The TrueTalk Blog

Whuffie Or Not, Most Hate Advertisers

Tara Hunt's fun new book, The Whuffie Factor, is gaining a lot of well-deserved online attention. Whuffie is the reputation-based currency introduced by Cory Doctorow in his 2003 science fiction novel, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom. Hunt's book takes up where the Cluetrain Manifesto left off by citing many examples of ways that companies are using social media as means for engaging customers.

But, none of that matters to many of us who've been ground down by advertising and now recoil reflexively at the notion of being pitched in still another form. We've been having a conversation about these ideas on VloggerHeads, and here's my most recent contribution. If you're interested, my first video on the subject is here. Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Find more videos like this on VloggerHeads

Community Inspires Creativity

The folks at VloggerHeads are a relatively small but tight knit community.

My contention is that community encourages and inspires creativity.

Don't believe me? Well, check out this collage created by Scott, one of our most active members. I think it speaks for itself.

Poles Apart

We all know that we live within what might be called a "continuum of intimacy." Some of our relationships are very intimate in regard to certain areas and less so in regard to others (think about co-workers who know your daily office habits well but have never seen you in your fuzzy slippers.)

On line, we're finding ourselves relating in a similar fashion. I had a couple of experiences yesterday that brought home the different value to be gained from different kinds of online "relationships," and talked about them in this video. I'd be interested in your experiences of these various kinds of relationships.

Find more videos like this on VloggerHeads

Communication Tools Have Become "Communiniches"

The rise of Twitter has bloggers doing more than the usual amount of navel gazing.

"Is blogging dead?," many wonder.

The online trend-setting Jason Calacanis probably did as much as anyone to get this ball rolling when he announced his retirement as a blogger back in July. Others, if not exactly calling it quits, have noticed a dip in their blogging productivity.

Regular readers of The TrueTalk Blog will undoubtedly have noticed a (blessedly welcome?) decrease in the frequency and verbosity of my posts. Mostly, that's been due to my intense focus on VloggerHeads over the past five months. But, Twitter has also had an impact.

So, does Twitter threaten blogging? Not in my view.

Every communication tool ever developed has supplemented, not replaced, the ones that existed prior to its appearance. Snail mail? Going strong. Telephones? Still here. Fax machines? Oh yeah. Printed books? Billions sold.

Why? Because each tool is well-suited to do one thing—something—better than any other. And that something can be thought of as that tool's communication niche, or "communiniche." 

The novel continues to be the best method for in-depth exploration of the interior lives of characters.

Twitter is a great way to quickly capture a moment. But it sucks at capturing nuance.

Try to imagine trying to write War and Peace in smoke signals.

The key is finding the right tool for the right niche.

Take video. Today, for example, we have 12Seconds, Seesmic, VloggerHeads and YouTube. All four of these services provide an outlet for creating and uploading video material, but each is focused on a very different niche. While 12Seconds and Seesmic are geared toward top-of-the-head webcam uploads, and YouTube toward being the video repository for entertainment, VloggerHeads focuses on enabling engaging interaction around thought-through material.

So, 12Seconds/Seesmic:Twitter::VloggerHeads:Blogging.

Each has its place in the increasing niche-focused online world. The key is knowing which communication tool to use for which job.

And, We Just Keep Going...

Hard to explain why this is so powerful for me, except to say that it just is.

Find more videos like this on VloggerHeads

User Generated Masterpiece

Many people call vlogger-produced videos "crap." Watch this and decide for yourself.

Find more videos like this on VloggerHeads

Ninging Tweetly

We took a small step towards opening up VloggerHeads yesterday. At least, we tried to. We ran into some database conversion problems that eventually led Ning to take our network offline in an attempt to fix things.

Except that they didn't forewarn us they were going to take it down.

Ouch!

Laura, who is managing our case, send me an after-the-fact message apologizing for the surprise and giving me more information on their action plan. Hey, shit happens, right?

So, this morning, I posted my first Twitter tweet of the day in more or less my usual manner, with a bit of a twist:

Not long thereafter, this response popped up:

lauraoatning? Definitely our contact there! So, I replied (if only I could spell better!)

Look, we all know service glitches happen. For me, the key question about a company is how they respond and recover from the glitch. Ning's doing well on that count, and monitoring their Twitter mentions is another indicator that they get it.

Now, let's hope the problems get resolved so that we can introduce lots of new people to the great material being produced on VloggerHeads!

Social Networks Decrease Porn Viewing?

I was stunned a little bit ago to see this article. Something is happening...but what?

BTW, if you're interested in this article, you'll probably enjoy the new book, Numerati, by Stephen Baker, about the huge rush to analyze, visualize, and make sense of (sensize?) the enormous amounts of data we generate daily simply by our online behavior.

Recycling, VloggerHeads Style

Six weeks ago, renetto and I started VloggerHeads. Paul, myself, and three other people had been discussing the project for the better part of a year. I wrote about it here.

It's been a fascinating six weeks. While we'd been planning extensively for the site, the actual launch circumstances were serendipitous. And, we learned, again, the wisdom of von Moltke's (slightly modded) insight: no launch plan ever survives contact with the users.

Thank goodness! There's no way we could have planned to create a test community that is as creative, passionate, funny and energized as the one we have. Many, many VloggerHeads vlogs have both serious and humorous elements as vloggers get used to expressing themselves in an environment that encourages everyone to say what's on her/his mind in their own way. People who have spent up to two years only watching videos on YouTube or LiveVideo are making vids on all kinds of subjects.

I asked one of our members, Mysti Mayhem, for permission to embed one of her videos in this post. When I watched it last night it struck me as a great example of the kind of interesting material we're seeing posted hundreds of times daily. VloggerHeads is still in alpha testing, but if you'd be interested in joining us, leave a comment and I'll contact you about an invitation when we're ready to bring in some more people.

Here's Mysti!

Traffic Lights and Social Innovation

What happened when the Dutch town of Drachten took out the lights?