Gumption

Do YouJustGetMe? Do I Even Get Myself?

David Evans presented a paper at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2008) this week on the science of interpersonal perception, or more specifically: how well people are able to understand (or "get") others based on others' online profiles, and what elements of those profiles are most important to that understanding.

The results presented in the paper, "What Elements of an Online Social Networking Profile Predict Target-Rater Agreement in Personality Impressions?", are based on data collected through an online site, YouJustGetMe, that invites users to answer a set of 40 questions designed to enable assessment of their personality - based on the "big five" personality traits, which, according to Wikipedia, include the following:

• Openness - appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience.

• Conscientiousness - a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behaviour.

• Extraversion - energy, positive emotions, surgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation and the company of others.

• Agreeableness - a tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.

• Neuroticism - a tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability

The research questions that David and his co-authors, Sam Gosling and Anthony Carroll, posed were:

Are people getting to know each other via social media? Are they at least seeing others as the others see themselves? Under what conditions?

The YouJustGetMe web site was designed to answer these questions. The site enables users to conduct a personality self-assessment (i.e., answer the 40 questions for themselves), create a profile of themselves based primarily on things they love or hate (33 pre-defined fields), and assess (guess) others' personalities - answering the 40 questions as they would apply to the "target" person - based on the target person's profile. The self-assessments are then compared to assessments by others to measure the impression agreement. They also created a YouJustGetMe Facebook application to enable the same kind of experiences within a specific, and popular, social networking website (which they acronymize as SNW). In both contexts - the YJGM and FB sites - users who created profiles could invite friends or family  to provide assessments of them, and/or they could enable other random users to provide assessments of them.

The findings, in a nutshell, are:

• People get each other
  SNW profile owners are generally seen by others as they see themselves (i.e. impression agreement was substantial)
• People on Facebook get each other
  Impression agreement was associated with context (agreement was stronger on the basis of Facebook profiles than on YouJustGetMe profiles)
• Women are better guessers and easier to guess than men (random assignment)
  within the context in which raters were judging unknown targets (i.e., YouJustGetMe profiles), women were better raters than men and were rated with higher levels of agreement than men
• Some profile elements provide better clues than others
  several specific elements of the profiles were associated with increased or diminished levels of impression agreement.

The first two results are not terribly surprising to me. The first finding is consistent with other studies that suggest dating profiles are pretty accurate, e.g., Nicole Elison's presentation on "Deceptive Self-Presentation in Online Dating Profiles" at the recent Communities and Technologies conference (C&T 2007). I don't mean to imply that Facebook is a dating site, but like online dating sites, I believe most Facebook users know, want to know, or might come into physical contact with (or at least proximity of), each other. The second is consistent with other papers presented at this conference (e.g., the two papers presented by Kristin Stecher and Scott Counts - which I hope to blog about, along with other presentations at the conference, sometime soon) and other conferences (e.g., papers presented by Cliff Lampe and Scott Golder at CHI 2007 ... for which I just realized I never finished / posted my blog summary) that provide evidence for the efficacy of Facebook features in conveying information.

The third result is interesting, as it brings to mind some of the ideas that Louann Brizendine writes about in her book, The Female Brain, regarding the evolutionary biological basis for women's keener perceptual abilities:

If you can read faces and voices, you can tell what an infant needs. You can predict what a bigger, more aggressive male is going to do. And since you're smaller, you probably need to band with other females to fend off attacks from a ticked off caveman - or cavemen.

She also writes about how and why women - and girls - are far more keenly aware of their own appearance than men (or boys), which I suspect would lead to higher agreement between the image they want to project and the image that is perceived by others. [Aside: the last time I wrote about The Female Brain - in the context of Content-Centered Conversations (regarding teen use of social media) - a comment directed me to some other material questioning some of Louann's claims; I remain open to further clarifications and corrections about my interpretations of this and other books.]

The fourth item was also interesting. The most useful profile elements that led to people "getting" other people (in decreasing order of utility) were:

• A link to funny video
• What makes me glad to be alive? 
• Most embarrassing thing I ever did
• Proudest thing I ever did
• My spirituality
• A great person
• I believe this

The least useful profile elements in helping people get other people (in increasing order of utility) were:

• Profile picture was a non-person
• An awful website 
• An awful person
• A great book

I'm surprised that the link to a funny video is the most useful profile element, but the other elements make sense to me. Looking over the least useful elements, I'm glad to see that the things we love are better able to help us understand each other than the things we hate, however I'm surprised that a great book was among the least useful ... especially given the recent NYTimes essay by Rachel Donadio on books as markers for compatibility, It’s Not You, It’s Your Books:

Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about ... their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”

Again, I don't mean to equate Facebook with [online] dating, but I do think there are strong similarities. Perhaps the key differentiator, here, is that getting someone is not the same as getting along with someone.

One of the [other] interesting findings that David revealed was that Facebook reveals more about agreeableness and neuroticism than face-to-face encounters. He showed an interesting graph in his slides (which I hope he'll post to SlideShare) that provided some insights into how different systems (online and offline) mediate revelation in each of the five categories.

As I noted in the MyStrands Labs, Seattle "mini-manifesto", one of our goals is that "our technologies will be designed to help real world communities better enjoy the benefits of virtual communities, digital communications and electronic commerce." Perhaps we can create new technology-supported channels for people to better get each other's agreeableness and neuroticism in physical spaces; although this may not be welcomed by disagreeable or very neurotic people, I do think it would meet our goal of ultimately creating benefits for everyone.

On a more personal note, I've created a YouJustGetMe profile that has nothing more than a link to his blog. I've long been a fan of personality and social psychology, and have earlier taken a Myers-Briggs personality typology assessment (I'm an ENFP), the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment (my top 5 strengths are Woo (Win Others Over), Connectedness, Relator, Ideation and Adaptability), the "five things you don't know about me" self-disclosure blogospheric meme (I am/was a picky eater, I'm a recovering Catholic, my only "A" in high school was Personal Typing, my only non-A in grad school was Theory of Computation and I met my wife over a keg of beer) and a music and personality assessment ("reflective and complex").[Aside: The latter assessment was based on some of Sam Gosling's earlier work with Jason Rentfrow, and I enjoyed meeting Sam at the conference and talking about other dimensions of mutual interest, such as workspace personalization.]

