Revisiting Audioboo After Two Years
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Oct 2011 0 comments
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Mar 2011 Social Media in Government
The post is a bit old, but I found it well worth the read.
Amplify’d from mashable.com
What is government 2.0? Tim O’Reilly describes it as government working as a platform. Others might describe it as applying the technologies that make up Web 2.0 to the practice of government, including blogs, wikis, social networking and crowdsourcing. The simplest way of describing government 2.0 may be any technology that helps citizens or agencies solve problems, either for individuals or the community, and enables government to operate more efficiently or effectively.
Social media and government isn’t just about new ways that agencies or officials share or gather information, collaborate with the public in addressing the grand challenges for the 21st century or build better policy through online engagement. Applying social software to internal collaboration is also a key element of improving the way government works through technology.
See this Amp at http://bit.ly/gDeZGm
via Amplify.com
14
Mar 2011 Social Media in Government
The post is a bit old, but I found it well worth the read.
Amplify’d from mashable.com
What is government 2.0? Tim O’Reilly describes it as government working as a platform. Others might describe it as applying the technologies that make up Web 2.0 to the practice of government, including blogs, wikis, social networking and crowdsourcing. The simplest way of describing government 2.0 may be any technology that helps citizens or agencies solve problems, either for individuals or the community, and enables government to operate more efficiently or effectively.
Social media and government isn’t just about new ways that agencies or officials share or gather information, collaborate with the public in addressing the grand challenges for the 21st century or build better policy through online engagement. Applying social software to internal collaboration is also a key element of improving the way government works through technology.
See this Amp at http://bit.ly/gDeZGm
via Amplify.com
31
Oct 2010 Drop.io Acquisition Spells Bad News for Many Music Podcasters
The recent announcement by Drop.io that it will soon cease operations has been a bit of bad news for some music podcasters. These show producers, many of whom are members of the Association of Music Podcasting, use the service to allow independent musicians to submit their songs.
According to the Drop.io blog we have until December 15 to move files out of our accounts. Many music podcasters have already looked for alternatives, including Soundcloud and Dropbox. However, I haven't found either of these services to offer the same ease of use and simple interface for the musicians. They may provide me with a place to receive tunes for review and possible inclusion in the show, but they don't offer much in simplicity for the person doing the submission. I love Dropbox for personal and business use, but I don't want artists to have to open yet another account simply to upload a few songs for my show.
Even Mashable reported that Drop.io offers:
"...file hosting and sharing service of considerable renown in Web world, particularly among those who espouse the need to keep things simple."
Why the closure? Drop.io reports:
Today, we’re proud to announce that we’ve struck a deal with Facebook. What this means is that Facebook has bought most of drop.io’s technology and assets, and Sam Lessin is moving to Facebook.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be winding down the drop.io service. As of this week, people will no longer be able to create new free drops, but you’ll be able to download content from existing drops until Dec. 15. Paid user accounts will still be available through Dec. 15 and paid users will be able to continue using the service normally. After Dec. 15, paid accounts will be discontinued as well.
Though I use Facebook, I'm becoming quite annoyed by the many acquisitions that it has made. These often [read: usually] cease the existence of other services that I use. The technology is then used in ways that I would never find myself participating at my Facebook account.
Perhaps I'll return to using the cforms plugin for Wordpress that I had used in the past. I found it to be buggy and unreliable, but at least it was simple for the artists. Perhaps there have been improvements made since I used it last that will show it to be a good alternative.
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Aug 2010 Google to abandon ‘Wave’ project
Google to abandon ‘Wave’ project
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: August 5 2010 00:33 | Last updated: August 5 2010 00:33
Google on Wednesday called an end to its ambitious Wave project, an online collaboration service that it once hailed as a potential replacement for e-mail. The service, launched with great fanfare a year ago, will be closed at the end of this year, though the technology behind it could be used in future Google projects, the company said.
Wave marked an attempt to reinvent e-mail by allowing a group of users to communicate and share information simultaneously in the same workspace on the Web. Its most eye-catching innovation was a feature that let users see what others were writing in real time, character by character. However, the service was deemed too complicated by many users, and earlier this year Google said it planned to simplify the service.
via ft.com
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Apr 2010 Well Connected?
