Looks like we got the final word came in on the entry I made for Web 2.1 on Wikipedia and we got negged. My original post about this and a link to the original submission on the web2point1.org site is still accessible though, so perhaps someone can rewrite that and resubmit it more in the style they would like to see.

Not a big loss really, as it will either emerge as something or not. It did provide a personal lesson in regards to such knowledge community issues, the weight of member reputations versus ‘outsiders’ and the need for something better – so in a sense this is a good thing as it proves many of the points I have been making about the shortcomings of such systems.

Just in case you missed it, now there is also SeattleMindCamp and Ireland TechCamp as well. It makes me so excited to see these experiments cropping up everywhere. I won’t be able to make either of these right now, but we have something else in the works which will be announced later today – and hopefully I will be able to get to some of these as they happen elsewhere.

My only hope is that we can have a place for all the organizers and participants to share the knowledge about what works and what doesn’t with each other beyond the level of the local events. Whether the location where this information is shared/organized is ubder the BrainJams banner or BarCamp or whatever is next is not the important thing. It is that we come together, globally, to share our passions and contribute to each other’s efforts – whether that is with new ideas, with pointers to other resources or with direct effort it can bring nothing but good.

From the things that make you go hmmmmmm department:

Kristie and I saw a piece of this interview this morning on CNN while eating breakfast. I can’t be sure, but it would seem he might be one of those rulers who uses an iron fist with a velvet glove on it. You can see the interview online and judge for yourself.

Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but a very short while (I think less than an hour) after Amanapour finished grilling Abbas on whether or not Syria had any involvement with the assasination in Lebannon, and what they would do about it if it was proved true, his Interior Minister committed suicide. Then again, the minister had given an interview a few hours earlier where he commented over the radio that this might be his last interview.

Thanks to Dan Pink for a pointer to this piece by the San Diego Union Tribune on the emerging trend of Laughter Clubs – no, not Comedy Clubs, but rather groups of people who get together to just plain laugh their asses off in the name of good health.

I guess it makes sense, if several researchers have found through scientific study that laughter is the best medecine, why not?

I was just checking back in on Jeff Jarvis’ blog when I saw that 30+ more people commented on his Squidoo piece. I was surprised to see that people were slamming it, apparently not ‘getting it’ – probably due to the language Seth used which is intended for an audience beyond the developer and tech community. I was even more surprised to see that Seth had posted into the conversation himself (lead by example, lets hope more leaders learn the importance of engagement on a personal level).

Given that Squidoo is very similar to Insytes I kind of went off on a rant to try to explain it better from my perspective. I may have done a good job of it, or perhaps I didn’t, but check out the post and my comment on the bottom of the page and let me know what you think. It certainly was not edited or planned (I have a Web site to design for a close friend of mine that is due tonight).

OK, so this is beyond my normal purview and way out of my line of expertise, but it is so important I thought everyone should really learn about it. There is lots of talk about sustainable business practices, particularly in regards to construction and manufacturing. I really have yet to see many cool, practical implementations that made me sit up and take notice, until one day last week when I caught a DiscoveryHD episode on The Home of the Future.

As a gadget guy who even tried to start a company in the space (InfoApps if you are wondering what company) I was really intrigued to learn more. Some of the cool gadgety things were a refrigerator that suggested recipes based on what you had inside of it and a stove that was also a refrigerator so you could leave your dinner in the fridge/oven and it automatically turns on at a pre-determined time to have dinner ready when you get home (running late, call the stove and slow down the cooking – thats cool!) But they also showed some incredible new building materials.

The most interested of which to me was Autocalve Aerated Concrete (AAC). As strong as regular concrete, but 1/5th the weight, it is also heat resistant, you can SAW it like wood and it actually floats! Read more about it from the Partnership in Accelerating Technology in Housing (PATH) Web site

There was a bunch of other cool stuff they were shoed, but after 15 minutes of searching the Discovery site, I can not locate the program. The reason for this post is in regards to thinking about the Recovery 2 efforts. Right now AAC is a bit more expensive in the U.S. (they have used it for decades in Europe) but it is cheaper to work with (pre-fab blocks can be 4x as big and still weigh less). I am hoping that some of the smart things they are doing are considered appropriately in the rebuilding efforts.

