Archives for November 2009

The Reversal of Disclosure

November 30, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

: photo by NJ Scott

Back in the day, businesses had secrets. So did you, but yours were a lot less fun to expose. And then the internet came about, and very swiftly, it became impossible for businesses to keep their secrets. Which, naturally, means that everyone feels like spilling theirs. And, as is the case for every first-run test, everyone did it poorly.

I had a blog. Actually, a LiveJournal. Those were the days. Plastering my mood, whatever music I was listening to, and whatever I was thinking all over the web. I didn’t care because no one else did, it was the Summer of Ones and Zeroes. Privacy was gone in its traditional sense, and instead I got to hide behind any of nearly fifty screen names I once kept active, secure in the belief that anyone digging for my indiscretion would surely be foiled by the sheer amount of other noise that sounded exactly like me all over the web. I spent nearly ten years keeping myself hidden in the murk behind cascades of creative pronouns and the use of everyone else’s screen names in public. It was geek subculture at its finest.

Naturally, it all came crashing down. Just as the eighties had killed the buzz left by the sixties, the Summer of Ones and Zeroes fled under the sheer dominating weight of the Digital Millennium.

I remember the first time I heard of someone getting fired for their blog. They had written a scathing commentary on inter-office politics on LiveJournal and hit the publish button without ticking the box that said “Friends Only” – ruining a career in thirty seconds.Forgot to replace his boss’s name with the usual pseudonym, which was similarly unflattering and appeared on a few hundred angered entries.

Back then (read as about eight years ago) no one had any idea of exactly how permanent the net was. Once a post disappeared from the first page of your blog, it kind of disappeared forever into the mists of the backdated entries, and not too many of us thought much about the repercussions of our actions.

Businesses didn’t seem to have the same problem, really. They always had secrets, but they in general had the know-how to keep them, or at least do something constructive with their disclosure. The common practice of stamping everything with Trade Secret and litigating the snot out of passers-by who meddled was in full effect. What happened to that? Just like with my friend who lost his job, the internet happened. Leaks develop, and the magnifying capability of the Great Index in the Clouds makes it nigh impossible to hide certain things.

Now, however, something even curiouser is happening. Companies have blogs. Company representatives have blogs, about their industry and their businesses. Public personalities are enhancing business in a massive way, turning multinational corporations into the friendly Mom and Pop stores of old – it’s a wonderful phenomenon, even ig it is a bit disconcerting.

Everyone has the capability of becoming a respected publisher. The Huffington Post is overtaking newspapers. Twitter scooped CNN this time last year. And seemingly without a gun to their heads, the small fry are all changing their focus. The purely personal blog is disappearing., slowly but surely.

The personal blog is getting censored by its writer, and being slowly replaced by professional blogs. Even me. I haven’t written a personal update in months, and I find I’m getting a lot more even just in the doing of writing about productive things instead. It feels sort of like if I were Henry Rollins, suddenly becoming an investigative journalist at times. But it’s an interesting experience to take note of, this change from the geeky rant to the respectable practice.

It feels like the internet just left its screaming childhood and is finally going to college. I wonder what it’s majoring in?

A Note on Leadership for Bloggers

November 28, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

: photo by pedrosimoes7

If you’re paying attention at all these days, decentralisation is everywhere. Crowdsourcing, microbrands, personal branding – The Cult of Me is in full swing, and it’s leaving a lot of people really puzzled as to how they can either not fall behind, or avoid the trend all together. Here’s a hint: you can’t avoid it. But you can weather it and come out on top. Especially if you treat it with respect.

Some background. Twitter. You’ve heard of it, right? If ever there was an example of perfect Cult of Me behaviour, this is it. You get on, you follow people, they reciprocate, and soon hundreds of thousands of people are on your list of followers. It’s a daunting task, imagining that thirty thousand, a hundred thousand, a quarter million (ok, a stretch), even a million (@stephenfry) people might just be hanging on your every tweet – it’s a weight and a responsibility. Or is it?

