I attended a blogger lunch at The Heritage Foundation this afternoon.  While the event was about a topic not relevant to The Bivings Report, I did get something out of it for the blog.  At the meeting I overheard two people who have known each other for years on the Internet but met today for the first time in person.

Certainly not everyone who forms relationships (friendships, professional associations, etc.) on the Internet has a chance to interact in the real world, but meeting and interacting off-line cements on-line relationships.  In fact, while I may communicate and track people I knew years ago on the Internet, the strength of the relationship is derived from our interpersonal interaction with each other.  Regardless if a relationship started on-line or off-line, both realms can help cement and strength the relationship.

Thus, while this is pretty obvious, I think it is important to remember every once in a while how helpful meeting on-line friends in the real world and vice versa is.   

This morning I attended a breakfast discussion (thanks, Kara Kelch for inviting me) put on by Potomac ExecutveBiz at the Tower Club in Vienna, VA.  About 20 persons from various organizations, consulting shops, technology firms and start-ups showed up to throw around ideas and experience regarding Web 2.0.

It was well worth the time spent (The food was way better than most places!) and great to hear from others in the field.  Jim Garrettson of ExecutiveBiz led the discussion.  Here are a few comments of my own – my idiosyncratic take-way.  Sorry if I missed any important points (I’m over 50); you can add them in the comments section.

As we all know, the consensus was that there is no firm definition of Web 2.0.  Blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, YouTube and Flickr all got their due.

In a general way, Web 2.0 is about giving more power to the individual to express, explore and collaborate with others on the web for personal, professional and organizational advantage.  Many more voices, connections to friends, associates and strangers, and fleeting, at times, or lasting relationships for many reasons, at others, on a local, regional and global scale. (For a contrarian view, see Mark Cuban’s posting on how boring the web has become.)

• Vishal Gupta talked about how Cisco is harnessing wikis (following the model set out by James Surowelski , to spur innovation through collaboration, and how Jeff Crites at Fellowforce.com has built a start-up around the notion.

• Thomas Wallace from Ecofusion and Chase Warmington from emPivot.com described their new start-up to leverage the power of user-generated video in the sustainable development space.
• David Gorodetski at Sage Communications raised the important distinction between the technology itself and the social aspects, and Brian Reed at Boxtone talked about the strategy of implementing 2.0 tactics.  (This to me is critical: the strategy must dictate the application of the technology.  It matters that we’re clear about what we want to achieve before we select the technologies.)
• Brands are evolving.  As Andrea Morris of Hinge, Inc.  (I think) paraphrased Jeff Bezos, “Brands are what people say when you are not in the room.”  How true.  And companies are finally coming to the realization that they can’t control the message, the word of mouth, or customer interactions.  Phil Zalewski at Pulse Media Group mentioned Nike’s efforts in this arena, and the example of Dell was brought up.
• As Arthur Clarke once said,” The future is here but it’s not evenly distributed.”  There was lots of talk about how everyone is an organization can and should (?) make use of the evolving web.  As Martin Ringlein of nclud noted, not everyone has the temperament, skills or inclination to participate.  Others disagreed, saying that there’s probably a place for everyone on the new web.  (I’m not convinced).  And the same goes for organizations.  Some still try to limit the use of the web, and others are very slow to adopt.  Carie Lewis was surprised to learn that Instant Messaging was not available in her new organization.
• The World Bank’s Irakli Nadareishvili brought up what I thought was an under-appreciated idea.  Making new applications (software, databases, widgets, etc.) available to others for their blog and websites will push the boundaries of Web 2.0.  Facebook is doing this, and so is The Washington Post, as is The World Bank with its blog tracker, very much like our own ImpactWatch (but which isn’t free).

These new things – mixtures of data, visuals, interfaces, etc. – much like Google maps and restaurants on your mobile phone – called "mash-ups" will truly push to the next level.  It’s one thing to have a platform to say something; it’s truly another to offer services that help find people (the current search for Steve Fossett), offer services to the aged, and transform our health care system, alleviate poverty and reduce violence (those elusive goals founders of the Internet keep aiming for.)

