Traveling Geeks

Traveling Geeks: A Guardian Newspaper Media Panel, Twitter, From Back to Front And Beyond…

Tuesday evening our third event that day for the Traveling Geeks (but not the last) was to take part in a media debate at The Guardian newspaper’s offices in north London.

The Guardian is one of the UK’s largest newspapers and its media section is superb — anyone that is anyone in the media industry reads it, and anyone that’s interested in media — reads The Guardian’s media section.

It was a very good turnout for the event despite horrid downpours. Part of our TG gang (Robert Scoble, Sarah Lacy, and JD Lasica) were on the panel discussing the future of media with the Guardian’s Emily Bell, and the BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones.

It was a good discussion but it felt very “2005” in terms of the subjects, which kept returning to blogger/social media versus mainstream media.

The Butcher of Fleet Street

I was sitting at the back of the room next to fellow TGer Craig Newmark of Craigslist. And inevitably, the panel’s moderator couldn’t resist asking him to stand up and explain himself for killing the newspaper industry.

Craig is mightily fed up with this question. And I agree. It is not his fault that the newspaper industry is in trouble. But Craig handled it all very well, throwing in a line “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” which drew laughs and distracted the panel from further pursuit of a tired line of questioning and drew the discussion back to the favorite subject of the day: Twitter.

From Back To Front

It was fun publishing from the back of the room and having our Tweets projected onto a big screen in the front of the room.

Here is the evening’s Twitstream.

And here are my contributions:

Reboot Britain – First Stop on Traveling Geeks tour

I knew it would be intense when I said yes to the call to adventure, but if the first day is any indication, the Traveling Geeks tour redefines intense. The day starts with an exercise in cat-herding, with the whole crazy crew piling into three London taxis. Try putting any five of those rather strong individual personalities into an enclosed space and “intense” is the only word for it.

We spend our first day at Reboot Britain, the kind of event I’d love to see in the USA. It was sponsored by NESTA, also the kind of organization I’d love to see on our side of the pond. You can get a sense of what went on by searching our tweets via the #rebootbritain hashtag on Twitter. I was particular nervous because I was scheduled to speak at 6:00. I far prefer to get my talk over at the beginning of the day, so I can relax. The speakers were engaging enough for me to spend all day sitting down, which is not my custom. It was probably the first day in two years that I didn’t take an hour out to walk. I was surprised at the extraordinarily warm response to my talk. It was the first time I had spoken publicly about a subject I’ve grown passionate about – 21st Century Literacies. You know you’ve hit the mark when people are still sitting at the end of the last session of the day. I finished speaking, acknowledged warm applause, sat down — and people kept sitting. So I got back on stage and fielded questions for another 20 minutes. Thank you, London, for making my day!

After Reboot Britain, we were treated to the extraordinary hospitality of the extraordinaryJ.P. Rangaswami and his colleagues at British Telecom, aka BT. I first became acquainted with JP through his blog, Confused of Calcutta. This was not the usual thinking from a highly placed executive at a telecom operator. Not the usual thinking, period. So I started following him on Twitter (@jobsworth) and when I noticed that he was often listening to vintage Grateful Dead tunes, I struck up a correspondence. On one of his visits to San Francisco to visit BT acquisition Ribbit (more about them later), we got better acquainted over dinner. So when he heard the geeks were headed for London, he arranged a mind-boggling capper for our first day – dinner at the top of BT Tower. We were greeted by no less than the CEO of BT, who made some surprising and welcome statements that lead me to suspect that BT might be the kind of un-telecom, un-operator that the world needs to remove the telecom operators’ obstacles to a truly mobile web. We’ll see. Mark my words – just as Xerox PARC changed the world because Bob Taylor was a once in a century people collector, I suspect that BT is going to have a similar impact because of JP. Really. Watch and see.

Is the Web Female?

Yesterday at Reboot Britain in London, there were back-to-back sessions and countless panels on technology, innovation, social media and the web.

It ranged from ending the digital divide, redefining the role of public service media, where next for the media and politics, consumer democracy or a politics of citizenship, to the future of policymaking, how video games open learning and creating a social, environmental and ethical revolution in business.

