| Robin Good's Latest News What Communication Experts Need To Know - Breaking News About Ideas, Digital Tools, Methods And Skills To Communicate And Learn More Effectively With New Media Technologies (daily) New Advertising Paradigm For B2B Publishers: Turning Advertising Into Relatio... Are you willing to use your professional brand to put a face on your business? The new DirectAds service from LinkedIn allows you to do just that. If you are looking to find the best way to communicate effectively to a selected, targeted and trusted audience, the new advertising approach introduced by the social network for the "pros" may be worth a deeper look. The new LinkedIn DirectAds service allows you to address in a very targeted way, professionals and other work contacts with highly targeted ads that you create yourself. The LinkedIn professional network community is made up of senior executives, salespeople, and industry experts in just about any market industry, counting over 20 million professionals with an average household income: $109,000. The cost is relatively lowas you can get started with as little as $25 and move up from there. Business content analyst John Blossom, provides an excellent intro and overview of this new direct advertising approach utilized by LinkedIn while dissecting its key strengths and future opportunities. He writes: "Executives are a conservative bunch when it comes to dealing with their personal reputations, but LinkedIn has proved to more than 20 million professionals so far that it is by and large a very trustworthy environment. With that trust as a primary asset, it\'s likely that LinkedIn has set the stage for some solid revenue development that is likely to upend a few B2B applecarts in the long run. For the time being, though LinkedIn is just at the begininning of what promises to be a long battle for the rights to what professionals value most in carrying out their business - trusted relationships that can yield revenues." Here the full story: The Payoff: LinkedIn Focuses on Monetization through Ads and Targeted Research by John Blossom LinkedIn\'s growing success is both admired and feared by many in the content business, but the rap against them for quite some time has been, "Well, yeah, but where\'s the monetization?" In truth, LinkedIn has been growing revenues steadily through traditional brand ads, partnerships and payments for premium services. But with two key moves LinkedIn is raising the bar on its prospects for revenues - and for a potential exit at a more appreciable price. DirectAds The fist LinkedIn initative is its new DirectAds service, which enables LinkedIn members with profiles to produce simple text ads on a self-service basis that can appear in other members\' profile pages. Similar in overall concept to Facebook\'s SocialAds program - a link to the advertiser\'s profile appears in each ad to ensure that marketing is on a conversational basis with a known entitiy - DirectAds has the added benefit of being able to target executive peers in the LinkedIn network with a great deal of granularity - and charges healthy but affordable minimum rates to do so - a $25 minimum for a flight of ads, with impressions based on a variable formula. Filtering options include many of the criteria found in a typical member\'s profile, including the ability to limit ads to specific geographic regions. DirectAds Potential The potential for DirectAds is very strong within LinkedIn itself, but it also has the potential to provide B2B publishers with some real concerns as this evolves. Though there is no announced plan to take DirectAds off-site into other publishing venues, certainly classifieds in B2B journals and Web sites could be easily targeted by LinkedIn with its extensive network of top-shelf executives and salespeople. More importantly, it\'s not too hard to imagine that a B2B publisher seeking revenues from companies trying to get a message through to very specific executives would jump at the chance to use DirectAds to get rates far higher than classifieds for its very targeted profiling capabilities. In very tightly knit B2B communities DirectAds would play very well in B2B publishing venues. Technologically, it would not be hard to implement at all - it would only take enabling a B2B publishing site with Google\'s OpenSocial API. With such a combination DirectAds would have a Google AdWords/AdSense revenue combo for on-site/off-site revenues that could be impressive indeed. If done properly - hopefully avoiding Facebook\'s pratfall with its Beacon program that released private data in a user-unfriendly manner - this has the potential to be to B2B publishing what Google was to consumer publishing, turning advertising into relationship building with one click of the mouse. With its potential for ultra-precise targeting, it could put somewhat of a dent in marketing lists services as well in time. The LinkedIn Research Network The other interesting new program at LinkedIn is the LinkedIn Research Network, which leverages some of the concepts that it employed in LinkedIn Answers to provide a tool that can enable executives to conduct peer-to-peer industry research. As in LinkedIn Answers members of LinkedIn can pose questions to peers in the LinkedIn network, using LinkedIn\'s extensive structured and unstructured member profile data to zero in on just the right people to target for questions. The Research Network provides its users with a workbench to monitor responses to questions and to in effect build research panel who can be contacted for additional questions. The revenue hook in Linked in Research Network is its use of LinkedIn\'s private InMail network to contact members. Members may use InMail for contacting up to 20 people at a time, presumably to cut down on "spam" research requests and presumably to make it easier to meter the pricing to a reasonable block of minimum requests. Of course, one can sign up for InMail at any number of premium levels, so the real hook is to promote InMail premium subscription revenues as much as possible. Given that the demo video was intent on saying that this product was targeted primarily at financial industry analysts trying to contact experts in companies and market sectors, perhaps their initial expectations for its use are limited. But clearly its ability to combine the art of research into the art of marketing will make this a popular option for many over time. Future Outlook With both of these options LinkedIn is taking a relatively low-key approach to product development, moving relatively slowly to ensure that their most valuable asset - the trust and security that the LinkedIn system of opt-in relationships has protected through its development - will not be tainted or abused. Executives are a conservative bunch when it comes to dealing with their personal reputations, but LinkedIn has proved to more than 20 million professionals so far that it is by and large a very trustworthy environment. With that trust as a primary asset, it\'s likely that LinkedIn has set the stage for some solid revenue development that is likely to upend a few B2B applecarts in the long run. For the time being, though LinkedIn is just at the beginning of what promises to be a long battle for the rights to what professionals value most in carrying out their business - trusted relationships that can yield revenues. N.B.: DirectAds is currently available to only a limited set of LinkedIn members, but we plan on opening up to more advertisers soon. Originally written by John Blossom for Shore and first published on June 30 2008 as "The Payoff: LinkedIn Focuses on Monetization through Ads and Targeted Research" ...
