Connecting the Dots

Discover your inner Robin Williams

Everyone thinks their own kid is amazing, hysterical and full of magic, but the comic strip above was created by my 13 year old son (and most of his are too sophomoric or kid-centric to show here!) and this one tickled me so thought I'd show it...especially since we've had the Dad/son "naughty web sites" discussion a few times. This "unleashing your inner comic" is a category that is all over social networking sites in the form of applications, but also seems to be growing in stand-alone sites too: taking disparate elements and creating something new in a specific way.

The site he used is one I've never paid attention to: StripCreator. There is a page with a comic strip layout (you choose characters, colors, enter dialogue and more) and then you publish it. Once you've setup an account, all strips you create are available with a popup menu. Sadly, there isn't any embed capability (a shortsighted move) so displaying ones creation elsewhere isn't possible unless you screengrab like I did with the one above.

At a recent Barcamp:Minnebar in Minneapolis (profiled here on my other site, Minnov8), there were a series of "Lightning Demos" where presenters got 10 minutes to showcase their wares. One, Scribbls, had the audience in stitches as they showed how people who'd created or taken one scribbl + another scribbl could = a third one. Any scribbls in the base can be snagged and combined with another with some funny results.

The ones that had people laughing really hard I'm not going to show (hey...my Dad, sisters, aunt, wife and kids read this blog!), but suffice to say they were R-rated and very, very funny IMHO, and the one below is certainly clever.

The point is that these sorts of participative sites are ones that are simple, easy to use, fun to both view and to create within, and are sites that see people invest significant amounts of time in as their eyes are glue'ed to the pages.

Target: Are you paying attention to social media?

Last time I checked, a search for Target's house brand, Trutech, resulted in a post I wrote from May of last year (Why you should NOT buy Target's Trutech brand) being the #1 search result. Today, I noticed that it had fallen to #2 and that a "Target.com Official Site" sponsored link now appears. Perhaps that's related, but maybe not.

My friend and Minnov8 cohort, Graeme Thickins, recap of last nights Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association social media panel (which I couldn't attend) was fabulous. Best Buy, Fingerhut, Gage Marketing, General Mills and Target were all represented and had insightful things to say about what they were all respectively up to when it came to social media.

At last evening's event, Thickins reported that a metric was presented that Target's Facebook page has 33,000 members. While that's interesting, that post I wrote has had ~75,000 pageviews (almost all unique visitors) and dozens of mostly negative comments.

I've reached out on several occasions to the woman that handles PR for Target's Trutech brand; tried to connect with the video buyer; and in general reach out. Not to make a fuss, but to see if there is any awareness that they're selling electronics that -- God forbid you break the remote -- can't be operated with any of the dozens of universal remotes Target sells. Seems like something the video buyer might want to know and maybe fix while calming  the Target "guests" down, heh? (just read some of those comments and you'll see people are quite agitated).

The Minneapolis StarTribune had an article about people posting negative feedback on their Facebook area which Target took to heart and jumped on, but is Target completely clueless and unaware of the tools to scan other social media and to address obvious shortcomings?

The Day There Was No News

The Day There Was No News, originally uploaded by Pixelsurgeon.

Though this "The Day There Was No News" video was on the popular site BoingBoing and thus many of you have seen it, I wanted it available on my blog and to add a comment about it here as I found it a bit haunting to watch the scrolling news ticker at the bottom as the montage of BBC news anchors, right before signoff, sit and wait to go off camera as though there was nothing to say!

What if there was no news but only positive visions of the future?

A friend of mine is building a new, change-the-world offering focused on kids (initially 5th and 6th graders) and is all about enabling them to build a positive, vision video about their life. While there are many benefits: kids learning to communicate in a video age; learning and using hosted applications to create it; storyboarding out their vision and assembling it into a finished video; it's the essence of creating a vision video that is so powerful.

He and his team have enabled one school to date and I attended the in-school screening of the kids vision videos (there was an evening event too which I couldn't attend). You should've seen the faces of those kids who've done a vision video and shared it with their classmates, teachers, school and parents! I didn't even know these kids but connected with them on an emotional level as I looked at their hope-filled visions of the life they intend to create. It's mind-blowing that these positive feelings, beliefs, and joyful dreams live inside these little bodies and few of us ever have a chance to see how kids envision their future lives.

