LibraryTechtonics

Information Superhighway Four: The Construct Additional Pylons Edition

FableVision, Boston Games For Change, Harvard Free Culture, and the Public Radio Exchange Proudly Present…

INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY FOUR: THE CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS EDITION
A Gathering Of Boston Tech

January 31st, 2009, 8:00 – 12:00
Berkman Squared, 50 Church Street, Cambridge MA
RSVP on Upcoming

Boston is full of cool Internet people. Why aren’t they meeting each other?

INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY is Boston’s monthly party gathering hackers, activists, artists, designers, nonprofits, startups, academics and general geekery to hang out and connect with one another.

* No agenda, no “networking,” no presentations. Just beverages, food, ideas and cool people.
* Best of all the price is free, just like the current market value for the Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker.

* This time: come out and meet Boston’s gaming peeps! We’re gathering startups, nonprofit game developers, researchers, and (as usual) a few awesome curveball guests for the mix.

* Also, come and play games! We’ll have some cool newer fare set up on big screen and projector — but will also be working the nostalgia circuit (read: Sam and Max, Doom, Chrono Trigger, NetHack) with a bank of slick XOs courtesy One Laptop Per Child.

With Featured Guests and Organizations:
* Gary Goldberger (FableVision)
* Gene Koo (The Berkman Center for Internet and Society)
* Jon Radoff (GamerDNA)
* Josh Diaz (CMS / GAMBIT)
* Scott MacMillan (Macguffin Games) and Darius Kazemi (Orbus Gameworks) (Boston Post Mortem)
* MacKenzie Sigalos and Katelyn Foley (One-For-All)
* Keith Hopper (Hopper Analytical / NPR)
* Andrea Mercado (Technologist)

Also Sponsored By Information Superhighway Alumni:
Beth Coleman and Kevin Driscoll (CMS), Mel Chua (Hello Silo), Steve Garfield (Founder, Boston Media Makers), Nate Aune, Brian Del Vecchio and Jon Pierce (Betahouse), Brett Stilwell (Pecha Kucha Boston), Mac Cowell and Jason Bobe (DIYBio)

ISFour Theme Song

Website: http://twitter.com/infosuperhiway

I’ve talked about what I’m looking for in a job, with a greater focus on how the organizational culture works as well as how that meshes with my work style, rather than how the job description reads. I found this video (~35mins, just under 3 time tokens) via a Lifehacker post this morning, and it really speaks to how I work in general, what I’m looking for in an environment in terms of excellent ways people can manage time and communications.

Video feedback highlights:

• Merlin talks about how you can control who has access to your time, how, and by which methods. It’s not impossible magic, it’s about choices you make according to the value you assign to tasks, meetings, interactions, and relationships. I make these choices all the time, by way of who gets access to me via which social networking sites, my status on chat, when I answer emails, and how/when I use in-person/phone communication. Just because I have Piper (my Blackberry) with me at all times doesn’t mean I’m a slave to her; she’s my right-hand gal, and I access her as necessary, not every time she makes a noise.
• Towards the end, Merlin tackles the tough bit of not being the only person who believes in these tenets, and how to figure out how it works in the group work dynamic in bite-sized pieces. I’m looking for a place that either a) already believes in these methods and is open to working through them, or b) willing to be open to experimenting and compromising on how things are done using methods like those Merlin outlines, where the bargain will work both ways.
• Learn to use tools better. Read Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home. Have the conversations with people about how you communicate, and don’t assume people use text, email, Twitter, wikis, Facebook, LinkedIn, chat the way that you do, or at all, for that matter. Understand when you should have a conversation with someone, and have it. And be mindful of other people’s time tokens.

This morning’s Social Media Breakfast Boston (SMB10) focused on the topic of measuring ROI. As someone who is predominantly a consumer in this context, it was an interesting peek at what seemed like advertising/PR inside baseball. There was a live stream of the talks, and the recording will be posted on Hubspot’s blog, the very gracious sponsors of this morning’s breakfast. You can also check out everyone’s tweets from this morning.

I won’t rehash the event too much, since the video will give you most of the information you need, and the presentations are brief and worth the time. Suffice it to say that at least 2 of the presenters, Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan and Visible Measures VP of Marketing and Analytics Matt Cutler, focused on the numbers. Not that this is bad, it’s actually really interesting to get a glimpse of how the numbers come to be, and how they are used.

Overall, the gist was that old advertising doesn’t work anymore, and people find what they need through searches and social networks as opposed to clicking on blunt force ads. So, by using resources (money, people, time) to create a presence in social communities instead of buying Google AdWords and pursuing traditional advertising methods, you increase your visibitlity, and therefore your ability to reap monitary rewards. However, the trick is knowing where on the Roulette board to put your chips, and how many, based on who lives and plays in each space, and what types of content they find valuable, and without ROI assessment, it’s a tough bet to make.