We were asked at the end to say who’s the winner of Web 2.0.  The consensus favorite was the individual.  I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure we're all equal winners.  I'd feel differently if I had been a founder of Youtube or MySpace.  

Marketing and grassroots activity on social media sites like Facebook is a burgeoning field.  More and more people are recognizing the power and the variety of ways an organization can harness or benefit (or suffer, for that matter) from social media action.

The news today provides an example about why this trend is important.  According to The New York Times, Time Warner is closing its new economy magazine Business 2.0. 

What I find most interesting in the article is that it states: "A report in The New York Times in July that Time Inc. executives were considering closing the magazine mobilized some support among readers, who started a group on the social networking Web site Facebook."

The Huffington Post's media page linked to an Adage article with the headline: "Facebook Group Not Enough To Save 'Business 2.0'."  While this headline is true, it is very imprtant to note that one of the most read newspapers in the country, the Times, mentioned the Facebook group supporting the magazine.

The moral of the story is that the mainstream media organizations pay attention to social media — particularly the larger and better known sites.  Creative efforts, embarked by organizations or their supporters and detractors, may get significant media attention.  Therefore, it is important for organizations to pay attention to this part of the web as well. 

When the CIA began advertising and recruiting via the social network facebook, I kind of laughed since someone working in the clandestine services should keep information safe and not freely divulge it.  However, the whole point of social networking sites is to share information with your "closest friends."

Interesting, the Financial Times reports today that the intelligence community within the United States government sees more use to social networking sites than just recruitment.  As the government is trying to improve inter-agency communication that plagued it before the 9/11 attacks, the paper reports that, "Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, believes the common workspace – a kind of 'MySpace for analysts' – will generate better analysis by breaking down firewalls across the traditionally stove-piped intelligence community." 

According to this article, the government expects to deploy the social network – named "A-Space" – to all of its intelligence agencies by December.  This is a rather interesting development in the world of social networking sites; it's a bummer that most of us can't observe how it functions. 

At first it was the Red Coats, then The Beatles, and now BBC employees are the British Invasion.  This time they're invading one of America's most popular web sites.

As of this posting, the British Broadcasting Corporation facebook network has 14,726 members.  For an imperfect comparison's sake, I've checked the CNN network, and it only has a 311 members while the Turner Broadcasting (CNN's group in the AOL TimeWarner empire) network has 1,843 members.

Back on June 6th, Richard Sambrook, the social media savvy and friendly Director of BBC Global News, wrote on his personal blog SacredFacts that "[t]here are over 10,000 members of the BBC group (for which you have to have a bbc email) alone. That's about half the entire organsiation."  The BBC has invaded facebook!

Today I had lunch with a friend who works for the organization and asked him if there is some directive from management to join.  He said that there wasn't and reckons membership went viral as people kept inviting their colleagues to join.  However, people have joined; how many actively use it is another question.

For awhile some regular facebook denizens created groups for specific programs, but now a few BBC employees are creating groups around programs and other features so that they can use the site for more than personal reasons.  For instance, the domestic BBC Two news magazine show Newsnight and the BBC Mundo ¿Hablas español? blog created official groups to connect with their audiences; the prior has asked its group members for story ideas with an invitation in the title, "Get Yourself on Newsnight!"  Further, the new iPlayer — which is in beta — now has an application on the social networking site that allows users to rate and share their favorite BBC programs.

While there is no directive to join or use the site, my friend also told me that he plans to use it to promote his program soon.  Hopefully, the site will help the show connect with its audience better and perhaps use its audience to promote it to their friends.

Of course, only programs and BBC features that lend themselves well to social media — based upon format and audience demographics – will benefit from facebook, but it seems that many Beeb employees are keen to try.

At the very least, as Sambrook wrote in his facebook post, "it's fun. If you havn't [sic] jumped yet with facebook, twitter or any of the others, come on in, the water's fine."

