Lee Siegel, author of Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob was bullied when he wrote about his views online which challenged the beliefs held by many bloggers, YouTube performers, and social networkers. It was, for him, a case of publish and be damned.

Watch the web extended interview by clicking this link -

You can also read the BBC story there too.

I think Lee raises some very important points here. As a supporter of the increasinlgy social aspect of the web I must also admit that in many cases there is a race to the bottom, and Lee in his BBC interview promoting his new book articulates this dillema better than I ever could. These concerns, along with stories of the explosion of usage, the vast unmoderated tidal wave of User Generated Content (UGC), ever lower costs to entry (in  terms of ease of use and financial) means that digital content has essentially zero value to the end user and in many cases the publisher/originator.

This is OK if what you want is essentially always free access to content - whaterver it is. But when the codfied database of the web is expected to double every 11 days by 2010 then how the well do actually sort the wheat from the chaff, considering most of what is User Generated is, basically, garbage? How do we begin to avoid the scenarios Lee talks about and ensure that moderate voices can be heard and that original perspectives can be encouraged and not shouted down by the loudest voices?

I think this is the biggest challenge for 'net content providers and users over the next few years.

 

For Siegel, the online world is not so much inhabited by us as by our egos, which are slowly destroying civilization.

Drowning voices

It is not just teenagers making videos. Many of us have carefully-crafted profiles designed to attract others on social networking sites.

Siegel believes our egos are now running riot on the web.

We have started to kick back at anyone who may try to lead us, or try to inform us. We will not be told.

Siegel points to the rise of the blog.

Strong opinions need little research or fact checking, yet the blog has quickly gained influence. He fears this trend will reduce what the truth is to whoever shouts the loudest.

 "I think that's very, very dangerous because there are experts. No-one would talk of citizen heart surgeons, for example," he says. "But on the internet they talk of citizen journalists, because it seems that anyone can take up a keyboard and write a story.

"If the only truth is the result of the strongest, most emphatic assertion, what happens to the patient, soft spoken, contemplative people? They'll get drowned out."

Rational review

Lee Siegel knows his book is controversial but only because few people have questioned the net's show-offs and bullies.

"Unlike earlier transformative technologies, like radio and television, the internet has not been subjected to critical examination. It has escaped that.

"I think it's time to look rationally and level headed at this thing and talks about its dark side as well as its virtues," he says.

 

Just returned to the office after a short presentation opening up the SPaceFd conference here in Bradford.

SpaceFD ( and I must be careful to get spelling and case right!) is another local and regional instance of the Elgg platform with a focus on enabling Foundation degree students. 

It was nice to see so many people there ready to discuss and elearn more about this means enabling student-employer-college  engagement

I couldn't stay sadly - lots ot get onw ith here including a deadline for my paper to the 7th Conference on E-Learning due today!! help

It'd be nice to seem some SpaceFder's on Intouch too - if anyone's out there, get in touch!!!

 

 

 

Below is that list; I hope you'll find it useful and leave comments helping to extend the conversation further. In my mind I'm thinking of everything from RSS and wikis to Twitter, Facebook and blogging. Online tools that leverage social connections.

Last month we wrote about an initiative called The Working Group where people trying to bring about innovation in big companies. Many readers probably know about Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang's fantastic blog, where he explains social media in a business context, often in a format you can take directly to the boss. There are lots of different resources available online to help the intrepid early adopter and I hope this list will be one of them.

Ultimately, I'm not yet convinced myself that persuading anyone is the way to go. If you can make time on the side to use new tools and you can perform - perhaps the benefits can best speak for themselves. If that's not the case inside of a company, I'm sure it is between two companies with different attitudes towards adoption of new social technologies.

ROI is the elephant in the middle of the room, and it's addressed a bit in item number ten below. It's a topic I need more people to chime in on; I live and breathe this stuff and can articulate the benefits of it to a great degree, but it just speaks for itself to me too. So if you're an ROI-head, pipe up. Links, traffic, mindshare, connections between people and early access to actionable information are the things I usually cite without quantifying.

Let's get into the list though, and please do feel free to add your own thoughts as well.

