I came across an article Robert Scoble wrote yesterday about the new method he’s going to use to organize his Twitter accounts. He’s been getting really excited lately as he figures out how to efficiently use Twitter to access good information that’s important to him. I’m going to write about the importance of media scanning as part of a “metathinking” framework in an upcoming post, so I’ll leave the commentary about what he figured out about Twitter lists for later.

Basically, Scoble decided to create multiple Twitter accounts to organize the different types of information he produces:

The value to this is much deeper than it may appear at first. Twitter is an amazing experimental grounds in figuring out how to leverage the power of the real-time web. Besides being an incredible platform that essentially operates as an “idea exchange”, where we can chew on ideas and news together collectively, it’s an amazing source of information acquisition.

As Scoble figured out in organizing his Lists, by creating different lenses and filters in Twitter, we can control the types of information we want to access. By separating his information into different accounts, he’s giving his readers the opportunity to also get filtered information.

It makes total sense, because not everything @scobleizer says is going to bring you value. If you’re not a personal contact of his, then you’d probably be satisfied with just seeing the original content he produces. Everything else is basically just noise. For instance, I just pulled this one out of his feed:

Obviously, unless you’re that person or know the context of the conversation, that comment means absolutely nothing to you.

Another example that comes to mind is Beth Kanter’s feed. If you’re a nonprofit who cares anything about how to use social media for social change, you should probably be reading her blog. I keep wanting to add @kanter to my “social change strategy” List, but she has so many individual exchanges with people that I have a hard time extracting the value from her stream. For instance, here’s a screenshot of her feed from just now:

There’s just a lot of excess noise that I don’t have the time to deal with. From a business perspective, that could mean the potential loss of a client for her, because they’re not able to filter the stream and see how valuable her knowledge would be for their organization.

So, why create a separate Twitter account?

* It will allow your audience to hone in on the content you create that matters most to them.

* It improves your information search strategies, because you can create Lists that only include original content.

It’s a great way for organizing a better system of thinking.

I hope that every serious blogger follows this lead and creates a separate Twitter account that just pulls the RSS from their blog into Twitter. (use Twitterfeed for this). We’ll all get more value from the network.

E ci rimangono (nella nostra libreria, ovviamente!).

El tema ese de que la muerte del RSS está muy próxima, realmente no es cosa muy nueva que digamos.

No obstante, hay un hecho en particular que ha propiciado que vuelvan los cuestionamientos acerca de la caída en el uso del RSS y de la que posiblemente sea la herramienta web más usada para leer feeds: Google Reader. Y éste hecho no es más que las Listas en Twitter. Se han creado entorno a de 6.5 millones de listas a muy pocos días de haberse liberado esta característica y la cifra sigue creciendo a cada minuto.

No hay una regla a seguir para hacerlas, y se pueden usar indiscriminadamente para agrupar los followers haciendo cualquier tipo de categoría. Sin embargo dándoles un uso más práctico, pueden ser una excelente herramienta para clasificar el tipo de contenido de el timeline. Por ejemplo yo tengo dos listas creadas; una de Aula Geek y otra sobre los Blogs que sigo

Con esto Twitter se vuelve una herramienta poderosa , poniendo un poco de orden a lo caótico que puede llegar a ser un timeline(sobre todo si sigues a mucha gente) y así poder acceder de manera rápida a información que acontece al momento y no tener que esperar a que sea publicada una noticia y después actualizada por el lector de feeds, además de acceder a información que por otros medios no podrían ser tan accesibles.

Robert Scoble,el padre de la cultura blog en Microsoft y la voz de Microsoft en la blogosfera da algunas razones por las cuales deja Google Reader para usar solamente Twitter y sus listas, a continuación traduzco brevemente algunas:

Menciona otras razones también muy interesantes como la facilidad de uso de Twitter en dispositivos moviles, en la cual estoy totalmente de acuerdo. Pero también es necesario acordarnos de aplicaciones como ByLine , que os comente hace unos días.Esta aplicación para la lectura de RSS, sincroniza tus feeds y demás configuración de tu cuenta de Google Reader.

A pesar de todo esto, creo que aún le queda algún camino por recorrer (aunque cada vez mucho menos largo) antes de aniquilar por completo al RSS.

¿Cambiarían su lector de feeds por solo usar Twitter?

While it may not have carved out the giant slice of the social media pie that Twitter has, FriendFeed  has something truly exceptional: The individuals who make up the FF community. It is a community that is largely comprised of  good-hearted, wicked-witted and fierce-brained souls who are deeply loyal to each other.

