PANEL: DIY NOW ... OR SOMEONE ELSE WILL
* Trapani, Rheingold, Hart & Vos
* This is a great time to make stuff happen
-- cheap hosting
-- endless info on the internet
-- loads of people willing to work for free/cheap
* Various lessons learned -- all seem useful (find presentation online!)
* Vos :: Weekendhotel.nl
-- biggest problem was the increasing demands on his time
-- site for the best hotels in the Netherlands & Belgium
-- slightly different because it's all about speciality locations
-- they visit hotels & B&Bs and then write-up what they're like
-- but some of the popularity is due to the "users POV" -> effort made
to be honest
-- there is a link to the hotel's own website (some of which he created
for them as a way to make money before the main site picked up)
-- his problem was bridging from concept to popularity where the site
became profitable (took 18 months before he made any money -- so he had to make
a living elsewhere)
-- don't expect things to be an instant success
-- his biggest mistake was that he wanted to make too much money
-- his definition of success was all money-centric; inappropriate
-- two tricks to not get too stressed out:
1) go work out every afternoon
2) turn off email in the afternoon
-- real solution should have been to reduce expectations of how much
money to make
-- process:
1) Start/learning (month 0-6)
2) Get project up and running (month 6-12)
3) Make it bigger (month 12-18)
4) Start making money (month 18 >)
-- there is money in bulk advertising (but you have to serve a LOT of
pages a day to make any money from it at all)
* Alex Hart :: freestanding webmail clients - atpmail.com
-- if you make a good product, people will buy it
-- he considers himself a programmer -- so that's his focus for these
"key lessons"
-- web app is just a web page that knows the user (saves state)
-- the web is the ultimate platform (hardware irrelevant, anything is
poss)
-- application paradigms:
- buttons, not links
- right click menus
- drag & drop
- no full refresh
-- don't work on your webserver
- tools are generally terrible
- no backup copy
- don't mess with active site
- don't need internet
-- available tools
- apache for windows
- activestate perl
- php for windows
- mysql, emacs, aspell, clamAV, etc
-- automate everything
- it saves time
- reduces errors
- command line tools are the best (scripts, aliases, fast &
flexible)
- gave an automation example for moving files via FTP with Perl
-- in the beginning:
- think about security (think about what's happening with form
data)
- think about the database
- think about testing
- think about log files
- think about code comments (esp after spending hours debugging
something)
* Gina Trapani :: DIY coder
-- mostly a coder until recent move into writing a lot
-- the right software to build...
.. scratches a developer's personal itch
.. offers users better technology than they already have
-- build something that you need and want
-- it doesn't need to be new and original -- it just needs to be better
than what's already there
-- there's plenty of stuff out there that sucks really really bad!
-- a good software project lead:
- releases software
- emphasises users (over advertisers or technology)
- is "constructively lazy" (find the shortcuts, don't reinvent
the wheel!)
- knows how much s/he doesn't know
-- also see Eric Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar
-- "true wisdom is knowing what you don't know"
-- good project volunteers:
- are smart, articulate & passionate
- are self-interested users and ego-maniacs
- can't sleep until that bug is fixed
- don't reinvent the wheel
-- the totally obsessive developers are the ones you want to work with
;-)
-- keep volunteers by:
- frequent iterative code releases
- keeping open lines of communication (mailing lists, good email
skills)
- encouraging a reputation-based community of collaborators
- building something important and useful
-- people will love it and trust it
-- keep the project going by..
- constant communication & releases
- accepting if your project turns out not to be useful
- blogger were building a project management tool!
* onematchfire.com/diy/ (it'll be a wiki in about half an hour and we can post
our services/projects)
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PANEL: LEVERAGING SOLIPSISM
* Tantek Celik -- technorati
* Don Turbull -- professor @ Austin
* Thomas Vander Wall -- obsesses about personal info management
* Jeffrey Veen -- Adaptive Path, filling in for Peter
* Worked on various blogging platforms (inc Blogger, Technorati, etc)
* Solipsism -- "Nobody exists but me!"
-- all about the ego, the self, existence
-- self-centred info architecture (e.g. MyDocuments folders - only
matters if _I_ understand and can find the information)
* Information management tools are becoming more socially aware (e.g. Delicious)
* Intersection of private information with other people's information in the
public domain
* Making connections to people through the information they tag/find interesting
* All the social networking sites were abstracted from information (e.g. Flickr
(Stuart Butterfield), delicio.us)
* Amazon also does this -- your behaviours matched to other people's and then
giving you recommendations based on similar things
* Thomas Vander Wall:
-- a view of personal information management (incl emailing to
yourself!!)