I found this box in the storage trunk in the back of my work van yesterday. It is a Global Village 28.8 modem. I obviously had forgotten that I had put it there when we moved to the new building several years ago. Yes, I know, I should probably clean that thing out more often. I check the "go kit" in there regularly to make sure I have my PIO resources, but this one had been shuffled to the bottom of the stack.I clearly remember (and miss) the PowerMac 8600 that this modem served. At the time I was using it we had only one email address serving the fire department. It came to my machine. I would get the (very few) messages each day, print them, and place them in the mailboxes of the appropriate people. At the time I had to attach an analog convertor the the phone so that it could be used with the PBX phone line. High tech!Note the Compuserve disc included in the package. I just broke the seal today to get the disc out for a photo. It makes me wonder how many of these envelopes remained sealed even as they made their way to "file 13."Did I mention that just this week it was announced that ALL fire department employees now have access to their own email accounts? We've come a long way, baby.
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Apr 2010 TuneWiki Is In My Neighborhood
Each day I drive by a very historic building in our neighborhood. The building at 4 W. Franklin Street in Centerville, Ohio has housed a variety of businesses dating clear back to 1872.
According the Centerville-Washington Township Historical Society
A log cabin first stood on this site in 1816. It was used as a cooperage in the 1820s and 30s making barrels for the pork packing business. The present two-story Victorian building (the Franklin Street portion) was built by Clark Pine in 1872 and incorporates at least two earlier buildings into a unified structure. The foundation and sill plates of the log cabin can be seen on the southeast corner of this building. The two-story section and porch on the west side were added in 1895. This building also served as the Centerville Post Office in the 1880s.
Source: http://www.mvcc.net/Centerville/histsoc/clark.htm
My only recollections of the structure have been recent. I moved to Centerville in 1988. I can remember a variety of shops in the building, including the Coffee Affair (my favorite), the Ashley and Hillary Boutique, a (very high priced) denim clothing store, and another clothing boutique. None of these lasted for long. One of the primary culprits appears to be a lack of available parking for a retail store. (I feel that some of the failure was the very eclectic nature of the retail goods and the extremely high prices.)
Recently, however, I've noticed a new logo on the windows of the building. As I am an active musician and fan of most things of the techno-geek variety, the logo caught my eye.
The site -- and the apps it seems -- also offers:
- Music News
- Streaming music
- Forums for music fans to discuss the songs they like/dislike
- Social connections to Facebook and Twitter
- Map charting to show what people are listening to -- with geolocation
- Music downloads
and a ton of other stuff. It looks like they are constantly developing more content and technology to cater to music fans.
The service appears to be free. The iPod app that I downloaded was free, as well. There are advertisements served both on the web site and within the app that I have been using. This integrates well and has not distracted me from enjoying the service.
So far I have been impressed with some of the features of this app. It catalogs the music that I already have on my iPod. When I start listening to this music within the app, it downloads lyrics to the song I'm listening to and shows them line-by-line in real time with the tune. Impressive! There have only been a few songs where lyrics were unavailable, but this doesn't surprise me as they are from independent artists or more eclectic offerings. There is also a limited number of artists where the service will not be able to provide lyric content. They state on the TuneWiki site:
Because TuneWiki is a legal service (unlike the majority of lyrics websites on the internet) we must comply with any wishes that the publishers and artists have about their lyrics.This can change! We know EMI want to give us the rights to host the lyrics but they can't. Let us help them by showing as much public support as possible. Please reply to this topic. Your reply will be included in a petition with EMI to allow us to host the lyrics.
If we get enough people supporting us then we can show the EMI that our users really want the lyrics and then something can be done about it.
I'm quite impressed with the extensive offering of the site. It caters well to listeners of popular music. As a listener of more independent music -- or less mainstream artists -- I may not always find what I'm looking for here. I certainly could care less about what L@dy G*G* is doing, but there is a lot of content on the site about that one. [Artist name submitted differently by this author, as I don't want the flame wars and comment spam that results from this high profile search term.]
I guess the thing that impresses me the most, though, is that the operation is in place in a very historic building in the center of my little town. The computers, desks, and high tech logo on the windows and walls is a stark contrast to the very rustic and historic appearance that we often see in this building. It is nice to know that a business in the tech industry has found its way to my neighborhood. (I wonder if they need a media relations/promotions guy? I could walk to work!) And, of course, this doesn't appear to be a retail operation. It is an office environment for an online operation.
Give them a try on your iPod/iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian device. Or just click on over to TuneWiki.com to see what they're all about.
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Apr 2010 Air Powered Car
I want one. And I think everybody else should want one, too.
Reports say that this five-seater car runs on compressed air, has zero pollution, very low running costs and will cost about $15,000. Estimated mileage is 150-175 miles (200-300km). Estimated cost to fill it (in three minutes) is two dollars (1.5 Euro).
