"What Makes a Digital Nomad?"

An intriguing whitepaper whose crowdsourcing was orchestrated by Bruce Eric Anderson at Dell. Looks fascinating, but I'll have to print it out to read it properly.

CCCC2009 theming contest: Congratulations and certificate

Some of you may remember that I ran a theming contest for CCCC2009 last year. CCCC's call for papers was about to come out, and I had found previous years' themes ("Making Waves"; "Taking it to the Streets") to be maddeningly vague and insufficiently creative. So I called for people to tweet their suggestions for CCCC2009 conference themes.

The results were creative and outrageous. I had trouble picking a winner, but in the end my committee (which had a total of one member) selected what we thought best epitomized a conference theme. James Ford, a grad student at UC-Santa Barbara (and, coincidentally, one of my former MA students at Texas Tech) came up with the winning entry.

I plan to present him with a certificate. But I also wanted to share it with the world. So here it is. Brilliant work, James. I foresee a bright future for you as a conference committee member.

"This is exactly how an ideologically-oriented newsgathering operation / noise machine / echo chamber should work."

Manuel Castells argues in The Power of Identity that since democracy is now mediated through electronic media, to gain a groundswell of the vote, parties veer toward the political center. In the absence of sharp policy differences, scandal becomes the mode of differentiation.

We've seen our share of scandal in the last several electoral cycles, and certainly in the last one, in which thinly-sourced charges of racism, sexism, and even false pregnancy were leveled. Writing for The Next Right, Patrick Ruffini argues that Republicans have fallen behind in the muckraking as left-leaning bloggers work on "taking out" rising Republican stars before they can aspire to national office. And lest we misunderstand him, he sets us straight:

In case you're expecting me to bemoan this as the birth of left-wing hack journalism, that's where I part company. This is exactly how an ideologically-oriented newsgathering operation / noise machine / echo chamber should work. The real threat here is not what all of you were booing in Tucker Carlson's speech at CPAC. The New York Times is merely marketing refined gasoline at the pump. The place where it's being drilled, refined, and transported is in the blogosphere, where the likes of Daily Kos and TPM [Talking Points Memo] tease out initial leads that are too hot for the NYT.

The joke here is that the right is supposed to have an apparatus that does exactly what TPM does on the left.

The problem with legitimizing scandal as a tactic for decapitating political parties, of course, is that it discourages normal, well-adjusted personalities from running for national office.

Question and answer: Will phones be the new laptops?

Mark Cuban asks if phones will replace laptops, and speculates on how this might be possible: wireless keyboards and monitors designed to interact with the little processor on your phone.

Of course, this is not an entirely new direction, and it makes total sense for those who mostly use their computers for communication, office software, and web surfing. (It makes less sense for resource-intensive applications.) Indications are that the phone and desktop will continue to converge, especially given that Nokia's dipping its toe into the laptop business. Android is also migrating to netbooks. Look for more of this in 2009-2010.

Interactive Austin 2009

I'm excited to be speaking at Interactive Austin 2009, a conference whose goal is "to explore how social media enhances business and marketing strategies and adds to the bottom line." Austin's social media community is vibrant, and I think this event is going to showcase that fact nicely.

If you're in Austin or plan to be, please do check it out. Monday, April 27, Norris Business Center. I think it's going to be a blast.

I'm Outta Here - is here

The book I'm Outta Here, about coworking, is now for sale at Lulu.com.

Crowdsourcing for tips

A few minutes ago, Twitter informed me that someone named bountystorms had begun following me. I clicked through to the stream, then to the listed website, BountyStorms.com.

The basic idea behind BountyStorms should seem half-familiar to anyone reading my Twitter feed or blog. When I wanted a good popular-oriented name for my new project, I crowdsourced it: I gave my followers the parameters, then invited them to submit their own ideas. I didn't come up with this idea, but I've found it to be really handy for generating ideas than I never would have produced on my own.

BountyStorms is a site for submitting ideas to be crowdsourced. Unlike run-of-the-mill crowdsourcing, though, BountyStorms involves paying a cash prize for the winning idea. That is, it connects a network of BountyStorms readers with people who need a service - and are willing to pay (paltry) cash for it. Skimming the site, I see requests for "Product name for a leading edge energy appliance" ($20), "Creative Ideas for Valentines" ($5), and "Catchy title for Work Life Balance/Resilience workshop ..." ($20). Some of these problems are traditionally those of PR or marketing firms, while others are more along the lines of self-help.

Will the service take off? This is the sort of service that could take advantage of stray minutes in people's lives. If it can attract enough clever readers, it might become useful. So far, though, the number of people weighing in on each idea is fairly small.

Thoughts on how the economic downturn will reshape the world

We're all talking about the impact of this economic precipice, right? Instead of venturing my own analysis, let me point to two analyses that are very different but have similarities.

