Language is free… shouldn’t the web be too?
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on September 27th, 2007
Tagged as: Marco Camisani Calzolari, Net Neutrality, Shel Israel, Social Media
With all this talk of interior revolution, the spectre of Net Neutrality has resurfaced once again. This time from an Italian blogger/journalist I haven’t yet met, but look forward to doing so soon.
Marco Camisani Calzolari writes for the IT supplement of one of Italy’s most respected financial newspapers. He has often described himself as a “bridge between the slow world and the fast world” and Shel, the next time you’re in Italy you should look him up.
On his blog, Marco has published this scary image of the future should the campaign for Net Neutrality be lost. It would be sad to lose my ideas for those online activities my wife and I are currently working on, but it would be a disaster for humanity to lose the possibility to discover knowledge. I’m thinking of the language course, of course, particularly as it now has a name: Language Is Free.
The picture’s here, but credit for it goes to Marco. Spread the word…
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The difference between saying something and thinking it
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on May 29th, 2007
Tagged as: Acer, Asides, Edelman, Gaping Void, Richard Binhammer, Shel Israel, Social Media
I made an important discovery yesterday. One of those blinding flashes that sneak up on you when you least expect them, yet are so bright they burn colourful imprints onto your retina so that you can still see them even if you close your eyes.
It seems I have more in common with Hugh McLeod than I imagined.
Many years ago I dropped out of university before I even had the chance to start. I went to a very good private school in
Until I went to hospital.
The school organized a works-experience week and I and two others (who made it to the other side) were shuffled into an operating theatre to see what surgeons do first hand. It also gave me the opportunity to see who the surgeons were.
That day I learnt the most important lesson of my life. Who you are and what you do aren’t necessarily the same thing.
The English education system makes it almost impossible to back out of your chosen career path at the last minute which is why at the tender age of 19, I found myself on a plane heading to Italy, where I’ve lived ever since.
That day returned to me recently during one of those “what am I doing with my life??†moments when I was blinded by that flash I mentioned earlier.
It seems that the cutting edge of the blogosphere is social networking. It’s like a massive, uncontrollable Hollywood-style scandal rag reporting ‘round the clock on who’s sleeping where, who said what and how my judgement is invariably wiser than yours.
Getting on this train is easy: Read, write and link. Read, write and link. Hugh calls it “people talking†and people talk perpetually.
Like mainstream chat show ghosts, the stars of the blogosphere are beyond reproach. They’re sneezers, opinion makers, forces to be reckoned with. The rest of us drop like flies.
There is a holier-than-thow element to this. Apparently, to be successful, you’ve got to have your ear (aggregator) to the ground, know the movers and shakers and hang out at the right blog expos. Even better, vlog about them. Corporations in particular can’t miss a beat.
Now I’m the first to admit that, expos aside, I do this myself – I’m doing it on this blog and in this post. It’s also how I met my friend, colleague and rival Richard and it’s how I plan on meeting many others in future.
That’s what I do. But is it who I am?
Didn’t blogging start out as a “web log� A diary of me, my thoughts and a way of sharing my chunk of life?
I guess at some point some big-boy bloggers’ personal conversations dried up and they sought out other conversations, building traffic for no other reason than because they channelled their thoughts into the comments of others (link love), fuelling a never-ending conversation that systematically leads them towards a conversational anti-climax they knew was coming anyway.
Boy does this system get you noticed (and ranked).
But what exactly is the point?
In my book, the only things that ignite and build genuine interest either have a start and a finish or, at the very least, a sense of purpose. Anything else is just a scratched record, with clicks replaced by links that, sooner or later, take you back to where you started.
For my job, the Edelman/Vista fiasco had a start and a finish and it was an amazing experience to be in the middle. Following and countering the adverse PR for my client was an education in syndication management. The bickering about who got the damned Ferrari notebooks and who didn’t frankly didn’t light my pipe at all.
So where’s the link with Hugh? Hugh writes passionately about purpose in the epic “How to be Creative†article.
“One evening, after one false start too many, I just gave up. Sitting at a bar, feeling a bit burned out by work and life in general, I just started drawing on the back of business cards for no reason. I didn’t really need a reason. I just did it because it was there, because it amused me in a kind of random, arbitrary way.
Of course it was stupid. Of course it was uncommercial. Of course it wasn’t going to go anywhere. Of course it was a complete and utter waste of time. But in retrospect, it was this built-in futility that gave it its edge. Because it was the exact opposite of all the “Big Plans” my peers and I were used to making.
It was so liberating not to have to be thinking about all that, for a change.
It was so liberating to be doing something that didn’t have to impress anybody, for a change.
It was so liberating to have something that belonged just to me and no one else, for a change.
It was so liberating to feel complete sovereignty, for a change. To feel complete freedom, for a change.
And of course, it was then, and only then, that the outside world started paying attention.â€
I just walked that same path with my wife and our Runaway Parents and Genitori in Fuga projects. The fact is, it’s got nothing at all to do with what we do, but everything about who we really are.
There’s a different flavour to projects you have, to use Hugh’s words, “complete sovereignty overâ€.
“The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will. How your own sovereignty inspires other people to find their own sovereignty, their own sense of freedom and possibility, will change the world far more than the work’s objective merits ever will.
Your idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours alone. The more the idea is yours alone, the more freedom you have to do something really amazing.â€
Writing about who you are also puts what you do into perspective, draining some of its ultimate value perhaps, but forcing you to put your long-term strategy into perspective.
Even if you still can’t resist that one last link to someone further up the tree who absolutely, without question has something interesting to say about the state of the
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Social Linking sparks Adaptive Learning
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 18th, 2007
Tagged as: Long Tail, Projects, Shel Israel, Social Media
I am going to be absorbed by two things this week:
The first is something I caught off of Jack Humphrey’s fabulous Friday Traffic Report blog.
