Uncarved

A summary from Web Worker Daily’s 10 Golden Rules of Social Media:

1. Respect the Spirit of the ‘Net: communication and connection to people and information.

2. Listen.

3. Add value. Before posting a message as a new participant in a forum, ask yourself: How is this providing value to the conversation? To the community?

4. Respond.

5. Do Good Things. This goes beyond adding value online. It means fundamentally changing your business model from a single bottom line — profit — to a triple bottom line — people, planet, profit — and then perpetuating this social responsibility to all you do in business, including online marketing and selling.

6. Share the Wealth. In social media, sharing is the fuel of the conversation engine.

7. Give Kudos. Social media works when you are generous. There is nothing wrong with self-promotion, but things really take off when you give others praise or a moment in the spotlight. The rise of retweeting — real retweeting, not spammy retweeting — shows how far giving credit to others can go in social spaces.

8. Don’t Spam.

9. Be Real. Authenticity is the secret ingredient behind any good and valuable social media marketing campaign.

10. Collaborate. Before you dive into social media for marketing and selling, take a look at who is out there and who is doing it well. How can you work with them, instead of trying to muscle your way into the space with all of your dollars?
    

The author of the article largely organized it to speak to larger commercial organizations, but the basic points are valuable advice for developing the identity any type of brand on the social Internet.

Check out the full article for a fuller take.

Check it out howto, social media

Arnie discussing the imperative to modernize the publishing infrastructure in California’s education system by moving to digital textbooks:

As the music and newspaper industries will attest, those who adapt quickly to changing consumer and business demands will thrive in our increasingly digital society and worldwide economy.

It’s one thing to hear the tech nerds of the internet speak of the RIAA’s clueless clamoring into the digital phase of the digital publishing landscape, but quite another to see such a high-profile politician so plainly paint the RIAA as a poster child embodying the inability to adapt to changing market realities.

I can’t help but speculate that this imperative takes aim at two birds with one stone. I find it difficult to imagine it to be mere coincidence that California-based Amazon dropped their Kindle DX — introduced with a marketing message explicitly speaking to its value proposition to text book publishers — with such an uncanny confluence of timing.

Business Sense, Modernizing Education Amazon, Arnold Schwarzenegger, education, Kindle DX, publishing, RIAA

Comedian Louis C. K.’s piss-take at human behavior when our expectations are not met.

Although he amusingly paints the behavior of folks annoyed with unmet expectations with absurdity, his insights actually led me down a different path of reflection: the importance of the art of managing expectations.

Nearly any undesirable situation can be dealt with more gracefully, with the application of effective expectation management.

General Thoughts expectation management, humor, video

John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes another great piece, this time about the Pre, in which he struck upon a compelling insight with respect to the new device’s hardware keyboard.

From his post:

[I]t is my theory that a hardware keyboard is a significant selling point for only one group of customers: those who already own a phone with a hardware keyboard…

[...] Most normal people have yet to buy their first smartphone…. Normal people aren’t planning to do much typing on their new smartphones, and they’re probably right. Any smartphone QWERTY keyboard, software or hardware, is going to be better than what most people are used to, which is pecking things out on a phone with a 0-9 numeric keypad.

I type far better on my iPhone than I expected I’d be able to, and that seems to be true for everyone I know who owns one. The only people who struggle with the iPhone keyboard are those who are already accustomed to a hardware smartphone keyboard.

[...]

For as good as the Pre is, and I’m convinced it is excellent, it just doesn’t have much to offer that would sway someone considering an iPhone. But for someone considering a BlackBerry, the Pre might look very sweet: a big bright screen, a beautiful modern user interface design, a kick-ass mobile web browser, and, yes, a hardware keyboard. The Pre is the BlackBerry Bold done right.

My experience has been the same. The people I know that have hated the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard are people that had already become accustomed to using a hardware keyboard.

That particular insight aside, it’s great to hear — from someone whose software design reflections I’ve long respected — that Palm did such a solid job with the overall design of the WebOS.

Linking Out Blackberry Bold, iPhone, Palm Pre, WebOS

Thankfully, the Pre has been received with some great reviews, and it’s truly something that its team can be proud of. But now that the mysterious device is becoming available to the masses, the nitpicking will begin (which is actually a great thing, incidentally).

