Digging through Web 2.0 for Feelings and Facts and Fraternity

My last few posts used slacktivism to make a point about online activism, but the lesson that I have taken from my blogging and wanted to pass on to others is that Web 2.0 tools can be used to tell the story of a cause not just the facts. The story of a cause goes to the heart or the meaning of a cause and why someone should join, not merely the facts of the issue.

The World Wide Web may have started transmitting only data, but it has evolved into something more and is continuing to evolve.

Change-agent organizations need to understand and adapt these new means of connection, communication and collaboration. It is a balance between pulling on people's feelings and getting them to be part of some larger cause and providing the facts so that they can make up their own minds and find new means of working together.

From the New York Times TECHNOLOGY / INTERNET | August 24, 2009 By ALEX WRIGHT

Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts

The universe of reviews, ratings and recommendations online open a tantalizing window on the collective consciousness.

“Social media used to be this cute project for 25-year-old consultants,” said Margaret Francis, vice president for product at Scout Labs in San Francisco. Now, she said, top executives “are recognizing it as an incredibly rich vein of market intelligence.”

Here are two TED Talks featuring Clay Shirky, who in the first TED Talk looks at how the end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics, Iranian protestors streaming news to the world, showing how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news by bypassing censors (if all too briefly).

The second TED Talk examines how the Internet and Web 2.0 can enhance collaboration.

Appealing to the Slacktivists

In the last post of this blog I made a defense of slacktivists in general, though I ended up agreeing with so many points made by Evgeny Morozov that slacktivists will still not be able to hold their own convention. This post will also be in support of slacktivists, but this time as an essential audience for change-agent organizations.

My last post took the perspective of one who fits into the slacktivist demographic, though I believe that the demographic is more diverse than appreciated. This time I am going to consider the issue from organizations that need large numbers to directly support their efforts through activism and funding, or to support larger scale efforts to initiate change through other government and social organizations. The Millennium Development Goals involve both approaches in bringing them to fruition.

There are numerous organizations struggling to meet the challenges of implementing the objectives of each of the Millennium Development Goals. These organizations often involve professionals on-the-ground seeking to increase awareness and derive support from a larger and usually less expert base. There is also an overall effort to get developed countries to meet their promise of fully funding the Millennium Development Goals. The Stand Up and Take Action event is an example.

The first set and the second set of activism are natural allies. For the organizations seeking to implement each of the particular objectives of the Millennium Development Goals, the struggle to push the larger agenda is no doubt important, but I cannot see it as a defining goal. Whether or not a certain number of people stand up on October 16th, those organizations working in Africa to eradicate typhoid or to provide universal education in India will still be at work. However, for those working in the second category for global political change, which is what we are talking about, having the first group of on-the-ground change-agents is not enough to positively influence the fundamental source of change in the leading developed countries, the mainstream voting majority. This majority cannot be defined by political affiliation alone because no one makes up a super majority. It does have one general defining aspect and that is, for the most part, for most of the time, non-activist.

Here again, I agree with Evgeny Morozov.

Of course, the ideal case here is when one's participation in digital activism doesn't subtract from -- and instead enhances -- one's eagerness to participate in real-life campaigns.

Now that gives change-agent organization two tasks. One to make sure the the true-hearted and dedicated activists don't lose heart and become part of the Facebook generation wasting their time on Mafia wars.

However, it's also quite possible that a significant portion of the activist population would be morally content with the "slacktivist" option alone, preferring not to get too close to more dangerous activities that are likely to get them in trouble with authorities.

I seriously doubt that anybody who was was of the meddle to protest would not because the Internet just made it too easy. The harder task is getting the uninvolved masses on board.

What we are dealing with from the perspective of social or change-agent organizations promoting their cause is social marketing, and as with social-entrepreneurship it takes a degree of business acumen.