Called social power linking, in essence the theory is that Search Engines do not have the monopoly on surfers. By that I mean that surfers don’t start at a SE, visit a site, go back to the SE, visit the next site and so on. Once they’re surfing, they’re probably bouncing from one site straight to the next. I know that’s true for me - I use a non-personalized Google page as my homepage (to get off it ASAP), and only ever go back there as a starting point when my personal search conversation changes.
In between, I’m clicking around a lot, using one site’s links to head off to another, that I probably wouldn’t have found in in SE’s.
Here’s where the “social” aspect comes in and it’s particularly important in blogs, after all we bloggers will link to anyone!
Just like in SEO, Social Power Linking gets you in the way of passing traffic but not just SE traffic generated by a few, carefully guarded keywords. It’s about giving and getting. Being part of communities, throwing up and promoting your feeds within them and getting much more efficient and effective in what Jack describes as “marking your turf”.
There’s quite a lot to pick up on here so I’m going to spread it out over the week ahead and share a little of the experience online every day.
The other thing I’m involved in this week is getting my Web-Teach project into first gear. This is one of those ideas I’ve had in the back of my mind for longer than my pride will allow me to admit, and the reason it’s surfaced now is thanks in no small part to a recommendation by Shel Israel when replying to Tom Shelley of the Economist.
The idea of paying bloggers part of the Adsense (or similar) revenue from their particular page is as simple (and obvious) as it is pure genius and exactly what my Web-Teach project is looking for.
Web-Teach (not its final name BTW) is essentially an adaptive online language teaching project, designed to offer language students access to relevant content (personalized fields of interest) that is also didactically in line with their linguistic needs. A way of giving what they want AND what they need. A kind of B5Media for language-learners if you will.
Trouble is, this idea is so far down the Long Tail it’s mind-bogglingly complex to undertake alone and that’s where Shel’s revenue-sharing idea steps in (if you’re reading this Shel, thanks for that).
So Web-Teach is now almost viable. It’ll have an unglamorous launch but maybe, thanks to the power of social media, a bright future.
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Blogs in the “real” world
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 12th, 2007
Tagged as: IT Blogs, Long Tail, Shel Israel
I read an interesting article over on Shel Israel’s blog about how Tom Shelley of the Economist had started mailing him asking for ideas on the direction the Economist should take while developing its own blog.
The post immediately after was one from Shel asking the public how his new book was shaping up.
This product/public interaction got me thinking about how one could or should adopt social media to create and market a new product and whether the need to satisfy public demand stifles brand identity by outsourcing it to the world at large.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m already a self-declared fan of Dell’s IdeaStorm and firmly believe that direct public interaction in shaping a company’s products and strategies is a fascinating development of this new medium.
If blogs are the doyen of long tail social dialogue, then why is it their creators feel they need to satisfy short-tail philosophies to make sure they are accepted?
I think there is a danger of getting wires crossed here.
Blogs, however, live in an entirely different medium. Sure, Technorati has its own Top 10, but this is principally about frequency, not authority. So asking the public how a blog should be isn’t so much helping a blog’s rankings as an attempt to make it an instant, popular hit rather than building it and shaping its inherent values over time.
I think companies should do everything in their power to ensure that their soul is the driving force behind projects as niche-rich as blogs, and champion this above anything else from the outset, no matter what happens.
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Starting from scratch
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on October 12th, 2006
Tagged as: Acer, Dell, Richard Binhammer, Shel Israel
The ongoing discussion over at Shel Israel’s blog is keeping me up at night.
Not only because it’s the single most interesting thing I have participated in professionally for years, there is also a serious time lag between my input and everybody else.
I don’t know where Shel is at the moment but I assume Richard Binhammer is in Texas, meaning he’s on the ball when I’m tucked up in bed…
Still, it’s a fascinating development, and one I am going to stay up for every step of the way.
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Changing from the inside? More like an opportunity to battle it out.
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on October 10th, 2006
Tagged as: Apple, Dell, Masked Blogger, Naked Conversations, Richard Binhammer, Scoble, Shel Israel
I knew this was going to happen.
Anyone who’s read Naked Conversations will have noted the authors’ persistent message: Apple doesn’t blog. Google doesn’t either. Be warned…
Yet someone has spoken up. The masked blogger has come along and reached out to Shel Israel in public (or perhaps in private is a better way of putting it). I share the masked blogger’s predicament and fully sympathize with his frustration.
Millions of bloggers *get* this social medium thing. Yet just as many companies do not. While it can’t be denied that the international business community has been slow to pick up on the arrival of blogs, I think it’s a little unfair to criticize the slow-moving conglomerates for not having a blogging voice.
Some companies are slicker than others, faster to adapt to the winds of change. Granted this gives them an advantage, and the case studies of Kryptonite and even Scobles’ close call with IE7’s toolbar issues prove the validity of an alert presence, but you just can’t escape the inertia and the firm grip of traditional, tried and tested media.
Having said that, I don’t think this post was the most suitable place for corporate messaging, and Dell’s Richard Binhammer made a brave move to post what is a shiney, carefully-written press release.
While having the Senior Manager for Dell’s Corporate Communications underlying his company’s commitment to hearing its customers can by no means be dismissed as a bad thing, you can’t get away from the fact that it was a well-worded attempt to, how does Scoble put it? “..improve their image“, at the expense of everyone else.
Now that someone has entered the argument *officially*, the best that could possibly happen here is that the major competitors slug it out. Thing is, as there’s no-one else out there right now, I doubt that’s going to happen in a hurry.
1-0 to Dell, but it should have been disallowed.
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