It’s a Me, Me, Me, Meme World
The “me, me, me, meme.” What is it?
Cool tech geeks start something online. We jump on the bandwagon. Our friends see what’s going on. A crowd forms, asks questions, then follows our lead. Lifestreams form.
In the video game Final Fantasy VII, the Lifestream is a river of Mako energy coursing through the Planet. The Lifestream is considered the blood of the Planet, which in turn is considered a collective conscience similar to the Oversoul of transcendentalist philosophy, but not quite the same as the type of entity proposed in the Gaia theory.
Our own personal lifestreams, or “public timeline’s” if you prefer, are slightly more mundane that the one from Final Fantasy, however it can still be pondered in an analogous manner. Our lifestream threads together everything that we are. Where we go, what we say, who we interact with, how we express ourselves, concepts inside artwork that we create, symbolism that we identify. All can be considered “us” or “me” in some, hopefully non-banal, way.
We say “me” a lot in our lifestreams. Not always directly. Indirectly also. Off the top of our heads. Well thought out over hours of writing and editing. At the snap of the shutter on our iPhone. While visiting at parties and gatherings. By connecting/friending/following through social nets. Generating our APML wake and bow waves through the public timestream. We are the social seed for our downstream online and offline, everyone has a built-in personal wetware network and many people let this stream filter back online, forming a personal lifestream wake.
When we say “me” we say “we” a lot as well. The “we” message is buried in context of the “me” and provides the rich matrices upon which our lifestreams thrive. “ Frank is watching the Chicago Bears and blogging <link> - #twitter” tells me what Frank Gruber is up to, but the link was meant for his followers -”we”.
When Dave Winer snaps an iPhone photo in the Palo Alto Apple store, I see his Twitter/image post and also note, based on her earlier Tweet, that @StephAgresta is in the store at the same time. @SamHarrelson then notices that Dave might have captured @StephAgresta in his iPhone shot of the Apple store. I then see Stephanie twitter about a happenstance meeting in the Apple store with Dave, Robert Scoble and son. I know all these people, but am I watching a personal version of my own external life unfolding in a Twitter stream? Am I watching Dave’s? Robert’s & Patrick’s? Sam’s? Stephanie’s? Later on I notice (from his Twitter wake) that Robert and wife had their new baby and he might have been in the Apple store in connection with that wonderful event!
Now imagine a person walking up to you, whom you may not recognize immediately, saying “hi Dave/Steph, I just noticed from your twitter stream that you were in the PA Apple store and wanted to say ‘hi’ because we were in the same place at the same time. Our twitter streams crossed in time.”
Wow, new types of meetings are happening in today’s silicon valley technology stores … a new dimension to social meshing is occurring based on bridges being created between online and offline lifestreams.
Me. I’m in this place. I’m in this photo. I’m live video streaming you at this moment. I’m playing pool. I’m waiting at the airport. I’m on AirforceOne. I’m pondering my navel. I invented a new drug. I’m at a funeral. I participated in a Senate hearing. I’m blogging. When saying “me” we don’t like saying it into a vacuum, but that’s the way all lifestreams begin. Erupting from a birth-point in time. The spot upon which we first create a social persona and declare “I am me, and you shall learn more”, like some holy writ dug from the sands of ancient lands. In a world of 6 Billion people we are standing up to say “hello world - I am an individual.”
Now lot’s of folks are saying, “ya, but what about ‘them’, all of you ‘me’ focused people. “Them” - those outside our personal sphere, our socio-economic plateau, our comfort zone. “When you focus so much on yourself you ignore all those people around you.” It seems that if you place your thoughts out into the public consciousness one can be labeled “narcissistic” Who knew this would be the response from people who don’t do it, so can’t “get it?” Duh.
I say create a Twitter wake - drop your social seed and watch it sprout. “Me” “We” “Them” will intermingle. This is the power of connected networks of people.
Of course the solution to the “starting in a vacuum” problem above is simply to participate in life offline as well as online. The wetware networks feed your online social existence. Groupings, micro-crowds, followers, friends, whatever you want to call it, the systems of social interaction which we participate in will subsume our individuality to a greater good if we give at least as much as we receive. However, perhaps when we network in person, face-to-face we can talk about something other than “me” or “we”, I’m so tired of hearing “so, what do you ‘do’?”, perhaps we might re-focus a bit and put ourselves into the shoes of “them” and see what that feels like as a community after the “them” concepts we discuss filter back into our online “we” stream.
