www.nickhodge.com

For vari­ous reas­ons, I am on another sab­bat­ical from Twit­ter. This is not my first, and I dare say not my last. Dur­a­tion, unknown. Frankly, I am bor­ing myself and slowly stick­ing my foot in my own mouth. To fill the now empty space, I have spent more time think­ing and writ­ing. So, for instance these are some raw num­bers from the last few days. This is by no means scientific.

Twit­ter

Aver­age Tweets per day: 100
Aver­age size of each tweet: 100
Total Words: 10,000
Estim­ated Per­cent­age valu­able (ie: valu­able con­tent): 10%
Words of Value = 1,000

Blog­ging

Aver­age Tweets per day: 100
Aver­age size of each tweet: 100
Total Words: 2,765
Estim­ated Per­cent­age valu­able (ie: valu­able con­tent): 90%
Words of Value = 2,488

So, the ques­tion remains: are the con­ver­sa­tions on twit­ter worth 2.5 times the pub­lish­ing via blogs?

Join Gov­ern­ment, busi­ness lead­ers and polit­ical blog­gers for Australia’s inaug­ural Polit­ics & Tech­no­logy Forum, brought to you by Microsoft Australia.

Quick details: Date: 25^th June 2008, Time: morn­ing, Loc­a­tion: Hyatt, Canberra

For the first Forum, Microsoft is host­ing key­note speaker Matt Bai, author and polit­ical writer for New York Times magazine. Matt will address the rise of polit­ical move­ments in the inter­net age, with a focus on new forms of Inform­a­tion Tech­no­logy and how they fash­ion or rep­lic­ate the polit­ical debate and trends.

In the midst of the nev­erend­ing US Pres­id­en­tial Primary Sea­son, and just prior to the Party Con­ven­tions: Matt vis­its Aus­tralia and provides a vis­ion of the future of polit­ics in the age of Hyperconnection.

Seats are com­pli­ment­ary and strictly lim­ited. To reserve your place, RSVP by 11 June 2008 and quote event ticket code’BAI’.

U IZ BANND FROM TEH TWITTA.

This post­ing on http://on10.net/ : “64bits. More than 2 times 32″ has been in my Win­dows Live Writer drafts for too long. Sit­ting there, look­ing at me.

The topic was easy. I knew I was going to write some­thing about Vista x64. Not that I am the world’s expert: and that was half of the prob­lem. Research­ing, read­ing. Try­ing things out.

Writ­ing it down, well that is another matter.

Some days writ­ing is easy. It just flows. From your brain through the keys. Music going to get a steady rhythm. No-one in the house inter­rupt­ing your thoughts.

Other days, you are not in the zone. Watch some video. Listen to some Pod­casts. Twit­ter a little. Twit­ter a lot.

And twit­ter, my friends, is suck­ing the words from my brain. That’s it. Twit­ter is a word-sucking-vampire of thoughts.

Des Walsh, the doyen of Aus­tralian Blog­ging, is now using his strongest brand: his name.

Your par­ents give you a name. Most people live with this name for the rest of their life. Unless you are Regin­ald Ken­neth Dwight, now Sir Elton Her­cules John, CBE. (Oh, there’s a whole Psy­chi­atry con­fer­ence in that name change alone!)

As alpha blog­gers and all suc­cess­ful people know: all you really own is your name. This is the label to your repu­ta­tion. Own it, defend it, mar­ket it.

Suc­cess­ful blog­ging is com­posed of authen­tic per­sonal voice, from you under­neath your name. Use it wisely.

Yes, I’ll be at the Aus­tralian Blog­ging Conference.

http://www.freedomtodiffer.com/blogoz/

And Microsoft is a spon­sor, too. Which is way cool.

People I hope to meet there include Duncan Riley. See if he’s found out who Fake Steve Balmer is.

Ques­tions my AIM Present­a­tion Last Week:

A big thanks to Stephen Collins of acid­labs for his detailed response. As an expert who speaks to senior decision makers daily on Web 2.0 and social-networking, he’s an excel­lent resource.

