Just to let everyone know – Alphablogs is on a sabbatical right now. Both Carol and Isabella are involved in a lot of projects, so we have decided to focus away from this blog right now. We’ll start writing here again when the time is right. In the meantime, please enjoy our previous posts!
Blogged
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Your Alphabloggers:
Carol Sill
Isabella J. Mori
Twitter Groups
Twitter Groups is Twitter application #37,941. We’re trying it out right now, and have created a “Vancouver” Twitter group. This, for now, is the home page. The group’s page at Twitter Groups is here.
Social Media Rainbow
Awesome social media portrait by Brian Solis. For a larger view, go here.
Norms, early adopters and morality
After not having posted here for quite a while, finally a sign that I’m still around here at Alphablogs!
Here’s an attempt at reflecting a Twitter conversation about social media etiquette, early adopters, morality, and all kinds of other interesting topics. It was a worthwhile conversation, one we might continue, so I’d like to preserve it for posterity. Putting the various strands together was an interesting exercise in itself, which is why it’s an attempt – I know I’ve missed a number of interesting contributions.
This first tweet by @shanegibson is, from what I can tell, what started it all …
Is there such thing as “Social Media Etiquette” or are most rules set up to fortify the position of those that already have arrived?
And because we early adaptors are so strange, you’ll have to start reading the conversation at the bottom!
moritherapy @raincoaster which brings me to another point: soc media allows for those wild ADD jump-abouts that i like to engage in. BAD in polite convo
moritherapy @lizstrauss i’m sure you’d have interesting things to say in this soc media etiquette convo w/ @hummingbird604 and @raincoaster
Tojosan @moritherapy stranger than what? I’ve been called strange before…as a matter of fact… )
moritherapy the “sweetness to strangers” thing is interesting. who is a stranger on twitter?
moritherapy sorry i missed all kindza yummy thoughts due to the thai emergency (looks like they’re going to sawasdee).
hummingbird604 @raincoaster How is it a contradiction?
moritherapy @hummingbird604 quick, what’s the best thai restaurant?
raincoaster@shanegibson Etiquette’s function is not to help people “connect and grow,” it is to provide norms so interaction can take place
raincoaster @hummingbird604 So stability is only situationally desirable? There’s a contradiction there. 42 minutes ago from web in reply to hummingbird604
hummingbird604 @raincoaster I wouldn’t classify it as a flamewar, is it? BTW – I have gotten no more new followers. You get more new followers than I do!
hummingbird604 @raincoaster Not in all cases and not at all times. I guess it would depend on the issue at hand.
raincoaster And on that anarchistic note, I’m off to make raincoaster soup. And I don’t care if it’s not normal.
raincoaster @hummingbird604 Is stability itself a desired outcome? about 1 hour ago from web
hummingbird604 @moritherapy Institutions defined as rules and norms are what makes our world more stable. Living in constant anarchy? Not very stable.
raincoaster FYI y’all, Twitter-based flamewars about etiquette are great for getting new followers.
hummingbird604 @raincoaster Although we did come to an agreement – early adopters set the rules and norms by arriving first to the party.
raincoaster @hummingbird604 No, you can see it. But it’s overlaid with sweetness like a tiger trap is overlaid with branches.
hummingbird604 @raincoaster But to see MY dark side, someone would need to be REALLY evil to either myself or my friends. Is that considered an “edge”
raincoaster @hummingbird604 Yes, it could well be the first disagreement. Except about men.
raincoaster @moritherapy The secret is, if you’re an early adopter you’re living in anarchy all the time…but you must constantly move on.
raincoaster @hummingbird604 You have an edge. Baldridge is like that perky girl played by Reese Witherspoon who has no dark side. I pity her.
hummingbird604 @raincoaster I don’t think I’m sweet in the Baldridge’s model. But I’m sweet in my own kind of way. Sometimes, disgustingly sweet 
hummingbird604 @raincoaster I don’t think I’m sweet in the Baldridge’s model. But I’m sweet in my own kind of way. Sometimes, disgustingly sweet
moritherapy @raincoaster i’m a closet libertarian (or is that nostalgic anarchist?) and hope there won’t be too many norms. nor too many strict norms.