MasterNewMedia Web Traffic Stats, Authority, Audience Metrics: June 2008 Here the web traffic stats, page views and audience demographics of Master New Media (all editions) as collected during the month of June. Google has significantly decreased the amount of traffic that it is sending to Master New Media in the last two weeks. This has a significant impact on revenues as most of the ad-clickers do come from searches on Google. I am looking into optimizing the search engines crawling setup and checking the site structure for problems which may have affected this. MasterNewMedia compared head to head with some of its many competitors: Poynter.org, Scoble, Copyblogger, ProBlogger. Source data: Google Trends Showing publicly your web traffic data, audience demographics and your best content is a great way to show your authority, credibility and progress to all those that may be potentially interested: advertisers, sponsors, fans, competitors, potential partners. Since last month, every first week of each month, Master New Media, publishes all of his major web traffic, demographics and audience statistics as collected by the multiple services I use to gather accurate information about my online readers. If you would like to suggest additional stats to be included, or would like to recommend a specific analytics technology to add to my toolkit, feel free to utilize the comments section at the end of this monthly web traffic report. MasterNewMedia web traffic stats for June 2008: Here the details: Master New Media Web Traffic And Audience Metrics: June 2008 Unique Visitors and Page Views Total Visits on Master New Media: 518,685 Total Page Views on Master New Media: 755,491 MasterNewMedia International Editions - Breakdown MasterNewMedia International - English Version: Unique visitors: 255,076 Page Views: 366,194 MasterNewMedia Italian Version: Unique visitors: 125,992 Page Views: 185,304 MasterNewMedia Latino Version: Unique visitors: 112,546 Page Views: 172,071 MasterNewMedia Brazilian Version: Unique visitors: 25,071 Page Views: 31,922 Source data: Alexa measures the number of pages viewed by site visitors. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once. The page views per user numbers are the average numbers of unique pages viewed per user per day by the visitors to the site. Source data: Ad Impressions and Clicks Source data: Google ADSense Demographics and Technographics Audience Age Audience Sex Source data: Audience Languages Source data: Popularity by Region Source data: Traffic by Platform Source data: Woopra - data relative to a smaller sample than total audience Traffic by Browser Source data: Woopra - data relative to a smaller sample than total audience Traffic Sources Source data: Most Viewed Content Top 10 articles MasterNewMedia.org May 2008: Slow Computer? Speed Up Your PC By Disabling Unnecessary Windows Services Where to Find Free Images and Visuals for My Blog - Mini-Guide, Part 1 Web-Based Instant Messengers: A Mini-Guide How To Convert .MOD Video Files To MPEG-2 On Mac And PCs Free Video Stock Footage Resources Online How To Blog: A Beginner\'s Blog Publishing Guide Broadcast Yourself Live On The Web: Best Tools To Create Your Own Live Web TV - A Mini-Guide Video Publishing Online: Where To Share Your Video Clips On The Web Online Picture Editing: Free Web-Based Image Editing Tools RSS To HTML - How To Convert RSS Feeds Into Published Web Pages - A Mini-Guide Source data: Authority Google PageRank Here below the Master New Media Pagerank calculated with PR Checker: PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. If you want learn more about Pagerank here are some relevant articles: Guide To Understanding Google PageRank Google Pagerank Explained, Defined, Best Reference Resources Future PageRank Helps Reputation And Trustworthiness Shine Over Artificially Inflated Search Results: Google TrustRank Alexa Rank: The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). Source data: Technorati Authority Source data: Link Popularity Google Inbound Links MasterNewMedia English: 3.440 MasterNewMedia Italian: 1.640 MasterNewMedia Latino: 869 MasterNewMedia Brazilian: 738 Yahoo! Inbound Links MasterNewMedia English: 3.329 MasterNewMedia Italian: 620 MasterNewMedia Latino: 13 Citations, Mentions and Trackbacks Source data: Source data: Master New Media RSS Feed Stats Source data: Edited and prepared by Robin Good and Max Badolati for Master New Media and first published on July 3rd 2008 as "Master New Media Web Traffic and Audience Metrics: June 2008" ...