A List of Objections, Replies and Concessions Regarding Social Media and Tools

1. I suffer from information overload already.

Possible replies:

Try just skimming messages in some fora - you may need to look closely at every email you get but you don't have to look at every Facebook friend's update.

The right tools for you will feel helpful in time, not like a burden. Experiment for awhile with new tools and stick with the ones that deliver you the most high-quality information, whether those tools are high-quantity or not. (Thanks to Aaron Hockley and Ruby Sinreich for these thoughts.)

Check out tools like AideRSS and FeedHub - just two examples of services aiming to improve the signal to noise ratio.

Times change and so do information paradigms. Get used to it. The amount of information you had access to 3 years ago was infinitely more than people at any other point in history and we're in the middle of another huge leap right now.

Concession: If you think consuming all this new information is a challenge, wait until you try to find the time to make sense of it! (Thanks to Nancy White for that thought.)

2. So much of what's discussed online is meaningless. These forms of communication are shallow and make us dumber. We have real work to do!

Possible replies:

Much of it is not meaningless, but if you feel overwhelmed with meaninglessness - try subscribing to a search for keywords in a particular service and using that as your starting point for engagement.

Having a presence and starting a conversation is rarely a bad thing - bring quality conversation to a space and you'll find others ready to engage. (Thanks to Banana Lee Fishbones, obviously a fan of open, non-anonymous public communication :) for this articulation.)

Personal information can be very useful in understanding the context of more explicitly useful information.

If learning how the market feels about your organization, engaging with your customers and driving traffic to your web work - all very realistic goals for social media engagement - aren't work, then I don't know what is. Even in the short term, strategic engagement with online social media will have a clear work pay-off.

Concession: The signal to noise ratio will be easier to maximize if you can find an experienced guide to learn from. Just jumping into social media and new tools on your own will not neccesarily lead to a meaningful experience. It could, but it will take longer.

3. I don't have the time to contribute and moderate, it looks like it takes a lot of time and energy.

Possible replies:

If you aren't going to eat that lunch of yours, I'd be happy to, thanks.

With practice, familiarity and technology fine-tuned with a little experience you'll find the time required will decrease.

You might consider this time spent on marketing or communication with existing customer base - perhaps there's something else in that department that isn't working well and could be replaced with online work.

Concession:
Doing anything well does take time and energy. You've obviously been thinking about this stuff a lot, it is important - and it's going to take time and energy.

4. Our customers don't use this stuff, the learning curve limits its usefulness to geeks.

Possible replies:

You might be surprised to learn how many of your customers do already use these new tools. Even more will do so in the future.

The best designed tools are designed like good games - you can get small rewards right away and then learn more advanced skills to win bigger rewards. Among online services that are intended for general audiences, only poorly designed ones are too geeky.

Many of these tools provide value vastly disproportionate to the literal number of people they reach. These are like high-value focus groups where you'll gather information and preparation to engage with the rest of the world.

Try asking someone near you to give you an in-person demonstration of one of these tools. You'll find it much easier to learn once you've seen the right paths taken to show what it can do.

5. Communicators [bloggers, tweeters] are so fickle, better to stay unengaged than risk random brand damage. We don't want hostile comments left about us on any forum we've legitimized.

Possible replies:

If you need to, you can require that any comments left on your own site be approved before they appear. This slows down the conversation but if it makes conversation possible for you then do it.

There are far fewer people who will take the time to say hostile things, even on the internet, than you might imagine.

Engage - you'll be appreciated more for it. People are going to say what they are going to say - you can either let any criticism go unanswered or you can be the bigger person/brand for responding well.

Conversations are going to happen online, better to be engaged than to have it happening behind your back. (As articulated by Rick Turoczy.)

It's ok, no one believes that anyone is perfect anymore. Swing for the fences sometimes - you might strike out, but sometimes you'll hit a home run.

Even if you're not responding publicly, you should watch closely so you know what people are saying. Maybe you don't have a blog, but subscribe to a blogsearch feed or alert for your company's name. Maybe none of your people are on Twitter - you can subscribe to a feed for a search via Terraminds.