hummingbird604 @moritherapy I was being funny. Given how sweet I am, I was hoping everyone would see the contradiction in that
moritherapy @hummingbird604 YOU are saying sweetness is overrated? i’m speechless
raincoaster @hummingbird604 Sweetness in Baldridge’s case means you HAVE to respond to every stranger who speaks to you. It’s dangerous, inappropriate.
hummingbird604 @raincoaster And perhaps the very first time when we’ve disagreed on something!
hummingbird604 @raincoaster @GusF We should try Cipriano’s one evening
raincoaster @moritherapy See, reading guidelines before entering a social forum like Twitter isn’t really normal, is it?A reflection of the 1st adopters
raincoaster @moritherapy There are usually throwdowns when the initial elite begin to lose battles 4 defining the norms. It gets ugly, but is necessary
hummingbird604 @moritherapy And *that* exactly is what @raincoaster was referring to. Early adopters set specific rules/norms of behavior.
raincoaster @hummingbird604 Miss Manners rules. Letitia Baldridge is very sweet, not very correct. Original Emily Post is my fave, new Posts are v v bad
moritherapy @raincoaster haha, that’s for sure, that we weren’t screened for socialization. good thing 
moritherapy remember the brouhaha last year about twitter etiquette? o’reilly. here at twitter wiki http://tinyurl.com/2fs8yg
raincoaster @hummingbird604 Also don’t forget, early adopters in tech were never screened for socialization. That’s why the internet’s still so strange.
hummingbird604 @raincoaster Now, on the miss manners books, I’m totally tempted to read them.
raincoaster @moritherapy Ann Landers don’t know shit about etiquette.
hummingbird604 @raincoaster And this last tweet (early adopters lead by default) is what I agreed upon
hummingbird604 Ok, so here’s the lowdown – made a normative statement of how I’d like the world to work instead of a positive statement of how it DOES work
hummingbird604 @raincoaster I *am* an academic. But I was looking for the latin root for morality (wikipedia entry much faster!)
raincoaster @hummingbird604 Again, I say early adopters lead by default. Noobs enter, take cues from what’s already happening, by definition between EAs
moritherapy @raincoaster i’d be interested in a conversation about etiquette, not a talk. unless you wanna be ann landers about 1 hour ago from web in reply to raincoaster
hummingbird604 @raincoaster But after re-reading, I am making a normative statement of how the world should work (or how i’d like it to work) instead of a
moritherapy @raincoaster would be interested in one of those papers on morality and etiquette
raincoaster @hummingbird604 Wikipedia? You disappoint me. I thought you were an academic. I’ll refer you to Miss Manners instead. Have all her books.
hummingbird604 @raincoaster I think the disagreement stemmed from what I implied as the norm (e.g. early adopters SHOULD lead) – a normative statement
ffer. Fingers crossed
raincoaster @hummingbird604 Your translation and equation contains a tautology. “Proper” does equal “good etiquette”.
hummingbird604 @raincoaster Ok. On THIS I can agree.
raincoaster @hummingbird604 Um, Raul, I KNOW what morality means. I wrote more than one paper on the difference between morality and etiquette.
hummingbird604 @raincoaster Although I would agree with you about not confusing ethics with good etiquette.
hummingbird604 @raincoaster (definition direct from wikipedia – but Twitter doesn’t have footnotes!)
hummingbird604 @raincoaster Morality comes from the latin moralitas, “manner, character, proper behavior”. We make “good etiquette” synonym with this.
raincoaster @hummingbird604 Early adopters lead the movement by default, not by awareness of moral burden. First people in a party set the tone.
raincoaster @hummingbird604 Because we’ve been trained to use those as synonyms for “Desirable” and “Undesirable”. Do not confuse morality and etiquette
hummingbird604 @raincoaster Etiquette is a social convention built around norms of interaction. But if it’s amoral, then why do people say “good” or “bad”?