GoToMeeting 4 Everyone: 100% Mac Compatibility Plus VoIP Keep The Screen-Shar... Citrix has just released version 4 of GoToMeeting (and ver.2 of GoToWebinar) which adds to an already outstanding screen-sharing tool, full 100% Mac compatibility and integrated VoIP, among some other smaller new features. With this release GoToMeeting strengthens its position as a the leading and best performing screen-sharing technology I have seen so far while introducing two powerful additions that are hard to compete with. The new GoToMeeting release offers even more than one could have expected in this new version, which attempts to further streamline and simplify the already cool and slick interface while throwing in some heavy new features and improvements. I think you will like what I have to show. Here all the details: GoToMeeting 4 - New Features 100% Mac Compatibility The new GoToMeeting 4 is now 100% Mac-compatible, allowing Mac users to host a screen-sharing session or to receive presentation rights from a PC user. Not only. The new VoIP feature is also integrated in the Mac verson of GoToMeeting, allowing full voice over IP audio for both presenters and attendees also for them. The only major feature that hasn\'t made it yet to the Mac platform is the recording, but according to the Citrix GoToMeeting team this should see the light pretty soon in one of the upcoming minor upgrade releases. Integrated VoIP Probably too long-awaited to have the impact and the benefits that this was planned for, the addition of VoIP to GoToMeeting is probably the second most interesting feature in this new release. Being this the first release of the voice feature for Citrix, one cannot expect it to be perfect from day one. And in fact, if you have gotten yourself used to use Skype together with GoToMeeting (a perfect match) I do not think you are going to find the new integrated VoIP solution any better than the manual mashup you have used until now. The GoToMeeting VoIP facility works, but it is not as good, solid and reliable as what most everyone has come to expect from a VoIP call. Skype has long earned its crown in this area, and any competing effort will have to take very seriously into account that unless you offer something as good as or better than Skype, people will not bother using your newly added VoIP. As a matter of fact in my own initial tests of GoToMeeting 4, I have had to give up on using the native G2M VoIP facility and switch back to Skype which offered much better audio quality and performance. I would expect Citrix to refine and improve VoIP markedly in the coming weeks, but again my sensation is that this has been done too late and not with a killer solution. It is very difficult to switch user habits once they have settled on some tools that do efficiently what they need. Additional New Features Attendee Audio Controls and Advanced Audio Monitoring Much better attendee audio controls are now available making it possible for the host / presenter to easily identify among the attendees who is talking or making noise, and to as easily mute any or all attendees until desired. One-click Recording G2M v.4, integrates like its previous version a full recording facility which is capable of memorizing both the visual sessions as well as the audio from your presentation. Recordings can be rendered either in the native GoToMeeting format, which can be replayed back in a GoToMeeting session as well as in the standard Windows Media Video file format. Floating Control Panel The new GoToMeeting 4 sports a fully floating control panel which can now be easily moved to any position you want on the screen. As before, wherever you place the control panel the attendees to your presentation will not ever see it. It remains completely invisible to them. JoinGoToMeeting.com A new site service from Citrix makes it also easier to log in into any G2M-based presentation. Just communicate the meeting code and send your contact to JoinGoToMeeting.com and the only thing they can do there is to input the meeting code you have just given them. With one click then they are in. Great idea to simplify the log in process. Bravo Citrix. Edit Countries International However amazing it may sound, if you choose to utilize the powerful international teleconferencing service integrated into the new GoToMeeting 4, you can now specify for which countries you want teleconferencing support and the G2M system will provide you with dedicated toll numbers in those very countries you have selected. The countries supported for now beyond the US are: Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, Canada, Belgium, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. Learn More GoToMeeting Product Overview Watch a GoToMeeting product demonstration FAQ Technical fact sheet (PDF) Sign-up for 30-day free trial GoToMeeting v.3 Review by Robin Good Summary Overview Pros - Key Strengths 100% Mac and PC compatible Integrated VoIP Best screen-sharing performance in the market Integrated audio and screen recording International support (growing) Integration with other tools such as Outlook and IMs Live annotation and mark-up tools More manageable and customizable interface Cons - Areas for Improvement New cosmetic changes to the interface do not provide tangible improvement. In some cases they may even infer some frustration as user brow accustomed to their tools and to the way they look and feel. If unwarranted changes even to the most cosmetic parts is introduced without a strong need, there will always be users who will like and others who will not because they already liked so much what they had before. Solution? Such improvements should be offered as an "option" in the Preferences setup of the tool and not as a forced upgrade. VoIP. Too little too late. Two years ago was the right time to add VoIP to this tool. As of now, the addition of a mediocre VoIP solution, at least as seen from its initial performance, offers more something to talk about rather than something to talk through. People have gotten used to utilize Skype in conjunction with G2M, and made exception for those who can\'t use Skype for some reason, the rest will not find this addition worth abandoning their habitual solution. Annotation and markup have remained the same. A major opportunity for gaining further market strength and to attack other uses and applications has gon unused. Live markup, collaborative tools are going to see a huge boost in demand and use and being on the cusp of innovation and usability on this front means being ahead of the game by a long step. Editor\'s Comments The new GoToMeeting 4 confirms its leadership as the best screen-sharing tool on the market. In My opinion, and after having tested hundreds of competitors remains unchanged: Citrix GoToMeeting has the best performance and screen-sharing quality you can find around. There are competitors who are easier to use, less expensive or more feature rich. But, if your main goal is to do a professional screen-sharing session with up to 25 attendees, I would not hesitate a second in recommending this tool. GoToMeeting ver. 4 has all of the basic features you may need to do a professional screen sharing session, including text chat, voice over IP, teleconferencing, invitations, recording and moderator tools. The user interface is the best in its class and outside of a few minor items it makes just about any task easy and intuitive to find. The addition of VoIP offers greater collaboration opportunities to those who do not have access to a phone line or who didn\'t want or like to use Skype or similar tools in tandem with G2M. Though the integrated VoIP technology in G2M isn\'t as good as Skype, it does provide a fallback solution for some users. The element which still offers the greatest opportunity for extending GoToMeeting competitive edge is the annotation and markup facility. This is an area that will see lots of growth in the near future across all of collaboration tools. I have been suggesting several improvements to the G2m markup tools in the past but only some have seen the light of the day so far. I am ready to bet that in the next version of GoToMeeting or in the next version of one of its key competitors you will see some major innovation which will provide a great incentive for new users to jump in. All in all, GoToMeeting consolidates its screen-sharing position as a leader offering a well-rounded, solid, reliable and highly performing tool for a reasonable price ($49/month for up to 15 users). If you have never tried GoToMeeting, I do suggest you give it a good try. Originally written by Robin Good for Master New Media and first published on July 1st 2008 as "GoToMeeting 4 Everyone: 100% Mac Compatibility Plus VoIP Keep The Screen-Sharing Crown At Citrix" ...