From Walt Mossberg’s review of the Palm Pre:

In fact, during my testing, one of my downloads from the App Catalog caused my Pre to crash disastrously — all my email, contacts and other data were wiped out, and the phone was unable to connect to the Sprint network or Wi-Fi. Palm conceded the catastrophe was due to problems it still has getting the App Catalog to work with the phone’s internal memory, and explained that this is one reason it hasn’t widely distributed the developer tools. [Emphasis added]

Now, in all fairness, the Pre is a brand new device whose software was written afresh, from the ground up. While this makes it very modern, its WebOS software stack has not as yet been run through any ringers, and it is most definitely a very complicated stack of software. As such, stories like this do not surprise me. In fact, I’m actually anticipating a number more to surface in the coming months. I do not say this disparagingly, by the way — it’s simply a very ambitious piece of kit that Palm are putting to market.

My greatest “doomsday scenario” fear for the Pre is that some disastrous bug in its immensely complex Synergy API is found that starts eating up or corrupting people’s address books all throughout the cloud.

O, Palm — my fingers are crossed that you’ll find (and patch!) any Synergy bugs before the rest of the world does.

And, by the way: congratulations!

General Thoughts Palm Pre, Synergy, WebOS

I’ve lately been involved in a number of conversations about the value proposition of Twitter as a publishing platform to anyone interested in developing a public persona for a company, an organization, or even one’s own career identity. What follows are ideas that have repeatedly surfaced during these conversations, as well as a handful of links I’ve been amassing from my reading, as well as links friends and colleagues have shared with me.

Some Terms

Throughout this post, for the purpose of simplicity, I will use the term brand to apply to all types of public personae, whether organization or personality.

I will also be speaking about a brand’s domain of interest, by which I intend to refer to the plurality of whatever industries and/or disciplinary fields that are relevant to the brand. I’ll use it in this singular form as a blanket concept, covering all topics of interest to the brand.

Finally, I’ll be using the term market to refer to any and all entities to whom a brand seeks (largely competitively) to offer a value proposition, and who interest — in whole or in part — in the brand’s domain of interest. In the case of a company, their market is naturally their customers, clients, etc. In the context of an organization, its market may be composed of the members it seeks to attract, or the community that it seeks to serve. Finally, a market for an individual’s own brand can consist of one’s prospective employers, clients, students, an educational institution, or grant or fellowship for which he or she may wish to apply.

Why Even Bother With Twitter?

Before I get into the any of the how, let’s invest a moment to get on the same page with respect to the why, since the means must be evaluated against whether or not they advance your efforts towards the desired ends.

This is material that’s been covered the world over around the Web, so I’ll keep this concise:

The goals are currency and reputability.

Currency here refers to the state of maintaining continuing familiarity with the ideas and topics relevant to the conversations presently taking place in the brand’s domain of interest. Currency helps a brand focus its efforts to remain relevant to its market, and is maintained by consuming incoming information.

Reputability refers to the brand’s reputation within the context of its market. Its measure exists only in the eyes of the brand’s prospective market, so it can only be built and developed with public action. On Twitter, this means publishing, or tweeting.

And so the value-proposition that participation in the Twittersphere offers a brand is that it can help the brand stay at the top of its game, and give the market a sense of the brand’s voice, relevance, and even competitive acumen.

But how can a brand engage with Twitter to realize these goals?

Read more…

Business Sense, Tutorials howto, social media, Twitter

In thinking about Google Wave since last week’s announcement—and thinking through its extendable document model (particularly its Gadgets API)—I began to realize that it reminded me of something I’d seen before; something from the past.

Then I realized what that something is: a modern re-imagination of Apple’s abandoned OpenDoc component software technology that has been social-enabled and lives in “the cloud.”

Read more…

General Thoughts Google Wave, modular software, OpenDoc, software design

I’ve lately been exploring the value proposition of RESTful APIs to organizations whose technological infrastructures are built upon a collection of legacy software components, customized to communicate with each other by highly tailored middleware software stacks.

That exploration will not unfold in this post, however. It could easily be an entire book unto itself.

Rather, I would like to focus specifically on ideas I’ve had about what a high level object oriented API for interacting with RESTful services might look like, and funnel those thoughts into the design and implementation of a plugin I’m developing for the Symfony framework, called sfRESTClientPlugin.

Audience and Scope

This post assumes at least casual familiarity with Web development. I will explore some general principles of the RESTful interaction paradigm, but only to the extent to which they inform the design direction of the plugin’s API.

Although all the code samples will be in PHP, it is my hope that the exercise will yield material valuable to people working with other software stacks.

Read more…

Public Brainstorm API, PHP, plugin, proposal, REST, sfRESTClientPlugin, Symfony