Both Hubspot and Visible Measures seem to be getting the numbers right. They’ve found ways to generate followers in various social networks online, they see the eyeball potential of all those followers, and they’ve even been able to turn some of those eyeballs into actual customers. These are PR/analytics firms, whose customers are other businesses… more on that in a minute.

Brian Halligan mentioned during the Q&A that, while many of the people in the room might not want to hear this, the future of good “advertising” is really in hiring content creators instead of PR people, to create content to drive traffic to businesses and brands. Cool commercials, online only content, music videos, free articles, games, toys, all sorts of stuff, because users finding your content is the new way to attract attention, not by in-your-face methods like ads. Be findable, and be cool.

So back to the people in the room being mostly PR people… I had an interesting conversation with Chuck Tanowitz before the presentations began about how he believed that the future of PR is possibly for companies to bring in journalists as an impartial third party to create content about the companies, just to get the word out about what they’re doing and why people should care in the content realms that people live in. After the presentations, this fed into part two of our interestin conversation on how some marketing people (especially on higher levels) don’t understand how the new web is really about user-generated content on the user’s level (not necessarily shiny, polished, or high-quality), and how that supports the craving for real transparency (because people aren’t stupid, and they can tell that something too shiny, polished, and high-quality is really just choreographed and not entirely transparent advertising).

Given that much of marketing/PR/analytics see potential in the numbers of followers they garner in any given social tech outlet, and that, on a business-to-business level, they are seeing some measurable ROI by how many new customers they bring in, but can only have faith in the rest of the subjective and human element of social networking ROI that can’t be measured — being a fan may not lead to them making money right now — I have questions from a consumer perspective for you. Those who are in the business, take off your business hats if you can before your read and respond.

• Do you follow companys on Twitter, join groups/become fans of companies on Facebook, subscribe to RSS feeds, sign up for email newsletters, join groups on LinkedIn, etc., based on the brand of the company alone, or does it have something to do with the people and personalities who represent these companies? Are you drawn to the people, who lead you to the companies, or does it matter?
• Following companies on Twitter: do you do it? Why, or why not? What kinds of content draws you to them, or pushes you away from them? Is an all link feed just spam to you, or is it better than RSS? Do you prefer people from companies who interact as humans first, employees second?
• Are you loyal to personalities, or to companies? Say you love yarn, and you buy yarn from a company because you like dealing with a specific person… then that person goes to work for another yarn company. Are you loyal to the yarn company because it’s great, or to the person because they’re great?

I do agree that good content is the best way to attract attention. I’m just trying to suss out whether the numbers would work out the same way for business-to-consumer interaction. Let me know what you think of my braindump on this… I look forward to your answers to the questions.

First, let me address the “how’s the job hunt?” question: in short, it’s not.

Right now, I’m not actively spending my days pouring over job listings and sending out cover letters, and I won’t be anytime soon.  Instead, I’m spending way more of my time just talking to people, not in the “I want a job from you” kind of way, but in a “hey, we both do interesting things, and I have the time, so let’s chat” kind of way. If jobs come out of these relationships, then that’s super. If not, that’s totally fine, since the relationships are more important to me. If a job falls in my lap in the midst of everything I’m doing right now, and it’s the right job at the right place, I won’t say no. People I know are sending me links and leads to jobs, which is always helpful, as long as they fit what I’m looking for. But otherwise, I’ve eschewed the traditional job search for now.  More importantly, I’m resting, spending my time doing things I’ve needed and wanted to do, and just enjoying life.  I’ll let you know when things change in that respect.

So what am I looking for?

Better time: First and foremost, regaining and maintaining a sense of work/life balance is of the highest priority.  When I was freelancing in technology many ages ago, I did a much better job managing my time and preventing work time scope creep, but it was still a bit crazy. When I was working in librarianship, the freelance work seemed to never end, and between the crazy library hours schedule and side work, I was working all the time, and I could never do things at night (which I really like to do).  So, a more normal workday (Monday through Friday, 9am-ish to 5pm-ish, occasional nights and weekends), is my ideal situation.

Not in a library:  I don’t want to work in a library or for a library vendor.  If you want clarification on this, you’re welcome to leave a comment.  (As a side note, at some point soon, I may be changing the name of the blog, so that it will no longer be a misnomer.)

Easier commute: This includes walking distance, T (Boston area public transit subway), bus, or any combination thereof, at less than 45 minutes one-way.  I’ve done the driving commute in the Boston area, and it’s really just a stress generator for me.  I think I’d do it for the right job, though.

