July 2nd, 2008, 2 Comments »
Irish blogger Damien Mulley devised a generous and clever means of increasing the visibility of Irish tech companies:
The premise is that everyone talks up a company (if they think it deserves to be) on a particular date. Every second Tuesday at it happens. Everyone tech and non tech alike are encouraged to talk about the company so that hopefully a tipping point is reached and a potential investor or journalist or partner hears/reads about the company.
Happily, the first candidate for this bloggy bake sale is our client, PutPlace. The response has been mighty, mighty impressive. For all you Catholics, Eirepreneur suggests that a better name might be ‘Shove Tuesday’.
I was thinking that we ought to do this for Vancouver (or British Columbia) startups. Maybe Techvibes or Bootup Labs could sort that out?
In related news, we’re running a photo contest for PutPlace. All you have to do is photograph yourself making a silly face, submit it to our contest, and you could win an annual subscription to PutPlace for 100 GB of data + $200 USD Amazon gift certificate. Go forth and panic for the camera.
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April 8th, 2008, 3 Comments »
Just a quick post to list some places I’ll be speaking at, and some other events that might be of interest to you, my dear, dear readers.
First, a couple of Vancouver events. I can’t attend these, but I wanted to spread the word:
Upcoming events where I’m speaking include:
- April 14 - Open Web Vancouver - I’m pleased to get a chance to give my 1100 Stacies talk in Vancouver. It’ll be somewhat unorthodox for a fairly technical conference, but hopefully it’ll provide a, uh, refreshing change of pace.
- April 22 - 25 - New Comms Forum - Just sitting on a panel at this event in Santa Rosa, California. I’ve never been to this event before, though, so I’m pleased to get a chance. I’m also hoping to scoot down to spend one day at Web 2.0 Expo. I must try to finagle media accreditation there.
- April 30 - Go-To-Market Roundtable - Running a morning session for the BCTIA.
- May 6 - 9 - DocTrain West 2008 - Speaking at a couple of sessions (and maybe sitting on a panel) at this Vancouver conference.
- May 8 - BCAIM Luncheon - Julie and I are giving a Social Media Marketing 101 session.
- May 12 - HTCE - Julie and I are talking on “Seven Risks of Social Media Marketing”.
- May 22 - An event I probably shouldn’t mention, because I don’t think it’s been announced yet.
- June 17 - 18 - Web Content 2008 - Running a couple of sessions at this Chicago event.
After that, things pretty much calm down until the fall.
3 Comments »
October 11th, 2007, 5 Comments »
I just received an email announcement from NowPublic, the Vancouver citizen journalism startup. The message was about NowPublic’s new flaming policy:
And why, you may ask, do we take our time finding Flamers is and weeding them out, instead of just ignoring them? Well, flaming doesn’t just hurt the individual being flamed—it hurts the entire community. Flamers tend to end conversations by entering them; they create a hostile, circuitous environment where real discourse is quashed in favour of insults and abuse. We won’t stand for it.
It’s plainly written, and if not for its verbosity (it’s 2200 words and suitably located in the ‘fine_print’ directory), it would be an outstanding example of anti-flame guidelines. I guess they’re covering their bases. I’d be curious to hear more about the reasons behind the new policy, given my recent interest in debate within online communities.
The reason I’m writing this post is that, without any apparent irony, the email concluded thusly:
Please don’t hesitate to email flamers@nowpublic.com if you have any questions.
Cheers,
NowPublic editorial staff
Am I the only one who finds that a little funny?
5 Comments »
May 30th, 2007, 4 Comments »
For no particular reason, I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about online communities lately. I recently encountered a phenomenon on ChangeEverything.ca which initially struck me as unusual. Upon further reflection I think it’s quite common: there’s very little disagreement and debate in their community.
I discovered this because I wrote what I thought was a fairly contradictory comment in response to a post about gas prices. To my surprise, nobody wanted to take me up on the debate (I eventually goaded Rob into it offline).
I love debate, so I tend to seek it out in online communities, whether it’s something old school like alt.sports.hockey.nhl.vanc-canucks or more recent projects the always hotly-contested DeSmogBlog. So I was kind of bummed when nobody–not even the blogger herself–took on my challenge.
Then I started looking around the site. I browsed through a month of posts (this was a couple of weeks ago), and despite there being numerous hot button topics (local politics, global warming and so forth) and plenty of comments, I couldn’t find a single example of disagreement. That just struck me as weird.
A Positive Sense of Belonging and Encouragement
I asked the ChangeEverything.ca folks and here’s some of what they said. Community Manager (I hope that’s her title) Kate writes:
the first two months ChangeEverything.ca was live it was in ’soft launch’ mode meaning that we were introducing people slowly and intentionally into the community to foster a positive sense of belonging and encouragement. I think of it kind of like introducing new fish into an aquarium. Because of this careful and deliberate building of the environment, the disagreements that do show up on the site (and there are several) tend to be civil and short lived. We were not aiming to create a place here people do not contradict one another, but rather that when they do they are respectful about it so that something truly progressive may be generated.
And Rob, who helped create the site, says:
Another reason speaks to the site’s purpose. For the most part, this is less a debate/argumentation site than a news/resource-sharing/collaboration site, and the culture of dialogue reflects that. Discussions tend to focus on “how” instead of “rather”, and where people weigh in, it’s usually to reinforce someone’s goals and cheer them on.
Finally, whether you’d call it groupthink or broad values alignment, the people who come to a Vancity-sponsored community-change site are different from those who come to a site that dives into the fray and takes on partisans in a highly-contested space, as DeSmogBlog does.
Broad Values Alignment
Indeed, my theory was that many community sites draw like-minded people, and the kind of folks who would join ChangeEverything.ca would have, as Rob puts it, ‘broad values alignment’. Kate says that they don’t market to VanCity members exclusively, but I’d imagine that’s where they drew most of their early adopters (and therefore conversation tone setters) from. Obviously, people who bank with VanCity have some values and ideals in common.
There seems to be some division here between communities that group around a lifestyle (green, goth, whatever) and those that group around a hobby or common love (skydiving, Lindsay Lohan, whatever). The former are, I’d guess, less likely to experience the diversity of opinions which drive debate.
Too much debate is a problem we experience on DeSmogBlog sometimes, but I think too little debate is an issue too. Debate enlivens a community, identifies its core values and sharpens its ideas. I suppose each group needs to find its own ideal level for this kind of discourse, but I was frustrated by ChangeEverything’s lack of cut-and-thrust. Happily, there are plenty of Interwebbians elsewhere who are happy to vehemently disagree with me.
On a vaguely related point, I recently learn about Change.org, which was launched this spring. It appears to be a sort of globalized version of ChangeEverything.
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