Category Archives: Social Media

Speaking tomorrow night at Keene Public Library: “The Big Disconnect – How Communication Is Changing All Around Us”

UPDATE: Just confirmed that the start time is 7:00pm versus 6, which is what I thought it was, but I was writing my post based on info on the library’s web site. 😉

If you are in the area of Keene, NH, tomorrow night, Monday, April 13, 2009, you are welcome to swing by the Keene Public Library at ~~6pm~~7:00pm to hear me speak on: “The Big Disconnect – How Communication Is Changing All Around Us” where I’ll be talking about who the ways we communicate and the tools we are use are changing… basically the topics I write about here, over at DisruptiveTelephony.com, in my FIR reports and essentially in most of the other places I write. The full abstract of the talk is below.

This whole thing started off innocently enough. Another parent at my daughter’s school knew about the kinds of things I do and asked if I would be willing to talk to the library board (on which she sits) about changes in communication technology. They are apparently doing some long-range planning over these next few months and she thought my input would be helpful. My first response was (and still is) to suggest they talk to my neighbor and long-time Keene resident Jon Udell who has, among other things, created the LibraryLookup Bookmarklet Generator. She appreciated that info but continued to also want me to talk to the board.

Given that this is the kind of presentation that I do on an ongoing basis anyway, I agreed. Then somewhere along the way it seems the library board morphed this into a public presentation… when she asked me for a headshot and bio for flyers, well, I knew it was getting a bit bigger… 😉

Ah, well… it didn’t and doesn’t matter to me. If I’m speaking to five people or 20 and private or public, it should be a good conversation regardless. Having this presentation has also been helpful in that it has helped me synthesize some points that I’d been thinking about for some time into a more coherent form.

So at this point it’s a public event to which anyone can go. If you find yourself in Keene tomorrow night, feel free to stop by. Here’s the abstract of the talk:

Is the future of our inter-personal communication a ‘tweet’? Are we going to become ‘friends’ with everyone through sites like Facebook? What are all these ‘feeds’ people are talking about? And what is going on with all these e-books?

We are living in a time of great change both in terms of the technologies and tools we use to communicate but also in terms of the changes those technologies are making to the fabric of our society. Traditional media outlets are under severe stress. Newspapers are folding or stuggling. Television audiences are fragmenting and moving online. Radio empires are collapsing. Email is dying under the weight of spam. Landlines are being cut in favor of mobile phones. In the midst of all this change, people are sharing details of their lives in social networks like Facebook and MySpace. They are ‘tweeting’ with Twitter. They are posting video to YouTube. They are collaborating using documents ‘in the cloud’. They are networking on LinkedIn. They are blogging and podcasting. They are sharing and creating information in so many new forms and ways.

In this talk, communication technology expert Dan York will discuss these trends and technologies and look at how both the ways in which we communicate are changing as the underlying technology changes. What is fueling those trends? How are people changing the way they consume information? What does it mean for each of us as we blur the contexts in which we interact with people? What are both the challenges and opportunities for organizations and businesses? What are some of the societal impacts? What about privacy? (Or is there such a thing?) And how can people most appropriately participate? Come with your questions and join in the conversation about how communication is changing all around us.

P.S. I don’t know that I’m entirely comfortable with the label “communication technology expert“. I suppose some people may consider me that, and I have been working with online communication networks and tools for pretty much 25 years at this point… but from my perspective the more you know, the more you know you don’t know…

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

Technorati Tags:
keene, danyork, dan york, social media, communication, communication technology, facebook, twitter, trends

Of choosing a new image/avatar – and wondering why we choose the images we do?

6 Replies

So I’m thinking of changing the “avatar” image I use across all my blogs and social networks.

In truth, I quite like the current image I have been using (pictured on right), because I’m not really a big fan of most of the pictures of me that are out there. But with this particular one I like the profile… I’m almost smiling… and the purple and pink background is distinctive. My image can easily be found in a batch of other images. I’m also looking to the right, which is again just different from so many of the other images out there.

This image has worked well for me as I’ve used it across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, all my various blogs, my Gravatar, and basically every other social network I’m in (and I’m in a lot as part of my job). Given that “Dan York” is a rather generic name in English, and that there are a good number of other “Dan Yorks” out there, I’ve tried to use one image everywhere so that when people see my account on some service, they have a very easy visual clue that it is, in fact, the Dan York they know. It’s part of my online identity… a bit of personal branding, etc.

However, there’s a fundamental problem with the image – I only have it in low resolution.

And in fact, very low resolution. For all the many positive comments I’ve received about that particular image, the truth is that it is simply a screen capture of a random frame in a video interview that Jeff Pulver did with me back at Fall VON in October 2007. That’s it. A screen capture of a web video. No pro photographers. Nothing like that.

The problem is that when conferences ask me for a “headshot”, in my ideal world I’d like to give them the same shot that I have on my website and social networks… but I can’t give them this one. So I need a new image for which I also have a higher resolution image.