The Future And What It Holds: Howard Rheingold Video Interview - Frontiers Of... I shot the video interview that follows for the Frontiers of Interaction conference which took place yesterday in Turin, Italy. Superbly organized by Leandro Agrņ and Matteo Penzo, the sold out event brought together high prestige names like sci-fi writer and visionary Bruce Sterling, Elizabeth Churchill Principal Research Scientist di Yahoo, Jeffrey Schnapp, Nicolas Nova, Ashley Benigno as well as a selected cream of Italian visionaries and technologists (Luca Mascaro, Fabrizio Capobianco, David Orban and several more). The focus of my questions in this video interview with Howard Rheingold, was kindly suggested by the event organizer Leandro Agrņ, and they focused on: a) the future of technology, b) the speed at which things change, c) who will eventually control the Internet, d) what we can do about it, and e) how pervasive technology will become in the next few years. The Frontiers of Interaction event was mostly in English with some Italian language sessions. You can watch good quality recordings of most of yesterday sessions on Dolmedia Frontiers of Interaction page. Here\'s the integral unedited Howard Rheingold video interview (18 mins) as well as the entire English text transcript. Interview With Howard Rheingold Frontiers of Interaction - Turin - July 1 2008 Full English Text Transcript Intro Robin Good: Hi everyone here is Robin Good from Rome, Italy and I\'m connecting with Howard Rheingold just off San Francisco bay. Good morning Howard! Howard Rheingold: Good morning. RG: How are you doing today? Howard Rheingold: Excellent, it\'s a shiny, beautiful day, I\'m alive, what more can you have? Speed of Change Robin Good: ...nothing really. We\'re here for the Frontiers of Interaction fourth edition that is taking place in Turin and we\'re offering the audience there the opportunity to reach out to Howard who\'s one of the pioneers of cooperation, collaboration and the evolution of the use of media technologies from computers to the more pervasive mobile technologies that we are using at most every corner now. So Howard has been following this evolution by living inside the evolution, by participating in communities online and by writing, studying and learning from others as much as he could so I\'ve got a few question that I\'ve stammed from the theme of the interaction event that is taking place in Turin, and the first one is just really to warm up, I don\'t know what you\'re going to answer to this but the question is: "How speed is really getting in this future? Is it getting ahead of us, is it difficult to keep up ace with it, I mean as we\'re trying to understand all that it changes it keeps changing faster. What reflections you have on this? Howard Rheingold: What\'s changing fast is the technology and the access to all kind of new media. We witnessed the fact that we are speaking through our computers, with computer cameras, on video...that\'s no big deal for a lot of people now. It was pretty miracolous maybe impossible, just a few years ago, it\'s just a huge proliferation of ways to communicate, devices...I think the big good news is what has been called the digital device really has been attacked by ... We have cheap powerful chips that, I think at last counter was between a three and a half billion and four billion mobile phones in the world and at least a hundred million of those are cameras. I think it\'s pretty clear that five years from now, ten years from now most people in the world will be carrying a device that will not only enable to speak on the telephone but access the Internet, to download and probably to upload and to stream video. So a lot of the dreams of yesteryear are now in people\'s pockets. I think the bad news, if you want to look at it that way, is that there are so many different ways to communicate. You\'ve got forums, you\'ve got Google groups or Yahoo groups, you got several different ways of communicating with video, you\'ve got blogs, wikis, we\'ve got Twitter, we\'ve got instant messaging, we\'ve got chat. now I think the divide is one of literacy, the device is not so much between the haves and the have-nots, in terms of having access to technology, but between the knows and the know-hows and the don\'t-know-hows. What you know and how you know, how to participate, and the on-going culture that\'s being created upon access to many to many media, that really makes the difference and I don\'t see our educational institutions or our parents keeping up with the pass of change. I think parents are afraid to talk to their children about making moral choices, thinking critically about what they see online because they fear ... their children no more than they do about the technology. At the same time we see this moral panics about what is happening online. Then I think it\'s a result of the larger society and a lot of mass media that communicate with that society. Also lagging behind their understanding of the media that are becoming available. Who Will Control The Internet In The Future>? Robin Good: Thank you Howard, very interesting answer. You opened up quite a bit of space and interesting themes there, but let me ask you: as far as the pervasive presence of the Internet, I have here a provoking question. Do you that given the first alerts of net neutrality or the big changes that are taking place in the world economy...I mean who do you think is going to be possibly ruling next if the Internet becomes more pervasive? Telcos, banks or actually more actual power to the people. I know that is an impossible question but it\'s a provocation. Howard Rheingold: Well you know I think people have various degrees of education where this Internet technology came from and where it\'s going, to at granted it was originally created by the US defense department but the Internet was not really created or nor was it grown by the telephone companies or the computer companies of the world. It was really created by millions of enthusiasts like you and I, who for the first time had access to what we call many-to-many technologies. It used to be said that freedom of the press is for those who can own a newspaper. For some years now anyone who has a desktop computer connected to the Internet and now, above of all connected to the Internet, they\'ve got a printing press, a broadcasting station, a place where a community can have a marketplace, and you\'re seeing whole new industries created in dormitory rooms. It\'s no longer the big incombent rich companies that create innovation but although they really work clueless because I know because I went in and interviewed the major telephone companies of the world in 1992 when the Internet was beginning to show on the horizon. Not only were they clueless and contemptuous of making their tools available for millions of people, they are not clueless now, the incumbent content owners, the Disney of the world, the recording industry, the motion picture industry are reacting by extending copyright laws and by trying to ... copyright laws into devices. In the US we have the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which the US and other countries are trying to extend to the world, through the world of intellectual property organizations, which makes it very difficult for amateurs to make amateur production using these technologies because of the lock on ownership. You have companies like Disney who can take folk tales like Snowhite, appropiate them from the public domain, stamp an ownership copyright on it and then sue anybody else who tries to use what they\'ve stolen in the first place. On the other hand we have companies that provide access to the Internet, the phone companies and the cable companies, trying to re-institute the centralized technical, economic and political control that they had before their centralized .... networks or democratized, net neutrality is the name for one of the ways that broadband