The evening event had parents all choked up as they watched these vision videos. My friend told me that one mom of a disabled boy came up to him afterwards, tears streaming down her face, and told him that she had no idea he had those sorts of dreams and intentions wrapped up inside his being. "I'll never look at him in quite the same way again," she said with a mix of wonder and pride in her voice. 

Nothing happens until a vision of an outcome, of the future, or of possibility appears, and it's amazing when kids (or any of us) build a video that's a vision for our lives. Our hopes and dreams, our vision of the world as it could be, shifts our thought patterns and slowly moves our thinking to then create what could be.

My friend's vision is to have a "day" where kids all over the world show their videos of hope and possibility. Imagine that day, in a world where joy and hope is the focus and fueled by positive imagery, music, sound and visions of the future, being one where it's "The Day There Was Only Hope."

Minnov8: Showcasing Minnesota Innovation in Internet & Web Technology

If you're out in the Bay area or on the other coast in New York or Boston, it's pretty easy to be smug about your culture of risk-taking, pool of top talent, and strings of successful, world-changing innovations. But as the world continues its acceleration to one that's increasingly connected and ways of collaborating make distance irrelevant, smart people will pop up everywhere and I'm convinced we'll see a flattening of the geographic advantages these pockets of innovation represent.

Six of us were bugged that there was so much going on in Internet and Web technology innovation right here in Minnesota, that when I suggested we start our own blog to showcase that innovation, there were nods of agreement and a willingness to dive in and make it real.

The biggest reason we were all interested in this blog is that these showcases and interviews are what we wanted to read and there wasn't anything like it out there.

The result is Minnov8: Minnesota Innovation in Internet & Web Technology. This past weekend was the biggest Barcamp yet, Minnebar, and over 400 people showed up to present, learn and participate. Rather than recreate everything on this blog, why not take a peek at Minnov8? This and this post are ones that will recap what took place.

Wherever you live and whatever space you care about (e.g., technology, education, greentech, etc.) and where there are a critical mass of people willing to leap in and work together as multiple authors, I'd encourage you to start one of these...it's pretty simple to do and fun to boot.

Wells Fargo: Doing the right thing...and the smart one too

After my adventure with Wells Fargo the last couple of days, I was pleased to discover this morning that they'd fulfilled the account reinstatement from their mistake and we are back in business online. What I hadn't expected was a call today from Wells Fargo Executive Vice President, Debra Rossi, who is the Head of Merchant Payment Solutions.

She apologized, made no excuses, told me about their recognition of the fundamental breakdown of their normal process (to call the customer before canceling them!), asked what she could do to make us whole, listened to me without interrupting and engaged conversationally while ending with her direct phone number in case I have any issues going forward. Tough to invest this kind of time when you're running a major part of the Wells Fargo $573B business and undoubtedly have pressing matters piling up.

Ms. Rossi will also be supplying us with a letter of apology.

This call went a long way toward making up for the frustrating adventure and embarrassing shut down of our ecommerce, and now gives us the opportunity to communicate with our offended customers (those we know about anyway) so they don't think we're no longer reputable or somehow can't handle Web commerce.

What was enlightening as well was this: my posting, her reaction and action, and a successful resolution (and, I'm certain, lots of awareness within the company so this doesn't happen again to someone else) is a great example of social media and conversational marketing in action.

Though polite queries from Ms. Rossi and others yesterday about my original post were offered as being curious in nature, the implication was now that this matter was resolved would I take it down or what was my intention?  Today's social and new media -- and blogging basics -- dictate that posts are not removed nor materially modified once published and I adhere to that philosophy and practice. It's why I amended/updated yesterday's post and am now writing a fresh one: to detail their action, call out and laud them for it, and to be transparent, but I'm compelled to leave the post up as-is.

Lastly, I always encourage my clients to do exactly what Ms. Rossi did: don't let things fester as they'll become infected like what happened to Dell Computer (remember "Dell Hell"?) and the PR disaster that rained down upon them...from which, one could argue, they're still not fully healed.

Ms. Rossi did the right thing...and the smart one too.

Where the hell is Wells Fargo? Out on the dusty trail, I presume

UPDATE: See this post for final resolution that came in a phone call from a Wells Fargo executive.

Here's a superb lesson in how not to manage your customer relationships and, especially, solve their problems.

