Large Group Meeting for Social Networking

The large group meeting is finally here. The agenda is packed and so is the room. I'm very pleased with the turn out for day one, having Market Leaders, Volunteers, National Center and Affiliate Staff as well as IFTF staff and their traveling band of experts.

Follow along here as I try to "Live Blog" the workshop.

8:30 AM - 9:30
Introductions took the better part of the first hour. We have more than forty people in the room. Judging from many of the member's comments, everyone is impressed with what they discovered from the homework assignments and everyone found how web 2.0 can help them with their specific concerns. I think the overall theme would be "freedom to fail." In Robyn's opening comments she challenged us to "Fail fast and continuously improve." (I mangled her quote, so maybe I'll hear it again and update it here (already I'm failing - SWEET!))

Among the comments is also a lot of worries about time to get to know and interact with all the social networks and media and tools. Mark Shoeberl also brought up something I hear a lot and that is "this is interesting stuff, but after signing up, I don't ever go back." Vickie Peters said, "I would rather be out in my garden than online." To me this means that relevance is crucial. Ok Duh (live blogging is hard. bear with my mastery of the obvious please.) But really, we don't need to be signing up just because it is there. We need to find the tools and applications that are relevant to our goals and purposes.

9:30 -
Jerry Michalski - Social Networking 101
Jerry spoke with us when we went to Palo Alto last month. He's a huge proponent of social networking, he says that right now we are experiencing a "Cambrian explosion of innovation." Jerry loves twitter and has gotten our core team doing that often. (Go sign up if you haven't and follow me at xian3000. I'll add our other colleagues names here so you can join the network.)

Jerry is talking about the way transferring money has changed in places like Nigeria. Where once they entrusted couriers with cash (hope he doesn't stop at the pub or grocery on the way) and are now passing phone minutes which can be sold or cashed, thereby making the phone a small and much more secure bank.

Weaving a global brain - one of his slides I'll be absorbing before trying to paraphrase. He constantly uses the term Dendrites to describe participants in social networking who become parts of the overall "Global Brain." This is about crowd sourcing or group sourcing, and touches on the wisdom of crowds. Being able to stay connected to others, share your thoughts and experiences at any given moment allow the greater group to build on the experiences shared. Reminds me of something I heard about Ants and how they use scent trails to show where they are going. As a path of ants becomes successful (i.e. the found the sugar) more ants follow it, making the trail "hotter," which calls more ants who make it even hotter. So what started as one ant's accidental discovery becomes a single file line of all the members of the ant hill bringing food home quickly and efficiently. (I think this is what this means)

A Map
Jerry has a sort of chronological map of people and products that have lead to what we are talking about today. It starts with Personal Web pages (circa 1994) and links to Justin Hall (94) (missed the reference while taking notes here. Google it and fill me in on the comments) then points to Weblogs which emerged in about 1997 that got RSS going which allows us to quickly and easily aggregate a lot of stuff without keeping up with myriad web pages. Next on the map is Ward Cunningham inventor of (among other things) WikiWiki in 1995. This is the birth of things like Wikipedia.

He mentions other services like Flickr and Del.icio.us (a bookmarking site I've been using for our Social Networking group.

Mashups - combination of these cool tools. First one HousingMaps.com - takes craigslist and google maps to build a homemade mls.

Manyeyes. I lost track again, but it sounds like a cool tool where people add analysis of anything they are interested in and open it for discussion and commentary. Check it out.

Open discussion is around the emergence and destruction of social networks. It is an organic flow that moves and is guided by social movement. "How to keep up with my kids?" "it was once MySpace, then Facebook, now what?" The organic nature of these tools and networks change behaviors but also illustrate behaviors that have always existed. Now they are revealed. Once they said "never trust people over 30" one day they may say "never trust anyone who doesn't have embarrassing moments shared online." We all have them in our past, we have all shared them, why can't you?

Moving on to Weblogs - you are reading one now and hopefully commenting or posting yourselves, so I'm going to take a short break to listen (and check twitter)...

Wikis - how many of you have used the Wikipedia? It is horrifying and wonderful. There is a great opportunity to learn and share what you area expert at. At the same time, it is terribly intimidating and shut people out just by its sheer size. (I have heard only hatred among our volunteers. The health info and science can be weak) Some other wiki examples Jerry discusses are

TaxAlmanac.org (intuit)
BarCamp.org("unconferences") you will see a long list of bar camps going on all over the world.

Check em out...

Web 2.0 describes a break with first generation web tools and apps. Its not that there are these sites where there is social networking, but that social networking is becoming ubiquitous and expected as parts of all web apps - more or less. These tools make you more interactive, more connected, more social, more open, more complicated and unpredictable.

Mentioned Prodigy, remember them?, at the last minute they added email and discussion boards to their services. This ended up frustrating Prodigy when people used the boards to bitch about their unsatisfying service. Web 2.0 should embrace these behaviors, or at least make us resigned to the fact that we are not in control of our brand image and now we get to hear how much... See "Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky.

Looking up those links put me a bit behind. Now we are looking at cute pictures of kittens. Not sure how we got here, but he is showing how people can comment on Flickr images directly as well as adding comments on the page. If you like cuteness, go to cuteoverload.com. I am wondering for those of us who don't like cuteness if there is a site "bring on the ugly" and if I should reserve that url yet.

This is funny, Meighan Girgus just brought me her laptop trying to start a facebook page. Facebook was showing an error message that read "You are ineligible for a facebook account!" WOW! What's in HER background that Facebook already knows about? Maybe one of you could start an account for her. We need her on board!

Another important concept to understand, Tagging. Get to know this. You can see it being used on blogs, flickr, youtube and many other places. You can tag things and subjects and see what other stuff has the same tag. I think this is where the cuteness thing came up above. I would like to see us using tags with our content. It will certainly facilitate find our subjects when we start sending out via RSS and other open channels like that. We will be using the tag heartfuture08 for our workshop. Find us later on places like Del.icio.us, flickr (maybe) and blogs like this one.

Jerry's Media Sharing list:
Photo Sharing: Flickr(now a part of Yahoo! p.s. Jeuno is a genius flickr contributor. You might just know him)
Video sharing: YouTube (Now a part of Google)
Link Sharing: del.icio.us (now part of Yahoo!)
Document Sharing: Google Docs (still a part of Google)
Library sharing: Shelfari
Event Calendars: upcoming (Yahoo! again)

Between blogging and instant messaging is Twitter. This is also known as nonaoblogging or microblogging. In Twitter you follow people like you follow a blog. As opposed to IM where you have to agree to pair before communication can happen. I put up my twitter name above, so check it out. Follow me and when you do, I'll decide whether or not to follow you. My choice. No offense Mike if I don't follow you back ;)

Founders affiliate has a twitter account you can follow. They are using it really well too. Check em out at foundersheart

Summize is a search engine for twitter conversations. Commenters, tell us what Comcast is doing with this. Sound like genius customer service, but don't tell Yolanda, she'll want to do it yesterday.

Moving the over-long post here...