On the panel, “is the web female?” moderated by BT’s JP Rangaswami, four women talked about their opinions around a) what does the web ‘being female’ mean and b) should there be the “divide debate” at all?

Australian Joanne Jacobs was amusing and got a laugh from the audience when she said, I’d like to think that I’m the token bloke on the panel.” She tends to do more ‘masculine’ things online, she tells us. Before she went deeper, I was wondering whether that meant playing war games or creating widget skins in black and gray. Not quite.

Bottom line, how we spend our time online is different depending how much feminine energy we house in our daily lives. Are we women working from home, raising two children and active in our kids PTA? Or, are we women engineers developing the latest UI and have a child, but our husband does the chores and looks after the kids most of the time?

Or, frankly other issues altogether, such as the ones that we didn’t have time to really explore at depth. It’s not just how comfortable we are throwing ourselves into the public eye, but how much we say once we do, how often and with what tone.

Says Joanne, “Culturization is the hardest thing for specific needs or outcomes. The web a great opportunity for women and men to deliver what they are looking for and get what they want online.”

MT Rainey of Horses Mouth brings up the feminine versus masculine issue that I spend a lot of time thinking about. She says, “it’s not so much is the web female, but the question is how can the web men help bring out the feminine side?”

The flip side is true too and we see it in places like Second Life or chat rooms where women take on a male persona or act things out anonymously because it ‘feels’ safer to do so.

The debate in the hallway was mixed but most didn’t feel that technology was geared towards men. They haven’t been to Silicon Valley I was thinking. 99% of my client CEOs and head honchos have been men as have the majority of their engineering team. There’s always a token woman or two among us but I never feel as if they’re the main decision drivers. Bear in mind that this is the majority of my experience but not all.

I’ve certainly worked with women CEOs and proactively pushed women heads of business development and engineering for speaking roles and media interviews on countless occasions.

Masculine energy drives a lot of the UI decisions in many of my past experiences, as well as the marketing ones. When a target audience is predominantly female, then they’ll often fork out the cash for the research to make sure they’re on track with patterns and preferences. And yes, they look to me for guidance.

It’s an interesting dance however since designers, like artists, love to create what they love and what works for them – and we all know that this isn’t necessarily what their audience wants or needs.

One of the things women do online is get things done. It’s all about efficiency. Meghan feels that if women were involved earlier on, there would be more group regulation around commentaries on social forums and that technology would be more practical and efficient. More practical and efficient? I couldn’t agree more.

There’s also the issue about how comfortable women feel about making abrasive and controversial statements and comments on the web. Joanne feels that Americans and Australians are fairly comfortable about making abrupt statements online, although Sarah thinks that while American women are active on the web, they’re still not that comfortable with aggressive behavior on line.

It’s obviously a cultural thing. Joanne would love to see women participate in more games in the real world that are more outcome oriented. “If I was going to improve the web, it would be more game oriented for women entrepreneurs,” she says.

As for improving the web, MT says in the spirit of Reboot Britain, “we have a lot of users who don’t use a lot of rich-media sites. We should create sites where women can come to a place to help each other rather than having to rely on institutional resources only. We should take those two big slices of what we spend millions of pounds on in the public sector, and create things online where people can deliver the soft elements that will appeal to women.”

Meghan adds two things: “clarity and friendliness and making it easier to find things on the web.” That goes back to the old age search debate.

Things often come full circle.

“I promote Klout.net because I love interesting start ups and Klout measures influence on the social web.” @JosephMorin #WDYDWYD #TG2009

"I promote Klout.net because I love interesting start ups and Klout measures influence on the social web," says Joe Morin.

“I do what I do because I love what I do. I live what I do. I am what I do. Social media is my life, my world and all my connections.” @Blonde20. #WDYDWYD #TG2009

"I do what I do because I love what I do. I live what I do. I am what I do. Social media is my life, my world and all my connections."

“I help communities harness social media to be used for social good,” @JDLasica. #WDYDWYD #TG2009

"I help communities harness social media to be used for social good."

UK: Digital Inclusion And The Moral Obligations Towards Tech Education

Traveling Geeks: Monday morning we met with Tristan Wilkinson, Intel’s director for public sector, EMEA Region. His main interest is how technology can be used to improve countries’ economies and improve the quality of life for people through work opportunities.