1. Susan asks: Does Microsoft have a Cor­por­ate Blog­ging Policy?

For me, it’s encom­passed in this simple phrase: “Don’t be Stu­pid”

How­ever, the more formal policy is embod­ied in some more formal bul­let points:

• Above all, “Be smart.”
• Respect exist­ing con­fid­en­ti­al­ity agreements
• Don’t break news; don’t dis­close con­fid­en­tial information
• Be cau­tious with third-party information
• Respect prior employers
• Identify your­self
• Be cau­tious in how you offer sup­port or advice
• Speak for yourself
• Think about reac­tions before you post

This Wired art­icle on Jeff Sandquist, the quiet uber-boss of Microsoft’s com­munity sites provides another per­spect­ive from an inde­pend­ent point of view.

2. Susan asks: what about vis­ib­il­ity of your his­tory as an Employee?

Ques­tion from employer’s per­spect­ive is that they already have the abil­ity to openly vet poten­tial employ­ees: ref­er­ences, word-of-mouth. Many of the ques­tions are related to whether a poten­tial employee will fit into the organisation’s culture.

From an employee’s per­spect­ive: I can­not stress enough that you must own your own digital iden­tity. It’s bet­ter to call out what might be out there, and explain your per­spect­ive. Thank­fully, Aus­tralia has strong Equal Oppor­tun­ity laws that pro­tect employees.

Another ques­tion I would ask is was is the fact that “it” was done, or that its is sud­denly search­able that makes you uncom­fort­able? Much more of a moral ques­tion, I suppose.

Where you draw the line? It depends on the indi­vidual. Blog­ging and par­ti­cip­at­ing as an indi­vidual just for work pur­poses is appro­pri­ate. Lock­ing down your pic­tures and other per­sonal inform­a­tion for your own fam­ily and friends and sep­ar­at­ing your iden­tit­ies is also appro­pri­ate. Noone should ever be forced to write to the web against their own per­sonal values.

The final point I would make is that the inter­net is a pub­lic place.

3. Ques­tion From Phil: Thanks for a very inform­at­ive present­a­tion. I was inter­ested in a some­what “off the cuff” com­ment you made about your title being made “pro­fes­sional geek” after some debate with your employer, Microsoft. Do you want to elab­or­ate on the dis­cus­sion you had about this and whether it caused any con­sterna­tion? It strikes me as inter­est­ing if it was hard to con­vince people that a title like this might fit on an org chart in the brave new web world!

This post has the evid­ence. A proud moment when the cards arrived, and my former boss Frank Arrigo chan­ging the HR sys­tem.

OK, the story.

My offi­cial title is Enthu­si­ast Evan­gel­ist. I love what I do, but this title is too marketing-title for me. I do work in the Evan­gel­ism team.

On my fourth day at Microsoft, the global team met Rory: a http://channel9.msdn.com/ host and a char­ac­ter. His cent­ral theme is “cre­ate a persona”

I decided my per­sona is myself. Be a geek. Be an access­ible geek for those who are enthu­si­astic about tech­no­logy. A Pro­fes­sional. Hence Pro­fes­sional Geek.

So, next step: ask for the busi­ness cards. Title: Pro­fes­sional Geek.

The internal order was quickly rejec­ted by Pur­chas­ing. Why? All titles prin­ted on cards needed to be reflec­ted in our HR sys­tem. After 3 weeks of back­wards and for­ward email (low pri­or­ity in my list of things to do) — Frank found a work-around. All it needed was an email from him “OK-ing” the non-standard title, and all is OK. I also remem­ber send­ing an email to Microsoft HR ask­ing for a title change. To no avail. Being in Frank Arrigo’s team at the time, I think they expec­ted some icon­o­clastic requests.

Later in the year, Frank found he could freely change titles in the HR system.

The univseral response of people when they see “Pro­fes­sional Geek” is one of glee. I starts a con­ver­sa­tion, and truly reflects what I am, do and stand for.

Microsoft is so cool to per­mit this.

So, how do you get this through your organisation?

Really, its about what you do for your organ­isa­tion and what that rep­res­ents to the out­side world. Enthu­si­ast Evan­gel­ist was too inward looking.

4. Free­dom of expres­sion. Does the blog­ging influ­ence what I write?

Yes, it does influ­ence what I write, record and pub­lish. I am an employee of Microsoft; but con­text is also important.

For instance, there are per­sonal entries on my blog — and entries from when I was not an employee of Microsoft. The real­ity of Maslow’s Hier­archy of Needs drives us all; and this will influ­ence what and how I write.

