Some interesting thoughts in an article titled “Social Media’s Effect on Learning” over on a WSJ Blog.

Some snippets:

“Bilingual people aren’t cognitively smarter, but they are more cognitively flexible,”

“Practice at constant switching improves an aspect of their cognitive abilities.”

“This is much like what people do when they’re updating their Twitter status, instant-messaging friends, or answering text messages and emails while they’re doing something else. Dr. Kuhl said this multitasking, where people are stimulating new patterns of sequential processing, could then reap the same benefits as bilingualism.”

“If not .. then networking online is at least acting as a brain innovator.., promoting new paths of discovery and interactivity in the brain.”

Read full story.

What Mark refers to as depth is what Linda Stone calls “the next aphrodisiac” in her talk at Supernova 2005 – Full Focused Attention.
 
Five years into Linda’s 20 year cycle framework of culture, cycle where swinging back to the individual as a centre of gravity. Full focus attention. It’s why I’ve focused, from time to time, on things such openness, sharing, and context.

Culture creates the technology it needs to fulfil its desires.

Mark Pesce, author, technologist, futurist.
We have become broad grazers of culture. Over the last decade, our ability to ‘go wide’ has reached unprecedented levels.

Whether an uprising in Iran, a celebrity marriage gone sour, or the trivial factoids which obsess us, we now have the tools to take it all in, all the time, wherever we are.

The mainstream media have tried to follow us on or flight path into breadth, only succeeding in becoming more insubstantial.

But the time for breadth is over. We’ve passed the test – with high marks. We need to move along.

The other and mostly unexplored axis of an information-saturated culture is depth. Each of us has the capacity to dive in and learn more about almost anything than ever before.

It nearly always starts with Wikipedia, which then points you to another resource, which points to another, and another, until, at the end, something like real mastery has been achieved.

With depth comes judgment; walk a mile in another’s shoes and you can know their thoughts. It’s not fast food, but it is a nutritious meal.

It’s interesting to note that the big movie this year (and probably the decade) is James Cameron’s Avatar. Uttered at its climax, the film’s catch phrase is, ‘I see you.’

Three words framing an experience of depth, one soul knowing the soul of another. That might be too much to ask on a planet of nearly seven billion souls, but we know we are lacking, and long to restore balance. Depth must take its place alongside breadth as a core human capability in the era of hyperinformation.

Without it, we will simply evaporate into ephemera and trivia. But with it – and this is my dream – we can reach the rock-solid core of being.

• Read all responses to this article

It makes me think a lot about what I said regarding Social Isolation over on my Lifekludger blog recently.

[audio:http://media.dnwallace.com/mp3/Snippet-Keynote_MeWeandtheNetwork.mp3]
Shout-out by Nancy White

Nancy White
Keynote: Me, We and the Network
Learning Technologies 2009 Conference

The power of you – or of me, is mighty. But when and how do we tap into the power of “we” – bounded groups, or networks which flow beyond our personal lines of sight. What practices enable us to utilise the power across these three forms?

Learning Technologies 2009 Conference Podcasts from both days available now at http://bit.ly/2zq7yv

Strangely or not, I tend not to see myself as disabled. Maybe that’s why I tend to focus on sharing more about what I’m doing than who I am or what I think about disability specific things – whatever those are.

It’s possibly also why when I refer to people with a disability I use the term people ‘living’ with disability. After all, tha’s what I’m doing. It’s also the focus I put on the possibilities technology can and does offer to enrich that ‘living’.

Besides which, I’m just a practical sort of guy.

I’m not the best at conveying what I feel either about what runs deep and not most elequant expressing what I really believe.

Sure I’ve had my lucid moments on issues I’m passionate about, which you’ll find within the years of posting here, and on my other blog - like Social Isolation, Co-presence and Barriers. Generally though words get in my way. Thankfully others don’t have the same problem.

