Socially Speaking

For many, Cory Doctorow needs little introduction. He’s co-editor of Boing Boing, one of the world’s most popular blogs (@ 2 million + unique visitors/month), an award winning sci-fi novelist, digital rights activist, and a wickedly brilliant (and nice) human.

Forbes and the World Economic Forum (WEF) tend to agree:

Top 25 Web Celebrities for 2007

WEF’s Young Global Leaders for 2007

I’ve had the chance to meet Cory at the Google Unbound event, and again at NYU’s Free Culture series. He’s been accurately described as a “walking, talking Wikipedia of digital rights” (as I witnessed at NYU), and he’s a self-described ‘nethead’ (meaning he’s been online for as long as he can remember, and has actually written his books online…for years).

To say he’s engaging is a massive understatement. You need only to hear/watch/witness him speak, and you’ll know how very true that is. But, look out. You’d better strap your brain in. Seth Godin on Cory:

I sat next to Cory at a conference today. It was like playing basketball next to Michael Jordan.

We’ll be elaborating on Cory and his work here, up through the event and beyond. For now, here are the details:

WHAT: Interactive Podcast with Cory Doctorow

WHEN: Monday, February 12, 2007 from 1:30-3:00pm PST

HOW: Register here. But hurry!

It’s free, as always, but spaces are limited and you’ll need to register in order to participate.

Cory’s latest short story collection, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present can be downloaded for free, listened to via podcast , and purchased one of many places (you can get an autographed copy delivered to your door, too).

Used to be that ‘Differentiate or Die’ was the survival catch phrase for organizations in just about any industry. Seems now, the word of the day is one that we like very much: interactive. Don’t believe us? Ask around:

“We can have the coolest content or technology, but changing human behavior is hard,” said Mitch Feinman, senior VP at Fox Mobile Entertainment. “But if you give people a reason to participate, they will.”

Eric Bader, senior VP of MediaVest Worldwide had this to say:

“Too much of what we’re seeing is for branding and awareness — it’s the easy model to graft onto digital,” he said. “But what we’re looking for from digital media is levels of interaction.”

“For us, it’s a lot less about finding ways to use mobile but the ubiquity of the phone to allow you to participate in a campaign,” Bader said. “That it’s interactive is more compelling to us.”

And, (fairly new) CBS Interactive president Quincy Smith:

“The real opportunity for media, in this day and age, is ostensibly the interactive platform, not just online, but mobile and gaming. Basically, promise a way for content companies to get closer than ever to their audience, to build community around their audience, to learn from their audience so they can put out better professional content.”

For months we’ve been preaching this: if we’re in the world of two-way (or social) media, then why are so many platforms still linear? Let people participate. And by that we mean more than commenting (although commenting is great). One of Waxxi’s mottos is: The Floor is Yours. That means, when it comes to a podcast or vidcast, it’s not all about the interviewer, or interviewees. It’s what the people (the viewers, audience, listeners, customers) bring to the table; what they bring to the conversation, experience, and content.

In short: Let Them Participate.

Our next Waxxi interactive podcast will feature two world-renowned figures in technology and business: Michael Parekh and Michael Arrington.

A founder of Goldman Sachs’ Internet Research group, Michael Parekh was one the early pioneers who helped discover, nurture, and fund the foundations of the web as a lead analyst for the IPOs of such organizations as UUNET, Yahoo!, and eBay. Michael (Mukesh) is a native of India and came to the US in 1977. He is passionate about all things Internet and technology, as well as interesting trends he observes, globally.

In building TechCrunch over the last year, Michael (Mike) Arrington helped lay the foundation for the Web 2.0 world we’re living in today, becoming one of its most highly respected pundits, educators, and analysts. Mike is a former corporate attorney (of Wilson Sonsini fame) who has also helped bring public several companies, and is co-founder of edgeio. He grew up in California and Surrey, England, and lives and works in Atherton.

