Mary Hodder, of Napsterization and Dabble.com, has an interesting wrap up on MashupCamp. What’s interesting about it, to me at least, is not that it deals with mashups (which I’ve begun to dissect) but that it deals with the Camp format itself.

What is a camp? Mary’s got a nice, first-person kind of description:

Camps are in high contrast to top down conferences, where star speakers have their names and pictures splashed around the conference pages for months before the event, followed by music and theater lights to queue the audience to note the star about to speak, letting us know we should be in awe of them, and feeling distance from them. At camps, everyone has an equal chance to speak; there is no advance schedule, and no advance speaker list. The distance is much smaller and people are accessible no matter their status.

The shift in feel is nice. Instead of awe for people like Lessig, there is tremendous respect. The room was quiet because people wanted to listen with care, not because we were forced to… the camp format really supports respect for speakers, experienced or less so.

Most other speakers here are not at his level in terms of career accomplishments. These hackers of mashups, discussion leaders or demo-ers are smart thoughtful accomplished people nonetheless. They need to spend their time well, and the camp conference format means they are able to suggest sessions for discussion and hacking that meet their needs well, but they can also participate in discussion with folks like Larry who are distunguished for the thoughtful consideration of, in his case, IP and digital media.

Source: Napsterization, “Larry Lessig at Mashup Camp”

I’ve got many different points of view on this matter:

• Participant - I’ve been in more than my share of Open Space events and I can tell you that the opportunity to learn is really tremendous. The experience brings out things that are almost never possible, even over the top-shelf liquor in the best hotel lobby.

• Developer - We’re actually building this sort of software. It presents a ton of challenges organizationalyl and developmentally, but now that we can see the pieces of it working together, we know we have a winner.

• Advisor - We’ve been talking and now, even working, with a number of different conferences, tradeshows, and other types of groups that are involved in getting people together. It’s examples and descriptions like this that help drive home the value.

There seems to be an exploding hype cloud around the concept of mashups. I’ve even seen it suggested that Mashups are the evolution of Web 2.0 in many ways - the hype is being transfered from AJAX to Mashups, or something to that effect.

Problem is, I don’t see the viability. Richard MacManus has an interesting post on this subject. As he notes:

To put it bluntly, data owners hold the balance of power in this new world of Web mashups. Some data owners, like Google and Yahoo, provide formal APIs and are careful to explicitly define restrictions on what external developers may do with their data. Some data owners, like craigslist, don’t provide APIs and are more implicit and arbitrary about whom they allow to use their data.

Either way the fact remains that data owners can easily block off the air supply for mashups, either with a business decision (as in the craigslist-Oodle case), a policy update for an API, or by simply changing the data or technical rules around it.

Source: Web 2.0 Explorer, “Mashups: who’s really in control?”

However, this argument doesn’t quite go far enough. There are two obvious situations that would lead to you to bar access to a service:

• Cost - This is the one that Richard pegs. If it’s costing me loads of cash and not extending my brand, reach, value, etc, then you’re not useful to me - you’re a parasite.
• Competition - This is, seemingly, the bigger flag for me. If you are a competitor that is leveraging my data to create your own service or to marginally extend my service, I’m more inclined to see you as a threat.

If I view you as competition, there’s little you could do to assuage me that I should still have access to your data. On the other hand, if you’re simply costing me money, what if I wanted to charge you? This is where my main problem with mashups rests. Mashups aren’t making money. Consider this summary from MashupCamp:

or many, that more productive place was the “Monetization and business models” of mashups session. At least 65 swarmed into the room for approximately 90 minutes of talk about how to make money with the custom applications.

There ended up being no consensus, other than on how to define the various categories of mashup creators and identify which ones were likely to generate income in one way or another.

Source: News.com, “MashupCamp–a new kind of get-together”

If there is a sustainable revenue model AND mashups can navigate the seas in such a manner to not step on the toes of ALL parties they merge, they just might be able to survive. That’s a lot of CAPS if you ask me.

We’ve been busy talking, educating, and demonstrating to a number of different audiences the power of social media. I’ve found that, despite all the flowery buzzwords and metaphors, it works a lot like pornography - you know it when you see it.