Just recently I came across a post by Lauredhel titled “On ambient intimacy and assistive devices” that had me saying “yes, yes, yes; that’s what I wanted to say to so many people so many times”.

In part she writes about being social …

The internet is the virtual watercooler (or coffeehouse, or playgroup, or pub) for people like me, isolated due to disability. And I’m fed up with able-bodied folk slamming electronic community as a meaningless half-life. I’m sick of internet use being constructed as a signifier of a person as a pathetic loser worthy of mockery. And I’m over ignorant pundits reviling the rise in electronic community as The End of the World as We Know It, a one-way highway to the inevitable disengaged, apolitical fragmentation of society.

And in an analogy to be physical assistive devices… ”

People who use wheelchairs, for example, use wheelchairs. They get around in them. Wheelchairs are useful, value-neutral objects. People are not “bound” to them; they’re not “condemned” to life in a wheelchair. The use of a wheelchair doesn’t mark a person as either a sinister or pitiable caricature. And above all, people are not synonymous with their wheelchairs. They’re people who use a mobility device, a tool. (emphasis mine)

The internet may be many things, but it is also my social assistive device. And that’s not tragic, or threatening, or worthy of scorn. It just is.”

Do yourself a favour and read the whole thing on her blog “Hoyden About Town”

Thanks Lauredhel. This so underlines why I have felt strongly for nearly 30 years about technology as a tool in general, why I think the connection and openness that a social web enables is important and points to why I keep persisting with the idea that is Lifekludger.

Dave

Something about this is neat. The act of helping is so ingrained and helping robots reveals something inherent about our humanness. Were these ppl helping to be a part of something? Or because they knew there must be human behind it?

Unorganised crowd sourcing.

Fascinating.

Dave

[via David Weinberger]

Here’s some pics: (more here)

UPDATE: @silkcharm has posted a qik video:

Dave

October 10 is World Mental Health Day.

Expect to see lots of Blue.

A lot of my Twitter friends are already turning blue and are doing various things, calling it Blueday2008 and
using the hashtag.

I’m never one for jumping on bandwagons for the sake of it. Like these wristbands you see everywhere for instance. But I wear a BeyondBlue wristband, constantly. If you’ve got one, or see one, you might like to take a photo of it and put it on flickr and add it to the group I started there.

I also made a T-shirt for your Second Life Avatar, if you feel so inclined. You can pick one up from here as part of the Blueday2008 event in Second Life.

While there you might like to have a look at/in my sculpture / artwork in there called Ocean of Tears , which, though I started long ago, have been spurred on to complete at, and release on a time like this.

I wrote before in this blog post here why I’d be interested, and in fact why I am doing this stuff.

All this Incandescent Blue, and the iTunes Genius gave me a music list to write this post to.

As long as we are talking about it – What do you do to stay sane?

Peace.

Dave

http://www.beyondblue.org/

Technorati Tags: blueday2008, secondlife

When I caught the news about BT buying Ribbit I took notice. Why?

Because.

Because I know JP enough (podcast) to know it’s got significance for the future.
Because I know the power of voice as the primary means of communication to build relationship.
Because I believe culture creates the technology it needs to fulfill its desires.

So I wandered over to Ribbit and watched the announcement video (very clever guys).

Acquisition video : http://www.ribbit.com/video/ted/ted_jp.swf
Ribbit : http://www.ribbit.com/
BT : http://www.bt.com/

With the Ribbit purchase, it certainly seems the rest of the net seems to be latching on to the idea of ‘web enabled phone calling’ – which of course makes perfect sense. When I mentioned the acquisition to Mike he was quick to draw the comparison to Ebay’s purchase of Skype where maybe Ebay saw Skype as a way to voice-enable transactions that initiate on the auction site (even though that puts transaction before conversation).

However I want to draw a line to somewhere else, based on something I’d read from David Weinberger’s blog a week or so before, that popped immediately into my mind when thinking about the Ribbit news.

