Evolving Web

Context Shifts / Meaning Shifts / The Song Remains the Same

I had a dream
Crazy dream
Anything I wanted to know
Any place I needed to go

- Led Zeppelin

We’ve known for a long time that context determines meaning.  When we read, when we listen, context drives how we experience the information.

Web 2.0 has been all about dumping information on us.  Letting us share it.  Letting us bury our naked bodies in it. 

“To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides.” – William James

The world (perception) provides the context.  My recent Plurk post describes how a change in a User Interface context can change how conversations can evolve.

Stockholm Syndrome is an extreme case, in which a malevolent force can change the context of your daily life and thereby change the context under which you judge your captors.  If kidnappers or abusers can win over the minds of their captors, can there be any argument that the mechanism of communication guides context?

The story – the succession of actions taken by actors – is a factual recount of events.  The context is an envelope around that story that provides meaning, emotions, motivation, subtext, and other interpretive elements.  Limited context = limited experience.

So, while context and meaning may shift, the song remains the same.  We can see this clearly with US sentiment towards the actions in Iraq.  At the beginning of the war, there was widespread support in the US.  By the end, it was one of the most unpopular actions in history.  Did the story change?  No.  But the lenses through which people were viewing the actions changed.

If your User Interface limits the lenses of context people can use to examine the information you are providing – the value to them will be limited to the contexts of your choosing.  If people want to tell a story best interpreted out of that context – they will not use your product.

Perhaps the next movement will be applications that really let us use the information, rather than just being excited about creating it.

(Jimmy Page solo to follow)

((These thoughts were written down after an afternoon in a coffee shop in West Seattle with An Bui.  Read her post inspired by the same conversation.))

Technorati Tags: context,stockholm syndrome,web 2.0,web2,william james,enterprise 2.0,led zeppelin,Jimmy Page

Why I Plurk, Again

I’ve discussed this before, but there are inherently different social interactions that happen in different social media tools.  These are facilitated by the differences in the user interface.

Yesterday, Brian Kerr posted this little thing on Plurk (source).  Plurk’s UI allows you to post pictures that are actually visible.

What came next?  A nice little discussion that took 24 hours to mature.  The threading and alerts in Plurk made that possible.  With Twitter, the value-add of the conversation would have been lost.  Twitter is such a temporal tool, without conventions like @ or # tags, threading is impossible.

Here is the Plurk discussion:

Context is often driven by the circumstances in which the context itself is generated.  Your User Interface, like Twitter’s, may have marvelous impacts on how certain types of communication are conducted – but they do not help with all kinds of communication.

There is no Tower of Babel User Interface.

In this thread, the context starts with a pesky cat looped cartoon and ends with a discussion of non-attachment. What @mitten dubs the “kitteh paradox” after Brian defines the core issue – happiness is transitory if you are attached to a certain definition of happiness (cereal or sitting on the table). 

This contextual evolution is primarily due to the Plurk UI which allows this thread to maintain itself over the course of hours or days.  I still use Twitter every day, but I also use Plurk – simply because these fundamental UI differences yield fundamentally different types of conversations.

Technorati Tags: twitter,plurk,brian kerr,laura fisher,non-attachment,user interface,user experience,social media

Better is not More 2 – Pick Your Networks Carefully

We are abusing the new substance of ubiquitous conversation.  Social media’s gifts are to help people communicate, filter, and organize.  In other words, they are meant to help reduce and calm the information flowing towards us.  It is to make things manageable. 

But we get too much of a good thing and everyone asks “How do you get work done with Twitter on?”  Some efficiency consultants recommend prohibiting the use of Facebook or Twitter in the office.  We can’t have simple conversations over coffee without interruptions from text, phone twitter, etc.

A few weeks ago, I posted my Ten Tab Rule for calming social media.  This was a personal guide to decrease the load of information.  Your ten would be different I’m sure.

In business, more exposure is good, more distraction is not.  Carefully picking and choosing networks to join and participate in is vital to your success.

The funny thing about networks is, after a while they become intertwined.  What does this mean to you?  It means if you are a regular blogger with a strong Twitter community and are familiar with many on, say, Urban Spoon – those networks will permeate other networks.

What?

Well, let’s say that your Twitter community includes 300 people.  Maybe 12 of those people are active on Twine, 15 on delicious, 25 on Yelp, 40 on Digg, etc.  Some of your messages on Twitter will resonate with those people and they will pass the word to other networks as appropriate.

This is your true reach.

So, what I’m positing here is: maybe it’s better to be a strong member of a few networks than a weak member of a lot of networks. Don’t kill yourself joining and participating in everything.  Always keep an eye on what’s new, but nurture your key networks.  Grow them and let them provide.

