Even the pet cats and dog have a blog except it hasn’t been launched yet (just kidding, I haven’t).

Can you tell the blogger state of newbies or blogger age by the following conversation?

1. Husband after an argument:

“I bet you’re gonna blog about our fight. Go ahead, blog about it. See if I care”

2. My sister and I after an unpleasant bank experience:

“Will you blog about it or should I? If you won’t, I will.”

Go figure.

Do you know the difference of an oldie (veteran) and a newbie blogger?

If I look at the statistics and the incredible growth of social networks, I wonder how and when would these networks be used to join expertise, share ideas, do volunteer work, and mobilize people for social change?

Over at the web2fordev blog, I analyzed the potentials of social networks to address world challenges, which I extend in three posts. My assumption is that a lot has already happened, but most initiaves are still squattered around the web and the large group of “normal”, non social media enthusiasts, the majority of the web, is just tapping into online social networks.

The next Billion – the rise of social network sites in developing countries

Social network websites are becoming a global phenomenon. Millions now go online to engage in social networks. According to Wikipedia, there are some 1.5 billion members worldwide. Where is this growth taking place? What does this mean for web2fordev? And what role do mobile phones play. Almost a million people registered on Facebook in just three years for Egypt alone. According to Appfrica, South Africa has 1.1 million Facebook members, Morocco 369,000, Tunisia 279,000, Nigeria 220,000, Kenya 150,000,and Mauritius 60,000. The largest online social network is in China. QQ focuses on instant messaging and gaming with over 300 million active members. (Whole article)

The world becomes a village – implications of social networks

What happens when millions of people engage in social networks? Online communities are not a new phenomenon, but the creation of large online meeting spaces marks a new era and new dimensions.

What is happening in these social networks and what are the implications? A great analogy comes from Anand Giridharadas, who wrote an article by the title “Behind Facebook’s Success: It Takes a Village“. Anand argues that being in a social network is like living in a village, where you can share your thoughts, emotions, news, and more – something like entertaining neighbourhood relationships, with the difference that geographic location, physical distances and time do not matter anymore and interactions can occur on a global scale, 24 hours  a day and seven days a week. Once you establish your network with a multitude of members, “you are compelled, as in the village, to know their business. It’s strangely nice.”

From local to global – social networks address world challenges

Whether the environment, poverty or peace, almost all of today’s challenges are also dealt with in one or in another way  through the Internet. Online social networks play an increasingly important role in connecting people and offering spaces where groups of individuals can work on solutions and push for change. There are fascinating examples from local to global engagement.

What are the different forms of engagement and who takes part in them?

The ease of forming groups

There are two main pillars: Firstly, through the social web it has becomes increasingly easy to find and connect with people sharing common interests and worldviews. Secondly, it is getting easier by the day to set-up online groups online, attract followers and see them coalesce around a shared vision or common mission.

Clay Shirky highlights a social factor in his book “Here comes Everybody”:

“Ridiculously easy group-forming matters, because the desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct that has always been constrained by transaction costs.” “Everywhere you look, groups of people are coming together to share with one another, work together, or take some kind of public action. For the first time in history, we have tools that truly allow for this.”

Different forms of engagement

Participating in social networks can be very different, for example, from passive sharing to active problem solving. Gaurav Mishra has elaborated the “4Cs Social Media Framework“, which helps look at the different forms of engagement. I adopted it slightly and describe each level through different examples.

Content Sharing

It all starts with sharing information between people, by publishing content, to let each other know about certain issues and create conversations. It can be by simply sharing a common tag such as web2fordev to collect bookmarks or to use the same hashtags such as #iranelection when spreading news about the recent election in Iran.

Forming Networks

This way, far-off individuals can find each other in a spontaneous and informal manner and form networks. It has never been that easy to locate people with similar interests. Lisa Campbell did an interesting study about mobile social networks in Costa Rica and describes how Twitter and Hi5 are gradual forming networks of like minded people. She emphasises how these connections are increasingly fostered by interactions via mobile phones. For example Hi5 has a mobile version in 26 languages. Online networks engaged in development cooperation can be found with the spectrum of DGroups.org.