providers are trying to make sure that you can\'t start a competing business in your dormitory room. In the future you\'ll sort of have to be a technology geek and a policy-maker to understand that these conflicts are taking place, but I think, if you look at what the cable companies in the US are trying to do in terms of controlling what bits pass their parts of the network, that\'s the net neutrality, if you look at what the authoritarian government of China is trying to do in making, I think that at last count was two hundred million in China with access to the Internet and they have everything that everybody else has: they got their social network, they got their instant messaging, they\'ve got their video, a tremendous freedom to communicate just as long as you don\'t criticize the government so I see... And they\'re trying to do it at the same level by controlling the routers, the machines that pass the bits, they want to have sensors in those routers for political expressions, just as Comcast in the US wants to put sensors in those routers to prevent competing bits to move over their network so I believe that the future is not necessarily going to be as the freewheeling and creative as it is now. I think the good news is that millions of people have tasted freedom. They can make videos and upload them to YouTube, they can start a mailgroup anytime they want. I think that having a population that\'s tasted that freedom is going to be hard to put it back in the box when you got one phone company and three television channels and your only choice is which brand are you going to buy, not what are you going to create, what the millions of amateurs are going to pay attention to. I think it\'s important for people to understand that our freedom is not guaranteed in this ... What we know and what we do is going to count in the next few years. People\'s Lobby Robin Good: How we can best put to use what we know and what we can do to avoid seen a too a negative change in the media we love so much? Howard Rheingold: Well, at least in theory, democratic governments are influenced by public opinion. Public opinion to an elected political office holder means potential votes. Right now, the people they listen to are the lobbyists for the big companies who are spending a lot of money trying to win politically what they have lost through decentralization of technology. Politicians are not going to listen to the amateurs, the millions of people who use the Internet without anybody\'s permission about what they create. But. If we know what is at stake and we make known to our political leaders, if there is significant public opinion that we want to retain these freedoms, they have to listen to us, because they take those large sums of money from lobbyists so that they can get re-elected. But if they get the message from the voters that it doesn\'t matter what you spend we are not going to re-elect you if you cut our freedoms off, I think that will have some effect. I can\'t speak about the situation in China but in countries where we have some degree of public opinion that can influence policy-makers. Let policy-makers know. If you just go and search for the word net-neutrality you will find out about the battles that are going on. If you search under Digital Millenium Copyright Act you will find out what that means. There are organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation that are trying to organize. So it is not as if people are doing nothing. We need more people who are aware of these issues and to join their names in the effort: people\'s lobby. Pervasive Technologies Robin Good: When it comes to the pervasive Internet, this mobile net you have studied and followed so much, what are going to be the implications that we are going to see starting to appear, that we are not too aware of , that are coming against us at full speed and that you can anticipate to us. What is it going to be? Are there going to be sensors everywhere? Are we going to see machines inside social networks? What is going to happen? Howard Rheingold: I think that the next thing that is going to happen is that most people on earth are going to have a telephone with Internet access. Actually this is already happening. We have already 300 million phones in China alone. So the largest growth for mobile phones in the future is precisely for those people who have not had access to technology and to the latest in media before. So we are seeing in higher nations like China and India bring in their significant people power and brain power. This is why I think it is very important, given the global problems we have to solve about global warming and energy efficiency, environmental degradation, political conflict... we need all the minds that we can in on this. So I think it is very exciting... Iqbal Quadir who started the Grameen Phone in Bangladesh, which makes telephones available through the microloans that have been made available by the Grameen Bank to a woman with no other income in a village in Bangladesh. That not only enables her to begin economic development for herself and for her family but it gives access to information, labor information to everybody in that village. Quadir believes that access to information and communication an essential part of development. Sending money to people in the capital cities of developing countries just makes the problem worst. What we need is to enable the people in the villages, the people who are moving from an agricultural way of life, who are streaming into cities, give them access to healthcare information, give them access to education. One of the tremendous opportunities we have online, is that we have the world\'s knowledge available, decreasing costs on devices, decreasing prices to more and more people... Again I think that the critical uncertainty there is how are people going to know how to use the devices and the access to gain healthcare information, to get an education. This is why I think there are tremendous opportunities there and real challenges too. The other side of this is that we are living in a surveilled society. It is so easy to put a camera up everywhere. It is so easy to tap into that data streams of individuals not only follow your phone calls but everywhere you go on the Internet. Huge power not only for the states to have political control over citizens but for spammers, for people who simply want to sell you something. For your neighbour who may be angry at you. For your ex-spouse. For the person who you may have cut off in the traffic and got your license number. This panoptic surveillance society is not just a big brother is big everybody. It is important to note that with these tremendous opportunities to expand freedoms and wealth we also have tremendous threats to our privacy and to our political liberty. The technology alone is not going to guarantee an outcome one way or the other. We have a period of time here when all these technologies have become suddenly available. We have gone from only a few very wealthy people having gigantic mobile phones to 3.5 billion tiny mobile phones in a little over ten years. That has never happened before. Took a lot longer for alphabetic literacy, the telephone, the printing press to spread. Our institutions have not kept up with that. we are in a period where our institutions are trying to decide what to do: how to educate people; who is going to control these things; what freedoms do we have. I think it is exciting, because I am a believer that if enough humans know what\'s at stake they can influence the outcome. And there will be an outcome in ten or twenty years from now, you will know who controls these technologies and who does not have freedom and control. Originally shot and recorded by Robin Good for Master New Media and Frontiers of Intercation IV and first published on July 2nd 2008 as "The Future And What It Holds: Howard Rheingold Interview - Frontiers Of Interaction IV" ...