I’ve thought of going to a local photographer for a shoot… and I may still do that, but as I wrote about over on a Voxeo blog, I was fortunate to have some great shots taken of me out at eComm by photographer Duncan Davidson (click any of the images to jump to his site – you can then click between the images on his site):

(And do check out the rest of the eComm 2009 image gallery – I’m quite impressed by Duncan Davidson’s work.)

As Duncan has very kindly given speakers permission to use them for headshots, blogs, etc., I’m now toying with using a cropped version of one of those shots. Something like maybe one of these:

I’m thinking maybe the last one… mostly because it’s off-center a bit. What do you think?

All of this got me thinking and wondering these thoughts:

What do you like in an avatar shot?
What made you choose the one that you are using now?
Do you like close-up images or farther away?
Do you like just the person in them or with other people/kids/significant-others/animals?
Serious? Funny? Muted backgrounds? Distinct backgrounds? Posed? Casual?

(Or are you perhaps not the over-analyzing, over-thinking type that I am and just put up random shots and change them around all the time?)

There’s no right answer, of course… in this world of social media we all get to choose this part of our online identity… and that persona can of course change and morph over time as we ourselves do. Still, I find it interesting to think about – why do we choose the images we do?

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

Topics and links for my FIR report into show #432- March 19, 2009

1 Reply

Today I sent over to Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson my usual weekly report into For Immediate Release. In my actual report, I said I’d post the links to the reports that I was talking about in the report. They are:

Seattle Post-Intelligencer stops publishing print edition after 146 years and shifts to online only
Pew Project For Excellence in Journalism: “The State of the News Media 2009“, and in particular:
Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Charlene Li: Future of Social Networks presentation
C.C. Chapman and The Advance Guard: About Facebook Pages

Now, as to what I said about each of those…. well, you’ll have to wait until Shel & Neville edit/produce FIR #432 and post it on the FIR site sometime today. 🙂

TIP: As you’ll hear in the report, I recorded it in the field. I did so using the iRecorder app on my iPhone which I’ve used in the past. The neat thing about iRecorder is that it’s trivial to get the files off the iPhone – the iRecorder app simply runs a local web server on your iPhone and you connect to that web server from another PC on your local network.

However, as I discovered today, that is the only way to get the recordings off your iPhone and so if you don’t have WiFi access… or more specifically unrestricted WiFi access… you are out of luck.

Today I recorded this segment en route to my local Panera Bread where I planned to work all day offsite and mostly offline. I figured I’d just transfer the file over the free WiFi and send it off. However, this failed miserably. Both my laptop and my iPhone were able to get on Panera’s free WiFi, access the web, etc. But when I put iRecorder in its “Sync” mode running a local web server and then tried to connect from my laptop, I couldn’t! After a couple of attempts (and a cup of tea) I wound up returning home to do the transfer.

Blame the security folks, methinks. In trying a couple of other connections, it looks like the folks at Panera are very nicely restricting people from connecting to other computers on the free WiFi network. This is a VERY good thing! 99.9% of the time… just not when I want to do a file transfer over the local network. It’s actually good to know and honestly makes me more inclined to use Panera’s network, since they appear to be protecting me from scanning from other computers on the network. It was just not how I thought today would work out. Ah, well. Lesson learned.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

Social media, attention, distraction and overload…

The blurring of our lives: Does learning info about co-workers via Facebook improve connections? Or feel creepy?

7 Replies

At what point does all the information sharing in Facebook (and other social media) that is now visible to your co-workers cross over from being helpful in building connections between employees and move into feeling like a somewhat creepy invasion of privacy?

Right now we are living through a grand experiment in blurring the lines between personal and business lives…. between “friends” in the traditional sense, “friends” in the local community, “friends” we’ve met online and “friends” who are co-workers (and in some cases “friends” who are vendors, customers, etc.).

Sure, those lines have always been blurred in some fashion. Many times the people we work with are some of our closest “friends”. For many people who work in jobs in a local community, the intersection of their “friends” between employees, customers, and people they know in the community is very high. The same people come into their store that they see at a local sports game… or see at the local school… or go to the same church with… or see at a local bar.

For others, the intersection may be quite smaller. Co-workers may be far away. The job may have little or no connection to the local community. Family may be scattered all over the region, country or globe. “Friends” may be fewer or may be farther apart – or may be more online. In larger communities, especially, you may go to a church on the other side of the city and have kids in a sports league in another part of the city and your office may be in yet another part of town.

The degree of the blurring has a lot to do with the size of the local community you live in and the degree of your connection to that community. You may not attend a church… or play in a sport (or have kids that do)… you may not have kids and not have the school connections.

The point is that we’ve typically have different groups of people with whom we’ve shared different pieces of information. We know people in different “contexts” and share information with them in that context and often that context alone.