One is Richard Florida's analysis in the Atlantic, entitled "How the Crash will Reshape America." Many in my Twitter stream have pointed it out. Florida sets up his argument this way:

In his 2005 book, The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman argues, essentially, that the global economic playing field has been leveled, and that anyone, anywhere, can now innovate, produce, and compete on a par with, say, workers in Seattle or entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. But this argument isn’t quite right, and doesn’t accurately describe the evolution of the global economy in recent years.

In fact, as I described in an earlier article for this magazine (“The World Is Spiky,” October 2005 [link opens PDF]), place still matters in the modern economy—and the competitive advantage of the world’s most successful city-regions seems to be growing, not shrinking. To understand how the current crisis is likely to affect different places in the United States, it’s important to understand the forces that have been slowly remaking our economic landscape for a generation or more.

Florida goes on to argue that we'll see some real impact shear at the level of region and city, not nation, and that the disadvantaged will be those regions and cities that lack dense social connections. That doesn't do justice to Florida's argument, but I want to note that this analysis is at least somewhat consistent with Castells' argument.

The other analysis comes from a paper that David Ronfeldt posted, along with its responses. Ronfeldt dusted off and reframed a paper from a few years ago, suggesting that we start thinking in terms of the "network-state." In the comments, one person suggests that we're on the cusp of radical decentralization in favor of rhizomatic constructions - and that the result will be less effective asymmetric warfare (e.g., terrorism) since the disappearance of state centers will mean lessened asymmetry. Another points to the response of the P2P Foundation, which pushes farther along the lines of "peer-governed civil-society networks," which are described as "the great innovation of the last decade."

Update on titling my new project (bumped to top)

Originally posted 2/9/09; update below.

A few days ago, I invited people to suggest titles for my new project, a popular text (blog, book, probably both) about loose work arrangements in Austin. So far, the entries have included the following:

• cgbrooke: Attack of the Telecommutants!!
• spinuzzi: adhocracy
• spinuzzi: "the pick-up economy"
• billhd: Quirk* *(Co-Work, really fast)
• johnmjones: "The Clay Spin Zone."
• aprudy: Ac-knowledging Austin
• johnmjones: 'The Funtastic Workatoriums of Dr. Clay'
• billhd: Austin's "Invention Class"
• mkgold: Working Out: How Social Networks Reshape Organizational Structures
• jdhancock: "The Clay Spin."
• honeyl: Ambient Workability
• honeyl: Office Dispersion
• honeyl: Atelier Diaspora
• siquecountry: alt!Office
• siquecountry: teleCommune: jellys, conjectures and other alternative workspaces
• cgbrooke: Smart Jobs
• cgbrooke: The Workplace of Crowds
• ifss: http://is.gd/iwdO
• ifss: Cutting Loose in Austin: How the Live Music Capital became the Web Worker Capital
• socialtechno: CrowdWhoring
• socialtechno: MeLancing
• socialtechno: DeliWorking
• socialtechno: CrunkArbeit
• siquecountry: Business Casual
• siquecountry: Co-Work: Using loose places and Jelly spaces to work, freelance and connect.
• jcsalterego: The Untold Stories of Digital Nomads
• jobsworth: weird work
• jobsworth: wrok
• jcsalterego: Digital Nomads

There are some real gems in here. Do you have a favorite -- or do you think you have a better idea? Why don't you tweet with the hashtag #spinuzzi-project and I'll add your feedback to the list. If you don't have a Twitter.com account, feel free to drop your suggestions here in the comments. Looking forward to seeing what you think.

Update 2/15:

• People have added the following entries:
• spinuzzi: Spliced
• averysmalldog: Work 2.0
• twitt_ercoryb: the real cloud computing
• spinuzzi: hyperworkspace
• @spinuzzi "adhocracy"
• djteknokid: office 2.0
• djteknokid: workspace 2.0
• spinuzzi: So close in, yet so far out
• spinuzzi: Work on everywhere
• spinuzzi: Outer workspace
• johnmjones: Jelly
• cwood: Working Where You Work Best
• jade_girl work space
• spinuzzi: work, spaced

These are some great suggestions. But reading through them, I'm having trouble finding a direct hit, and I think that's because the project is still too underdefined. So I'll let this cook a while longer, define it more carefully, and move from there. Thanks so much, all, for some great suggestions.

Twitter, the Google of right now

TechCrunch has a good post today on the significance of Twitter. Erick Schonfeld points out that a datastream like Twitter provides "a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine." And the information returned by such as search is very different from that returned by Google, in which information is privileged by number of incoming links (among other factors, of course -- I don't want to oversimplify Google's algorithm).

The difference, Schonfeld argues, is that Google captures people's intent. Twitter captures trends ("what people are doing or what they are thinking about").