One of the hurdles we’ve been forced to address, and attempt to resolve, is the content creation gap. Creating content is hard. We’re often asked “Is it worth having a community before the event even happens?” I alway answer the same way. The activity demonstrates the classic hockey stick growth.. flat at first then growing rapidly once the event has completed.

Another dimension to that discussion, however, is one raised in a recent post by Bradley Horowitz (pointer from Bernard Moon).

There are a couple of interesting points worth noting. The first is that we don’t need to convert 100% of the audience into “active” participants to have a thriving product that benefits tens of millions of users. In fact, there are many reasons why you wouldn’t want to do this. The hurdles that users cross as they transition from lurkers to synthesizers to creators are also filters that can eliminate noise from signal. Another point is that the levels of the pyramid are containing - the creators are also consumers.

While not quite a “natural law” this order-of-magnitude relationship is found across many sites that solicit user contribution. Even for Wikipedia (the gold standard of the genre) half of all edits are made by just 2.5% of all users. And note that in this context user means “logged in user”, not accounting for the millions of lurkers directed to Wikipedia via search engine traffic for instance.

Mostly this is just an observation, and a simple statement: social software sites don’t require 100% active participation to generate great value. (emphasis added)

Source: Elatable, “Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers”

That last statement is really the most important (imho). We’re so trained that more is more, it’s hard to appreciate the value of social systems sometimes. Tt’s nice to have someone sitting atop one of the largest communities online providing this insight. I’ll be updating our own documents to make sure this is clear.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how the chat room works on this site. I definitely think it’s the way to go but I am missing something from the mix. As the owner of the site, I really want notification when I get a new chatter, much like I get an e-mail when a new comment is posted.

While there are a number of other solutions to this problem, and the 3Bubbles team is on the job, I wanted a quick fix now. So I whipped up this script.

Essentially, it checks when you land on a page to see if there are any of the 3Bubbles iframes in use. If it finds them, it pops up a window for that site that lets you see the full list of chats that are present. It updates in real-time since the iframes are copied to that page.

I’ll be improving it when I get time and there’s more things for me to play with, but it does the job for now.

Dowload it here.

If you have Greasemonkey installed, you can right-click on the link and choose “Install User Script”.

With all small businesses, one, if not the, most important criteria for success is a strong, committed team. In the past 8 months or so that I have been tentatively at the helm of our little adventure, I’ve brought many people inside the fold.

When we started, I went really wide with the folks involved. Why? I generally believe that taking any 10 people to start something (you choose what it is), about 2-3 will survive the duration and prove not only enthusiastic but dedicated. When we started syncPEOPLE, I assumed the same. Now it’s 8 months later and the team has certainly shrunk to the right size.

The 37 Signals folks are know for promoting teams of 3. We’ve fallen on that magical number with the addition of Pete Lasko. Our core team now includes myself on Business and UI matters, Pete on Design and Development, and Duane on Development. There’s tremendous overlap there, so please excuse the liberal application of labels. If you don’t believe it, stop by one of our sessions in Provo and see for yourself.

The hardest thing to take, however, is advice. Good advice often never comes in the form you would hope for - it’s frank, direct, and most importantly, unselfish. I take our advisors very seriously. Why? They are there to help and are fortunate enough to not have their heads in the muck all the time.

We’ve had Stowe Boyd on board since the beginning - partly due to my friendship with him, but mostly stemming from his wide experiences and insight into the worlds we’re converging on.

Today, I’m proud to include Jeff De Cagna on our list of advisors. I met Jeff at a conference recently, but that was just the first real meeting. I’ve been lurking on his blog for months now. He’s one of the few individuals from the industyr that is blogging yet and that was a huge plus for me in terms of getting to know him. After a good deal of discussion, and eventually his own evaluation, Jeff decided that he 1) like what we were doing and 2) felt he could contribute in a way that would be beneficial to us both.

I’ve just updated the site, but here’s his bio:

Jeff has spent his entire career working for the advancement of associations and membership organizations, mostly by poking those organizations with a stick! He is the association community’s leading voice for innovation, and recognized by his peers as one of the field’s preeminent thought leaders. In 2002, Jeff was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Association Executives & The Center for Association Leadership.

