Category: The Power of Many

  • Reputation and Patterns at SXSW

    Here’s my obligatory plug for my South by Southwest proposals. I’ve got two panels in contention at the cool-but-unwieldy Panel Picker, so I thought I’d provide some shortcuts here. A lot of folks feel that there are too many panels at SXSW and not enough solo presenters. I tend to agree, but I think the…

  • Build your own search robot at Searchbots

    Back in February, Mark Zeman, Lecturer and Subject Director in Digital Media, College of Creative Arts, Massey University, New Zealand, tipped me off to a search agent research project called Searchbots. I tagged it as something to blog about in my email and then, well, I got busy with my new job. I’ve finally checked…

  • BarCamp virgin here – be gentle

    Two years after the first BarCamp (an ad hoc unconference formed initially in response to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, I’m finally planning to make it to one, this weekend’s BarCampBlock, headquartered at SocialText’s offices in Palo Alto. According to what I just jotted on the Sessions page on the wiki, I’ve just volunteered to lead or…

  • Sifry steps down as Technorati CEO

    Maybe everyone else in the blogosphere knows this already but I just read that Dave Sifry is stepping down as CEO of Technorati: Technorati Weblog: A Change In Seasons Looks like Tantek’s timing was impeccable. I first met Dave during the dotcom bust when blogging was booming (again) on the backs of a lot of…

  • Groundswell author on blogging a book

    Back when I wrote The Power of Many I blogged about blogging a book in progress and since then I’ve noticed a number of other authors blogging about the same subject. (Contrast this with William Gibson’s decision to stop his blogging when he started his next book.) Now it looks like Forrester analyst Charlene Li…

  • Podcast of my SXSW panel now live

    If you missed Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Privacy, and Reputation last March at South By here’s your chance to hear me, Ted Nadeau, Kaliya Hamlin, Mary Hodder, and George Kelly take on these topics, very early one Sunday morning after an untimely daylight savings change and, for many people, a night of carousing…

  • I need to hire Liza Sabater as my publicist

    In an interesting rambly ‘meme of the month’ post at her famed CultureKitchen website, called Radical Fringe, Liza writes: > … Jeff Tiedrich of Smirking Chimp, confirming my theory that you’re not a true net native if you don’t know who Christian Crumlish is or if, at least, he doesn’t know who you are. If…

  • Technorati launches new design

    Looks like Technorati has reconfigured itself to be less blog-centric and to take a more multimedia look at what they call over there the Live Web (Technorati Weblog: Come check out the refreshed www.technorati.com!): > First, we’ve eliminated search silos on Technorati. In the past, you had to know the difference between keyword search, tag…

  • Answering danah's twitter questions

    In reply to apophenia: Twitter questions (curiosity is killing me…): > **First, the practical question. Can i quote you?** >[ ] Yes, and you *must* use my real name. >[ ] Yes, but please use a pseudonym and don’t use any identifying information. >[ ] No, please just use this for your own weird thoughts.…

  • Avoid Tagged.com like the plague

    On the SIGIA-L discussion list people are talking about a spammy social network site called Tagged.com. I only know about it because I received an invitation from an unfamiliar sender to a never-used spam-honeypot email address of mine. I looked at the site, it seemed shady, so I ignored it. That was months ago. Now…

  • Amazon adds social networking

    Following on its adoption of tagging last year, Amazon has now added a friends feature. At least I assume this is something new. I hadn’t heard of it before. The first clue I had that such as social networking functionality had been introduced was receiving an invitation in my email from a writer friend of…

  • Email messages don't disappear that easily

    A lot of political blogs are reporting today that White House staff and operatives evaded regulations and used outside email services, such as their RNC accounts, resulting in the deletion of reportedly five million email messages: BREAKING: White House lost Over FIVE MILLION e-mails in two year period | Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in…

  • I'm impressed by pobox.com's customer service

    I’ve been using pobox as a mail forwarding service since 1995 (I think I read about it in Wired and I was sold on the idea of a middle layer between my correspondents and my potentially ever changing email addresses). When I started owning my own domains I simply forwarded custom (“vanity”) email addresses from…

  • Men and women respond differently to Kathy Sierra

    I was discussing yesterday with Jay Fienberg how it bothers me that some of the ostensibly supportive comments on Kathy Sierra’s blog include thoughts along the lines of “I am a big man so I am not vulnerable to these kinds of threats.” Not only does this sort of reinforce the chauvinism, as Jay pointed…

  • Blog responses to my SxSW panel

    I gathered these links and quotations within a day or so of the panel I moderated at South by Southwest, but since then I’ve been to another conference and am generally running behind. Still, I was pleased by many of these responses (and even the less positive ones provide useful criticism) so I wanted to…

  • You are your own words

    I’ve been following the upsetting story of how Kathy Sierra, creator of the Head First book series, author of the Creating Passionate Users weblog, and noted speaker on the web / technology circuit was frightened into cancelling her scheduled appearance at eTech by a series of escalating threats to her personal safety in the form…

  • My slides from SxSW

    These slides are only minutely useful as they are nearly all images without any notes or bullet points. When the podcast comes out I will work on synchronizing my remarks with the slides. I’ll be posting Ted Nadeau’s slides next. His were much more content rich. **Update:** Here are Ted’s slides:

  • Yet another friend metaphor (for twitter)

    So I just wasted, er, spent a half hour surfing twitter pages and poaching friends of friends. I noticed that I had a strong gut sense of who I felt it was ok to befriend, most of the time, but that it doesn’t necessarily map to people who are actually my friends or whom I’ve…

  • Liz Lawley on 'why twitter matters'

    mamamusings: why twitter matters: >But asking “who really cares about that kind of mindless trivia about your day” misses the whole point of presence. This isn’t about conveying complex theory–it’s about letting the people in your distributed network of family and friends have some sense of where you are and what you’re doing. And we…

  • Open sourcing the patent process

    This story (Open Call From the Patent Office – washingtonpost.com) suggest that a breath of fresh air may be entering the patent-review process: The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to…

  • Catching up with NAN

    Hey, I’m only a month late on congratulating Jay Rosen on the launch of NewAssignment.Net (“an experiment in open-source reporting”). My excuse is I was finishing a novel and working full time, but what about the blogs, Christian? And who will think of the children? Here’s some tidbits from Jay’s update of the time, which…