Together, Michaels Parekh and Arrington represent the core of the Internet, and technology: where it’s been, how it’s evolving, and where it’s going.

The date to join in on this global conversation is Thursday, June 29, 2006 and time is 10:30AM PDT. As always, all you need is a phone and/or Internet connectivity.

By dialing in, you’ll not only hear the entire conversation, but have the chance to be a part of it. We’ll give you instructions when you register, but the process is rather simple: hit two buttons on your phone in order to ‘raise your hand’ to ask a question or make a comment.

Many of our members and participants outside the US will choose to use this feature only. This was tremendously effective and important for our first interactive podcast.

We’ll have more details posted shortly. Stay tuned.

Last week, at a gathering at San Francisco’s Hotel Utah, a powerful group of social media types, podcasters and bloggers corralled. Shel Israel hosted the event in honor of Jackie Danicki and Adriana Cronin-Lukas.

Jeremiah Owyang helped spread the word, as he does so masterfully, as well as putting people who should be talking together, together. One of them being, on my behalf, Mario Sundar. Mario is a passionate, inquisitive, and incredibly knowledgeable person with whom I’m interested in becoming more acquainted. Thanks for sharing some time to speak (and for the very kind words), Mario. We must continue the conversation.

Gratefully, Adriana was quick to introduce me to Mike Hudack of Blip.tv. And Jeremy Pepper was quick to point out how much he sounded like Vince Vaughn (it’s true. Jeremy was spot on). If you haven’t seen what they’re doing, take a look at Blip. We are.

It was great shaking hands and chatting with BrainJams‘ Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells. [mental note: keep in touch with them. we like what they're doing.] And just down the bar, not there for the event, was Buzz Andersen who does some interesting work with Apple’s Soundtrack Pro.

A nice surprise was seeing Mike Arrington again (the last time was at a much larger party at the TechCrunch House) who agreed on the spot to join our next interactive podcast with guest Michael Parekh. More to come on that…which will prove to be one heckuva global conversation.

What I’m finding so interesting is the concentration of immensely driven, passionate innovators, thinkers, creators and knowledge workers here in the Bay area. We’re thrilled to be a part of it all.

(closing tip: if you’re in London on June 21, be sure not to miss What My Space Means, held by the Engagement Alliance).

On Saturday I attended Techdirt Greenhouse for the second time. It was, again, a great gathering of intellect, talent, opinion and creativity. The format and methodology is what attracted me in the first place: brain jamming, if you will. Interesting companies were pre-selected and given the opportunity to present to us, the participants. We then, armed with our color coded shapes (which defined our discussion leader/rooms), were off to separate breakout groups to ponder, debate, challenge and summize the questions asked of us by each of the presenting companies.

Two that stood out to me in making an impact, socially speaking, were Jumpcut and SalesBuilder. Jumpcut is making some waves by bringing way-cool movie making capabilities – a la iMovie SANS the Mac – alas, even to the novice. CEO Byron Dumbrill was impressive, and has already caught the attention of Warner Independent Films. Even better, he’s combined social networking (community) with digital media. We likee.

SalesBuilder is doing something really different, and close to our hearts: telling companies to stop focusing on themselves in their online presence, and really focus on their customers. If I might steal from Techdirt’s blog post subtitle theme, this stems from the It’s-not-about-you department. Really.

This is one of the reasons I take a back seat role as the host of Waxxi’s podcasts. If I didn’t, we wouldn’t be interactive, or nearly as interactive. Nor would we be any different from any other podcast (one-on-one, or one-on-few, interviews). “The floor is yours” is one of our mottos, and seemingly SalesBuilder CEO’s Olivier Chase’s mentality. Good stuff, and a powerful tool to any organization that wants to be truly closer to their customers, and outstep their competition by doing so.