That FriendFeed is special is something I firmly believe — even as a former member of that particular community. (A status revealed in the interest of full disclosure. Similarly, it should be noted that my reasons for leaving had nothing to do with the service or the other folks using it. If you have a year where two people to whom your family is close die in rapid succession, you too might consider spending much more time connecting with those important to you face-to-face as opposed to screen-to-screen.)

But that community is also one that has been feeling more than a little worried ever since Facebook bought up FriendFeed, a feeling perhaps best summarized at the time it happened in this witty yet wise post by Louis Gray.

Thus, it is completely understandable that the community took some offense to Robert Scoble’s comment on the current state of FriendFeed the other day. If someone hurts your friends, you get angry. You defend your friends. Simple as that. And that’s just what people did – some eloquently and some in a more brusque manner. But the reactions to Scoble’s comment that can be glimpsed below the initial post demonstrate what is best about FriendFeed – it is an excellent forum for rapid interchange and discourse rather than just a way to broadcast your own “look at me, look at me!” message. (I’m looking at you Twitter.)

It seems unlikely that Scoble realized quite how disrespectful the tone of his comment seemed or how massive the impact of one of FF’s foremost cheerleaders seemingly turning on it would be — though he almost certainly has an inkling of it now.

Consider the impassioned and articulate response to Scoble crafted by FFer Lindsay Donaghe:

“<plea>
Please, Robert, I know that you’re disappointed in what has happened to FriendFeed and you feel like you need to take out your frustrations on something, but it’s time to take your own advice and leave quietly if you’re going to leave. FriendFeed may not serve your particular needs anymore but your needs seem to be very specific, decidedly not mainstream, and difficult to comply to. That doesn’t mean that FriendFeed is not a valuable service to others with different needs. You don’t have to leave, but there’s no point in making things harder for the rest of us who support the service by trying to hammer the nails in the coffin while we are still pushing up the the lid for air.

You are actively fulfilling your own prophecy by chasing people away from FriendFeed and inciting people there to unsub and block you so that your feed is less and less interesting. And then you are insulting the rest of us by declaring that all the geeks have left when it’s your own efforts in sabotage (or lack of in pruning your feeds) that are making your experience worse, while claiming that you’re trying to spur someone into action to be FriendFeed’s new hero. But we don’t have that knight in shining armor to champion for FriendFeed and return it to its former glory. If anything, you were the most likely candidate. Now we just want to be left alone to use FriendFeed the way we are comfortable to using it. It’s time to stop the abuse.
</plea>”

How many other online communities would inspire commentary with that much depth of feeling and intelligence behind it?

I was listening to Guy Kawasaki when he recently visited Bangalore and gave a few talks and a workshop on Twitter. One question that often pops up is how Guy manages to follow 180,000+ people. His simple answer was that he does not follow their public time line. I understand that because even with less than 2000 people, I have trouble keeping up.

What Guy actually does is track mentions of a few phrases including his name and direct messages. This reduces the load some what but it can still be considerable.

So let us take a hypothetical scenario. I want a piece of information to be propagated to 20 of the top tech bloggers who are actively interested in a specific subject area.  I can’t see anyway this can happen reliably through Twitter. We don’t know how they sample messages. We don’t know how frequently they follow their public time line. We cannot mention all of them in the Tweet. Many of them (understandably) hate to be directly messaged. So how do we really reach them?

This report on Information Diffusion provides some ideas on  how information propagates through Social Media.

“Those who respond very quickly to e-mails, technology addicts who are always connected, are the ones responsible for spreading certain rumors or campaigns quickly via Internet,”

if information is so interesting that it reaches many people, the diffusion is faster because these people quickly forward the message. This explains why some computer viruses quickly spread via e-mail in a matter of hours, despite the fact that the email response time is one day. However, if information is not so interesting, the diffusion is slower because it is controlled by those persons who take a long time to respond; this causes some rumours or bits of information to remain dormant in social networks a long time after they are released.

Will lists alter this? May be. It depends on the patterns of use. I think we still have a lot to study on how to effectively communicate marketing messages on Twitter and reach the right people.

With all the security problems around previous versions of WordPress platform, it is a great idea to immediately upgrade WP installations to the latest available version. Take that, Scoble!

Anyway, WordPress 2.8.5 is out. Spare no time and upgrade now.

