Year: 2008

On Saturday, we created a mobile resource guide for those affected by Gustav, as many in the path of the storm would not have internet access.  As people begin returning home and begin the process of rebuilding after nearly $8billion in damage, we hope this mobile resource guide will aid the Hurricane Gustav relief efforts. 

There are three versions of the Gustav Mobile Resource Guide available:

• For iPhone
• For Mobile (including the Nokia N95 and BlackBerry)
• For Your Blog (just click "Get Widget" at the bottom of the widget on this page)

The guide offers quick access to…

News – Minute-by-minute updates from government agencies and citizen journalists.

Info – Quick references for how to help.

People and Shelters – Searchable self-reported listings of shelters, resources, aid providers, and evacuees.

Raise awareness about the relief efforts by adding this guide to your blog sidebar. Stay connected to the latest info by bookmarking it in your iPhone or other mobile device.

Mobile version

 

Widget version

If you’re a member of an association, or are an executive at one, you’ll want to check this out.  Our friends over at Principled Innovation have just published the Association Social Technologies Executive Summary.  Some really great information in here.  A few highlights:

• 31% of associations have a social networking presence
• 10% of associations will have a social networking presence "soon"
• 31% of associations are exploring the idea of using social networking
• 24% of associations report that their association has a blog
• 92% of those blogs allow reader comments (sweet! – ed.)
• 14% of associations report using a wiki

A lot of really, really great stuff in the exec summary; can’t wait for the full report.  Check it out here.

Related: Social Networking for Businesses and Associations

Very happy!  Just got word that the BlogHer Guide to Political Bloggers, which was built with Cerado Ventana, is now available in the iPhone App Store.  If you’re tracking the Democratic National Convention (DNC) or the Republican National Convention (RNC) here in the States over the next few weeks, might be worth checking out.

Sweet.

This year, Cerado has built an Unofficial Pocket Guide for the
2008 Blog World Expo to help attendees navigate the conference and connect with one another. It’s powered by our innovative Ventana^TM system.

There are three versions of the Unofficial Pocket Guide available:

• For iPhone
• For Mobile (including the Nokia N95 and BlackBerry)
• For Your Blog (just click "Get Widget" at the bottom of the widget on this page)

The guide offers quick access to…

Buzz– The latest blog posts,  announcements, and Twitter comments are the first things you see when you open the Guide.

Network– The Network page lets attendees add themselves to the guide  and link to their Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

Agenda – The Agenda page is your quick reference to sessions. Look here for titles, descriptions, times, rooms, and speaker names.

Help – We’ve included a helpful FAQ to help you keep track of everything that’s going on.

Blog World Expo 2008 will take place September 19-21 in the Las Vegas Convention Center. To reserve your place in the conversation, register now, and get the mobile, iPhone, or blog version of the guide.

This post is one of a series of recommendations arrived at by
going through the entire list of South by Southwest panels that are up
for consideration for 2009.

Important: Would love your support for "FlashMarkets: From the Roman Agora to the Mobile Web." Click here to vote or learn more.

SXSW 2009 Panel Recs: Human / Social Issues

Grokking Bloggers: It’s About Love and Underpants
 Elisa Camahort Page, BlogHer inc
"BlogHer’s recent Social Media Study quantified what most developers
and companies already intuited: Blogging is mainstream, addictive and
trusted. Women, in particular, are abandoning other media channels to
get information, and are becoming early adopters of every new Web 2.0
tool. This acquisition of information is only a by-product of acquiring
something more powerful: empowerment. This early adoption of technology
is not about cool-hunting or personal empire expansion: It’s about
love. What does it have to do with Underpants? You’ll have to come find
out."

Why We Love Our Jobs
Pawel Szymcsykowski, Zappos.com
"In the Zappos offices on any given day you’re likely to see people
racing pinewood derby cars, parading in lederhosen or singing karaoke
in the lunch room. Have all the adults left the building? Find out how
Zappos employees manage to be productive while having lots of fun at
work."