It was dealing with issues of marketing, communications and networking the helped to lead me to the Millennium Development Goals. In a previous post on the blog I looked into the book GROUNDSWELL by Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff which makes the case that either Your Marketing Is Riding The Wave or Its Under Water.

More importantly for this post it provides taxonomy for Web 2.0 usage on the Internet. This I submit is also the different levels of slacktivists.

1. “creators”, who blog on their own web pages,
2. “critics” who post comments,
3. “joiners” who sign up for online communities,
4. “spectators” who read and watch, and finally
5. the unengaged “inactives”

The general understanding of slacktivisits seems to fit under numbers levels 3 and 4, only a small step above the bottom rung of inactives. I still put online creators and critics as being in the slacktivist pool, realizing fully as I have said that writing a blog does not equate in any way from on-the-ground action of groups like Oxfam UK, ONE, Millennium Promise or other similar organizations. Web 2.0 could hopefully help change-agent organizations recruit the unengaged "inactives" and move each rung of the Web 2.0 ladder up, but it is as likely to be other slacktivists higher up on the rungs.

This may fly in the face of our vision of social activists taking a stand like the revolutionaries in Les Miserables, but the concept of effective political change only coming from sit-ins and the risk of arrest, police brutality, or torture as opposed campaigning in the virtual space is to my mind false for liberal democratic countries. I do not believe that such actions alone will accomplish the Millennium Development Goals.

As I said in my last blog post, demonstrations and sit-ins can force the discussion into the open, but at some point the message needs to be taken up the the majority of voters in the democratic countries to put pressure on their governments to put pressure on other governments. It is the responsibility of organizations such as the Millennium End Poverty 2015 Campaign and anybody else supporting these goals to lead such as effort.

It is our responsibility as individuals participating in causes of our choosing to avoid become political commodities by understanding that you are commodified when you lose the ability to change things.

A Defense of Slacktivism (Not Really)

I linked an article critical of slacktivism by Evgeny Morozov in Foreign Policy to a blog post I did on actions being taken on behalf of Aung San Suu Kyi Support getting thanks but not results. Despite having admitted to being a slacktivist, I wanted to look closer at those parts of the article I agreed with which are critiques of my actions and the actions of the vast majority of us.

Morozov provides the standard definition of "Slacktivism" as, “an apt term to describe feel-good online activism that has zero political or social impact. “

It gives those who participate in "slacktivist" campaigns an illusion of having a meaningful impact on the world without demanding anything more than joining a Facebook group. Remember that online petition that you signed and forwarded to your entire contacts list? That was probably an act of slacktivism

Admittedly this is true for me. A good number of worthwhile online petitions come by email, on which I quite honestly don’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time. I would rather spend that time on causes that I have chosen to put more time - the Millennium Development Goals. So I click and move on.

The main point is “that media attention doesn't always translate into campaign effectiveness” was made by my blog post Aung San Suu Kyi Support getting thanks but not results. The web can be a catalyst, but it can not make a difference in the "real" world on its own.

He offers his own argument for slacktivism as a Straw man through the "long tail" argument.

...the dramatic fall in transaction costs of organizing activist campaigns has simply opened up the field to many more participants and issues, there has been no drop in the actual quality and effectiveness of these campaigns.

I also wonder if "nano-activism" for specific campaigns easily thrown up on the web and send to thousands of people, most previously not involved in activist campaigns, benefit from the increased public attention. There has to be more to these campaigns then how the website is designed.

Morozov goes on to write about "activism for a lazy generation”. Again I cannot argue with this on its face. I don't believe that Morozov means the protestors in Iran using both demonstrations for which many meant arrest, beatings or death and Web 2.0 tools like Twitter, but for campaigns such as the United Nations Millennium Development Goals there will be a point where they need to reach the mainstream masses of the developed countries. The Millennium Development Goals as far as I can determine are not mainstream in the United States.

