Digging through my archives

As many long-time Blogviator readers and fellow Idea Harvesters know, I recently decided to move my world-famous, influential blog over to a hosted WordPress site.  Wordpress is a wonderful, flawless open-source blogging platform used by talents such as Chris Brogan, ProBlogger and–now–myself.

I left the process of migrating years worth of blogs to my unpaid intern/mail-order-wife, Katya.  She has never migrated a blog before but I was too busy working on keyword optimizing my next e-book that I thought no harm could be done.

Fortunately, some of the posts made it.  Others I will be retrieving on a post-by-post basis until the blog is fully restored to its former glory.  If any of you long-time readers remember a social media related topic I’ve covered in the past, please feel free to jog my memory in the comments.

Why Chris Brogan isn’t charging enough

Some self-hating bloggers have been dumping giant coolers of Haterade on the back of my fellow blogger Chris Brogan.  Why, you ask? (It’s my blog and you’ll ask the questions I want you to ask.)  It appears he made an innocent mistake and let it accidentally slip that he charges $22,000 for a day’s worth of consulting.  What?! you ask on cue.  Shouldn’t he be charging more than that for a day’s worth of community building inspiration and social strategy?  This is the man who co-wrote “Trust Agents” (even though I’m still unclear on which agents I should trust: special, travel, real estate?  All of them!)

First of all, let me re-enforce that Chris Brogan was only pointing out an important tribal truth about “pricing, value, worth, etc.”  Many people missed this (I am not one of them).  He makes it clear to “Charge what you’re worth” and “Charge for the value of your content.”  So a few thin-skinned “comment trolls” had snark-asms a few days later when Chris Brogan posted an ad for an unpaid assistant [post deleted by Chris Brogan].

Let’s put this in context: The world’s greatest living blogger needs an assistant and just because he charges $22,000 per day, he’s supposed to pay her?  (There’s a historical standard that proves attractive, young-ish girls are the most capable personal assistants.)  Let us take a moment to re-think this paradigm.  Blogging isn’t easy work.  If Chris Brogan charges $22,000 per day and he has an inexperienced intern helping answer his phone and pretending he’s in meetings, then she actually owes him $5,500,000 per year (not including two weeks of vacation).  He’s basically giving her over five million dollars of wisdom and change agenting for free.  What attractive, preferably brunette, summer-dress wearing recent college grad wouldn’t jump at that chance?

When people sat at the foot of Buddha, did they expect Buddha to compensate them for his yoga instruction?  When an ancient Trust Agent named Lao Tzu was writing his seminal eBook “Te-Tao Ching,” do you think he never once stared at his intern’s Chest Agents?  Let Chris Brogan have an unpaid intern to get his coffee and to invoice the companies he’s inspired at $22,000 per day.  At least he’s following the number one rule in social media and not only being transparent, but showing his authentic self.

Google will dominate with Google Wave

I have seen the Future and it waved back at me.  Google Wave that is.

Imagine if you could re-invent email–only with all of the amazing advantages of social media, such as polls and Google maps and Contacts.  Now imagine email was not just a tool for sending messages, but a real-time collaboration tool where you could watch what the other person was typing as they were typing it.  In short, it’s an amazing game-changer.

I’ve only just begun playing around with Google Wave but in the world of Idea Harvesting, it could be the irrigation system that nurtures the growth of your ideas through micro-fertilization.  In this case, the micro-fertilization process would be the updates and links and “idea sharability” that is exchanged on the fly.  All good ideas need to be fertilized before they’re harvested and Google Wave might very well be the place this happens.

The interface, like all Google products, does a wonderful job of presenting lots of information with minimal design interference.  It may take a moment to orient yourself to the future, but remember back when you first saw a Netscape web browser or an email inbox?  My guess is it won’t take long for people to fully embrace Google Wave and all of its limitless possibilities.

1 Amazing Site for Fantastic Lists

Lists can be powerful.  They order information numerically, giving our brains a chance to rest while we go from one list item to the next, absorbing the knowledge of the tribe.  If humans were bees, lists would be that little dance bees do to tell the other bees where the honey is.  Lists can be difficult to create too.  To create a list, you must have information that can be ordered numerically (numbers) or, in some cases, alphabetically (letters).  This is why I love reading one of the most intelligent and technically savvy websites covering social networking: Mashable.

If you were to ask even a seasoned blogger and social networking guru like myself to come up with a list of essential music sites, I might be able to come up with 40 or 50 essential sites.  Mashable has, not 90, but 90+.  Anyone can search for music sites using Google’s search engine.  Clearly Mashable has done their due diligence to qualify each of these as essential so you won’t waste your time on sites that won’t exist in a few years.  Who even know if lists like this generate site traffic?  Obviously Mashable doesn’t care about blog traffic, they are educating, informing and inspiring.

I hope that Mashable continues to have the resources and courage to provide amazing, game-changing lists that will blow your mind (and mine).  Alpha/numerically ordered lists are one of the 7 Huge Knowledge Hubs Every Community Engagement Architect Should Love (which is a post I’ll be writing in the future).

Now excuse me as I go spend some time on one of the essential sites SingShot, which is the “YouTube of Karaoke.”  I’m predicting a bright future for this site!