Let's stop and think for a moment.  When was the last time you heard a song on the radio and thought to yourself, "I have just got to get to the store and buy this CD!"?  I honestly cannot remember the last time this happened to me.  Now, it's much more likely for me to browse the net, see a song on a friend's Facebook or MySpace profile, and head over to iTunes to download a digital copy of that song.  Times have changed, haven't they?

According to a recent study by Entertainment Media Research, this pattern of browsing and buying digital music is becoming more and more commonplace.  This company argues that social networks are in essence changing the way people browse and purchase music.

In June, Entertainment Media Research (from now on, EMR), conducted an online survey of 1,700 people in the UK to judge how music consumers use social networks to obtain music.  Here are some important points from the research:

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Ben Hammersley's coverage of the recent elections in Turkey isn't the only time that BBC News is using social media to report a story. 

Currently, José Baig and Carlos Ceresole are traveling across the southern USA without uttering a word in English.  ¿Hablas español? is their project to see what's it like to use only Spanish in the country.  Beyond a BBC hosted blog, they're using other social media tools like facebook, flickr, and Skype to connect with their audience.  So far, 325 people have joined their facebook group.

These projects should prove interesting.  Using these social media forums probably doesn't cost the BBC more than it is already spending to gather information.  While money isn't the issue — especially since the Beeb is generously funded in part by the British people, distributing content via social media is risky for a mainstream news organization, but the BBC has the enough good reputation to experiment. 

I’ve been reading with fascination a series of articles that have appeared lately that question the value of maintaining a presence in Second Life. To make a long story short, a year or so ago, when the Second Life hype was deafening, companies appeared in mass to construct their own virtual presences as a way to market their products. Now a year later, companies are rethinking their presences in Second Life for the simple reason that no one comes to their online stores.

NBA commissioner David Stern had this to say about his league’s presence, which went live in May of 2007:

I think we’ve had 1,200 visitors. People tell us that’s very, very good. But I can’t say we have very precise expectations. We just want to be there.

To put that figure in perspective, our modest blog here sometimes attracts 1,200 visitors in a given day. But I think Stern’s quote is instructive beyond the number he reveals. Like with so many companies/politicians/organizations, he has launched a social media campaign that has no real purpose.

To me there seem to be distinct phases to the life cycle of the hype around these social platforms as marketing tool.

(Phase 1) The real first movers start experimenting with marketing in places like YouTube, MySpace or Second Life. The Wall Street Journal or Business Week writes a story touting what they are doing.

(Phase 2) The “me too” crowd dives in head first in the hopes of getting some earned media and branding themselves as a company/organization that “gets it”. The campaigns are often sloppy and the commitment is shallow. Most of the campaigns end in failure.

(Phase 3) The hype is over. The “me too” crowd has moved on to the next thing and success/failure of campaigns are judged by the actual results that they produce as opposed to the hype they generate.

I think Second Life is in Phase 3. MySpace probably is too. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are in the middle of Phase 2.

So what’s my point? I don’t really have a big one. I’ve just seen some pretty awful videos on YouTube lately with no rationale beyond “me too-ism.” Before diving in head first, I’d encourage folks to truly think through what they are hoping to achieve and not do something just for the sake of doing it.

Not every company needs a Second Life island and not every politician needs a presence on 24 social networks.

As I mentioned on Monday, Google — which owns YouTube — invited me to attend the CNN/YouTube Democratic Debate in Charleston, SC. 

Thank you, Google and CNN for a great time!  I had so much fun.

I was part of a group of about 10 to 15 YouTubbers that were invited.  Some were invited since they are active in political discussions on YouTube while the rest of us were selected since our questions had a great chance of making the debate. 

My question was to find out where candidates get their news and information and why they trust their main sources.  It didn't make the telecast, but just barely.

Personally, one of the most interesting aspects of the the debate was talking with my new friends who are active on YouTube.  For instance, one is starting a new job any day now and mentioned in a recent video that she mentioned her employment news.  Then all of the sudden she posts a video from Charleston explaining she's attending the debate as a guest of YouTube.  She laughed that the timing of the debate and new job aligned poorly.  Someone left a comment on her post giving her the impression that her subscribers might now think that she is a YouTube plant — a lonelygirl15. 