Morozov challenges the basic slacktivist narrative by asking the question:

are the publicity gains gained through this greater reliance on new media worth the organizational losses that traditional activists entities are likely to suffer, as ordinary people would begin to turn away from conventional (and proven) forms of activism (demonstrations, sit-ins, confrontation with police, strategic litigation, etc) and embrace more "slacktivist" forms, which may be more secure but whose effectiveness is still largely unproven?

The answer to whether the utility of the very public work of 1000 "slacktivists" equals that of the very quiet and often unattributed work of one traditional activist is that it simple does not.

However, this seems to me to be a very unpersuasive argument. How often has demonstrations, sit-ins, confrontation with police, strategic litigation, etc worked without either a democratic system of change through voting or a sufficiently large militia to bring about the change? Vietnam did not end because the demonstrators convinced the government, but because they finally convinced the voters who changed the government. The demonstrators forced open the discussion, main stream then took it up, perhaps with false turns and setbacks but they made the final decision.

The real issue here is whether the mere availability of the "slacktivist" option is likely to push those who in the past might have confronted the regime in person with demonstrations, leaflets, and labor organizing to embrace the Facebook option and join a gazillion online issue groups instead.

However, I disagree with the idea that ordinary people, of which I am a fairly good example, would be out demonstrating and confronting police if not for the Internet. Today, I worry about family, mortgages and my job while trying to participate when I can through online activism and voting. The young have far less problem doing both online and on-street activism.

If this is the case, then the much-touted tools of digital liberation are only driving us further away from the goal of democratization and building global civil society.

The argument fails from my perspective. This blog and Milestones for a New Millennium have found too many resources and too many connections beyond Facebook to give any credence to this argument. Still in the end, Evgeny Morozov makes a number of points we need to think about, and each of us needs to re-examine what they are doing to determine for themselves if they can do more to make a difference and still live their own lives.

The Importance Getting a Single Message from a Social Media Network

I have been thinking about how organizations, and especially what I call change-agent organizations, can use Web 2.0 tools to get their message across with the greatest impact. This combines both marketing and organizational concerns. Social Media involves networks and groups but the agents are still individuals. How individuals collaborate within a group will define the message of that group.

Scott Briscoe on 11/3/08 wrote the article The headline was a no brainer in Acronym. His article links to how it read on The Washington Post website.

"Online social networking sites, or socnets, are changing how people get their political news.

Scott's point, "What the article made me think about was that it's one thing to believe that change is occurring, it's quite another to be doing something about it — what are associations doing about it?"

If political advocacy is a major part of your mission, do you know the quantity and quality of the involvement of people affiliated with your organization in social media? Are they pushing forward ideas that synch with your organization? ... How are you training members to get involved in these areas? The circle of people who are engaging in these online communities has grown too large, and the circle who read without engaging is also larger still. ... In 2008, it's too numerous to count in both large and small ways. ... The next page is already beginning to turn; you need to make sure your organization has something to say about what is written on it.

Relate Posts:

• Designing Your Future and Your Success as a Team Effort
  
• Collaboration As Management Tool= Management as Collaboration Tool
  
• Branding as Commodity Finding Connection Through Leadership
• Collaboration Moving Masses Through Compassion

Inform, Engage, and Empower During Your Freetime

One new set of connections created through my Milestones for a New Millennium blog was through becoming one of the moderators for the Orkut group End POVERTY / Fim POBREZA.

I find that Orkut offers more of a conversation regarding relevant topics than does Facebook. It is an international conversation spanning the globe. Lately the direction of the discussions has been on the best means of directing the discussions. The basic format for the discussions is the web itself and more particularly Orkut, but we are open to numerous avenues of communication. The question is which avenues are best for both open dialogue and advancing the cause of the Millennium Development Goals?

A recently learned term is Slacktivists, basically well-meaning but all too often ineffectual (at least until a tipping point is reached) social activists hanging on and together through social media. At the other end of the continuum are professionals (as in "gets paid for it.") in the social media/Web 2.0 arena. Most of us hope to be somewhere in the middle trying to help when and where we can on a part-time and unpaid basis.

