As most readers may know, I have been working on developing Archetypes that describe not only the types of content that surface through blogs but also for the different types of blogs themselves. Certainly, I am not the only one pursuing this line of thinking.

Previously, I’ve noted that one method to look at Blog Archetypes was a dissection of the Editorial Goals of the author(s) and the composition of the Entry Archetypes (see “Introduction to Blog Archetypes”). These two simple constructs provide a very broad base to move forward from in that they get at both the conversational nature of blogs as well as the underlying motivations.

A couple of weeks after that initial post, I came across some interesting thoughts from Jon Lessing, a decidedly more “business” approach to understanding blogging (see “A Different Take on Blog Archetypes”). Specifically, Jon was investigating the various business models that could prove to dominate in the long run.

Most recently, Suw Charman, recent addition to the Corante Team, has provided another high-level categorization worthy of note:

1. Marketing blogs – external, B2C blog, used to promote either the company or a product/service.

2. External blogs – used to communicate with the public, but not for sales purposes, for instance, in a consultation process.

3. Insider blogs – employee blogs, sanctioned but not controlled by the company they work for. (Sometimes disclaimed by the company they work for.)

4. Internal blogs – blogs used within a company to share knowledge, build communities, disseminate news.

5. Content blogs – public-facing blogs reliant on content to bring in either subscription or, more likely, advertising revenue.

Source: Strange Attractor, “Lumpers and Splitters”

I’ll try to incorporate these classifications as I further my versions of the Blog Archetypes.

Amy Jo Kim mentions a new technology that is designed to ease the “pain” of dealing with those, now tiny, pictures the new breed of camera phones are snapping around the world.

For camera phone owners, one of the greatest hassles of the process is actually getting the picture off of the phone once a picture has been taken. There are a few reasons that moving pictures is important (at least for now):

• Contagion – For the most part, people are snapping pictures “in the now” and want to spread that moment to as wide an audience as possible (usually the members of the clan that aren’t physically participating).

• Storage – Currently, the small devices are not equipped with enough memory. This makes it impossible to store a large amount of photos on the device at any one time. Couple this with the photos already attached to contacts in the address book and the available space is even smaller.

To further aggravate matters, there are a couple of strong forces that are working to prevent users from actually getting their photos off:

• Interface Design – As with most electronic devices, there are a number of features that are present, but often not used. With camera phones, usually a button is dedicated to the camera. However, there are still issues in terms of how to manipulate that image, how to annotate it, etc. that prevent many users from having the picture the way they want it.

• Infrastructure Design – Making phone calls is a relatively painless process on your average camera phone. Sending pictures is a different story. In many respects, it requires a bit of knowledge outside of the device to tell how to send a picture (e-mail vs. MMS, for example) . In addition, there’s a potential looming question if the image ever made it to its destination.

  In Europe, where SMS is far more entrenched, these may be “easier” tasks. We’re only barely getting used to it here in the States now.

Enter Cognima. They’ve developed a new technology that will allow for the automatic publishing of photo content to a central server. The process happens behind the scenes and is, in essence, painless. According to a study they conducted, it works:

Cognima’s study showed that normal camera phone users end up not being particularly active MMS users. Only 18% of the regular MMS users they followed kept on taking and sending pictures on a regular basis two weeks after the trial began. However, 70% of customers using Cognima were still happily snapping photos.

Source: TheFeature, “Taking The Upload Out Of The Camera Phone Process”

A couple of days ago I lamented my experiences (see “Blogging Needs Better Stewards”) bringing a large group of people from diverse backgrounds into the world of blogging. Though there was great interest and hype around the industry at whole, we collectively dropped the ball when trying to re-create the foundations and to paint a complete picture.

Taking my complaint to task, the Jester himself has offered a nice write up on what blogging is, what it does, and how it’s done.

To quote just the most basic definition:

A blog, web log, or online journal consists of a online journal, diary, or writing of things that interest you. Goals can range from wanting a forum to exchange ideas, gain feedback, judge reactions, share your knowledge & experience, showcase your weekly comic strip, showcase and share your photos/art/pictures, bookmark your favorite topics and hyperlinks, and/or to be a part of an online community with people who have similar interests… or just the opposite, and merely to lurk and absorb and read one or all of the above with or without partaking in responding and feedback.