David had been lamenting the method of editing audio and wondered why we couldn’t have a method where spoken audio gets converted to text, we edit the text and then the audio gets automatically edited and reassembled according to the edited text.

Editing audio by editing text : http://snipurl.com/editingaudio  [www_hyperorg_com]

With the release of the iPhone, the pervasive success of touch pads on laptops, and the fascination of Microsoft Surface technology and the surface sphere, it seems we are well on the start of the way to touch nirvana.

iPhone : http://www.apple.com/iphone/
Microsoft Surface : http://www.microsoft.com/surface/
Sphere : http://blog.ted.com/2008/07/microsoft_surfa.php
Touch barrier : http://snipurl.com/touchbarrier  [lifekludger_net]

There remains the last bastion of successful input – voice.

Sure, speech recognition has been getting better and better, but not to the point of wide adoption and nowhere near mass market penetration. And certainly not in a way that enables easy, on the fly, sporadic input – and importantly not mobile. Even though some services like Jott are proving popular.

Jott: http://www.jott.com/

But it will come, for the same reason that touch came – because it’s natural, effective and personal and it enhances easer than most things our most basic need for connection.

So just maybe I can see that voice is on the upswing as an input method. And there’s a growing drive to develop voice to text applications. To use our voices for further augmenting our bodies seemingly insatiable need for effective, creative output.

Nothing can replace our human need for connection. And nothing connects like conversation. And for conversation, even in short form, there’s nothing quite like voice.

That’s why when a telco buys a voice software company, with JP in the mix, I take notice.

Because : http://www.itgarage.com/node/736

Dave

Image: ‘Levanta la voz’ – www.flickr.com/photos/62518311@N00/87225176

Technorati Tags: because effect, bt, connection, joho, jott, jp rangaswami, bt, conversation, sphere, surface, touch, voice, weinberger

Which lead to the thinking about how I do what I do at Lifekludger, documented in the “Contexts and Clues” section of the About page as — “To get from one context to another takes a Kludge!“….

So just the other week I get a ping from @fang about the book kluge —–

Then I see a tweet from @kanter asking “what is the sweet spot between personal productivity and connectedness?”

My response (below) gets quoted by her in a blog post “What’s the sweet spot between personal productivity and social productivity?” here ……

Which leads me to read Stowe Boyd’s post about “Information Overload, Schmoverload“, and his thoughts on network productivity here ……

Then I talk about it with Mike on our podcast here …..

And so there I am, reading Stowe again, critiquing more mainstream media articles on the so-called ‘curse of multitasking’ and the over emphasis placed on ‘personal’ productivity – “…the war on Flow” here ….

And what do I read? “In the wonderful book, Kluge, Gary Marcus makes a solid case that the human mind is really bad at memory, and that we have developed all sorts of compensating techniques to counter that weakness. Our memories can be demonstrably changed by simple shifts in context ….”

From Context to Context via a connected kludge.

We need connection to others and to other’s thinking if nothing more than a technique to counter our weaknesses – we need a networked life.

And this holds true in any area of application – personal or professional.

That, my networked friends, is life network productivity.

Dave

Technorati Tags: beth kanter, connection, context, fang, information, overload, network productivty, stowe boyd

I read with interest my good mate, Hugo Ortega’s UberTablet blog. Hugo was the very first guest on our Extraordinary Everyday Lives podcast and, outside of my regular colleagues, has been the single biggest supporter of my Lifekludger endeavours, and indeed myself, in a substantial way – providing equipment to try with my mouthstick especially.
So as I read in his latest blog post about how he’s been snowed under with the things he’s been doing to promote all things Tablet in Australia I’m reminded of what Mike keeps telling me and what we’ve been trying to avoid with Lifekludger.

People Don’t Scale – Networks Do.

But it pays to remember I’m talking about people here when I refer to Networks. Maybe it’s better stated:

People Don’t Scale – People Networks Do.