Product Management for Humans: What Version Are YOU?
Christine Herron, First Round Capital
"Self-help, self-improvement, self-growth…for the most part, it’s a
bunch of gooey hooey. Cut to the chase! Product and brand managers have
clear, proven techniques for understanding and evolving products,
learning from experience and feedback, and both setting and executing
against a strategic roadmap. Apply them to develop the person that you
want to be. What version are YOU on?"

For your reading pleasure, check out Reinventing Direct Marketing with VRM Inside.  Good stuff.

This post is one of a series of recommendations arrived at by
going through the entire list of South by Southwest panels that are up
for consideration for 2009.

Important: Would love your support for "FlashMarkets: From the Roman Agora to the Mobile Web." Click here to vote or learn more.

SXSW 2009 Panel Recs: Programming and Content

Learning from Architecture
John Athayde, Hyphenated People 
 "Designers
and programmers have been referencing Architecture since long before a
computer was involved. What can we learn from the field that taught us
that less is more (Mies)? Is your website a sign or a decorated shed
(Venturi)? What is a pattern Language (Alexander)? From Vitruvius to
Palladio to the modernists and the digital revolution in architecture,
see and discuss how these fields intersect and influence each other."

Why People Search Still (Mostly) Sucks
James Reffell, Yahoo!
"Despite search, social networks, and gushy articles in the New York
Times about Googling exes, looking for people online is often
unsuccessful — and sometimes it’s successful in creepy ways. We’ll
cover the issues that keep us from good people search, and what we can
do about it."

Yes, You Can Make Beautiful Sites with Drupal!
George DeMet, Palantir.net, Inc.
"A panel of Web gurus will share their experiences working with creative
partners and colleagues to develop visually stunning and highly
functional Web sites using the Drupal content management platform.
Learn tactical tips and tricks that will help you bend Drupal to your
will and create your own beautiful sites."

Coding for Civic Participation
Clay Johnson, Sunlight Foundation
"There’s a revolution happening in government transparency. We’re using
technology to make government more accountable to its citizens. A panel
of experts will talk the details about new APIs and tools that make
government data more accessible so that you the programmer can change
the world."

Beyond Aggregation — Finding the Web’s Best Content
Louis Gray, LouisGray.com
"RSS aggregation has reduced the massive ocean of Web content into
something more manageable, but we are still left overloaded with
information and manual searching. This panel will explore new avenues
for finding the Web’s best content, and how this more intelligent Web
will affect major media companies, online publishers and consumers. We
have confirmed Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb as a moderator."

Transactions do not have a time dimension. They are atomic and exist by themselves.  Transactions exist in isolation.

On the other hand, relationships do have a time dimension.

For example, the ease with which we can find others online (e.g. friends from high school or college) now means that it’s easier for long-running relationships to be created.  (This is extremely top-of-mind, as just this week I’ve been fortunate enough to reconnect with two old buddies, one from high school and one from college, both of whom I haven’t spent any notable amount of time with in over 20 years.)

Up until recently, I wonder if it was much more difficult to create long-running relationships.  It seems to me that, historically, most "relationships" were with one’s contemporaries (literally: "with time").  We’d have connections with those who were in the same time and place that we were.  It now seems easier to connect the transactions into a flow than it was even a couple of years ago.

I wonder if the business focus on the "transaction" is an artifact of the historical difficulty of representing information that has a time dimension?  Or, perhaps, as we moved into the database age, the relative difficulty of representing change-over-time versus simply representing a transactional row lead to this focus on the transaction in isolation, as opposed to tracking the big picture of the evolution of a relationship over years?

It’s the difference between this and this.  Which one really communicates more information?

Edited to add: I think this transactional mindset affects both customers and vendors, and is one of the things that I hope we can address with VRM.

photo: pizzodisevo

This post is one of a series of recommendations arrived at by
going through the entire list of South by Southwest panels that are up
for consideration for 2009.

Important: Would love your support for "FlashMarkets: From the Roman Agora to the Mobile Web." Click here to vote or learn more.