Co-Creation

At the higher level of engagement, people actually start jointly creating things by using text, audio or video. Such efforts are well represented by Wikis, such as the Water Wiki, with the contribution of many other organizations or on dot.sub where volunteers translate the subtitles of videos in their preferred languages.

Collective Action

Collective action can materialise in many ways. For example, people can act collectively in the name of a cause or for expressing their grievances. This happened last year when 50,000 Estonians where mobilized over the web to clean up garbage throughout their country in one day; or in Egypt, where a Facebook group grew to 70.000 members supporting the strike of textile workers in a matter of days. The group triggered a lot of discussion on democracy in Egypt but it did not lead to street protests due the unwillingness of the government to allow demonstrations. Another example is a campaign to rally against the FARC in Colombia. The Facebook group, “A Million Voices Against FARC,” initiated rallies that took place in 165 cities across the globe.

Communities

On a higher level, this collective action can generate communities, which differently from an ad-hoc network, have a sustained collaboration and a shared goal. Such is Nabuur.com, existing since 2001, where over 17.000 volunteers try to help villages in developing countries. This online help network is used by participants from around the world to discuss approaches to development, generate ideas, and obtain feedback. For example the “Zero Waste Management project” in Bweyogerere in Uganda can improve its immediate local context through such web enabled support. The Public Participation GIS community is another example with its close to 2000 members active across the globe and collaborating on a number of initiatives at different levels all dealing with participatory spatial information management and communication.

Examples of collective actions towards the implementation of a joint project or more specifically towards the development of a shared product are the communities populating the galaxy of free/open source software (FOSS). Notable examples are the communities which work on the development Content Management Systems like Joomla, Drupal, or other applications like Openstreetmaps.

Real Life Impact

So, higher forms of collective action can have spill-over effects to the real world, for example, improve a situation and create communities to work on more solutions for pressuring problems. One last interesting example exemplifying the whole above described engagement, is the project around Ushahidi, where human rights activists offer a platform that crowdsources crisis information. Although the tool itself has generated a lot of enthusiasm, equally interesting is how it has developed so far. It started with befriended bloggers, who as I understood, got to know each other through their blogs and formed a network of similar interests. That led to a collaboration in the post-election crisis of Kenya, where some of them took action and established a crisis monitoring tool. The people involved had not known each other before and got connected over the web. The tool was used then in the field and triggered a country wide collective action to document human rights violations. The success triggered the coalescing of a community around the issue of crisis mapping with developers and activists developing the tools further and replicating them elsewhere. This is an example on how web-enabled collaboration had real impact in the field. One other outcome is a crisiscamp, which took place recently in Washington. Another one is planned in the UK.

All these different phases  do not need to happen in a prescribed order and it should illustrate how much work and effort is needed to build up a community. These illustrate how much potential lies in these new group formations. The majority of interaction is mainly for leisure but with little means an individual engagement can grow for example to a larger campaign. But Beth Kanter has also indicated the difficulty to lead Facebook members to higher levels of engagement. A petition is quickly signed, but to contribute and interact on a regular basis is not happening on a massive scale yet. A critical mass of individuals engaging proactively, trust, animation and experience are needed particularly in often anonymous online interaction, which usually takes up time.

The potentials of social networks are not necessarily for the good. Extremist groups, even hoaxers,  are very sophisticated to exploit social networks for their purposes, so that “social networks and video-sharing sites don’t always bring people closer together“. Social network providers are not rarely overburdened to deal with all these different forms of activism.

July 20, 2009

People you have never met face to face or even spoken to can become your best customers or suppliers. So how does it happen, and where can you find them? This article looks at doing business on the Internet.

One of the amazing things about the Internet is the way that it allows us to communicate with people all over the world in real time. Software technology such as VOIP, instant messaging and business collaboration tools have made it not only possible, but quite easy to work “side by side” with remote professionals.

Whether you are looking for legal advice, someone to program a Microsoft Access application or a writer to produce a couple of hundred words of copy for the front of your website, there are people out there just waiting for the chance to win your business. Equally, there are thousands of potential customers searching the Internet for people with solutions to their problems.

As business people are becoming more and more comfortable with doing online business with strangers, the opportunity for doing business on the Internet is growing steadily.

