  People will not join as they will feel “sold” to.  The ones that do join, are almost certainly not the people they want to talk to either, unless their long-term aim is to get those people to consume more of their product.  That’s fine, but unlikely to work, as people are feeling less and less affiliation with brand and are more and more seeking out their own personal communities.

Companies need to recognise that they need to participate in the network to build up credibility. Then recognising that they have credibility, they will need to push the idea of value… for the community but not necessarily for them.

Shareholders won’t (and don’t) like it, unless the business model is entirely around the advert model (I have the eyeballs, you pay to place something in front of them).  In the end, shareholder led companies care only about the money.  Social networks are difficult value propositions in that sense.  Control of the message and conversation is reduced. The internet makes web investment more of a gamble than more old-school industries and models, so it requires a different type of investor and a different type of shareholder.

So, advertising will - and is - become more about showing how companies can be more community-centric and community-valuable.  Unless agencies pick that idea up, and more importantly work out how to sell it to their clients, then they will struggle to retain clients.

There will always be companies that stick to the old models until new ones come along. I remember listening to a Unilever representative about 2 years ago saying that they were going to “wait and see” what happens with social networks and associated business models before deciding on whether to throw marketing budgets at them. Unilever and others appear to be the safe industries, that will throw large budgets at “tried and tested” approaches.  These are the companies with the safe investors.  These are the companies with an unimaginative view of the world.

If your agency has that kind of client, then you’d better watch out that they don’t drag you away from the future and drag you down with them.

I hate London Underground ticket barriers.  Don’t get me wrong, they work fantastically, especially with Oyster… most of the time… and that’s the user experience problem. They work great for most situations but…

The biggest annoyances come when using a ticket (not Oyster) and it is invalid and doesn’t go through. At that point the barrier doesn’t open.  An error condition if you will.  The person invariably stands there looking stupid, or walks into the barrier (which can sometimes be very amusing - the confused look is just so funny sometimes).

It’s all down to the way the ticket machine works. You put the ticket in the back and then it comes out of the top. Once you take the ticket, the barrier opens.  However, to get the ticket back, whether it’s valid or invalid, you have to step forwards.

That step forwards, in the subconscious minds of everyone around, is an acceptance of your ticket. Everyone trying to get through the barriers behind you then expects (because that’s what almost always happens) that the barrier will open.

If your ticket is invalid, the queue movement stops, you look stupid, you get annoyed looks from everyone behind you and much jostling as you try to go backwards through a queue that is trying to push forwards.

Not only that, but if you are directly behind and don’t notice the invalid ticket ahead of you, you can put your ticket in and they go through.  If you’re really unlucky, at that point your valid ticket has gone, the person in front with an invalid ticket has disappeared, and you can’t get through the barriers.

There’s a simple solution. Instead of both valid and invalid tickets being treated in the same way, e.g. coming out of the top, all invalid tickets should come back out of the machine the way they were put in. It’s the step forwards that matters to the crowd, not the ticket.  It’s the step that means the normal conditions apply. It would stop the person stepping forwards until their ticket is accepted, and it would stop the person behind being able to put their ticket in.  At the very least, the person behind shouldn’t be able to enter their ticket for maybe 2 seconds after an error condition, to avoid their ticket allowing the wrong person through.

Maybe it’s just me being grumpy about commuting, but I just think that London Underground could significantly improve their ticket barrier user experience.

Wishing I’d gone to the TechCrunch UK meetup in London today.

Looks like a lot of people went, and lots of people with new ideas who want to get their ideas out there.

Mike Butcher posted loads of stuff online, and I just would have loved to have gone. I don’t seem to spend enough time around those kinds of people.  And they all seem to have VCs stuffed in their pockets somewhere…?

Ah well, next time.

I’ve realised that I have a lot to say, and that I’m useless at keeping to 140 characters. So I’ve decided to start blogging instead of just twittering.

I’m hoping it’s going to facilitate more discussion and conversation than my twitter’s do.  We’ll see!

Watch this space.