It is available through the built-in upgrade feature or it can be downloaded from WordPress.org.
http://wordpress.org/latest.zip

More about WordPress 2.8.5:

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
• Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
• Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
• Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

Don’t be a Scoble, upgrade your WordPress now!

For your reference (and give John Grubber more page hits!) | (like he needs more????):

• WordPress Attack
• Ihnatko – WordPress
• Regarding WordPress and Security

Don’t worry, any referals from this post is like a few teardrops into the ocean.

I was lucky enough (or random enough) to be given access to a new Beta feature within Twitter called Lists. The Lists feature is similar to a compilation of features available by other means – create a list of interesting people to follow. For some details, and an interesting discussion, Robert Scoble shared some thoughts on Posterous.  What is novel, is that Lists can be shared publicly. The public part can also be done by some other third party sites, like Tweepml.org – but the user still follows people at the individual person level.

By creating and controlling Lists at the source, the equation has changed.

Sharing publicly, also means that if I use your list, I relinquish some amount of control to you. There is a ripple effect to this subtle change in control. Suppose I get a little lazy and decide to follow a list for local tweeps (near Burlington, Vermont, where I live). Someone spends the time to make the list, and I do not want to repeat the effort. Did I just give up control? I will now follow the Burlington Tweeps that that person decides (they can add and remove people).  Currently, I keep my own eye out for new folks, using a variety of hashtags – will I still add them to my list? Think about the impact to you and who you follow?

Will Twitter be creating a pseudo class system?

After reading the post, there are a number of interesting comments, but one caught my eye, by Andrew Mueller:

Lists make the utility of twitter much greater for the casual user who can identify a few highly curated lists and simply follow the list stream rather than the people. Once Tweetdeck, Seesmic and others integrate lists into their apps this could be done in columns in single streams. In this scenario it make sense that follower growth rates will decline. This may have broad implications for the twitter ecosystem. After all why should I curate a list of “Web Innovators” when Robert Scoble has done it for me!

…it will limit the discovery of new people to follow and could result in two classes of twitter citizens – those who are on list that are followed and those are not.

What are the implications of this change, for new users, and brands? I think that Brands will have a much tougher time, especially new entrants, as they will have a tougher time engaging. Andrew and I had an interesting interaction on Twitter based in this, which lead me to this post. The core problem is that for power users, who are creating the lists now (or when Twitter releases the function publicly) will represent a snapshot in time. Robert’s list of great programmers may grow, or possibly remain static. Hashtags offer a similar function, but they are not exclusive, they allow for new entrants.

It is not all bad

• There are some interesting uses for lists as well. For conferences and events, the coordinator can create a list for people to follow. They could publish the List name far ahead of the conference and add potential twitters to the list.  No hashtag to worry about, and up to 5 more characters to use.
• Brands and Companies will be able to share lists within an organization without everyone having to know who to follow. Marketing sends out a message “Hey, just follow http://twitter.com/mjayliebs/scrm” Big benefit to Social Service Communities.
• Follow Friday and follow counts may go away, or be reduced in importance. With lists, you may not have follow counts that have the same meaning. You may have a lot more people following you than you know (blocked people will still not be able to see your tweet stream).

This will play itself out, for sure. But, the impact is bigger than it first appears. I know some of the people I interact with might not use lists, or might not use them extensively. Innovation and collaboration with NEW people will take a hit. New people will start with lists and might be less inclined to interact one on one.

What are your thoughts? What are the impacts to transparency (you can add to list without a follow)?

And that includes me. No, I do not have a Google Wave invitation yet. I have put in my application, pleaded with my friends, and even considered eBay (no, not really on that last one). I can’t give you the hands-on review from the legal mindset that you all are looking for. Not yet, anyway.

What I can do is provide you with some context if you are like me and have heard all about it, have gotten all excited to try it, but wonder what the heck it is and why should you even care.

Because I haven’t done the hands-on, I can only provide you with the  information I have culled from others among the scores and scads of on-line articles about it. Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft need only hiccup to cause a social media riot. Wave is no exception, and maybe is even more tantalizing in that it has been the subject of the months of hypeof tsunami proportion leading up to the limited edition 100,000 or so special, closed pre-beta invites that started trickling out last Thursday.