-- we each have a personal view of the world
-- it's all about how you're organising the room behind the window
showing you the world
-- when people look in the window from the outside, they see your stuff
on the inside
-- our perceptions shape who we are
-- "the world of paper is falling over"
-- we get lost early in our digital lives (scent of info to stench of
info)
-- refindability is what's really important
-- "usability is king, but refindability is the bright young prince"
-- different names for the same thing, same name for different things
-- "we've got that syncing feeling..."
-- we're looking at building a personal info cloud
- portability/ubiquity
- access
- personally organised
-- external storage and management
- but without losing control of your data!
-- personal storage as well (iPod, PDA, laptop, desktop, keydrive)
-- standards (open APIs, std ways of pulling info in, etc)
-- personal aggregation is the next big thing
- tie our stuff together
- unbolding
- missing tools
* Don Turnbull:
-- things are hard to classify
-- we need to classify for searching and info retrieval
-- "the inmates are tagging the asylum" - e.g. Flickr
-- even academics are starting to use tagging systems (CiteULike)
-- uses of tagging
- collaborative filtering systems
- recommending systems
- information filtering
- search system augmentation
-- a focus on the user's view rather than the systems
- people-centric view of data
- linking users by interests
-- how do you get people to cooperate? (are there people who don't want
to share?)
-- how good can the tags be?
-- volume of recommendations vs number of recommendable items
-- how accurate can the recommendations be
-- what about changing interests
-- web is a shared info space without much actual sharing
-- when have you tagged enough? When can you stop tagging?
-- what happens when we get tagging spam? (tell Si!)
-- popular tag terms, prolific taggers
-- we need common formats/APIs for tags
* Tantek Celik:
-- there's a tagsplosion happening now - everything is taggable
-- talking about how technorati got to doing tags
-- there's a difference between linking (look at this) and tagging (this
is a...)
-- thus, rel="tag" standard
-- technorati is doing stuff differently -> the tags are on blog posts
- it's distributed tagging
- they're visible (tag pages are visible)
- if technorati goes down then the tags are still there (they're
on your blog!)
- there's another tag for related (folksonomy)
- relevant pictures pulled together on pages too
-- standard is deliberately limited to blog posts
- next helping people have their own private delicious on their
own blogs
- helps with inaccurate data in the pipeline too (e.g. Amazon
recos)
- giving users back their data
-- very ethical possession to take
* Q&As:
-- new systems are all about being "no-weight" rather than
"light-weight"
-- "there's anarchy in folksonomies"
-- it's not perfect but it's certainly better than nothing
-- don't wait on the one true taxonomy (it'll never happen!)
-- people start out with 20 tags and the explode into 100s...
-- we need to get better at trusting people -- and more granular in
tagging
-- get away from broad lines
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KEYNOTE: MALCOLM GLADWELL (KC's Summary)
* Lots of anecdotal evidence
* It's all a snap judgement (decisions made in first few seconds)
* Snap judgements can be compromised by certain things (e.g. male musicians +
screen)
* Give less information to make better decisions (e.g. screen, dr's checking for
heart attack)
* Take out all seemingly relevant data and reduce the information set upon which
decisions are made
* Changing environment can also help purify the decisions made
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PANEL: OPEN SOURCE MARKETING - The New Unwieldy, Unlimited Product Publicity
* Christian Crumlish - "The Power of Many" (online communities are becoming
ordinary)
* Jason Calacanis - Weblogs Inc (various blogs, paying bloggers to blog,
blogsmith software)
* Rob Davis - grassroots campaign for Firefox in NYTimes
* Dean campaign is obviously an example
* Firefox campaign was all about getting 2500 people to participate to fund the
add
-- more than that signed up in the first day!
-- got more than enough money for the ad
-- posted the PDF online so people could create their own poster
-- 60% US people, 40% from overseas
* iPod mini-movie created by George Masters
-- spread all over the web, but Apple never commented
* Open Source Marketing seems hypey -- but it might be something new & real,
which would be exciting
* Vigilante marketing, viral marketing, participatory marketing, community
marketing are all similar ideas and buzzwords
* Open Source Attributes:
1) Community Meeting Point
2) Transparency
3) Endorsement
4) Commitment
5) Source Materials
* Is it real?
