Community Mobilization

Second Life Future Salon Thoughts

Last night I had the privilege of presenting my work and experience in the first ever Second Life Future Salon hosted by the Acceleration Studies Foundation.  I presented right after Babbage Linden, and Linden Labs employee who tele-works from the UK.  He made a very powerful case for SL and other virtual spaces to become the new locale of work and value creation.  I found his work environment and schedule particularly interesting and I believe that he is on the cutting edge of a new phenomenon regarding the location of the workplace.

The meat of my presentation was on the challenges of taking an organization with little virtual world experience and getting them move forward.  My notes are here and at the end of the talk I fielded some great questions.  Most important in my mind was what will happen when more charities wake up and flood the virtual community? Will it saturate the market and ruin ti for everyone and my answer is; maybe.

Like the material world everything has a tendency to normalize and settle into a comfortable level.  My short term prediction is that there will be dozens and dozens of SL charity events in the ext year, and the community will get fed up and reject.  After a period of adjustment there will be an acceptable number of events that the community will self produce and the process will become normalized.  Who will prevail is unknown, but it will be the organization that has better than average community support form users.

Second Life Future Salon Notes

Here are my notes on the future of Avatars for the tomorrows Future Salon, and my speaking outline as well.

Download avatar_a.pdf
Download sl_future_salon_abstract_and_outline.doc

I look forward to seeing you in world tomorrow.

 

Network Roundtable - Leading in a Connected World

I am at Babson College for the Social Network Analysis Network Roundtable learning about SNA and how to use UCINet and map relationships in an office.  This is neat stuff that I love looking and and so excited to be here.  Rob Cross of UVA has put together a great event and I look forward to the rest of the day.  I have a nice foundation in this stuff having been through a KM Cluster SNA training with Valdis Krebs.  I enjoy the ideas behind looking at the real meat of networks.  I think organizations structure pigeonholes people into thinking that that is how things should work.  Not so.  If you are in a business I suggest you honestly consider looking into how work  gets done in your office.

No sms.ac C&D letter for me

Normally a cease and desist letter is something that you dread but I have got to be honest I am a little insulted that I did not get one like Joi did.  It is funny that you know you have become an influencer in the blogoshpere is when you begin to get C&D letters.  That is a crummy way to measure influence, and an even crummier way to find out that you are not worth the effort of a mass e-mail from Kevin B. Jones  Esq., Deputy General Counsel of SMS.ac I presume.

We at any rate Chilling Effect has a nice writeup and analysis of the letter so I am linking and tracking back to them. 

Arianna Huffington Group blog

An article in the NYT today by Kataharine Seely chronicles Arianna Huffington's new venture into the blogoshpere with a group political blog.  She claims that her blog aims to include a number of politically recognizable figures offering comment and opinion and insight into today's hot issues.  An interesting idea since Huffington makes insinuations that the traditional media is a right leaning entity, a though contrary to the beliefs of Republicans who cry that they are being skewered by the liberal media.

A few of her cohorts commented in the article about the possible liabilities celebrity bloggers bring, such as their limited time, desire not to become personally invested in the content, and general aversion to putting personal commentary out that may offend fans.   Her claim is that with so many interesting people contributing there is bound to be something of worth every day ... so it will be like Boing Boing but internally fact checked, and stylistically edited removing all of the credibility and soul.   

All I can really do is point back to a post from over a year ago Arianna Huffington; Cyberslut and it seems that she is well on her way. 

First Mention in Slashdot

I had my first mention in Slashdot yesterday and I am very excited.  Would have like to have my URL posted there but it will happen eventually.

Preferred Long Distance is a SCAM!

Was on the phone with a friend of mine in Seattle who runs Xtensive Multimedia Solutions and his story is scary.  Someone from a company called Preferred Long Distance" sold him on a new long distance plan saying that they were a new division of QUEST communications.  They told my friend their charges were about $25.00 - $30.00 a month but his bill ended up well over $80.00!  If you live on the west coast and get a call from someone from Preferred Long Distance hang up!

Second Life Future Salon

I am very excited about participating in the Second Life Future Salon next Thursday the 28th.  Jerry and the folks at Accelerating Studies Foundation are putting together a great session on digital worlds and how aprapo that they hold the meeting in world right?  He put up a futures salon blog for people to come and share thought on.  I will be presenting on philanthropyin virtual worlds near the end of the session.

Meetup to Charge

A Business Week article says that Meetup.com will soon begin charging event organizers to set up their monthly meetings through the service.  Yes ... it is a  service and a dam cool one at that.  The company has a robust set of good staff and great technology and as much as the New Jersey Bulldog meetup organizer does not want to believe it, it takes money to run these things.  I saw this coming, and Scott and I have talked about it at conferences and in passing a few times.  This called a business model shift because it is a dynamic business and not some static web page.  If your Meetup events are valuable to you and the people who attend, ask everyone to pony up a  dollar bill once a month and enjoy each others company.

Everyone is a Journalist, Everyone is a Photographer

There is a trying discussion going on over at FI Space on the considerations of using services like Flickr to aggregate photos from events, especially nationwide fundrasing events such as the ACS Relay For Life.  Distributed media mean everyone produces their own content, good or bad, but as a society we are so responsibility-phobic that the masses are not prepared to accept the burden a professional media producer. 

I think there is a strong need to pay attention to the monikiers and screen nmes that we use, especially that staff use so as not to confuse viewers into thinking that these photos are an organizationally driven effort.  We should offer a place for volunteers to aggregate photos, but thee is a difference between the photos that the organization takes, pays for, and sactions and our volunter's snapshots.