From Anthony Ha - Digital Beat

What IS it? At the core, Google Wave is a tool for online collaboration via real-time communication. According to the official Google word, the “communication” can be viewed as both a “wave” of conversation or a document. The participants in the wave or collaboration can utilize all sorts of media in the course of the conversation, offering rich, real-time sharing opportunity. Check out this screenshot of a wave here:

As you can see, waves look like threaded conversations, rather than the more traditional “back-and-forth” email model. Waves can constantly “crash” into your inbox, particularly if your box is open to all. Like a surfer confronted with too many possible rips, Google Wave certainly bears the potential to overwhelm the typical end user.

Another aspect that makes waves somewhat unique in the sharing world is their easy modification by participants, their ability to be played back at any time so that a new participant may be brought up to speed, and their fast transmission of information – you can see the other wave participants responses as they type them! The collaboration is real-time as well, due to some fancy “concurrency control technology” tools. Natural language features provide context and spelling correction. And, waves are embeddable, offering the ability to place the conversation and collaboration anywhere. Waves are amenable to the use of widgets for customizing and broadening the experience.

Without a doubt, Google Wave sounds like a might powerful tool, particularly in the enterprise arena. Imagine access to such a facile and speedy set of tools across departments or units – not only can the process be shared (like a wiki) but participants can get involved and see others’ involvement in the process right here and right now.

Sounds great, right? Well, not everyone is buying the hype. Carmi Levy at BetaNews has announced that he is sitting out the first “wave” of Wavers . Levi believes that Wave won’t be as big as Gmail, in large part due to the fact that “collaboration isn’t the holy grail of productivity.” Levi also thinks that most collaborators are not yet ready for the rocket-powered Wave: even the relatively simpler Google Docs has not broken among Levi’s peers and the emailing of Microsoft attachments remains the most popular method of securing feedback and a team result.

Then there is the question of security – while a Waver must have permission to participate, allowing anyone to edit source data tends to offend every traditional data security principle.

Robert Scoble also exhibits skepticism regarding the value of Wave as a true productivity tool. Scoble suggests that Wave represents multiple layers of unproductive tools: email, topped with chat, topped with social media, topped with features that lack an intuitive interface, et cetera. Scoble also criticizes Wave for its lack of integration with Google Docs and Spreadsheets and its tortoise-like pace. Hit the jump above for his fleshed-out discourse as to why he is not ravin’ ’bout the Wave.

Steven Hodson at the Inquisitr seems similarly unimpressed, mostly due to the difficulty he experienced ramping up with Google Wave and getting even rudimentary controls under control. He is holding his conclusions in check until he can spend more time with the tool and, hopefully, “get” the hype.

Steve Rubel opines that Google Wave, as it currently stands, is not a Twitter, Facebook or even email killer, in large part due to its complexity. Rubel believes it solves a problem that doesn’t exist, but is hopeful that Google Wave 2.0 addresses the concern and delivers on the promise.

Louis Gray’s take is not as critical, as he offers his personal experience with Google Wave here. He crafts a nice overview of the user experience, for those craving their own near-hands-on. But even he suggests that Google Wave will prove most useful for collaboration among small teams. And, reading between his lines, Gray appears to lament the fact that Google Wave is simply another place to check for conversations and information exchange, further burdening an already overburdened on-line network of email and social media outposts. It seems Wave may not be the ideal source for “crowd” conversations among large groups.

So, does my post sound a bit like the fox who couldn’t reach the proverbial grapes, proclaiming them to be sour as he quits the quest? Maybe so. But I am still hot to try Google Wave and allow my own first-hand experience to be my guide. I am guarded, however, after reading the somewhat critical reviews from some of tech’s elite. If these guys are having issues with Google Wave, how will the average tech-averse lawyer or business person manage its might? In any event, if a reader has an extra invite to pass along, I wouldn’t turn it down and might even be your best friend.

Maybe you are one of the lucky few already enjoying Wave and currently making up your own mind about its utility or lack thereof. I have something for you too: a cheatsheet for Wave searching from Google itself.

Check out the lengthy Google developers preview video that follows. Or hit the simplistic video further below, linked in Scoble’s post.

I absolutely think that there should be a Bill of Rights for the Social Web.  There are some major difficulties in creating a set of rules for the Internet and Social Media because there are challenges in setting those rules.  I respect Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington for taking responsibility for creating these.  The Bill fo Rights gives Social Media users knowledge and power to own their words.

The main points for the Bill of Rights contain:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

I would also recommend adding something about transparency.  It is important that if you want respect as a blogger, you need to fully disclose your information and that you are completely transparent with who you are and what you do.  We have seen problems with this from agencies and big companies who don’t disclose who they work for.