Concessions:
Some of the critical things that get said about you online might not warrant a response. Just decide which ones do and file the rest away somewhere.

Communicating in this different context is very new and challenging for traditionally trained business people. Good luck.

6. Traditional media and audiences are still bigger, we'll do new stuff when they do.

Possible replies:

They already are, from blogging to online video to social networks to mobile to microblogging - big, established brands are already doing all of it. They may be experimenting but they will bringing all their market dominance into the most useful social media sectors as soon as it suits them. Will that be too late for you? It might be.

Traditional media audiences are also more passive - online audiences can engage with, rebroadcast and otherwise amplify your communication efforts.

Concessions:
That's true and fair, if you think your business can thrive while taking that attitude towards a period of intense social and economic change then you just rock on with your bad self. I'll be taking my love of innovation to the employer down the street.

7. Upper management won't support it/dedicate resources for it.

Possible replies:

A lot of technology adoption has for some time had to happen despite this reality. People adopt new tools on their own at work, without permission. They discover powerful ways to solve their problems and then they share them horizontally.

Compared to other expenses, meaningful engagement with new online technology does not have huge costs.

Concessions:
Meaningful engagement with new technology does require some expenditure of time, energy and money. If you're not willing to do this then you'll be unlikely to see big benefits.

8. These startups can't offer meaningful security, they may not even be around in a year - I'll wait until Google or our enterprise software vendor starts offering this kind of functionality.

Possible replies:

The skills you build and the connections you make will remain with you, though. This is a paradigm shift underway more than it is about any particular tool.

Chose your tools carefully - expect data export as an option so you can back up or switch services whenever you need to. This isn't widespread yet but the best tools allow it.

Concessions:
You do need to be careful, but if you do so intelligently then the benefits can really outweight the risks. It is very possible that any one of these services might shutter in a year or two, but you'll get a lot out of them in the meantime and hopefully won't lose access to your data if that happens.

9. There are so many tools that are similar, I can't tell where to invest my time so I don't use any of it at all.

Possible replies:

A little experimentation goes a long way.

Try asking people in your field who have some experience what tools they are using.

Try searching for keywords related to your work in various sites. You'll find out that way which sites are best suited for you.

Concessions:

It's true, it can be very confusing and very few people are able to keep up with all the new services that are launching. Don't worry about it, just do your best.

10. That stuff's fine for sexy brands, but we sell [insert boring B2B brand] and are known for stability more than chasing the flavor-of-the-month. We're doing just fine with the tools we've got, thanks.

Possible replies:

Some of these things, RSS and wikis for example, aren't passing social fads - they are emerging best practices and the state of the art.

ROI is very hard to measure, but try allocating a little energy over time to experiment and see what kind of results you get. From connections between people and projects, to search-friendly inbound links, to early access to important information - the benefits of engaging in new social media go on and on.

Conclusions

There are no conclusions, this is just a conversation. Please feel free to add your thoughts in comments and check out the comments to read what others suggest as talking points when faced with these objections.

Lilia Efimova writes:

"It is not easy to find to whom and how to credit when one's ideas are inspired by reading weblogs of others and conversations in a weblog network. When those ideas leave the blogosphere and take shape of something that is part of paid work (publications, presentations, instruments, methods), lack of attribution could result in a bitter feelings as sharing one's ideas for a "collective good" is not the same as giving them to someone who might be competing for a publication space or consulting assignments in the "real world"."

As a publisher, and as someone personally interested in the exchange of ideas and knowledge, these sentiments are I think something to be keenly aware of. I try to attribute when and I where I can but sometimes kinda fail.

I'm wondering out loud here but is there any role for an independent publisher in the efforts to resolves these issues?