Slacktivists may be those who take no more effort than clicking a button to join a petition, but they are still a step above those that don't know and/or don't care. I try to put a good deal of information on my blog to make it easier for others to connect in the hope they will pursue their own pathways. The basic web connection is information through shared self-education. Then comes engagement which does sometimes mean signing online petitions. There is also the potential, as the Obama campaign has demonstrated, for empowerment.

It is not just the IT-intelligentsia's road, it is a journey for all of us. Ethan Zuckerman discusses Technologies and Emerging Democracies: Building a Better Gatekeeper in an MIT video. I agree with both Zuckerman and others in my Orkut conversations that Hi5, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Zuckermans's favorite Reddit among dozens of others offer their own unique impressions regarding their areas of interest, but it also means that the Web is balkanized. Are we "Gatekeepers" or are we attempting to break through the gates?

Is there a way to better leverage the collective wisdom of these international connections being created through these groups? Just trying to keep up with all the information and maintain my two blogs is an effort. Then there is that pesky real world day job. I try to rise above being a slacktivist or at least attempt at being a fairly prolific slactivist. Without the educational background and professional expertise in the Web 2.0 world, how does one best use these online resources to endeavor to connect and make a difference in the world?

I have a good deal of respect for experts in this field, but their professionalism is often related to the medium not the message. The question is how best to connect? One earlier post exploring this idea which I revisited and reedited was Being Human, Working, Writing Stories, Being Human.

Effective Pitches And Word-of-Mouth Core Promotional Values

This weblog often looks to Entrepreneurial Mind for basic insights on free enterprise. Not that I agree with everything written, but it is very good resource into the pragmatic philosophy of small business capitalism. It often provides insights into "why" you should do something and connects those whys to larger concerns in life. The fact that Professor Cornwall recognizes that there are larger concerns in life is to be respected.

Lately this weblog has been considering some of the ongoing musings regarding online social media including comparing its advantages and disadvantages to person-to-person communications. The Entrepreneurial Mind back in June wrote on how to Develop an Effective Pitch. This, the most basic component of business communication, minimal time, maximum information, optimal impact, has traditionally been face-to-face. The ability to deliver a good pitch is recognized as essential to being good at business, not any particular aspect of business, but leading the business. This apparently is still be true at Belmont University.

We teach our students about the art of the pitch. Most entrepreneurs will have only moments to grab the attention of an investor or a customer, so they need to learn how to explain what they do and how it creates value in a very short few moments.

However, as with so much in communication today, it is no longer only face-to-face or limited by geography as the Entrepreneurial Mind also informs us.

TechCrunch has an on-line site for elevator pitches. Visitors can vote "up" or "down" on the product ideas and offer their comments.

If a pitch is in your future go to this site and watch some of the pitches. It helps to see which pitches work and why. It really helps you to see what makes a pitch effective.

Even if you don't pitch for money, you will pitch to gain customers, attract employees, talk your spouse into your crazy idea, etc., etc. Learn how to pitch!

One of the goals of this weblog is to combine ideas together and one that seemed to be in the same vein comes from Zane Safrit writing for Small Business Trends Why's Word-of-Mouth So Important? back in May.

The pitch is recognized as a one chance at bat attempt. It seems that it would be rather beneficial if your pitch was good enough that others would be willing to continue to deliver it for you. As with the pitch, word-of-mouth no longer needs to have two mouths in the same room or area code. If the word-of-mouth community-created script is as tight as the sucessful pitch then branding should be all the more assured.

With effective, positive, powerful, self-sustaining, word-of-mouth you have the core mission statement, a fundamental mission statement that gets visceral, emotional, physiological, borderline irrational buy-in from your customers and your employees.

Zane Safrit argues that this directly helps the bottom line by improving CASH-FLOW.