Hugo has found that he’s become a bottle neck – we each only have 24 hours in our day. It’s a lesson we need to heed in this age of exponential growth in available information and rapidly advancing technological growth, if we are to somehow turn it into knowledge and practical outcomes that can benefit and grow us as people enriched by the age we live in rather than enslaved by it.

Just how we grow a network that can scale and how we can do that while keeping the true to the spirit of why the network exists is another matter. It’s an issue that seems to be evolving at the same time as the rest of the technical issues are that are underpinning it. Maybe why we are seeing such attention paid to social networks.

The answer though cannot lie back in the centralised past as centralisation creates bottlenecks. It can’t rest on one point of contact, a single node. The end goal might be node focused but that doesn’t have to mean node centred.
Maybe, like so many other things, the answer lays buried somewhere in the natural world, the small pieces [people] loosely joined [network], the strength of the geo-desic dome, in the triangle of abundant, heterogeneous, creative people – the ecosystem of humanity.

Connection and Openness.

An human ecosystem based on connection and openness [sharing], focused on a node. That’s the Lifekludger vision.

Dave

Reference (from Mike coming out of discussion with JP) :

ABUNDANCE: speaks to the post scarcity world of the internet – where the cost of storage and distribution approach zero, some very different rules kick in. Kinda crucial to the longtail and the jewels therein.

CREATIVITY: coming up with new ways of doing stuff – sometimes just for the pure fun of it. Whether solving a problem or scratching an itch. Either way, leave your past solutions and old habits at the door. You are not a mindless, replaceable unit of production here!

Naked Yak 27/01/08 8:04 AM NakedBiff

Nurturing

The more we share the more we know each other, the more we have in common. In this sense, how we use the technology that is available to us is key – we should use it to share. And we are!

From Boston Now:
“People may make fun of blog or Twitter posts about what someone had for breakfast or how they like a certain video game, but it is all part of how humans build a cooperating society that works. It can’t be rushed, and it can be nurtured, even with simple text messages.”

In the long run, sharing technologies may just help bring about World Peace, by making us more aware of each other.

Not us and them, but we. (kudos to Father Bob)

Dave

Just like Laurel, I was asked on the ABC Radio Tuesday night to talk about Second Life (SL).

Evidently the show was about online relationships, not just SL, but I didn’t know this beforehand, not that it worries me. Unlike Laurel, who got bombarded with the sex and Second Life questions that seem to titillate the main stream media, I tended to focused on what SL offers me in terms of adding to the fabric of my life, the creative expression and particularly how online social networks of any kind hold the potential to lessen the effects of social isolation for a variety of people.

Second Life, as a visually rich environment full of a diverse range of people can give an opportunity for equally rich social interaction. Just like the physical world….only a different geography.

Pixels are people too.

It was interesting to be in discussion with the twitter crowd, particular thanks to @mpesce, @nickhodge & @silkcharm, before, after and as the show was on air and get comments and encouragement from them – another group of social interactions.

The show was streamed live but I don’t think podcast. However I’ve been in touch with the Producer and have a disc with the whole show on its way to me. Will see if I can make it available.

Dave

“One of the things that characterizes people living in difficult conditions is a very well-developed sense of how dependent we humans are on each other,” says Cockburn. “There’s a sense of community that is beyond anything that one encounters in the developed world. ”

“This is what allows people to survive their difficult circumstances and to support each other physically and emotionally, given the hard work and pain that they live with,”

Bruce Cockburn,

via the cockburn project

at cockburnproject.net

Dave

Photo via flickr from by Catman75

It’s been a heady couple weeks which started innocently enough with Cameron Reilly asking me about getting a little place in SL that TPN supporters could meet up. I found a good priced parcel that within a few days proved too small. I think the first time Cam dragged a building across the ground got him hooked and from there I’ve been running after him since. We then found an island cheap and started setting that up. Soon however Cam’s love of geodesic domes had us hitting the limits of our island and so we had to scale back our aspirations and adjust to what was possible with where we currently are at.