What if your business was dependent upon online ecommerce and one of the processing chain providers cancelled your account without telling you, while the organization that owns the relationship and process cordially ignored you?

That's what happened to us, and the big problem lies with our prime relationship, Wells Fargo, and how they dropped the ball (or stuff off the stagecoach if you like that metaphor better) and have not helped me resolve the problem in any way.

There's a reason Wells Fargo uses a stagecoach as their symbol since it's illustrative of the state of their leadership in merchant services...more aligned with the 1800's than the demands of business in the 21st century.

WELLS FARGO AND PARTNERS HAVE ME IN A CHOKEHOLD
After six years of successful ecommerce running on one platform, our hosting company let us know in January they were pulling the plug March 31st. So we made a change, rebuilt our site on a new platform in the first quarter, and launched the third week of March before the old one went dark.

Our new platform required us to set up a new processing gateway (really the whole chain from payment gateway to back-end credit card processing with a third firm to bank and the money then in our account). I chose my personal and commercial banking company, Wells Fargo, since I trusted them. The bonus was there would be a single relationship point, they could set up the payment gateway with partner Authorize.net and the back-end processor, and it was actually less expensive then us going direct with the latter.

But it suddenly stopped working two and a half weeks after we launched.

For the first few weeks we received "successful transaction" settlement reports from Authorize.net and credit card orders were processing fine...and the last couple of weeks my staff flagged me that there were zeroes on these settlement reports. Since many people order by phone or fax even today -- and our sales weren't suffering dramatically and we didn't have a mass mailing going out until this past Monday -- we initially assumed it was the economic downturn, people getting acclimated to the new site and so on.

Yesterday two customers called about credit card payment failures on our site. I went online and tried two purchases myself with two different credit cards: they both failed. Digging in at Authorize.net, I was stunned to see dozens of failed transaction attempts.

You won't believe what I've gone through to get this problem resolved and no, it's still not fixed at 3pm CDT.

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UPDATE as of 6pm CDT: See the resolution at the bottom of the post.

Virtual Communications: Using Lessons Learned Elsewhere

Moviemakers of the suspense, horror and drama genres learned long ago that in order to build tension in the audience, slowly lowering the sound makes moviegoers start to strain to hear the dialogue (and yes, music and other sound is added to build to a crescendo). Tension builds, the muscles in the bodies of the audience tighten, they begin to lean forward slightly and THE HAND FLIES INTO THE SCREEN, GRABS OUR HERO AND THE AUDIENCE JUMPS IN THEIR SEATS SCREAMING!

Works every time.

Now take a technology we've used for a long time -- conference calling on the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) -- and realize that people calling in on a variety of devices (headsets, cell phones, office phones) add noise and the telephone system (and conference bridge) sample at only a measly 8khz. The result? Tension builds, our muscles tighten and we actually shift our attention (you know who you are....you surfin' the web folks when you're supposed to be listening to us on the call!) and the quality of the conference and what we're trying to communicate to one another suffers.

Let's look at Skype and how using it decreases tension and increases the quality. Sampling at 16khz means the quality is substantially higher than POTS and is so good that you can hear people breathe, move something on their desk or even click their mouse. The "resolution" of the audio is much higher and thus the call quality is better. The result? Lower tension (or none at all), the callers are relaxed and the communication is higher. Thankfully there are emerging conference bridges that can handle call-ins via Skype and sample at 16khz to maintain call quality (e.g., HighSpeedConferencing).

Let's take this one step further to other forms of social media: Imagine you hosted a party and when your guests arrived, no one greeted them at the door, clusters of people were broken up into little cliques ignoring them, and as you glanced over at them in the doorway thought, "They're on their own and are just going to have to figure out how to participate."

The Cognitive Age: Why Social Media Matters

Our economy is down, gas prices are up, jobs are being lost and outsourced, we're at 'war' with possible escalation (e.g., attacking Iran), and there is tremendous uncertainty in nearly every industry being disrupted in some way by the connecting of the globe and the increasing influence of the Internet.

Let me submit for your consideration that the impact of social media -- technologies, software and approaches connecting any of us willing to participate with them online -- is pointing the way toward new systems and behaviors that will enable us all to move higher up the value chain as we learn how, together, we can create and deliver what the world needs in new and innovative ways.

