A weblog by Christopher Carfi, since 2004.
Over the next couple of days, I’ll be doing a little bit of photoblogging as well – great conference, and unbelievable venue here at Navy Pier in Chicago. I just walked outside the conference area to find this blues stage with band doing a screaming cover of Red House.
It’s good to be home. 🙂
By the way, if you want to subscribe to just the photo feed over the next couple of days, I’ll be posting the pics directly to Flickr and the photo feed is here.
Technical Tools To Build Traffic
Site description: "Grabbing an audience and keeping them engaged is enhanced by technical
know-how. We’re going to help you get some, including how to use
syndication to your best advantage, and a little DIY search engine
optimization. This is a reprise of what was one of our most popular
sessions at BlogHer Business in March, featuring, once again, Elise Bauer and Vanessa Fox."
The Top 5 Ways to build traffic:
Elise also shared a number of site design tips:
Session description: "There have been many
calls for a session about the art of writing itself…how to improve
your writing, how to find your unique voice, etc. This session covers
narrative prose, and the blog as a platform for narrative prose
specifically. In a blogging world of 140 character posts on Twitter and
link posts posing as "content", is there a place for stories? Author,
blogger and screenwriter Claire Fontaine talks with other bloggers Birdie Jaworski and Ree from Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, about why they still find time to write intriguing beginnings, gripping middles and satisfying ends."
Audience: We’re trying to build a collective story by way of interviewing a number of people. What suggestions would you have?
Birdie: I live in a small town in New Mexico. The families in my area have an incredibly rich history, but no one ever tells them. I went to the library, found old photographs of the community, and now I am showing the elder members of the community the photographs, and asked them to tell me about that place. If you show people something that can be a visual cue, it can bring back a flood of memory. It’s been fascinating.
Claire: Asking the right questions is probably key. If you can ask the right questions, it can tease those stories out.
A lot of interesting conversation of "telling stories" versus "blogging" or other similar forms. Stories are just that … beginnings, middles, and ends. Characters. Narrative arc. Stories are a very different creature than an episodic blog post that is not of any particular "form."
Audience: Which are the stories that I want to keep close, and just for my family and friends? Which ones do you put out there into the world?
Claire: I just published a memoir. For me, telling "risky" or "scary" stories from your past frees yourself. The stuff that people respond to are the stories that we were originally afraid to publish.
Claire asks herself three things every time she writes: "Is it true? Is it clear? Is it beautiful?" But she also explicitly does NOT think about the "reader," as she would lose her "inner conversation" that creates her stories. The only fact-checking is "am I telling the truth from within?"
Birdie uses contrast as a mechanism. For example, she writes about a man in her town, and compares him to herself. In doing so, she brings out more of what she is about and, at the end of the story, at which she and the subject are equal, but different.
Audience: What about "creative nonfiction," (yes, I know I’m using the term wrong) where I put two things together that were each true, but didn’t happen at the same time? Or I leave out the middle of the story, because the beginning and end were the most interesting. What’s the right way to do this?
Panel: You *definitely* need to disclose that. Even putting the phrase "based on a true story" will help to prevent you from getting into the trouble. Or, if you’re not sure of a fact, preface it with "I think" or "in my opinion"…don’t state something as fact if that’s not the case.
Claire says "every story is an unanswered question." And don’t answer that question until the end. That mystery is the key.
The Life Stages of Online Communities
Session overview: "Communities have a lifecycle. What we do to nurture them depends on
where a community is in its life. Talk with people at all stages of
managing online communities as part of for-profit and non-profit
endeavors. What are best practices, pitfalls and warning signs to look
for at the birth, growth spurt or middle-age of your community?"
A few key points that have been made regarding growing a healthy community:
Just arrived in Chicago and am heading into the first session at BlogHer 2007. Will be liveblogging some sessions later; other folks are liveblogging here.
Jenny Ambrozek and team used a collaborative environment (in this case, a wiki) to author an article on "Connected Intelligence." The wiki can be found here: Learning Through Participation and Connecting Intelligences: Experimenting with a Wiki to Co-create an Article
The project was very interesting in its introspection on what was working, and what wasn’t, as the process evolved. The page on "Lessons," in particular, provides a great data point into what actually happened.
"June 29, 2007, with deadline looming. co-author Jenny Ambrozek posted
an article update and invitation to participate to the 21st Century
Organization blog 21st Century Blog
June 30 Knowledge Jolt blogger, Jack Vinson, blogged about our article writing experiment Jack Vinson Blog
July 2 Jenny Ambrozek in checking Technorati www.technorati.com for activity around our blog post also noted Jack Vinson’s Policies Can be Changed post and added a comment.