Filed under Diatribe, Geo-temporal, Microcrowds, Tagclouds, Web Marketing | Comments (7)Captology and Microcrowd Influence
I learned a new word the other day, Captology, and it helps me define an area of thought of particular interest (thanks to my buddy Crosby!) I was talking with him about some of my recent posts covering geo-temporal and microcrowd concepts and he suggested that I check out a particular Stanford University website. According to the description on the Stanford University Persuasive Technology Lab website, the definition of Captology:
Captology is the study of computers as persuasive technologies. This includes the design, research, and analysis of interactive computing products created for the purpose of changing people’s attitudes or behaviors.
And they have a nifty Venn diagram that I’ve borrowed so you can visualize the concept.
At the moment I’m thinking of how captology interacts with microcrowds. Specifically microcrowds on Websites, Mobile Devices (iPhone), the desktop, in Virtual Reality (SL), and where this crosses over into in-person interactions with geo-temporal implications.
Definition of Microcrowd (s): noun. A group of people in which members are passive, active or aggressive participants. A Microcrowd member may influence other members with their participation.
Example: When I saw my acquaintance Justin Kan during a Citizen Agency party the other day, our discussion led me to consider some new thoughts about geo-temporal tracking. Justin has no idea, but the conversation and my active participation within a specific microcrowd of people altered some of my evolving thoughts around this type of tracking.
In addition to interacting with this example group in person, I also interact with many specific members online. Twitter, chat, email, blog comments and many more points of distributed contact form my networks within the microcrowds that I interact with. Blackberry and MacBook Pro are my primary connection tools, but within email the browser and other applications I also connect with asynchronous video (live: justin.tv recorded:viddler.com) and more.
I might log into the justin.tv website in order to “watch the content”, but because he lives in my city I might log in to see where he is, or to see if the party I’m going to is worth getting into a cab for (Justin tends to hit the same party scene I do so I can “preview reality”.) This seems like the ultimate in technology impacting me, influencing my decisions, yet this decision is also influenced by the wisdom of the microcrowds because if I didn’t travel a similar SF party circuit as Justin and could not “preview the party” then my party-going decision making would be influenced by other microcrowds. If I find out that the Extra Action Marching Band will be at the party, my passive participation in the microcrowd centered on this band would tip me towards attending the party, even without a “reality preview” through Justin.tv, because I love watching this band. Knowledge of their attendance tipped me into going. Once I’ve made this decision, I might Twitter or email about the party to get friends from my other microcrowds to attend. And so it spreads.
At the Citizen Agency party I might have learned something that changes important parts of my life, or I might learn somebody had a birthday. At a Giants baseball game I might be influenced to care more that someone had just hit a homerun, or I may learn that someone that I know had a heart attack. The information conveyed is not important to this particular post as I’m focused on how information waves spread through and among microcrowds. How the information is relayed and the influence applied from within the community and the technology that is in the hands of community members during the conveyance of the message is important, impacting persuasion and human behavior.
I’m participating in many microcrowds in many different ways; in blogs, with family, on social websites, at parties and general assembly events, on handheld devices, in school, on music and video players. Each touch point that I have with the technology tools or in face-to-face meetings will generally influence what I think about and how I perceive “it”.
This appears to be like memes moving virally towards a tipping point, but I believe it’s also analogous to neuron pathway development, influenced by the volume and type of connectivity and communication of participation.
This post has been languishing in my drafts folder for some time, so rather than sit on it longer, or draw any conclusions, I’m just going to put it out there for discussion … hopefully this spurs some new ideas for you.
Filed under Mashups, Microcrowds, Online Advertising, Tagclouds, Web 2.0, Web Marketing | Comments (2)The Tangible Cost of Bad Trade Show Schwag
Tradeshows and The Schwag they effuse; we’ve got to get real here.
Bad schwag gets thrown away immediately. Not only does it NOT make it onto desktops, it causes harm to the environment. And all of you who don’t believe the environment is an important issue can go flip a duck.
Schwag has weight. When consumers are trying to decide what to take back home in the already heavy suitcase, your schwag will lose unless it has value, real or emotional. Perhaps they do need a new pen or want to give a bag to the cleaning crew. However there is a large probability that your chosen schwag may not do anything except take up space in the garbage of local hotels.
I’ve been to hundreds of tradeshows and seen a lot of schwag in my life. During a 4 year stint I actually produced shows for a living, so the schwag I’ve seen has run the gamut.
I’d currently wager that AdTech has a definite lack of schwag innovation considering the industry which it serves. Where are the call to actions and so forth? I expected to see more companies tying their live tradeshow participation and schwag giveaways to their websites, for example.
I can’t affect company tradeshow participation plans, but I can comment on the schwag, so here we go. There are a few simple rules to make your schwag memorable and worth keeping. Kind of like Internet advertising in a way.