Having a presence for people to connect on SL has been great. Many who drop by are sharing and helping each other in all sorts of areas, both in and off world as well as socialising. Certainly I’ve connected with a lot of the TPN followers and using voice has helped in strengthening that connection. Twitter as a way of notifying that there’s actually people in SL has helped and Duncan Riley has written on TechCrunch about this aspect.

I’ve been pleased that there has been a strong Australian contingent in those visiting which has made quite a difference in my experience seeing how SL population online seems to fluctuate to the West Coast US time zone. However there have been visitors from listeners around the world. too.

I find it interesting that community is actually being lived out in many places and aided by the myriad of online services each adding their particular specialty to the mix. So people connected on blogs or flickr or twiter or skype also connect on SL, sometimes even on many at one (like Twitter from within SL).

Just like communities, friends don’t have to live in silos.

Break out – Join in!

Dave

TechCrunch : Twitter + Second Life =Spontaneous Web Meetspace

SLURL : The Podcast Network HQ in SL

Nick Hodge blog : @dnwallace, SecondLife Engineer

I’ve reversed my Brain Damage policy.

http://twitter.com/dnwallace

Hope I live to regret it

Dave

So, for those who might read this blog but not the other, there’s something over on my Lifekludger blog I wrote titled “Isolation kills” you might be interested in.

Isolation kills – Lifekludger

Dave

It gets even weirder, because of the friends blurring with business colleagues.

Maybe the nature and title of the relationship needs to reside in the hands of the one making the connection, not an outside imposed technological ‘cubicle’ definition.

Relationship specification and definition should perhaps be inverted and opened up – individual centred relationship context – self configurable extendable fluid relationship matrixes.  Just like cones of silence need to be. Supported by technology not defined by it.

It’s kinda like the personal social side of Docs VRM stuff.

Just a thought.

Dave

….We should use the potential openness of social networks to make a difference, to shape the future into a much more intimate place – a world of ‘we’.

This comment about ‘we’ resonated with what I read Father Bob talk a lot about – like is typified in the post quoted below. It’s even more pertinent because of the sentence about the blogging ‘we’.

I still believe that a culture (people) creates the technology it needs to bring about what it desires – and in it’s simplest form that is summed up as ‘we’.

No longer us and them, just WE!

6:45pm Wednesday August 8, all the lights go out at my place in South Melbourne. 6:50pm all the lights are back on. Lucky me.

The only torch at hand had flat batteries. The only cigarette lighter had no fuel. It’s a two storey house – dark as the tomb. What would I have done? I wasn’t prepared. Someone was. The electricity grid was prepared. Thanks to lots of fellow citizens who work all hours that the rest of us in a big city may live in comfort.

No longer us and them, just WE. Yet another example of how we depend on each other to do our duty. Ok, a computer put the lights back on but someone programmed that computer. Thank you, that someone.

Hospitals function because some people look after others, put others before themselves.

Traffic flows according to the same principle, whether on earth, sea or in the sky.

When a disaster strikes, natural or manmade, police and other essential service providers swing into action. Duty calls, some go even beyond the call of duty.

Churches do their duty when they behave as centres of hope in their neighbourhoods.

Bloggers do their duty when they act as “social” reporters. The mainstream media is jealous of this emerging information sharing phenomenon.

Pictures are taken by phone cameras and downloaded (or is it uploaded) onto MySpace or YouTube. Is this done from a sense of duty or a desire to become known?

……….

(emphasis added)

Dave

[tags]we, naked, bloggers, culture, signal, openness, sharing, giving, father bod, naked yak[/tags]

Facebook is all at once touted as saviour and villan. Dave Slusher points out what others are thinking. Cam’s talking about Telstra and being pinged by Techcrunch.

Mike’s trying (very well) to explain what it is we’re feeling as Stephen Downes echos similar sentiments and Laurel explains definitions and points us to where in Facebook the RSS is hidden.