A Facebook www.facebook.com and email exchange followed. The Jack Vinson Wiki Page was created and we captured Jack’s insights about “policies” impacting knowledge sharing and learning in a real laboratory.
It took the wiki+blogs+Technorati+Facebook+email to gather the laboratory example.Co-Creating Takes Time
It was 14 weeks from wiki creation to article deadline but the bulk of
activity happened in the last month. The authors had competing
commitments and it was only as the deadline approached and focused
their attention that real structural activity began. What we didn’t
realize was that although a collaborative product benefits from
connected intelligence, the production cycle must allow for more review
and reflection by the various participants.
Unknown is how many more people we could have reached, and how much
richer or different, this article would be if we had started outreach
earlier. As the wiki remains open so readers can contribute their
reactions and tell us what we’ve missed.
"
Check out the analysis of the evolution of the wiki here.
photo: tanio
(iTunes) (MP3) (click here to subscribe)
Episode 21, about 30 minutes.
Today’s Topics:
Related Links:
JPG Magazine
Threadless
Next Week: CRM and VRM, Doc Searls
Small is Beautiful
Craigslist ; Craig Newmark
Cult of the Amateur
Business Lifecycle in Community Context – What Can Community Do?
Fon; Community Delivered Wi-fi
Moo Cards; Appended to Existing Community – Flickr
MySpace as Marketing Vehicle
X-Men Promotion on Myspace
iPhone as Cultural Event
Categories of iPhone Line-Waiters
Will You Get an iPhone?
Nokia 770
Jake’s New Biz: Ant’s Eye View
Cerado Gets New Offices
Common Craft – More Videos coming soon
Blogher 2007, Chicago
Interesting research from my alma mater CMU, on the neurological processes that occur at the moment we’re making a buying decision as customers.
"Their findings, recently published in Neuron,
suggest that there’s a battle in the brain between immediate pleasure
and immediate pain when we’re deciding what to buy. This contradicts
conventional economic theory, which states that people make decisions
based on immediate pleasure versus saving their buying power for some
future pleasure. The subjects in the MRI study weren’t thinking about
what benefits they would gain at some later date if they chose not to
purchase The Family Guy DVD set now. Rather, they were deciding based
on how painful (or not) they thought paying for it would be right now.Loewenstein says that the findings helped
confirm what he and Prelec first noticed (i.e., that spending money can
be painful) in the early 1990s while collaborating on a paper. At the
time, they had to rely on mathematical models to prove their point. But
MRI technology now allows them to back up that claim with hard
data–real pictures of human brains that show real activity in the
brain’s pain center. Hard data is what Loewenstein hopes will
eventually lead to the acceptance of the field among doubters who still
hold fast to traditional economic theory.Loewenstein hopes to follow up his research regarding the "pain of paying"
by exploring a growing and looming problem in the United States–why so
many people run up so much credit card debt. Much like he did in the
study with Knutson and Prelec, he wants to see what goes on in the
brain when someone pulls out plastic instead of money when making
purchases. His hypothesis is that credit cards numb the brain’s pain
center (i.e., reduce activity in the insular cortex) because no
currency is exchanged and costs are postponed, thus weakening the
body’s built-in defense mechanism against unnecessary purchases. He
believes that MRI testing could provide definitive answers." (empahsis added)
Sprint has fired over 1,000 of their customers. On June 29, 2007, Sprint sent out letters to a number of customers that stated:
"Our records indicate that over the past year, we have received frequent calls from you regarding your billing or other general account information…Therefore, after careful consideration, the decision has been made to terminate your wireless service agreement effective July 30, 2007."
Here’s a copy of the letter:
image: MissDiva
I think Sprint’s move is terribly, well…uncreative. You’ve got a group of over 1,000 very vocal customers. Is there not a way to turn all that energy to good, mutual, use, where the customers can get their problems solved and can provide the organization with information or ideas that could help the rest of the customer base? It makes me wonder — were the problems that these customers were having with the service unique in some way that made them difficult to resolve? Or are the problems endemic within Sprint’s processes, and it’s just this group of customers that were actually following up and attempting to get them resolved, instead of rolling over?
(If you remember, I’ve had my own issues with Sprint over the past couple of years.)
Who else has had issues with Sprint recently?
More on the story here:
Our local Half Moon Bay and Coastside community site, Coastsider.com, puts up its community guidelines. I loved this one in particular:
6. Please use your real name. We don’t require this but we’d like to know who you are. If you sign your name Bill Clinton or Frank Zappa, we’ll in all likelihood delete it, unless we’re certain you’re the former president or the reincarnated Mother of Invention.
Related: Backfence closes its doors, with commentary from Terry Heaton and Jeff Jarvis. And a spot-on review of a Backfence meeting from last year from Adina Levin.
image: Barry Parr