One of the best op-ed pieces I've read in some time, The Cognitive Age, was published in the New York Times on Friday by David Brooks.

In this piece he's putting globalization in context in this election cycle, which is chiefly on competition with other countries and the policies of government that ostensibly is accelerating job loss in the US. Brooks puts forth this premise which bears emphasis:

"The chief force reshaping manufacturing is technological change (hastened by competition with other companies in Canada, Germany or down the street). Thanks to innovation, manufacturing productivity has doubled over two decades. Employers now require fewer but more highly skilled workers. Technological change affects China just as it does the America. William Overholt of the RAND Corporation has noted that between 1994 and 2004 the Chinese shed 25 million manufacturing jobs, 10 times more than the U.S."

Then he outlines his central argument which, I should add, I completely agree with:

"The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked."

What does this have to do with social media and why does that category of technology matter?

It's not easy being green: Trying to buy rechargeable stuff

We're so close, and yet so far, from truly rechargeable devices requiring little or no fossil fuel.

In half an hour I'll be heading to a dealership in Minneapolis to look at (and probably buy) a Neuton rechargeable mower. They're the first ones that finally have what I need to cut my lawn with no fossil fuel needed: a 19" swath, removable battery (extras are $99) and a price-point that's reasonable though a hair on the high side ($479).

I have reservations about the device, though reviews are generally good about their older, smaller models and the battery life, cutting capability and so on. The other reservation is that this purchase is -- at a minimum -- a five year purchase cycle so I'll live with this decision for a long time. My first reaction though was "Who the hell is Neuton?" since I've always purchased name brand mowers, specifically Toro brand. I'd certainly be more comfortable buying from a major brand, but none of them offer the sweet spot of what I require like the Neuton does and, in fact, Toro no longer makes rechargeables.

Currently I drive a diesel full size car that gets an average of 30mpg if I don't drive like a crazy man. But what I really covet is a diesel or gas-assist, plug-in hybrid like the new, plug-in capable 2009 Toyota Prius. My lease runs out in November of this year, and there's no way this model will be shipping since the dealers would already have pre-order ability, which they do not.

The reason for the delay in shipping products that are rechargeable, is the current state of battery technology.  Using plugin hybrid cars as the most visible example, there is tremendous effort underway in the world (Toyota, GM the most visible) to ship a plugin hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) and Toyota's CEO stated last year that Lithium Ion batteries (needed for range and efficiency) wouldn't be ready and volume shipping across Toyota's line until 2012. Unfortunately for me and my lease end-date, I'm probably one car cycle away from having a PHEV and will undoubtedly have to buy this off-brand plugin lawnmower.

I'll say this though, when gasoline hits $5 a gallon (or more, God forbid) then demand will be so high that in November I'll be lucky to get on a waiting list for the next Prius without paying double the sticker!

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UPDATE 5:41pm: I bought the Neuton and the dealership had charged the battery so I tried it out when I got home (and my 13 year old son begged to use it and he did most of the mowing...sure hope THAT excitement lasts!). It works MUCH better than I thought it would and the second battery I purchased means I'll have zero worries of running out of juice. This is a great little product.

The Hybrid/RIA War: Adobe's Open Screen Project

Today's announcement by Adobe of the Open Screen Project has been well covered in the blogosphere. What hasn't been well covered is the story-behind-the-story and that this is a major salvo in the hybrid application war.

I've written before about the rich, internet application (RIA) space (here, here and here for example) and the momentum being built behind the tools, approaches and delivery containers with content, data and functionality mashed up and delivered in a hybrid manner.

As the world is increasingly connected and broadband/wireless speeds increase (and device types proliferate with internet connectivity), the demand for more and more functionality integrating the desktop and the internet is accelerating and the major vendors (and open source ones) are trying to figure out how to empower us to create and deliver new digital assets that customers will value and buy.

What isn't discussed much is the now primarily covert 'war' underway between Adobe with Flash (and AIR, Media Player, et al), Microsoft with Silverlight, Apple with WebKit (though little has been intimated publicly on what they might do in the RIA space or how they might leverage the stealth Quicktime installs on Windows with iTunes and the recent Safari Windows release) and Mozilla's Prism. All are focused on how to provide a winning environment upon and within which content creators, developers and strategists can deliver ever higher value and create competitive advantage for they and their companies. Whoever pulls that off will win.