The most expensive phone I’ll never buy

Steve Jobs, who is the CEO of Apple Computer, took the stage yesterday to introduce, not a new desktop, laptop, or even iPod.  But a mobile phone?  An iPhone to be exact.  I can’t imagine Apple will keep putting an “i” in front of every product they produce, so expect this to be one of the last iProducts.

The iPhone demo was impressive enough.  It certainly looks flashier than even my Razr but a few things stuck out that I predict will be the downfall of Apple’s mobile phone:

1. No keypad.  I’m sorry, but I can’t imagine many people switching to a phone that doesn’t have a keypad.  Every phone since Edison has had a keypad.  People are used to it and Apple will need to come up with a model that includes a keypad if they expect people to use this iPhone.
2. Expensive.  The iPhone costs, get ready, $599.  Gulp.  Still ready to rush out and buy a $600 phone that doesn’t have a keypad?  Didn’t think so.
3. Touchscreen.  Okay this is sort of related to the keypad issue.  I appreciate the futuristic thoughts behind a touchscreen, but I eat lots of greasy foods and even when I’ve washed my hands, my sweat contains enough grease that I end up smudging any glasslike surface.  I suggest you buy shares of Windex now!

They got a few things right.  There is an exclusive contract with Cingular Wireless, which I consider to be far superior to other wireless carriers like Verizon, although AT&T would have been a smart choice.  It runs on Cingular’s EDGE network, so you can count on the mobile internet connection speeds to be fast.

Of course, Palm, Motorola, and Nokia will be making similar phones too, so if you rush out to buy an iPhone when they’re finally released in six months, you may discover you’ve got a very expensive paperweight in one year.

Do you care what I had for lunch?

Imagine blogging, but without all the words.  And no pictures.  That’s the promise of the new website Twitter, which lets you tell your friends what you’re doing at any given moment.  (As if you’d want to.)  The neat thing about it is that you can compose SMS messages from your mobile phone (most carriers provide SMS plans with compatible phones) so you can be on the go and not chained to a desk with your laptop.  I tried it on my Nokia and it worked but the novelty will wear off quickly.

The serious drawback of this system is that (unfortunately) people aren’t very interesting.  In a worst case scenario, Twitter could turn into a black hole where people talk about what they’re drinking at a bar or inform the world that they’re waiting in a long line at the movie theater.  This will clearly lead to Twitter’s demise.

People by ourselves are boring, but if there were a way to take an interesting tidbit from someone else’s life and share that same thought with your friends, the level of discourse would naturally evolve toward loftier topics and discussions.  Rather than focus on random daily thoughts best left to the individual, the intellectual highroad is the direction where Twitter will find success.

Another big limitation is that you only get 140 characters.  You read that right, characters, not words.  Expect Twitter to allow longer updates as people will inevitably use a web browser to update messages rather than a mobile phone.

Will Twitter be left in the Web 2.0 dustbin?  Leave your comment below, and yes, you can write more than 140 characters.

Sharing videos on the Web?

There are a lot of problems today with sharing videos online.  You need to buy lots of online disk space, serving these video files can easily blow through your monthly bandwidth allotment, and some people don’t have a DSL line to watch them.

Along comes a new website, YouTubes, that eliminates the first two problems.  Anyone can upload a video and YouTubes will use their servers to deliver that video anywhere in the world.  The beauty of this is that anyone can do it, although I’m not sure if most people have the know-how or the want-to.

Here is a link to a video (DSL/ISDN required) that shows someone at a zoo, talking about an elephant’s looonnggg… trunk.  (You thought he was going to say elephant penis, right?)  Infantile humor aside,  I imagine YouTubes could one day evolve into a place where people post videos on a regular basis–although not with the juvenile humor or focusing so much on animals.  Maybe the next Martin Scorcese or Cameron Crowe will be found uploading a feature film to YouTubes?

Would you ever consider uploading a video to a website for all the world to see?  Explain your thoughts by leaving a comment in my comment box below.

Correction: The site is actually called YouTube, not YouTubes but I’ll keep it uncorrected above since I am an ethical blogger.

Friendster replacement?

When Friendster launched last March, I fell in love with it as many of my blog readers did.  I have spoken for a long time about the need for private networks that allow people to socialize with friends and family–online!  Sharing your thoughts and pictures of what you did on the weekend could very well be a growth area for the Web.  But the key to all of this is privacy.

This attention to privacy is what intrigues me about a new website I noticed yesterday called thefacebook.com.  It’s a site by a group of Harvard students who are restricting the use to students only.  Their attention to privacy makes sense: how many college students want pictures of their binge drinking escapades ending up in their parent’s Inbox?  It’s their belief in privacy and their understanding that the Web is a public place that makes this young generation so savvy.

Now, if only the concepts of thefacebook could be applied to a less exclusive group.  You could invite all of your friends into this “community” and everything would be protected by the privacy standards modeled by thefacebook.com.  That would be an amazing leap for networked socialization.  Would I love it?  Not quite, but it would be something I’d very much like.

Do you think private social networks like Friendster and thefacebook will succeed? Type your comments into the boxes below please.