Bloggers

I’ve followed various people’s blogs for a long time, but I’ve suddenly realised that it’s not very focussed.  I’m aware that there are trend-setters in different industries and niches and the more linked blogs appear to be the more read.

But does that mean they are the right people to listen to? Maybe, or maybe it just means they’re better at marketing their blogs!  I’ve heard many things about TechCrunch and not all positive, but you can’t argue with how many people read the blog.

My areas of interest

So, I’m interested in Social Media and Strategy.  Business is changing and the web is changing with it.  My background may be technical, but my experience and value to a company is in being able to:

• help a company understand the impact of social networks/media on their business
• where a company may be able to interact
• how a company can change it’s structure to make itself more agile and available for the changes that are occurring on the web
• Help a company to manage and develop valuable applications and systems for use in the social media space

So, it’s everything from how to build online communities around a product, to how to ensure that a facebook application can deliver results and includes how to ensure a company can change the perspective of people within a specific community to a more positive view of that company.

The hidden bloggers

I was reading Chris Brogan’s blog on If you intend to blog seriously and I was thinking that even though I think I know my market and my community, maybe I don’t.  Am I missing some serious people out that I should be reading?

Currently my list of blogs that I have installed is small, mainly because I’ve started again so as to give myself a clean slate. Some are my friends, and some are people I think have good things to say.  My current list (in no order):

• Copy Blogger
• Gia Lyons
• James Ogley
• TechCrunch and TechCrunch UK
• Mike Butcher
• Paid Content UK
• Andy Piper
• Luis Suarez
• Horse Pig Cow
• Perfect Crowd
• Chris Brogan

I haven’t even started to mention my twitter feed, but go and take a look at http://twitter.com/pjnet to find out who I follow.

Who else should I be reading?

Who are the key players in this market? Who are the UK-centric bloggers who I should be listening to as well?  What am I missing?

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!

I’ve update Travel Streamr so that it can now use FireEagle and it works great!  It does not store your FireEagle credentials at all, so you’d have to continually authorise.  This is intentional as I want to store as little as possible (and it’s not like it’s onerous to login to FireEagle).

Doing bits and pieces on it ad hoc. It’s just a bit of a proof of concept project, but it works quite nicely as a mobile application currently.  I wanted to generate a web application in rails that was mobile, used FireEagle and did something useful, so I came up with this at Mashed 08.

Still have to implement user uploading of text, images, audio and video (all geocoded) and using Amazon S3 so it can start to be a useful tourist/local application, but it’s getting there.

And then, when that’s all done, I’ll be adding in lots of other stuff, including geocoded advertising options, so that if you’re in a city and you’re looking for stuff, ads for restaurants and hotels may come up.  Cheap ad options are very very simple.

The API is still “non-commercial” though so until that changes, I can’t make money on this.

Note: Already have the code for S3 because I built another proof of concept called deadparrotimages a while back, which is a temporary image store.  Images are deleted after an hour or a day.  I thought it would be useful to send round images that you don’t want saved on the net forever, something like when selling an item and you don’t want everyone to know about it.

Well, mashed08 is finished and I’ve only just got round to blogging about my application.  Spent yesterday at an interview and finally got a contract in Milton Keynes!

I got a large proportion of what I wanted to get done completed, but it wasn’t quite enough.  I didn’t win the chumby

The application is Travel Streamr - a simple way of viewing lonely planet information about a location, as well as seeing location specific photos (and videos) from Flickr.  Also included is (will be) the ability to create an account and upload text, audio or video comments about locations.  I hoped to get it integrated with FireEagle, but didn’t have time.  The fact the winner did integrate with FIreEagle is neither here nor there (but I’m still slightly annoyed).

I did have a great time at Mashed 08 and met up with lots of old friends and made some new ones too.  Especially enjoyed spending time with Jim “Win” Purbrick (aka Babbage LInden from Second Life) and met a couple of twitter friends and followers that I wasn’t expecting to.

Reviews of Mashed from:

• TechCrunch
• The Guardian

Interview with O’Reilly GMT

Update: Youtube Video of Interview

Had a long chat with the guys at O’Reilly GMT.

My mashup is going well, and I’m hoping to win the Chumby that Lonely Planet are giving to the best Lonely Planet mashup!

Just arrived at Mashed 08 (Mashed 08 Backnetwork) and am starting to listen to a talk on how to “chapterise” an MP3 using ID3 tags from the BBC.  Audio visualisation looks good to, where it changes colours dependent on whether it’s music or speech.

Cool!