I would be very interested to learn whether / how other people "get me" based solely on the material posted here on this blog ... or perhaps even just this post, as I've included a number of snippets from earlier blog posts in the foregoing paragraph(s). I think that between the posts and sidebar links to photos, books, people and organizations I find inspiring, that most of the 33 elements in the YouJustGetMe profile are covered. If you are reading this, I invite you to contribute your assessment of me - or, more specifically, my profile (and if you have a blog, I invite you to create a profile based solely on your blog, and if you post a comment or send me email, I'll be happy to provide an assessment of you ... and, of course, I don't take anything personally ... and hope you won't either).

As the title of this post suggests, I was originally planning to go on to ruminating on whether I even get myself, but I've already reflected on self-reflection and self-expression ... and will save further rumination on this topic for another time.

I'll include - and conclude with - the YouJustGetMe analysis of my self-assessment in the post-continuation below (which you can view by clicking the link), hoping that not including it in the main body of this post will reduce the likelihood of irreparably biasing the outcome of this informal experiment.

[Note: if you do want to contribute an assessment via my profile on the YouJustGetMe web site, please do not read the rest of this blog post until you make your contribution. Thanks!]

Commenting on Validation / Validating Comments

Ever since my last post, which started out about locked-in syndrome (inspired by The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), but which developed into a revisitation of a frequently discussed topic [on this blog] - "the need for approval ... for validation ... for appreciation ... for mattering" - I've been attuned to validation in a variety of forms and forums.

The stream of comments that followed my initial post were incredibly engaging and validating - to know that two people I admire so much were touched by the post, as was another person who serendipitously stumbled upon it - and all of them helped draw me a bit deeper (and more broadly) in a followup comment into the topic(s) I'd touched on in the initial post ... culminating in my revisiting one of the most validating poems I've ever encountered: "Love after Love", by Derek Walcott ("... You will love again the stranger who was yourself ...").

However, another comment on that thread - and a number of other recent comments on a number of other posts - initially appeared validating, but upon closer inspection (and reflection), seem less so. In an earlier post, in which I was commenting on commenting, I explicitly named - and thus (I believe) alienated - a friend who had posted a validating comment which had a very similar syntactic look and feel to other comments which I labeled spampliments - thinly, though sometimes effectively (due to my incurable addiction to validation - online or offline), disguised spam compliments. Such comments appear to be primarily intended to add "google juice" to various web sites - by incorporating a URL in the comment itself and/or in the commenter self-reference. I'm tempted to delve deeper into this shadow - I tend to be very self-referential in both my blog posts and comments on this and other blogs - but given my perception that I lost a blog commenter (if not reader (if not friend)) last time I ranted about this, I think I'll simply drop it, but not without first noting that validating comments that [initially] appear to be validating me (or my blog ... not that I think the difference is significant (and therein lies the rub)) is an ongoing challenge. I do want to be very explicit, though, that I really do appreciate (and feel validated by) comments from people who are in some way moved by what I write. [Ironically, I recently noticed that the number of comments on my blog has superseded the number of posts ... and that trend may reverse itself [now] ... but I feel impelled to write what I think and feel.]

Anyhow, returning to the original thread, yesterday, during the 4+ hour drive down to MyStrands HQ in Corvallis, OR, I had an unusually long time for audio engagement. During the first portion of the drive, I listened to the audiobook rendition of The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz. I've already written about his second agreement - don't take anything personally (the same post in which I explored my shadow(s) about commenting on commenting) - and his fourth agreement - always do your best (about which I [still] feel strongly ambivalent). One of the things that jumped out at me during this particular listening experience was his description of how, as young children, the adults in positions of authority (parents, teachers, ministers) hooked our attention, and "domesticated" us by cultivating an addiction to future attention ... resulting in, among other things, our willingness - and even desire - to [try to] be who we are not simply to please other people ... i.e., just to receive validation (from others).

I then switched on the radio, to catch some NPR news ... which was immediately followed by Terry Gross' Fresh Aire interview of Sheryl Crow, one of my favorite artists (make no mistake). During the interview, entitled Sheryl Crow: Gracefully Navigating "Detours", she spoke - among other things - of her need to be accepted and appreciated for her music, not [simply] for her physical beauty. She said she intentionally dressed in a bedraggled style and used black makeup in the photo shoots for the cover[t] art on her first two albums - Tuesday Night Music Club and the self-titled Sheryl Crow (I always thought it odd to have a self-titled second album) - in an attempt to obscure her visual attractiveness, so that people would be better able to hear and appreciate her aural artistry. Well, at the risk of dating myself, and without delving too deeply into this shadow, her first two albums were my gateway into opening up again to popular music, after a nearly 20-year "dry spell". Her musical talents shined brightly (for me), and despite her attempts to hide her physical attributes, those too shined through pretty clearly (I'll briefly note that Pink Floyd's song, "Shine On, You Crazy Diamond", was released near the end of what I consider the [last] golden age of rock and roll). Anyhow, the point I really want to emphasize here is that I find it reassuring that even an artist as immensely talented as Sheryl Crow still feels the need to be validated ... which makes me just a wee bit less self-conscious and more accepting about this need in my self ... perhaps enabling me to better love [myself] with a paper thin heart.

Content-centered Conversations: The Pew Internet Report on Teens and Social Media

I finally read the recent Pew Internet & American Life Project report on Teens and Social Media. Among the most interesting findings, for me, were the correlation between the creation of content (online stories, photos, videos) and conversations about that content, and the connections between connecting online and connecting offline. As I'd noted with another recent Pew report I blogged about last month (on Digital Footprints), there were [also] a number of surprises in the magnitude of some of the numbers.

The concept of object-centered sociality - social practices (such as conversation and other acts of communication and connection) that are inspired by objects of interest within some kind of community - is something that I (and others, notably, and more eruditely, Karin Knorr Cetina and Jyri Engestrom) have written about before. Object-centered sociality is one of the central concepts behind our proactive display applications, which use large displays to show online media associated with people whenever they are detected nearby; our goal has been to spark conversations in the physical world based on objects typically only shared in the digital world.

What is interesting about the Pew study is that it offers some numbers to characterize the socializing that transpires around the social media created and shared [online] by teens (ages 12-17):

• Photos: 89% of teens who post photos online receive comments on those photos (52% "sometimes", 37% "most of the time")
• Videos: 72% of teens who post videos online receive comments on those videos (48% "sometimes", 24% "most of the time")
• Blogs: 76% of teens who use social networking services (SNS) post comments on blog posts written by others.