This is particularly true with the divide between our “work” and “personal” lives. Sure, we’ve always shared some parts of our personal life inside the walls of our “work” environment. We’ve talked to our co-workers… gathered at water coolers or in break rooms or cafeterias. Some people have shared very openly about what they are doing and we’ve learned much about their overall personality. Others have remained very private and shared virtually nothing. To some degree, we all have a facade that we construct that is how we appear to our co-workers.

The wall between work and personal lives has been there.

That wall is being demolished, though, along with all the other walls, in the new world of social media. We typically have only one Facebook account… we have one Twitter account… we have one MySpace account… and so on. We add “friends” who we know in various contexts to the same account.

Think for a moment about who you have added as Facebook “friends” (assuming you use Facebook). I know my list contains at least this:

people who have been long-time friends in the traditional sense of the word
people I know through activities related to VoIP/communications
people I know through activities related to information security / VoIP security
people I know through activities related to marketing / PR / communications / blogging / podcasting
co-workers from my current employer
co-workers from previous employers
several industry analysts
developers / programmers I know from various projects
people I met while living in Ottawa, Ontario, and Burlington, VT
people with whom I was involved starting up a curling club in VT
a couple of extended family members
an increasing number of people I grew up with back in the 70s and 80s, some of whom are probably wondering what in the world it is I do now
people I’ve met at various conferences and became friends with
a few people from Keene, NH, where we moved this summer
other people I’ve met randomly in some context and become friends with

It’s a diverse list of people… and yet they all see the same information in my Facebook NewsFeed. They see the same
status updates… they see the same photos I post… the same Notes I import… the same del.icio.us bookmarks… the same videos I create.

The many different contexts are blurred into one.

Now maybe this is a great thing… we all get to learn more about each other – and the person behind the facade that we construct for each context. Or maybe are we learning too much. Where is the line?

Going back to my original question at the beginning… within Facebook the “25 random things about me” meme seems to be going strong in recent weeks, at least among the people to whom I am connected on Facebook. You know, it’s the “here are 25 things about me that most people don’t know”. We went through a whole string of memes like this out in the blogosphere a few years back and now and then they keep surfacing.

Anyway, the few posts I have had time to read in Facebook lately have actually been quite fun to read. I’ve learned a lot about some of the folks… remembered old stories… learned new ones. Some have been discreet in the info shared… and some have been more revealing than I would personally be.

It’s that latter bit that got me thinking about all of this. What if the person sharing the “revealing” information is a co-worker? Do we understand yet how (or if) this changes our relationships? Do I gain more respect learning of a serious childhood illness now overcome? Do I lose respect for that co-worker when I learn of the drunken binges they go on each month? What if I don’t like their politics or religion? Does any of this change the way I interact with the person? On one level, how can it not change my views of that person? – but can I/we move beyond that?

Have our “culture” and “conventions” caught up with the degree of information our tools now let us share?

Where is the line between information we share with co-workers and our “personal” lives? Is there even a line? Or is the very concept of such a line just a quaint anachronism of another era?

P.S. For my own part, I assume there is no line and continue to follow the mantra: “Never put online (anywhere) anything you would not want to appear on the front page of the New York Times.” Perhaps that limits my “openness”, though…

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

Technorati Tags:
facebook, socialmedia, social media, culture, privacy, friends, microblogging

Twitter invades the daily comics (well, Zits, at least) – and the annoyance of copyrights prohibiting embeds

1 Reply

So there I was this morning in the usual daily routine of having breakfast and reading the comics in the daily newspaper (yes, I still get a daily paper – two, in fact), when the world of social media landed in the comics. There in the “Zits” comic strip, Jeremy and his friend Pierce are gasping at the thought that students actually passed notes on paper in the time “B.T.”, as in “Before Twitter”! I admit to laughing out loud and getting perplexed looks from other household members.

You can see it for yourself (click on the image):

And I would have loved to embed the comic here, but I definitely respect copyright notices and the notice on the page for the comic is very clear (my emphasis added):

© 2008 Zits Partnership. This feature is presented with the permission of King Features Syndicate, Inc. and is furnished solely for personal, non-commercial use. Redistribution in whole or part prohibited.

That last part would indicate to me pretty clearly that I can’t just go and embed the graphic in my post, which is too bad, as it would be a lot more interesting for readers to see the comic in the context of my commentary here. But between someone applying stock copyright terms and probably someone else’s desire to have the page viewed “on the property”, it means viewers here have to go over to that site to see the comic. Some will… some won’t. It’s just annoying.

Now if they provided “embed” codes for the comics like you have for, say, YouTube videos (or most other video sharing sites), the publishers would be able to ensure they gather statistics but they would also get the added publicity of having their comic strip embedded on other sites and increase the number of people who have seen the strip.

But I digress…

My main point today was merely to point out that it was fun to see a mention of Twitter on the comic pages today. I’m sure there will be a lot of readers of the comics who won’t have a clue what this means… but for those of us who do understand, we can laugh along. (While simultaneously realizing again why some schools are futilely trying to ban cell phones.)