Actually, they just opened it up to everyone. I think this is a great idea, as I travel a bunch and knowing if other people re in the same city to connect with is what I do manually. A more automated method is just my style.
Add me as a fellow traveller:
http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/joipodgorny
technorati tags:dopplr, travel
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Lord knows I will be able to this month and next. And I am not complaining, far from it. I have always wanted to travel, both professionally and personally. Whoa, am I getting my wish now.
So, I wanted to put my travel schedule up so that if any of you were in any of the towns when I am there we can grab a coffee or beer (or any other beverage you like). I love company and if it keeps me from watching the local news in my hotel room – even better!
London – 9/16-9/24
– Various meetingsNYC – 9/26-9/30
– Tween Mashup, co-paneling with Erin ReillySF/Bay Area – 10/3-10/11
– Online Community Summit in Sonoma
– Virtual Worlds 2007 in San JoseShanghai – 10/31-11/5 (? actual dates)
– various meetings
If you are in any of those places (or within rental car driving distance) let me know! (joipodgorny at gmail.com)
And because I am a google apps fangirl lately, I made a google calendar with my “Joi is not in Chicago” schedule. I know, I know – but it’s handy for friends and family! 🙂
technorati tags:travel, shanghai, nyc, london, sanfrancisco, conference, mashup, ypulse, tween
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Quick notes, as I am very much into 2 different books right now and want to get back to them this evening. 🙂
Cell phones
Argentinians – They are everywhere. The most impressive aspect of cell phones are all of the cell phone stores. We have tons of them in the states, but they seem to be more plentiful in the cities here. Buenos Aires, Salta, Tucuman all are overflowing with them. We even saw some small huts similar to hot dog stands (called panchos here), butselling cell phones. My favorite brand name is Movistar, which is a cell phone store, not a rental place. The other observation is how crowds of people stand in front of the cell phone stores (and most stores, for that matter) staring longingly at the phones.
My international group – I have a couple brit gals in our group, both 19 years old, who are very connected. SMS´s have been flying on one of their phones whose still works down here. Our guide uses SMS all day to keep in touch with her friends. The brit gals say that the 8-12 year olds in the UK mostly have their own phones and they see it´s use as more for SMSing than actual calls.
Internet cafes
This oasis for the foriegn traveler and local alike is so sparse in our US cities. Why is this? I usually travel the US with my own computer, but if I didn´t, where would I go in the average US city. I can think of only one or two cafes in Chicago off the top of my head. I passed 4 on the way back from the public square here in Tucuman, a couple blocks from our hotel. This was true in every semi-big town we have been in so far. I find it so odd we don´t have as many.
Facebook and other Social Networks
Facebook – I was able to sit next to the aforementioned brit gals in the last internet cafe I was at and watch them use Facebook together. They were sure to edit their status daily on the trip, check for messages, return any wall comments, check who had tagged them in photos and, of course, search for others in our tour group and promptly friend them. On gal was shocked when I was less than creative in my “how do you know this person” response.
Hive – One of the Dutch gals on the trip was not familiar with FAcebook and only by name with MySpace. She said that everyone is “hiving” in Holland. I intend to ask the same question to the others on the trip as well.
technorati tags:argentina, facebook, hive, movistar, buenos-aires
So I have been off the grid for a couple weeks now and am smack dab in the middle of a South American vacation. So if I am not replying to your emails, SMSs, friend requests, tweets, pownces, in-network messages and other millenial means of communication, rest assured – I am not dead or wounded. I am in Argentina, currently Salta, enjoying the cool weather, amazing mountains, delicious food and wonderful people that this counry has to offer. Unfortunately, my Spanish has degraded this trip from lack of sleep (16 hour plane trips, 22 hour bus rides!) and I am thinking in French instead, but I am on a rather rigid tour and the tour guide is here with us at all times doing just that. I plan to blog about the personal trip at http://joipod.tumblr.com.
