So if I have any readers left, HI! This poor little blog has almost been abandoned lately.

Never fear. Life is settling down, so I should be back on my normal blogging schedule shortly. Actually, it kinda feels like I never left Chattanooga. I think that’s a good sign.

Two weeks at home, and I’m strangely busy. It looks like I have two opportunities to build a web presence on Drupal using CivicCRM. Anyone have thoughts/ideas/suggestions? Both groups have a budget of $0, so I’m more drawn to the FREE aspect of Drupal than the lofty aspirations of the open source movement. Any Joomla/Drupal debates?

I’m back a little earlier than expected. Oh well. At least I gave myself an out yesterday. Now that I took the pressure off myself to post everyday, I’m inspired. Last night a brainstorm was unleashed for blog ideas. Go figure. Now, I just need time to implement them.

This morning I found out that my department won a grassroots innovation award in the technology category at an undisclosed conference in the very near future. Some of you know that (my place of employment) and (CRM software provider) developed the (________) application for Facebook. It’s incredibly innovative and the first successful app to be used for advocacy.

Is it possible to brag anymore vaguely?

Anyways, Woot! for all of us. A lot of hard work went into developing it. It was an honor to be part of the effort.

It’s nice to get accolades. Working in an industry that so few people understand is hard. Even fewer people appreciate the best practices. Go us!

Geni.com
Genealogy has jumped on the social networking bandwagon, but this time it actually makes sense. Instead of friending is it “relativing?” Maybe you can be related to Obama too!

The Chatt Library hits YouTube
I never expected the two people to lead the library into the 21st century would be the matriarchs of Chattanooga arts scene. It would be a great video if produced in-house, but Comcast should have edited the last :45 or so.

NY Times: Google Takes Step on Video Copyrights
Why police the Internet? Google will do it for us.

Now Is Gone–the book and the blog.
Found this a few weeks ago and forgot about it. It also looks like I need to take a trip to B&N.

Gavin Newsom Case Study: Facebook for PR, branding and Press Releases A case study with examples of everything Facebook alluded to yesterday.

Rohit Bargava: The Future of PR Means Dumping the Inferiority Complex
Sigh. If we want to get this massive chip off the shoulders of the profession, why don’t we start in the classroom. It doesn’t help when the next generation enters the workforce cynical and paranoid.

Google acquires Jaiku. Is November 5 the Facebook/Google showdown? All the tech giants weigh in, including Brian Solis on how lifestreams are relevant to communication.

Junior Takes a Bride
This is a few days old, but I can’t help it. I’m not a fan of Harold Ford, Jr. but marrying anyone who works for Carolina Herrera adds a much-needed layer of class to the rather trashy Ford family. Will they live in Memphis? Can someone like her survive in Tennessee? Will she supply couture for Ford family appearances in court? Just imagine a gubernatorial campaign with a real fashionista in the Volunteer State! Can’t you see her wearing a classic Carolina evening gown to the Grand Ole Opry? Oh, the blogging would be so much fun!

Facebook took a page from Google’s book and hosted a political summit today.

Will Facebook increase their DC presence like Google? Competition is great. Especially competition that involves free food and breaks from the office. If they keep doing these things, I hope that Facebook changes their presentation. Between the progressive events that I attend for work, and conservative ones for the sake of my sanity, I’ve seen the Google presentation about four times.

The turnout for the event was surprising. There was a huge line to register and find a seat. While waiting, I noticed that almost everyone was under 30. According to Facebook, 56% of the users are over 25, yet every campaign and congressional office sent younger staffers.

I’m happy to hear that changes will be made to integrate groups into the newsfeed. As much as I love Facebook, they keep adding things rather than improving some of the basic functions. They’re finally lifting the ban on messaging more than 1,000 people and working on allowing candidates to send messages to all of their supporters.

They still won’t allow groups to create profiles and are quite adamant about it! This hurts causes and advocacy groups more than anyone else. It’s frustrating to have so many wonderful tools at our disposal, but Facebook only allows political campaigns to fully use them. Nonprofits are getting more engaged in politics and launching full-scale battles over legislation and races. If Facebook wants to further the democratic process and encourage conversations, they need to get over this decision and create some type of profile for groups. The Cause application is great, and my employer was one of the first ones to sign up. However, it’s still an app and very limited in what you can do with it.

I also love how Facebook’s answer to everything is “build an application.” I don’t know if they’re really lazy or empowering their users to have a greater say in the development of the social utility.

Some of their stats are amazing.