He is founder or co-founder of two association community consultancies, Principled Innovation LLC and Association Renewal LLC, both located in the Washington, DC area. A graduate of The Johns Hopkins University, Jeff earned a master of education degree from Harvard University. Jeff’s personal interests include the NHL’s New York Rangers, collecting fine writing instruments and playing with Wilbur, his devilish dachshund.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to just what I want to do with this blog. When I first started, I was working through a career change of sorts, moving away from my role as a developer to, well, I don’t know what I am actually.

I had a discussion with several folks at Northern Voice of aligning your audience with your work. The main issue that seems to exist is that as we change as individuals, so does our voice. As someone with many different interests and experiments, I’ve found that many people have followed along with me as I stumbled along. I don’t know that it’s fair to change, but “you get what you pay for” - right?

Today, I’m at an interesting crossroads with what I am interested in. Things seem to fall out into three main buckets:

socialconference.com

My company, syncPEOPLE, is developing a vision I’ve had for the world of events. We’ve been pushing through to develop something that solves so many of the problems I’ve encountered as a semi-professional conference-goer. We’re also bringing in and addressing the needs of the organizer and the people that sponsor and exhibit at these events.

In this regard, I’ve been spending more and more time at blogs and sites that deal with the event and meetings industry. We’ve been looking at how to mediate - how to forge a natural middleground that lets us be participants while still understanding that organizing successful events has never been easy and will continue to be ripe with concerns.

xposted.com

This is the secret project that we gave a glance at during Northern Voice. It is essentially a system that will give bloggers a much more direct way to monetize (or as Nancy White has suggested “cha-ching” their blogs. I’m going to refrain from talking too much about this for the moment, but the reception we’ve gotten from everyone tells us this is a direction to pursue.

In this arena, we’re dealing with many different audiences and issues. I’ve had to do a lot of reading about copyright, blogger’s rights, and publisher’s needs. It’s quite a bit of information and will require much more research to make it succesful.

blogaccents.com

If I ever had one passion as a developer, it was for solving interface issues. I’m not a Jedi Master like Josh Porter or LukeW, but hey, I’m pretty good at what I do. Though I have spent most of my time on the business side of things, the one aspect of building both projects above has been in simplifying the design and working on improvements to the metaphors we use.

Over the last few months, I have also spent quite some time contracting my time out to provide that special blend that I can offer to other startups and large companies alike. Where else can you get a sociologist, graphic designer, programmer, idealogue, and entrepreneur all rolled into one (probably lots, actually)?

One area that I have seen blooming in that time has been the arena of products I call Blog Accents - they’re the accessories being created to adorn our blogs. Web 2.0 has given us a number of different ways to integrate cool things. I’m planning on running each of these sites on a different platform so I can test things out and see how it goes.

Next Steps

So what’s this all mean? Well, sometime soon, I am going to be dropping this site into an archives.socialtwister.com domain. This site will be come an aggregator, of sorts, from my other entities. With x:posting, I will be able to write once and publish anywhere - allowing me to give individuals the choice to better choose which type of information they wany.

I’m also going to be adding more voices to discussion. My partners, Duane and Pete, will be new contributors. I’m also looking for others that want to talk to any of the communities mentioned above.

So that’s it. Fasten your seatbelts and keep your hands inside the vehicle of change.

Well, as luck would have it, a motherload of snow avalanched onto New York City over the last day and a half which has created all sorts of problems for everyone.

I drove down with Bre Pettis yesterday from Northern Voice. We had some great conversation and I’m sure he and I will be in much more contact over the next coming months. And boy would I be in a real pickle if it wasn’t for him.

Turns out that Jetblue, famous for making me take The Red Eye, was still planning on shipping us back into New York on the 11:35 out of SeaTac (yes, that is the name of the city). I was over at Bre’s for the better part of the day and we worked and talked and spent time configuring our phones - we made an exchange for each others’ phone (don’t you love GSM).