Four very different approaches, market positioning, tools to create and develop, and overall go-to-market plans (most of which an outsider can only guess at) but the promise of RIA's is huge for applications and for us, whether we want to create-n-deliver or just enjoy the fruits of the labors of others: replacement for current web apps; completely new categories; and even one area we're already exploring in my company, a new type of subscription/self-updating ebook that RSS feeds, video and audio automagically appear within when a subscriber opens it and is connected to the 'net.

Who will win? I don't know yet but the winner will be the one with the best tools, the largest runtime container distribution, and the most support from the ecosystem surrounding them. The momentum is with Adobe but, then again, it was with Apple in 1980 at the dawn of the personal computing industry, and we know how that turned out.

Behind The Eyeballs: 75% of All Ads and Content Ineffective?

So many designers, user interface creators and arm-chair critics think they know what makes really compelling content, how ads should be displayed or even how a web site or application should be delivered. But do they? Do any of us really know what it takes to present and communicate content and ads that are truly compelling, cut above the noise, and garner attention from an increasingly scattered audience who have in front of them an overwhelming and accelerating number of choices?

One company is staking a claim to an understanding of the cognitive landscape behind our eyeballs with their quantitative and measurable solutions: NeuroFocus (via AdLab). Dr. A.K. Pradeep, CEO of NeuroFocus, said this in a follow-up interview with Media Post: "We've found that about 75% of all content--not just advertisements--is not neurologically optimal."

"For example, consumers interpret info on different parts of a screen with different sections of their brain. [...] So an advertiser or TV show producer has reduced the engagement potential and effectiveness of their content from the onset if the bulk of the textual and numerical info is placed on the left side--with the imagery or brand logos on the right."

The company obtains their results through biometric measurements. That means volunteers strap on a skull cap with electrodes on it and engage with the content and advertisements of which they're presented. The thing that troubles me a bit, is that like the uncertainty principle in quantum physics, my experiences have shown that when observers know they're being measured their behavior and cognitive processing changes. It does seem, however, that NeuroFocus' research at least provides a baseline from which content and ads can be more precisely delivered. Then further refinement can occur (with we unaware and passive brains behind eyeballs) with other analytical tools or simple measures of clickstream data.

The Nielsen Company (the grandaddy of TV measurement) has made a strategic investment in NeuroFocus so they're obviously on to something.

The promise (to advertisers) of the shift to internet-based ad delivery is measurement and to us (the online user) it's ad relevancy, contextualized or personalized ads. Rarely does significant  and ongoing ad placement occur without measurement nor do venture capitalists sit still for long as ad-dependent-for-revenue companies attempt to drive user engagement and expansion of our involvement with their offering...and thus garner advertisers.

Solid measurement is healthy. Best practices more so as they're indicators of actions we can take with understandable and quantifiable returns. It's still pretty early in the evolution of the internet, but knowing what to do, how to deliver it and how to measure it is key to economic success on the 'net and continued innovation.

To read more, take a peek at this well done New York Times article here and the CEO has a couple of mp3's and a white paper here.

Collaboration shouldn't be like driving by keyboard

Back in 1984 I was a manufacturer's rep for a computer company called Apple and they had this new computer called Macintosh. Using the mouse was foreign to most people and we'd put on seminars to teach them how to manipulate a mouse and try out this new fangled computer and it's graphical user interface or GUI ("OK everyone...now drag the arrow to the top left of the screen. Good. Now drag it to the bottom right. Good. Now click once on what looks like a manila file folder. Good." Yes, it was that sort of brain-dead-simple movements that gave people a feel for a GUI since no one we were presenting to yet had a clue.

One of the metaphors I remember using to help people understand this new paradigm of controlling a computer was comparing this new mousing method -- and how fluid, intuitive, fast and seamless it was -- to driving using a computer keyboard and typing out commands vs. just using a steering wheel. I'd start off...

Imagine if we had to use a keyboard to drive a car! To start the car moving you'd type in "Go 30" and the car would begin to accelerate to 30mph. "TL 20" for turning left 20 degrees" "Alt-B" for braking. Then "OH MY GOD, THERE'S A WOMAN WITH A BABY CARRIAGE!!" and I'd pretend to be all flustered and scrambling to quickly locate the Alt-B keys to stop the car (trust me...it seemed pretty funny 20+ years ago).

