BlogOn Update

This conference I'm organizing for July 22 and 23 (register by today and it's $50 less than it will be tomorrow, use the UCBerkeley code, and it's an additional $50 off, either before or after today) is moving along. Lot's of interesting speakers lined up to talk about social media (which includes much more than social networks and blogs) and the business opportunities for investing and creating businesses. Our intention is not to talk about social media exclusively, as that's been done before, but rather to talk about what parts are opportunities, where tools need to be made to see things happening between people, and what investors should focus on when considering these opportunities.

Also, we've added a scholarship registration, so that community bloggers who can't afford the $149 blogger fee can be comped. We ask that you submit a little info to us, and then we'll ask a few to help out on a couple of things. But we feel it's important for people who create social media to participate, no matter their ability to pay the conference fees.

If you are interested please register!

A Shot Across Microsoft's Bow

Not to mention, it's a step further into the total disruption for traditional media. See the Safari Home Theater movie. So Apple Safari just released a built-in RSS aggregator in version 1.2 with the latest OS, and the Tiger disc handed out at the Apple Developer Conference this morning has been shooting around the office, ever since the Steve Jobs keynote.

So what it means, for trad media, when RSS aggregation is embedded and just a feature in an OS, is that it becomes an everyday thing, instead of something the geeks have downloaded for their phones and computers, to manage RSS feeds. What's next, when you have that seamless feed aggregator built-in, is a filter, a direction, some help managing the content that takes less time. Yep, you guess it. The blogosphere.

So what does that do to the clicks+ads business model traditional news media sites use, thinking their readers come directly to them? Users can seamlessly pull in content, from both blogs and the NYTimes, into their OS, without being geeks, and then pivot on their favorite parts of the blogosphere, and then it's an RSS+ads model, or something else we haven't dreamed up yet.

Even cooler, if you're a metadata junkie, is Spotlight, which allows a toolbar level search of all docs, files and folders, email, calendars, and contacts. Apparently the demo was quite cool, zippy and yes, another challenge to the MS folks.

NYT and RSS

Christine Mohan of the NYTimes sends word that they have a new expanded set of RSS feeds.

What's Up Pussycat?

So I'm going out of town tomorrow for 10 days.. but will be back posting on Supernova and anything interesting that pops up on the trip....

Orkut Linking and FOAF Messages

So, this is facinating! Folks, bloggers, who read me? (I'm guessing and have sent them email to find out) are asking to link to me in Orkut. I haven't met them but they are Iranian bloggers. Now that we are linked, due to Orkut's messaging system, I'm getting messages asking me to travel to Iran, or things like this:

subject: peyvand ba kudakihayeman goruh hay e zir baray e in manzur tashkil shode ast.be anha bepeyvandid: http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=87138 http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=87141 in gruh ham baray e iraniyan e moghim e alman: http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=84027 movafagh bashid

to join Orkut communities (though I have to admit, not speaking the language, I don't really know what I'd be joining, so I'm not going to do so because I don't want to just be a lurker).

But how absolutely cool to have the friend of a friend and community messages broadened by the new linking. I love it!

BlogOn -- A Conf I'm Organizing at UCB

Folks I'm working with include Chris Shipley, Susan Mernit, Ross Mayfield and Mike Sigal. It's about social media, which I sort of defined earlier by describing what social media I play with. But there's more to it than that. It includes blogs, which right now are probably the most known of the social medias, but it also includes other kinds of tools and interactions that people connect with, in communities of interest. We are trying to highlight all the media we can and all the ways people mess with them, and push and pull things to each other.

The conference proposes to address what the business cases are for social media and look at some of the latest experiments companies are having conversating with users, making interesting interactive technologies and figuring out how users are pushing media with blogosphere filtering and RSS (that goes for radio and video, not just news).

BlogOn is being held at Haas Business School, and is supported by the Journalism School and the School of Information Management, as well as the Center for New Media and the Managment of Technology consortiums, which are made up of several graduate schools at UCB. Companies like Microsoft and Six Apart and Knight Ridder Digital are also helping to underwrite the costs with sponsorship.

We are admitting bloggers at a reduced rate, and also will shortly start taking apps for scholarships, for those who can't afford the costs. We'd like to make sure that people who really want to go have a chance to be there.

