Shaping Thoughts

Love this presentation of Clay Shirky

Lots of humor and great thinking about underlying trends and promises for the future!

For a transcript please click here.

For some other stories about this presentation click here.

Technorati tags: Clay Shirky, Web 2.0

Comment | posted May 2, 10:37 pm on May 02, 2008 | category: Web2.0

A bit quiet out here?

True, it has been somewhat quiet out here. With a reason!

I am currently spending all my free time on researching and building an simple local voting website. Being no hard core programmer, I have been searching the Net for stuff like PHP, Javascript, MySQL etc. A lot is out there and all you got to do is get some understanding and link it all together. Tons of fun learning about all this stuff though!

Will report back once I got something running.

Comment | posted Feb 20, 11:38 am on Feb 20, 2008 | category: Local web / Web2.0

First meeting on a possible LocalWeb

So we recently had our first face-to-face meeting on a potential LocalWeb initiative. First of all, I loved to (finally) be able to talk about my passion: Internet, web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. It has not occurred often, that I could spend 3 hours focusing on those topics.

Purpose of our community LocalWeb:

• Improve well being (relevant info in nice things in town)
• Social cohesion (people that know and understand each other will be more caring and co-operative towards another)

From the obligatory introduction round it appeared three out of the four participants have an IT background and employment. Among the four of us there is also a considerable amount of experience with previous local web experiments and knowledge of local community. This will come in handy!

We discussed a couple of former initiatives like:

• a link portal with a commercial drive (get traffic; sell advertisements): unsuccessful because too little traffic; maybe because Google helps people out these days and lot of people/company’s/clubs websites are found that way.
• a site linked to a “web ring” of community guides (paper version) providing local content and links. Issue: “Google effect” and nobody willing to provide content.

It’s all about getting people to participate!
The main topic of the night was “participation”: will we be able to generate enough participation because it should be an easy exercise for the four of us (self sustainable; with minimum moderation and content generation; other people taking over some jobs). So far only around 100 unique people turn up on local offline town events, although the content of those meetings are quite compelling. Is the hurdle for participating offline too high? Would it be lower via an online channel?

Some tips and guidance:
What’s resonated from the comments on my first post on the topic:

• Make sure you satisfy a real need of people.
• You must solve a real problem for them (like in ability to find like-minded people). Something that they will be willing to participate for (create content).
• Engage people on things that are important to them (school issues, local event calendars, fun stuff!)
• Make sure the community has a clear purpose and make sure people know that purpose

Using local events and low hurdles:
Another important help for attracting participation is focussing on local issues or events that people might want to react to. Well, there are some we examples we could use, like:

• The upcoming merger between three towns
• Sinterklaas celebration
• A Skating track made of plastic (!)
• The grand local theatre play last summer about an important historical event (1953)
• The upcoming new cultural festival this summer

Next to that, content creation should be have very low hurdles:

• easy: like Twitter or in a discussion forum
• medium: photo sharing
• hard: editing a wiki or creating a blog post

In terms of applications…
Some applications that crossed our minds:

• A discussion forum supporting people:
  • like for citizens initiatives
  • just people looking for other people (for running with; for playing chess with)
  • people looking for information (good school?; how does swim lessons work around here?
  • issue: needs eyeballs to questions/topics to attract people that will answer questions!
• A wiki for:
  • having people willing to write about past events
  • history of the town
  • famous people
  • presentation of their club (link; feeds)
  • issue: learning curve for using a wiki!
• A social network:
  • people and their profile (interests; skills etc)
• A portal to act as front page surfacing all things produced in other components via feeds:
  • and combined feeds from sites providing news about the town
  • featuring photo’s tagged with local tags (from Flickr or anywhere)

Next steps:

• Set up a wiki to get the three others involved used to such a too and evaluate it for local implementation. (Done)
• Use the wiki for working out our case for an interactive LocalWeb.
• Everybody starts looking for good examples around the world of experiments that worked and that not worked.
• Precisely describe the past experiments and the reasons of their failure.
• Brainstorm on what people would be looking for.
• Put up some feeds already on the wiki (using e.g. Yahoo pipes)

Technorati tags: Citizen journalism, Local web, Web 2.0, Community, Hyperlocal, Local

Comment | posted Feb 6, 10:06 pm on Feb 06, 2008 | category: Local web / Web2.0

Thinking about local communities again

My thinking about local communities did not stop after that blogpost in August last year, which received some nice comments by the way.

What I noticed however, was that I could use some “locals” to think with me on the subject. Via the website of a local photo-club I traced a web-savvy potential “co-thinker”. After some email exchanges, we even ended up with a team of three! Next Tuesday Wednesday is our first face-to-face meeting and I am really looking forward to it.

What we could (should?) discuss first:

• Who is who (introduction round; who’s good at what?)
• Mapping the local www-space (what’s there online?)
• Value of local resident participation on the local-www (use cases; what are people looking for?)
• Implications of local resident participation on the local-www?
• The local media-landscape (actually it’s about one good local newspaper!)
• Mission of the project (what do we want to achieve with getting locals online or online locals to the local web?)
• What potential tools would be available (who has experience with what; learning curves etc.)?

Actually, to me personally the difficulty of finding like-minded people for this project already highlights the value of connecting people here via local online tools.

Just thinking, that it may be worthwhile to create a series of blogpost about this venture…

Technorati tags: Citizen journalism, Local web, Web 2.0, Community, Hyperlocal, Local

Comment [2] | posted Jan 14, 10:58 pm on Jan 14, 2008 | category: Local web / Web2.0

Love to follow those Seesmic guys!