Using today's virtual worlds is somewhat like typing commands vs. fluid steering with a wheel. While I enjoy Second Life (SL), the learning curve necessary to build an avatar, learn how to move through the SL space is far too daunting to all but the most highly motivated among us. While flying in-world is fun and it's cool, getting around isn't as easy as it appears in recorded SL videos or perhaps how devotees of SL would have you believe.

To use SL in a business setting for casual use isn't practical (I've tried) since the training and learning costs are too high and get in the way of the intended reason and outcome of getting together to collaborate in the first place! Can't tell you how much time I've invested with people to get them to stop flying and learn how to come back to ground and walk and I'm not terribly patient when it comes to coaching people through the basics when we've got stuff to be accomplished.

Qwaq understands these limitations and has a different approach...one that's simple with relatively short learning curves. I've written about Qwaq before and their approach (e.g., building upon the open source Croquet engine), but haven't looked at them for quite awhile. Did this afternoon and it's clear they've been making great strides and even have an emerging ecosystem (e.g., 3D Templates).

Qwaq isn't as high resolution or functional as an SL, but that's not their target market and again, the biggest plus to Qwaq's approach is that the learning curve is really short. Anyone with face-time in front of computer for any length of time can quickly get up-to-speed and use it.

Qwaq was just showcased in analyst firm Gartner's latest report, "April 2008 “Cool Vendors in Collaboration and Social Software, 2008” and the software is worth a look if you're connecting with people virtually and would like a persistent room (i.e., work on stuff and leave it there for future work), a virtual meeting space and an enterprise-ready virtual environment that emulates the real world nicely with all the advantages of a location agnostic collaboration space.

Simple but Effective Podcasting Overview

Found this easy to understand podcasting overview on LaughingSquid (from Common Craft) and thought you might like it. Not because you need to know about podcasting perhaps, but rather how concise and fun it is to watch. More of our communication needs to be this way!

Can you point me in the direction of content monetization?

My recent post We, the people, need a strong media, saw several good comments but Tom Kieffer provided a link (Clay Shirky) that led me to an essay by Nicholas Carr The Great Unbundling: Newspapers and the Net. It's worth a read and really got me thinking about any content offering staying viable today, whether it's newspapers, TV, magazines, blogs or even a small newsletter for a highly targeted market.

Carr outlines near the beginning, "The shift from scarcity to abundance in media means that, when it comes to deciding what to read, watch, and listen to, we have far more choices than our parents or grandparents did. We’re able to indulge our personal tastes as never before, to design and wrap ourselves in our own private cultures. The vast array of choices is exciting, and by providing an alternative to the often bland products of the mass media it seems liberating as well. It promises, as Chris Anderson writes in The Long Tail, to free us from “the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare” and establish in its place “a world of infinite variety.”

Though he starts out talking about the "economics of culture," he quickly gets into an examination of the issues surrounding content abundance (i.e., new media) and the economics of traditional media and the unbundling of it in an online age as it pertains to newspapers. I was confused as to the point of his essay since media downtrending is obvious and I was hoping he'd posit a fundamental or obvious solution.

I still think newspapers need blog networks but those thoughts are a tactical manifestation of a larger strategic one: in an age where content is a commodity and extremely simple to create and distribute, those who can edit, classify, aggregate and harness content will add value to that content and gain a critical, mass audience, enjoy monetization opportunities and remain viable.

Why we, the people, need a strong media

My wife and I are reversing our previous decision to cancel the New York Times Sunday edition because of an article this morning. After reading it, I had the profound realization that we, the people, need a strong, independent counter to mis-information, spin or positioning that any Administration might push on the American people...

...and bloggers aren't it.

The gist of the article is that the Bush Administration and the Pentagon were architects of a coordinated, orchestrated campaign to position retired military leaders as spokes-puppets for the Administration, going on network news as "military analysts" with either veiled or overt obfuscation of their ties and that they'd been spoon-fed "messaging" about Iraq to carry forward.

According to this article, many of these "analysts" have close ties and affiliations with the defense industry so their livelihoods and incentives are directly aligned with the military industrial complex and the trillions of expenditures on defense and the 'war' on Iraq and nebulous terror.