Control is difficult because once you post something on the internet – it doesn’t go away.  That is why it is so important that the first Bill of Rights stresses ownership of all the information that you put on there.

In my opinion, companies need to have a social media policy as well.  Knowing that so many people are using social media, each company/agency/association need to implement a Bill of Rights unique to their organization.  Everyone that is using the sites need to recognize their responsibilities and realize that they are representing themselves and a company.  More than half of employers block Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.  While I don’t think companies should full-on block these sites, I think it is important they recognize people are using the sites and should implement policies based on their rules. 

All in all, I think it is difficult to establish a Social Media Bill of Rights, but this one does a good job in making it general and overarching.  Also, people need to recognize that since new technologies and Web sites are continuing to be developed, the Bill of Rights need to be ever-changing and constantly updated.

Seems like the Pandoras at Dachis are particularly sore these days that entrepreneurs in the social media demimonde they helped unbox are making money and living large without proper pedigree, paying their dues or playing by the rules (as Peter Kim et al define them). Worse, in doing so those pusillanimous parvenus and pretenders — my homage to William Safire — are challenging Dachis’s Ptolemaic model of the social media consulting universe (where an insular club of self-congratulatory, self-referential early adopters occupy the center of the bullseye, natch).

David “Respect My Authoritah” Armano recently issued a cri de coeur against charlatans, opportunists and — gasp — plagiarists posing as social media “experts.” That refrain was echoed by a predictable chorus of acolytes using the comments thread to praise Armano’s wisdom and call for some sort of social media professional certification body — presumablycomprised of themselves — to separate the righteous sheep from the unworthy goats. Just as dutifully, Armano chimed in on the comment thread to praise their wisdom in recognizing his wisdom.

“The problem is this expert was sucking in the feed of my blog without permission, attribution and had more holes in his resume than a slice of Swiss cheese [emphasis added]. So how do you separate the social media snake oil from the vinegar?”

First, WTF is up with that metaphor? Which component represents Armamo’s content in this salad dressing dyad, the snake oil or the vinegar? Sounds unpalatable either way.

Second, his outrage over breaches in garden-variety content streaming etiquette is overreaction enough, but Armano goes on to imply that this “expert” was not worthy to traffic in social media content (which Armano might or might not have himself streamed, adapted or re-tweeted from others) because of an inferior resume. Oh REALLY….Apparently pedigree ought to trump ingenuity, enterprise and drive in the Social Media World According to Armano. I wonder if he would say that Michael Dell was unscrupulous and didn’t deserve his success because he was a college drop-out and disrespectful to IBM.

Brazen unattributed content streaming is definitely uncool, but it is also a foreseeable — arguably inevitable – extension of social media’s fetishization of content sharing. Further, isn’t it one of the central tenets of social media faith that community wisdom will sniff out and snuff out inauthentic poseurs and grifters?

In an April 10, 2008 post, Chris Brogan, commented honestly on his own experiences with the plagiarism, hypothesizing that copying is a constitutive part of the human condition and suggesting that owning up to those conscious and unconscious borrowings makes one’s own truth shine more brightly:

“We are all derivatives of someone else. It can’t be helped. Musicians have roots in other musical traditions, even if it’s not obvious at first. Nirvana is heavily Beatles-influenced, for instance. Authors are unique-twist copies of other authors. It’s just the way of the world, and how humans evolve.”

From there he gave a bravura exhibition of how a genuinely centered, confident, non-self-aggrandizing social media expert respsonds to the scourge of plagiarism:

“I’m inspired by others, and derive some of my skills and abilities from what I’ve learned from others, so instead of bitch about someone copying my stuff, I’m going to praise some people that I have learned from in developing my own presence. (None of this is to blow smoke up these people’s butts. I know most of them. I like most of them. This is about me, and about what goes into the media I make).”

He went on to describe the debts he owes to Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, Tom Peters, Annie Proulx, Jeremiah Owyang and Jon Swanson, then concluded simply and elegantly:

“My big point: none of us are originals. It’s okay. And I’ve DEFINITELY done it myself, where I’ve thought something WAS my thought, only to find out that I was synthesizing something I read a few days back, or a conversation I had (Did that famously badly once, to a friend I love, and had to rescind).

“But if you KNOW you’re going to riff off someone, give a little link love and be done with it. Fair?”