In any event, come 9PM, I check the status to find that it has been delayed for another 3 hours - departing 2:35AM. I know a bad thing when I see it. So I jumped off of that and am not waiting for the flight tonight at 11:35. Big Fun!

So, I’m working at a Starbucks around the corner from Bre’s while he’s off educating our youth.

At least I’m getting back just tired enough to spend Valentine’s with the wife.

So, my session is over. It was a really quick one, but that’s what happens when a good dialog gets started, right?

I flashed through my 5 slides and gave the big picture. Unfortunately, the connection was a little slow at the moment which made getting clicks to launch on time a little tedious.

On the feedback side, I saw quite a bit of head nodding and many people seemed quite interested in what we were proposing. If the number of people that have come to me since then (something like 2 hours) is any indicator, then it seems like lots of people will participate.

Chris Pirillo and Jake Ludington were both in attendance as well. Chris raised a good point about Google Spam deductions for re-posting content which we’ll surely have to address. Of course, we both spoke later and we’ve come up with some ideas.

The best comment - from Chris. He said, paraphrasing, “As a person who makes a living monetizing content… this is a valuable idea.” At least that’s what it sounded like ;)

I’m reporting live from the Hampton Inn, Downtown Vancouver. Unfortunately, Chris caught a nasty little flu (or something like that) and bailed so I am here alone for the next few days. Not so bad, now I can jump from bed to bed.

Tomorrow MooseCamp kicks off. I’m looking forward to a number of the presentations, but, naturally, I can’t wait to catch up with many of the folks I haven’t seen in quite some time now.

My presentation/discussion tomorrow is titled, “(Really) Monetizing Your Blog”. We’ve been developing a system here for some time now and we’ve got many ideas that we want to put on the table to get feedback from people. While I hope it to be a great discussion, I’m certainly planning some fun as well. That fun, specifically, will look like a sneak preview of the new system we’ve been building that should change the way that bloggers fun their obsession.

We probably will still be quiet on just what we’ve done for a few weeks to come, so if you can make it to the Camp, be sure to pop your head in.

Ben has an interesting post about some dialog he had regarding the commerical viability of blogging and/or podcasting to some of the association folks during the ASAE Technology Conference.

Here’s a choice little segment:

The first thing I want to blog about is: Can associations make a profit by blogging or podcasting. A gentleman who attended my panel discussion on Web 2.0 Social Media and the Long Tail seemed resigned that there was very little possibility to make money from blogs and podcasts. I replied to his question, stating that I felt that the finances would work themselves out in the end through better member engagement. Better engagement = better renewals. Our moderator chimed in to say that blogs and podcasts aren’t expensive to set up, in terms of hardware and software costs. That’s true, but as any blogger will tell you, blogging takes a lot of time, and that’s where your expenses will be greatest.

Source: Certified Association Executive, “”

Ben does a fine job explaining some of the key benefits. I’ll wrap them up in my own words here. There are three primary, softer, returns that should be considered when looking at these mediums.

Expanded Reach

Making use of blogging and podcasts will put you in reach with a much broader audience than one might imagine. Blogs tends to perform wonderfully in terms of search engine indexing. Beyond the search impact, these two audiences (though often overlapping) represent a very diverse group, including the Gen-X and Gen-Y audiences we’re all being sensitised to.

Extended Conversation

With a broader reach comes a greater opportunity to engage real conversation. Conversation is a hot topic these days and often, it is simply lumped in as a buzzword disguised as a regular word. In truth, once you’ve created the channel you not only can put in, you can take out. You have the freedom to talk to people, not at them. Use your new conversational powers to make a difference in the way you see things.

Enhanced Opportunity

Ultimately, having a broader reach and greater depth to the relationships you have established will increase your opportunity many fold. For example, your new relationships could enable you to gather data that would otherwise be obtrusive. Your new relationships also could lead to better retention for existing members and potentially new prospects. And last, but certainly not least, a better relationship with a tight-knit community will attract new types of suitors, not to mention many of the old ones ;)

Indeed there is a great deal of potential in blogging and podcasting. Like most things worth pursuing, however, they take time and patience to master.