tech ronin

Ryzing to the Top: 8 Tips

A member of Ryze wrote me today asking me what I would recommend to him in terms of how to get the most out of Ryze. I got so carried away on the subject, that it was obvious that I needed to post my observations and recommendations here.

This isn't earthshaking stuff, but I would have gotten a quicker start at Ryze myself if I would have known these things to begin with:

1. Spend some time there every week. Things build with time and regularity.

2. Carefully pick 1-3 networks to participate in actively. You may want to reserve time looking for a good one, but once you've found one, I would read a few months worth of posts (depending on the volume) to understand what they are talking about and who the major participants are and then start posting good, helpful, thoughtful comments and ideas. Let yourself be known on the network(s). It's easy to spread yourself thin and never get known anywhere but I've found that people read your posts with more interest once they *know* you.

3. Be as open as you feel comfortable with so that people will be able to establish a one-sided relationship with you simply from checking you out on your page. Be personal. Be appropriate. Get ideas for your page by looking at other pages. People refer other people to my page because they think it is a useful page.

4. Keep up with your guestbook entries on your own page. Once you get going, it's easy to fall behind. Make short upbeat GB entries in return to everyone (you can provide advice to those whose entries seem offensive and encouragement to newbies, etc.) and invest additional time in especially thoughtful guestbook entries based on what you find at the other person's page for the people you would really like to connect with.

5. Browse Ryze for interesting people. You can search on interests, see who the friends of a person you like a lot are and find interesting people from their posts in networks. When you find someone interesting, make a guestbook entry in their page or send them a private message, whichever seems most appropriate. I found that Ryze is more interesting the more public people are in their communications, so I've leaned towards making guestbook entries unless it was clearly better to use a private channel.

6. I also entered testimonials and tips myself as I learned about Ryze and that drew attention to me and brought hits my way. [Ryze has a large rotating set of tips and testimonials that Ryzers can submit]

7. Also, I have a weblog and wrote a fairly elaborate set of posts about Ryze and social networking [Social Networking Made Easy, Part 3] which caught the eye of Ryze founder, Adrian Scott, and he requested to use a big excerpt from my post on his welcome to Ryze for beginners page. That gives me lots of hits.

8. Be open and interested regarding promoting your own business, but first focus on connecting, being interested, being helpful and expressing yourself.

Flickr Fly-by: Chat vs Groups

On Flickr you can have chats with your group members, but tonight I was appreciating the old-fashioned groups with posts. Chat is cool - the immediacy gives it energy and other benefits. But, it's still a serial sort of experience - sometimes multi-serial if you play more than one chat at the same time.

But, the cool thing about groups with topics and posts is that you can randomly access them. This is where the freedom in space and time operates. If somebody interesting makes a thought-provoking, exciting or insightful post this a.m., when I'm busy, I can come by that evening and see it and reply or build on it.

From what I've seen, the quality is higher - thus to me more interesting. I might get lucky in a chat and have a good conversation live - that would be big fun. But if I'm willing to be patient and get subsequent responses later (I have to admit to wanting a response right away), I can participate in more interesting conversations more of the time. I feel like I have to keep checking on the chats to see if anyone interesting is around or if anything interesting is happening.

If I'm in a *good* chat conversation, I'm around anyway and will see if someone else comes into the *room*. But, I'm not necessarily willing to spend my time hanging out. It still feels like sitting at the bar to me - too slow for my taste. Guess I'm too much of a Type A for that. Fishing and baths have never appealed much to me either.

A new addition to the groups part of Flickr that really helps is that *hot* topics are listed in a narrow lefthand column and the current topic's posts in the larger righthand column. Once I've gotten up to date and posted or not, I can quickly scan for other topics of interest that are active. Topics that get posts go to the top of the list. It saves me clicks and I like it. Don't make me work too hard to get my mind candy and connection!

One thing that would add even more to the groups environment would be to list who in the group is online at that moment as well as who of my friends are online - make it easy for me to monitor whose online and lure me on. Make it easy for me to *score* when I do.