He posed an interesting question: Do the people that enjoy the benefits of the digital economy have an obligation to help those that don’t have the same access and skill sets?

The way the question is phrased doesn’t invite much debate because it shoots straight for the moral high ground.

Mr Wilkinson says he isn’t “selling anything” but he clearly is. As a representative of Intel, it is natural that he would be of the opinion that more technology and more people that know how to use the technology, the better for society and the earning power of individuals. And thus better for Intel as the dominant building block infrastructure provider.

There is a lot of truth to the view that people with technology skills will have better employment opportunities but will this always be true? Our experience constantly shows that as certain technology skills become more ubiquitous, their potential earning power diminishes proportionally. You constantly need to keep climbing up the value chain.

New technologies do provide new jobs as new types of businesses are created but they are also used to reduce the costs of operating a business and that means eliminating jobs.The overall effect over the long term, in my humble opinion, is that our use of new technologies will reduce the number of jobs, it is not a zero sum process. [Please see: The Internet Devalues Everything It Touches, Anything That Can Be Digitized.]

This all leads to a much more interesting question that we face in the not too distant future, which is not about who gets the new tech jobs.

I’d like to know what happens when, say only 20 per cent of our population needs to work in order to provide all the goods and services for 100 per cent of our society?

We constantly create new types of “divides,” our economy thrives on new systems of haves and have nots. At some point, because of the incredible productive capacities we are able to build and to manage as a result of our technologies, we won’t have to have everyone working to produce the goods and services we all need.

In such a scenario, a system of division becomes meaningless and useless — so how will we deal with that? How will we equitably divide up the spoils of our technological progress and prowess?

I strongly believe we have a moral obligation to begin discussing these types of questions before we have to deal with their inevitable arrival.

Distance learning.

Mr Wilkinson spoke about the importance of using technology to educate African children. He quoted statistics that show that an extra year of primary education among African children significantly improves the health of babies, and reduces AIDS infection rates. So yes, if we, the beneficiaries of the digital economy are able to improve the primary school education of African children then that is a good thing, and it is a moral obligation that we do so.

Fellow Traveling Geek Jeff Saperstein made a great point that removing trade restrictions between the European Community (EC) and African countries would do much more for the health and wealth of African children than using technology to improve education. Trade would lessen the need for aid. Trade is a sustainable form of development — charity is not.

We also discussed “Digital Inclusion,” which is a fancy term for digital divide. Mr Wilkinson said that we have moved beyond the simple issue of access and we need a more ambitious definition.

Robert Scoble said that he has little interest in digital divide issues, the issue for him is more of a “friend divide.” People without rich networks of “friends” will suffer because they will find it more difficult to find jobs, and gain access to people and knowledge.

Interestingly, Mr Wilkinson started off our meeting by saying he doesn’t get Twitter, he would rather be climbing trees with his kids. But by the end of the meeting, and because of constant cajoling from the Traveling Geeks, he registered on Twitter: you can find him @IntelTristan.

He also spoke about being an “immigrant” into the technology world and that it doesn’t come naturally to him, unlike for children, which have a natural digital literacy. I disagreed with this common view of digital literacy. I don’t see a generational divide when it comes to technology but only an experiential divide. If you don’t do it, you don’t know it.

The average age of the Traveling Geeks is probably somewhere in 40s, we are no spring chickens, yet we are in the forefront of using many emerging technologies. Anyone can do the same – regardless of age.

When Mr Wilkinson says he doesn’t feel comfortable using certain technologies that’s because he has chosen not to spend sufficient time with them — which is unusual for someone with his job in giving advice to government organizations. You can’t understand much about social media if you aren’t involved in it.

I will have some video of our discussion coming up later. If you’d like to find out what my fellow Traveling Geeks have to say about this meeting, and also further accounts of our trip during this week, please visit: Traveling Geeks where the posts are being aggregated. You can follow the Tweets with the hashtag #tg2009.

Speed Dating with Tech Entrepreneurs in London “US/UK Speed Date with SeedCamp Winners” as Part of the Traveling Geeks Blog Junket #TG2009

One of the fun events we’ve created for the #TG2009 trip July 5-11th is a “US/UK Speed Date” event where the Geeks are moving from company to company around the room to collectively meet with all of the SeedCamp winnners.