Technorati Tags: social media,facebook,twitter,ten tab rule,networking,social networking,information overload

A Thanksgiving Post About Food

A week or so ago I taught an informal cooking class for a small group hosted by @imjay and @afuller.  People have told me that they appreciate my posts about food and cooking – on Facebook, Twitter or this blog. 

So, for Thanksgiving, I thought I’d give you a few sources of information that can get you into cooking as well.

Elements of Cooking

Michael Ruhlman’s Elements of Cooking Site is awesome for the basics of cooking (like cookware to select) and finer cooking (like preparing bone marrow).

Epicurious

Epicurious.com is an awesome site for recipes, ideas, tips, shopping … anything you need for food.  There are many sites on the web with recipes, epicurious has recipes that have surprised and inspired me.

L2O

L2O is an awesome, beautiful blog.  In writing, photography, and execution – it is flawless. Done by Chicagoland’s L2O restaurant (my first stop on my next trip).  The blog is gorgeous and gives you a great appreciation of the beauty and versatility of ingredients.  

Chefs Catalog.com

When I need something new I will (I admit it) hit froogle or some other comparison site, but by and large I seem to end up at Chefs Catalog. They have basically everything.  I’ve bought pots, pans, utensils, gadgets and ingredients from them.

The quality of the materials you use from cooktop, to cookware, to ingredients all make a difference.  Chefs Catalog will fix you up.

The Kitchen Designer

Okay, so this is big time kitchenporn.  The Kitchen Designer blog basically gives you endless appliance envy.  But it’s excellent for keeping tabs on what’s out there for those big things that make a difference.  Like your cooktop, your oven and your grill. 

So that’s it.  Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. 

Technorati Tags: epicurious,l20,chefs catalog,kitchen designer,michael ruhlman,cooking,foodie,food

Things You Wish You’d Done Yourself

Every year we make caviar deviled eggs to eat as snacks as we make our big Thanksgiving dinner.  Okay we do this at Christmas and New Year’s as well.  This year I thought I’d take a few minutes and check out deviled egg recipes  and maybe find something new to do with at least some of the eggs.

Well, there’s deviledeggs.com and deviledegg.org.   Com will teach you how to perfectly boil and peel and prep.  Org has a bunch of interesting recipes. 

But both are outrageously simple.  Just deviled eggs.  Period.

I appreciate the focus of their respective business models.

Technorati Tags: deviled eggs,caviar,cooking,food,foodie,thanksgiving

Thu An Bui Joins Modus Cooperandi

As Modus Cooperandi closes gets ready to enter its second year, we are preparing to launch a book and two new product offerings.  To help with these launches we are happy to announce the addition of Thu An Bui to our team of associates.

An’s background in business analysis, law and social media makes her a perfect fit for Modus Cooperandi.  An has a keen understanding of human communication, the tools of communication, and how businesses communicate internally and externally. 

As we move forward into 2009, we are very excited to work with Thu An in our research, writing, consulting, and training.

Technorati Tags: Thu An Bui,Modus Cooperandi

Stupid is as stupid shops

I have been having a love-fest the last few days. We’ve been going around talking to companies around Puget Sound.  The topic: how they are changing their management styles as we move into a clear and looming recession.

Many companies are doing very interesting and refreshing things to deepen the relationships they have with their customers.  Some of this means social media, but some of it also means better customer service and generally being more involved with the community.

In other words, as we’ve been getting closer to economic collapse – people seem to be getting more humane.

And that’s pretty awesome.  We’ll be blogging about our findings soon enough, but today I got an amusing bit in my RSS reader.  Wal*Mart didn’t seem to learn from last year’s negative press and is, again, sending out cease and desist orders for sites that are broadcasting their Black Friday sales before Wal*Mart’s official publication date.

Says TechDirt:

…l-Mart's high-priced law firm has sent a takedown notice to the site SearchAllDeals.com, which is a search engine/aggregator of various deals sites. The site doesn't host any content itself, but that didn't stop Wal-Mart from sending a false DMCA takedown claim to the site (and, of course, a false DMCA takedown is illegal). So, we have Wal-Mart, whose employees think deal sites are helpful, getting its lawyers to send out bogus takedown notices over content that isn't copyrighted, and then sending them to search engines that don't even host the content in question.

This may be interesting to watch. Local business may well have a resurgence in the next few years simply due to a few key factors:

1. You have to drive farther to Big Box stores (cf. the demise of Circuit City)

2. Big box stores tend to have large and impersonal rewards programs, vs personal service

3. Big box stores tend to use social media as exploitation tools as opposed to communication tools

4. People are plain weary of the big box aesthetic (size, parking, impersonal service, etc.).  [Apparently the big boxers get this.]

Will authenticity win out in the long run?  Let’s watch.

