A Networked World

Scribefire is the biz

I was just bemoaning the difficulty of posting similar or identical content to multiple blogs, and the lack of a tool like Hootsuite that lets me post to multiple twitter accounts at the same time. Fortunately I was moaning to Stephen Blyth who is connected to various of my NFP activities and he pointed me to Scribefire which does exactly what I want.

It works like this.

The first time you open ScribeFire, an account wizard will appear to help you connect ScribeFire to your blog. Simply fill in the information it asks for, and when you finish, your blog will be listed in the right-hand pane:

To post to your blog, simply type some text in the main editor panel of ScribeFire, give it a title and click the Publish button:

ScribeFire will post the entry to your blog, and it will appear in the list of entries in the right sidebar so that you can edit or delete it later if you want.

Scribe fire also lets you:

• select and drag content from the webpage into the workspace
• edit existing entries
• keep the content in the workspace and then publish to another blog
• save as a draft
• schedule publication

Other Features

Other features of ScribeFire allow you to categorize and tag your blog posts, upload images, set the timestamp of your posts, save works-in-progress as notes, post an entry as a draft, share your posts on social websites, and upload files via FTP. 

Not to mention embed Youtube video and images from your hard drive, Flickr, a web page and find related images with Zemanta. It also allows multiple category selection and trackback URLs by default (which is better than my TypePad or Wordpress bookmarklets). These guys are GOOD.

I'm still figuring out how to automatically import page titles and URL's but since I've only had it 15 minutes, I can't really complain.

Best of all, its a Firefox PLUGIN. Brilliant

Kudos to Jon

OK, how many of us would love to check the blog and find this?

Send that to the sponsors Jon.

Or did some of his anti Bush stuff finally attract the avenging Republican Angels and a DDOS attack?

Does This Happen to You?

Blog long enough and you'll unload a lot of language, most of it mundane, some of it completely appalling and an occasional little gem lurking in there. What gets me is that every now and again I come across something like this posting from Talkshop.

While no one can underestimate Google's power, putting so many of your eggs in such an unsteady basket as search result ranking does not a business plan make.

One could argue using a variation of the well-worn — and very false — publicity axiom that "There's no such thing as bad PR" and that this lawsuit is part of a PR strategy. I don't agree. Sure KinderStart is getting a lot of linkjuice for this lawsuit, however, none of it is building the brand and I'm not sure it's worth the expense and distraction of the lawsuit.

The other reactions from around the blogosphere:

Earl Mardle: "There are days when my mind needs a good boggle just to remind me that comedy is three parts outrage. If this wasn't so outrageous, it would be hilarious."

Now, maybe its just old age, but I couldn't for the life me remember writing that, and if you asked me what comedy is, I don't know that I'd say "three parts outrage".

On a broader note, Lilia unpacks a posting by Jack Vinson who quotes something I said to my daughter when we were having a heart to hear a few weeks ago. "How do I know what I think till I hear what I say?"

Don't know how it works for you, but in my case I really (I think she means rarely) know what I want to say in a paper once I sit and struggle on writing - even when I have a detailed outline before starting, writing is always discovering something that was hiding in half-baked thoughts before.

For more on that check Research on how artefacts support thinking and knowledge creation, How artefacts support thinking and knowledge creation (2) and comments to the second one.

And, something else (from August 2002 :) - Uncovering the implicit, on how blogging seem to fit well professions that involve turning implicit into explicit. What is funny, is that then I write about the mangrove effect of blogging, not knowing that it would actually turn into a line of theoretical inquiry later on:

For me, blog is something for articulating ideas. They get some shape once they get out of my brain, and it becomes easier to deal with them. Blog is something for catching those difficult to catch things...

Blogging is thinking outside the head, and in my case it is also remembering what the hell I said.

Jimi Hendrix – Corporate Blogger

Due to the fact that my back went out before me, and I spent the day trying to catch up with it, there was no conference in London on social tools in business, no lunch with Johnnie Moore and Euan Semple, just walking on eggshells and, thank goodness, a osteopath with a spare appointment.

But plenty of time to think about the subject of the conference and the ongoing discussion on the use of tools like blogs, wikis, RSS etc in business and organisational life.

I confess to being prejudiced against the tools-first approach, if your business is not crying out for the tools so that it can work the way it wants to, I suspect that you are wasting your time, and worse, by adopting tools for which your organisation has no organic need. 

Johnnie Moore Comes Through in London

I pinged Johnnie the other day to see what he was up to in London while I was blowing through this week and lo, also behold, there he is facilitating an Open Space session at the Blogs & Social Media Forum and, being the kind soul he is, has wangled a pass for me to join the jollity.

The whole shebang is being moderated by Euan Semple so it looks like old home week for me. As Johnnie points out, this real world meetup and collaboration is a hidden, but huge, benefit of long term bloggery.

Network: (vi) To Create Meaningful Connections

If you missed the aerogel I perpetrated on scaling, you might want to start there but this is the bit that hangs off the end, after UNLESS IT NETWORKS.

