Socially Speaking

The Waxxi ‘cast with Cory Doctorow is up for your listening pleasure. There were more questions coming in via IM/email this time than via phone, which is an interesting dynamic. Cory really delivers an incredible amount of knowledge, thought and sharing in answering one question, never mind dozens. Have a listen.

For those who prefer text, here is another (great) question from the chat, by Diggal:

(1) Why do you think Boing Boing is so popular, and (2) do think online blogs will take over print, TV and other traditional media?

So, Boing Boing I think owes its success to a few factors. One is, we have good taste. I think we pick out neat stuff. That’s cool. I think, though, that there are lots of people who have good taste, and one of the things that we do that goes beyond having good taste, is we are very, very, very explicit in our headlines and our summaries. You can tell from reading a Boing Boing headline exactly what the Boing Boing story is about. You can tell from reading the first sentence, everything that’s in the story. You can tell from reading the whole post, everything you need to know about the link.

And that’s, I think, an enormous advantage over other blogs, which often post things like, “Funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Can’t describe it, just go look.” When you’re looking at 10,000 undifferentiated headlines in your RSS reader, it’s really hard to pay attention to those things. They don’t alphabetize well, they don’t make any sense, as compared to these very, very explicit headlines.

There are other reasons of course. Clay Shirky famously described the power law distribution of blogs. His thesis is that the rich get richer when it comes to inbound links and to attention and traffic. Which is to say, the more links you have pointing at your blog, the more chances there are that any given person will find your blog; the greater the chances that any given person will find your blog, the greater the chances that someone will make a link to your blog; the greater the chances that someone will make a link to your blog, the greater the chances that someone will find your blog. So, in other words, we’ve been around a long time, and that makes us popular, too.

Will blogs take over traditional media? I think the future composts the past. You know, opera wasn’t’ taken over by radio. It might have been overtaken by radio, but it wasn’t taken over by radio. By the same token, I don’t think traditional media will disappear, but I think that the role that it plays will be greatly shifted.

There are certain kinds of stories that you might want to tell, and certain kinds of messages you might want to convey that are just better suited to being discussed and conveyed in a distributed fashion by individual bloggers and small groups of bloggers who have this distributed conversation linked together by services like Technorati, Google Blog Search, trackbacks, and comments that just aren’t as well suited to being distributed and promulgated by big, monolithic broadcast media.

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.

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.