• 200,000 people join every day and the site doubles with active users every six months.
• People spend and average of 22 minutes a day on Facebook.
• By the end of 2007, 75% of active users will be out of college.
• 41% of active users are likely to vote for a candidate if they could learn more about he or she on Facebook.

Voters want a more personable candidate. Facebook helps. All of those odd factoids that people love knowing about candidates should be on profiles. Groups are also a great opportunity to build on those microcampaigns that target key populations (i.e. women). If groups become more integrated with the newsfeed, they could be a much more powerful tool. Before Facebook went global, they were useful for organizing and spreading news. Now they’re too big and are really only good for propaganda and making statements. Just including updates in the feeds might make them useful again.

More at TechPresident

As my friend Raee would explain, I’m geeking out over the new IPDI study, Poli-fluentials: The New Political Kingmakers.

Someone stated at the press conference that people are beginning to examine the nuances of Internet involvement in politics. Since I spend a lot of time contemplating the nuances of Internet involvement in politics, I’m psyched to read it.

IPDI, with the help of a several sponsors, surveyed 10,000 influentials and took a closer look at those who are highly involved in politics. I’m sure that I’ll write another post with details for TechRepublican, but I had to gush here first.

The exciting thing is that they have a giant, and I mean giant, dataset that they just started working with. Poli-fluentials is the first report. During the Q&A, they mentioned several more areas that they’re reporting about including the regions of the country that are more powerful. Are blue states really that more active on the web than red?

I would willingly hand over any of my future offspring to get my hands on that dataset.

Go ahead and mock me about being a nerd. I promise to go shopping this weekend and watch a chick flick to balance it out.

Elyzabethe at Yellow is the Color is calling it quits. This seems to be a trend among bloggers.

Is this part of the adoption cycle? The early adopters were probably around 2004 or earlier. Then blogging hit mainstream and everyone had one. Is the fad of blogging winding down? I would have assumed that the trend of blogging was over. The only blogs around should be angst-filled teenagers, tech nerds, stay-at-home moms, people with too much free time at work and the small group of talented writers who need to be blogging.

A while back, Raee, also at Yellow is the Color, stopped posting. She told me that she was tired of the chatter. She couldn’t add anything to the discussion, and most bloggers were yelling at each other. She’s not the only one among my blogging friends or daily reads either going private or quitting the Internets completely.

Raee has a point. Blogging is amazing because it potentially gives every blogger an equal voice. While the democratization of our communications and political systems is a good thing, it also creates a lot of noise and conflict. Democracy is never a neat or polite process.

(more…)

Edelman and PRWeek just released the Next Generation of Communicators, a report from their New Media Academic Summit 2007.

I wish that I had known about this conference! One of my major problems with academia is the wall between research and professionals. By the time a paper is peer-reviewed and published in a journal, it’s irrelevant. It’s frustrating to wait for studies to be released when you need the data now. More coordination is needed like this conference and subsequent report.

The PR field is better than most. Since the development of academic programs for public relations in the 1970s, the professional world has been deeply involved in most college programs. However, the average professor is not technologically savvy. Furthermore, the PR field just woke up last year to the world of new media. Too many communications departments are still operating under traditional media relations models, which were developed by Burneys and Lee in the 1920s. Hard to believe that even with technology, the PR field operates with 80-year-old methods, but I witness it everyday.

As Julia Hood, editor-in-chief of PRWeek notes:

Unfortunately, there are still PR programs that have not kept pace with industry momentum. Some students are exiting colleges without any notion that the everyday communication activities they engage in with their friends and family have very real applications in their future careers.

Hello! That captures my bachelor’s degree. Tennessee has an incredibly solid program for the technical aspects of communications. Thanks to UT’s School of Communication, I can write a mean press release and plan amazing events, but I learned nothing innovative. Too many PR programs are based on antiquated communications formulas.

To put it in perspective, I graduated in 2004. That was the same year that Facebook was released, Google launched their own e-mail platform and purchased a free program called Blogger. Things have snowballed just a little. Had you told me that working part-time in the IT department and blogging would help my career development, I would have sworn on my dog-eared AP Styleguide that you were crazy.

I fear that programs aren’t adapting quickly enough. It’s difficult enough to convince existing practitioners that the world has changed. The last thing we need is inadequately equipped new graduates.

H/T SixtySecondView

Earlier this week, I wanted to write about Facebook’s new Google index and didn’t get a chance. Then I heard about the Danah Boyd/Scoble discussion. Since I can’t go more than a week without posting about my favorite social utility, here goes.