Making Sense Of New Technologies And Media: An Opinionated Digest by George S... Sense-making is the extraordinary new unconscious effort the Internet avant-garde has moved into. After an initial phase of discovery, experimentation and pure exploration, web publishers, bloggers and educators are gradually turning their efforts into looking at what they have learned and making it accessible to everyone. Photo credit: V Ribakov This is why you see such an explosion of screencasting and presentation tools, story-building services and video publishing venues. We have now understood how important it is to stop, explain it in simple, easy digestible terms, and get more people on board this new fantastic communication infrastructure which is the Internet. Connectivism guru and educational technologies expert George Siemens takes you, into his weekly journey around some of the fascinating changes and discoveries taking place around you. If you want to expand your technologies and media horizon by learning from highly varied and diverse viewpoints, George has got the resources, research and articles to keep you busy and interested. Here what he has found this past week: Open, Connected, Social Alec Couros has posted a paper - Open, Connected, Social - Implications for Educational Design - for an upcoming conference based on his successful (and distributed) online course. He\'s onto something important (and as I acknowledge here, has served to inspire some of my thinking for our upcoming connectivism course). Alec explains his philosophy, methods of assessment, tools, acknowledges the challenges of managing the distributed conversation, and provides student reaction. Distributed Learning Environments Writing in the Digital Age: "In the conversation over distributed learning environments, it is important to begin by recognizing that the question is not IF our learning environments can be or should be distributed but rather HOW...Students' learning experiences are shaped by these distributed networks, and our pedagogies circulate through these networks. This may seem self-evident, but our discourse on emerging technologies in teaching regularly makes the error of situating the choice between a new "distributed" environment and an existing cohesive one (and in the case of face-to-face teaching, even an imagined "immediate" environment)." The author makes a point I\'ve been whining about for awhile: traditional classrooms "pre-make" too many of the connections for learners. Learners, in my own humble opinion, do not need their connections fully pre-formed. A bit of stress, a bit of ambiguity, and a bit of confusion are healthy contributors to learning. As long as we have a feedback loop where learners can contribute and faculty can respond and adapt, we have the basics in place. Connections are the starting point of all learning. It\'s so obvious...and therefore so often overlooked. We really need to think about types of connections learners have with each other and content...and ways that we can extend the learning experience by critically analyzing and forming those initial connections. Android Google announced a new mobile operating system and development platform called Android in late 2007. Wired provides a fairly coherent overview of Android, its development and its future potential. The mobile world is huge - far exceeding PC/Mac numbers worldwide. Apple\'s iPhone has raised the profile of smartphones significantly. Overall, innovation in this space has been lacking. Google has now opened innovation to "network effects", allowing others to assist in innovation, while simultaneously strengthening Google\'s position in mobiles (sounds a bit like Windows in the 90\'s). The biggest payoff for Google: if people are online, regardless of devices, they are searching. And if people search, Google sells ads. The Petabyte Age Wired has an interesting online resource detailing massive changes in data - The Petabyte Age. A broad range of topics are reviewed that reflect how massive data abundance creates new challenges and opportunities. Included: data visualization, tracking airline fares, commodity prices, tension/conflict, etc. The articles are unfortunately placed under a grand theme titled: The end of theory which makes the bold Google-love-in proclamation based on correlations revealed in data exploration: "Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all. There\'s no reason to cling to our old ways. It\'s time to ask: What can science learn from Google?" Um, yeah, ok. Google is all about science, innovation, and exploration. Simply being able to do different things with data does not eliminate the need for rigor, research, etc. Doing things with data - at any level - is founded in some type of theory. As stated here: "Correlations are a way of catching a scientist\'s attention, but the models and mechanisms that explain them are how we make the predictions that not only advance science, but generate practical applications." Learning 2.008 Learning 2.008 in Shanghai is one of the more interesting conferences I\'ll be attending this year. Eight keynotes (if that\'s the right word) have been invited, but from the proposed layout of the conference, I think keynotes will take a back seat to conversations with attendees (which is exactly how it should be). I\'ve been requested to present/attend a series of 8 presentations/workshops/conversations. The opening night will have all keynotes deliver a short (7-minute) TedTalks style presentation to get people motivated. Learning 2.008 breaks up conference routine and pushes conversation from the podium to the conference floor. If you\'re interested, a short podcast about the conference is here. Brain-based Learning I suspect most educators have heard of brain-based learning (I read a particularly dismissive article on the subject recently where the author questioned what the alternatives are: Liver-based learning? Is that like butt-based sitting? Oops, off topic). Brain-based learning theories are often accepted without critical reflection. For some reason, however, perfectly normal, sane human beings accept all kinds of statements when prefaced by "neurospeak", as detailed in the Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations (.pdf). When we hear certain ideas expressed in non-neurospeak language, we are often quite good add evaluating bad information. When similar information is presented in neurospeak, our commonsense judgment seems to fade and we accept bad information. A short video (8 min) video on Brain based education: Fad or breakthrough. Multitasking? Multitasking as a concept is being called into question (well, it has been called into question for several years, but the commentary is moving mainstream). The Myth of Multitasking is the most recent article on the subject. Research on this front - like with so-called millennial learners - is still in the early stages and we\'ll continue to see reports both validating and denying the concept. John Medina at BrainRules offers a short discussion on the error of multitasking. I personally, will continue to enjoy my high rate of distractedness and continuous partial attention as I email, blog, search, listen to podcasts, etc. Quite simply: most things I encounter on a daily basis aren\'t important enough to warrant full undivided attention. When these moments arise, however, I focus and discontinue multitasking (or task switching). I wonder if the criticism of multitasking isn\'t partly misplaced...i.e. perhaps we just have much more noise in our world today (video games, TV, podcasts, blogs, youtube) and the key task is one of knowing when to experience multiple information sources and when to focus. Creating Powerful Presentations I\'m moving into the somewhat reflective stage of summer. My thoughts over the last few months have been focused on how I deliver presentations, how I use slides, and how audience members interact with ideas put forward. About 3-4 years ago, my slides were heavily text-based. Over the last year or so, I\'ve tried to rely more on images. But I\'m not satisfied with how the ideas I\'m trying to present come across. Have you ever attended a presentation and the speaker, by her charisma/energy/passion/style, just "blew you away"? I\'ve seen several examples recently of individuals who focus more on stories and less on explicitly defining ideas. Memorable presentations need to do more than just make us think. They need to make us want to do something/be something different. They need to draw us together with others, with "big ideas". Anyway, as I\'m trying to figure out ways to more effectively communicate, I came across this: Creating Powerful Presentations: "You gotta do what you gotta do to make the media you\'re using effective". Originally written by George Siemens and published as weekly email digest on eLearning Resources and News. First published on June 29th 2008. To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book "Knowing Knowledge". ...