HERE COMES THE PAUL HARVEY MOMENT

The irony here is that Peter Kim, in his Sept. 23, 2009 ”amen” (my term)  to Armano’s rant, appears to be adopting the convention of Brogan’s earlier post — without crediting Brogan.

“We invest time and energy in contributing to a collective understanding. I applaud Todd Defren and ShiftPR for sharing their work on the social media press release. Nielsen Online offers free use of their industrial-strength brand monitoring system through Blogpulse.

“We celebrate the success of others. The community at large helped Chris Brogan and Julien Smith become New York Times best selling authors. We’ve cheered on my friends and former colleagues Charlene Li, Jeremiah Owyang, and Ray Wang (and Deb Schultz) in creating Altimeter Group.

“We give credit where and when credit is due. As Dachis Group builds momentum and understanding around Social Business Design, most people have acknowledged our work in adding their own thoughts to the conversation.

Hmm, makes ya think. Whether the similarities are coincidental or purposeful, maybe Kim should give credit to the New York Times best-selling author who had the wisdom and class to demonstrate how to place social media “plagiarism” in perspective and then process through it with grace and genuine generosity of spirit, not vitriol and proprietary-speak topped off with a self-serving plug for a wannabe new business paradigm.

In a Nov. 16, 2008 post entitled “Social Media is Not Socialism,” Kim puts it even more bluntly:

“When someone plagiarizes content, the social system breaks down.  Individuals who plagiarize seek to claim credit for themselves.   Social media is already social and a Robin Hood-style redistribution of value isn’t required.  But credit and attribution remain key to socializing and increasing the value of content for everyone involved.”

Red alert! System failure!

I guess that would seem to be the case if the ultimate goal of social media is to productize/monetize Social Business Design (which, it coud be argued, is itself derivative of primary social science and marketing research conducted by others).

In closing, my formula for battling social media socialism is this: If you’re that concerned about getting credit for your content, then name it, claim it and smack a big circled “C” on it. Otherwise, trust the wisdom of the community to recognize your work no matter where it appears or who takes credit for it, and the truth will out.

Feel free to use that one.

Gina Trapani at Smarterware writes an article reporting that ”Robert Scoble argues that requiring users to post their true location in geolocation apps is an “antifeature” because it freaks people out. Users want control over where they say they are and want the option to be “fuzzy” about it” (full article at http://smarterware.org/3455/geolocation-software-features-freak-people-out, original article at http://scobleizer.com/2009/09/23/antifeatures-big-mistake-that-location-app-developers-make/).

I’m quite scared about geolocation and at the same time excited. 

Fears comes mainly from the fact that in the world today, God only knows the use that can be made from geolocation (BTW: fears doesn’t come because I need to hide something, but mainly because I have no control on what others can do with this informations).

Excitement comes from possible uses (example: 911, first aid, finding missing people, testimonies,…).

The problem is not geolocation itself, that, like any other technology is an “enabler”, but as I said before, is the use being made: going digital is great, abusing of technology is quite stupid.

This post as a comment also at http://smarterware.org/3455/geolocation-software-features-freak-people-out/comment-page-1#comment-1119

With just a month left for nominations, BigFix is adding a new prize to the 2009 System Administrator of the Year contest – a progressive jackpot up to $5,000. The prize will start at $2,000, with $200 added to the pot for every 10 new nominations. The final prize will be split between the winning sysadmin and his or her nominator. In the case of self nomination, the entire cash prize will be awarded to the sysadmin.

Do you want to nominate yourself or somebody else? Here’s the link.

You could win $5,000

This cash prize will be the new Grand Prize, with the runner up receiving a laptop, a conference pass to the 2010 Large Installation System Administrator (LISA) Conference, Guitar Hero 5 and their choice of Wii, xBox, or PS3. The next Top 3 entrants will win Guitar Hero 5 and their choice of Wii, xBox, or PS3.

BigFix proudly sponsors the 2009 System Administrator of the Year contest, which acknowledges the under-recognized rock stars of information technology who are vital to the smooth functioning of business, government and public services.

Sysadmins are the unsung heroes of information technology, keeping computers up and running, defending infrastructures from malware and hacking attacks, and helping end-users maximize their productivity. The contest is also an opportunity for the sysadmin community to share information on best practices and new ways to deliver value to their constituencies.