I've noted before that commenting is a form of "filling buckets" (saying or doing things to increase others' positive emotions) online, and have often wondered about what factors influence readers' decisions about whether or not to post comments. The Pew numbers are interesting, but I'm still interested in knowing more. For example, the first two figures are about receiving comments - on photos and videos - and the last figure is about giving comments - on blogs (and only by SNS users). I would be interested to know the full set of numbers for giving and receiving for blogs, photos and videos, as well as the correlation between people who create content (post blogs, photos and/or videos) and people who comment on content created by others. I suspect the correlation is very high, and indeed, if one subscribes to Ross Mayfield's conceptualization of the Power Law of Participation, content and comments are simply different points along a continuum. And, speaking of the power law of participation, I'd also be interested in other social media practices by teens, e.g., favoriting, tagging, subscribing, etc. (an earlier Pew study on tagging reported that 28% of online users have tagged content, and 7% do so on a daily basis, but that study did not include the under 18 population).

I imagine the level of commenting - and other forms of participation - is affected by the scope of people who have access to the content, but I wonder if content that has restricted access (e.g., to family and/or friends) is more or less likely to promote participation - I'm wondering whether a variation of the bystander effect, wherein a smaller group may be more likely to take action (e.g., comment) than a larger group, might apply in this context. Anyhow, the report does offer some numbers on access restrictions as well:

• Photos: 39% of teens who post photos online restrict access to their photos "most of the time", 38% restrict access "only sometimes", and 21% "never" restrict access.
• Videos: 19% of teens who post videos online restrict access to their videos "most of the time", 35% restrict access "only sometimes", and 46% "never" restrict access.
• Blogs: Unfortunately, no numbers are provided for how many teens who post blogs restrict access :-(. I, for one, would be very interested in these numbers.

The Pew report notes that that 64% of online teens (and 93% of teens are online) are content creators - "online teens who have created or worked on a blog or webpage, shared original creative content, or remixed ontent they found online into a new creation". I can't find a reference now, but I seem to recall an earlier Pew study sometime in the past year or two that reported the number of adult online content creators - er, I mean the number of online adults who create content - was 19%. This number has probably grown, as well, but probably not to anywhere near 64%.

The report also includes a breakdown of some specific online creation activities:

• Photos: 47% of online teens post photos (vs. 36% of online adults); girl photo posters outnumber boy photo posters by 54% to 40%.
• Videos: 14% of online teens post videos (vs. 8% of online adults); boy video posters outnumber girl video posters by 19% to 10%.
• Blogs: 28% of online teens are bloggers (vs. 8% of online adults); girl bloggers outnumber boy bloggers by 35% to 20%, and the gender gap is growing larger over time.
• Remixes: 26% of online teens have remixed content (vs. 17% of online adults), with no significant gender differences in this activity.

The largest arenas for online social media use are social networking sites, e.g., MySpace and Facebook. 55% of online teens have SNS profiles, and those teens are among the most active content creators in all the categories mentioned above, and often by huge margins (e.g., 73% of online teens with SNS profiles post photos, whereas only 16% of online teens without SNS profiles post photos). Of course, given the fact that many SNS platforms include tools for posting or embedding photos, videos and blogs, the wide discrepancies are not terribly surprising.

What may be surprising - especially to many critics of teen online media use - is another finding: "in many cases, those who are the most active online with social media applications like blogging and social networking also tend to be the most involved with offline activities like sports, music or part-time employment." And, teens who use social networking sites are nearly one third more likely to spend time with friends in person on a daily basis than average teens (38% vs. 31%).

One area that I found initially surprising is the observation that "95% of teenage girls participate several times a week in at least one communication activity, compared with 84% of boys" ... meaning that 5% of girls and 16% of boys are, well, rather uncommunicative. Upon further reflection, though, I realize that I have known some people who might fit this description (my wife might claim that I often fit this description). It's [also] interesting to note the significant gender difference here - boys are nearly 3 times more likely than girls to be uncommunicative.

This - and other elements of the Pew report showing that teen girls tend to be more communicative than teen boys (e.g., 35% of teen girls blog whereas only 20% of teen boys blog) - is consistent with some statistics I recently read about in The Female Brain, by Louann Brizendine: e.g., women's brains have 11% more neurons in the centers of the brain used for language and hearing. Another interesting statistic in the book was that men's brains have 2.5 times more neurons in the areas associated with sexual drive than women do. She puts these together in some interesting observations relating to teens:

We know that girls' estrogen levels climb at puberty and flip the switches in their brains to talk more, interact with peers more, think about boys more, worry about appearance more, stress out more, and emote more. They are driven by a desire for connection with other girls - and with boys. Their dopamine and oxytocin rush from talking and connecting keeps them motivated to seek out these intimate connections. What they don't know is that this is their own special girl reality. Most boys don't share this intense desire for verbal connection, so attempts at verbal intimacy with their male contemporaries can be met with disappointing results.

...

Why do previously communicative boys become so taciturn and monsyllabic that they verge on autistic when they hit their teens? The testicular surges of testosterone marinate the boys' brains. Testosterone has been shown to decrease talking as well as interest in socializing - except when it involves sports or sexual pursuit. In fact, sexual pursuit and body parts become pretty much an obsession ... Young teen boys are often totally, single-mindedly consumed with sexual fantasies, girls' body parts, and the need to masturbate.

I plan to blog more extensively about Louann's book in the near future, but for now, I'll just note that there is a whole area of social media use by teens that is not covered by the study, which is prompted in part by the book, and in part by my having recently watched the movie Superbad. If, as some claim, the Internet is for porn, and teens are the most active users of online media, I suspect there is a use case that is significant to at least half of the teen population that is not covered by the study. I won't hold my breath about this usage model being included in some future study by Pew - and I'm not sure whether it really qualifies as social media - but I wonder if the pervasive loneliness, shame and fear of being "found out" that teen boys suffer can be ameliorated through some kind of content-centered conversation in this shadow dimension of online life ... perhaps it already is.

Worst Speech Ever: Guy Kawasaki on Stupid Ideas, Indefensibility and Being a Mensch

Guy Kawaski gave a great demonstration of and presentation on entrepreneurship in the Web 2.0 era at yesterday's PARC Forum. His new company, Truemors.com, is "a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site" that cost him $12,107.09. The site enables anyone to post, comment on, or rate any breaking rumors or news. Two days after its launch, The Inquirer ("news, reviews, facts and friction") called it "the worst web site ever", which may have been partly responsible for a spike in attention - the site received 246,210 page views that day - leading Guy to wryly note “there's no such thing as bad PR as long as they get the link right” and "we probably got more hits than if we'd been labeled 'the best web site ever'" ... prompting him to ask any bloggers in the audience to label any posts about his talk as "the worst speech ever".