SeedCamp is an organization that matches mentors with technology entrepreneurs. It’s a terrific idea and one that goes beyond just the relationship of a venture capital firm with their investment companies.

I’ve reviewed these organizations in advance and will hope to capture as many of their business models and unique points of differentiation for you on the trip as possible.

Here’s a list of the companies with whom we’ll meet for this event. This is my quick overview of what I got out of just looking at the home pages of each of their websites. I’ll be briefing you more via this blog as I get to hear their stories.

The biggest thing I noticed in reviewing these sites is the terrific work coming out of the UK. The Silicon Valley used to have an unfair advantage of venture capitalists, tech workers and local savvy. No more.

Today I am working out of Utah on my MacBook Pro, starting to write this blog post on free WordPress software that was updated by my tech guy from India (thanks, Satish!). Once you see the creations of these Seedcamp winners, you’ll agree that consumer web service creation is no longer coming solely from the California coast.

Basekit Groupspaces Huddle Kwaga Moo Qype School of Everything Skimlinks Spotify Stupeflix Ubervu Zemanta

Basekit Drag and Drop Object-Oriented Web Site Designer. Hot area for massive growth, according to moi. Can’t wait for this demo.

Groupspaces The next generation of Yahoo! Groups, full of excellent features, like file sharing, payment systems, group scheduling. Finally, someone with an alternative to that heaving elder, Y! Groups.

Huddle Like Basecamp. Interested to see the differences. Global collaborative projects are here and Huddle knows it.

Kwaga Email management system. Perhaps like OtherInBox? Hoping it has support for Apple Mail.

Moo We all love those little cards. Checking in on the advances of one of the most fun, unique companies in the world of printing.

Qype User-generated local reviews. Yelp for Europe and South America (so far).

School of Everything Great idea – sign up to teach something or cruise the database for something you’d like to learn. As Boomers age out, they want to give back and have a lot of skills. Great individual matching opportunities for unique skill sets. Fire dancing anyone?

Skimlinks Site-wide JavaScript to add affiliate link codes to your whole site. If you are a publisher, signed up with a bunch of affiliates, this is a great way to automate links on your site to add affiliate code and get rolled up reporting.

Spotify A new spin on music. Waiting to see the demo. My buddy, Shak Kahn, is involved so I know it’s going to be clever.

Stupeflix Kinda like Animoto – take your photos, images and add your music to create a video. This is absolutely what’s hot right now and I like the new empowering tools for folks who want to be creative but aren’t schooled in the arts.

Ubervu If Twitter Search and Google Alerts had a baby, it would be Ubervu. I’m super high on the meta services for social nets. Like MobyPicture, a syndication tool that let’s you post your images, audio and video to all your soc nets in one fell swoop, Ubervu is a social listening tool that also lets you comment from the ap. This is smart – take out the steps to commenting by helping you reply and comment to any service from one ap. Can’t wait to see this demo.

Zemanta Speaking of “commenting,” Zemanta is a Firefox extention that gives you creative ideas for adding images and other associated content to the comments you’re making on the web. I’ve installed it and will play with it and see if it makes me look smarter.

P.S. At SXSW, I interviewed Dave Taylor (AskDaveTaylor.com) about his blog commenting strategy. At this juncture of the web, you must engage in social listening, and Dave gives some great strategies for commenting and managing your time around responding. Here’s the interview.

Dave Taylor and Susan Bratton Community Powered Podcast SXSW

Original Post – Click Here

Susan Bratton & Dave Taylor on Social Media Strategies for Staying in the Game Without Being Overwhelmed – Coping Mechanisms from @DaveTaylor

Love creators and the power of technology to connect to audiences. Creators give real value to our lives. @zzizzl #WDYDWYD #TG2009

Love creators and the power of technology to connect to audiences. Creators give real value to our lives.

“We simplify the way people communicate by using their name as a simple point of contact,” Micha Benoliel, Digitrad. #WDYDWYD? #TG2009

"We simplify the way people communicate by using their name as a single point of contact."