I’m with Boyd here. Facebook and Myspace are constantly compared, but the two operate from completely different philosophies. Facebook was started so that college students at Harvard could meet each other–meaning you were likely to friend people you already had a greater chance of meeting. MySpace was designed as a way for musicians could promote their work. The basis of MySpace is self-promotion while Facebook helped your social life. Two completely different things.

I whole-heartedly joined Facebook because of the privacy settings. I loved that I could only friend people from my university. It was small and not intrusive. Then it went global. Then we got mini-feeds that kept tabs on everything your friends did. Then Facebook opened up to everyone without an edu address. It was only a matter of time until your profile could be opened to search engines.

I understand both arguments for and against the walled garden. As a professional communicator, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out a way to use the data on Facebook profiles. There’s so much targeted information. It’s a gold mine for marketers.

Then I approach it as a user. I’ve written about my struggle to accept Facebook as a professional tool extensively here. It started out as a way for me to stay in touch with my college friends and gradually morphed into a professional networking tool. Perhaps it’s because I’m in a city, but people are now using Facebook profiles as business cards. It’s hard to direct people to your Facebook profile when college friends are posting old sorority pictures and tagging you (Nothing scandalous. Just pictures that I’d prefer to die on someone’s old hardrive). I’ve had discussions with friends back home, and the progression of Facebook hasn’t nearly reached the level of penetration that Facebook has in DC. For example, yesterday I was at Ebenezer’s, my favorite DC coffeehouse. As I walked around, I couldn’t help but notice almost every person using a laptop in the busy shop was surfing Facebook. If you aren’t on Facebook in DC, you simply don’t exist. If you’re not in an urban area, Facebook is soley recreational.

Privacy is also a concern. I’m not the only woman out there who’s been Facebook stalked and had very scary people following my blog. Perhaps I’ve watched too many Lifetime movies, but there’s a dangerous side of the web. This is a discussion that I’ve had with my female blogging friends, so I’m not alone in being wary of complete transparency. I applaud Facebook for warning me ahead of time about the change, so that I could alter the settings on my profile. However, as Boyd points out, how many people are going to take the time to do that? There have already been too many crimes committed from information on MySpace profiles. How long until there’s the first Facebook murder? Judging by the information in my mini-feed, not many people adjust their privacy settings or use the limited profile.

Usually, I’m cheering on the transparency factor in web communicaton, but how far is it going to go? The wall between personal and professional lives has already been torn down. This is happening so quickly that I sometimes wonder if the 2.0 bubble will burst, and we’ll see a backlash of returning to complete privacy and an anonymous web.

There’s also a debate about the cool factor of Facebook to the college crowd. Since Facebook went around the early adopter pattern with college students using it before techies, there’s an interesting breakdown. The luster has worn off for most college students and recent grads while the tech crowd is still mesmerized by this flashy toy. Thus the question–will Facebook continue to grow?

I theorize that it will. Facebook is still an ingenious set up. We’re in the early days of successful social networking, and I believe it will parallel the Internet in the late nineties. Remember when you signed on AOL and were excited to get two or three e-mails? E-mail was a novelty that quickly entrenched it’s way into our lives. Now, e-mail is a burden that people try to escape. Facebook and it’s offspring will likely work their way into society in a similar pattern. Younger users may not be as excited about Facebook as they were a few years ago, but the utility has become a part of their everyday lives.

If you read one blog today, click on Brian Solis. He nails it with his post on the sociology of social media.

Technology enables us to communicate, but the tools change constantly. People don’t change. People are relationship-based and communicate through networks in their lives. 

For the first time, the web allows us to mimic the way that people communicate in the real world. However, we spend more time studying the tools rather than the methods behind the tools.

From an academic perspective, most studies focus on the effect of a particular medium on people, especially with television. We aren’t focusing on how people communicate, but how they internalize the message that the medium forces on them through broadcast methods.

We’re always wondering what the next big thing is. What happens when the Facebook phenomenon ends? Will Twitter hit the mainstream? Is e-mail dead? If we understand the conversation and are participating, the tools are secondary. If true two-way communication exists, the right technology tools will be there. It’s all about that conversation:

Today, conversations are markets and markets are conversations. And the forums for these conversation cultivate an tight, unswerving and mostly unforgiving community and culture. Participation requires observation in order to understand the the sociological landscape and the dynamics that define each community. They are after all, populated by people, not audiences.

Read it.