Technorati Tags: Wal*mart,walmart,techdirt,inside the aisle,big box,social media

Coping with the Santa Barbara Fires in Real Time with Twitter and Flickr

On June 3rd 1980 I spent the night under the stairs.  This wasn’t all that uncommon in the middle of Nebraska.  Tornado warnings were common.

The difference was, on that night, the tornadoes actually happened. When I emerged from my home, about half of my city looked like the picture to the right (an actual picture from the tornado aftermath).

What did we do to cope? We huddled under the stairs. 

Today, people are simultaneously coping and providing a real-life real-time face of the experience of disaster.  Photos and descriptions of the fires can be found on blogs, twitter and Flickr.  As the events unfold, you can not only learn about what is happening (news) but also experience it and feel it from a human perspective (understand).

When events like this happen, the emotions you go through are rapid fire and very difficult to describe after the fact.  In fact, you may not even remember most of them.

Watching people actually live through this, actually experience it is both

ghastly and welcome.  I worried about being a voyeur. But I remember what it was like to go through an experience like this.  I think that in 1980, I would have been Twittering and blogging and taking pictures as fast as I could.  Not only to get the word out, but to help myself cope.

Technorati Tags: tea fire,montecito fire,santa barbara fire,twitter,flickr,blogging,coping,disaster

 

How To Make Screencasts – The Definitive Guide

Today I wanted to read up on screencasting.  I went to Google and found more about screen scraping than screencasting.  It seems that most How-tos (including this one I’m sure) are scraped by fake sites that replicate content – and they all scaped the same particularly weak article.  I went through dozens of pages of crap to bring you this short list.

So, here’s a real short list of screencasting resources.  It’s all you’re ever going to need.

How we make video screencasts

Softonic’'s awesome conceptual video about screencasting (from which the image above was taken). After a morning of becoming increasingly annoyed with sites having stolen content from other sites, this video was awesome. Very conceptual mind you, but ... awesome.

DemoGirl’s How to Make a Screencast

This is the best actual how-to out there.  Hands-down. Regardless of the platform you use, this has the best tips and the best procedures.  Watch this above all else. The blog post that relates to the screencast is here.

How to make easy video screencasts of software in Windows

Detailed step by step for using Windows Media Encoder to make screencasts.

Ask 37signals: How do you make screencast videos? - (37signals)

Interesting how to in that it tells you to do the audio before the video. Very interesting, that. Still this is much better than most tutorials out there.

What Is Screencasting | O'Reilly Media

Extremely detailed.  Very much appreciated.  There’s a lot of links here, so it’s a great starting point for an accounting of all things screencasting.

1. Screencast Genres
2. Screencasting Tools
3. How to Make a Screencast
4. How to Edit a Screencast
5. How to Deliver a Screencast
6. Screencasting Futures

Technorati Tags: softonic,screencasting,demogirl,37signals,o'reilly,windows media encoder

A Passel of Emergency Management and Preparedness Blogs

As we know, emergencies are varied and can strike at any time.  Not surprisingly, there are many blogs out there that discuss all of these nasty events and how to manage or prepare for them.

Here is a handful of them.

In Case of Emergency

Interesting emergency management / preparedness blog with very different types of posts than others. Not updated recently, but updates seem to go in spurts.

CrisisCommunication

Discusses the use of tech during crisis situations. Most often social media.

Bernstein Crisis Management

Discussions of crisis and emergency management

In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog — A Citizen’s Eye View of Public Preparedness

A very renowned emergency management blog, currently on haitus due to illness.

Stephenson blogs on homeland security 2.0 et al.

Homeland security blog. Good information here, but also more politically than specific action focused.

Disaster Central — Metropolitan College of New York (MCNY)’s Emergency and Disaster Management Blog

Well detailed emergency management blog from Met College NY. Really good stuff here.

Dave's landslide blog

An awesome blog of all things landslides. Frequently updated, topical and well written.

Crisisblogger

Very thoughtful crisis / emergency management / preparation blog. Research, thoughts, and conference notes are all here. Good stuff

Counterterrorism Blog

Emergency management blog specifically focused at CounterTerrorism efforts. Group blog.

Amanda Ripley : Author of The Unthinkable & reporter for Time

Awesome emergency prep and situations blog by author of "The Unthinkable"

Disaster Zone: Emergency Management in the Blogosphere

Eric Holdeman's Emerg. Mgt and Prep blog (he's in Puyallup)

Crisis Informatics Blog

Rarely updated blog on crisis informatics from a research / university perspective

Resilient 2 Disaster

A wiki of disaster preparedness resources.

SurvivalBlog.com

Survivalist blog / covers some emergency prep issues.

Technorati Tags: emergency management,emergency preparedness,blogging,blogs