In March 2007, Munir Kota­dia on ZDNet blogged how a Mac user’s cat had broken MacOS X secur­ity.  Now I am a sucker for cat stor­ies. And as a Mac user, I had seen our cats sleep­ing on our PC and Mac laptops around the house. Where there is warmth, there is cat.

My mis­take was blog­ging a ref­er­ence to this art­icle on http://on10.net/ with a pic­ture of one of my cats. This blog entry was pulled within a few hours. It was a stu­pid, rush-of-blood to the head post that added to value to the world.

How many rules I break above? About 4 or 5.

The car­dinal rule is sens­it­iv­ity to secur­ity as an issue. I wasn’t think­ing, and was stupid.

Thank­fully, Microsoft per­mits mis­takes. And admis­sion of mis­takes. Learnt my les­son, built a bridge and I am get­ting over it.

I still think the story is cute, and in ret­ro­spect it deserved at least a LOLcat.

Swollen­pickles (swollen­pickle­do­nions?) rates this blog, and 24 oth­ers as “under­dog blogs.” The art­icle is pos­it­ively titled “25 of the low­est ranked top 100 Aus­tralian blogs”

What’s more, I loved to watch Under­dog on the TV. Now there is a lame-arse Dis­ney movie com­ing in August. Another of my child­hood icons destroyed!

Great way to link link backs and boost your­self above that fate­ful 75^th pos­i­tion, I reckon.

Inter­est­ingly, this blog is cat­egor­ised as “geek stuff”. KTHXBAI

Robert Scoble, now earn­ing a liv­ing deal­ing with PR people in the ‘val­ley, under­stands the dif­fi­culty of blog­ging from within large organ­isa­tions. Robert refers to one of the 4000-or-so blog­gers at Microsoft: David Weller.

The best way to learn about an organ­isa­tion, its plans and products is with a search engine. Mar­ket­ing and product teams are abso­lutely scared wit­less of the trans­par­ency that blog­ging provides. It’s not evil­ness, it’s the fear of inform­ing the com­pet­i­tion. Espe­cially in the online world where the small is as power­ful as the large, and products live and die within a 24-hour cycle.

Mar­ket­ing and PR prefer a “write-only” inter­net. Sadly, the inter­net as we see it today is read and write, read and write.

Maybe Microsoft is not “uber­cool” because it’s not obscure enough. Too much trans­par­ency, too many eyes, too many mouths. Please don’t for­get for each one of these mouths, there is a match­ing set of ears. We are listen­ing too. Blog­gers write, and see the response, feed this back into the cycle of product development.

One won­ders about other organ­isa­tions, and if the “eyes” to “ears” ratio also applies. Read and Write.

I’ve been dog-fooding (that is, intern­ally test­ing) Win­dows Live­Writer — for cre­at­ing edit­ing and post­ing to my three Blogs. Install, and it just works.

Tim Heuer’s Flickr4Writer plu­gin is a must-have. A major time saver.

There are many pos­it­ive stor­ies about Live­Writer, this how­ever James Clarke’s takes the cake: Jet­Fuel: Sil­ver­light plu­gin for Live­Writer.  Some­thing else to play with!

At the Hill and Know­lton “Sur­viv­ing and thriv­ing in the next dec­ade — Tech­no­logy Pub­lish­ing” Break­fast Bytes this morn­ing, a group of emin­ent pan­el­ists in pic­ture above, from the left:

• James Tuck­er­man – Pub­lish­ing Editor, Ant­Hill. New rel­at­ively magazine about ideas, money and skills. Pre­vi­ously more print than online, but adding new online pro­jects later in 2007.
• Heather Craven — Dir­ector of Mar­ket­ing & Com­mu­nic­a­tions, Cir­cu­la­tions Audit Board,
  Aus­tralian Cir­cu­la­tion Bur­eau. Sub-committee research­ing digital.
• Brian Haverty – Edit­or­ial Dir­ector, CNET Net­works Aus­tralia : Read­ers first, video and text style publishing.
• Tony Sarno – Editor, APC. Adding new online APC pro­jects later in 2007.
• Peter Roberts – Man­aging Editor, BRW. Part of the Fair­fax group, around since 1857. Noted that http://www.afr.com/ relaunched this week, and closed con­tent model AFR Access continues.
• Andrew Kirk, Hill and Know­lton: Chair

The theme from the morning’s panel and Q&A is that “there will be a mix­ture of online and print” and that “online and print” read­ers are treated as dif­fer­ent read­ers by the big-names. My per­spect­ive as a cor­por­ate online/citizen journ­al­ist is slightly different.