How to make the connection

One of the best known service marketplaces is Elance.com. At the time of writing, this website boasted over 80,000 registered professionals and over 24,000 available projects. Elance.com is a market place for buying and selling services where one can create a profile to find customers, or upload a project description to find a supplier. To find out more, visit the Elance.com home page, and click at the top of the screen on “Get Services” and “Provide Services” to see the two sections of the site.

Classified ad websites like Gumtree.com.au allow you to post your ads for free and have a huge directory of ads to search through.

Many suppliers will have websites that can be found by searching in Google or Yahoo, but often it’s better to look for a forum post where a recommendation is being made, so you can gather a little background information before doing business on the Internet. Try searching Google for the service you are seeking with the words “looking for….” at the front of you search. This is likely to show you forum posts where other people have been looking for the same thing.

Communication

Different industries seem to prefer different platforms for communication, but the most popular would be Yahoo messaging, MSN Instant Messenger and of course, Skype. Skype is hard to beat as it allows voice, video calls, conference calls and instant messaging all in the one interface, and has good call rates as well as the free “Skype to Skype” service.

Another useful service is yousendit.com, which allows you to send files that might be too large for email.

Watching out for sharks

Whether you are trying to connect with a customer or a supplier, it pays to be careful. In the case of suppliers, once you have a name or business name, run some searches in Google to try to find any other references that might give you a hint of their track record . Ask for references and examples of their previous work.

When it comes to selling your own services, you need to be sure that you will get paid. Always ask for a deposit, even if it’s just 10%. If possible, break the job up into parts and ask for progress payments. For example, breaking a project down into four parts, and being careful not to start the next part before the previous part has been paid for can reduce the potential for being ripped off.

There are risks on both sides of the transaction when doing business on the Internet. Keep that in mind when you are in the early stages of negotiating with a new online contact. They are likely to be just as careful as you are when it comes to the question of payment.

Things to keep in mind…

When selling services on the Internet:

• Consider listing your service in classified websites and/or freelance directories (e.g. elance.com, gumtree.com.au).
• Before dealing with a customer, make sure you know who will be paying the bill. Sometimes you will find people ordering work on behalf of others, even though they don’t have the authority to spend the budget.
• Break the project into progress payment to minimise risk.
• Always ask for a deposit.

When buying services:

• Do as much research on the supplier as you can.
• If possible, send a small test job.
• Don’t pay too much up front.

Tristan Boyd18 May 09

What experience have you had doing business on the Internet?

I really agree with Dr. Patrick O’Keefe from iFroggy Network and the author of the book Managing Online Forums. He shared how appreciation can help grow the community on your blog.

He says “Appreciation is a powerful thing. If you manage an online community and are concerned with encouraging a healthy, positive atmosphere and with retaining members, there is one simple, relatively easy thing that you can do to improve your chances of doing both. Appreciate your contributors.

What brought this to mind was a recent message that a member sent me over at PhotoshopForums.com, where he thanked me for thanking members for their contributions because, he felt, it was a part of what made the community great. Now, you may be thinking – “you, Patrick, the administrator, thank people on your community. What’s the big deal?”

Well, it made a big deal to this gentleman, who wrote a really nice message, expressing his love of the community and highlighting my notes of appreciation as a major reason for him loving it. It was a great, kind message that meant a lot to me. Beyond just the personal sentiment, it meant that what I had wanted to be expressed; was expressed. The member received my message of appreciation loud and clear.

When I say messages of appreciation, what am I talking about? Drawing from the forums example at PhotoshopForums.com, primarily I am talking about thanking members for good contributions, in the very thread that they make them in.

For example, let’s say someone joins the community and asks a question, in an effort to find out how Photoshop does something. Then, one of our members replies with the answer, in detail, written in a kind and helpful manner. And then, after the member replies, saying that it has helped them, I also reply – thanking the person who provided the answer and, perhaps, welcoming the member who asked the question, if they are new.

It’s not like I write long posts to do this. “Great stuff, Dave!” “Excellent work, Joe.” “Thanks, Bob.” Basically short messages of appreciation, letting them know that I am reading and that I appreciate what they are doing within the community.

The member who contacted me reasoned that all too often, when people try to help someone, they disappear or they don’t say thanks. That is simply the reality of running a community where support is a large part of what you offer. That’s life and it happens. But, my messages had helped to soften this and offset it and make people feel more at ease and at home, as a valued member of our community.