Guy had delivered an amazingly inspiring keynote emphasizing "The Art of the Start" (the book I most frequently recommend to prospective entrepreneurs) at the Northwest Entrepreneur Network's Entrepreneur University in November 2004, a few days after I had veered from the path corporate citizenship and started down the path of entrepreneurship. My notes from the event say he was "stressing the importance of making meaning (vs. making money), trying to change the world for the better; I also like his invitation to "be a mensch" (e.g., help people who cannot help you)." I don't know whether Guy will ever be able to help me, but given the huge boost I got from Guy's talk 3 years ago, I figured the least I could do would be to return the favor and give him a little Google Juice for "the worst speech ever" ... and perhaps driving a wee bit more traffic to his new site ... even though I don't believe it aligns well with his earlier stated maxim of changing the world for the better.

The inspiration for this site came from a CommunityNext panel on web founders who had defied the "venture capital model" that Guy (founder of Garage Technology Ventures) had moderated in February, and which included

• James Hong, co-founder of HotOrNot, a company / web site that was created to resolve an argument he had with a friend about how attractive a women they'd seen at a party was. He and his co-founder created the web site - which enables users to post photos (um, presumably of themselves) and/or vote on whether people depicted in [other?] photos are hot or not - over the next few days, and sent out emails to 40 friends ... and had 40,000 unique visitors by the end of the week. Photos on the site have now received over 12 billion votes,and  the company has 4 employees and is earning (or yielding) $10 million / year in advertising revenue.
• Markus Frind (who Guy described as "one guy sitting around in his underwear in Vancouver"), founder and sole proprietor of PlentyOfFish ("100% free. Put away your credit card") - a free (i.e., advertising-supported) online dating web site - created the company / web site because he wanted to study .NET. The site draws 500 million page views per month and $10 million in annual advertising revenue.
• Drew Curtis, founder of Fark, a web site where he posts 25 interesting news-of-the-weird items per day, which garners 50 million page views per month and several million dollars annually in advertising (I wonder how much Chuck Shepherd makes).

Guy, a veteran evangelist, entrepreneur and VC - under the traditional model(s) - was inspired by these successful, though deviant, entrepreneurs. Now a 53-year-old father of 4, he would like to sit around in his underwear making millions - or even hundreds of thousands - of dollars per year from a web site. And so, in practicing what he preaches in The Art of the Start - entrepreneurship is more about doing than thinking - he decided to launch a web [2.0] site of his own.

Guy claims is goal is to continue a proud history of information democratization through technological advances, including the printing press, personal computing and desktop publishing: "I wanted to create a web site where anyone could post any information that thousands of people could read." So, he assembled a variety of resources - monetary and non-monetary - and founded Truemors. In his Powerpoint presentation, he offered some numbers on this process:

• 0 business plans (you don't need a business plan for a $12K investment)
• 0 number of pitches (you don't need investors - this is within the scale of manageable credit card debt)
• 7.5 weeks from registration to launch
• $4,500 in software development ("offshored" – to Electric Pulp, headquartered in South Dakota) vs. the $1M it would have required 3 years ago
• $4,824.13 in legal fees (incorporate new company, secure trademarks, investigate liability ... especially for libel) vs. $500 for "my uncle, the divorce lawyer" ... or $50K for Wilson Sonsini (his advice: don't skimp on good legal counsel, it makes future acquisition much easier)
• $399 for a logo (from LogoWorks) vs. the "butt ugly" London Olympics logo, which cost $400K
• $1,115.05 for domain registrations, including domains to “surround” truemors.com (Network Solutions) vs. $400 for GoDaddy, which he was boycotting due to a Superbowl commercial that he labeled as "sexist" ... which I found ironic, given his admiration of HotOrNot, and some of the use cases he offered or his own site. He bought 55 domains with various misspellings and top-level domain names (TLDs) - far less expensive than the $25K it cost to evict a cybersquatter in the future.
• 1.5 Full-Time Equivalents (FTEs) - he has one partner ... not sure which one is part-time
• 3 mentions in TechCrunch (first leak, second leak + screenshot, official launch)
• 261,214 page views on first day
• 14,052 unique visitors first day
• $0 marketing budget – Guy called in a lot of favors ("I spent 24 years [being a mensch] to make a $0 budget possible")
• 405 truemors posted on the first day
• 218 truemors deleted on the first day (junk, spam, or otherwise inappropriate) - according to Guy, half of the blogosphere complained there was nothing but crap on the site (which, by the way, does have a crap category (which Guy included in his later demonstration)), and the other half complained that Guy is a censor.
• 3 hours before site was hacked (he wasn’t offended, but rather was flattered "at least we were worth hacking")
• 36 hours before the Yahoo! Small Businesss hosting service recommended they move somewhere else
• $29.95 initial monthly fee for Yahoo! Small Business
• $150 was the new monthly fee when they moved to an ISP
• $3000 is the current monthly break-even point (they now include paid content for text - written by Truemorists - and photos - taken or found (on wikipedia, wikimania or iStockPhoto) by Truemorazzi)
• 2 days before Truemors was labeled the “the worst website ever” (by The Inquirer)
• 246,210 page views that day ("we probably got more page views than if we were labeled 'best website ever'")

Before demonstrating Truemors, Guy concluded his presentation with 4 observations:

• The blogosphere is full of angry people (essentially accusing Truemors of being "a stupid idea, poorly implemented"), leaving Guy with a newfound disrespect for the blogosphere, which he [in turn] accused of being composed mostly of 15 year-olds and 50 year-olds who live with their parents and have never French-kissed (hmmm, perhaps this could be a juicy truemor (for the record, none of those attributes apply to this blogger)).
• $12,000 goea a very long way these days
• You can work with a team that is thousands of miles away
• Life is good for entrepreneurs these days

Having been initially inspired by the panel of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs he moderated, he said that he would like to stop traveling and giving speeches, and ideally, someone in the audience at the PARC Forum would be recursively follow in his footsteps and be at the podium a year from now giving a speech starting out with "I saw Guy Kawasaki give a talk about making a million dollars sitting around in his underwear..."

Guy noted the the difficulty in predicting which startup companies will succeed - "I’m almost wiling to say that some of the stupidest ideas turned into the greatest companies" ... examples of which include Apple (whose initial customer base was homebrew computer clubs with 10 people), eBay (founded to sell used printers), Google (the 12th search engine), YouTube (a web site for people to post videos of putting Mentos in Coke bottles). In what seemed like an interesting mashup of Darwinism and Social Darwinism - perhaps Sociotechnical Darwinism (?) - he suggested that with Web 2.0, more people can try more stupid ideas for less money, and since you can never tell which stupid ideas will be successful, the world will become a better place.