Source: JesterXL, “What is a blog?”

I’d love to see more of these. If anyone else wants to submit their definition of a blog and what it means to them, please do and I will aggregate them all into the right column.

I attended the BlogOn Bootcamp yesterday which was intended to be a hands-on workshop on blogging for those attendees that are interested in the blogging phenomena. Unfortunately, that was a mission that was doomed to fail.

The speakers did a good job with the material they were assigned. The issue was really twofold:

• Complexity – Blogging is such a complex industry that it’s often hard to remember the number of bean bags being juggled at the same time. As a result, trying to cram the entirety of the blogosphere as well as demonstrating how to use these technologies into a few hours is a near impossible task.

  It would have been more beneficial to do a high level and then dig into the few most important topics than to try and broach the entire space.

• Presentation – It’s sad to say, but we’re terrible at explaining what we do in this blogging business. To really sell the notion of anything, really, requires a good deal of practice and refactoring. It takes time to learn what works and what doesn’t, what people like and what they don’t.

  Most important, it’s about creating a picture, sometimes literally, that leaves people with a mental model that persists once they walk out the door. For the most part, the Bootcamp failed to create that image and it was easy to tell from the audience.

If we want to make this move, we need to sell it.

Match.com was on TV today speaking about their new campaign to get single Americans out for the vote. I haven’t been able to find a link to anything related to the campaign, but one two interesting statistics came out of the interview:

• 39 million singles already do not vote, whereas couples are more likely to vote
• Being registered to vote makes you more sexy, apparently. In a brief survey of 1600 singles, 91% of respondents indicated someone was more attractive if you are a registered voter

Who knew.

I will be attending the BlogOn Conference on The Business of Social Media. The event will be held over the next two days in UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

The event has recently sold out, but there is still a live webcast available if memory serves me correctly. If anyone will be attending and wants to meet up, please, comment here. I’ll be posting some notes once the event is completed.

Since I’ve just posted on the potential of fostering social networks in the air travel industry, it only seems appropriate to point to these two articles that show both the good and the bad sides.

On the good side, we have a recent article highlighted by the Online Dating News blog. As the article notes:

DALLAS – The loving looks begin outside the gate, jump to the jetbridge and snuggle themselves into coach seats in the Southwest Airlines courtship ritual.

Low-fare carrier Southwest likes to say it is the airline built on love, and thanks to an open seating policy where customers are free to chose their seats, many a romance has taken off with the purchase of an inexpensive ticket.

Over the years, the Dallas-based airline which calls the city’s Love Field its home has received thousands of letters and scores of wedding invitations addressed to top executives from couples who met on one of the airline’s flights.

Source: Houston Chronicle, “Airline’s open seating breeds love connections”

This is similar to the experience I had when travelling from London to Amsterdam and from Nice to London using EasyJet. They use the same first-come, first-served model. Once you’ve checked in, you get to board earlier or later. There must be any number of strategies to “trap” or “barricade” yourself into a situation that is favorable to your desires. Quite interesting.

On the bad end of the spectrum, we have an example of how the often alcohol-laden nature of travel can act up. In this case, we’re seeing a reversal of the Air Rage problem.

MOSCOW, Russia (AP) — Drunken passengers often give air crews trouble, but Russia’s leading airline on Tuesday reported an “unprecedented” reversal: A passenger was assaulted by intoxicated flight attendants.

Two crew members on a domestic Aeroflot flight beat up a passenger who had complained that the flight attendants were drunk, airline spokeswoman Irina Dannenberg said.

[...]

Seeing that the crew were intoxicated and were not fulfilling their duties, Chernopup asked to be served by a sober and competent flight attendant, Dannenberg said. He was then beaten up by crew members.

Source: CNN.com, “Reverse air rage on Russia flight”

So the networks are there, and vibrant, but not organized. I still think we need this.

