The difference between saying something and thinking it
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on May 29th, 2007
Tagged as: Asides, 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 judgment 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), fueling 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.”
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 over”.
“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.”
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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How do you replace Kathy Sierra?
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on May 2nd, 2007
Tagged as: Gab Gab Gab, Social Media
It is with a large lump in my throat that I have taken the decision to change my RSS feeds over there on the right hand margin.
Despite hanging on to the smallest glimmer of hope for the longest time, it seems clear that Kathy Sierra really has decided that enough is enough. I am sorry to see her go as her blog was perhaps the first one that truly captivated me.
So how do you replace something of that calibre?
Many thanks to the ever-affable RichardatDell for pointing me in the direction of David Armano’s simply fascinating Logic+Emotion blog.
The pace has risen. Can’t wait to get up to speed.
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Who said copywriters don’t need to adapt?
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on April 3rd, 2007
Tagged as: Social Media
Found quite possibly the most informative video on Web 2.0 I’ve ever seen this morning.
Compiled by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, it’s a phenominally quick revue of the changes that have happened over the web’s brief history and a profound look at the implications of these changes.
Watch and learn.
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Net Neutrality - coming to a server near you.
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 26th, 2007
Tagged as: Asides, Gab Gab Gab, Problems, Social Media
I had no idea this was on the cards.
Just as I started to believe in the power of the many, it looks like some of the few have very different plans for the future of the Internet.
Spread the word.
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The unstoppable power of online communities
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 26th, 2007
Tagged as: Gab Gab Gab, Internet Marketing, Long Tail, Social Media
My last post spoke about not going back.
I wrote it very late at night (for me anyway) and it was a groggy description of where my world was heading.
Two days and as many nights have passed and if anything the weight of change described in that post is even heavier today. An old saying goes: When the student is ready, the teacher will come. I like to think of it as the moment your mind is open, clarity comes.
I am beginning to see the power of long tail communities.
I’m not speaking of empty forums set up to discuss the pro’s and con’s of a single idea but communities where the collective knowledge, emotions and feelings of millions of users is shared. In his book “The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand
Wikipedia is of course the flag bearer for this medium, but there is an increasing amount of interest in this means. Take Imagine, a site that infuses the mechanism for people to self-organize get togethers such as the one’s introduced by Meetup.com with the passion of idealistic activists around the world.
Imagine’s vision is deceptively simple:
We want to live in a world where all people can live free and dignified lives, where any person who wants to help another can do so, and where no opportunities for action and collaboration are missed or wasted.
The strength of purpose of this kind of initiative is phenominal, with thousands of people worldwide dreaming, planning, doing what they want for their own communities, shifting power from institutions to people at the edges.
Or even the Personal Democracy Forum 2007 coming soon to New York, starring some of the online world’s biggest movers and shakers that aims to address:
- How is voter-generated content changing election campaigns?
- Why should advocacy groups adapt to the connected age?
- What new technology tools and practices are on the horizon?
- How are new technologies democratizing the political process?
- Which political leaders “get it”?
OK, political motivations aside, what do communities like this offer for business and marketers in particular. The possibilities are endless, once the insights and mindsets of your target audience has been fully understood. Once you accept that the many can be smarter than the few (The Wisdom of Crowds
Look at what happened over on Dell’s Ideastorm site, which uses a combination of blog user interaction with a Digg-style voting mechanism to give public weight to the unthinkable.
Going back to Wikipedia, and to one of my projects in particular, what would happen if you focused the probabilistic systems used to build an unstoppable collection of online reference material on a “massive-scale” towards instruction? Could the web be left in charge of its own education? Could its millions of users teach themselves?
Like the guys at TTeach, I believe they could and am working on a means to prove it.
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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, 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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