It appears everywhere there’s a (natural) tendency to want to put things in neat boxes and try and grab some stability (sit down in the boat folks!)

JP is writing the Facebook Enterprise Epistles in parts 1, 2 and 3, with 4 soon to come (which will be my favourite as he is going to tie it into Four Pillars). Doc’s staying away (wise man is Doc, well, busy man too). There’s two very interesting juxtapositions right there from two people I admire immensely.

Certainly, to the Enterprises which see Facebook as a villan, it’s a villan that represents OPEN – even though to the people in the masses formerly know as the audience, Facebook and Web 2.0 still doesn’t seem to be as open as it ought. Showing open means different things to different folk in different spheres.

Of course, I think it’s all very interesting, even if I do feel a bit twitchy. The one thing it is, no matter where you sit or view it from, is OPEN. The discussions need to be had and aired. And we need to be patient and listen and not shoot ourselves in the foot, or anyone else in the midst of it.

Facebook or no Facebook, my friend Roy still seems to me one of the most open people I know.

Change is all around. Even this morning in Second Life, my favourite Elf had turned into a Nun. Seemed stangely odd hugging a Nun with the name Silkcharm.

However in the midst of it all, I’ve had one main thought for the last few days – Where’s my friend Kent?

I guess that thought echoes on what community really means.

Don’t worry about the technology people – the walls on that will come down with the walls around our hearts.

Peace.

Dave

Image ArtistsHeartMechanicsBrain by dkart.

Technorati Tags: doc searls, malcolm gladwell, tipping point, mike seyfang, laurel papworth, dave slusher, roy blumenthal, facebook, open, openness, closedvopen, stephen downes, jp rangaswami, kent newsome

One was JP talking about his ‘self-editing’ actions when posting a list of songs he has been listening to and his feelings about revealing to us all he listens to Boney M!

On our “social media” culture and the implied transparency he writes:

When I scanned the list I was very tempted to take out the Boney M song, but I didn’t. It felt like cheating. It felt like the equivalent of quietly kicking your golf ball out of the rough when no one’s watching. You don’t do that. It felt all wrong even though nobody was watching. So anyway I didn’t do it. And it made me ponder about the cultural and social implications of the renaissance of transparency that we’re all experiencing.

(emphasis mine)

Beyond the traditional idea of transparency, as a means of holding some external entity like public officials accountable and fighting corruption, the way we are all becoming more interconnected in different ways means that we are being called upon as individuals to hold ourselves accountable.

The focus has been turned inwards. More inversion.

If you think about the concept of Doc Searl’s ‘giant zero‘, we’d be standing on the inside of it pointing inwards with no wall between us. Or at least that’s where we seem to need to be.

Transparency assumes something in the way, a wall, a fence that, if not completely blocking the view, is somehow nonetheless a barrier. Openness means the way is clear – not just ‘see through’, but ‘go through’.

But while we might be experiencing something of a renaissance that starts with transparency, and I suggest is moving beyond it, social change never comes easy and we will need to find ways to adapt. This thought was bought home to me by something on the Naked yak blog.

Social Networks In The Limelight
Wherever there is change there is conflict. Maybe we are seeing the consequences of becoming more open.

Openness has consequences…and conflict, even if it’s within ourselves where we experience it. Certainly there’s signs on the interweb of this wrestling in regards to privacy, business ideas and personal experiences.

But opportunity is also a consequence of openness – a because effect. Opportunity for all kinds of things – connection, business, trust, markets, meaning…life.

I think it’s worth the risk.