hummingbird604 @raincoaster – um, I might have misunderstood. But I stand by what I said – early adopters have a responsibility to lead the movement.
raincoaster @hummingbird604 That is not a responsibility. It is a sociological truism, a fundamental form of human interaction. Etiquette is amoral.
hummingbird604@shanegibson And yeah there’s such a thing as social media etiquette about 3 hours ago from twhirl in reply to shanegibson
raincoaster @hummingbird604 Not what I said! Early adopters bring their own preferences and work out a balance between themselves which becomes the norm
hummingbird604@shanegibson I concur with @raincoaster – the early adopters have the responsibility to lead the movement, not to stake a position
Miss604 @hummingbird604 @shanegibson … etiquette + Creative Commons in my books
…
Addition by shanegibson, with this useful comment: “What’s interesting is how each of us only had seen parts of this dialogue based upon who we were following in twitter too!”
If I had the time, I’d love to follow this dialogue into all its nooks and crannies, in order to pick up all the voices …
Anyway, here are the stray tweets:
@10thToTheFraser @shanegibson definitely is SM etiquette. most of it boils down to the golden rule: treat others as you want to be treated.
@davemacdonald @shanegibson great question. secondlife is apparently facing this now. For social media I think there are more early adopters than ever.
@IanWatt @shanegibson I would be happy to teach the Social Media Etiquette class
@raincoaster @shanegibson Hey, that’s why there’s always a market for new forums: ppl not well socialized to existing norm niches need them. Eureka!
@raincoaster @shanegibson Define “growth.” I agree norms are useful in establishing connection. Got some great quotes on that too long for Twitter, alas
@raincoaster @shanegibson That is a specialized social network with institutional norms. They tend to be less widely adopted. Not “wrong” just niche
@raincoaster @shanegibson Etiquette’s function is not to help people “connect and grow,” it is to provide norms so interaction can take place.
@shanegibson @hummingbird604 great idea. I’m fascinated by the contrast and similarity with offline social networks and “classes” of networkers
@shanegibson @hummingbird604 @raincoaster RT @ariherzog Echoing social media empowering and connecting, you’d like this of mine: http://bit.ly/1csa
@shanegibson @raincoaster @hummingbird604 social media and networking etiquette should empower people to connect and grow not constrain or stratify.
(Oh, and moar funny pictures here)
Canada 9-5 in October
Hello everyone and welcome to the October 2008 edition of Canada 9-5, a selection of Canadians who use blogging to showcase their work and civic involvement. This time around is unusual – normally we present a mix of submitted blogs and others we have come across in our travels; this time we’re only presenting those that were submitted through the blog carnival. We actually get a lot of submissions but many of them fall by the wayside because somehow the message that this is about Canadian bloggers didn’t quite get through.
Here’s what’s on tap today:
Ethnic Marketing
Ethnicomm submitted an article about using Google alerts. I also liked this post on marketing to ethnic communities.
A recent article on Adage.com called “Marketers: We Don’t Get How to Do Diversity” made me laugh.
Seems that the majority of the big marketing gurus in 60 odd companies surveyed by executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles believed that multicultural marketing was critical to their business but about 24 of them said they can’t quantify it. Come on! What a cop out!
The financial worth of multicultural segments is relatively easy to determine…at least here in Canada. According to Marketing Magazine, South Asians, Chinese, Italians and Portuguese account for more than $36 billion in annual expenditure, or 24 per cent of the total market dollars in the GTA. The South Asian market is worth $12.6 billion annually in Toronto alone.
But it’s not just about not knowing. I think it’s also about not caring. Getting the senior exec to buy-in and support multicultural or ethno-marketing was a significant roadblock for the marketing gurus. And who wants to fight that battle when it’s easier to stick with the status quo?
For the rest, go here, to Ethno-Marketing.
