www.nickhodge.com

Thanks for the inter­view, Stil!

Debat­ing with Cameron Reilly is like fight­ing an intel­lec­tual tor­nado. Thank­fully I was being grilled after a bottle of merlot.

In the instance of this pod­cast, I am speak­ing for myself not my employer (which I make clear in the podcast)

In ret­ro­spect, the dis­cus­sion could go on for another 30 minutes: the concept of Geeks for Good is a concept that is rat­tling around in my head.

Thanks to Duncan Riley for a great con­ver­sa­tion today — now On The Pod, on The Pod­cast Network.

Art­icles men­tion: Jeff Sandquist in the April 2007 Wired.

“The heat internal being 70x” is a lit­tler hyper­bolic — more like 70% of the heat is internal when blog­ger steps out­side our blog­ging guidelines. Some notes on our Policy has been dis­cussed here already.

“Microsoft Pop­fly is for mak­ing Web Bling” lulz. my favour­ite quote.

Microsoft Office Live Work­space signup.

I use Edit­grid for col­lo­brat­ive fin­an­cial man­age­ment in our house.

Microsoft in Aus­tralia links, because I could not recall on the fly.

Microsoft on HD DVD

Thursday 11^th and Sat­urday 13^th Octo­ber in Mel­bourne for the About Seni­ors week.

Sat­urday 27^th and Sunday 28^th Octo­ber in Perth for Pod­Camp Perth.

After yesterday’s unstruc­tured Twit­ter meetup: The Pod­cast of the Twit­ter meetup with a ran­dom conversation.

http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2007/08/23/gday-world-281-melbourne-twitter-lunch/

Thanks Cameron for let­ting me be heard on Australia’s #1 Pod­cast. I’ve gotta stop say­ing the g-word so often.

Yes­ter­day I had con­sumed +5 stand­ard cof­fees (my usual day is +2) by the time the pod­cast was recor­ded. You can hear the pace in my voice. Later that day, I Twittered the world to death with ran­dom ques­tions (includ­ing: does Win­dows Mobile 6 have a regedit? evid­ently, yes. Thanks Paulfo) and state­ments. On the Vir­gin Blue flight home, I wrote a couple of pages of notes of the day that have spilled into these blog posts.

I’ve had the oppor­tun­ity to think about the “Mar­ket­ing and Twit­ter Strategy” ques­tion, and have pos­ted my thoughts from yesterday’s Mel­bourne exper­i­ences.

What is the Web 2.0 World Say­ing about you, now?

I strongly recom­mend any Marketing/PR per­son just start­ing out to down­load and install Particls: http://particls.com/. You can use Particls to watch the inter­net for you. Enter the phrases and words that are your products and brands, and watch the con­ver­sa­tion that ensues.

It is wise to start your online jour­ney by enga­ging the exist­ing con­ver­sa­tions and exist­ing com­munit­ies, rather than attempt­ing to start your own lonely blog and talk to noone.

Social Net­work­ing use by Marketing/PR

Social net­work using MySpace/Face­book/MSN Live/Linkedin/Bebo etc etc etc is a per­fect mech­an­ism for cre­at­ing a com­munity; and more import­antly: stay­ing connected.

Note that people are largely engaged in these com­munit­ies for per­sonal social reas­ons, not to have a product shoved down their throat. The rule of authen­tic voice applies.

Second­Life use by Marketing/PR:

Know who and where of your audi­ence. Des­pite heavy hype in the tra­di­tional media, the num­ber of people logged in to Second­Life always seems low. (25000 to 40000)

There is some­thing enti­cing about a com­pletely immers­ive 3D world, where in a dream-like state you can fly any­where and build any­thing. It demos well, and the allure of “instant mil­lions” attrac­ted a cer­tain “type” of ini­tial user.

The web was like this in 1994/5. Not much out there, much hype and a lim­ited few had the hard­ware and ‘band­width’ to par­ti­cip­ate. I would highly recom­mend doing deep research prior to sig­ni­fic­ant investment.

Fully immers­ive worlds such as World-of-Warcraft (note: you prob­ably can­not mar­ket here) are very suc­cess­ful; and the future of end-user gen­er­ated immers­ive worlds is large.

Twit­ter use by Marketing/PR:

http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2007/08/23/gday-world-281-melbourne-twitter-lunch/

@Froosh expressed it best: Twit­ter is micro-blogging: thoughts in 140 char­ac­ters. It is also more instant. What is hap­pen­ing now.  An organisation’s exist­ing blog strategy should also cover Twitter.

Run­ning 2 bots (http://twitter.com/NeilFinn and http://twitter.com/Elv15) and an event alias (http://twitter.com/auremix07) my assess­ment is that Twit­ter­ers are look­ing for real people, not chat bots at the other end of the line. Twit­ter­spam such as “go visit this link” and the like causes mass unsub­scribes. “Our product x is now ship­ping” the same.

What the Twitter-verse is look­ing for is the instant human reac­tion and feel­ing from events that pre­cedes the formal cycle.

So, just Twit­ter­ing to get a “mes­sage through” or hype a product/event does not work. What is needed is an authen­tic, hon­est voice of a real per­son. It is part of your Word-of-mouth, viral strategy.

In a Write/ReWrite/Read Web, People mat­ter. Not Messages

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.

Uncle Dave, with his new found power of record­ing his own Pod­casts, invited me to yab­ber on about my week so far.

We sub­ver­ted the Uncle Mike hier­archy, and had a good show.  Thanks Uncle Dave.

It has been an excel­lent week for the ABC. The Curtin “docu-drama” gave a por­trait of a man of his time: Prime Min­is­ter John Curtin dur­ing the 1941 through 1942.

Last night, Jeff McMul­lan did a stand­ard “journ­al­istic show” wrapped as debate on new tech­no­lo­gies, and the impact on com­munity on “Dif­fer­ence of Opin­ion: Grow­ing Up in the Digital Age”. Cap­tured inthe fresh­ness of the moment, this Pod­cast cap­tured by Chris Saad of Particls. Dis­cus­sion boards on the topic are inter­est­ing to read.

Another essence is that people’s online and digital life is real. It is a part of generation-y iden­tity. The base-level mor­als and eth­ics still apply; and prob­ably more so in a world that is flat and always on.

• Life in Chip­pend­ale, Steven Noble.
• Roy Porter: Social His­tory of London
• Eng­lish: defin­i­tion of vir­tual. Is vir­tual a pejor­at­ive? Maybe my lan­guage is a little too 1990’s