Posts filed under 'Blogs'
Yesterday I’ve assisted to the Conversas Unicer (an informal meeting organized and sponsored by Unicer a major beverage player in Portugal) where Bruno Giussani was the main speaker and some very well knowned portuguese bloggers (Maria João Nogueira, António Granado, Luís Paixão Martins, Eduardo Correia, Paulo Ferreira and Paulo Querido) joined in in yesterday’s conversation.
The starting point “We used to call them users” set the motto for a great presentation. The title was a clear reference to the ‘OLD’ web, where people’s role weren’t anything more than mere spectators of the whole business. The web we live in today if far different, since much of it is actually based in Action, web2.0 brought in personalization and customization, users stood up and embraced the role of actors! Which for companies actually meant more work or at least they couldn’t just count on users eating all the PR jargon they meant them to take. Users got a voice!
According to Bruno, users can be more or less involved along time with a company or product, but they tend to follow a specific path of engagement:
- witnessing
- sharing
- conversation
- collaboration
- action
At first, we’re all mere spectators, witnessing whatever happens around us. Nothing new here, or by that matters with the any of the following states. The only difference is that with the advent of web, the power and time by which this all process happens is amazingly fast, meaning I can progress from the point where I’ve witnessed something to the point where I decide to engage some action about it in a fraction of the time it used to happen.
For companies this brought in the need for them to engage users in all this different mind settings. And basically you have two options about it: retreat or engage the conversation. Bruno and the portuguese bloggers that joint the conversation seem to have an agreement that if you’re 100% into it, it’s probably better not to jump into blogging at all, since the side effects of poor communication (blogging in this case) can be as worst as traditional communication.
On the other side, for the companies that actually engage the blogging as a communication process, there are clear advantages. Users will always talk about a company products, so if a company does provide their customers with a place for open discussion about their products, they somehow control or at least have an active part in that discussion. Anyone barely involved in PR knows how much better that is 
Plus, and this was something I haven’t heard during the general conversation, people bond with brands, it’s a natural happening, the difference this days to me is that people don’t expect to be mass-branded any more, so the closer they feel to a brand, the more personal the experience gets… and experience is everything in there days.
I personally thing that this theme is amazingly important in the Portuguese context, and I’m not complaining as usual to the fact that Portuguese companies tend to be 2/3 years far behind the rest of Europe/World! But by seeing so many companies PR’s in that room and see them taking part of the discussion and acknowledging the importance of the blogs in their communication as a way to increase their users satisfaction and have closer control how their brands are interpreted by their customers it’s already clear the importance blogs will have in the future or traditional public relations.
One last note, for the Unicer team who organized this all event, congratulations to them all, I’m truly inspired and admired with the concept.
UPDATE: the full video (PT) is now available:
April 11th, 2008
It’s true, SHiFT is back!. We almost died on our first ’round’ in 2006 but we decided to do it again and today we just gave the first (public) step towards it: we’ve unleashed the dates - set your calendars:
A lot of work, discussion and planning will take place in the coming months, so EVERYONE is invited to help and participate in the discussion! We haven’t closed down the speakers list and there will be space for the community to vote on who gets to go up on stage later on, but if you know an exciting speaker or you’re just wishing your secret hero to be there, don’t be shy and let us know!
Pop us an email over at speakers@shift.pt.
Don’t forget to keep an eye on the official Blog, or subscribe SHiFT’s Twitter / jaiku feeds.
See you back in October!
February 29th, 2008
Following a tip from Mark, this blog is now fully iPhone compatible! All it took was to install a very nifty Wordpress plugin - iWPhone. So if you’re the lucky owner of an iPhone just tried it out, you should see something along this:
There’s also another Wordpress plugin for the administration area of your blog - iPhone / Mobile Admin (this one not only for iPhones, but for most of the mobiles actually):
February 20th, 2008
Well, SHiFT isn’t happening this year… and yeah, believe me no one’s more sad about it than myself, well may two other crazy guys! But we couldn’t stand still so we’re helping SAPO in an astonishing event:
and trust me, we’re all aiming high, as high as we’re allowed to get all the Portuguese developers an amazing event, party and mash-ups contest!