If I had a lot of cash I would build one of these AAC plants – in fact I would build a dozen all around the country and try to educate more people on the benefits – but I build web sites and software, not buildings, so my only hope is to get people to spread the word about such great innovations.

Recovery2

Not that I am partisan or anything like that, but I am just now catching up on Apple’s earlier announcements, and once again they have proven themselves worthy of the adulation. Just look at the remote for the new iMac in comparison to the remotes for the Windows Media Center PC. They really are a tremendous example of a 2.1 mentality – they know how to really provide functionality and an interface that real people can understand and use. Their motto should be:

Simplify it, and they will come.

Then again, I was hoping they would announce a deal with Tivo to directly sync the Tivo to the iPod. So while I am generally ecstatic about the products, the ramifications of the system they are deploying for media as property just sucks. (Give to the Creative Commons fundraising campaign if you have not done so yet) The fact that they will be charging $1.99 per episode may be good for shareholders but is terrible for us working folks. As with my earlier post on Digital Photos though, it is pretty difficult and expensive to make the whole situation simple. In fact, I still have not gotten my Tivo synched with my Mac for taking shows with me, so perhaps it might be worth $1.99 if I missed an episode, but I will avoid doing so as long as I can.

Is this the beginning of the real revolution in Video Journalism though? Only time will tell, but if I were to place a bet today, my guess is that the general public will clamour for this next generation – shipped in time for the holidays even – wow. Its so damn sexy I would run out and by one now if I was not living on a budget. My iMac is not even 7 week old and its already obsolete though – this never ending cycle of whetting and satiating our technolust is starting to wear on me….

But I still want a new iPod – besides, it costs the same as the 5 GB model I bought on the first day it was introduced.

I was just going to write about wanting to do a VisionQuest 2.0 in preparation for what lies ahead (though there is not time unfortunately, so I will spend some time ‘going within’ instead). Naturally, I figured I would link to some photos of the Rites of Passage VisionQuest I did at the end of 2001. At the time, Yahoo was really the only easy to use choice for photo sharing that I knew about, so I put them there along with some others. So when I went to grab the URL for the VisionQuest Photos I rediscoverd all of these other photo sets I had there from days gone by. So now my photos are everywhere – on Flickr, on Yahoo photos, on my own PHPGallery site and even on Shutterfly.

I realize I can merge my Flickr and Yahoo accounts, but that will screw up other services I have since I use a Mac – and it will likely mean that I would have to use my Yahoo login instead of my Flickr login. But then again, it always seems that my iPhoto Flickr Export just drags on and on forever so I have a challenge using it as it is – is there some trick to this to optimize the performance? Even if iPhoto Flickr export worked for me properly, I have another problem – before my wonderful girlfriend Kristie (who just launched her own Blog after getting inspired last week) bought me an iMac G5 for my birthday, I lost a lot of my photos when I upgraded my iBook to Tiger and the backup copy I made onto an external hard drive was corrupted (Maxtor firewire problem it seems)

So now my photo collection is just a complete mess – almost as bad as my MP3 collection – with multiple copies everywhere, recent favorites missing etc… I won’t even get into all of the photos I have stored in the garage that I would like to get scanned (literally thousands, all the way back to my grandparents baby photos)

As I see it, iPhoto to Flickr is really the best option for managing and sharing photos – but this alone is not enough. You still need a good backup plan running on a regular schedule and you need to consider each photo for its tags and then assemble your albums. Simply put, there is only so much automation you can have – and even less of it for free since this is a complex problem.

I could see where one day we could just have the photo go from the camera to the site wirelessly with a date tag, the GPS in the camera identifies the location, which correlates it to any known events, Ojos automatically tags the photos with the names of the people in it and all you need to do is decide who gets to see it and if there are any witty things you want to say about it. (this just reminded me of seeing a speech by Phillipe Kahn at Interent Everywhere back in 2000 where he talked about his ideas for LightSurf)

So we need a beter way to import photos to Flickr now from all these other places (I heard a rumor that one might be coming for PHPGallery to Flickr) – hopefully more open source developers will find a way to have conversations with average users like me to understand what they could be building that would be really, really useful. We also need for Flickr (or someone) to enable the entire value chain around the digital photography space.