During the Truemors demonstration, Guy gave a few "use cases" about people using Truemors to find conversation material prior to a date. Interestingly, given his purported objection to sexism, I found his use cases rather sexist: a PARC hardware engineer reading up on health truemors before a date with a woman he'd met on Match.com (or perhaps PlentyOfFish?), or a woman reading truemors on autos or sports before a date with a guy she'd met on an online dating site.

When asked "What’s to stop anyone else from doing this?", Guy replied "Nothing ... except that everyone in the blogosphere is saying this is stupid. Why would someone copy something stupid?" He then went on to observe tha there are very few things that are truly defensible. When a VC asks an entrepreneur "what makes this venture defensible?", "patents" is the wrong answer. If you're planning to spend time and money litigating patents, you're going to fail (although patents can be valuable for future acquisition prospects). The right answer is "Nothing. We're just going to implement better and faster".

When asked about the estimated value of all the favors he cashed in, Guy admitted it probably ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But he also noted that "entrepreneurship is not about a level playing field, it’s about about tilting the field to you." He then went on to say a little more about karma and being a mensch, which reflected the foundations of menschood he'd earlier noted (in The Art of the Start):

1. Helping lots of people, especially those who cannot help you (although I personally believe it's impossible to determine in advance who can and can't help you ... in fact, I actually believe that everyone has something of value to offer, even when it's not immediately obvious).
2. Do what's right (not what's easy, expedient, money-saving or possible to get away with)
3. Pay back society, for such gifts as
   • family and friends
   • spiritual fulfillment
   • good health
   • beautiful surroundings
   • economic success
   • a hat trick every once in a while

After 24 years of helping people, it looks to me like Guy is more interested now in making money vs. making meaning. Although the examples of "stupid ideas" that grew into successful businesses may have been questionable at the outset, many of them at least had grand visions. As I'd noted in one of many references to The Art of the Start - in an earlier post on social entrepreneurship as doing well by doing right - he [had once] espoused a socially responsible motivation to starting things:

[T]he best reason to start an organization is to make meaning – to create a product or service that makes the world a better place

• Increase the quality of life
• Right a terrible wrong
• Prevent the end of something good

... making meaning is the most powerful motivator there is ... [and] if you fail, at least you failed doing something worthwhile.

Guy did talk about failure, and what it would take to succeed: even if someone buys Truemors for $50K, he will doubled his investment on "the worst web site ever". His ultimate goal is to make at least $1M annually in advertising revenue, and spend more time at home. Providing for and spending more time with one's family are, of course, worthy goals, but I do not believe that labeling Truemors as a venture that will make the world a better place is defensible ... and I see it as incompatible with the second principle of being a mensch: "doing what's right (not what's easy, expedient, money-saving or possible to get away with)".

During the Truemors demo, Guy suggested that Truemors was intended as "NPR for the eyes" and that its redeeming value is that "If you read truemors every day, you would be a more interesting person". I'm reminded of the Chinese proverb "may you live in interesting times". We certainly do live (and venture forth) in interesting times, and I do believe that on a certain level, we're all interesting people (though this is not always immediately obvious to all observers / participants). I will be interested to see whether Truemors holds my interest ... or makes me a more interesting person ... or makes the world a better place.

[Update: there is a Google video if Guy's talk.]

Spampliments, Spampliments, Spampliments, Spampliments ...

A reader using the name "Cara Fletcher" posted the following comment on the first blog entry I posted about my wife's anal cancer (Anal Cancer: A Real Pain in the Butt):

The anal cancer should be really a pain in the butt and I am sure it's not very pleasant.I now have to deal with my back pain and with the searching of cure for it that will really help me and hope I'll never have to deal with anal cancer.

I won't insert the old post here, but suffice to say, the title of my initial post was intended as a tongue-in-cheek attempt to lighten up during an otherwise very dark and frightening period ... and the darkness and fear was more directly reflected in the body of the post (though perhaps not as clearly as I'd intended). "Cara" may have read the post, may even be dealing with back pain, and I wouldn't wish anal cancer - or back pain - on anyone. However, seeing as "Cara" lists her homepage as www_alleviatebackpain_net, I suspect that her comment is simply a fairly well-disguised attempt to draw traffic to the site.

The timing of this comment is somewhat ironic, given that my second-to-last blog entry - Don't Take Anything Personally: Commenting on Commenting - was about such spampliments - comment spam with context-sensitive content, referencing something in the title or body of a blog post, often using complimentary terms, and thus better masking the real intent of increasing the Google Juice of the URL referenced by the person(s) posting the comments. That earlier post offered me an unexpected opportunity to practice not taking things personally (such as comments posted on my blog, but also including any perceptions or judgments I may have about others taking anything I say personally). And this comment - and, I suppose, all comments - offer me opportunities for further practice.

I'm reminded of two of my favorite "life rules", as articulated by Cherie Carter-Scott in her inspiring book, If Life is a Game, These are the Rules: 

Rule Three: There are no mistakes, only lessons.
Growth is a process of experimentation, a series of trials, errors, and occasional victories. The failed experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that work.

Rule Four: A lesson is repeated until learned.
Lessons will repeated to you in various forms until you have learned them. When you have learned them, you can then go on to the next lesson.

So, as with the earlier spampliments I noted, I'm not going to take the comment by "Cara" personally, even though this one touches on an area with a strong emotional charge. I am, however, going to delete it and report it as spam to TypePad. If "Cara" was truly intending to add value to me or my blog, well, I apologize ... and suggest that she (?) take greater care in creating even more sensitive context-sensitive content to post as comments in the future.

BTW, the title of this post is a thinly veiled allusion to a chorus in the famous Monty Python skit on Spam ("Spam, spam, spam, spam, ...") ... after all, if I'm not going to take these kinds of things personally, I might as well enjoy a good laugh. Surprisingly, I couldn't find a YouTube video with the segment, but there is a version, with Japanese subtitles, on Google Videos.

[Update: Here are two more examples of spamliments I just found (and deleted) from my wine weblog, both originating from IP address 202.143.126.145:

I am impressed to see this blog. There is a lots of imformation for me. I naver been seen this type infomative place . I m very thank full to the owner of this blog. http://www_cheapviagrabuy_com

hello friends first of all I want to know how to make this type blog. I want to make a this type blog where people come can disscuss and give us his opinion than we get more knowledge. http://www_weightlossdietpillz_com

I also found other references to the term "spampliments" on other blogs - Michael Terry and the net-K.us/blog - so I clearly did not invent the term.