That, he says, is why Twitter has merited another round of funding. And if I can inject my own analysis here, this is also why social media types have gone crazy over Twitter and its potential: Google is for marketing with SEO, SEM, and paid search, but Twitter is for detecting trends and holding conversations in real time. Unbelievably, Google can now be considered the king of the "slow" media.

But so far Twitter has not done much to capitalize on its search potential: Summize, which is now search.twitter.com, is still a fairly rudimentary search engine. Let's hope that this new round of funding is applied to cracking that nut.

Homeless teens need cell phones too?

That's what Jeff Perron argues. Homeless teens have no fixed address (obviously) and no way to be contacted, which makes finding a job very difficult; mobile phones allow employers to contact them. Perron argues that mobile phones also allow agencies to mass-text health information and services information.

Perron makes a pretty good argument, one that will sound better as mobile service costs drop (assuming they actually do) and especially if SMS costs drop. I'm interested in how this argument seems to be a continuation of universal service (in its second aspect, that of providing inexpensive access to all interested households).

"I'm Outta Here!"

The new book on coworking, I'm Outta Here, is going to launch soon on Lulu.com. Cruise by the website to learn more about it. I've been watching chatter about this book on Twitter and NotAnMBA, and am really looking forward to seeing it.

Reading :: Social Media Marketing an Hour a Day

Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day
By Dave Evans

I'm not terribly familiar with marketing, but I know that some social media marketers were fairly forward-thinking regarding the broad social implications of social media. The Cluetrain Manifesto was an early contender, but many others have followed. And they've built their arguments on the same essential insight that Cluetrain provided, which is that social media entails a shift from broadcast to dialogue, impressions to conversations, and information to participation. Many fields and disciplines are feeling the effects of social or participative media on their own practices, most obviously marketing and advertising, but also journalism, education, and of course my own subfield, technical communication.

Turning these disciplinary ships takes a long time, so the message bears repeating and developing. And that's where Dave Evans' Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day comes in. Evans has been in marketing for a long time and has done much of that work in social media, so he has developed a fuller understanding of the media's permutations and how to operate in them. Here, he supplies background, operating frames, and even exercises and worksheets to get marketers up to speed on the new landscape. He starts with the basic message of The Cluetrain Manifesto -- becoming a proper social media marketer means giving up control and instead participating in conversations in order to build up the social capital that affords influence in that space -- and develops that message in terms of practical applications. For instance, he extends the traditional funnel model into a social feedback model, taking into account the lateral communication among purchasers and potential purchasers. In this new space, he says, marketing efforts are less about what the marketer has to say and more about what the consumer needs to know now (p.86).

The social web, he points out, is being reorganized around connections between sites rather than around specific sites (p.265).

With these lessons in mind, he develops metrics for social media marketing, crystallizing around content, relevance, and impact (p.295).

Although the book is for social media marketers, I see many potential lessons for other content providers such as technical communicators. In particular, holding conversations with users, facilitating their connections, and reorganizing around web services rather than tightly controlled sites are all steps that could be productively implemented in formal documentation. I hope they will be - and Evans' book is a good place to begin thinking about what this would entail.

Un-Googling

When I am trying to figure out a particularly difficult question, I reflexively think about how to formulate Google queries. But how would you formulate a Google query for a question like this one?

What the resteraunt that has peacocks walking around on the lawn. It's near downtown in a old mansion type building?

That question came from someone I follow on Twitter. I supposed he could have Googled for "austin restaurant peacocks" and sifted through the results. Instead, he tweeted it. And within five minutes, he had the answer ten times over.

This incident is a nice example of how crowdsourcing can provide an alternative to search engines, or more accurately, how the ongoing differentiation of our online space can lead to the development of different information niches.

You can also see why relating status messages to geolocation can open up new possibilities for archiving and extracting this sort of local knowledge for such questions. Yet another reason why Google might be interested in that application space.

Title my new project

So I've been working on a new project here in Austin, based on recent work but ideally slanted toward a more popular audience. I'm interested in how people are using looser work arrangements in order to perform knowledge work in Austin.

And I need a great title for the blog, book, or whatever comes from this project.

I'll be

• Visiting coworking spaces and interviewing their proprietors and customers
• Visiting Jelly locations and interviewing people who work there
  
• Visiting and interviewing freelancers, contractors, subcontractors, and sole proprietors
• Visiting and interviewing people working in loose arrangements within the tech industry
• Visiting and interviewing telecommuters

I'll be examining how they get their work done, how they replace organizational resources with their own, how they share resources, how they network, and how they socialize. Based on Manuel Castells' studies, I think that Austin is one of the leading edges of development of these alternate working arrangements. It's a fascinating story that needs to be told, and I'm interested in telling it.

But I need a title! Think along the lines of something Clay Shirky or Malcolm Gladwell might use. Punchy, relevant, expressive, interesting to a popular audience.