I’ve spent far too much time waiting for planes, flying on planes, exiting planes, and what not. Tomorrow, I am back on the road again for a couple of days in San Francisco to catch BlogOn. The entire time, I’ve been thinking one thing: Where’s the Network?

Let me explain the backdrop a bit. Air travel brings millions of people into close proximity on a daily basis. From the long lines to the waiting lounges and onto the planes themselves, people are placed into contact with many people that have never met before. For many, this entire process spans any number of hours, and even into extreme cases, days. It’s always amazed me that there isn’t more of an effort to get people to interact.

So where are the opportunities, if any? I think there are a few contexts that are worth considering:

• Seating – Currently, we have very little control over where we are sitting. The basic class system of airline seating tends to separate in terms of wealth but fails to really deal with anything else. There’s no “Kid’s” section, for example.

  What would be quite interesting, however, is the ability for people to aggregate based on a series of personal or professional preferences. Imagine indicating that you are interested in skiing, hiking, and rollerblading. Based on those preferences, seating is organically aggregated.

  There are, naturally, lots of logistical and security issues with this approach. Despite all that, it seems like the trip would be so much more enjoyable being surrounded by people that I knew shared my interests.

• Waiting Lounge – The Waiting Lounge is always packed with tons of people that are just twiddling their thumbs trying to kill time. For the more daring, they will branch out and start conversation. In past experiences, I’ve found most people are receptive to a little conversation and enjoy passing the time this way.

• In-flight Experience – Riding for 8 hours in a cramped environment is ripe with issues, least of which are the social ones. But once you’re past the physical obstacles, it’s hard to pass the time if you can’t sleep. I’ve flown a number of different airlines over the last few years and only recently has the experience improved. Technology is to thank. Here are just two of the great things I have seen:

  • Song Pop Quizzes – In February I was flying out to Las Vegas to attend a conference and celebrate my birthday. On that flight, we got to experience the new in-seat entertainment system Song was outfitting their planes with.

    We found an extremely interesting game running. The game allowed the passengers to answer a variety of Pop quizzes. There was a running timer and the scoring was based on choosing the right answer in the fastest time possible. Interestingly enough, the game allowed passengers to select a member name, but it also identified their seat location.

    This added an entirely new dimension to the flight. On one level, people were changing their names to reflect their personality, or the personality of the group they were with (my buddies and I were R2, D2, and C3PO — our nicknames for each other. In addition, we also knew how we were doing and found ourselves peering around to see who was winning or losing as the game progressed.

  • Virgin Atlantic Text Messaging – I’ve come to be a real fan of the Virgin Atlantic Airline. I took them to and from England for my recent EuroTrip. The experience to London was good enough, but apparently, on the way back I was on one of the “upgraded” planes. This plane featured a far more interactive in-flight entertainment system (powered by Linux no less).

    What interested me most was the Text Messaging abilities. The system allowed members to send SMS messages to their buddies on the ground. More importantly, though I didn’t experiment with it, a passenger could message another passenger on the plane. This was ideally intended for the singles that spy someone of interest in the Waiting Lounge or while on the way to the rest room. It’s quite ingenious.

Is an emerging Third Space our travel space? If these are any indicators it seems like we should expect more changes along these lines than less.

The researchers at the University of Michigan have come up with their own “Small World Instant Messaging” system. The system works as follows:

To search for information, a user sends a question to his own referral agent, which broadcasts the query to all of the user’s buddies’ agents. A referral agent in the buddy’s messenger searches its information identity profile to see if that person is likely to be able to answer the question; if not it can forward the query to its buddies.

When a likely match is found, that person sees the question and the path the query traveled, and can start chatting with the questioner immediately or make plans to discuss it later.

Source: Social Software Weblog, “Take a SWIM : Small-World Instant Messaging system”

What happens when our identites collide? If one is revealed and another is compromised?

Peter’s run into some complaints on his personal blog

http://worcester.typepad.com/pc4media/2004/07/i_hosted_the_ca.html

David St Lawrence warns of the peril

http://ripples.typepad.com/ripples/2004/06/balancing_micro.html