Another new friend got an angry comment from one of her channel subscribers just after she posted her first video from Charleston.  The person asked if she was attending the debate, and she said that she wasn't since we all had to sign non-disclosure agreements to not reveal our trip until the day of the debate.  The commenter called her a liar.  However, what could she do?

Transparency is crucial in social media, and two of my friends were accidentally caught in incidents that affected their reputations.  Hopefully, any disgruntled subscribers understand the circumstances that my friends were placed in.  That's one of the most important things I learned during my whirlwind trip — a once in a lifetime experience that I don't want to happen just once.

Now, in interest of transparency, here's a disclosure.  The Bivings Group has an account with Fred Thompson's campaign.  Having said that, here are the circumstances around my question and invitation.  I recorded my question before we had the Thompson account, and YouTube had no idea of my employer or job before inviting me last Wednesday.  Before the debate I did disclose my connection to Thompson to the Google staffers in charge of my trip.  Further, I also disclosed this fact to journalists that interviewed me about my experiences in Charleston.

The LA Times had a story last week about companies abandoning their presences on Second Life due to poor return on investment. From the sound of things, many companies that have stayed may not be long for the world:

But the sites of many of the companies remaining in Second Life are empty. During a recent in-world visit, Best Buy Co.’s Geek Squad Island was devoid of visitors and the virtual staff that was supposed to be online.

The schedule of events on Sun Microsystems Inc.’s site was blank, and the green landscape of Dell Island was deserted. Signs posted on the window of the empty American Apparel store said it had closed up shop.

The story gets to the heart of the matter when it says, “most firms were more interested in the publicity they received from their ties with Second Life than in the digital world itself.”

You see this all the time. Companies launch MySpace pages or Twitter accounts or iPhone versions with no rationale beyond getting a short term media hit. After the buzz dies down it becomes pretty clear that the emperor has no clothes.

I’d advise a more measured approach to these things. Companies that take the time to do some research and understand the culture of the communities they participate in will have a lot more success long term than those that dive in head first in search of a few press clips.

I’m someone that is eager to try out the latest Web 2.0 tools, be it Twitter, Powcne, Jaiku, etc. One of my frustrations is that I have to essentially start over every time I create an account on one of these things. I have to enter the same profile information over and over, and, more importantly, I have to recreate my network on every one of these sites.

It gets old quick and is one of the reasons I personally haven’t embraced social networking to the extent others have. I just don’t have the energy to maintain presences on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, etc.

Tony Macdonnell feels my pain and suggests creating a portable “friends” system using OpenID. Here is the gist of it:

I’d love to see OpenID be able to support some kind of “Friend Confirmation” system that would allow me to submit my OpenID to a social network like Pownce (which I am currently going though the “Friend Finding Headache” with), and have it automatically add all my friends that are members of that application. It would be amazing if applications could also add new friends of mine back to my OpenID as well. With this I could traverse all the brilliant applications in the Web 2.0 world taking all my friends along for the ride with me.

I’m not sure this is the exact right solution, but it is certainly on the right track. It is time for your friend’s list to be made portable.

When I first heard that the BBC assigned a reporter, Ben Hammersley, to report about Turkey's elections via several social networks, I wondered how the Beeb would present the reporting. 

Would it just leave all the information at the individual sites and hope that people would navigate to the other reporting?  Would it place links or somehow coax the social networks to allow it to advertise the other sites on each reporting page?  Or would it cull all the data into one place?

It has chosen the third option; see the Webreporter: Turkish journey page.  I like how this page serves as a quasi-portal to the reporting spread out over various sites.  This serves as a place for the reporting to combine while maintaining a consistent layout (with the exception of the Google map with Hammersley's route) but still leaves reporting spread out.  In a sense, the reporting serves as bait to lure flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter, etc. users to the BBC's site — a rather interesting marketing campaign.  I wonder how Twitter, Yahoo!, Google, etc. feel about this.