-HJ Lilia Efimova, Mathemagenic, July 10, 2008

Paul Coyne :: Feeds

Blogging Research: Attribution and Ownership of Ideas

Lilia Efimova discusses the challenges around attribution in a cloudy, bloggy world. "It is not easy to find to whom and how to credit when one's ideas are inspired by reading weblogs of others and conversations in a weblog network. When those ideas leave the blogosphere and take shape of something that is part of paid work (publications, presentations, instruments, methods), lack of attribution could result in a bitter feelings as sharing one's ideas for a "collective good" is not the same as giving them to someone who might be competing for a publication space or consulting assignments in the "real world"." Of course, these issues will become common ground for academics and businesses as we continue to connect and network and learn online. -HJ Lilia Efimova, Mathemagenic, July 10, 2008

BBC NEWS | Health | No alcohol for young drivers call

It's generally the case that Executives tend to invest in new technologies and processes because they hold out the promise of either increasing competitive advantage (for example, by enabling new services or improvements to existing ones) or reducing costs. While opinions differ among discussion participants as to whether Web 2.0 technologies (like InTouch) have yet demonstrated any economic impact, a consensus is emerging that the technologies are valuable internally (mostly by improving collaboration) and externally (by strengthening connections among suppliers, partners, and customers).

Although no longer so very new the ideas and technologies that have become known collectively as Web 2.0 appear to be moving up the agenda for many Chief Execs and Boards. 

It's also clear that motives for this interest varies, as do expectations.

MckInsey conducted a global survey earlier this year, 'how businesses are using web 2.0'. The results are fascinating, and sometimes surprising.

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_page.aspx?ar=1913&pagenum=1

 

Successful Investments so far...

More than half of the executives surveyed say they are pleased with the results of their investments in Internet technologies over the past five years, and nearly three-quarters say that their companies plan to maintain or increase investments in Web 2.0 technologies in coming years. (A mere 13 percent say they are disappointed with previous investments.) Companies that acted quickly in the previous wave of investment are more satisfied than late movers. Less than a fifth of all those surveyed say they are very satisfied with their returns. Of those who rate themselves as very satisfied, 46 percent are “early adopters” and 44 percent “fast followers”.

Why web 2.0?

Executives say they are using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate with customers and business partners and to encourage collaboration inside the company. Seventy percent say they are using some combination of these technologies for communicating with their customers. For example, about one-fifth of them say they are using blogs to improve customer service or solicit customer feedback.

Respondents report that to communicate with business partners and, secondarily, to achieve tighter integration with suppliers, companies are using Web services, peer-to-peer networking, collective intelligence, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), and peer-to-peer networking.

Companies are using the same technologies to help manage knowledge internally. Just over half of respondents say they used one or more Web 2.0 technologies for that purpose. Just under half use these tools for designing and developing new products—for example, setting up systems to gather and share ideas.

Finally, among the executives surveyed, technologies for automation and collaboration appear to be gaining more traction than some of the technologies that have received more attention in the press. Blogs, podcasts, and mash-ups trail technology trends that allow people to contribute knowledge to a common effort or allow machines to exchange information more easily.

However, looking at companies that have invested in specific technologies, two distinct groups emerge. Some 43 percent of companies are even more focused on networking and collective intelligence technologies than the global average; these companies are likelier than others to be large, in high tech, and in Asia. And some 22 percent are much likelier to have invested in RSS, blogs, and podcasts than others; these companies are also likelier to be in industries such as media and telecommunications and located in North America. (might this mean that a Web 2.0 enabled Insight will be attractive to US buyers users?)

Some participants, especially those whose investments have focused on changes in their IT systems and who have invested less in Web 2.0, tend to view advantages as fleeting. “While we have been in the forefront of most technology upheavals over the past two decades, none of our investments have provided us with any significant competitive advantage for a significant duration. The technologies tend to get adopted by competing financial institutions with no meaningful time gap [and] tend to get commoditized very rapidly.”

Participants in the survey see these technologies as enabling a different way of doing business, both internally (for example, by aggregating knowledge from throughout the company) and externally (by tapping customers for product-development ideas). These respondents, such as this executive from a company using several technologies, tend to expect a more sustainable advantage. “Web 2.0 tools are helping to encourage interest in collaboration across the organization and helping us to explore new and different ways of collaborating. In time this may bring us some form of competitive advantage, but it would be hard to quantify anything at this stage.”