One paragraph leapt out at me and at that moment realized there isn't a snowballs-chance-in-Hades bloggers could or would perform this type of investigative journalism...or even afford to do what the Times can do, take the time necessary to investigate and then write a report like this article, or even have the power to stand up to coordinated message manipulation by the government (my bolding):

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

I've not yet seen any shift in media power from 'old' to 'new' media that could rival the pulpit a major news daily wields, mainly because of the fracturing of information distribution (and the attention we pay to any given source) today's Internet is driving. Are you? If so, point out to me the trusted, non-opinion but fact-based investigative blogs or blog networks -- ones that are 'new' media vs. extensions of 'old', traditional media like a New York Times blog -- and I'll take it into consideration though I'll wager there aren't any.

If the downtrending of news business models continues to deteriorate and more of us get our news from comedy shows like The Daily Show or Colbert Report -- or from lightweight, opinion-driven news sites like Huffington Post or Slate -- true investigative journalism is what suffers as does our ability to learn counterpoints and balanced or alternative viewpoints (though ironically, one of my favorite "News 2.0" articles is here from Huffington Post but is still opinion).

What do you think?

Photojournalism: Every Career Affected in an Internet Age

Last night I was delighted to attend the National Geographic LIVE! event with photographer Sam Abell, and came away with something I didn't expect about professional photography in today's internet age. More on that in a bit, but first a story on how I came to attend this talk and some impressions.

I've been clear while on this new adventure Connecting the Dots and fulfilling my intention as a management consultant in all things internet, web and social media, that I had to be attuned to "the signs" pointing me along my path. These signs are usually tiny and insignificant unto themselves -- and therefore most of us miss seeing them -- but I've been hyperaware and on the lookout for over two years.

As an amateur photographer, I'm always seeking ways to improve my photography through making my lens clearer and ensure I'm using the right filters. This isn't the camera lens or filters I slap on to them, but rather is the lens through which I view the world (my perceptions, prejudices, curiosities) and the mental filters I apply to a photograph's outcome (knowledge, ego, and my inner drive to show technical competence) and strive to convey in a photo what I'm feeling inside.

Last week I scanned my bookshelf and grabbed an early 1990's book on photography (from National Geographic (NG)) to re-read it. Flipping through this nicely done smallish paperback, I settled on a sidebar about the techniques of this guy, Sam Abell, and how he'd almost been fired by his first editor for his dark and non-use of the tricks-of-the-trade (e.g., fill-in flash for underexposed subjects on a bright background). There was something about his approach that resonated with me and caused me to go back and look at his photos and dwell on them awhile.

Two days later I'm on my way to an appointment and Minnesota Public Radio has an interview running with him that I listened to for 45 minutes. Then I read a newspaper article about him. Later that day I come across the event linked to above and broke into a smile...

...."OK, I get it and see the signs," I thought, and bought tickets to last nights event.

Are you even aware of what's available on the Web?

The good new and bad news of the Web: There is so much innovation, so many resources, such a wealth of content and now millions of participants to connect with and pay attention to, it's sometimes easy to overlook the fact that the global database is being added to every moment of every day and ironically making it tougher to find stuff.

Besides some of the obvious-to-my-tech readers directories like Go2Web20, a listing of Web 2.0 hosted applications (2,294 listings as of Thursday, April 17, 2008), the Open Directory project, Sourceforge listing of more than 174,000 open source packages or even such more narrowly focused sites like one for content management systems (OpenSourceCMS), it's the acceleration of content repositories that stun me and yet finding them is more challenging than ever.

At issue is the amount of energy investment required to seek and find what you need. Here's one example: I have a friend in need of access to huge numbers of photos for his K-12 education initiative. Of course, these need to be unrestricted-license images so kids and teachers can use them with abandon. Besides some of the obvious education offerings from key providers, I've placed 19 links to sites I hadn't heard of before (click on 'Continue reading...' below) but finding them took me nearly two hours of trolling to discover and this list is FAR from comprehensive.

This illustrates my point: Without considerable time invested coupled with some searching competence, it's tough to find all of the great stuff that already exists on the Web and is being added to daily.

This is one reason that I'm cautiously optimistic about the semantic Web summed up thusly: "Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Finnish word for "cat", reserving a library book, and searching for a low price on a DVD. However, a computer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web."