Most online community has very little reliable hierarchy. In many cases, the people setting up the systems sit back and let others participate. They can be called upon in extremis for moderation, yes, but never for motivation. Reliable hierarchy has been the driving thrust of progress for a long time – and it’s useful, the way having the sharp end on front of the spear when you throw it. What the trend of decentralisation does is seemingly remove the shaft and turn everyone into individual spearheads going for their own targets, with no weight behind them. When you’re trying to hit a broad target, grapeshot works wonderfully, if the target’s soft.

But where’s the hierarchy? That’s the wrong question to ask, isn’t it? The question I’d like you to ask is not where has the hierarchy gone – there are still leaders, and just about everyone has followers.

You’re a leader. Face it. Own up to it. Even if you lead your friends to coffee once a month, you’re leading, especially if you have any presence on the web. What are you doing with that leadership potential?

The questions I want you to ask are, firstly, when you send out your followers to get their followers and aim at a target, what would the action look like? Are you at the head of the spear, with everyone you have access to helping to create momentum for you to move forward and pierce to the heart of your goal? Or were you playing catapult and sending out thousands of tiny pieces of ammo in an effort to spread your effectiveness over a wider area? And, secondly, how much effort did you put into deciding which method to use, if any at all? How much energy did you devote to making sure the approach you used was the most appropriate for the situation?

What You're Building Already Exists

November 27, 2009 by Ian 1 Comment

We spend a lot of time working on getting bigger, acquiring more, whether it’s money, toys, symbols of status, or yes even networks. But how much yield does this give us after we gain certain volumes? The Law of Diminishing Returns claims that hour two on a task can’t ever equal hour one, but how much does this matter when some of us are nearing month two, or even year two and so on? Especially in internet scaled time, where tasks are faster and theoretically more efficient, diminishing return is an unknown quantity.

So much time trying to build, and what does it get us? Are we creating a new sphere of influence, or are we adding ourselves into the mix that’s there already? Sometimes the answer is simple; we happen on a new service like Foursquare and dive in with the early adopters, we become the loud first answer in the focus group behind which everyone falls into like. Other times its less simple, like when we join Facebook after having run a personal boycott for years because we don’t see the benefits of the service. Whether we’re the first on the scene, or the fashionably late arrival, the question we always end up with is a complex one: What do I do here?

Becoming a participant in a service is easy. Anyone can sign up for any website and start chugging along. But all of the media gurus tell us that if we want to get the most out of something we have to build a following, build a community. They’re doing it, and they talk about how, growing and reciprocating, and so on – but the advice is often difficult to follow because it’s almost invariably geared toward someone who speaks the same dialect as the person giving it. There’s a common disconnect, though, and it’s simpler than you’d think.

What you’re building already exists. Communities are everywhere – from the line at the coffee shop to the national identity you carry whether you’re Canadian, American, Egyptian, Iranian – on every scale, in every locale, community already exists. So why do we keep trying to build it?

Because building is always easier than serving. It’s the difference between a million casual followers only there to watch, and a hundred dedicated disciples, engaged superfans capable of further influencing hundreds of thousands of people on their own because they believe.

Some of us are just starting to build our networks, gathering followers, manufacture a platform for ourselves.We do this in any number of ways, but the thrust of it comes down to either social climbing or service to our peers in whichever community we’re acting on behalf of.

How do we know when we can call the process “done”, when we’ll be finished? When do we get to change from being One of Us to being the Leader of the Us? When can we start exclusively reaping the benefits of this circle we’ve joined, farming it for everything its worth?

Easy answer: Never.

Harder answer: Spend some time thinking about the communities you’re most active in, and try to figure out whether you’re enhancing the group by being there, or if you’ve self-included your way to influence without ever serving that community. If the answer is the latter, you’re done already.

And once you’re done, it’s time to leave the group.