It was nice to see some familiar faces, like Jackie Danicki, Hillary Johnson, Chris Sims, Anne Donker and more. It was equally nice to see new faces, one of them being my lunch mate Mike Sigal of Guidewire Group. And Sprint’s Russ McGuire, who gave a speech centralized around the theme of his excellent blog, the Law of Mobility.

Someone who left a very strong impression upon me, even before we got to know one another more, was Adriana Cronin-Lukas. There are few people in life with whom you connect on very intense levels, and know that your meeting was not a coincidence. Adriana is one of those people, to me (and others, of that I am sure). In addition to speaking at industry events – as she did the next day at Vloggercon on Net Neutrality – Adriana is making marks in the world as a Sherpa of social media, and then some.

Thanks to the Techdirt Mikes and the entire team for another great idea workshop. Keep ‘em coming.

Our first interactive podcast with Robert Scoble and Shel Israel was not only fun and insightful, but historical. People were able to communicate, comment, share and ask questions to Robert and Shel directly, whether via chat/IM or via phone. The content is smart, interesting and the energy level is high.

Since the event ran over an hour and a half, we’ve split it into two parts. There are a few ways to listen:

1) Click on either Interactive Podcast or Naked Conversations on Waxxi’s home page. You may download parts one and two, or play it within the page. There, you may also subscribe to the podcast’s RSS feed.

2) Listen live here to Part One and here for Part Two

A few things to note:

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a Cordless Phone. What you’ll notice in the beginning of Part One is a bit of fuzziness, especially on Robert’s line. That’s something we learned not to do in the future: have guests call in on cordless phones. Landlines with a quality headset a must, everything else (cordless, VoIP, cell phones) a no-no.

Radio Quality, Digital Sound. My voice will sound different, in terms of recording quality, than the others. That’s because I did my part from a studio. And I worked with folks with more than four decades of broadcasting experience. The goal, as Shel mentioned, was to help move podcasting forward.

To Edit or Not to Edit? Should the interactive podcasts be completely, well, Naked? In the aforementioned ‘forward’ thinking process, we felt it would only improve the listening experience to edit out some of the “uhs” “ums”, seconds of dead air here or there, and to record an intro and a close.

Chat is as Important as Voice. We implemented a chat client very close to the launch, and were not able to alert everyone to that fact until the day of the event (next time, plenty of notice so that international callers don’t have to worry about staying on a direct phone line to the US just to have their questions answered). The chat/IM was equally as important to the interactive experience as having people call in. It also allowed for commenting, and facilitated the flow of the conversation quite nicely.

We’ll detail each part in future posts, but in the meantime nobody does it better than Jeremiah Owyang. Thanks again to everyone who signed up, participated, and interacted, and to our incredible guests.

Enjoy the listen.

update: We gave Jeremiah a sneak peek (he’s good at pulling those eStrings). His announcement of Waxxi going live is here.

After many hours of post-cast work in the studio, and answering many emails, IMs, blog posts and calls, I can finally blog about Waxxi’s inaugural, historic interactive podcast.

Before writing about the details of the event, which Jeremiah Owyang did with lightning fast timing and hurting fingers (indeed, a Web Prophet), and which Mish, Peter Dawson and Robert Scoble live-blogged, we need to send thanks to many.

To our guest speakers:

Shel Israel, renowned consultant, accomplished and in-demand speaker, writer, genuinely nice guy, and soon to be globe-trotter. It all started at a really fun party over a glass or two of great wine. Thanks for being open to something new. Thanks also for the kind words, and continuous support. We hope you’ll come back for a future Waxxi cast to talk about the findings of your next book.

Robert Scoble, who I feel like I know yet I’ve barely met (only briefly when he signed my copy of Naked Conversations at said party). Why? Because he’s real. He’s a real guy talking about real things, Microsoft-related and not. Thank you for being bold, brave, honest and forthright. Thank you for opening up our tech/business/shareholder value-driven world to something more important: life itself. And thank you for taking time to spend with us today, so close to the time that you left your Mom. I hope you and I get the chance to sit down together someday soon.