Oh yeah, thanks for the link and traffic to my previous post, BBC.  I'm chuffed.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen harangues Mother Jones, the left-leaning investigatory magazine, for its feature package titled "Politics 2.0" in which it basically asks, "Are we entering a new era of digital democracy-or just being conned by a bunch of smooth-talking geeks?"

Rosen, an open source advocate, accuses that "The Mother Jones editors had a great story about politics and the web within their grasp, but they were too busy fabricating myths they could bust up later— and so they missed it."

So, what do y'all think about Politics 2.0?  How would you answer MoJo's questions like:

Blogs, social networking, and viral video are redefining where political discussion takes place. But are they just replacing the old machine bosses with a new group of bullies?

Is old media dead, or is the blogosphere just a flash in the pan?

I don't think that Politics 2.0 is dead since most of the major 2008 presidential hopefuls are courting bloggers, using video sites like YouTube, or deploying social networks on their campaign sites.  In fact, it probably is growing since the mainstream media just loves covering politics on the Internet as well.  However, I'm biased.

I openly admit that I don't get the whole point of twitter.  I'm not that interesting, and the stuff I do isn't either.  However, some people love it.

Well, twittervision makes tweets that much more interesting as it shows the geographic location of a tweet on a Google map of the world.  This seems like an interesting use of a Google API.  In fact, seeing tweets pop up from all over the world is fascinating.  Perhaps this is how I'll get hooked… (Click on the image for a clearer view)

This morning Todd gave me the somewhat amusing task of tracking down some cool applications on Facebook.  In browsing through the network's new features, I realized that there are applications for just about any activity imaginable, from tracking restaurants, movies, and music, to adding pictures of cute bunnies to one's profile.  A lot of these applications remind me of features available on MySpace, including the photo slideshow applications and the "top friends" apps, which allow you to designate who your "best friends" are within your profile.  There are, however, some really useful and interesting ideas that developers have come up with for Facebook. A few of my favorites are listed below.

Useful Apps 

I am all for tools that enable me to condense all my web surfing in one place.  The Feeds application allows you to list all your favorite RSS feeds in your profile by creating a Feed Book. The application also helps you share your feeds with friends and see what feeds are the most popular across the whole network. Digg and del.icio.us also have useful applications that let you display and keep track of your bookmarks using Facebook.

In a similar vein, Flickr Photos allows you to link your Flickr account and your Facebook profile, making all of your photos accessible via Facebook. This is a big time saver for people like me who have tons of digital pictures but hate having to use the Facebook upload tool. 

Two more that I like are Netflix Movies and Flixster.  Netflix Movies displays your Netflix queue and "movies at home" in your profile and updates it once a day.  You can also find friends who are on Netflix. Flixster lets you rate movies and get recommendations from friends.

I also like the idea behind Hangouts, which lets you tell your friends where you're going and keep track of places you like to go.  You can also see what your friends think about some of your favorite hangouts. Eating fits in here, as it lets you track your favorite foods and restaurants.  Use those with Unthirsty, a happy hour finder, and you've got yourself a weekend.

Avid readers might want to check out Visual Bookshelf, iRead, and Books, which let you keep track of your library, rate books, and find others who have books you want to read. 

Not so useful, but still fun 

Besides the useful apps listed above, Facebook is chock full of applications that are pretty useless but still fun and entertaining.

Locational apps like Map Your Friends and Where I've Been let you track your travels and friends' locations on maps. 

The Compass helps you determine your political leanings, while Polls lets you ask your friends questions.

Finally, who wouldn't want pictures of cute bunnies in their profiles? 

By opening its platforms to developers, Facebook is now offering its users a fully customizable environment.  Prior to these developments, a major criticism of the network was that it didn't offer the flexibility of MySpace, which has endless widgets available for its user profiles.  I think this increased flexibility factor is helping Facebook vault to the lead in terms of social networking popularity .