Otherwise, I will be trying to pluck professional sorts of observations throughout the trip (to quote the wise Robin Johnson “You are always on”) and post them here. I am back and blogging on 8/12 otherwise.
Take care! Hasta!
technorati tags:argentina, buenos-aires
technorati tags:valleywag, social-networking, map, data
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Clear Channel Outdoors’ Spectacolor division plans to announce in the coming weeks the fall launch of one of the outdoor industry’s first high-definition “spectacular” digital boards. Located in New York City’s Times Square at 47th Street and Broadway, the Spectacolor HD board will sport the highest resolution possible and be equipped with the latest interactive technologies, such as Bluetooth, SMS messaging, and free broadband wireless access from Duffy Square across the street from the 40-foot by 40-foot screen.
Clear Channel Outdoor To Unveil ‘Spectacular’ Board
I wonder who/how they will monitor the user generated content. Not even for the kids, but for everyone…
technorati tags:nyc, times-square, clear-channel, ads, billboards
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I have been itching to use Dopplr for a while now. My biz and personal travel schedule is about to get crazy over the next couple quarters and would love to expand the possibilities available when I leave town.
If you have an extra invite (or know someone who does) please let me know!
🙂
Update: I do have a registration for Joost, but I can trade that (or give one, really) if you want one. I also crave Pownce now too. so many fun buzz-worthy companies…
technorati tags:travel, dopplr, private-beta, beta, online-community, social-media
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I was able to go to the Online Community Unconference in Mountain View this week and what a great day! Saw so many old colleagues and made tons of great new contacts/friends.
Instead of posting long joi-speak notes from the event, I thought I would actually post a couple posts about the ideas it sparked over the next couple of days. Plus, there is so much content on the wiki for the conference that I still have to go through.
But there were a couple of sessions that I had pure notes for – the session evangelizing your community and the session on using volunteers in your community. So I thought I would post those here.
—–
Evangelism of your community
– Paid Ambassadors
– Internal and External promotion
– Need to set ground rules
– Presence at Conferences
– Qumana – nulk posting of posts
– Badges for other sites
– User forum for their ideas
– make sure you ackowledge their contributions
– Street Teams – online and off
– Cool Psts Feed
– Celebrity Endorsement – for bands contact their manager, not publicist
– give away schwag
– embeddable content
– widgets
– feeds
– games
– videos
– have humility
– Tagging
– have to make sure all using the same tag
—–
Managing volunteers in communitites
Certain areas are naturally higher touch and should not be run by volunteers
– U13 kids is a good example
Volunteers have limited access
– no access to user data
– yahoo groups has user database and emails them without them knowing email address
Make sure you have vaguer language with volunteers
Clearly defined project lengths are helpful
Talk of the need to have a more automated way to manage volunteers
– look at flickr – no management
– reputation based system may work
– how do you ensure quality based reputaion rather than just quantity based
– i.e. digg, slashdot – easily gamed
– lithium has a good repuation system built
technorati tags:ocu2007, evangelism, marketing, online-community, Mountain-View, widgets, volunteers, management, incentives
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5.31.07
Richard Edelman
– mid-level employees are the best to get blogging and will usually lead the pack
– not too many CEO’s blog or will blog
– they are too busy, cant grasp transperency, have too many tech hangups
– will often ghost write the blog, only editing at best the content
– Pitney Bowes CEO is going to be blogging soon (whoo hoo! postage news! j/k, i will prolly read it)
– he thinks that every company can employ a social media strategy into their marketing plan, regardless of product or service
– 3 rules
– make stories visual
– don’t be defeated by setback
– go into the grey area
———-
Craigslist
– told funny story about a toronto post of missed conections where a
woman spilled her grandmother(‘s ashes) on a man and was writing to see
if they could have coffee.