Judges include:

• AEleen Frisch (author, Essential System Administration)
• Doug Hughes (serial presenter and guru at many USENIX LISA conferences)
• Ben Kus (founder, BigFix User Group)
• Thomas A. Limoncelli (sysadmin author, http://www.everythingsysadmin.com)
• Johnny Long (founder, Hackers for Charity, http://www.hackersforcharity.org/)
• Ryan Russell (author, Stealing the Network)
• Robert Scoble (blogger, http://scobleizer.com)
• Amrit Williams (blogger,http://techbuddha.wordpress.com)

Nominations are open untilOctober 23, with contest winner and runners up announced on November 4, 2009, at the USENIX Large Installation System Administrator (LISA) Conference at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel.

Oh yes you sure read it right, I’m going back to school as of today. After almost 3 months of fun and joy the vacation is finally over. No more turning back now… time for some action!

So I went to my first lesson of this year (and also the only one of today): Automation. And yes it is really all about automation with machines like you could have guessed. For the first time in 5 years of studying Economic Engineering we’re going to visit some companies (one of them Ford Genk). And we will get a group assignment instead of an exam for our course of Automation. Is this a good thing? Time will tell I guess.

After that lesson I went to the library of my university [Universiteit Hasselt] to do some reading for my theses about “Corporate Blogs”. And at this point that means reading “Blog Schmog“, a book written by Robert W. Bly who is a Blog Critic to say at least. I’ve even read some interesting things in it that I will be able to apply on my own blog (yeah this one you’re reading) too. And I also plan on reviewing the book later on after I finish reading it. Before this one I’ve also read “Blog Marketing” by Jeremy Wright and I will probably read “Naked Conversations” by Robert Scoble & Shel Israel too afterwards.

And a few hours later I took the bus straight home which was very crowded, just the way I’m used to it. Oh yes after that ride I knew for sure: “It has started! We’re going back to school!” And there I made this picture of my classmate John who took the same bus as my girlfriend (not on the picture) & I. Say Chééééééééése

Actually I’m quite happy that school started again. I always feel so useless when having a long vacation… don’t you? Oh and if anyone knows a “must read” about corporate blogging, feel free to tell me about it!

eSarcasm, The Site Whose Tweets Cannot Be Beat ™, achieved another milestone yesterday when it surged past the magic 500 Followers mark on Twitter. And, we are proud to report, we did it all without pumping up on ‘roids.*

Thanks largely to our efforts to pander to Twitter users’ raging obsession with themselves while desecrating the memory of Michael Jackson (we love you Michael – but not in that way, if you know what we mean), our follower count grew by more than 12 percent in a single day. Rest assured we’re gonna bang on that drum until it breaks.

So we did some number crunching on who’s following us and why, and the results are damned fascinating:

• 27.2 percent are Web cam girls who only followed us so we’d look at their ‘hot pics’. Roughly 52 percent of those ‘girls’ are in reality grossly distended guys with hair between their shoulder blades. However, a small percentage of of them also look like this:

  We don’t care how fake they or their boobs are, we’re counting them.

• 23.4 percent are Social Media Gurus who pelt us with tweets every five minutes. We suppose they have to do something while waiting around all day at the unemployment office.
• 19.7 percent are Internet Marketers who are dying to tell us how we can become rich via Twitter if we just follow their 27-step program. They also promise they won’t come in our mouths.
• 11.3 percent are identical profiles with names like edwardt42 and photos of Boring White Men (BWM) attached. It’s nice to know the bots love us, too.
• 5.2 percent of our followers are Robert Scoble, but only when measured by weight.
• @GuyKawasaki’s army of faceless drones is following us. But we’re pretty sure they’d follow Satan into hell.
• @Satan is not following us, thank @God.
• There are three or four smokin’ hot yet apparently authentic chicks who dig us because we’re funny. We are actively stalking them.

To those who’ve signed onto the eSarc eXpress, we commend you on your excellent taste. Now let’s all go out and kick Ashton Kutcher’s ass.

* Technically, JR’s gender reassignment does involves the use of some steroids, but we got pre-approval for them from the National Bloggers Association.

Cosa che capitano: il blogger americano Robert Scoble ha messo in diretta online la nascita di suo figlio.

Technology evangelist Robert Scoble is worried: the past is slowly, and sometimes not so slowly, slipping away from him. Online social media services archive imperfectly. Photos vanish into unreadable or corrupted formats. Logins, and even entire business enterprises, pass away without fanfare. And he’s got tips to help you plug the leaks.