Finally: I found the Monty Python "Spam" skit on YouTube:]

Don't Take Anything Personally: Commenting on Commenting

I recite Don Miguel Ruiz' Four Agreements as part of my daily mantra practice (mantras are positive affirmations reflecting qualities I want to cultivate in my self). I have already blogged about the ambivalence with which I sometimes view his Fourth Agreement, Always Do Your Best. I recently ruminated about my ambivalence regarding his Third Agreement, Don't Make Assumptions, in a comment on my friend Dan's Unfolding Leadership blog. I now want to turn to his Second Agreement, Don't Take Anything Personally, in general, as well as its application to the blogosphere ... renewing a practice I followed for a week, almost exactly one year ago, relating blogging to other inspiring books, e.g., Love is the Killer App, Blogs are the Killer Platform (riffing on Tim Sanders' book), The 8 Blogging Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen Covey), Your Heart's Blog: The Practice of Unfolding (Oriah Mountain Dreamer).

[BTW, just for completeness, the First Agreement is Be Impeccable With Your Word.]

On the book jacket of The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, Don Miguel defines his Second Agreement as follows:

Don't Take Anything Personally: Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.

This agreement is very much in alignment with a concept we embrace in The Mankind Project: recognizing that "each man is my mirror" [MKP is a men's organization, hence the gender bias; although much of our work is confronting and resolving issues with other men, many of the concepts and practices apply equally well to all people].

Much of the work I've done around this concept has been on not taking any negative projections of others personally. If someone expresses anger at something I do or say - or something I don't do or don't say, as is often the case - it is usually because I have touched some wound they have suffered in the past. While I find it easier to see projections by others, I am increasingly able (or willing) to see projections in my own behavior, when I'm willing to reflect on why it is I really feel anger, sad or fear about something.

One of the ways I try to practice greater awareness of the real causes of my anger and to take greater responsibility for my feelings is to stop using language that suggests that someone else has made me angry. No one makes me angry (or sad or fearful). I often feel angry /sad / fearful, but projecting this onto others diminishes my power and accountability. Instead of saying (or thinking) "he made me angry...", I substitute "I feel angry that he...". This, then, opens up a space in which I can reflect - usually at some future time - about what it is about me that was triggered by words or actions (or inactions) of others.

While I've been practicing this agreement when it comes to emotions I typically label as negative, I find it far more challenging to apply this to emotions I typically label as positive, e.g., happiness. For example, when someone says or does something that makes me about which I feel happy, I really want to take that personally. If someone compliments me on something I've done, said or written, I want to own that, just like I have often taken ownership of criticisms others have directed at me. And yet, if I apply the Second Agreement consistently, even these positive projections are still, well, projections, and I'm no more justified in accepting responsibility for anything positive anyone says or does than I am in accepting responsibility for anything negative anyone says or does.

Applying this to my own projections - when I say something positive about someone else - I can gain somewhat greater insight into the process. I recognize that the nice things I say about others typically revolve around actions that either reflect qualities I perceive in my self (so they are, at some level, saying "way to be like me!") or qualities I want to cultivate in my self (saying "I want to be more like you!").

One of the dimensions in which I see these projections play out most clearly is in my experience of the blogosphere. The comments I post on others' blog entries are usually triggered in some way by the blog posts on which I'm commenting, but my comments themselves are always about me. I truly intend to express something that may be of value to the author of the post and/or his/her readers, but the only thing I can be sure of is that posting the comment is somehow of value to me (though it may not always be of positive value).

The example I mentioned at the beginning of this post is a good case in point. Dan Oestreich wrote a characteristically introspective and inspiring post, Just Keep Me In The Light, sharing his experience at a workshop, in which he noted (among other things):

Anyone who leads — anyone — cannot afford projection, cannot afford to assume.

This triggered one of my many internal struggles: can we not afford to assume, or can we not afford not to assume? So I posted a comment, in which I wrote about this struggle:

I think it’s impossible to drive a car without making assumptions about the other drivers on the road. Sure, one wants to be prepared for unexpected actions and reactions on the part of other drivers, but if one doesn’t assume that most people will abide by most traffic laws most of the time, one wouldn’t be able to drive.

Tying this back to leadership, how can one lead if one isn’t willing to make certain assumptions - about the competency, integrity and dedication of those whom one is leading? Of course one wants to “trust but verify” but isn’t alot of that trust based on assumptions? I think we cannot but help make assumptions … perhaps the key is to be more conscious about when we are making assumptions.

On a related note, I also don’t think we can help but make projections. All I really know is my own experience (and I don’t even know that very well). As much as I may try to understand you for who you are, I’m not sure I can ever honestly say that any perceptions I have about you are not some kind of projection. Perhaps, again, the key is simply to be conscious of the projected nature of these “perceptions”.

Obviously, I don’t have any of this worked out - thanks for helping me to be more consciously in the question(s)!

Fortunately (in many ways), Dan is a good friend, and a fellow subscriber to the Four Agreements, and thus I know that he knows not to take anything I write [in comments on his blog] personally. I wasn't so much challenging him about his assertion as I was simply opening up my own conflict about projections and assumptions - which I hope to open up further in some future blog post (on the Third Agreement).

The tipping point for me to blog about taking things personally in the blogosophere is due, as usual, to a confluence of multiple events. Commenting on Dan's post set the stage, but it was subsequent comments on my own blog posts that helped motivate me to write [er, at some length] about this.

My wine blog receives a higher comment-to-post ratio than this blog [part of this is no doubt due to the fact that my wine blog posts are typically far shorter than posts on this blog]. Lately, I've been noticing an increasing number of increasingly deceptively complimentary spam comments (spampliments?).

Some, of course, are not so deceptive, e.g.,

I am Very thank full the owner of this blog. Becouse of this blog is very imformative for me.. And I ask u some thiing You make more this type blog where we can get more knowledge. http://www_penisenlargementz_com [substituting underscores for periods to avoid giving the spam commenter's sponsor any extra links]

Others, however, are a bit harder to decipher, e.g.,

Very nice post. I liked your writing style and the way you covered the topic.

One comment even included a reference to the wine shop (Garagiste) I'd referenced in the post on which it was commenting:

i want visit Garagiste and taste their finest wines. i always searching of good type of wines.

In fact, I left this last one up for a while, until the following comment came in, which also had the same source URL (http://www_drinksos_com, which advertises a hangover cure which I imagine is every bit as effective as the, er, enhancement advertised in the abovementioned comment source URL):

Thanks for your information. i have also had some great experince for wine tasting. there is one restaurant in my town and they have many good brands of wine.