Laid Off After 20 Years
Canajun Finances sent an article that’s a part of a series of posts in the wake of getting laid off at Nortel.
Twenty years of my life summed up in a bank entry (a 5 digit bank entry so I am not really complaining about the sum itself), it just seems so final.
Over my twenty years at Nortel, I have met and worked with some of the most amazing people and seen technological changes that staggered me, when I think about how life was before these technological “miracles”. I have had four children, and many wonderful things have happened, and many sacrifices were made for work, and at the end of it, I have one line in a bank statement to sum it up?
Read more here at Twenty Years In One Line.
Market Your Customer
Our second marketing blog for today is Harmony Thiessen’s Think Tub Business Blog, part of her company, HG Consulting & Publishing. She seems like a fun person – hopefully I’ll meet her one day, maybe at the bloggers meetup. She’s qualified – her business strategy career and specialty in marketing and revenues began, she says, at the ripe age of 14, when she was a shift manager at Jack In The Box. In the post that she’s offering us today she talks about marketing your customers.
Rather that run another TV ad about your great prices, or print ads in the local paper about your anniversary sale – talk about the people who make your business possible = your customers.
Twitter and LinkedIn
Remember the social media megaproject in the winter? I was the Twitter and LinkedIn lady. Looks like Andrea Stenberg could have done the job, too. She sent in an article about Twitter. I also found her entry on a new feature at LinkedIn quite useful – I actually didn’t know about the feature (or maybe I didn’t pay attention when LinkedIn emailed me about it).
LinkedIn announced an amazing new feature on their site: you can now have discussions within.
It seems like a no-brainer to me, but for a long time LinkedIn groups didn’t have this feature. All you could really do with a group you were a member of is look at the profiles of the members and invite them to connect.
To be honest, until now I felt the LinkedIn groups were pretty pointless. LinkedIn is all about connecting with people you know, but you couldn’t get to know other members of a group until after they became a connection. It seemed to defeat the purpose of LinkedIn.
But with this added feature you can have conversations with people in your groups. You can ask questions, comment on what others have to say, have a debate. In other words, you can get to know people.
The full article about LinkedIn is here.
A Toronto Realtor On An Elevator
In September, we had Krupo, an accountant, here at Canada 9-5. He was so kind to write about an “awesome blog written by a young Toronto realtor ” and offered this article on a new law that will alleviate anxieties around construction completions. I personally enjoyed this post on elevators:
What I find really amusing is that people go to great lengths to avoid interacting in elevators, and use these time-tested techniques, yet when the doors open, they saunter out really slow as if to say, “Oh, is this my floor? Right, okay. I’m not in any hurry to get off, and I did NOT find that elevator ride awkward at all, in fact, I could do that all day.”
A Canadian Tax Blog
Dean Paley sent this article on Minimizing Capital Gains and Estate Planning. I couldn’t get quite fired up about that topic but found this post here, RRSPs Versus Non-Registered Accounts, useful. I think many of us just pay blindly into RRSPs, thinking they’re such a wonderful thing. There are a number of scenarios where they are maybe not the best place for our money.
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That’s it for this time around. As always, if you know of a Canadian blog that fits what we’re doing here (and we’re looking particularly for non-IT bloggers; IT blogs are already getting a lot of exposure) please let us know by using this submission form. We’re taking a bit of a break here; the next edition will be out on January 8, 2008.
Remember the Future?
I’ve been spending a lot of time online in what used to be called videoconferencing, using those connections to record interviews. Came across this image that seemed a perfect retro reference to the new way we can all communicate.
In my reflections on this process, I see we are in a phase where on the phone I am disembodied, while in video on the web I am located in a type of body, or a place/image which I identify as “me”.
A Bit of Internet Philosophy: Living With the Loose Ends
In our ongoing conversation here about – about the meaning of the internet for the individual? (is that what we’re talking about here, Carol?), I’d like to play a bit with Carol’s last two blog entries (Ikiaqqivik Means Internet and Traveling Through Layers and Identity: Two-Bit Wit, Memes and Zen). Let’s see what I can come up with.