Because net content is weightless, networking maintains the momentum of what I create as other people take up the load of ensuring distribution; naturally because it supports some of their contentions, prejudices or obsessions, but the network guarantees that I will get better distribution of what I produce than I could alone. In that way networking is a gift economy, you lend me some of your credibility and donate access to your network for our mutual benefit and I donate my production to your uses. For example, Gary at Teledyn republishes this blog as a feed and I'm all in favour

But what matters here is the fact that networking tools let me link bits of information so that others can navigate among those bits to see what I'm using to get where I am in that field of knowledge. Some of the bits are "mine" in the sense that I have constructed the artefact (document, image, table, graph, audio track etc) and some of them are constructed by other people. On a network, especially the much discussed Web 2.0, it doesn't matter. The reciever can use the same tools to create similar and equally connected fields of information that include, dip into or extend what I have done.

Fundamentally networking is a kind of Velcro at the edges of bits that encourage them to stick to other bits guided by people. It is certainly a loosening of the idea of ownership that leads to a mindset and a practice that eventually comes into conflict with ideas of copyright and exclusion.

Dan Gillmor Adds a Brick to the Tower of Babel

In Technology feeds grassroots media Dan sets out to tell the great unwashed about the technological impact of the net on the media landscape, but along the way he lets slip the real story.

The democratisation of media is also, fundamentally, about the people we once called mere consumers. Their role is evolving from a passive one to something much more interactive, but they are blessed (or cursed, depending on one's viewpoint) with an unprecedented variety of voices and services.

Valuing the Un-Monetised Asset - Blogs

I can see how the constitutionally timid might find this piece by Roland Piquepaille on ZDNet to be a bit demoralising. The economic weight of the blogs

what exactly is the economic impact of the millions of blogs? Let me provide some answers, like a research company would do, except I haven't seen many studies about this particular aspect. And like the research firms, my estimations below are almost certainly wrong. In this column, I'll look at the different actors of the blogging world: the companies that sell publishing tools; the advertising market; the consumer market; and the impact on companies.

He goes on to point out that blogging software and hosting companies make a pittance, advertising revenue is derisory and direct income is miserable to OK. He concludes with:

As a summary, the blogging phenomenon is just marginal economically speaking. But bloggers themselves are different because they're writers, they have a voice and they're real customers of real products.

Damnation with faint praise and hard to argue with, but wrong. He can't help but look at money as the measure, but in a knowledge economy, the flows are NOT monetised most of the time, he'd have had the same problem assessing the economic weight of voluntary work, or "women's work", on the other hand he'd be committing economic suicide if he suggested that it stop.More to the point he would get the same answer to the question, "what is the economic weight of environmental services provided by the planet?" Standard economics treats it as zero, and we know that is a lie.

In fact the business world is laden to the gunnels with value assessments based on thin air. The economic weight of your brand, your goodwill, even your client base is mostly prestidigitation and BS, and blogs are in the same arena. But even so, it would be nice to be able to answer Roland with something more than "he just doesn't get the net dahling".

Fortunately, the net, and the blogs, come to the rescue almost immediately in the inestimable form of Johnnie Moore who turns to a completely different delivery vehicle and asks, essentially, the same question. The value of the book in you

Periodically, people inform me that I should write a book about... well whatever it was I was talking about that they'd probably heard enough of. I dare say this happens to a lot of us.

I find this suggestion easy to resist because I know how hard it is to write just one chapter of a book. I rationalise that writing books is a waste of time, based on purely anecdotal evidence from one or two disillusioned authors I know.

But I have been given pause for thought by this survey: The Business Impact of Writing a Book. This is based on a survey of 200 authors of business books. Here are a few fab facts. I always take these sorts of percentages with a generous pinch (huh?) of salt, but looking at the whole report, a coherent picture emerges.

39% of authors reported a strong or very strong influence on improving relationship with current clients
84% of authors reported a strong or very strong influence on brand improvement
74% of authors reported a strong or very strong influence on publicity and PR
53% of authors reported a strong or very strong influence on their ability to charge higher fees

Bingo! Writing a book is, as Johnnie points out, a waste of time, as long as you count only the direct economic and financial return on investment of that time. But there is a powerful economic process at work as you improve relationships with clients, strengthen your brand, build your PR and TahDaaaaaah!! Charge Higher Fees.

Said clients and business partners almost certainly haven't read your burblings and prognostications, and couldn't understand them or apply them if they had. It doesn't matter because what they are buying is not information but the glamour of being published, and the reputation that goes with someone plunking down a buck to print and distribute your bon mots. Publishing a book is the Air Jordans, the chunky gold necklace, the pierced nipple of the business world.

Now there is not much glamour in blogging, anyone with a net connection can do that. But it has a real business value. It lets me think outside my head where potential clients can see what I know, see how I think and behave, not just for a few hours, or on a carefully edited page, but every day, for months. I need only a couple of people every year to grok that stuff and think its a good idea to give me some work and the economic weight of the blog gets a serious paunch.