Finally, I have to say that Flickr is coming right along. After I complained on March 2nd that the staff seemed to be snoozing and schmoozing but not creating cool features that I could see, things started popping. They've been cranking out the new features lately. Here are my top four new features:

1. Finding people by interests, books, movies, actors, music and artists
2. Everyone's interests, favorite books, movies and music are links to everyone else with that same thing!
3. I can see when someone was last on Flickr
4. You can grab Flickr pics and post them to your blog. I like the concept this option reflects. Flickr isn't an island where you can't communicate elsewhere. It's designed with a whole world outside Flickr in mind.

Things are looking up!

Academic Blogging is a Must

Geez! I once aspired to be a professor in academia. I went so far as to get my Masters which perhaps could have been a PhD from UCSF in Sociology when I was in my twenties. Being young and idealistic, I got very disillusioned with academia then because it was so about egos and career progress.

What is the purpose of academia? I know there are all sorts of personal agendas related to job security, tenure and academic recognition (academics are human like the rest of us), but as I recall, there are overarching purposes that need to take precedence such as learning, research, teaching and sharing what one learns.

Liz Lawley has a post over at Many-to-Many called intriguingly: blogs, creativity, audiences, and academics. It's about whether academic blogging is worth the trouble. Liz sites some of the benefits she gets:

become part of an amazing, supportive “invisible college” of colleagues, from inside and outside of academia. I’ve had input into ideas that have helped me shape my research agenda before I’ve gone too far down a blind alley, I’ve found people to work with on papers and conference presentations, I’ve found encouragement when I’ve been stuck on a tough problem.

That's just part of it. What about the visibility you get? What about the personal branding you are creating? There's personal branding in academia just like everywhere else, of course.

With all these personal payoffs, to me, if you really care about the higher purposes of academic life at all, you get out there into the fray and risk a little to get a lot. But more than that, to give and share with the academic community and the world so that we all can benefit. And I hope you'll post links to the pdfs of your academic papers whenever you can too - I really love them.

All of a sudden there's this revolutionary possibility that we can get a ten-fold increase in communication around all this, and we turn it down for small-minded reasons? OK, maybe everyone isn't meant to be a blogger but academics seem like naturals.

As Liz says, there are numerous benefits to blogging that easily compensate for the risks of exposing your ideas prematurely or getting dissed for blogging sometimes half-baked ideas. It's true that us bloggers seem to be very self-expressed and will jump on tender new ideas and ferociously tear them apart at times. That's just part of the freedom in the blogging culture that may have its roots in the tradition of flaming which is part of Net culture, like it or not. We call it ranting when we blog.

I'm glad that Liz and many others do make the effort and blog. I suspect that academia might become borderline *irrelevant* or even somewhat obsolete if its academicians stay cloistered away with their academic journals. Don't get me wrong, this is a very good topic and worth further exploration of all sides of the issue. I'm just coming down hard on the side of academic blogging. We need you.

The Ideal News Aggregator

Danah Boyd at Apophenia has once again thought outside the box and expressed some great ideas. This time it is about what a newsaggregator should be able to do. It's easy for us non-programmers (well - I don't program in low level languages like C) to make all sorts of pie in the sky requests. But still. We need this stuff. Read her meaty post. Just give me:

i want to be able to choose to watch an entry, a topic or a person. I don't want to be forced into a person only; this unit of view is way too big.

You have to read her elaborations to see how great this would be. I love that it's probably quite possible and thus not too distant for us to get this - how about later this year?

My other personal favorite would be simply to be able to filter my list of feeds easily. I want to have my own categories that I can assign to any feed so that I can just read on the topic I'm interested in at a particular point in time. I have too long a list to read everything. I'm making due for the moment by creating folders and grouping my feeds. That's a start.

