http://theinternetispeople.com/2006/08/30/knowing-knowledge-and-releasing-books-online/

George Siemens is about to release a book:

How we market, how we learn, how we build, how we collaborate – these are all changing. Most organizations are not prepared for the sea change washing ashore. We are conducting business in a manner that is no longer reflective of the market, or society as a whole.

Knowing Knowledge is an exploration of knowledge – what it is, how it is changing, and what it means to our organizations and society. Knowing Knowledge will be available for purchase (or download) by mid-September 2006.

There’s a blog for the book, and George intends to turn it into a kind of living document by placing it in a wiki.

The Internet is People was originally conceived as a book, and I still intend some of the ideas posted here to form the basis of a publication. It’s very interesting to see how web-orientated authors cope with the print medium, and George’s wiki move is a bold one. He’s not alone: Cory Doctorow has released all of his novels as free downloads to great success, for example.

http://theinternetispeople.com/2006/08/30/michael-de-kort-the-coast-guard-and-democratised-media/

The Washington Post features a report about Michael de Kort, a Lockheed Martin employee who – after getting no results from the usual channels – posted a whistleblowing video on Youtube about a set of critical security flaws in a fleet of refurbished Coast Guard patrol boats.

The report suggests Michael’s tactics have worked:

The video also has caught the eye of people in high places. De Kort’s video has been covered by defense trade magazines, and yesterday, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, wrote a letter to the Coast Guard asking for an answer to De Kort’s “extremely distressing” allegations.

This is unlikely to be the last time this happens. As the read/write web allows more and more people to publish content online, people like Michael who have something important to say but would ordinarily not have a voice will able to make their concerns known.

Better yet, thanks to embedded media and social networking, the message can be shared and amplified. Here’s the video:

I can see this becoming ever more important as we start inching closer to the end of President Bush’s term in office and a new US presidential election. The question is – given the dubious turthfulness of some videos online and the propensity of the medium to be used for viral marketing – how many of these messages will we be able to trust?

http://theinternetispeople.com/2006/08/30/web-20-job-boards-roundup/

The 37signals Job Board costs $250 for 30 days; jobs are divided into design, progbramming, business and miscellaneous. Given 37signals’ emphasis on design, most are design jobs. It’s hard to say how many there are a day, as dates aren’t included.

CrunchBoard is Michael Arrington’s effort, attached to his not inconsiderable TechCrunch empire. Posting a job costs $200 (undercutting 37signals by $50); there seem to be three or four a day. Most are technical, but there seem to be a fair amount of marketing positions in the mix.

GigaOm Jobs seems to be modelled on CrunchBoard; it also costs $200 a month to post. It’s too early to say what the average number of jobs per day are. Most are programming, but there are some project manager jobs.

MetaFilter Jobs costs nothing, but you’ve got to be a member of MetaFilter to post. MeFi users tend to be clued-in, well-read, tech-savvy people, and the jobs run the gamut from developers to a director of youth education at a synagogue.

Performancing Exchange is a job board for professional bloggers, which differentiates itself by, like MeFi Jobs, being free; it also allows users to post fuller descriptions on the main jobs page, like a classified ads page. There seems to be more or less one post a day.

The Problogger Job Board is, compared to most of the above, a bargain at $50 for 30 days. (Unfortunately, it covers the same ground as Performancing Exchange, above.) Most of the posted vacancies are for professional blogger positions, although there are a handful of ad sales positions. There usually seem to be between one and five ads a day, and some look suspiciously unpaid.

Any I’ve missed? Any experiences with any of these, positive or negative? Let me know.

http://theinternetispeople.com/2006/08/30/on-the-move/

Om Malik and Michael Arrington are pondering Dave Winer’s move towards mobile-enabling the blogosphere. Specifically, his product OPML Editor will allow users to view content they’ve subscribed to on their mobile phone. This is definitely a useful feature; I certainly spend a fair amount of time viewing my Gmail on my phone (in lieu of a Blackberry or similar device), and the ability to subscribe to content and take it with you is brilliant. Similarly, Winer’s Yomoblog.com service for posting to weblogs by phone looks like it could be great.