SXSW 2009 Panel Recs: Marketing

Fire Your PR Firm: Brand it Yourself
Francine Hardaway, Stealthmode Partners
"Social Media Club interim board members will give advice and
anecdotes about how PR and branding have changed because of social
media and how, as an entrepreneur, you sre empowered. You can now
market your own product or company better than any PR firm. And you
should. This is for technical people, to teach them the DIY of social
media as a branding tool. You would be surprised how many engineers
don’t know this."

Try Making Yourself More Interesting
Brian Oberkirch, Small Good Thing
"There are no cheat codes for community. No Charles Atlas shortcuts to
make your pet project the one to rule them all. Want people to think
you’re awesome? Be awesome. This panel promises a bullshit-free look at
how you might tune out the jibber jabber, tune in to those who matter,
put your head down and make your online service a little bit more epic
each day. We’ll dissect Bike Hugger, Photojojo, Metafilter, and other
examples of Web charm for what *you* can do. Today, and tomorrow. And
the day after. Which is how you will become what you want to be."

Making Whuffie: Raising Social Capital in Online Communities
Tara Hunt, Citizen Agency
"This talk gets to the heart of how people interact and exchange
information in online communities: through social capital, or as Cory
Doctorow calls it, Whuffie. The key to growing customers in online
communities is through growing your social capital. You will learn the
5 lessons of raising Whuffie through online communities in this
presentation."

What Teens & Tweens Want In A Web Site/Application
Anastasia Goodstein, Ypulse
"If you’re designing or programming a website or application for teens
or just want to be relevant to the next generation, this teen panel
will give you a glimpse into how teens are using the Net and cell
phones. Find out what teens want, and more importantly what they don’t."

Micro-Interactions in a 2.0 World
David Armano, Critical Mass
We live in a world where the little things really do matter. Each
encounter — no matter how brief — is a micro interaction which makes
a deposit or withdrawal from our rational and emotional subconscious.
The sum of these interactions and encounters adds up to how we feel
about a particular product, brand or service. Little things. Feelings.
They influence our everyday behaviors more than we realize."

Everything You Know About Social Media is Wrong
David Parmet, PerkettPR
"Everyone knows that social media has created a revolution in marketing.
But aren’t most marketers missing the point about what social media can
or cannot do for them? This panel will expose the horrible lies and
deceptions surrounding social media marketing. You will know what
social media is and isn’t."

This post is one of a series of recommendations arrived at by
going through the entire list of South by Southwest panels that are up
for consideration for 2009.

Important: Would love your support for "FlashMarkets: From the Roman Agora to the Mobile Web." Click here to vote or learn more.

SXSW 2009 Panel Recs: Business / Entrepreneurial

Building a Brand that Matters
Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com
"Tony Hsieh is Chief Executive Officer of Zappos.com. Tony will discuss
the four essentials of building a brand that matters -vision, repeat
customers, transparency and culture. Tony will also focus on
Zappos.com’s commitment to WOWing its customers and Zappos.com’s
strategy for growing sales year after year."

Donors Vs. The Environment – Striking a Balance
Randal Moss, American Cancer Society
"As non profits go more digital they have to balance their donor’s
interests, their business needs, and care for the environment. Hear how
top non profits are addressing the challenge with technology, and learn
how going appeals to constituents, employees, and the bottom line."

Making a Living Being Yourself
Heather Gold, subvert
"Comedian and professional thought-provoker Heather Gold brings together
Dana Robinson (NBC) and 3 well-known creators/web personalities to
discuss the process and pitfalls of your play becoming your work."

Convincing With Pictures: First We Throw Away All The Computers…
Dan Roam, Digital Roam Inc
"PowerPoint doesn’t necessarily make us stupid; it just makes us
visually lazy. Dan Roam, the best-selling author of ‘The Back of the
Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures’ returns to
SXSW with a whole new set of tools and rules for using simple pictures
to discover ideas and convince anybody of almost anything. Even
ourselves."