FileMaker 7 Arrived today

Just got my brand new copies of FileMaker Pro 7 and FileMaker Developer 7! The release of FileMaker 7 is a major accomplishment for FileMaker Inc. This new version is way more powerful, open-ended and web-friendly. It also represents a full redesign of the internal workings of the product to such an extent that, for the first time, you can't take any FileMaker 6 system and open it up just fine in 7.

Depending on the complexity of the application, quite a bit of prep work before conversion and polishing afterwards has to be done. Third party tools will ease the process, but one document estimates that it will take you 10% of the time you took to develop the application to convert it successfully to FileMaker 7.

I've had the beta for a while now. I've attended an all day training at FileMaker Inc. I've read a lot of white papers and tech briefs. And I've still got a LOT to learn about this new tool. All I know is that it takes the lid off the upper end of the FileMaker market. This is not a toy! And I am very pleased to see a big jump in web capability within FileMaker so that we can easily share data with people outside our company such as vendors and customers.

If you are interested, you can see my top ten favorite features of FileMaker 7 on the FileMaker Kingdom page in my company website. I'm actually contemplating starting a FileMaker 7 blog because there's already all sorts of interesting information out and there's going to be so much more information and utilities coming out over the next year. Even though I've got a big learning curve ahead of me, I'm excited to have moved up to the leading edge, compliments of FileMaker Inc's bold new initiative.

Tip of the Knowledge work Iceberg

I just found this thought-provoking and original sixteen page article by Lilia Efimova, the author of Mathemagenic. It is entitled: Discovering the iceberg of knowledge work: A weblog case and is available as a pdf. Here are some immediately interesting excerpts:

The term knowledge work has been used for decades, but to date there is not much understanding of what knowledge workers do and how this work can be improved.

...exploring use of weblogs for professional purposes: as personal knowledge repositories, learning journals or networking instruments...

...knowledge management practice, once technology-driven, is starting to recognise that having knowledge bases or virtual community tools is not enough to ensure active participation and knowledge sharing...

Unlike physical work, knowledge work is unique and difficult to standardise: knowledge workers are autonomous and almost impossible to control (Drucker, 1999)...

...weblogs address interests and needs of their authors, but they also create an opportunity for others to benefit from having emergent ideas and personal notes captured in public spaces instead of private collections...

...Personal relations are vital for sharing knowledge (Cross, Parker, Prusak, & Borgatti, 2001), but the time spent building and maintaining personal networks is hardly taken into account (Nardi, Whittaker, & Schwarz, 2003)...

...what makes weblogs different is not the publication of content per-se, but the personalities behind them. Weblogs are increasingly becoming on-line identities of their authors...

...one thing that excites so many bloggers lays hidden from the occasional reader: blogging is learning about oneself and developing connections with others...

Lilia Efimova rocks! Don't miss the other valuable insights in this piece. It's so readable and exciting that I just added *knowledge work* as a new category.

Flickr Flash in the Pan?

Darn! I was sure flickr had more potential than Orkut and represents a step forward for social networking services. It's pretty slick and full-featured and there's more to do with pix exchange and live chat, but it's idling near zero right now. The bulletin boards aren't active, for one. There's a small group of regulars online, but that's about it.

Another sign of inactivity is that most of the same pix from two weeks ago are still at the top of the most popular pix list. This is a problem for a service that is named for its pix exchange capability and the pix aren't even very good yet.

I was hoping for a surge of interest, but no. I'm wondering what happened. Is live chat more threatening? Yes. Does it take more to get used to it? Probably. Does nobody know what to do with the pix exchange capability? Seems so. Is chat more of a 25 and under phenomenon that doesn't match up with the maybe slightly older age group that's exploring social networking services? Or do people who want live chat already have themselves set up with those facilities and not see the need to go somewhere online to chat?

Maybe it's just that the Orkut surge was so recent and people aren't ready to start all over again with Flickr. And certainly, the energy from Flickr itself, other than a promising start, is weak at best. The most recent post on Flickr's news page was on Feb 13th when the service went beta. I'll bet some backend work is being done, but the stuff you see on the surface appears to be the same. Energy absent.

