web 2.0, design & community
Last July, I spoke at the inaugural Ignite/LA on the use of virtual communities to enable strategic knowledge sharing across the enterprise. It took a while, but the video is now online.
The Ignite format uses 20 slides which auto-advance every 15 seconds making the presentation length a total of five minutes. The next Ignite/LA will be held on Monday, June 7th in Santa Monica. You can now register online.
Anyone who’s been paying attention has seen the dearth of writing going on here lately. I’ve been experimenting with lifestream focused themes that let me feed the beast that is this blog in an automated, sound bite fashion using feeds from the various services I use on a regular basis; Last.fm, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Netflix, YouTube, etc..
And the lifestream is precisely where Flavors.me excels. As they describe themselves, “Flavors.me allows anyone to create an elegant website using personal content from around the internet.”
I read (briefly) about Flavors.me in one of the feeds that I scan, but when I saw Bryan Harney tweeted about Flavor.me, I decided to check it out.
The service very simply and elegantly does what it sets out to do — creating a portal to your presence on various social networks. You can upload a background, tweak the colors and fonts and configure which services you want to connect to and share. There’s no direct interactivity, but in my view, that’s a good thing. If someone wants to comment on your Flickr photostream or retweet that clever quote, they can click through to the source service and do it there.
The best way to “get” Flavors.me is to poke around and try it, but if you’re timid about sharing, Flavors.me creator Jack Zerby has posted a terrific video overview.
Now go check out my Flavors.me site, and then give it a try!
Social media has transformed our world. Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis, YouTube — all emphasize the power of participation. Today the web is all about community; people gathering, sharing and collaborating with others who share their interests.
If your business, web site or service is not leveraging social media, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to extend your reach. But what exactly is social media, and what can it do for you from a business perspective? The following slide show provides a clear, well-defined explanation.
Is your company using social media? How? Or why not?
As explained on the Ignite site:
Ignite was started in Seattle in 2006 by Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis. Since then 100s of 5 minute talks have been given across the world. There are thriving Ignite communities in Seattle, Portland, Paris, and NYC.
Scott Berkun provides a terrific overview of what Ignite is and why you should give it a try, and it’s in Ignite format (of course).
Since I first learned about Ignite, I’ve been itching to give the format a try. Most of the presentations I’ve given in the past at conferences have been 30-60 minutes in length. The idea of using just five minutes to get your point across in a compelling way is exciting.
Ignite has finally come to Los Angeles with help from geek dinner, and I’m going to be one of 13 people standing up and presenting at the inaugural Ignite LA event. I’ll be speaking on something that I’m passionate about–nurturing virtual communities behind the enterprise firewall. Sexy, if you’re a social media geek in an enterprise world.
If you are in the Los Angeles area and want to drop in to check it out, you can RSVP here. Admission is free, and there will be booze and food available. Drink up. I’m much more entertaining after you’ve had a few cold ones.
I got hooked on the concept of Twitter when it took off at SXSW 2007. I don’t often have time to write an essay, but I can generally manage 140 characters. Over time, I’ve tried and tested a number of Twitter-like micro-blogging networks. Jaiku, Plurk, FriendFeed. And social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook allow a similar status update.
I like to test a lot of different things, and some contacts use one network or another. I don’t have the time or energy to bother with the care and feeding of all of these networks.
Enter Ping.fm. The name pretty much describes the service, allowing you toping your various networks all from one place. Once you gone through and configured your networks, you can enter your update from the web, from a mobile phone or iPhone, or using your favorite instant messenger.
Ping.fm automatically converts URLs to shortcuts. You can post links to Delicious. And you can keep all your various networks up to date.
There is even a custom URL option that will let you use Ping.fm to post a new blog entry on your self-hosted WordPress blog (with this plug-in).
It’s still a young web company, and Ping.fm is still in beta. Fortunately for you, it’s a pretty stable product and as of September, the beta is now open. Check it out.
This week, I’ll be attending the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Most of my colleagues and friends gave me quizzical looks when I told them about the conference, wondering why on earth I’d want to go to a conference about Microsoft Office. Office 2.0 may be about a lot of things, but it’s most certainly not about a certain well-known suite of programs from a company in Redmond.
So what is Office 2.0?
For starters, it’s the name of the conference described on the web site as “…a collective experiment organized every year in San Francisco, CA and aimed at discovering the future of online productivity & collaboration. It is a unique gathering of visionaries, thought leaders, and customers using innovative online services for getting things done at the office, at home, and on the go.”
Wikipedia describes Office 2.0 as “…a marketing neologism representing the concepts of office productivity applications as published applications rather than stand-alone programs. The term leverages the Web 2.0 concept to conjure imagery of collaborative, community based and centralised effort rather than the more traditional application running on a platform locally.”
So just as Web 2.0 embraces the community and user-generated content, Office 2.0 explores new ways of working in a primarily online, collaborative environment.
I’ve seen firsthand success with collaborative online communities, particularly with the online, community-centric approach Fluor has taken with knowledge management. Distributed ownership, administration and accountability, coupled with a culture that encourages every voice to be heard has proven to be not only extremely effective, but essential to success.
In the spirit of “eating your own dogfood” the conference is paperless. Instead, each participant is given an HP 2133 Mini-Note running Linux, with wireless access to all of the tools necessary during the conference: Google Apps for email and calendaring; ClearSpace for discussions, blogging and publishing; Zoho for presentations and so on. On Wednesday, we will split into teams and respond to a simulated enterprise crisis in which we’ll put all these tools to work to solve the problem.
I’m looking forward to meeting others who are applying these concepts to support their business strategy, and learning innovative ways to stimulate similar success throughout the enterprise.
The Challenge
Probably the largest challenge to Office 2.0 is breaking down the barriers put up by IT Czars and establishing trusted, reliable ways to work outside the firewall and in the cloud. Most enterprises are leery, and rightly so, of putting their eggs in someone else’s basket. It will be interesting to see how other companies are tackling this issue.
Check back here and via Twitter, and I will keep you posted throughout the week from Office 2.0.
The AOL Instant Messenger developers have had some fun with the AIM API, creating a network link for Google Earth that shows live AIM chat activity. It’s interesting to see where the AIM users are, and who they are chatting with.
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