Clearly there is  a great deal of divergent opinion in the value of web 2.0 to the business and it's contribution to a firm's sustained competitve advantage but it appears that this uncertainty is not preventing many firms explore what the impact of these tools might mean for them.

It's very interesting to me that those firms looking to encourage and foster a web 2.0/social media approach, including aspects of customer inclusion, employee participation, value co-creation, rich dialogue and interaction, open data and services - are the same firms looking at the long term, strategic,  pay-off rather than the more traditional accounting ROI argument for IT investment..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whenever I attend a conference I use my blog to record the event, capture what was most important to me and plant small action points for me to follow up on later. It's also, I've found, great for continuing some of the conversation that were begun at conference too.

This is a little different since this entry relates to Emerald's own International Conference, which has just concluded after a week of activity and enagagement from around the business.

For various reasons this was my first Emerald conference in my almost 4 years with the business; I think I hit a good one. From what I hear things have been changed around a little and seems to have involved other parts of the business in a way that previous conferences have not. I think they used to be very sales oriented but this was much more about rying to gain a real understanding of what the business is about, its objectives, strategy, resource, competences and capabilities in the service of our growth targets. 

It's easy to be sceptical about such corporate events, but this was pretty energising stuff and I was pleased to be a part of it. 

I only hope we can now follow up with some real commitment and political will to see through the changes in culture and process we all so clearly and passionately asked for.

Great to meet some of the oversea guys and gals; hoping to pop in to the newly opened Boston office in the next week - put the kettle on Jim!

Very pleased (and very surprised) to learn of the work the overseas teams are putting in to band together and collaborate via the InTouch community - v. rewarding. How to ramp this up, nurture it and let it grow without being overly prescriptive/aggressive in personal use of such tools?

Perhaps they too will blog about their Emerald International conference here too? that would be brilliant. It would also be consistent with the stated goals of the participants, even better.

What about knowedge sharing across the enterprise - again, this came across loud and clear in terms of things we must get better at. A conference is a great way to get the ball rolling but how do get the great event led behaviour translated into routine working practice and embedded within the culture of the business? Details to follow as Mark H might say...

While we're working out the details, this from Fortune Magazine interview with GE's CIO:

Does social networking have a role within General Electric?

We've gone out of our way to call it professional networking rather than social networking. We've been building a professional-networking capability that allows everybody to put in the organization directory the skills that they bring to bear. It's very searchable, so if someone is looking for a particular skill, they can go to that site. That gets about 25 million hits a day, so it really is becoming sort of a heartbeat of the company.

25 million hits a day - wow, that's quite a bit. Not sure what's included there, but wow!

I hope to have links to slides from the conference, perhaps even some pictures! I think they will be tagged for Emerald Eyes only for now but you never know...

 

 

 

 

 

Had a really interesting meeting late Friday which covered a lot of ground re: social netowrks, publishing, content and so forth. A colleague raised the very pertinent point of preservation which I admit is not something I've give much attention to in the past but it's really got me thinking.

The ephemeral nature of blogs, wikis and other User Generated Content (UGC) even has it's own 'ism' - Recentism. Though the term originates from and refers to wikipedia it can I think be applied to pretty much all blogs and wikis. 

Recentism is the practice of creating or editing articles without regard to long-term historical perspective, or to create new articles which inflate the importance and effect of a topic that has received recent media attention. Established articles may be overburdened with documenting controversy as it happens, new articles may be created on flimsy merits, and the relative emphasis on timeless facets of a subject which a blog/user community consensus had previously recognised may be muddled by this practice.

I do believe however that much of the content created 'in the now' and without regard to the long-term and the established literature can be valuable and useful. I think this sometimes referred to as 'grey literature' but I stand corrected on this.

A brief survey of the web reveals some concerns about the preservation of blog/wiki content.

This link (Poster on attitudes to blog presevation) is one piece of work that I have found.

I think I'll keep a very close eye on the activities of my colleague and her attempts to develop this line further.

From an entirely selfish and kind of Emerald Product Development perspective I think it may be the basis for a truly innovative and valuable service to the blogging community within the business and management and library studies fields.