One of the interesting problems Flickr may have is that their core users are players of The Game Neverending and my guess is that these gamers would rather be playing GNE than chatting on flickr. I would rather be playing GNE than chatting on Flickr but it's not *out* yet.

There's a strong place for Flickr, though. If you want to work with others, collaborate, socialize and chat with a focus on real world topics rather than fantasy, you need a non-fantasy networking service of some kind. So now how do you take the state-of-the-art tools of real-time gaming and enliven a social networking environment? How do you add more fun and flare and enable people to more easily get to know each other, throw ideas around, share experience, collaborate and create?

I, at least, don't know how to do that on Flickr. What all can you do with photos and little pix? You could exchange pix of rock, sports and movie stars I suppose. You could show people what your town looks like. You could show people what you are seeing right now while you are traveling or somewhere where something interesting is happening. You can always whip out your family and pet photos in a *getting to know you* conversation. You could keep your favorite book and album cover images in your shoebox and illustrate your conversations with them. That might be fun.

One reason I might not have a very good *second* impression of Flickr is that, given the meager population so far, I'm mostly interacting with strangers without context because the only place where you can find people online right now is at Flickr Central and to a lesser extent Flickr Ideas unless you've set-up a *meeting* in advance.

It gets interesting when you *meet* someone you know and like for the first time like I did when I *met* Dina Mehta online. One thing Flickr is in need of is more people so that you anticipate having these happy serendipitous encounters more often.

So, for now, Flickr is flatlining. If you see signs that Flickr is firing up, please let me know. I would love to be there when that happens.

Enabling Knowledge

I'm strictly an amateur in the field of content management and *knowledge management*. But since weblogs are considered to be a species of content management tool, I get exposed to all sorts of bits and pieces of information and concepts about KM and CM as I read my favorite blogs.

Currently, I've just come across Richard MacManus's post called The Passion of the Information Flow. Richard is undertaking to evangelize and introduce wiki's and blogs into his corporate environment. And I've got a free ticket. I am excited to see him putting his *money* where his mouth is in the real world where he works.

Richard turned me on to TWiki creator, Peter Thoeny's presentation on the use of Wiki's in the corporate world which is a treasure trove of wiki nuggets about wikis and leading edge km. Richard culled a quote from Thoeny's presentation that comes from an intriguing-sounding book called Enabling Knowledge Creation: How to Unlock the Mystery of Tacit Knowledge and Release the Power of Innovation:

"knowledge cannot be managed, it can only be enabled."

So true. We need environments where knowledge can be fruitfully exchanged. Where mavens, thinkers and observers are emboldened and drawn to participate in the "flow of information". But then, that's the way my mind works best - it blends and bends things. I'm not the systematic type. More the ADD type I would think.

The reason my blog has lots of original content (original to me at least) is that I have a terrible memory for facts, figures and sources. I frankly discard the data and have little interest in it to begin with. An extreme N on the Myers-Briggs scale, I rarely remember the ingredients that go into my beliefs and concepts. I like to immerse myself in the chaotic streams of ideas, experiences and information I find on the web - especially in blogs. New ideas and insights seem to sprout in abundance from this fertile ground.

Think tanks, R&D facilities and creativity sessions are friendly to this type of environment or at least try to be. Artists take to this sort of thing sometimes and perhaps Bohemian and Psychedelic culture have taken it to the max. Corporate culture tends towards control, line of command, corporate espionage and public image. Almost the antithesis, formally, of a knowledge enabling environment.

Fortunately, humans will be humans, and underneath the corporate veneer lies a hotbed of gossip, politics, water-cooler *chit-chat* and informal lines of communication. It pleases me greatly that weblogs and wikis seem to be infiltrating and making little incursions into corporate denizens. Good blogs here and there within the corporate walls can generate a readership and participation with or without corporate approval. There's always the threat of pseudo blogs stripped of their authentic voice and individuality. But these wither. Truth will out.