-- open source is a great metaphor
-- being ethically open is important -> encouraging transparency,
involvement, etc
-- but is open source more than just a metaphor?
- maybe not just inspired by open source
- but also using the methods/processes/principles of open
source?
* Basic premise of marketing : people who have great products don't need to do
marketing
-- make a great product and people will market it for you
-- people talking about it is the strongest way to market your stuff
* E.g. BzzAgents is paying you to buzz people (Calacanis is very Xander)
* Were tupperware and Ann Summers parties the original version of Open Source
marketing?
* "BzzAgents Dave is just trying to make money out of a process called 'giving
your friends advice'"
* Grey album was cool -- "bloggers to the rescue"; someone also mixed w the
Grateful Dead
* "People have died from exposure" ... so writers don't take unpaid work "just
for exposure"
* Basically don't take money from the people you're reviewing ("church and
state")
-- separate journalists from advertisers
-- church & state
-- "the second people know you can be bought, the gig is up"
* How do you run an open source campaign safely?
-- you need concentric circles of campaigning to be successful
-- there's a reason that traditional campaigns want to keep control of
the message
-- the disruptive technique users are the insurgents (those w/o money,
resources, etc)
* Amplifying your critics is actually really good sometimes
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PANEL: BUILDING YOUR BRAND WITH BLOGS
* Coudal (Coudal Partners), Fried (37Signals), Scoble (Micro$oft, Channel9),
Holzschlag (Molly, Web Standards), Byron
* Brand is Dead -- Long Live Brand!
* Consumers are way less loyal -- new, small brands can be successful
* The Accidental Blogger -> big-time Google juice with diverse content on
personal blogs
* Molly sees herself as a hybrid blogger - both personal & work content, very
varied
-- got massive pagerank for post & comment thread about a random indie
film
-- busiest thread in her entire blog is about racing frogs!
* The Fallacy of Transparency -- what is transparent is not necessarily
authentic!
-- do not mistake transparency for authenticity!
-- authenticity may even be weakened by transparency
-- people have great bullshit detectors - the stink will drive them away
-- authenticity is great for building your brand and your community
* Scoble - talking about Channel 9
-- videoblogs is promoting the conversation at Micro$oft massively
-- just using your name makes it difficult for people to see what you're
about
-- make your title appropriate to what you're actually talking about
-- Tantek spent time with him putting the semantic structure in (heading
in h1, etc)
- organise your page so that Google can get it properly
-- put navigation under your content for the sake of mobile devices
-- people find blogs through other blogs; lots of people use Google
-- look at Feedster, Bloglines, etc as people will use them
-- most of the interesting traffic comes from other bloggers link to you
* Jason Fried:
-- there are a few blogs that they use (business and other)
-- they use Feedburner for RSS to measure uptake
-- there's another blog for Basecamp used as a customer support/FAQ type
support
-- use your blog to build an audience first and then work out what you
can sell them
-- e.g. Signal vs Noise is all about design & business stuff -- product
that suited the audience was Basecamp and Tada-List
-- they're writing educational posts that people "eat up and then spit
out"
-- be honest and be open (full transparency on down-time etc)
* Coudal:
-- blogs are good for search engines
-- your business should probably have a blog, but should your business
have a blog?
-- build a real audience by providing content to like-minded people and
then provide them with products that will suit them
-- build stuff around the brand of the blog
-- gives you all the seats at the table - you get to be the producer,
the customer, the marketer, etc
-- people are very loyal and interested in the things you do
-- "if you build it they will come" is different from "if they come you
can build it"
-- focus on building the audience and then work it out
* Really what's going on here is that it's about having a conversation with
people
-- it's not about branding AT people
-- you don't even need comments for conversations!!
* People view you as a valuable filter to the web and that's why they read you
* If you see someone talking about you, you should make sure that they know that
you know!
-- post a comment
-- show the referrer list that you're watching
-- continue the conversation on your own blog
* Jewel casing example from Coudal
* "If you're small, don't try and act big; if you're big don't try to act small"
-- Fried
* People will know when you're not being authentic -- you need to speak with one
voice
* There's a big difference between listening and following (Fried) -- you don't
have to _do_ what your customers are saying you should, but you should listen to
them