January 2009 NetTuesday liveblog

UPDATE 5:25pm - I am at WorkSpace for the January 2009 Net Tuesday event. I said hi to Kris Krug, Joe Solomon, Lorraine Murphy and Suresh Fernando very briefly and then came right to the back to allow myself time to set up my liveblog.

Was planning to do it with Cover-It-Live but frankly I don’t have the time to learn the platform and “on the fly” doesn’t really jive with me. So I am definitely going for good ‘ol fashioned WordPress. The comments should be flowing freely if you want to comment.

I’m also available on Twitter (I have TweetDeck open) if you guys want to tweet your questions to the speakers. Will try to capture them on the fly.

UPDATE 5:31pm- I am just saying hi to Karen Quinn Fung, and can se some familiar faces here now. Carol Sill, Dario Meli, Jenn Lowther and Ryan Holmes from Invoke Media, Nancy Zimmerman, and many other friends of mine are here. If I haven’t said hi, let me know! I also can see Caroline from Beauty Night, April Smith and Erika Rathje (whom I didn’t know if she was coming or not)

UPDATE – 5:59pm – Kris starts by thanking the sponsors. WorkSpace, the location sponsor. Communicopia also sponsors the event (thanks Jason!). As we go around teh room introducing ourselves (Twitter name and a quote), and I have to say that a lot of people are NOT on Twitter. I’m kind of shocked.

Boyd Cohen – 3rdWhale
Their launch party is at Ceili’s Pub (Smithe and Granville) – so Boyd is inviting everyone to come along (too bad both ). They are at the intersection of smart phones, green businesses and consumers. Making it easy for people to live a green lifestyle anywhere where they live in the world. Green businesses having a hard time to reach consumers. Consumers not easy for them to find data about green businesses.

3rd Whale solves that problem by finding green businesses – then their iPhone application helps you find those green businesses. They are committing to having 100 cities by the end of the year (around the world). What kind of green business? Anything to live a green life-style. Do whatever you want to do anywhere in the world.

You can rate the business in terms of how green they are, etc. The next version has descriptions of every business and an expanded rating system and a tagging system so you can do more refined searches. They are integrating a coupon model for green businesses if you’re using their mobile app. They also have a user-generated review system.

QUESTION – How do you evaluate the green-ness of the companies you have on there? – R.- They have a mechanism to screen businesses online. Those that are relevant then it goes into the database. They rely on the user to rate it.

QUESTION – Eesmayl asks why 3rd Whale? - Triple bottom line, whale is an endangered animal, they want to be the largest social movement around green businesses.

QUESTION – Do you do anything non-iPhone? - Yes, working on. Android and BlackBerry.

Heath Johns & Ben Johnson – Urbantastic

They are doing a pitch for Urbantastic. Most of us believe that non-profits are really important. We are entering into a pretty bad patch. So we’re going to talk about how Urbantastic can help. How does a Non-Profit-Organization (NPO) transform itself? By engaging with the audience. Social media helps with the engagement. How does it look like? They get themselves a website. Then they slowly and surely open themselves up using e-newsletters and then blogging. Then they create a personality asking questions and doing some crowdsourcing. They are the platform for micro-volunteering.

Basically, it’s doing small tasks without any commitment. An example – instead of forwarding his concerns to the organization, he took 10 minutes to create something for the NPO. The best part for the volunteer, he/she doesn’t feel a commitment is necessary but their creativity is tapped on. Promote the organizations who embrace social media and engage in micro-volunteering.

Say you want to tap into a talented lbour pool, who don’t have much money and want to engage in a leaner, smarter organization model. The task may get undone or done very poorly. What needs to happen is to get the people engaged with the small tasks. The jobs get done for free AND professionally. This creates engagement between the NPO and the community of crowdsourcers. Saves money and creates an organization with a larger support base. That’s what Urbantastic helps create!

Q .- What’s the business model? R.- Well, we are not a for profit organization. Our operation is essentially a volunteer labour. Most of the value is with the organizations as they embrace the social media (and then further may be able to create some money out of it).

UPDATE: 6:30pm - We are still in the Q/A process with Urbantastic.

What are some other tasks? – Well, that’s a good question – Sometimes technology – Photoshoping for an organization, or just finding out information (crowdsourcing technique). Through Twitter you can do a lot of research. Is it like the Mechanical Turk? Yeah, but for non-profits.

Q.- Can you create user accounts? – You could create ratings of sorts, an important feature. You have to develop your public profile as a volunteer. Then you can put it on your resume.

Q.- Karen makes a comment - The Time Raiser model, similarities. Well, Time-Raiser is not an every day occurrence. It’s an event-based thing. Bring talented people like the Urbantastic audience. You can auction stuff for volunteer hours.

UPDATE 6.35pm – Now it’s the turn of Steve Anderson from SaveOurNet.ca

Steve Anderson – Net Neutrality

What is the net neutrality principle? The operator of the railway had to charge every company to get their car through the road. The Internet from its inception operated on the basis of net neutrality – open Internet = best idea wins. Whether you are a big company or a small company, you operate within a level playing field.

Put simply, net neutrality means non-discriminatory treatment of traffic. That is, outside of limited exceptions such as spam and known viruses, the companies that deliver information over the internet have treated all information the same, delivering each package of information as quickly and efficiently as possible (often referred to as the “best efforts” internet). Under this regime an internet user is free to use any equipment, content, application or service on a non-discriminatory basis without interference from the network provider. Network neutrality means that the network provider’s only job is to move data – not to choose which data to privilege with higher quality service.[Save Our Net F.A.Q.]