The most important financial result for a small business is its cash-flow. Here's how cash-flows grow with a word-of-mouth marketing as core to your strategy:

1. Reduced advertising expense.
2. Shorter Sales Cycle.
3. Increase in Repeat Purchases.

Word-of-Mouth Arises from a Profound Connection. Word-of-mouth results from a profound connection and engagement both with and between your customers AND your employees. The experience they share, they create together, INSPIRES communication.

So who is most likely to take part in this effort? Those who are already friends, use the tools of web 2.0 and will find common ground in your product or service, in other words your customer base. Even when they don't use the same systems, they still find ways to communicate with each other as the following news article from the New York Times demonstrates.

TECHNOLOGY May 4, 2008 Essay: Friends May Be the Best Guide Through the Noise New companies are trying to solve a problem that the Internet itself created gathering the dense jungle of user-generated content across several platforms into one stream.

Stumbling Through the Crowd On a Path To Wisdom

One topic running, at least in the background, through the recent posts of this weblog has been crowdsourcing. Despite having a working definition for this newly created term, I am still wrestling with fitting it within related web 2.0 jargon. At its most basic it seems to be an individual or entity with an entrepreneurial bent using the labor of unnamed masses transforming services into commodities.

How does this differ though with what was considered under the Challenging The "Popular" Theory Of Group and Individual Interaction regarding social influence? What factors move the process from crowdsourcing to collaboration or is it to a great degree a matter of perspective? All these perspectives would seem to depend upon one degree or another on some form of the wisdom of the crowds concept, without ever knowing what elements make up the crowd. We become connected without ever knowing who we are connected to, but does being connected to hundreds intimately to accomplish a specific task that is part of a larger goal really make any sense? Maybe if discussing one's favorite pizza, but preparing the financial statements for a business plan?

Some people, as this Wired article demonstrates, can make this aspect of the new economy work for them. Wired 14.06: The Rise of Crowdsourcing.

One arena of the crowd networking with the crowd is the new StumbleUpon community I recently joined. This StumbleUpon site that I sent to myself includes a companion piece to The Rise of Crowdsourcing article on the 5 rules of crowdsourcing labor. It also goes beyond that utilizing the wisdom of the StumbleUpon crowd to find other sites through related concepts. At least as far as I related them.

StumbleUpon

Discover new web sites

Wired 14.06: 5 Rules of the New Labor Pool

wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/...

reviews crowdsourcing, creativity, management

---

BrianDRPM has sent you a site he found with StumbleUpon

Finding Gigs in the Crowds

BrianDRPM
briandrpm@gmail.com

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Who You Know And Who You Trust And Who Trusts You

From Seth Godin's Blog: Who you know

One of the mantras of networking (and the many social networking sites that people are flocking to) is that it matters who you know. The goal of having a thousand or more friends online is that you're well known. Connected. A click away.

I wonder if there's a more useful measure: who trusts you?

Which brings up my question. How do you establish virtual trust? It is not a question that I find necessary to ask in the day job/real world. It's mostly sensed whether I can or can't, but what establishes trust in the web 2.0 world. There are a number of bloggers that I trust. Seth being one of them, but what is it that makes them trustworthy? The fact that they are recognized as trustworthy by so many others? My readings tell me that there is more to it than just that and that,whatever it is, comes through their writings. Besides asking the question,Seth Godin also provides an answer, at least for longer relationships.

Seth's Blog: Making promises

Is that what marketing is all about? I think so. Make promises and keep them.

Some organizations work very hard to weasel in the promises they make. They imply great customer service or amazing results or spectacular quality, but don't deliver. No, they didn't actually lie, but they came awfully close. The result: angry customers and negative word of mouth.

It's very easy to overpromise. Tempting to shade the truth a little bit, deliver a little bit less to save a few bucks. Who will notice?

The consumer notices.

If you need to overpromise to make the sale, don't bother. It's not worth it.

The best way to generate word of mouth is simple: overdeliver.