The event is obviously inspired in the Yahoo Hackday which totally contagious us back in May in London when some of us managed to attend it. Since not all Portuguese can afford traveling as far, SAPO decided to recreate it!
We’re trying to include everyone that wishes to go, but since the seats are limited, I urge everyone who praises for his/her geekiness without shame to register at:
Time as come for all of you geeks in the closet to come out, so I really hope we can all meet up in November in Lisbon!!
September 21st, 2007
UPDATE: I’ve also uploaded some pics to flickr, and the presentations are already being put online at the railsconf homepage.
As promissed I’ve been writing down a lot of notes (on paper) from the conference itself, which I’ll put online later! For now, you could check some of my non-edited notes from the presentations I’ve attend so far:
September 18th, 2007
My inner geek rejoices with the fact that Microformats have finally got a little more buzz lately! One particular Microformat I’ve been using is XFN (Xhtml Friends Network), aka the Relationships Microformats. This particular Microformat allows me to easily state the sort of relation I have with other people and for instance the blogs I link to.
Yesterday I was discussing with a colleague about whether she should or shouldn’t use them on her upcoming service and although to me the question had a dead simple question, convincing her and others wasn’t as simple as I expected!
People expect us to always have some sort of golden rules, some well defined goals or at least some clear advantages for spending development time/effort in implementing something we’re suggesting. I confess in this case we don’t have them, for for the sake of innovation I really recommend on jump into the unknown sometimes, just for the fun of it.
From our conversation I managed to sort out some key ideas on why we should all start using XFN on every service that can use it:
- CONTACTS AREN’T ALL BORN EQUAL!
As a user I clear understand that some people are more important to me than others, accept it, it seems to me and although I don’t call everyone friend, I call them all contacts, some of the are actually my friends and family, so some type of differentiation is necessary!
- EARLY IS AN ADVANTAGE!
If you think that you might use Microformats like XFN on your service, start using them from day 1! That’s the only way to ensure that you start collecting that extra information from the very begging and your users will start using them on every relation that they define on your service.
This is actually a key factor, all social networks start with high rate of new profiles creation and with them a lot of social relations are created too, having XFN introduce later in this process means that your users will have to endure in a redefine process for every relation they already had on the system, and to me, quite few of your users will actually do it, leaving you with in a mix state of information, some of they have XFN info other don’t.
- LESS ISN’T ALWAYS GOOD!
That’s the case with information, traditionally the more information you have, the better! With XFN in particular, the managers of that information will have a better understanding of the types of relationships that are sprouting on their services, allowing them to gather a clear typification of their user base, their interests and the type of relations they’re creating on the service: Who are they inviting, friends? Colleagues? Family? With little effort, this extra information, allow to envision new features where you should really invest some development time in!
To me is relatively simple, even if at the very beginning this extra information is pretty much useless, I really believe that sooner rather than later we’ll all greet ourselves by having it rather than not. As in so many other situations, when we collect information that by itself doesn’t represent or add any value, in the end we always seem to come up with new and interesting ways of using it.
- GROUPS LACK CONVENTION!
One of the reasons presented during the conversation for not using XFN was that from the User point of view you could get the same experience by allowing them to create and use different user groups.
Well thats just WRONG!
Sure, groups allow you to separate your friends, but if you allow your users to create user-defined groups, you have no way of actually knowing what type of people he/she is collecting in a particular group. By sticking with the XFN closed attributes you know that the users that used them, although randomly they’ll use it in the same sense and situation!
Those were the main results from our quick conversation! Now that I’ve written them, they seem pretty common sense, but they really weren’t when we started.
We surely missed some other reasons for using XFN, does anyone has other “motivation” factors for using them?