In Canada, last February 2008, big players began slowing down services. Competition is stifled. If you have a video service (small sized) and want to stream – you can’t compete with Dell because your service is being slowed down. If it continues to go this way in Canada, producers and entrepreneurs will not be able to compete because they’ll need to shell out a lot of money to be able to get into the fastlane of the Internet. We need more competition and choice – make faster, smarter and wealthier for everyone.

- Join the coalition
- Publicize it
- Get involved

Q.- You say that Canada is going the wrong way – are you saying that it’s just that we haven’t bothered or is it the politicians? In the US they are regulated in a different way, Congress has passed regulations. In Canada, recently the CRTC said that it’s ok that net neutrality is not operating. The NDP is supporting net neutrality, according to Steve.

Q.- Is it the responsibility of municipalities? – We need to encourage an open internet. Local political leaders who suggest free and open access.

Supposedly they are running out of business. But, the question remains – is our lobbying less effective than the American lobbying strategies on this topic?

UPDATE – 6:44 pm Now it’s the time for Lorraine who is going to describe the process of engaging with the community and the Fearless City strategy.

Lorraine Murphy – How to Twitter + Phones for Fearless

Lorraine begins by describing what Twitter is (the microblogging platform). April has been taking video (and so has Jenn Lowther, I think). If you look at Twitter now, many responses (the majority) are “@” replies (which means that Twitter is now about 80% responses). Effectively showing that Twitter has become a platform for conversations.

Twitter is great for news breaks. She proceeds to describe the Toronto explosions and her blog post is the # 1 ranked post on Google. Kris describes the changing face of news (7 minutes vs. 30 mins). Remember the earthquake going on?

Jack Burton Theory of Twitter – Then she proceeds to describe the professional side of Twittering (in her case, her contributions to the FearlessCity account). It has to be very professional. Now Lorraine describes the Phones for Fearless campaign – empowering Downtown East Side residents by video-describing your life. RainCity Studios designed the campaign and went viral. They had 35 blog posts from different people. She put out 400 DMs on Twitter and more than 1500 tweets for the campaign. It’s been quite successful. All she asked is “please just post about this“. Not “give me a phone” or anything. It just went wide. About 4,000 retweets on the Phones for Fearless campaign.

Q.- How long is it likely to stick around (e.g. the business model of Twitter) There are enough robustly created clones. If you learn how to use this platform.

Q.- Are there filtering methods? Yes, by keyword, or using Power Twitters, or TweetDeck to separate groups, or hashtags, or the Summize tool.

Kris makes a great point – you need to know how to separate the noise from the actual data (signal). He also describes the tool Yammer and also describes the greatly successful campaign. A couple of hundred phones.

Joe Solomon – Top Secret Twitter Secrets

UPDATE – 6:58pm – Now it’s Joe’s turn. Social Actions is bridging the actions with the users. Joe now describes what NPTechBlogs does. This is a Twitter feed that is automatically created for all the top non-profit tech bloggers. First, finding the bloggers and then second, parsing the messages (aggregates everything that is written on the topic). You can use TwitterFeed for this.

And you can also check Joe’s top tips here (his De.Licio.Us site). He also describes how to use Twollo (an auto-follow tool). You can do this because Twollo analyzes your own tweets and auto-follows. The other tool is SocialToo which is an automatic follower-back. He then does show how Search Twitter (Summize) can be hacked into TweetDeck to find specific data.

Q.- How do you make money? Joe is a consultant! He can develop a suite of tools and let you go ahead with it.

Monica Hamburg – Using Flickr for Good

UPDATE – 7.12pm - The main thing about Flickr is that it allows you to upload photos that you can share with the world. You can tag your photos and it’s really very well organized. Monica shares a great quote by Clay Shiry “… although people are doing this out of a personal need to keep track of their photos and so forth, the aggregate…”

The big thing with non-profits – they have these compelling stories. Someone will go to Africa and realize that some things are very powerful and they connect and they share their stories. They don’t have to make up stories, they already have them. For instance – Keep Reaching for a Star in 2009

It doesn’t really function independently. It’s better to integrate it with other tools. It has a lot more impact. So, solidarity. Faces of ONE campaign.

Starbucks Photo Petition Pictures. They support Ethiopian coffee farmers (your photos are submitted with that tag). Monica also describes the Medecins Sans Frontieres photo Flickr stream- unfortunately their Flickr photos do not have Creative-Commons licenses. Better for NPOs to actually license their photos with CC.

Monica is now describing the Bear Your Soul Flickr campaign segment to the larger campaign “Save the Great Bear Forest” (Capulet Communications helping Forest Ethics, Greenpeace Canada). You can check my post here. If you are not associated with any specific campaign, you can create your own one. For example, lots of people created a series of campaigns/groups around the 2009 Presidential Inauguration.

Q.- I’m curious whether there is any sort of a market place component for Flickr – A.- The owner of Flickr has that idea, but not Flickr really probably. That’s not the direction Yahoo! would take it.

Raul – ME – speaks to the concept of establishing relationships with people. I just wanted to make the point that it’s more likely that I will write about your stuff if we are friends.

QUESTION/ANSWER PERIOD

Related posts:

1. Happy birthday, Steve Anderson! (@steveinfos)
2. Ideas on Tap (January 2009) Video-Recap
3. Vancouver Bloggers Meetup January 2009 Liveblog
4. The Vancouver Bloggers Meetup for January 2009 is on Wednesday Jan 21st
5. Announcing the January 2009 Vancouver Bloggers Meetup!