I know this is a simple concept. I recently gave a talk at South by Southwest Interactive where I discussed responding to feedback. I didn’t consider any of it to be earth shattering. In fact, to many, I believe it was probably common sense.

But, I feel that when something is common sense, sometimes we take it for granted. We must remind ourselves. People want to help. People want to be appreciated and they want to know that someone cares. As the leader of a community, you can help them understand that.

You may say, “well, Patrick, you just say those things like a robot – you don’t mean it.” No, no, no. I do mean it. I mean it deeply. Yes, I may be repetitive in what I say. But, I only say it when I mean it. I don’t randomly pop it into threads without any care or without reading the thread, nor do I say it on every good post I see. But, I try to make an effort to see great contributions and say thank you.

How this helps you retain members should be clear. People like to be in a place where they are welcome, where people notice them, remember them, appreciate them. Remember the line from the “Cheers” TV show theme? “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name and they’re always glad you came.”

As cheesy as I know that sounds, it’s also true. Maybe not everyone knows their name, but some do, and they are appreciated and recognized. That’s the point.

How does it encourage a good environment? If people feel appreciated, that’s instantly a better environment than if the opposite were true.

But, also, members take cues on how to act from staff members. If you and your staff have bad habits, members will pick up those bad habits. If you and your staff have good habits, members will pick them up, as well. You and your staff are an example. Take this power seriously and responsibly.

You can appreciate members in other ways, as well. You appreciate them by listening to their feedback. Not doing what they say, necessarily, but listening openly and considering it.

In addition to public posts, I also like to randomly send a private message to a member who is doing a good job, just to say hey and to let them know that I’ve seen their posts, that I like what they are doing and to please keep it up because we appreciate them. Simple and genuine.

There are many ways to thank people in a more public way, as well. Having a member of the month program or a yearly awards program (where you and/or your community vote and select winners) can be a great way to show appreciation. Make sure that these programs have meaning, though, and are awarded to the truly deserving.

Making someone a member of your staff can be a form of appreciation, but that’s not what it should be about, in and of itself. Staff spots should be reserved for people who set a great example for members to follow, who follow your guidelines and who communicate in a kind and respectful manner consistently for an extended period of time. Don’t hand out staff spots to your top posters without thought. Make sure you pick people that you can work with to accomplish the goals you have set for the community.

Appreciation is a powerful thing. It can open doors, start relationships, give people happiness, bring people back and give them confidence. In the interest of cultivating community, please consider how not just appreciating people – but making sure they know you appreciate them – can enhance your community”.

please be friendly, Write what do you think.

Actually,In my opinion, If I read Web Bee’s article posted in Internet and Businesses Online : SMO named “How to use Twitter to improve your business?”, I wonder how Twitter useful for business?
Leave you with..

Initially developed as an instant messaging tool with a limit of 140 characters, Twitter has grown into a powerful marketing tool and is used extensively by internet marketers, SEO service providers, and website development and designing companies to promote and build a strong online presence. People swear by Twitter these days and we will discuss different ways of how to use this tool to boost your sales and improve business.

Twitter is a wonderful medium for free publicity, as it creates brand awareness and builds a relation based on trust with potential customers. An enterprise can convey it to the people about its latest product offering and future work. So instead of maintain an in house marketing and branding team, companies are getting attracted to Twitter in greater numbers than ever because of its viral nature. This type of publicity ensures greater product visibility and increases revenue.

A company can build up its own set of followers as it gives the consumers a broad platform and more choice. Classic examples are Dell and HP. Dell increased its sales by a massive scale when it started promoting their products on Twitter. Taking the cue, every company nowadays has a separate Twitter page dedicated wholly to Twitter responses and users. Twitter attracts web traffic and is changing the business landscape on a global scale.

Using Twitter wisely and strategically is every company’s prerogative to increase its SEO ROI and guarantee more hits to the web site. This is the age of social media. The more social a company is the more visitors it will attract. This is gradually becoming a challenging domain for SEO analysts and webmasters.