Dave

[tags]openness, transparency, doc searls, giantzero, jprangaswami, change, shift, inversion[/tags]

jp rangaswami – confused of calcutta – http://confusedofcalcutta.com
jp is a kind of information hero of mine. something about how he sees things just clicks with me in totally perpendicular ways. he’s the cio of bt global services.

nick hodge – mungenet – http://www.nickhodge.com/blog/
Uncle Nick is a Munge Brother of Mike‘s (and more recently mine). He’s a smart cookie, all round good guy and professional geek at Microsoft…says so on his business card. likes subverting hierarchies (come to think of it, that seems a Munge trait).

hugo ortega – ubertablet blog – http://ubertablet.blogspot.com/
hugo is a tablet freak but more than that he’s a great guy. he’s also the first and rare person who actually lends me gear to test drive and review on lifekludger. and he was the very first guest on the very first show of our podcast for a reason totally not tech related and for which you’ll have to listen to find out.

beth kanter - beth’s blog – http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/
beth is a one woman non profit technology blog phenomenon who loves Cambodian kids. read her, learn from her, support her, hire her!

father bob – father bob maguire – http://www.fatherbob.com.au/
father bob is a often cantankerous, often quipping, 70-something catholic priest with a heart bigger than kent’s home state, gold as the sun and spot on with care attitude – turned new media denizen. bob appears anywhere he can get his message of helping the poor out including an abc radio show, tv, and a podcast on tpn. even if you don’t subscribe, put a tip in his foundation’s paypal account. a buck a week is good.

So there you have it. My reads for Kent’s swivel feed experiment. An eclectic mix. Hope you enjoy something from there.

Dave

Technorati Tags: nick hodge, kent newsome, jp rangaswami, ubertablet, hugo ortega, bethkanter, munge, fbmf, father bob

Mark of the beast?

I’m actually back connected to the outside world after over 48 hours of two of my phone lines being out of order – one of them my ADSL connection.

I felt helpless as I rang Telstra again and again with them saying that its a ‘major fault” (no shit sherlock!) that had taken over 200 services out with it.

Geez. Realise just how much of what I do depends on net connection.

I managed to keep an eye on services at work through my 3G phone, at times connecting via BT on Mac out through it, but doing that too long would get very expensive very quickly so kept it to a minimum.

Along with thinking about contingency plans for your online identity, best think about your connections if a lot of what you do resides in the cloud.

Well, there went my plans of upgrading this blog to WP 2 today.

Dave

“There’s really only one rule for community as far as I’m concerned, and it’s this – in order to call some gathering of people a ‘community’, it is a requirement that if you’re a member of the community, and one day you stop showing up, people will come looking for you to see where you went.”

Whatever form it takes, that’s the kind of community I want. How about YOU?

Dave

Photo by Jeff Kubina via Flickr & CC

It’s reflected in the comment I jotted down here while liveblogging. During his keynote, Daniel Ben-Horin from Compumentor made reference to the emergence of a fourth platform. Mike Twittered it at the time as this : “May 14, 2007 Mike Seyfang: Now it gets interesting – Daniel Ben-Horin: the fourth platform (the terrain has shifted)”

This whole “Social Sector”, as Laurel terms it, encompasses all the elements of ‘Free as in Freedom’ and is an economy of sharing that builds with relationship and thrives on openness and connection. All the things that amplify an individual’s life ‘signal’.

Here’s a snippet from Laurel’s post “dotSub and the fourth Social Sector”

Social Sector is destroying companies and doesn’t even notice. Government – watch out, Social Sector is only about activism, without even realising it.

Get over there and read it all. Go on…you know you want to.

Dave

(Photo by 4MAX, via flickr)

[tags]cu07, social sector, activism, fourth platform, openness, freedom, signal[/tags]

Well, I got a signal in the ether from Beth Kanter about Alison Lowndes asking how Ali could best promote the AVIF Volunteers blog to get the message out about her work with children in Kenya.

I’m no A-list blogger but have been pleased about connections my blogging has afforded me. Here’s my tips, for what they’re worth.