Online Collaboration Tools - New Technologies And Web Services - Sharewood Pi... In this round of cool online collaboration tools Robin and I have this time picked services to send large giga-sized files online without worrying about how big they are, remote control any PC via your instant messenger, do free VoIP calls, and more. Photo credit: Vacuum3d Here the online collaboration tools we have selected for you this week: Fileai: Select a file and transfer it directly with no upload process via a download link Remote Live Desktop: Remote control any PC using a Windows Live Messenger text command Chawt Web SMS: Free service lets you send free SMS messages to any phone YouLiveSee: Create or join webcam conversation rooms Calliflower: Invite people and manage audio meetings through the web VoIP Stunt: VoIP software lets you have free PC to PC calls and normal calls at very low rates Fleck: Annotate any web page while chatting with other people who are visiting it TinyPaste: Type a text, share it via URL, and let other people edit it Fileai Fileai is a file sharing service that lets you send huge files to anyone. Just select the file you want to send, with no size limit, get the link, and share it with other people: the file will be sent directly from your PC to other people\'s, with no upload process. The service does not need any registration and it is free to use. http://fileai.com/ Remote Live Desktop Remote Live Desktop is a Windows Live Messenger utility that lets you remotely control a PC. All you need to do is to install Live Desktop on the remote PC, and you\'re ready to remote control it from anywhere. Besides using it to control your remote computer, you can also use it to give assistance to your friends by telling them to install it. Free to use. http://www.remotemsn.com/ Chawt Web SMS Chawt is a SMS service that you can use to send free text messages to people. After a free registration, you can send free text messages up to 80 characters to any mobile phone around the world, without paying anything. Only thing you get is a small ad at the end of your message. Free to use. http://www.chawt.com/index.php YouLiveSee YouLiveSee is a website where users from all over the world can engage in webcam conversations with other users. You can join other sessions created by other people, which can ben public or restricted, but you can also create your own channel and start broadcasting with your webcam and let other people join you. The service is free to use, registration is needed for creating a room. http://youlivesee.com/ Calliflower Calliflower is a free service that you can use to create and manage audio meetings. After you create a meeting, choose a subject and invite people to it, you will be given a US or French phone that people can call in order to join the conference. Plus everyone can chat through the web interface, also record the meeting in MP3 format. Free to use, registration needed. http://calliflower.com/ VoIP Stunt VoIP Stunt is a Skype-like VoIP software that lets you call other PCs or normal phones. You can send SMS messages, make free peer to peer calls to other VoIP Stunt users, and also call landline or mobile phones at very low rates. It is free to download and use, but you will have to buy credit in order to make ordinary phone calls. http://www.voipstunt.com/en/index.html Fleck Fleck is an online annotation service that you can use to add notes and comments to any website. If you want to add a note on a site, you just have to go to Fleck.com, type in the URL, invite your friends, and you can start adding notes, chatting with other people visiting the site, see previous changes that others made, and also save the comments that you and your friends made. Free to use, no registration needed. http://www.fleck.com/ TinyPaste TinyPaste is a new service that you can use to send text messages through a URL. Just drop your message in the box, no matter how long it is, click submit, and start sharing the URL. People will be able to see the message, add text to it and send you responses which will have a different URL for you to see them all. Free to use, no registration needed. http://tinypaste.com/ Originally written by Nico Canali De Rossi for Master New Media and first published on June 30th 2008 as "Online Collaboration Technologies - New Tools And Web Services - Sharewood Picnic Jun30" ...