Forwarding webpages with highlights and sticky notes, powered by Diigo

Sharing del.icio.us

Since my del.icio.us account was a significant contributor to the last post and to my overall weblog experiment I decided to also share my two unsolicited del.icio.us network links. For their own reasons these to sites decided to connect with my del.icio.us account. I am not complaining by any means, I am just not sure why they decided to link to me. I am glad if anybody gets any benefit from what I do. The euforic site is in both French and English.

espaarni08 by Risto Päärni
euforic by euforic

Connecting Throughout The World

As has been said before, this weblog is an experiment. Different web 2.0 tools are tried out to see how they work. One tool that is being tried out and that lets you know how other things are working is HitTail. HitTail tells you if anybody has connected with one of your posts and what search engine they were using. One that I really enjoyed resulted in a transformation of one post from So Money (of any currency) Can Buy Happiness to Así que el dinero (de cualquier moneda) Can Buy Happiness. This search originated in Argentina.

A more recent search parody fair use richter scales on a more recent post put me on the first page (bottom yes, but still (just moved down to second page fame is so fleeting).

Somebody else searched for restaurant paradigms. This time I was on page 5 and it linked to Making It Up As You Go Along. While it does provide some good advice and does link to Changing Plans Changing Life, I can't be sure as to how helpful it was.

Another search from India hit on past a post featuring ideas from Seth Godin.

A search from France is a little less certain as to they were looking for or where they ended up but one possibility is Si l'argent n'achète pas le bonheur, mais le bonheur d'argent Gets What do you utiliser l'argent? which was originally If Money Doesn't Buy Happiness But Happiness Gets Money What Do You Use The Money For?

First the Wind-Up Then The Pitch

Making the Pitch advices The Entrepreneurial Mind on 12/3/07 is one of the most daunting challenges for entrepreneurs. To help, he provides a link to Suite101.com , which he calls,

"a nice summary of what it takes to make an effective pitch under pressure."

"When they have to make a pitch for their business. It might directed to a potential investor, a banker, that first customer -- or in some cases to their spouse! This pitch has taken on the nickname of the elevator pitch, as you often have only a very short time to get your message across (imagine a short ride in an elevator with the investor before he or she has to get off on their floor)."

I would call it practicing on-the-spot concise thinking.

Scouting New Ways Of Connecting For Future Paradigm Shifts

via Small Business Trends | small business experts by Anita Campbell on 11/29/07

Anita Campbell tells us that she is a big proponent of business networking online and that The best online networks increase your face-to-face networks.

Instead of thinking of online networking as a replacement for face-to-face networking, perhaps a better way to think of the two is that they work together. She goes on to tell about some of the people with whom she works that she originally met online.

What can I say, but "small world." Online networking really does lead to person-to-person relationships.

Every one of the interactions mentioned (above) was brought about directly or indirectly as a result of networking online. Were it not for creating connections online, I would have known no one in New York — not a single person.

Now I realize that an important consideration is that this is among a professional cadre who are very comfortable with the online Web 2.0 world. It does however point to some pathways regarding communication and networking for the future and moving into new lines of work. At this point in time, this is basically a small shift in my personal paradigm but after a year or two, closer to dayjob retirement, it could become the basis for a larger paradigm shift in my life.

Blocking Your Own Paradigm Shifts

(Are you) Getting in your way? via Seth's Blog by Seth Godin on 11/29/07

Seth Godin asks the question, So, as a percentage of the time you spend at work, what percent would you say qualifies as "marketing"?

Now Seth has a definition which is likely more expansive than that of most people.

"I'm going to count educating yourself, networking, creating products, creating media, spending money, building networks of sneezers, inventing great stuff, executing great stuff, motivating front-line people and telling stories."

Based on this criteria I do a good deal of marketing both at my dayjob and with my online persona. My work depends upon constant communication. In some ways I do more marketing of projects than I do managing of projects. Often, it is the same thing. The best management takes good marketing. At least if I use Seth's definition.