I can summarise them as the Four Ps

• Participate
• Plug-in
• Play
• Persist

.Participate
This could be called partake but participate is more fitting because it’s about giving. The first thing I think that anyone seeking in getting something because of blogging is to give to it. Notice I said ‘because’…that’s due to the fact that blogging is about giving, contributing…the fruit of your blogging comes because you share. (due kudos to Doc Searls’ because effect)

Get a reader and read, read, read what others write. Of course you’ll read what interests you, but read widely, assimilate the wisdom of others into your endeavours. Get rss working for you. Set up some searches on keywords about your interests and put the rss in your reader. As you get more advanced, get smart in your reading with filtering using something like Yahoo pipes.

Give your eyeballs to others and you’ll receive eyeballs.

.Plug-in
This is about immersing yourself and your blog in the culture. It’s about making connections.

Connections happen when stories overlap. So share your story openly and find other’s stories that overlap yours. The power of blogs is in their ability to connect and links are the wiring of the connection. So link, a lot. Link to people’s blogs or sites as you speak about them, give them due credit. Use trackbacks. Quotes. Provide a context in why you are using the link.

Be part of the blogging community (network). Look for stories and comment on them. Keep track of your comments. Always answer any comments you may get on your blog or anybody responding to comments you leave. Always respond to email enquiries you get from your blogging.

Better still, write a blog post rather than a comment if it’s a long comment about the article and put it in your context. Look for and write about similarities/differences etc – make sure to link to the post.

Have a consistent sign-off and name you use on comments. Try and make it unique. Build familiarity with that name. Track it with searches plugged into your rss reader.

To promote your blog, promote others.

.Play
Blogging should be enjoyable. This is a creative, digital medium, not a newspaper. The same rules don’t apply. Play with digital tools and toys.

Do mashups and blog about them. Snip bits of audio out you hear that’s relevant and put them on your blog and write about them. Snip up audio and video to convey a point or feeling. If you get an inkling of an idea, pursue it.

Follow your heart and others will too.

.Persevere
This is a building process that happens over time (unless you are a celebrity…don’t get me started)

Above all else, just keep going. Perseverance is 90% of success.

To help, set yourself short term, achievable goals. Like read x posts per week. Post x times in a given time you determine. But in the end, don’t beat yourself up about it if you don’t meet them. Remember point 3!

Know that what you write and give and contribute will last. Notwithstanding any catastrophe, what you write, create will be here indefinitely. There’s something about longevity and the possibilities and opportunities it can bring into the future by its permanence.

Track records bring rewards.

Dave

Recently he developed another of his own guides to direct his twitter use and is only going to follow twitter conversations of people who follow his own. A fair idea I reckon. He calls it his ‘Pink Floyd Policy‘.

I love Pink Floyd. As it turns out, Kent has hit on a theme song I’ve aquired since my accident, albeit in a different context. But I digress.

Twitter. I’m not signing up for twitter – yet. You may’ve seen I wrote that I’m watching my friends twitter away, including Kent, and that it’s a shame that I cannot see what one of my real, not-twitter friends is saying simply because according to twitter I’m not her friend!

So, in a sense, I’ve created my own twitter policy and it revolves around not fragmenting my life any further than it already is. You could call in my ‘Brain Damage‘ policy. I’d rather think of it as ‘Breathe‘.

You see, I realised something today. It became clear when typing in google chat to one of my very good real-life friends who, although living nearby, we can’t seem to syncronise calendars to meet up. She made the comment something about having no life yet still can’t get to see me. I returned that my time is so fragmented currently that my life’s not a life. I recorded in my google notebook :

fragmentation=existence

signal=life

So, for now, I’m resolved not to sign up for twitter, even though I see it has potential – even as a ‘signal filter’ too. But let it be known, I’m the one making the policy and hereby reserve the right to re-make it later. But this is not easy for me, being the alpha-geek I am. This is no easy line in the sand I’m drawing.

So Kent, here’s my Nod. I can hear you. If you can’t hear what I’m saying, it’s because my lips are not moving. I am still home. We all don’t have to live in the same home (silo) to communicate effectively.

Peace

Dave