Offline

Posted by on Aug 31, 2007 in Random | 0 comments

I’ll be off the grid until 9/4/07. If it’s urgent, call me if you have the number. Play nicely with each other!

Blog Day 2007 – PodCamp UK

Posted by on Aug 31, 2007 in Blogging, PodCamp | 10 comments

Today we’re celebrating BlogDay 2007, and in honor honour of PodCamp UK, I thought I’d highlight the blogs of PodCamp UK’s organizers organisers and sponsors.

So, in no particular order:

If you’re in the UK and are free 1 September and 2 September, stop on by PodCamp UK and celebrate the day after Blog Day 2007!

Tags: blogday blogday2007

This is the New Media Fishbowl

Posted by on Aug 29, 2007 in New media | 14 comments

This is the New Media Fishbowl. A commenter on Mitch Joel’s blog pointed out a Facebook Application that could draw a hyperbolic map of your friends in your network and how they were related. I was stunned to see a true, graphical, and clear representation of the New Media fishbowl, the echo chamber, whatever you want to call it.

This is the fishbowl

The inner ring of hyperconnection is the fishbowl. It’s new media. Everyone in the outer ring? Financial Aid Podcast community members for the most part. These are all the people that the folks in the fishbowl are NOT connecting to – and there’s a lot of them. Most are college students.

Believe it or not, I’m happy with how my map looks, because the outer ring signifies that I’m trying to reach outside the fishbowl.

What does your map look like?

New Media Occupation of the Near Future: Meme Jumper

Posted by on Aug 24, 2007 in New media | 12 comments

iPhone. Bacn. Chocolate Rain. LOLcats. Copybot. Bum Rush the Charts. Lonelygirl15. What do all these have to do with each other?

They’re all “viral” memes – high speed, high attention, sticky microcontent that spread like wildfire in various online communities. Just a mere mention of them on a blog can, if caught early enough, drive a tremendous amount of traffic to a blog, podcast, or web site, simply by virtue of obtaining good placement in early search results.

Right now, it’s kind of a free-for-all in online memes. Things appear and disappear like so many flashes in the pan, but if you can time the meme market just right, you can ride the waves of attention like a surfer, as Justin Kownacki pointed out about the city of Pittsburgh and its two recent hits.

How, though, do you make use of this? Enter a career of the near future: meme jumper. Working in concert with a Community Developer, a meme jumper is the person who coordinates tying content and products into relevant memes and promotions.

Case study: Virtual Thirst, the Coke campaign conducted by Crayon New Marketing. As a contributor to Matthew Ebel‘s Second Life live album, it was no mistake that it was named Virtual Hot Wings and tied into the Virtual Thirst promotion. At the same time, we tried to add as much value as possible to Virtual Thirst by offering a tangible good to an intangible campaign.

How to be a meme jumper? Connect. Connect, connect, connect. Use tools like Twitter for near-real-time monitoring of what’s getting people’s attention. Use Yahoo Pipes to aggregate a list of URLs from the Twitterstream into a format that can be parsed, then look for the most common URLs in a 24 hour period. Technorati and Google Blog Search will keep you on top of blogged items, but check them frequently. Find a meme to latch on to that’s appropriate, then tailor your content to match the meme as best as possible, adding value to it and propagating it.

What’s the goal of a meme jumper? Build lots of short bursts of high intensity traffic to a web site to garner attention and eyeballs. It’s then up to the Community Developer and other marketing staff to convert those eyeballs into subscribers, reader, and customers.

A meme jumper is different than a brand hijacker. The latter just plugs into as many buzzwords as possible with standard link baiting strategies without adding any additional value. It’s less symbiotic and more parasitic.

How do you apply for such a job? It’s all about the track record. Start with small organizations and volunteer work – find charities to plug into that desperately need the help, and make them powerful presences online for fundraising drives. Once you’ve done a few, take your show on the road.

Out of the Office Autoreply: God's on break, please call back later.

Posted by on Aug 23, 2007 in Random | 8 comments

Based on what’s in the book of Genesis from the Abrahamic bibles, God created everything in six days.

Day 1. Universe.
Day 2. Earth and water.
Day 3. Land and shrubbery.
Day 4. Seasons, day, and night.
Day 5. Critters.
Day 6. Mankind.
Day 7. Break.

If you assume that God’s calendar works differently than humans, and that the universe, based on the best research available, is between 12 and 16 billion years old, here’s a rough timeline:

Day 1. Universe. 12 billion years ago.
Day 2. Earth and water. 1.3 billion years ago. (Rodinia)
Day 3. Land and shrubbery. 500 million years ago.
Day 4. Seasons, day, and night. We’ll chalk this one up to error as pre-biblical folks weren’t exactly strong at astronomy 5,000 years ago.
Day 5. Critters. 300 million years ago.
Day 6. Mankind. 2 million years ago (homo erectus)
Day 7. Break.

Based on the giant times between periods – 200 million years or more – it’s funny to think that we might still be on Day 7, meaning God’s still out having coffee or whatever it is deities do during their off hours, and probably will be for at least another 180 million years…

Do prayers get an out of the office autoreply? It certainly would explain why a lot of people’s prayers are not answered but occasionally some are. Maybe God checks his messages infrequently when he’s on vacation.