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Feb 2010 How do I turn off Google Buzz? Privacy settings, Gmail filters and more | Metro.co.uk
via metro.co.uk
It's at the bottom of your Gmail page. Just click it and turn it off. I did. It is supposed to help you streamline your social connections, but it just throws garbage at you and shares your email address, too. Kind of a smack in the face with loads of information that you still have to sort. NOISE!
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Jan 2010 Shel Holtz: Open access is smart business, not an employee entitlement
I find that the negative comments from company execs often come without much research. They are often off-the-cuff remarks to a negative news story or to a misplaced perception that people inherently need to be "baby-sat." It is sometimes very offensive to me the way I hear some of them talk about their work-force.
Here's a great article from Shel Holtz.
Open access is smart business, not an employee entitlement
At first, I shrugged off the semi-literate comment left to one of my posts over on Stop Blocking, the site I started to advocate for reasonable employee access to the Net, and particularly to social media sites.
The post to which “reason,” as he called himself left a comment reported on a study that showed 54% of companies were blocking access. Here’s his response:
isnt it funny in todays world how everyone thinks they deserve better than what they are getting without haveing to really work for it no job owes you facebook time so feel your rights are being taken for granted grow up you big baby work time is not your fun time so if you block your workers from facebook @ work dont feel that blocking reduces productivity and engagement, limits recruiting capabilities, and denies networking that ultimately benefits the organization. thats a bunch of crap do your job facebook dont pay your bills you lucky to even have a job.
I blew off the comment initially, relegating it to the “just doesn’t get it” dustbin. But I found the comment kept coming back to me, not because reason’s reasoning is right but because he seems to think that I’m advocating for employee rights in my efforts to get companies to stop blocking.
I’m not an employee rights advocate. If I were, very few of my clients would be interested in my services. My goal is to help organizations succeed. I’ve achieved my goals if companies are more profitable, more competitive, more nimble, more productive. I’m campaigning to get companies to open employee access to social sites because increasingly the networked connectivity of workers is driving competitiveness, productivity and other indicators of improved performance.
The fact is, through all my years working in employee communications, I’ve never been concerned with whether employees are happy. It’s not a company’s job to ensure employee happiness. Employee job satisfaction is another story. It’s tangible, it’s measurable and it has a direct bearing on employee engagement, which is a predictor of organizational growth.
But even job satisfaction is just one return a company gets from networked employees. Zappos encourages its employees to network on the job, resulting in a reputation for stellar customer service. Employees engaged in their social networks can also reduce the cost and improve the quality of recruiting. It can surface issues the company needs to address. It can generate ideas for new products and services. It improves employee productivity.
On that last note, productivity, I came across an item today on TMCnet sporting the provocative headline, “Workplace Productivity at an All-Time Low.” The press release touted the products of a company called Pandora—not the music streaming site, blocked by a number of companies—but rather one that “allows managers to analyze activities performed by employees and the time spent on different work items. It also affords the ability to track computer usage at a group and/or an individual level, cross-reference activities reported by an employee, and access an employee’s desktop in real-time.”
The all-time low productivity claim is based on this calculation:
On average, workers with an Internet connection spend 21 hours per week online while in the office, a little more than four hours per day. And on average, 26% of that time is spent on personal-interest websites. That amounts to roughly an hour per day, or 22 hours per month.
Pandora is just one of many companies that profit from the fear they produce with such outlandish claims. As I’ve repeatedly noted, these calculations don’t account for the benefits such networking brings to the organization, the improved productivity highlighted in a University of Melbourne study, or the amount of work these employees perform outside the 9-to-5 office hours because they’re networked. In fact, another story that crossed my desk today points out that companies in the UK were able to maintain productivity even as snowbound workers were unable to get to the office because their ability to connect with each other and the office let them get their work done from home.
And, as I’ve also noted before, these lost-productivity assertions don’t stand up to statistical scrutiny. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, nonfarm business sector labor productivity increased in the third quarter of 2009 by 8.1%. That’s a far more credible number than the back-of-the-envelope calculations Pandora, Websense and other monitoring-and-blocking companies use in their scare campaigns. In fact, it reveals the productivity claims by these companies as an outright lie.
Yet these tactics continue to influence managers, as evidenced by the fact that most companies block access despite the fact that blocking is contrary to their own self interests.
Leaders need to realize that organizations that encourage their employees to network during work—guided by clear policies and improved business literacy—will experience success that eclipses that of organizations that block access.
It’s not a question of employee entitlements. It’s a question of smart business practices.
Posted by Shel on 01/08 at 10:51 AM-->
via blog.holtz.com
Thanks, Shel. Great writing.
Rich Palmer
I'm just a singer, songwriter, safety educator, public information officer, new media enthusiast, dad, husband, and fan of many things online.