Like the quint­es­sen­tial invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ists: Wood­ward and Bern­stein learnt: fol­low the money. In the above list­ing of pan­el­ists, notice where their stated invest­ment is going. It’s online.

From a tra­di­tional publisher’s per­spect­ive, the busi­ness is about employ­ing journ­al­ists to gather hid­den facts, con­nect, ana­lyse and write stor­ies. People buy the paper (atoms) to read the stor­ies and maybe their eye­balls will stray onto an advert­ise­ment. The mar­ket­ing groups of com­pan­ies buy these pos­i­tions on the paper in the hope that the right eye­balls are enthralled by the product and/or ser­vice — and buy the product. The core of a publisher’s job is man­aging the com­pel­ling con­tent such that a spe­cific audi­ence is cre­ated that advert­isers value.

The web is no dif­fer­ent, except that any­one can be a pub­lisher, and out­source the rev­enue side (advert­ising) to Microsoft or Google. Large pub­lish­ers, such as Fair­fax, are unhappy that their expens­ive infra­struc­ture is sub­ver­ted online: Peter Roberts men­tioned twice that Google made $200 mil­lion in Aus­tralia without invest­ing in the content-side.

Peter Roberts also com­men­ted on one of his com­pet­it­ors, Alan Kohler’s Eureka Report, hav­ing only an online mech­an­ism but suc­cess­ful busi­ness model. My per­spect­ive is that Alan’s busi­ness is suc­cess­ful as he is seen as a respec­ted and inde­pend­ent entity within Australia’s fin­an­cial com­munity. Alan Kohler is a trus­ted brand.

The Gad­get Guy, Peter Blasina’s ques­tion near the end sum­mar­ised the morn­ing for me: What does the future really look like? Each of the rep­res­en­ted panelist’s organ­isa­tions (maybe with the excep­tion of cnet) have their busi­ness strategies weighted toward print, and the brand-value that print brings.

Peter Blas­ina comes at this with cred­ib­il­ity as a true multi-channel brand and per­son­al­ity: print, online and TV — and sur­mised that the com­ing gen­er­a­tion will change the face of the print publisher’s world. And they know it.

The future for pub­lish­ers is where the eye­balls are. And eye­balls are not going to be in print, it is going to be online. Eye­balls stay longer where this is trus­ted value, and most import­antly where there is a com­munity. Read­ing a magazine is an almost high-latency feed­back medium; where two-way inter­ac­tion is slow if attemp­ted at all.

Demo­graph­ics of the eye­balls are chan­ging to more online: younger read­ers being digit­ally nat­ive and older gen­er­a­tions hav­ing more time to explore online; with more females than males desir­ing a com­munity and inter­ac­tion rather than pass­ive accept­ance; high band­width con­nec­tion to per­mit TV, Radio and Print being equal online mediums.

Whilst I have no research to back this up, I am going to state it here. A com­mon refrain from print pub­lish­ers is that “Radio did not replace news­pa­pers, and TV did not replace radio” as their back­wards look­ing per­spect­ive on why online will not replace these old media. My argu­ment is that the inter­net can replace the media styles: with web pages, pod­casts and vid­casts. As Rupert Mur­doch is quoted as say­ing: “Big media no longer con­trols the conversation” 

James Tuck­er­man knows his read­ers, and I think has a plan to cre­ate value in Anthill’s com­munity. He under­stands the emo­tional con­nec­tion that he has with his read­er­ship. James also stated there are “pop­u­la­tion lumps” at birth-years of 1949, 1974 and 1985. Accord­ing to the ABS, there is another pop­u­la­tion lump in the 2005–7 range too. My sug­ges­tion is to watch Ant­hill as a pub­lisher. They are start­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with their community.

A Ques­tion about Second­Life, the cur­rent “craze” in Aus­tralia poten­tially due to a visit in meat­space by a Linden Labs per­sona, res­ul­ted in Tony Sarno say­ing that “many PBL man­age­ment have vis­ited Second­Life”. I fear it is because of the gambling dens rather than the com­munity aspect. About 20% of the audi­ence of largely PR and tech­no­logy industry attendees had logged into Second­Life, of which most had logged in once.

So, in industry par­lance, what is the tip-on for online? It’s the com­munity. Com­munity is the new Brand.