Nollind Whachell

Jeff Jarvis talks about what companies can do to compete against Google in untapped areas. I couldn’t agree more on his comments on social networks.

* Social connections: I think there is a big opportunity to map social connections that already exist online. MySpace is really Rupert’s space. The internet is our space. It is, once again, already a social network. So look at it that way and make connections among the people here. Make it a way to find people. Make it a way to measure the quality of relationships: authority (as in Technorati), trust, leadership.

“It is, once again, already a social network.” Exactly! This is another reason why I left Flickr. Yes, it does a great job at creating social networks but those networks are confined to Flickr itself. MySpace does the same thing. We need to start creating social networks that are open and accessible, that can easily grab, share, and utilize the existing content on our sites already, no matter which software or service they are created with.

Doc Searls has an interesting article entitled Markets without Marketing.

My take on this is forget about “markets” altogether. Instead focus on creating relationships. And yes that means thinking about your “customers” as real people.

One thing that I’ve realize about relationships though is that creating the relationship is the easy part. The hard part is actually maintaining / sustaining that relationship.

I normally recommend YouTube to people (and was even going to have a bit on them in my first issue of Exploring Squarespace) because it’s really an easy way to add video to your site. After reading the following from a Boing Boing post regarding YouTube’s new terms and conditions though, I don’t think I’ll be recommending them further.

…you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successor’s) business…

Love this post on Boing Boing relating to a person selling an old Seven-Up print plate with the wording as follows on it (and showing a baby drinking from a Seven-Up bottle).

So pure…So good… So wholesome for everyone… including the tiniest tots!

Why I find this both hilarious and interesting is that I’ve been thinking about and seeing a lot of these kinds of things lately around me (especially in advertising).

In effect, how many things are we doing today that seem normal, yet in the future we’ll look back and say how stupid and absurd we we’re? Or put another way, the “right way” to do something today may be the “wrong way” to do something tomorrow.

When I was away on vacation this last week, I realized how much I enjoyed getting out of the city and away from the “rat race”. It’s almost as though you finally get a chance to “unplug” and therefore you’re much more easily able to find yourself again. With this in mind, I was reminded of what I said before about culture. That being that not only does our culture define us but we too define our culture.

Why this was important to me is that I realized that if we are going to live in these ever increasingly fast paced times, where changes occur at a dizzying rate, then we need something to ground or anchor us so that we don’t lose our way and more importantly don’t lose our self identity in the process. For me, cultural values are the perfect anchor because not only do they define how you want to live your life but they also emanate from you and can change the world around you. In other words, you define your culture and your culture influences those around you when you interact with them.

A great example of this was back when I used to play Counter-Strike. During that time, I was playing in a computer game in a totally fictitious make believe environment. Yet in interacting with others within that game, I still held true to the values that I strongly believed in as a person. On our Counter-Strike server where we let people play in our “world”, we were very adamant in defining the values and rules of our community’s culture and expected those within that environment to follow them otherwise they could go elsewhere. We promoted an open, caring, and sharing environment where “newbies” (those new to the game) could come and receive help without being harassed or ridiculed. As mentioned previously, this created a wonderfully enjoyable environment for everyone within our community (it almost reminded me of the TV series Cheers where you show up and everyone yells “Norm!”).

Dave Winer’s words couldn’t be more true.

They’re supposed to seek out people, to interrupt repeating and droning.

The people with the awareness and attention need to be the ones exploring and discovering those hidden on the edges instead of continually droning about themselves and their own ideas. This pushes the idea of sustainability for everyone, not just a select few. The idea is to share what you have gained with others around you, so that the entire “village” prospers and grows instead of just you.

This is why search engines are such popular and powerful points on the Web. They point away from themselves.

The PayPerPost concept just seems so absurd to me. I mean if you’re going to go that far as a business, why not just go all the way and damn well start rewarding the people out there who are already talking about your product or service. I mean if some person’s site / blog is already generating craploads of traffic to your product / company because they actually truly value your product, why not just send them a “Thank You” cheque in return for their generous selfless advertising of your product / site!

Oh sorry, how stupid of me! Why would a business pay someone for something that they are already doing for free! That would just be “bad business sense” now wouldn’t it!?

“Pardon me but did you just see which way the clue train went?”

Completed.

No idea how practical this BumpTop environment would be but it looks like one of the better demos I’ve seen of a 3D computing environment. It also emphasizes an excellent point that a perfectly clean environment isn’t always a good one. Having a somewhat loose messy environment can actually make things a little more efficient and flexible.

Dave Winer pointed out an article by Jay Rosen on the Washington Post website that indicated the following.

All sites become equidistant from the reader.

Yes the technology we use enables this equidistance but at the same time we ourselves define the distance of these sites based upon their meaning to us. The more meaningful they are to us, the closer they’ll be. The less meaningful, the farther they’ll be away. The problem today is that many of us have lost what’s truly meaningful to us and thus instead of distancing or filtering normally meaningless things, we instead overload ourselves with them. This isn’t just happening online but in the real world as well. Often times the most meaningful things in our lives are the most farthest away from us, even though they may be a few feet from us in the real world.