August 31st, 2007
SHiFT website was just unveiled: http://www.shift.pt, and in it people will find a whole lot of information about it, like dates (28/29th September), place and much more. Check it out:
July 5th, 2006
… are a funny thing to have on blogs! FilmLoops allow us to share photos without having to post them, or all the thumbnails in a post, which is a rather boring thing to do.
I’ve read about them on the Guy Kawasaki Blog, but only yesterday I’ve noticed the blog posting feature and I decided to give it a try! Started with some nice pictures I’ve taken yesterday on “Estufa Fria” (a beautifull garden in the heart of Lisbon) followed the simple steps, and here’s the result:
Nice, isn’t it?
A simple idea comming out of this, would be to have something similiar in effect, but that could harvest the pictures from a simple pictures feed, something like a new version of Fotos screensaver, hein?
April 11th, 2006
Yep, it’s true, Google just bought a fully functional blogs analytics: Mesure Map! The funniest thing is that my invitation didn’t even arrived, but I guess Google has received theirs!
February 15th, 2006
I’ve been reading a lot about the role of Blogs as a new type form of information media, about the problems they raise but also about the advantages they bring on different scenarios and subjects.
A few months ago, I participated in a small talk (PT) which ended in a discussion of wether or not blogs could be considered a form of journalism, I personally said yes, although the more conservative wing criticize this position. The thing is that In Portugal if you don’t have a journalist credential then you cannot be considered a journalist, at least this was their main reason, besides this, which is something that might not be true in other countries, they also stated that journalists normally obey to some type of code of conduct, which a blogger may not, since there’s no guiding rules and in general no editorial role or board to evaluate the bloggers work. Another point, which I kind of realize it’s a problem is the one regarding the blogger security, on a traditional media there is some type of protection for the individual journalist, some type of safe net, the blogger has to deal with the lack of it, which might work in favor or against him.
Positions apart, seems that despite all the opposition blogs are increasing their importance as an important source of information, at least according to the latest report (part 2) of the Technorati CEO, David Siffry.
In this report, he states that although people are still paying a lot of attention to mainstream media giants, like CNN, The New York Times, etc. blogs are assuming interesting positions. He presents the the curve of importance according to Technorati, and surprisingly or not, on what we calls the Big Head you’ll find four blogs: Boing Boing, Engadget, Post Secret and Daily Kos sharing this sort of attention:
The most surprising of his report his that the biggest changes are happening after the Big Head and on a part of the attention curve he calls the Magic Middle, where blogs pretty much rule in the readers attention world. This particular area represents some of the most interesting and influential bloggers, which in many of the cases are writing of niche subjects and not for the mass media, but on this niche topics they rule:
But even when we get out of the niche subject, David points out that the blogosphere is and has been reacting to public events, to the incredible speed of about 1.2 Million posts each day, which means that there are about 50,000 posts each hour, according to Technorati stats:
Also deserving mention on David’s report is the fact that Tagging reaching mass utilization, 81 Million posts are using tags or some sort of categorization, which means over than 400,000 new tagged posts are created every day, it’s an impressive number.
David, presents the new service from: Explore, which allows anyone to guide his search according to the relevance guiven by a virtual editorial board composed by those blogs that technorati finds to be more important, informational or influencial on a specific subject. If you try out Explore, you see that you can refine (or fllter) by authority, in which authority represents this set of blogs that everybody seems to be linking to, in particular what do they have to say about what we’re searching for! The higher your search authority rank, the fewer results you’ll get. It’s an incredible feature provinding us with a tool to search the real “juice” on this mess blogsphere is becoming…
On the report you’ll also find some quite interesting numbers:
* <a href="http://www.technorati.com">Technorati</a> is now tracking over 27.2 Million blogs
* The blogosphere is doubling it's size every 5 and a half months
* It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
* On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
* 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
* <a href="http://www.technorati.com">Technorati</a> tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
* Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
* Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers
February 15th, 2006