The other two choices according to Seth are:

• Selling your ideas internally/waiting for approval
• and
• Dealing with the chaff of responding to inbound junk and wasted time in meetings.

Which is also true, and since I work for government, perhaps even more so. Seth doesn't attribute this to environmental or organizational factors though. I am guessing he sees the individuals he is talking about as change agents. Since they are supposed to be changing, improving, enhancing the image of who they work for in a substantial way, not just veneer, then they should be able to do the same for themselves. Sometimes the most needed personal paradigm shift is to market ourselves to ourselves.

Social Networking Spiritual Networking Its All Connected

Provides a bit more importance to the concept of social networking.

Buddhist Thought

"One day Ananda, who had been thinking deeply about things for a while, turned to the Buddha and exclaimed: "Lord, I've been thinking- spiritual friendship is at least half of the spiritual life!" The Buddha replied: "Say not so, Ananda, say not so. Spiritual friendship is the whole of the spiritual life!" - Samyutta Nikaya, Verse 2..."

So Money (of any currency) Can Buy Happiness

I have run into this blog and specifically this post from The Happiness Project: how money CAN buy you happiness a few times during my recent web-wanderings. Two of those times are of particular note. The first time did not have anything to do with happiness but with connectivity or commonality. I share common interests with Ashotosh Tiwari the writer of the Nepal Times article, "It’s a blog world". Mr. Tiwari also uses Google Reader and reads marginalrevolution.com, which according to Mr. Tiwari, "is the destination if you want to learn why, among others, high brow game theorists were again awarded Nobel Prizes in economics". He also suggests that for advice on how to operate a business better, businesspundit.com , is "a useful hub of articles, blog rolls and links. With postings on topics such as “How not to run a meeting?” the site is packed with tips for hurried and harried managers". One that this site has visited in the past is blog.guykawasaki.com which "is billed as “a practical blog for non-practical people”." Another website that I may not share but others surely do is tompeters.com. Of course there are a couple which focus on Mr. Tiwari's part of the world Indianeconomy.org and chinalawblog.com , one core77.com/blog which focuses on design and zenhabits.net which provides, "workable suggestions to increase personal productivity at work and home." Finally he reads happiness-project.com which, "has test-driven both schmaltzy and serious happiness theories, and it offers advice on everything from avoiding office romances to filling up your life with simple acts of happiness." Mr. Tiwari recognizes that "Running a business is only a small slice of life. Being happily productive every day is what probably matters more to people". The post that was current on the day I visited Mr. Tiwari's article was The Happiness Project: how money CAN buy you happiness. The second time was while going through my recent web-wandering while working with the concept of achieving happiness through our choices in life especially at work. Arguably, Mr. Tiwari and I have a good deal in common, at least on the Internet, and at least in the human commonality of seeking happiness. The original discovery of Nepal It’s a blog world was through Marginal Revolution.

Enjoying Tasty Tagging on Del.icio.us

As part of my Web 2.0 self-education I have been getting more and more accustomed to using tags. Especially, with the del.icio.us program created by Yahoo. I recently went through their new Update Tour. One item that particularly impressed me was a tag cloud of popular tags on del.icio.us. It focuses on many of the areas that I am interested in and give me some ideas for new ones.

What I like is that the organization of the network is based upon knowledge sets and the interrelationship between ideas rather than popularity. I am impressed enough that I have decided to create a del.icio.us cloud for my real life/day job. I have also seen how others use del.icio.us in their blogs and websites. Most merely allow you to put their post onto your del.icio.us account but some allow you to see how they organize their tags. It was Serendipityoucity, a blog that has impressed me for its organization and content a number of times in the past, that got me bundling my tags. I figure if it works for a PhD candidate it should work for me.