For me following the Seesmic guys is 1000 times better than National Television. I just love those guys, with all their humor and creativity. And in the meantime, if you follow them close enough (and especially Loic Le Meur), you get a real good look into the ways of a start-up web company. Boy, are they doing a great job doing the buzz marketing! (as a byline: I am sure many Enterprise 2.0 evangelists can learn from this!)

Tuesday’s Financial Times featured a nice article on the business life of Loic Le Meur. Great read.

Please find one of those great video’s the Seesmic team makes every day and features on Youtube (this one is day 44):

Technorati tags: Loic Le Meur, Seesmic

Comment | posted Dec 6, 10:39 pm on Dec 06, 2007 | category: Web2.0

Kiva very popular among lenders

Via the Twitter account of Ross Mayfield I was (re-) introduced to Kiva tonight. Great initiative of microlending to small business people in developing countries.

Ross apparently just made a small loan to a young Kenian woman owning an butcher shop, that needed some funds for buying a new freezer.

Clicking through the site, I was struck by the following message:

Apparently Kiva is in very high demand among people willing to lend a few bucks! Sounds good to me!

Technorati tags: Kiva, Web 2.0, Micro finance, Micro lending

Comment | posted Nov 22, 10:15 pm on Nov 22, 2007 | category: Web2.0

Together we can make information find us

Via Martin Kloos I found another brilliant little movie from Michael Wesch of Kansas State University about how the internet changes how we think about storing and refinding information and the role of tagging.

My personal favorite quote:

“We no longer just find information …together we can make it find us”

Hereby also a link to my post on the David Weinberger’s book Everything is Miscellaneous, a book which clearly was the inspiration for the video.

Technorati tags: David Weinberger, tagging

Comment | posted Oct 23, 09:26 pm on Oct 23, 2007 | category: Web2.0 / Social software

Managing a local online community without being harassed or worse

I need your advice!

I have been running around with the idea of creating a nice interactive website dedicated to my local community for quite some time now. The main goal is just connecting people around here. Have them share stuff (information, upcoming local events, experiences; historical facts; images; video’s) and find out what they have in common other than living in the same place on this Planet. Just to increase the general well being around here. Lot’s of tools around to create communities like that: forums, wiki’s, blogging software etc. However what has kept me from really going ahead with my plan, other then time, is a bit of fear.

Fear? Why would you be afraid you might ask? Well, the main issue is how to shield your self off from people how somehow feel mistreated by the local community (people who get banned from a forum for example). Of course the basic solution is to set up the site and never reveal your real life identity. However I feel this very much limits the way you can participate yourself in the online community (chance of revealing real life identity just by provinding information is always there) and especially also in terms of the marketing you can do for the community. In order to promote things I think it is a very good thing to express your self about the initiative in a local newspaper (or could that be done anonymously also?)

One of the most basic structures involved in an online community is really to install some rules or guidelines that people need to accept when registering. Something along the line of “respect for each individual; no swearing; no personal attacks etc.” and that breaking these rules means you risk getting banned (only account or worse, your IP address). However, especially given the fact that most participants will choose to stay anonymous there is always the chance that people will start to test the rules. And then these people will be talked to online, and be banned if they still do not comply. But they get really pissed off and need to find an outlet for the anger…

Ok, this is not really a well structured post. Just a set of basic thoughts actually. What I am very much looking for is experiences who created online local communities like the one I envision. How did you mitigate the personal risk? Please comment.

Technorati tag(s): Community, Local, Citizen Journalism, Blogging, Social Software, Collaboration, Web 2.0

Comment [4] | posted Aug 2, 08:25 am on Aug 02, 2007 | category: Local web / Web2.0

Enterprise 2.0 in 33 slides

Found this presentation tonight on IBM blog Eightbar. It just makes me smile…!! Great stuff.

Technorati tag(s): Enterprise 2.0, Internal Blog, Internal Blogging, Blogging, Social Software, Collaboration

Comment | posted Jun 27, 08:56 pm on Jun 27, 2007 | category: Social software / Web2.0

New KM: new tools make knowledge flow

David Tebbutt wrote an excellent piece for Information World Review titled Breathing new life into KM.

In the article David explains how new tools like blogs, wiki’s , RSS and tagging can provide the enterprise with at least part of the benefits that were promised, but failed to be delivered during the good old days of the Knowledge Management hype.

The KM hype ended, because users didn’t see the pay-off for themselves of formalising their knowledge into big systems.

David see the new tools creating value because:

...when people are socialising, even in a work context, they are much happier to share their thoughts and their experiences.
Go into a busy staff canteen and listen to the hubbub. You can be sure that a high percentage of those conversations are work-related. They don’t show up on any statistics and they’re not managed or facilitated by any computer software, but knowledge is being freely exchanged.
This is exactly what happens with social software except, instead of an audience within earshot, the audience can be as big or as small as you like. They’re brought together by common interest, by trust and by the fact that an exchange is taking place rather than a one-way “sucking their brains out”.

and

...an environment is being created in which knowledge can flourish and flow. Many of the benefits of social computing are those corner-of-the-eye things where you pick up thoughts from here and there and you discover that your own insight and understanding evolves. Knowledge itself seems to exist in the connections between information elements and between the participants as well as in the individuals’ heads.

and

Knowledge will never be managed but the environment in which it flourishes certainly can be.

Excellent article!

Technorati tag(s): Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Wiki, Blog, Internal blog, Social software, Knowledge Management, KM, Intranet

Comment | posted Jan 21, 09:41 pm on Jan 21, 2007 | category: Knowledge Management / Web2.0