Twitter has replaced newsletters to a large extent, and a company is offering its latest updates, news to its customers on the go and at a better pace. If it is running a website related to classifieds or web directory, it can share the updates like new items in the list. Twitter allows a business to attract a target audience to its business website or content. Searching twitter, often people try to find the persons of their interest. In this way, if you are someone offering business consulting services, people in search of your service might follow you. Twitter is a great platform for idea exchange and sharing of knowledge resources amongst interest groups, peers and associates. Now those having business blogs can easily post some new content and tweet it for view by the followers.

Twitter can help a business stay ahead of the competition. It can analyze its competitors’ marketing and branding strategies and can devise ways and means to counter those. Using Twitter, a business can reach out to maximum pool in minimum time, using minimal resources. This has certainly become a challenge for web designers and developers, who have to design websites, conforming to the strictest industry standards, so that the site comes out tops in search engine queries. SEO experts have to come up with ingenious optimization and Web Designing Services to edge out the rat race in the online world.

Do you know how it useful blogger?

My response is simple – yes it is.

Twitter is a waste of time…. unless you use it in a way that isn’t.

• Twitter can be a waste of time just like going to conferences and talking to people face to face can be a waste of time.
• Twitter can be a waste of time just like other micro-blogging/life streaming/social messaging tools like Plurk and FriendFeed.
• Twitter can be a waste of time just like talking on the phone can be a waste of time.

I would argue that there’s never been a type of communication invented that can’t be used in a way that is a waste of time.

The key is the way you use it.

Twitter can be beneficial to bloggers in many ways, but the key is to work out how you want it to benefit you and to go about using the tool (and it’s nothing more than a tool) in a way that takes you a step closer to it paying off in those ways.

If you’re just on Twitter because everyone else is and you’re using it in an unfocused way then you’re unlikely to see it as anything more than a waste of time.

I would also add that I don’t think Twitter is ever going to be something that everyone should use.

The way people talk about Twitter (or any other type of social media tool) sometimes reminds me of how people used to talk about Blogging.

Four or Five years ago I heard people speaking about blogging as though it’s the answer to every problem that a company or individual might have with their online presence. It was claimed that blogging could do almost everything and fix any issue you faced. The truth is that blogging can be great but it’s not right for every situation. The same is true for Twitter.

It takes a certain type of personality to click with Twitter and it will only ever meet some of your needs and even then, only if you’re smart about it.

If not, it could well be a waste of time!

A Question to Ask about Your Use of Any Medium

When looking at Twitter, or any medium for that matter, the question to ponder early on is ‘what are my goals?’ Once you have them nailed down you then have a framework to begin to think about how you’ll use it and how you measure whether it’s a worthwhile medium to use.

So what are your goals for Twitter?

Any other Thinks from other bloggers?

Darren Rowse     6 Jun 2008

From the view of blog-software,

What about from your view blogger?

For instance, when I take a photo in a restaurant, I am sometimes asked by the owner: are you a journalist?

Me: No, I’m a blogger.

Owner: What is a blogger?

Me: I write for my blog.

Owner: What is a blog?

Often, I take the word blog for granted that I don’t really bother to explain myself clearly. I found this video through Juned that explains what a blog is in plain English. Watch it.

If you want a more detailed description, read Darren Rowse What is a Blog?.

‘From “Web log.” A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.”

Let’s start blogging….

How to Start a Blog in Blogger.com

How to Start a Blog in wordpress.com

Now that you know what a blog is, you might want to get updated with new entries using an RSS Feed reader. Here is a video to understand what an RSS Feed and how to subscribe to a reader.

Go ahead, please Subscribe to this blog’s RSS Feed, by clicking the link below:

Subscribe in a reader

We’ve all heard of Web 2.0, but what does it mean? I think of it as the Interactive Internet. It encourages collaboration between users and is driving the trend towards more interactive websites.

The Internet as we have come to know it has been around for over ten years now. To date it has principally been used for searching, browsing and reading static information.

Now it is evolving into something quite different. We are now in what is being coined the “Web 2.0 era”, where the Internet is now about interactivity.

No longer do Internet users want to just look at and read a page they want to interact, leave comments, upload music or photos and be involved in the Internet community.

The Internet is no longer solely the domain of the technical expert. With the increase in user friendly interfaces, it is now possible to get involved even if you have limited technical knowledge.