To each and every one of the participants today who took the time on a Saturday morning/afternoon/evening (depending on where you were in the world). It was an energetic, insightful first session, albeit not without a bump or two in the road. Mr. Raftery, we owe you at least a pint of Guiness after you welcome your newborn to the world.

To TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington. Thanks for liking the concept, and because of that alone, helping introduce the world to Waxxi.

And last – but certainly not least – heartfelt, very special thanks to our hard-working, always on, and very patient team of developers, designers and consultants:

Bob Joyal, formerly with Fast Company; Frank Gruber, of Somewhat Frank (Frank, you rock!); Frederick Giasson of Talk Digger fame; Val Landi, Silicon Valley IT veteran and author of A Woman from Cairo; and our partner-in-design, Chicago’s Inflatble3.

Thanks, to all. We wouldn’t be Waxxi without you.

Frank Gruber, who authors an excellent blog focusing on Web 2.0, posted about waxxi and our event today.

So, who will be taking part in our interactive podcast on May 20th, other than Robert and Shel? Well, bloggers like Tom Raftery, Zoli Erdos, Alex King, Pete Dawson, Jeremiah Owyang (and many more) for starters.

There will also be neo and even not-yet-bloggers in the crowd –or people who want to explore the idea for themselves or their company.

It should be a lot of fun. We imagine some interesting conversations will result, both during and after the kickoff event (download the PDF here).

(disclaimer: Frank Gruber is currently acting as a strategic consultant to waxxi)

These, they are exciting times. In a mere 21 days, our inaugural interactive podcast, featuring Naked Conversations co-authors Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, will be upon us. Hundreds of people globally will be able to participate, and have an opportunity ask questions of Robert and Shel the same way one or two interviewers would do in a traditional podcast.

Some are curious how this “interactive”, or participatory, podcast will work. Well, it’s easier than it sounds.

Here’s a 3 step process that explains it, hopefully, pretty clearly:

1. Go to waxxi.us and click on Register. Then follow the yellow brick road. (or the simple instructions you get along the way).

2. Once you’ve confirmed your registration, we’ll send you a toll free dial in number and a unique user code. (this allows you in to the virtual event that day, and allows us to see who you are when you are ‘raising your hand’ to ask a question)

3. On May 20, 2006 at 10:30 AM PDT call the toll free number, and the fun begins. (to find out when that is in your part of the world, go here)

You don’t have to ask a question or make a comment. You can just listen and observe – the same way you might do at a conference speech or presentation. But, for those who have read the book (and even those who haven’t) and have questions or observations about business blogging, this is your shot to pick their brain.

We’ll have simultaneous chat/IM so the “hallway discussions” can take place, and everyone who attends will be invited to continue the conversation online.

There will be some pretty interesting people in the audience. We hope you can join us!

Podcasting has no doubt, grown by leaps and bounds. Feedburner’s latest report details some amazing podcasting factoids. Among them, as Frank Gruber points out:

1. Feedburner now manages more podcasts than there are radio stations

2. Podcasting is outpacing the speed of adoption of the last “most successful consumer product launch in history” the DVD

As popular as podcasting has become, we thought – wouldn’t it be great if people who are typically listening to a podcast, could be a part of it? They could participate in it, both the day it is recorded and after.

Comments on podcasting is not new, but very smart. Neither is social podcasting which is brilliant. But interactive, we thought would be very, very cool. Everyone’s in “the room” and as time allows, gets a chance to have their voice heard.

Our first interactive podcast will feature Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, co-authors of the book Naked Conversations. The invitation is open to anyone who wants to be a part of this experience, have a chance to ask Robert or Shel (or both) a question, comment on something they learned in the book or have observed as a blogger. Hundreds globally will participate.

Cost: FREE! But you need to register. After the event, the conversation continues online at waxxi.us. More on that to come.