Have something in mind? Tweet me your suggestions.

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I'll credit the person whose title I use.

More background here:

• Castells and work structure
• Zuboff and Maxmin and federations
• Coworking
• Knowledge work

Jaiku is gone, but Google unveils location-based service that does what I thought Jaiku would do

I predicted several times in the run-up to the Android launch that Jaiku - which combined the microblogging of Twitter and the location-based service of BrightKite - would be a key part of the launch. I was wrong - Jaiku never did come out of closed beta, and now has been turned into an open-source project unsupported by Google.

But functionalities tend to flake off of these acquired projects and float into other Google projects. Today, Google announced Google Latitude, which floats on top of Google Maps for desktop and mobile. As Google's "About Latitude" page states:

With Google Latitude, you can:

• See where your friends are and what they are up to
• Quickly contact them with SMS, IM, or a phone call


• Maintain complete control over your privacy

Enjoy Google Latitude on your phone, PC, or both.

It rolls out for Android, Blackberry, and WinMo phones that run GMaps 3.0, and for the iPhone and Sony Ericsson phones soon.

Not just owning two phones simultaneously - using them simultaneously

That sounds extreme even for me, but apparently it's becoming more common. Phones are

Optimized for one-handed operation. It means we can rather easily learn to use two phones in two hands. This gives the mobile a powerful advantage over other digital mass media, whether the PC or Playstation or Digital TV - we tend to only consume one of those at a time. But we can rather easily consume two distinct mobile phone based services - on two separate phones - from two competing networks even - simultaneously. Or, we can consume mobile services while we are supposedly paying attention to the other older media such as our broadband internet (sixth mass media) or TV (fifth mass media) or a video game (ie recordings, the second mass media channel).

"Who's Undercutting Obama?"

My spotter sent me this article in which a journalist complains that Obama's press office is not providing customary access to journalists. He complains:

I have called 202-456-2580, the main number for the White House press office, going back to the Nixon administration. Never has anyone in the press office declined to spell his name, give his job title, or hung up, even after the kind of aggressive exchanges that used to be common between journalists and flacks—and between journalists and high government officials, for that matter.

And he points out that while the Bush administration edited briefing transcripts, the Obama administration has gone farther, only posting snippets. He sees these as indications that Obama's promise of a more transparent White House is being undercut. He continues:

Politicians make choices and have to live with them. How they deal with journalists—especially whether they are candid and direct about dealing in facts—sets a tone that will influence the administration’s ability to communicate its messages, especially those Obama messages that run counter to deeply ingrained cultural myths about the economy, taxes, and the role of government.

Talking to working reporters is not the only way to communicate with the people. The Obama administration seems to be embracing direct delivery of its messages via the whitehouse.gov website and YouTube. They seem to be saying “We don’t need the press to communicate our messages to the people. We can talk to the people ourselves.”

Okay, so let's unravel this a bit. Journalism has lost a lot of traction because, in effect, everyone has a printing press: electronic distribution is fast, inexpensive, and distributed, meaning that individual journalists don't have the advantage of positioning themselves at one end of the media pipe. So journalists aren't accorded the respect or level of access they were once given, simply because the White Househas other, more direct ways to get their message out. I'm not surprised that the Obama administration has figured this out, as the Bush administration did, nor that the Obama administration is going farther along this path.

On the other hand, when journalists lose their near-exclusive access to the upper administration, they don't get to ask tough questions directly to those administration members. Right now, the new media don't either. The new, distributed media architecture means that everyone can be an op-ed columnist or beat reporter, but it also means that individuals don't have enough individual influence to force their way into policy discussions. (That is, media has become "flat," but government is still hierarchical.)

So perhaps we're coming into an interregnum as old media power arrangements collapse but new media arrangements have not yet coalesced. The result, under these conditions, will most likely take the form of White House broadcasts (via YouTube and the official website) along with aggregation of feedback channels (e.g., comments, blog trends). This is quite potentially a recipe for poll-driven propaganda.

I'm hoping that we will quickly see other permutations. One possible model is that of the star blogger who has built up an enormous audience via network effects. Obviously this model, still under considerable development, has drawbacks as well as advantages.

"Not a stupid idea"

Actually, I thought it was a smart -- but obvious -- idea: A dock for your smartphone that allows it to extend its capabilities to the desktop. That only makes sense as smartphones become more powerful and the processor overshoots the capabilities of the built-in peripherals. What I don't get is how something this basic can get patented.

Reputation Systems

Randall Farmer and Bryce Glass are authoring their book on reputation systems in a wiki. Right now most of the chapters are summaries, but keep coming back and you'll see the book in process. Looks great - reputation systems and other forms of social evaluation are going to be critical in the near future, and they've been underexplored, so this book is really timely.