I am keeping my note at the bottom of this weblog page on tagging. All of a sudden, despite having written about combining tags, I started noticing the little + signs in front of the "related" tags. Of course that only works with your own tag search box not the del.icio.us search box. So I am going to keep it in even if it is a bit newbie sounding. There is always the chance that somebody with less experience than me will drop by one day, and it could help. In the meantime I will keep on learning more. It would seem that tagging can get pretty involved.

Web 2.0 For The Over 50 - A Good Experience

Good Experience - The Web 2.0 question - and Grandparents.com. As has been mentioned before, Mark Hurst has been one resource in this endeavor to learn more about Web 2.0. As one getting to the hump of the fifth decade, I was interested in his post on what does 2.0 mean to people over 50 years of age. Then he goes with the assumption that everyone over 50 is a grandparent, at least at the start. His real point is the necessity of figuring out what your customers, grandparents in this case, really want. Figuring out what the over 50 crowd wants is something that nobody on the Web seems to be doing all that well now, despite some recent attempts in the news. (I am over 50, I can't remember who they were - actually I am over 50, and I don't care.)

As one member of this demographic, I don't plan to wait for the market to define my web experience. I can't help but notice but that the people in the forefront of making a difference in the brave new world are young. The world of Web 2.0 and new technologies like nano-technology are young. Google, which I use extensively, has only been around since 1998. I am trying to learn because I find so much of this fascinating.

One particular insight made by Hurst's post was listing the various groups that have the ear of the executives who put up the commercial sites that are suppose to be designed to appeal to a market segment.

• The technology press, whose job it is to report on the newest and flashiest trends, not necessarily what actually works in the long run
• Bloggers, many of whom are technophiles who enjoy playing with, and writing about, Internet trends and gadgets
• Investors, who often want quick results, and look to the press and bloggers to point the way

I would place myself into the second category but primarily for my own education. He then goes on to include two more groups, industry colleagues, who can (in some cases) be very helpful, "helpful" in this context would be something like the Councils (I paraphrased here emphasizing the positive) and customers. The later who are not on the list despite the fact that they can point the way forward, both in the short term and the long term. I put myself on both lists. As customers, clients and most especially citizens, we don't have to wait to be allowed to react to somebody else's web based marketing ploy. We can learn from the new technology and then find ways to contribute the one thing, we have hopefully acquired after half a century - wisdom.

Free Burma More Prayer and Prediction

A basic premise of this endeavor is the concept of condition, cause and effect. This applies fairly obviously to science and economics and also though perhaps less obviously to design, leadership and defining our own lives. Unfortunately the causes we may espouse or endeavor to support often do not lead us to the outcomes we wish for as we might hope.

This weblog partook in the Internet based Free Burma action. A recent check of the sphere.com site showed 123 blogs on Free Burma in the last 24 hours. That is a significant drop from recent days. This weblog recognized that this was only a symbolic gesture due to the limited outreach of this site. It seems that in fact 1 to 3 other persons did click on the same banner that they could have seen on 14,702 other sites (out of the millions out there) hopefully adding to any impact which would have been minuscule's on its own but added to the overall effort. Unfortunately all this together was not be able to prevail over the current tragedy. It did show what could be done but unfortunately both for the bad, the ruthlessness of the junta and the good.

This site also made the statement that regardless of what happens for the present because all things are dependent upon cause and conditions the days of the Myanmar junta are numbered. When I made the statement it seemed upon reading it a bit pretentious with so many factors working against the prediction but I left it in more as hope. I wish that cause and conditions were such that it were true as of today or the very near future. I still believe it but now it is a matter of faith or confident hope rather than any pretense at political insight but the realities of the last few days makes any proclamations about the future hollow. I need to keep in mind what somebody said, that these efforts are still worthwhile because we are planting seeds.

It does, however, make me think more about how the Internet is used sometimes far too much as a tool for mass communication, with more emphasis on the mass and far less on the communication. Its full potential in focusing more of its use at the local level have not been as fully explored it seems, especially as a means of educating ourselves.