Arrington also highlights Skweezer, a site that will take any other site and return it in a mobile-friendly format. This seems completely redundant to me given the existence of Opera Mini, an excellent browser that goes through Opera’s proxy server which automatically provides content-squeezing functionality. I now can’t do without it, and there aren’t any phone browsers – certainly not for my handset – that come close in terms of functionality. (To see if it meets your needs, there’s a Java-based demo here.)

Update: Of course, some sites prefer to do this kind of optimisation themselves on a per-platform basis: Yahoo! Go has just been released for Windows Mobile, for example.

http://theinternetispeople.com/2006/08/29/will-wright-computers-enhance-our-people-skills/

Bokardo.com highlights a Wired editorial by Will Wright, creator of SimCity, SimEarth, The Sims et al. I was particularly drawn by this quote:

Think of it this way: Most technologies can be seen as an enhancement of some part of our bodies (car/legs, house/skin, TV/senses). From the start, computers have been understood as an extension of the human brain; the first computers were referred to as mechanical brains and analytical engines. We saw their primary value as automated number crunchers that far exceeded our own meager abilities.

But the Internet has morphed what we used to think of as a fancy calculator into a fancy telephone with email, chat groups, IM, and blogs. It turns out that we don’t use computers to enhance our math skills – we use them to expand our people skills.

The full editorial is here.

Will’s experience is in computer games, and he goes on to say how games are becoming more social. One glance at World of Warcraft or The Sims Online – not to mention his upcoming title Spore or future Xbox Live developments – will back this up. However, this represents a wider trend in software, towards more social designs.

Software doesn’t have a life in itself; it doesn’t do anything, just as a hammer is dormant until someone picks it up and performs an action with it. Remembering that a software tool is simply a tool that allows a person to perform a task, usually involving other people at some stage, allows for more efficient design. Everything must be optimised to enhance the user’s ability to create, share, discover and collaborate.

http://theinternetispeople.com/2006/08/29/open-talk/

Skype and Google Talk are to interoperate. This is good news, not only for users of both systems, but for the Internet at large: Google Talk runs on open standards. Such a deal could mean Google Talk serves as a gateway between Skype and other clients that run on open standards, for example Gizmo.

A global, interoperable, free voice network would not be a small thing: very bad news for the phone companies, perhaps, but excellent news for us.

http://theinternetispeople.com/2006/08/28/apps-for-your-domain-googles-office-suite-launches/

Google have released Apps for your Domain, which is more or less the long-promised Google Office. Gmail, Talk, Calendar and Page Creator are part of the suite right now, with Writely and Google Spreadsheet to follow. This is a pretty fully-featured web office suite which takes a pretty violent swipe at Microsoft. All that’s missing is a way to install these applications on an organisation’s infrastructure – much like the Google Search Appliance. Might we also see variants on Google Base, too?

The source Information Week article notes that:

Later this year, Google plans to add its Writely word processor and Google Spreadsheets to the suite, build online collaboration features that work across its applications, and market the whole package to large companies for a fee. Google will include IT-friendly features such as APIs, directory-server integration, guaranteed performance levels, and telephone tech support.

The APIs are perhaps the most important bit: as I’ve already noted, these allow users to customise the system to suit their needs. For larger organisations in particular, this is crucial.

However, over at GigaOm, Om Malik talks a little about why they’re not using it: the privacy policy wasn’t stringent enough to meet their needs, particularly after the AOL search data fiasco. Similarly, Kent Newsome has some misgivings:

Bold but troubling is word via InformationWeek that “Google’s plans include prompting people who send Microsoft Office documents using Gmail to translate those files into Google’s formats for editing on Google.com, presumably in a forum where ad space is up for sale.” One of the great and valid fears of IT managers is data spread- when your data is spread all over the place, it becomes harder to protect and manage.