Just imagine, your blog posts - the ones you value and are perhaps valued by your peers - submitted to the Emerald Database with all the normal attribution of original ownership and preserved for the long term and offered to the research/academic community when they search for formalised content like books, journals and monographs. 

We are able to know detailed events in Ancient China that occurred thousands of years ago, because historian and scribe Sima Qian bothered to write the Records of the Grand Historian. Today, we want to do the same : be able to pass on the records of history to the future generations.

Is it me or is that not a really great development? 

 

I've had my copy of Office 2007 for some time now and only in the last 5 minutes have I learned that I can post my blog entries from Word!!

Brillian stuff. Very fuzzy lines between On and Offline and makes it even easier to contribute to a shared knowledge base. Any Emerald InTouchers reading this – you have NO EXCUSE to not contribute any and everything to this shared space – we talked about it last week, please post anything – start small, you might even like it!!

With up to 30% of Google/Yahoo searches returning links to Wikipedia, Google sees an enormous non-adsensed space. The traffic of Wikipedia makes ad providers salivate. To combat this untapped market, Google opted to create a service called Knol, where articles can be written by experts (sometimes). Is this sounding familiar to anyone?

Anyone can create a knol and invite others to contribute. If several people decide to write a knol on Change Management Strategies, both are allowed to exist. The community can vote and rate article quality. Authors of knols can also add Google's adsense service to the site and make money in the process.

Although not academically focussed (no impact factors here) - more of a series of how to's and general knowledge this feels like an important development in the publishing of knowledge on the web.

It will be interesting to see how this unfolds. Google is essentially stating that individual ownership of articles is important. I will be even more interested to learn how permanent these knols are and if they might be a assigned a Permanent URL such as a DOI.

How will knols be listed in Google searches? Will they receive better search returns than Wikipedia or Emerald Full Text articles?

The idea is well conceived. The service seems to function well, without the hideous editing text of mediawiki/Wikipedia. Feedback loops are in place through comments and ratings.

The opportunity for economic gain will likely also draw some participants. All those factors combine to suggest Knol has a real chance for success. Knol represents real and present disruptive force for pubishers I think.

Currently, the resources on the site are quite scarce, however I expect this to alter over the coming months.

Posted by Dusan on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 10:43 am under Mobile Web, Research

The number of subscribers using mobile Internet services will rise from today's 577 million to 1.7 billion by 2013, thanks to the demand for collaborative applications known collectively as "web 2.0" and greater 2.5/3G penetration.

Established mobile players face increasing competition from web-based brands (Google? Yahoo?) and will have to adapt their strategies to accommodate greater collaboration with other members of the value chain, if future revenue growth in the mobile web 2.0 space is to be achieved.

According to the new Juniper Research's report titled "Mobile Web 2.0: Leveraging Location, IM, Social Web & Search 2008-2013," the emergence of such applications as social networking, user generated content, instant messaging and location based services call for delivery of the mobile Internet as it was originally conceived - OPEN! The idea is to allow users to share, collaborate and exploit content/information without any single party controlling the value chain.

This, however, marks a fundamental shift for the industry towards the D2C (direct to consumer) model and places growing pressure on both mobile network operators and handset manufacturers to relinquish some of their control over the value chain.

The report author Ian Chard says: "Major web players have already crossed the Rubicon and established themselves in the mobile domain, placing the onus on MNOs and other members of the value chain to form innovative relationships and grab a share of the new revenue streams being created."

However he also notes that the mobile web 2.0 market is still nascent and business models remain in a state of flux, giving time for players to establish fruitful and reciprocally beneficial partnerships.

Other findings from the report:

• The Far East and China region will be the largest market for mobile web, reaching almost 416 million users by 2013, up from 190 million users at the end of 2008.
• The greatest untapped potential for mobile web lies in South America, while growth will be more measured in markets such as Eastern and Western Europe where fixed broadband penetration is relatively high.
• As with the fixed Internet, many mobile web 2.0 applications will need to be provided at base cost/flat-data rates or even free of charge, forcing industry players to seek new revenue streams (advertising?).

More information about Juniper's report is available on their website.