Is it cute?
Does it do anything?
Does it add value? (perceived quality)
At every AdTech in recent memory for example, I’ve seen hats, pens and notepads given away by Casale Media. Their golf hats are BRIGHT red and I mean BRIGHT. You would not get lost on the links in this hat. The notepads are a slightly strange design that are too big to slip into a pocket, yet too small to use for regular note keeping. Their pens however, the pens they give out are by far the best at the show, in my humble opinion. These pens are worth keeping a deep supply of. When I return from AdTech shows in fact I usually find that my red Casale pen has mysteriously gone missing from my office desk within days. Hmm…
I thought it might be interesting to solicit your feedback, dear reader, about the “best in class” of schwag which you saw and/or collected at the recent AdTech in San Francisco. That schwag which is worth keeping… Comment away about your own finds at the show…. like maybe you really loved the Doubleclick iPod mini speakers set for example…. hmm that might make a nice bedside music player…..
Here are some examples to get you going:
Best Pens
Best Flashy Thing
Best Notepads
Best Bags
Best Mints
T-shirts with the best design
Best “Other”
The Importance of Words in Web Navigation
Open API’s ROCK
I’ve written a few posts about Twitter already, fascinated with the simplicity of their pure concept. What a wonderful service, open to new ideas by exposing their API. In my eyes this is very forward looking because the Twitter team is expecting to see not just one community build up around the core service, but many communities. Twitter micro-crowds if you will, where all participants are engaged with the core service and valuable mash-ups. Already there are Twitter geo-location visualizers & user search (which exposes user post time-lines), continuously evolving Twitter books (140 characters at a time), Twitter stand up-comedians etc,. Every micro-crowd is using Twitter in different ways that meet the personal needs of each micro-crowd member.
Growing Pains
The use of Twitter and twitter-like functionality is expanding quickly, so I believe that the Twitter team is receiving a tremendous cacophony of Tweets about ways in which to improve the service. Instead of adding to the noise, I thought I’d add my $0.02 by pointing to a navigation issue that the Twitter team will probably fix shortly. In fact they are probably already planning to make the change, so perhaps I’m being a bit previous.
Why Word Usage Matters
Note the way that I used the last word in that last paragraph above, as “previous” can be defined as “too soon or too hasty”. While I am not an English Major, I was confused about how the Twitter.com service uses “previous” and “next” in navigation on the site. Today when I want to see Tweets that have been posted within the past, I scroll to the bottom of the “now” page, click “Next”, and I land on the page that represents data from my most recent past (page=2) in my “friends” time-line of posts. When I scroll to the bottom of this page I see “previous | next.”
I’m confused by what “previous” and “next” might mean in this context, because where Temporal considerations exist for me as a user I need additional clues in order to know what to do immediately. If I want to see older posts I know that I can probably click “next” and get to older posts, however I need to interpret this. I might also think that “next” will take me back to the next post in Time, the one that was most recently posted on the “now” page.
Words for Temporal Application
Previous and Next are usually a series of predefined linear steps where Time is not involved. Where Time is an important aspect of the user experience we need to add Temporal indicators into our navigation language.
For example, where data is representing “now” or “now-minus-a-few-minutes-hours”, textual navigation might work like this:
“Now and Recent || Older”
or just “Older” because we are probably already viewing data from “now”
And for data representing recent past, textual navigation might work like this:
“Now and Recent || Newer || Older”
*******
We almost need to invent a new word that means the time-span of “Now and Recent” in order to take into consideration all of the web services which involve a temporal flow of information. Users constantly try to stay abreast of information within a confined but loosely defined time-space prior to moving the information to “archive”, “delete” or “out-of-immediate-awareness” (like the messages that are deep in the past of your recorded chat-stream).
Let’s call it the “now-span” unless someone has a better idea.
It’s fun to make up words 
“X” = ” Now-span ”
Definition: The time-span of “Now including Recent”. “Within a limited recent history, including the present.”
“Y” = ” Now-spanning ”
Definition: To pay attention to geo-temporal events within (X). (i.e. To read a chat post sent to me in San Francisco from Stephanie in New York at 9:16 PST, while simultaneously performing other interactive tasks that are also geo-temporally tagged. Some tasks are completed immediately, others sit for awhile before being addressed)
*******
Time-tagging and Virtual World Geo-temporal Interaction
A feature of telemetry processes for spacecraft and particle physics called time-tagging can benefit the future of Internet socialization if applied in the right ways. In the above applications, time-tagging is used to annotate a point in the timeline for a stream of data, where the annotation includes both a recognizable time signature that is linked to a reference-able point in three dimensional space. A geo-temporal annotation.