Just a note: The force of this, the idea that what you’re building already exists, came out of an awesome discussion with Brendan Myers, author of The Other Side of Virtue, at an informal fireside he held passing through Winnipeg in October. If you’re still wondering hard how to use social media – indeed, any communication – in a noble way, it’s worth studying where your sense of nobility came from.

The Meta Human

November 26, 2009 by Ian 1 Comment

: photo by Kevin Spencer

Are you a Me Too person? I’m a Me Too person. I like to be included in things, whether I get thee by my own merit or gate jump my way in. Being Meta is all about the act of Me Too. At the risk of being self-referential, I love the idea of acting Meta. Not just blogging about blogs, or sending out tweets about Twitter, but the whole concept implied by meta itself. Perhaps I should explain what meta is, first, then maybe you’ll see the appeal.

As it applies on the web, and more recently on blogs and other applications, meta data consists of anything attached to a slice of real content – a blog post, a tweet, a picture you post on Facebook or Flickr – that is not actually the content itself. Tags, locations, author names, just about anything you can imagine pertaining to the content itself, can be made into metadata. If you’ve ever watched the news and seen the banners and tickers on the bottom – guess what? You’re looking at CNN’s metadata for the news you’re watching! What counts is less what people add to content as metadata. What counts, in the end, is what gets done with this extra information.

Meta data can include you in a lot of things. Some of the best examples of human metadata are business cards. We see a lot of Mr or Mrs or Ms, quite a few notes about degrees, PhDs after names, all of these bits we label ourselves with in order to create a platform on which to do our work. Metadata has been around a lot longer than the internet, but as it often does, technology has given us an appropriate, specific category into which to shove all of this extra information until it’s situationally relevant for us to pull out of our collective hats.

So what’s the big deal? How does this apply to being a me-too person? Meta is all about self-inclusion. It’s a force we often don’t recognize, at least when applying it to our community lives. Look at any of hundreds of pictures on Flickr – people have tagged the hell out of them in an effort to include themselves in someone else’s work. They comment, self-referential or not, to be noticed and maybe followed back to their home bases. But that’s ok, because that’s how community starts.

When we think about metadata often we think about how we can use this stuff to our advantage. It’s very useful, including the PhD on all of your contact lists where it’s deserved, because if you’re ever looking for smart people, you know where to start. For the same reason, it’s useful to fill in all of those boxes, required or not, when you comment on people’s websites, because commenting implies you want to be found, and leaving avenues for people to find you is a good idea. It makes you available, and being available is one of the major components of playing the me-too game.

The Meta Human isn’t just a phenomenon, for most of us it’s a reality. Technology gives us a lot of tools to make ourselves available to others. Profiles, social networking, personal branding – it’s all metadata, but so many people spend so much time and effort in attempts to make their identity fit the meta thoroughly, include everything meta in everything they do. From Tweeting about taking a shower, to slapping photos of your last drunken stupor on Facebook, people are intertwining their personas with the public record by attaching all of this extra junk to their timelines.

It does a lot of damage, as well as doing a lot of good. In the end, the people who will come out on top are those who learn not just to read the content, but who know what to do with the metadata attached to it. Which pieces to ignore, which to catalogue for future use. And, more importantly, an appropriate time to call on all of this secret handshake style contextual content as the hidden key to open which secret door.

All of which begs two questions:

How are you controlling what meta gets attached to your data? (and)

What are you doing about all of the extra stuff you’re soaking in along the way?

My Christmas List

November 25, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

In case anyone’s actually looking:

Books:
– Trust Agents, by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
– Six Pixels of Separation, by Mitch Joel
– Tribes, by Seth Godin
– 7th Son: Descent, by JC Hutchins

Also:
– Zip-up hoodies, 3x or 4x, possibly Large-Tall, for those in the US – plain monocolour is preferred, either black, charcoal or white. Maybe blue, surprise me.
– Tee-shirt print paper, for light and dark shirts, FOR the hoodies. I’m making arts and crafts.

That is all, really.
Me