Excellent organizational culture: I’m looking for a place full of a good number of people who are smarter than me, with a professional, collaborative nature.  I want to work with people who understand technology, and I’d love to work with some geeks again.

My position? Well, that’s the interesting bit.  At this point, my firm belief is that I’ll know it when I see it, but I’m open to suggestions.  I think that I’d do well in a consultant (internal or with a consulting company, not on my own) or client services position, and tech support/management, but I’m not limiting my options to that. My nature is to be a problem solver.  I can plan, I get human behavior, I can Geek-English translate, I work well with others in a team or as an individual and/or leader, and l learn quickly.  I have hands-on tech skills, everything from configuring and tinkering with WordPress (although I will admit there are a few things I haven’t gotten around to fixing with my theme, too busy living ;D) to fixing computer problems, and I’m a natural tinkerer.  I’m never afraid to say “I don’t know.”  I’m really good at using, planning, teaching, and counseling on social networking technologies.  You can get a full run-down on my experience and skills on my LinkedIn profile.

That’s where it’s at.

It was a festive day, running about online and in real life, “covering” the history-making election of 2008. Can you believe how many people actually got out to vote this year? Go Team USA!

I spent a good amount of the morning trying to feverishly tweet about Twitter Vote Report, a project quickly-yet-skillfully implemented in just three weeks by Allison Fine from the Personal Democracy Forum and Nancy Scola, Associate Editor of techPresident (Fast Company story). This project is proof that a huge tech project can be produced in a truly grassroots fashion, wrangled via a fantastic wiki, contributed to by volunteers, and get the attention of outlets like CNN (can’t find a link, but I know people saw it), Mashable, and rocketboom. Three weeks, kids. Amazing. I wish I had done more to help get the word out (I’ve tweeted off and on about it in the past few days), but still, I think the turnout was impressive.

Twitter Vote Report was designed to take in data from hashtags in tweets and reprocess them into mashups like Google maps to track wait times, machine problems, registration problems, fraud, and overall good/bad feelings about the voting experience. Most people new the basic #votereport hashtag, but not many of the other tags were used, or used properly, enough to help the other apps pick up the data necessary. On the enormous upside, it’s impressive that Twitter Vote Report offered a “don’t Twitter, never will” set of options, to broaden the scope of participation, including posting transcriptions and sound files of phone messages. I think that, with enough time to seriously market the tags, or perhaps even some sort of structured form-based input system for people may need it, it could be a serious way to track the next set of elections.

It took me approximately 53 minutes to vote. It was worth it. I tweeted my vote, and even took listeners into the voting booth with me via a recording on Utterli:

Ken George , WBUR Twitterer in Chief and Social Media guy over at WBUR, graciously invited me to participate in the #wburvote event, where a handful of us tweeted the election on behalf of the WBUR station. It was quite the hoot, filled with different approaches to using different types of social tools online, including Twitter, to report on the election. I arrived at the station around 2pm or so, spent most of the afternoon talking with Ken, and David Boeri, host of Radio Boston and awesome journalist/speaker, helping them brainstorm possible stories, uses of the technology, and methods for getting people to interact with the station. I also met a slew of interesting people, and discussed social networking, Twitter, and human interaction with new WBUR people I met.

The rest of the WBUR Twitter Central crew arrived in the early evening (in order of appearanc): Jeff Cutler, Gradon Tripp, Scott Frazer, Deb Agliano, and Adam Zand (there were more Twitter peeps posting off-site, check out the search for everything hashtagged #wburvote). The entire event was peppered with exceedingly exciting and scintillating conversation, excellent snacks, and lots of fun watching the numbers roll in. We were interviewed on video, talked to WBUR staffers about what exactly we were doing and many aspects of the social web, pictures taken. The staffers were really happy to see us there, and very curious about what we were doing, which made for a very positive and open environment. Everyone had different approaches to the “reporting” idea: Jeff corresponded with Twitter followers and friends about their experiences and tweet bits, Adam posted many utters, I messaged followers with questions and comments while I trolled different Twitter searches, and everyone tweeted their hearts out. The WBUR Twitter effort even got a shout out on the air, which is awesome progress.

When I started this post, I was drinking a Hitachino Nest Red Rice Ale, watching Obama deliver his FTW (abbrev. internet slang, “for the win”) speech, still tweeting, at home, in my pajamas, just after watching Jon Stewart announce Obama’s win on Indecision 2008 and helping a friend find a live video stream of the speech for his sister in China. It’s been a day of meeting new people, coining new phrases (Scott gets a super gold star for “premature calculation,” a danger of overly-excited polls, but nothing to be ashamed of ), and feeling really connected in person *and* by way of technology with the rest of the nation on this momentus occasion. It was definitely a treat to use the social web’s powers for good today, and I’m excited for what the future of interaction holds for us.