Visual Communication And Video Publishing - Selected Tools And Web Services -... In this new issue of visual communication tools and services found, tested and picked for you by Robin Good and me, Nico Canali De Rossi, here is what we have selected for you this week: there are some cool new tools and services to create presentations online, arrange your pictures in slideshows, record any region of your screen, and also to download YouTube videos and add captions to them. Photo credit: Hamster3d This weekly visual communication and video publishing toolkit includes: 280Slides: Create presentations online with no additional software FlickrStorm: Flickr search engine lets you look for pictures and browse them in a simple way S3Mer: Upload all of your pictures and arrange them in video slideshows Pviewer: Display your Flickr and Picasa pictures in a better way through an interactive slideshow Bradicon: Free application lets you convert pictures into icons CamStudio: Record everything on your screen and export it in AVI or SWF for free DownThisVideo: Download videos from YouTube and Google Video for free without registering Overstream: Add subtitle and captions to your videos on YouTube, Google Video, Daily Motion, and more Visual Communication Tools 280Slides 280Slides is an online presentation creator which reminds of Keynote. It offers a complete set of tools for you to create your presentation with no additional software and carry it with you: you can add text, images, movies, and edit them as you wish on the slides. When done, you can present it online, save it on the web so that you can have it with you wherever you go, and also download it locally in PPT format. Free to use. http://280slides.com/ FlickrStorm FlickrStorm is a Flickr search engine that anyone can use to better research images on the most popular picture sharing site. You can type any keyword, select the type of license, and wait for results to load, which you can then browse, download, and even get a list of related keywords that you can use to refine your search. Free. http://www.zoo-m.com/flickr-storm/ S3Mer S3Mer is a web-based solution that allows you to create streaming video and image presentations. It gives users up to 250 MB of storage space for uploading the files, that they can rearrange in a video presentations and then play it on any media player. There is no limit on the number of files you can use to make your slide show as long as you don't exceed the storage limit. Free. http://www.s3mer.com/ Pviewer Pviewer is an online service that lets you display your Flickr or Picasa pictures in a better way. All you have to do is provide a Flickr or Picasa username, or simply a Flickr research, select the number of rows and columns, number of pictures, and your slide show page will be automatically created. The service is free to use, with no registration needed. http://pviewr.713flash.com/index_home.html Bradicon Bradicon is a free web application that you can use to convert pictures in icons. Just select the file you want to convert, wait a few seconds for it to upload, and get a download button to save the converted icon on your PC. Free to use, no registration needed. http://ico.bradleygill.com/advanced.php Video Publishing Tools CamStudio CamStudio is a screen recording software that allows you to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create AVI video files and convert them into Streaming Flash videos (SWF). Its interface is really easy to use: just set the video and audio quality, and press the big red button to start recording. When done, you\'ll be able to save the file locally on your machine. Free to download and use. http://camstudio.org/ DownThisVideo DownThisVideo is an online service that you can use to download videos from YouTube and GoogleVideo. Just copy and paste the video URL, click download, see one of the available downloading formats, and save the file. The service is free to use, with no registration needed. http://downthisvideo.com/ Overstream Overstream is a site where you can add subtitles and captions to any of the videos you find on YouTube, Google Video, MySpace video, and Daily Motion. In order to use it, you just have to register to the service,have Flash Player 8, and just use the online Overstream Editor to add subtitles to all of your videos. Free to use. http://www.overstream.net/ Originally written by Nico Canali De Rossi and Robin Good for Master New Media and first published on June 29th 2008 as "Visual Communication And Video Publishing - Selected Tools And Web Services - Sharewood Picnic Jun29 08" ...
Music Should Be Shared: Joss Stone Joss Stone, a music artist who won a Grammy Award last year, is another one of the many pop stars who is most clearly voicing her support and open-minded approach toward music sharing, P2P and the Internet. Photo credit: (c) Joss Stone Joss Stone, if you don\'t know her, is an English soul and R&B singer-songwriter and occasional actress. Stone emerged to fame in late 2003 with her multi-platinum debut album, The Soul Sessions, which made the 2004 Mercury Prize shortlist. Her second album, the also-multi-platinum Mind, Body & Soul, topped the UK Albums Chart for one week and spawned the UK top ten hit "You Had Me." Both her album and single have received one nomination at the 2005 Grammy Awards, while Stone herself has been nominated for Best New Artist. Stone\'s latest album, Introducing Joss Stone, released in March 2007, has already gone "gold". Throughout her career, Stone has sold over ten million albums worldwide, and has won two BRIT Awards and one Grammy Award. She also ventured in the film business, making her acting debut in late 2006 with the fantasy adventure film Eragon, as the witch Angela. But here\'s the scoop: In a recent interview she said that - unlike herself - most artists are brainwashed by the industry, and she encouraged people to share her music. Joss defines the whole idea of music sharing as "brilliant" and has no hesitation in saying tha the thing she likes the least about the music industry is the business side of it. She believes also that most music artists are brainwashed by the industry, and that there is nothing wrong in passing up your favorite music to your friends. "Stone is not the only artist who actually wants people to share their work. Last year rapper 50 Cent made some positive remarks about filesharing, and Nine Inch Nails takes it even further, as they upload their music onto BitTorrent sites themselves. These artists are spot on, in fact, several studies have shown that artists actually benefit from filesharing. The more music people share, the more CDs they buy and the more concerts they visit." Source: Torrentfreak Here the video interview with a full text transcript: Joss Stone: Music Should Be Shared Video Interview Full text English Transcription Interviewer: Now that you are in the show business, what do you think about "piracy" and "MP3" and "internet" ...about music? Joss Stone: I think it is great.... Interviewer: Great? Joss Stone: Yeah I love it... I think it is brilliant and I tell you why: Music should be shared. I believe this is how music turned into some kind of crazy business. Now the only part of music that I dislike is the business that is attached to it. Now, if music is free, then there is no business. There is just music. So, I like it. I think that we should share. It's ok, if one person buys it, it's totally cool, burn it up, share it with your friends, I don't care. I don\'t care how you hear it as long as you hear it. As long as you come to my show and have a great time enjoying the live show... it\'s totally cool. I don\'t mind. I am happy that they hear it. Interviewer: Wow, I think you are the first singer telling this story to me! Joss Stone: Yeah, most people have been brainwashed. ...
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