What tools make up Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 can be defined as the set of technologies which enable collaboration and sharing between Internet users. These can be web pages, web-based communities or hosted services such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs and podcasts.

These tools, such as blogs, make it easier for anyone to get their material online, even if they have no knowledge of HTML.

Blogs are online diaries or journals created by individuals or companies and stored on the Internet. Blogs generally consist of text and images appearing in chronological order with the most recent entry shown at the top of the page.

Wikipedias are online encyclopaedia maintained by users. They allow people to contribute to and add definitions or topics.

Social networking include sites like MySpace and Facebook. Here, people put up a public profile about themselves. They can add their favourite photos, music and website links and choose to share these with friends only or the general public.

Podcasting. A ‘podcast’ is an audio file or series of audio files that can be shared with others. You can subscribe to a podcast in much the same way as you subscribe to an email newsletter.

Do I need Web 2.0 for my business?

When developing a website, you’d do well to consider not only the look and content, but also the user experience.

An interactive website can give prospective customers another way to interact and make contact with you. Whether through live chat or feedback or comments on your blog, you have the opportunity to make contact with a new person and encourage communication.

Do you want visitors to interact with your website? If so, how do you want to interact with them? Let us know via the comments..

MelissaNorfolk       20 Jul 07

How does it work and what is the trick? It simply needs to combine the already existing and freely available tools or open source applications in web.2.0.

The marker: Tagging
Tagging simply means to add key words to every link you save or blog entry you write. Basically you don’t sort anymore all your different files in hierarchical folders, you know anyhow that this is never perfectly possible. Because knowledge has always many domains e.g. a single article contains all sorts of information, each reader has a different perspectives on it. Through tags you can see where topics are overlapping and find information from different angles.

• Tagging in Wikipedia
• What is tagging?
• A social analysis of tagging with a nice visualization

The network: Social Bookmarking
Imagine your bookmarks are visible to your colleagues. You would be able to share links on similar working areas and browse via tags all imaginable topics of your organization. These links have a great value, because they are verified or even commented by your colleagues. So you find easily like minded people and identify quickly who works on a certain theme.

• Check out my bookmark tag cloud on the right column or go to my delicious network.
• Social bookmarking in Wikipedia
• Intranet Social Bookmarking: Tagging Behind the Firewall

The storyteller: Blogging
How often have you answered to the same question over again? Why don’t you make a blog post about it, so all your colleagues with the same problem could find answers in your blog. How can you exchange information without having to send a mass email? Post it on a project blog which documents the learning process of how a project has developed over time. Blogs can also become information boards, picturing the life of organizations.

• Bookmarking, tagging, and social software comes to the Enterprise (nice podcast)

The white board: Wiki
Remember how you used to send word files around while working collaboratively on a text? Now you can have a wiki to include your project documentation in, and everyone on your team can access it form anywhere. On the Wiki, you can see how a text develops over time and browse through the organizational knowledge via tags. With a Wiki, while your team works on a memo during a meeting, you can also link topics to other relevant sources. Thus you keep track of the team work.

• Wiki in plain English
• Web 2.0 for the enterprise: Wisdom of the employees

The connector: Feed/RSS
RSS is a universal format for files which gives you, on the contrary to email, the power to filter information. A colleague always writes interesting blog posts which are relevant to your work. You want to share links in a comunity of practice, or you need to follow up certain projects. Via feeds you can subscribe to the information relevant to you. Feeds keep you posted with all sort of information, such as links, documents, audio, video, wiki changes, etc.

• RSS in plain English
• Changing the Way We Communicate Internally

Why all of this? What is the advantage?

• Simply because it connects in manifold ways all available resources and people behind it.
• It makes everybody’s work transparent and offers new potential for sharing and cooperation.
• It is very easy to use. Just look how many blogs are out there and see how successful flickr, youtube and delicious are.
• It turns communication and knowledge sharing upside down and emphasizes on expertises.

Is this realistic? Does it make an intranet obsolete? What do you think? There are of course many challenges, but I will write about it in another post.

Check out also out this nice presentation on enterprise2.0.

Christian Kreutz ,  June 10, 2007

crisscrossed http://www.crisscrossed.net/2007/06/10/what-is-enterprise20-five-pillars-for-efficient-knowledge-sharing/