And it lets me join in conversations that I would never have access to any other way. I was talking to a mate last year and mentioned that I was on Dave Isenberg's blogroll. Turns out he knows about David and the reaction to that was worth bottling. I can't trade on my links and trackbacks, but that doesn't make them worthless.

I'm having lunch next week with Mark Bradley at the Australian Technology Park, if I had just cold called him and suggested it would be worth his while having lunch, I'd have expected to get the bums rush. But he's been reading my stuff for a while, lifted some pieces for his podcast and in the last week or so I've recorded a couple of pieces for him. Now we have lunch to talk shop.

The economic power of blogs is like the mechanical power of ivy, it takes a while to smother your house and tear it to bits, but don't doubt that it can, and will, do it.

Kind of Cool

I was nosing about after the story on whether or not Apple is going to get into the phone business and ended up at Techblog looking at the pics of the iPhone Concept. As I read down the page I saw a link from the word Phone and casually moused over it.

Up pops a little text box with some stuff about the link underneath. Turns out its an Adlink from Kontera that uses what they call a unique underline (it has a solid line with a dotted line underneath.

Now I've been using the latest version of Qumana which has a built in revenue model using contextual adverts. Haven't got to that stage yet because we are having a problem with some flicker on my laptop screen and I'm happy to get the posting away.

But it occurs to me that the popup text is not a bad way to present the advert. The link (which to my mind needs to be more distinct and unique) tells you there is something there and you can find out immediately by mousing over while the ad otherwise doesn't intrude into the reading space if you don't want it to.

Something like that could easily run off keywords in the text automatically.

It could also be useful for popping up useful related information. For example, Typepad is using something similar for managing comments. All I have to do is click the link to get some information about what is in the comment and links to edit, delete or unpublish the comment in question.

If the Qumana link above had been a "contextual" keyword, what popped up might not have been an advert, but links to the last 5 postings that I had mentioned Qumana in. I'm sure there are other uses as well.

I have a feeling that little text boxes are going to be popping up all over the place. The only problem I can see with embedding supplementary data like that is that we still need to manage the metadata.

Content Charges

More thoughts on the whole bizarre idea of networks charging for content delivery.

Media companies have been trying to get us to pay for their content since day 1, and failed miserably pretty well every time. So the vast majority of "content" from those big companies is either text and image or some audio or maybe video clips, none of which, absolutely none, will we pay for. You put money in the way and we just leave.

So if some network owner, in addition to charging for the bandwidth or the access or whatever the hell they want to call it, then wants to stick us (me and you Rupert Murdoch) for actually delivering the bits that we have paid to receive, they can look forward to some interesting stories appearing in news media around the world giving the pipe owners a serious scrutiny; and we KNOW they'll find something because everybody has a skeleton.

But lets look at something we apparently are prepared to pay for, iTunes at $0.99 a shot. Now, since that has been the price since day 1 we can assume that iTunes doesn't have much in the way of pricing power and that any attempt to increase the cost is going to reduce the business, if not actually create major hassles for Apple. But lets say that the networks can stiff the customers for another 1 cent a tune without killing the goose that lays the tin eggs. Now lets add it up.

In December 2005, after 17 months online, iTunes Europe sold its 100 millionth song, making a princely rate of  5.8 million songs a month. Lets be generous and round it to 6 million.

Meanwhile, in the US, the counter at the store says that 957 million songs have been downloaded, at an average or 29 million a month. That's 35 million CENTS a month in ePostage for the carriers. Ummmmmm, $350k a month split across all the networks? Like their lawyers will get out of bed for that.

And regardless of the BIG players, I'd bet that the vast majority of the traffic that networks are currently being paid for is content that people are sharing among themselves, be it blogs or P2P.

Take away that traffic because they aren't paying the postage, and the bandwidth based contract that I need to access the net gets a LOT smaller.

Telcos have to understand, surely, that they are in a commodity business; they will make profits based on moving as many bits as possible among as many ends as possible. Any and every action they take that reduces the demand for bandwidth undermines whatever is left of their business model.

They might even succeed in getting congress to pass a law that stupid, they might even try to implement the business models that could ride on it. But I would bet that they will just go broke even faster.

The perfect example is the British booze business, that lobbied for longer and more flexible opening hours on the grounds that they made $X per hour before, so more hours must mean more $X.

But that tiny shift has made a big difference, not just to the amount of booze that people drink, nor the rate at which they drink, but the places they choose to drink as well. No, really.

Pub chain: Longer opening hours have hit our sales

Regent Inns, the company behind the Walkabout pubs and Jongleurs comedy clubs, has announced that it has done badly out of the new licensing laws. Other groups have seen only a modest boost from extending trading and none have posted big profits in the aftermath of the licensing revolution. Many stay open an extra hour or two on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Those that serve food open an hour earlier on Sundays. One of the effects of the new regime has been a shift away from the high street towards local pubs, as people no longer go searching for late-night bars.

When you are in the wrong mindset, getting what you want doesn't help, because what you want will be the wrong thing. The Telcos are relentlessly in the wrong mindset.