However, there are alternatives. As Michael Arrington points out over at Techcrunch, the Zoho Virtual Office has been around for a while, and any company wanting to get into the online office space could do so with an easy acquisition. Unfortunately, Zoho are missing out on important features – like APIs (aside from Zoho Planner), and single sign on between their applications. Update: it would appear there are actually no less than 17 web-based competitors to Microsoft Office.

Click here to view Apps for your Domain – or the companion Google Apps for Education.

http://theinternetispeople.com/2006/08/28/lonelygirl15-a-new-kind-of-viral-marketing/

There’s been some talk over the past few days about Lonelygirl15, a 16-year-old homeschooled girl called Bree who posts well-shot, entertainingly edited videologs on Youtube with her friend Daniel.

It would appear, however, that all is not what it seems. Some of the later vlogs seem suspiciously staged, and references to her devout – but unspecified – religion in earlier posts culminated in a shot of an altar to Aleister Crowley. A seemingly-innocent fan site actually registered its domain well before Bree started posting to Youtube, which clearly suggests a thought-out marketing campaign. And filmmaker Brian Flemming seems to be putting a little too much thought into the mystery. He has a movie, Danielle, coming out next year, formerly entitled The Beast. Net sleuths have been quick to point out that Bree’s friend Daniel’s Youtube username is DanielBeast.

All of which would appear to point to a clever guerrilla marketing campaign. Bree’s videos became popular well before any of this started to raise suspicions: for the teen demographic who largely uses Youtube they’re fun to watch, often breaking into little dance segments or rap pastiches, and Bree is undoubtedly an attractive girl. Tribute and reply videos were already floating in when she started breaking in references to Crowley and a conflict with her parents surrounding her religion. People were already watching, and now more and more are being drawn in; blogs have been drawn into the campaign, as with Snakes on a Plane around a year ago. It’s likely that as the story continues, the coverage will only intensify, until – as with Snakes – it breaks out into the mainstream media. Whether that’s to promote a film, the talents of the people involved or something else entirely is up in the air.

This raises a question: as community-driven services like Youtube, Myspace et al spring up and attract user mindshare, what’s to stop media companies and those looking to make a name for themselves from gaming these social filters in order to spread their own message, particularly when some sites are having to pay ordinary users to contribute? The answer is nothing, if they do it right. Online, just as in real life, you need to be vigilant that who you’re talking to really is who they say they are.

http://theinternetispeople.com/2006/08/27/taking-advantage/

Call me sensitive, but I think there are lines between information, entertainment and marketing that sometimes shouldn’t be crossed.
Allowing users to download clips from a vast archive of video and use them for teaching and learning? Information.
Hosting every music video ever made, online? Entertainment.
Running realtime coverage of September 11, 2001 five years later on CNN’s [...]

Dave and I spent a couple of days in Klagenfurt, giving a workshop on Elgg. It was a really positive session; most people hadn’t seen Elgg before, but by the end of the workshop everyone was putting together profiles, uploading files and sharing with each other. I’m delighted to say that the feedback has been great – there were requests at the end to keep the workshop community alive so everybody could continue to keep in touch and share with each other. We met many new people who I hope will keep in touch with us and let us know what they’re doing – both with the software and in general. Thank you very much to Wolfgang Greller for inviting us out, and Graham Attwell for the introduction.

If you’d like us to come out and talk about Elgg at your organisation or institution, do get in touch. It’s a great way to introduce people to what the software can do. Failing that, I understand video of the event will be made available, and we’re also hopefully going to be providing video of our event on September 4th.

Klagenfurt is a spectacular spot; one of those places I want to return to in a more recreational situation, and I’m envious of people like Wolfgang who get to work there. It sits on a lake – which erupted spectacularly into a massive thunderstorm as we sat beside it after the workshop – in a picturesque mountain valley. The view coming in was amazing; were it not for the turbulence (it was a tiny propellor plane, and there was actual screaming from passengers behind us) I would have been in awe. Definitely recommended as a place to visit, and as I say, I’d like to go back and see more.