So now I've gone and deleted all the comments listing that URL as a web page (and if jakee and tony, the names provided by the people who posted the comments listed above, from an IP address in Karachi, Pakistan - a long way from the Garagiste wine shop in Seattle - are truly trying to add value, and not simply increasing the Google juice of their sponsor through promiscuous comments, I apologize).

The point I want to make, however, is not about the complimentary spam comments, per se, but that I was so easily duped into believing them to be sincere ... which I believe is because I was actually taking them personally ... and because I was taking them personally - and positively - I didn't examine them as closely ... just as I often take personally (and don't examine closely) the positive things family, friends and colleagues say to or about me in face-to-face or other types of mediated exchanges.

Speaking of which, another good friend and inspiring blogger, Matthew Cornell, recently posted a short comment on my recent post on A New Generation of Proactive Displays which has a very similar phraseology:

Neat! Tons of potential here ... and many ideas spring forth.

Now, I know Matt well enough to believe that he is sincere about this (and that he won't take personally my choice to single out his comment here). And I sincerely felt good receiving his comment, as I do in receiving all comments that are complimentary (as another blogging friend, Noah Kagan, so pithily put it: "comments make me orgasm" (a blog entry on which, of course, I posted a rather long comment)).

However, if I abide by the agreement of not taking things personally, I would have to say that this comment is really about Matt (just like my comments on Dan's and Noah's posts are really about me). Of course, Matt is an "ideas" guy (hence his aptly named blog, ideamatt.blogspot.com), and he often sees great potential in ideas and people (which is why he has changed career trajectories in order to help people become more effective in getting things done to realize their ideas). I think I can still feel good about the comment under this agreement, since even though comment may really be about Matt, something I wrote may have helped trigger him to perceive and/or project something interesting and useful ... but in writing this, I have to admit I'm not entirely clear about this (isn't the projection of triggering something in another person taking that personally, somehow?).

Anyhow, I'm going to stop here, and invite anyone who has insights to share on not taking things (e.g., comments) personally to post a comment ... though, of course, you know how I'll probably be interpreting (projecting onto?) any comments that are posted now ...

[Update, 2007-09-11: My friend, Taneli, told me that the intention(s) behind comments can sometimes be challenging to decipher on Flickr, and sent me an example of some commenting on commenting on a Flickr photo.]

Oriah and Buber, I and Thou: Bringing All Of Who I Am to Blogging

I’ve been listening nearly exclusively to (and occasionally blogging about) David Whyte’s inspiring words in his audiobook, Clear Mind, Wild Heart, on my iPod for the past several months. Having finished my sixth cycle through [my rip of] his 6 CD set, I decided to listen to Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s audiobook, Your Heart’s Prayer  … which was inspired, in no small part, by David Whyte.

I have written before of how Oriah has inspired me. This evening, on the flight from San Jose to Seattle, I listened to a segment that helped me understand why it is I participate in the blogosphere. Oriah was talking about Martin Buber, and his book I And Thou, which she says is “about all of life really being about bringing yourself into full relationship with the other.” She goes on to elaborate in a way that I map directly onto my experience with reading and writing blogs:

When you engage in a creative act, you bring yourself into relationship with that form, and if you give yourself completely to that process – you bring all of who you are to it – what happens is that you are changed, and a work is created – it could be an object, it could be a piece of music [Ed.: it could be a blog post] – but something is created, which to the receptive beholder, will give them the opportunity to have a direct experience of the form.

So when you write a piece of music [write a blog post] – let’s say if you’re a composer [a blogger] – and you bring yourself entirely to something that is larger than you, and you hold none of yourself back, you create a piece of music [blog post], which someone who listens to it [reads it], if they too bring all of themselves to it, they are able to directly experience that which is larger than themselves in their own way – it will be different than perhaps the composer [blogger] did  – but there will be a similarity in terms of what they engage with.

So my job – your job – as human beings, is to bring all of who we are to every moment.

I know this because the easiest place for me to do this, in some ways – and it’s not always easy, but the place where I feel compelled to do this, I should say – is when I write. There’s something about writing, for me, which compels me to try to include all of it … to hold nothing back … and I’m changed in the process of writing.

The other thing that happens is I produce a book [blog post] that other people come to and get something out of that I never could possibly anticipate. …

All I can do is bring all of who I am to that writing, and then that allows the opportunity for something else to come in, when someone else, who is a receptive beholder, uses that work … and that’s not me, it’s something that’s larger than me that comes through this.

… whatever I am, and whoever I am, all I can do is offer that, and feeling inadequate is not a reason not to offer that.

I often feel inadequate, in all my affairs, and the practice of blogging helps me feel the inadequacy and write anyway (invoking the wisdom of yet another inspiring author, Susan Jeffers, and her invitation to Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway). One of the many gifts I received at CHI 2007 this week was learning that a number of people enjoy reading my blog (at least on occasion). I never check my logs [well, I did once, when I signed up for syndication via Newstex], and I never check for references to my blog at Technorati, so the only way I learn that anyone has read my blog is when someone posts a comment, sends an email, or sends a trackback ping from their own blog ... or says something to me in person.

There’s a part of me that is embarrassed about enjoying learning that other people enjoy reading my blog – after all, that would be an example of taking something personally (and thus, in opposition to Don Miguel Ruiz’ second agreement, to which I generally like to subscribe). And, in fact, in the passage quoted above, Oriah even says, in effect, it’s not [entirely] about me, it’s [also] about the reader. However, she also emphasizes the interconnectedness among us, and so if blogging is bringing myself into full relationship with the other[s], well, then, I guess I won’t try to deny the joy I feel when I learn about instances of such interconnectedness … or, might I even say, interrelativity.

I usually refrain from using second person references in my blog, but I’ll make an exception here, to thank those of you at the conference (and at other places and times) who offered the warm encouragement I need to unfold.

Radical Transparency: Revelation, Reputation and Reciprocity

The current issue of Wired has a great feature on radical transparency, highlighting the benefits that accrue to CEOs who are open to revealing their shadows, and exposing the risks to the reputations of those who continue to embrace secrecy and/or duplicity in their self representations. As with many Wired features, it is provocative ... and rather biased ... and just happens to align well with my own biases. I want to explore some of the issues raised in the article, blend in some issues I and others have raised elsewhere, and ruminate a bit about the prospective breadth and depth of radical transparency.

In preparing the lead article, The See-Through CEO, author Clive Thompson walked his talk by posting an entry on his blog outlining his plans (focusing on three themes: "secrecy is dead", "tap the hivemind", "reputation is everything"), and inviting comments. He received over 50 responses, with very high signal-to-noise ratio; several of them are explicitly included in his article (others are presumably implicitly included).