Using “The Communications Strategy” framework on this problem would produce a service that looks like this:

• Educational materials on “so you want to take digtital photos” – a primer for those who want to know what the fuss is about and then a getting started guide
• Links to camera review sites, tied together with user opinions on the reviews and their own views on the cameras being reviewed
• Enable the camera purcahse transaction
• Educate people in how to use the camera model
• Educate people in how to use a camera (manual vs point and shoot)
• Explain the scenarios and usage of photo sharing better
• Import photos from everywhere possible
• Photo scanning (do it or enable the economy around it)
• More user stories of how the power of tagging and ad-hoc groups can be used in cool ways to create communities
• Provide stronger group functionality (my grandfather need not see those photos of our trip to Couples Resort in Jamaica)
• Tips for photo editing / design for advanced users
• Printing
• Guaranteed backups
• Licensing of photos via stock agency so that photographs uploaded into the system can be sold – this includes a Creative Commons license that would let designers search for Royalty-free photographs
• More local user groups for people to get together
• Community systems for knowledge sharing and passion sharing (ie interests) – perhaps rather than build these, stronger interfaces for integrating with existing communities can be built. Most people dont understand the concept of a Flickr Badge yet
• A place where the “I Hate Flickr” people can rant so that an understanding can be built of the most commonly experienced problems, which can then be corrected
• Don’t become an evil monopoly – maintain open standards, enable a solutions economy to flourish that provides opportunity to innovators and other service providers – essentially, don’t do everything, but facilitate everything and become the trusted source

So, this is totally not what I was supposed to be working on, but since I did, now you can get a sense of what I have been thinking about the last few years with regards to The Communications Strategy (aka The Customer Strategy, Customer Knowledge Management, Customer Experience Lifecycle and too many other silly names over the years to count). As Patricia Seybold said in Business 2.0:

If manufacturers want to own the customers’ branded experience with their products, they need to take responsibility for disseminating all of the product-related information the customer needs to buy and enjoy the product…”

Final Note on a separate rant: I was going to link to Business 2.0’s article from which I pulled this quote many years ago, but besides being an impossibly slow site and hard to find with basic text search, I had to join to see the full length article in order to see if it was the right one, so no link to Business 2.0 (or any other media that puts up such barriers to our conversations).

Just got another email last night from a friend who was in town for the Web 2.0 Conference who says he has the flu. That makes 7 people I know (plus myself) who came down with something after the week’s activities. Anyone go to the doctor yet? Is it just a cold or is flu season fast upon us?

Since my lunch meeting was cancelled today due to one of those illnesses, I am hoping to get down some of those lessons learned from last week to share with everyone. I also have about 120 tabs open in 8 windows that I want to share/talk about – along with a dozen other longer pieces on items of import. Thankfully for me, I am not totally out of commission, but am certainly not feeling 100%

Finally, last night after some serious soul searching, I have mentally and emotionally commited myself to what’s next… expect an announcement at the end of the week. In fact, if you are interested in seeing what we did last week continue and want to be a part, be sure you reach out to me to let me know (seems I dont have the full attendee email list). We are planning a little get together to discuss and would love your input…

A friend asked me how much traffic I was getting on the site and I had not even thought to look until today. It is really interesting to see it go from zero to a thousand plus from site launch on Monday 10/3/05 at around 1am to the day before the event. Also of note, about 20% of tracked referrer links (over 350) came from Chris Pirillo’s post on the event – not only is he a nice guy with some great parents and a great partner in Ponzi, but apparently he is pretty widely read too 😉

One of the things we were going to do at the event, but did not have time for since it was not core to the reason for being there, was to have people show how they heard about the event through a pen and paper built social map in the form of a MindMap. Am trying to figure out an easy way to get this done virtually, but don’t know of any free tools to do so easily – perhaps an OPML list could do it though, so if someone can take a stab at it and let me know, that would be very cool.