– they only charge in a couple markets, not really interested in expanding
– they only have sys admins and developers, no business people or designers
——-
15 minutes of fame
Wild Apricot
– web based member management system
– online payments, emails, etc
– last june launch
– wildapricot.com
Sneaker Play
– invite only social network for urban youth interste in street culture (sneakers, graffiti, etc)
– joke about sneaker battles was the catalyst
– launched june/sept
– http://sneakerplay.com/mesh
Concept Share – http://conceptshare.com
– ConceptShare allows you to easily share designs inside Workspaces that contain designs related to a certain topic or project.
– VERY COOL! I am recommending immediately
——-
Digital Sharecropping – Are You Taking Advantage of Your Users?.
Mathew Ingram talks with Michael Sikorsky (Cambrian House), Simon Pulsifer (Wikipedia) and Jeff Howe (Wired/Crowdsourcing).
Sharecropping – negatively using user work, benefiting and not sharing
Crowdsourcing – positive
“User” – term from drug culture
cambrian prefers to use the term “members”
If the users don’t want it, it’s not going to happen
false controversey – compared to child slavery
Amazon – micro chucnks of time to transcribe for very little money
but there is enormous potential for taking advantage of people
important that the user gets something out of it – money, reputation, etc
crowdfunding.com
good models for self policing:
slashdot model – layered community management
metafilter model
1 million penguins – collective novel
important to think about where are the lines that you should not cross
My Questions:
– how do kids and teens fit into the idea crowdsourcing and do you
think there should there be special protections or considerations for
sites targeting minors who may not understand the complexities?
talked to jeff foxe re cybercamps, kids and trends, crowdsourcing
—–
Building a Community – How and Why it Matters
Mark Relph (Microsoft) talks with Will Pate (Flock, CommandN), Jordan Banks (Ebay) and Lionel Menchaca (Dell IdeaStorm).
Jordan – “our bosses are the people who use the site”
Will – having something that is awesome is the biggest shortcut to success
What are the elements to make a community:
– evangelist position is a great idea (talk to users all day)
– community success is more defined about how everyone else in the company sees the community (hell yeah it is!!!!)
– passion needs to be at the heart of the community
– do not think of community as a vertical (siloed) function – community had to have a voice at every area of the organiztion
– when they will come – we will build it how they say, not the opposite
Question regarding managing the passion on a community
– it’s ok to apologize to the community – makes you more human as a company
Reputation systems
– Jordan sees a future where that is a universal login that tracks rputation
– possibly openid is answer or at least catalyst
Best/Worst impact of community
– Jordan – kitten train via ebay.ca (and they carbon offset the whole thing, j/k)
– Will – Flock cancer story
– Lionel – Ideastorm launched 2/16
How do you illustrate to people in your org the value
– metrics for community – all about engagement, churn statistics, lifetime value of a user
– community ROI “google it” from Will
– like an unproven theory in mathematics, you know it’s there even if it’s not articulated yet
multi-lingual communities
– 12 languages
– internationalization is challenge
– dell – launcing a chinese version and spanish soon
How do you keep them, even when they get mad:
– Jordan – You are either part of the problem, or part of this discussion
– Will – Kill them with kindness, being genuine and transparency
My Questions:
– What do you think about kids in communities? What is the process you
use to think about the younger users you may be attracting? Is it a
good idea to simply try to block them out rather than determine if they
are also part of your current and future audience?
—–
Monetizing the Long Tail – Life Beyond AdSense
Andrew Goodman talks with Nancy Peterson (HomeStars), Mike Masnick, Christine Herron and Ted Murphy (PayPerPost).