If we consider how humans have moved from discussions that occur in a typically limited geo-location in the off-line world (excepting global travel for arguments sake,) to a far ranging virtual world discussion basis (blog, forums, chats, SecondLife,) one can note the loss of certain aspects of inter-personal reference points. One loss is obviously the inability to see facial and body expressions, unless interactions occur on-camera or with avatars. Even these on-camera interactions are still very primitive in regards to reading facial expression. Another loss is the absence of a physical reference point, both in time as well as geo-location. Of course we always know where we are in the present, but there are many needs for access to historical as well as future looking time-tags associated with our online discussions and conversations.
When we discourse online, the participants in an interaction are often anonymous in the sense of physical geo-location, but the discussion is also bereft of a past/present/future, time/date stamp. Nor is the missing time-stamp correlated to the non-existent geo-tag. Nor is the distributed discussion geo-tagged by topic-of-discussion.” So as we converse online we are lacking certain clues, a few of the primary characteristics of human communication, which help us make informed decisions regarding participation in an ongoing dialog.
These images represent the geo-temporal concept as applied to RFID device tracking.
(Image Source)
If we were to enable a tagging or ping type system where every appropriate element of online interaction was annotated with Temporal related information and also assigned a geo-value, many additional possibilities would then exist for creating a richer and more humanistic online experience.
I saw a note about Atten.tv today and was interested to note that they plan to let you:
As you spend more time online, your clickstream (the record of where you visit online) increasingly represents who you are and what you are interested in. AttenTV turns one person’s or group’s clickstream data into another person’s entertainment. Watch what others are watching. See who is watching you. Influential individuals. Voyeuristic groups.
Today it was also revealed that Google plans to launch “Web History” so that registered Google Account holders can examine not just their account history with Google, but their surfing history.
Both of these examples showcase how we in the Internet industry are striving towards the next level of interaction online, where we will not only be tied together by content and discussion thread aggregation, but also through geo-temporal and geo-location user experiences.
As we tie ourselves together with open API’s we will need something like tags or post-pings to embed the geo-location and geo-temporal meta data to enable more lifelike interactions.
YOU, THEM, TOPIC, PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE, DELIVERY TYPE, MICRO-CROWD ID, …
Justin.tv has archives of their shows that are searchable by time-tag, but does not yet provide the geo-tagging which would enhance the visitor experience for both the casual voyeur as well as the subjects own narcissistic impulses.
RESOURCES
This is a great post to read more about this topic http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/010163.html “visual interface using historical and/or spatial context”
See couch surfing http://www.couchsurfing.com/ for geo-tagging based interaction
Timeline widget AJAX
http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/
Other reading:
Time-tagging
Podcast time-tagging
Birthing a Star
REALITY
In the physical Universe a Star is born by particles of matter falling into themselves, creating a gravity well which eventually leads to self-induced thermonuclear fusion reactions ignited by nuclear fission.
VIRTUAL
On the web, a Star is born in the same manner. Particles in the form of blog posts, TV interviews, book reviews, social networking, chats and other types of discussions, create a gravity well that is centered upon a singular point. When a Tipping Point (the fission event) is reached within the micro-crowds that form the particles mentioned above, a sudden group consensus forms and the Star is then born. Visualization of the Internet Stars ignition can be achieved by turning to tools like Technorati, TechMeme, TwitterVision, Alexa, StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us and others to watch the Stars Meme rise and run through the populace.
One additional point is that the virtual Star can also have a real gravity effect when they interact during meat gatherings. This can readily be seen by watching Justin.tv or Chris Pirillo or any of the other influential people who are now life-casting. When the Stars visit real world gatherings, they always exert an attractive force. This happens even if the Star is not wearing a camera, as can be seen by anyone who spots Matt Cutts at an event…and the crowd around him.
COMPARE
The difference between a nuclear Star and an Internet Star is that the former is self-ingesting in order to produce the energy expulsion which defines it’s existence. In the latter, the Star is ingesting the inbound “radiation” created by the audience or attentors in order to produce the near-visible cloud of effervescence that characterizes the Star.
SUPPOSITION
As apparently was just proved, that Einstein was right and a large celestial body such as the Earth or the Sun can bend space and time with their gravity wells, is there a correlation to be drawn to the manner in which an Internet Star effects the particles that comprise the fuel which has yet to drop into their gravity well?
In the end however, is there any question as to the longevity of each type of Star?
Filed under Web 2.0, Web Marketing | Comment (0)