Supernova

Kevin Werbach has very kindly invited me to attend Supernova, his conference in two weeks on:

Voice over IP...Social networking...Web services...WiFi and unlicensed wireless...Blogging and syndication...Broadband applications...Next-generation email...Grid computing...Digital identity...Collaboration tools...Digital content distribution...and more.

If your interested in it, they have a blog, wiki or you can subscribe.

danah boyd will be talking, and Dave Sifry and Clay Shirky, as will a host of interesting folks I want to see, that are too numerous to mention. Schedule here.

What Social Media is in My Pocket?

That would be social media of the technological sort. This list is sort of the equivalent of what gadgets do I have in my pocket. Push me, pull me. I don't care which.

Blogs:: Read 'em and write 'em.
Moblogs:: Love the immediacy of seeing someone's experience.
Audioblogs, Videoblogs:: Not as much, but do like them. Time consuming.
Webcasting:: My personal favorite is when I get an illicit feed of some event, where the event people don't have a clue it's going on. Love it.
Blog search tools Technorati, for the link cosmos. High quality info.
RSS:: In and outgoing. So there are aggregators that I use for the computers and the phone.
Social Networks:: Orkut, Friendster, Linked In. Consider them baseball cards however, unless I want to research someone. Don't use them too often as they aren't otherwise useful.
IM:: All the time.
Chat-IM:: Often.
Forums and chatrooms:: Only for occasional research. Low quality of info. Never post.
Online games:: Camera phone game, etc. Now and then. Fun.
Text messaging:: Constantly. Couldn't live without it. And it works often when the phone doesn't get reception. Or you're in a meeting and you can't talk. Or a no-cell zone. A godsend.
SMS:: Now and then, you have to send a photo. Like when a guy hits your car, and you calmly get out, snap a few photos, and his insurance co calls you 30 minutes later, and you email the photos from the phone.
Web on the phone:: Now and then, you have to get something critical. Or you're bored out of your mind in some analog line and it's an opportunity to check up on whatever Jeff Jarvis has thought about in the last 15 minutes.
Email:: spamminess is next to godliness.
Fax:: Yes. Would somebody please get rid of this network. I got rid of the fax machine years ago, and yet people still ask for them. So I'm forced back into the network.
Phone:: Yes, still need/like/want them. Even the ones nailed to the wall. There's nothing like chatting at 2am with someone in a gravely low voice that you like.
Wiki:: Use them for small groups over a long period, to collaborate. Or with a million people over a short period, to collaborate. Could use some iterations, but I still love em.
P2P:: Bittorrent, iTunes, Rhapsody, and more I can't think of now. It's periodic but oh so instant.
Flashmobs:: Went to one a long time ago. Died out. Them came back here and there. 2nd generation is much more interesting.
Craig's List:: Who could live without it. If nothing else, totally entertaining.
Meetups:: Once a month.
MoveOn:: Half the time yes, half no. Depends.

RSS Feeds at Traditional News Sites

Nothing earthshaking, but the Online Journalism Review/Staci Kramer have a piece on the current state of RSS feeds by news sites, noting that by having them, news sites can drive traffic to their sites and stay relevant with bloggers and other readers who want more control (like the Richard Miller story at the top of the article -- he built his own RSS feed for getting Wall Street Journal articles out). K. The usual, except for this chart which shows who's onto RSS and at what level (excuse the horrendous information display of this info; in the article, it's almost impossible to grok unless you read it carefully, but if you take the time to read it, it's really interesting as a timeline of RSS adoption. I reordered it and hopefully it makes more sense linearly. But I don't have time to make a graphic right now to show it better.)

Online News & RSS:

The Ground Floor
news.com
csmonitor.com
nytimes.com
wired news
bbc.com
salon.com

On Board
baltimoresun.com
boston.com
cbsmarketwatch.com
espn.com
Guardian Unlimited
reuters
slate.com
time.com
washingtonpost.com
fastcompany.com

Testing
projo.com
philly.com
thestate.com

En Route
wsj.com
MSNBC/newsweek.com

Thinking Hard
Belo
Morris Digital
Knight-Ridder
AJC.com

Not on the Radar
stltoday.com