Clive opens his article with a story about how Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin, was faced with mounting challenges to his company's attempt to disintermediate the real estate business by empowering home buyers and sellers through a rich (and enriching) Internet application. Redfin provides an easy-to-use window into the real estate market, offering a map-based interface for prospective buyers to see a wealth of information about homes for sale in a given market (I imagine a similarly powerful interface for home sellers, but have not yet explored that side of the house). Faced with resistance by realtors who understandably feel threatened by this introduction of disruptive technology that [somewhat ironically] renders transparent many aspects of a complex and lucrative market in which they once enjoyed a clear hegemony of information, Redfin was in danger of failing.

Glenn created a blog to reveal some of the challenges he was encountering internally and externally. While initially hesitant to being so open about the challenges, he found that "instead of discouraging customers, being open about our problems radicalized them ... they rallied and started pulling for us". Glenn's move, and the response, hardly surprises me, given his inspiring recommendations on 10 Steps for Building a Company at NWEN's Entrepreneur University 2005 (one of which was "be open and honest and respectful") and his more recent presentation on Fortune Favors the Bold (one of which is "radical openness: the truth will set you free"). I'm also reminded of Glenn's recommendations for hiring employees -- "find the maniacs and give them a reason to believe" ... and given how he has, in effect, invited his customers into the pool of maniacs and believers, I'm thinking that my earlier rumination on everyone's a customer might be due for an update, as it appears that, increasingly, everyone's a partner.

I was [further] reflecting on how openness and vulnerability tends to breed reciprocity, and that if businesses want to build strong relationships with customers, that has to be built on a platform of trust, and the best way to get others to trust you is to trust them (demonstrating trustworthiness by trusting). I've written before about the business value of integrity, openness, vulnerability and compassion, but at that point was thinking more about how those principles might be applied internally. As Web 2.0 progessively erodes the barriers between us and them, there may be more business value to practicing those principles in "external" relationships as well.

Clive notes that

Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation management system ... here's the interesting paradox: The reputation economy creates and incentive to be more open, not less. Since Internet commentary is inescapable, the only way to influence it is to be part of it ... network algorithms do not favor the cagey or secretive. They favor the prolific, the outgoing, the shameless.

However, I started to wonder how widely this radical transparency really applies (or could apply). Redfin is clearly a company that is setting out to empower its customers, and it's little surprise to me that some of those customers would help Redfin help them. Microsoft is another company that was profiled in this feature, where Fred Vogelstein [who, surprisingly to me, does not appear to have a blog] explored Operation Channel 9, the internal project wherein a small group of radicals went around creating impromptu videotape interviews with Microsoft developers and posting them on an external web site, and observed that "no large company - with the possible exception of Sun Microsystems - is as far along in understanding how the Internet changes the way employees connect with suppliers, customers, shareholders and peers". By promoting openness and vulnerability -- sometimes at the risk of being fired (reminding me of the risk / reward tradeoffs between thriving and surviving discussed -- especially in the comments -- in my last post) -- the Channel 9 crew helped Microsoft establish a new [virtual] front porch, making itself more approachable by its network of third party developers ... and, I suspect, a significant number of its end-users. This channel is also augmented with over 4,500 other channels (external bloggers), giving Microsoft one of the highest [external] blogger-per-capita rates (6.3%) of any company I know of.

So why does Microsoft have so many external bloggers, and why does, say, Nokia have so few? The blogroll at Stephen Johnston's ThreeDimensionalPeople blog has the most complete listing I've seen anywhere, but at 15 of 55,000, we have a blogger-per-employee ratio of 0.02%. There are, of course, a number of blogs sponsored or at least promoted by Forum Nokia, but as the forum is invitation-only (and the invitation can presumably be revoked at any time), I'm not sure how high these blogs would score on the radical transparency scale. I realize that many of the Microsoft blogs are primarily "promotional", but many of them tend to play closer to the edges with respect to what they reveal about the company and its practices, policies and personnel.

I know Nokia is very proud -- and protective -- of its brand, and so I started wondering about whether there is a fundamental tension between branding and blogging? According to Business Week's listing of Top 100 Global Brands, Nokia's brand is #6 and Microsoft is #2, suggesting that blogging does not adversely affect the brand (or at least not necessarily so). IBM, which has an extensive array of internal blogs (3,600 as of a report 2 years ago) and wikis, is #3 among brands, and seems to have hundreds of external blogs (judging from a few lists). On the other end of the spectrum, Coca-Cola (the #1 brand) has one rather infamous flog (fake blog), but very few "real" blogs (that I can find).

Does the discrepancy between external blog adoption rates have anything to do with a company's dedication to the empowerment of its customers? Nokia's mantra ("connecting people") certainly implies a level of individual empowerment, though perhaps not in the same way as Microsoft's mantra ("your potenial, our passion"), and I would argue that neither large company empowers its customers as clearly as Redfin does. It would be interesting to do a more comprehensive assessment of the correlation between brands and blogs, and even more interesting to investigate the causal relationship(s) between these two factors (and other factors such as size, vision, mission, values, industry, customer bases and business models). Meanwhile, in the spirit of Clive's openness, I welcome any insights anyone has to share on any of this.

ETech 2007, Part 2: People, Power, Patterns and Practices

I find it challenging to summarize my impressions of ETech 2007 in a single phrase (or a "one thing" that was most interesting, a question I often ask others returning from a conference). I already wrote about the themes of fun, games and magic at ETech, and Tim O'Reilly's recent post on a Call for a Blogger's Code of Conduct addresses some of the intimidation issues that arose during the conference. In this post, I'll focus on the ideas of people, power, patterns and practices that emerged over the course of the last two days of the event.

Mike Kuniavsky spoke of "The Coming Age of Magic" [slides], in which he depicted trends in computing costs that are leading to greater capabilities to embed computing elements in things that are not traditionally thought of as computers, which in turn, is leading to more animism, metaphor and automation. One of the interesting insights Mike shared was that it is not just the ability to embed computation in objects, but the ability to embed knowledge in objects (and thus create, modify and use knowledge in new ways), that will be an important source of new powers in the coming age of ubiquitous computing. Mike's views contrast with Adam Greenfield's warnings the previous day of the potential for human disempowerment through ubiquitous computing technologies. I believe that the key difference lies in how much technologies are designed (or co-opted) to do for us on our behalf rather than at our behest, reminiscent of some interesting distinctions Yvonne Rogers raised in a paper challenging Mark Weiser's Vision at UbiComp 2006 (and in which she invoked Adam Greenfield's book, Everywhere).

In keeping with the magical theme, danah boyd presented "Incantations for Muggles" [