But let me put in a good word for impermanence. Things seeping away, getting lost in time, imperfect legacies: that’s just part of what the past is all about. You lose stuff. That’s how human memory works too: it slowly fades out or becomes distorted. There may even be good psychological reasons for not fighting the process (or at least not becoming too anxious about fighting it), a case for not seeking perfect fidelity. At the very least, the loss of data, the maddeningly just out of reach face or song or quote: these are experiences just as poetically valuable and as interesting to me as some idealized total recall.

Scoble in particular mourns the loss of his baby’s first cry, vanished into the digital ether with the Twittergram service he recorded it on. I can see how that might be frustrating on some level… but on the other hand, I’m not sure that it’s ever really worth too much effort or regret trying to be completist when it comes to memorabilia from your own life. You can share a baby’s cry with the grown man it became, and that might well be interesting in its own right… but really, it’s not really going to reproduce the moment you, as parents, first heard it.

And memories are often paradoxically more powerful when they’re unaided. Me, I can’t quite remember the face of the first girl I ever really had a crush on. I know pictures exist (though none online), and maybe someday I’ll look back. Or maybe I’ll bump into her again someday. But the face will still just fade away again. And that unformed image will swim at the edges of my memory, tickling all sorts of mysterious and mixed emotions from equally inaccessible past moments. And maybe that’s right where it belongs.

Still, I might nevertheless try to, say, back up my tweets someday. But as witty and utterly unmissable as my ingenious 140-character insights are… having them all face a tragic, accidental deletion someday is far less frightening to me than the (frankly more likely) possibility of saying that one stupid thing that will be then remembered for all time. I mean them to be light and ephemeral.

And it’s certainly true that not every brilliant thing I’ve said has yet been fully appreciated and celebrated by the entire world. But on the other hand: they each had their moment, had their chance, and it’s better to move on: there’s so much still to be said.

Plus, a lot of what I’ve enjoyed with twitter over the past year is how the immediacy of social media can quickly become obscurity when you try to rewind back through it all. You’re either living in the stream of information, quips, counter-comments or else the whole enterprise becomes more and more culturally unintelligible: you lose your grip on how the fads, in-jokes, lingo and so on change over time. Every moment spent trying to reflect or relive is time not spent participating in the present.

There’s a deep insight there somewhere. We all really do need to accept that there are people, experiences, information that we’re just going to miss out on or lose touch with. Learning to let these things go without overanxious regret is, I think, central to finding happiness in a world with too much information and far too many choices. Life is finite, but the present is always both infinite and unrepeatable.

So I think I’m willing to accept, maybe even embrace, whatever digital lessons in data loss that serendipitously come my way. I can always make more.

[qi:012] Startups looking for VC funding need to make two things crystal clear when pitching to investors: One, how your company plans to distribute your product or services to the masses; and two, why it’s going to shake up the tech industry. That’s the advice offered up by the panels of venture capitalists and tech executives to startups that presented at the TechCrunch 50 conference this week.

While during a demo, startups have to explain what their offering is and how it works, that’s only one part of a successful pitch. “There’s been a lack of focus on distribution,” said Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and now the head of a $300 million venture fund. “The typical path a lot of startups take is they launch their product and no one finds out about it.” They also need to do a better job explaining how they’re going to catalyze the industry. As Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s put it after viewing demos, “I didn’t see anything where I thought ‘Oh wow, I think this will change the world.’”

When it comes to social networking, Facebook may have already done that, noting this week that it now has 300 million users worldwide. Robert Scoble, a known enthusiast of the space, said social media-focused companies should be looking to integrate Facebook Connect or OAuth into their services. But one startup, Stribe, is trying to reinvent the wheel by developing a technology that lets publishers build social networks around their web sites. While Stribe’s technology is impressive, it provides a service we could happily live without.

As for those that are looking to build their business around the likes of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, they need to offer something unique and something that adds value to those companies’ existing features. For example, Radiusly has developed a web-based service that lets companies create authorized profiles for Twitter and manage their accounts. A company profile would offer, say, links to its employees’ profiles. But Twitter already offers verified accounts for well-known executives and there’s a host of startups, such as CoTweet and HootSuite, that are focused on helping companies manage their Twitter accounts.

RedBeacon, a web site that connects people to local services and apparently hit all the right notes with its pitch, was crowned the winner of the event. On RedBeacon, people can post jobs they need done, such as house cleaning or gardening, and local service providers can bid on how much they’ll charge to do the job and when they’ll complete it. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company, founded by three ex-Googlers, is the startup to keep on your radar this year.