My hope is that one day, any of us will be able to perform one search, computers will take on more of the tedious task of determining what's relevant, and every single reference to "free education photo" offerings that meet my criteria will appear in a way that a human-directed listing now can.

Bye-Bye Northwest Airlines

No question that there are too many airlines and, with fuel costs a negative impact to the bottom line, consolidation was inevitable. Delta and Northwest Airlines merging to become the world's largest carrier makes complete sense.

Took a moment this morning to head over to the Minnesota Historical Society web site and search the photograph collection for Northwest Airlines and found these. It's always fun to look back and see what times were like in the early days, and force myself to compare-n-contrast it with what I'm doing right now and what it will be like for my kids to look back on 2008.

No question it will seem quaint that Mom and Dad struggled with finding wireless internet access; that we used that silly Twitter thing; that Second Life avatars were what we used to represent ourselves; that we didn't have machine augmentation allowing our thoughts to just jack into the 'net and connect with others with our thoughts.

Though it's easy to brush off, this development is a melancholy one for many of us here in Minnesota. We've seen many brands go away (e.g., Dayton's, Norwest Bank) and others explode (Sound of Music turning into Best Buy Company) but it doesn't make it any easier to watch.

I doubt we'll see any improvements in leg room, seat width or less crowded planes. Air travel truly is a Greyhound bus in the sky and is one of my least favorite activities...though one I (and everyone, I'd guess) will put up with since it beats driving, the train, an actual bus or not going at all.

Digidesign Update: Call from Dave Lebolt, VP, GM

After my rant and a subsequent email to Digidesign's VP and GM Dave Lebolt (and their head of public relations) Mr. Lebolt called me this morning.

The intent of my post was to get attention. To be a scream loud enough to be heard from Minnesota to California. But not just so I could get attention, but rather attention paid to customers who paid money for product no longer functional coupled with an internal system at Digidesign not geared to today's customer service and conversational marketing that I and the market demands.

We engaged in a fairly lengthy conversation about them, Apple, supporting the varieties of products and plugins they do, their people and the systemic infrastructure they have (e.g., their customer relationship management system) and what they need to have and do with it (e.g., interact with customers through alerts; implement RSS feeds so we don't have to go back to their site over-n-over again to check and see if updates are available).

He also offered to buy back the MBoxPro2. Yes, I could've been one of "those" customers and leapt on the offer, but that was not my intent and I'd rather they get the Leopard upgrade out and tell me that it's ready so I don't have to go and poke around their site every week. As a management consultant in social media where transparency, conversational marketing and engaging with people who increasingly demand a voice is one of the key tenets of success in today's marketplace, I have to eat my own dog food and bring attention to something so wrong and customer conversations so broken as my experience with Digidesign these last several months.

Competing (and being discovered) in a Time of Utility Computing

Unless you are actively seeking a particular solution or invest enough time looking at hosted Web applications like I do (once per quarter over the last nine quarters I've looked at nearly every Web hosted application on the major lists), then you'll undoubtedly miss seeing huge value Web applications like One True Media (OTM).

A friend had a specific business objective in mind and went on the hunt for a solution that would fit his need. He searched in vain and one day I happened to be doing my once-per-quarter surfing of sites and came across OTM and sent him the link.

"It's absolutely PERFECT!" he exclaimed and ended up choosing and aligning around it. Helping him out with communications and training around his initiative, I've spent significantly more time within OTM than I have using its competitors (e.g., Scrapblog, Vuvox, Flektor and Animoto), but I've been stunned with OTM's features, the "fit and finish" of the application, and how it is perfect for consumers interested in putting together mashed-up montages of video, images, music, and text slides. The bonus is inserting that finished creation either within a theme or not and then having the option to embed it in their social network/blog/website or to make a DVD (for a full review of OTM, see the excellent one done by one of the most under-appreciated and best reviewers of technology on the planet, Robin Good, here).

But will OTM survive? Will all of the ones I mentioned above in this category be able to survive as it becomes easier and cheaper to create and deliver hosted Web applications and thus competitors to arrive in this space?

I'm using OTM as a "poster child" for what I see as THE biggest issue of our new, social media/Web application/Internet-centric world: there are so many phenomenally good and valuable offerings out there that it's almost impossible to be discovered and build critical mass needed to survive -- and this problem is only going to get worse as utility computing accelerates making it easier-n-easier for competitors to appear.