No intros and went right into random questions with no apparent path or thesis to the talk
Infinite components
– scarcity of resources
– online the resources are attention, time and reputation
Web 2.0 model – “AJAX, AdSense and Arrogance”
Monetizing your content when ads are not paying anymore
– display ads, adsense
– paying people to review
PayPerPost
– could possibly post negative “overwhelming majority choose neutral” possiblilty
– clients were looking for more integrated content
Google is starting pay per action product
HomeStars (like Angie’s list)
Long Tail
– in aggregate, the niche items are the way a company makes money
– how can you make money in those specific niche areas
Freemium
– give it away and somehow magiclally they will upgrade
– Christine
– services harder than product/content
– cream puff example
– porn is good example
Who does adsense work for:
– have to have tons of traffic
– indexed for many terms in the search engines
Why is popular and what is the alternative
– it’s easy and an additional stream
Cincimoms.com
– internet made geography irrelavant, but getting back to the local being more important
– it’s a myth that local ever went away
Geosign
– ad company in canada – syndication of content?
My Questions:
– When and how do you think advertising will become more integrated
into the content of websites and, more specifically, online communities?
technorati tags:mesh07, online-community, wired, crowdsourcing, long-tail, adsense, web2.0, ads, UGC, toronto, canada, craigslist, geosign, freemium, long-tail, homestars, google, advertising, cambrian-house, kids, microfunding, flock, commandn, blogging, roi, ideastorm, dell, microsoft
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This post could also be confessions of an American in Toronto. I will start by saying it is very, very nice here in Canada. Toronto specifically is very similar in look and feel to Chicago and I felt right at home instantly. I am connecting with all of my friends from SXSW and meeting all kinds of new ones as well.
Yesterday, about mid-afternoon at the Mesh07 Conference, I became hyper-aware of how much I can embody a stereotypical American and became a bit down about it. In the day preceding, I had talked to many delightful Torontonians about dozens of things – politics (Canadian, American and international); health care, environmentalism; civic duty and a citizen’s responsibility to participate fervently in all of the above. My head was swimming with the conversations (I was also in my normal post-lunch thought coma, for full disclosure).
I was put over the edge by a panel of “youth” in the afternoon. They were to tell us what the youth were up to online. I have been to and even facilitated many of these panels before and almost thought I would bypass it for another talk, but I decided to pop in for a bit. The panel was made up of 6 late teen, early twenty-somethings, many with ties to a youth global action site, TakingITGlobal. As they introduced themselves and the amazing pedigrees they all already had, my embarassment of our US counterparts increased. 21ish and been an OCM or youth engagement coordinator for years? Currently thinking about corportate philospohy on philanthory or usability issues? Yikes, we are drooling neandrathals in the states comparably!
I seized the opportunity to finally ask a question to learned teens/young adults regarding tech and their lives and asked about how they engage with advertising. They gave contradictory answers, saying don’t use pop-ups (who does still?) because they are annoying, but then countering that the more annoying ads are sadly the ones they remember. Still, I ended up ducking out early to catch the last 10 minutes of another panel, yet thoroughly impressed with the young people of this country.
I was thankfully able to talk to some of my northern friends later that day and find out that the panel was a bit stacked. There was only one gal on the panel who was an average Canadian gal, and I remembered her online habits and comments conformed nicely with our youth. The others were just amazing do-gooder kids that, while they should be applauded and definitely paraded in front of people to show the capabilities youth can achieve, were in no way representative of canadian youth in general. Candaian kids are not bionic people. They are normal, cool, fun, silly, chill and only sometimes brainiac kids and teens, just like our kids. phew!
I chatted with one woman today from Ottawa, but now living in Toronto, about all of these thoughts I had yesterday and she thought that a possible that the kids from the more rural or small towns have more of a sense of duty and responsibilty to change the world (or their town) because the national “helping” mentality is more concentrated in those places. Canadaians are nice, but they are still privy to the go-get-em attitude that all bigger cities implant into their residents.
Thankfully my traffic on this site is not high enough to be terrfied of the flood of comments this post could possibly warrant. This is my disclaimer that I am enamoured with Toronto and all the people I have met so far from this city, and if my comments/thoughts are pedantic and general, I promise that I am fighting to change them as we speak.
technorati tags:canada, teens, civil-action, kids, takingitglobal, advertising, mesh07
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Joi Podgorny 