The internet
More and more I like the word “interwebs” – it has more evocative appeal: Webs upon webs intricately connected with each other, an immense neural network. “Net”, to me, sounds like it is just one big net – maybe it was like that in 1985 but it’s certainly more complex today.
Ikiaqqivik #1: Layers
Ikiaqqivik is the Inuit word for the internet. Literally, it means “travelling through layers”. It comes from the concept describing what a shaman does when asked to find out about living or deceased relatives or where animals have disappeared to: travel across time and space to find answers.
What a great word for the internet. While “interwebs” evokes the strands in each web, ikiaqqivik points to the multidimensionality of the internet. Both the words “net” and “web” conjure up two dimensions.
One example of the layers would be the different purposes we want for the internet; in this post, Carol talks about the uses that marketing and politics want for the internet: a transmission machine for simple, clear-cut messages. Others want it to be a tool for social change, for making friends, or for publishing. (For more on the purpose of the internet, see here, here, here and here).
Ikiaqqivik #2: Travelling / Wandering
The internet (interwebsiaqqivik?) is not about being static. It’s all about travelling back and forth and crisscrossing the many strands and layers of interconnected information. I wonder, though, whether “wandering” is a better word. A great deal, if not the vast majority, of the connections we make on interwebsiaqqivik happen not because we set out to make that connection but because our curiosity leads us down a path that just minutes ago we had no idea existed. “Wandering” seems to capture this better than “travelling”, which has a bit more of a purpose-driven connotation.
Zen: Where Is The Self in the Web?
Carol says,
Seems like the theory of who and what we are, wish to be and will be, is being constantly tested and transformed by the myriad circumstances of the world around and within us. There can be no one person in the midst of this change, and the search for that one person or one identity has been the work of mystics and thinkers down through the ages. So I leave the question of internal or external identity, of internal and external spaces, domestic and public, private and public to the French philosophers (and others).
Let me just pose as a Buddhist French philosopher here for a minute and expand on Carol’s words and ask, who is that person-self that is wandering through interwebsiaqqivik? To what degree do we freely determine our identity in cyberspace? Are we one person or many? When we are more than one, do we consciously shapeshift like a shaman or scatter our identities depending on the spaces we occupy (e.g. Facebook vs. online learning vs. blogging)? Or maybe “scatter” is the wrong word and “adapt” would be better? And once again, how do our online identities relate to our offline personae?
For today, I’m going to leave you with these questions.
A friend of mine said recently, “Growing up means being able to live with the loose ends.”
Canada 9-5 In September: All About Creativity
Welcome to Canada 9-5, the September edition! This blog carnival is about Canadians blogs about business, non-profits, public life and work in general. Somehow, this edition has a distinctive taste of creativity to it. Look:
A Winnipeg Music Blog
… with the great name Painting Over Silence. It tells you all about the Winnipeg music scene, which, like all music scenes, is mostly Indie. And thanks to Painting Over Silence, if you’re an Indie fan, you can now find out about your personality.
A couple days back an enlightening article appeared on the CBC that published the findings of a Scottish University’s study aimed at unearthing the link between musical taste and personality.
Musicians for the Environment
The Lake Ontario Waterkeepers, an environmental group, have a newsroom which contains one of the Great Lakes’ largest archives on environmental law and water quality issues. One of the articles aggregated there talks about Canadian musician Sarah Harmer, who co-founded PERL (Protecting Escarpment Rural Land), an organization campaigning, according to Wikipedia,
to protect the Niagara Escarpment from a proposed gravel development which would see parts of the wilderness on the escarpment destroyed. To support the organization, she and her acoustic band embarked on a tour of the escarpment, hiking the Bruce Trail and performing at theatres and community halls in towns along the way. A documentary DVD of this tour was released in 2006 as Escarpment Blues.
A Courier in Vancouver
Bulletproof Courier is the brain – or helmet? – child of Greg Crosby, a citizen journalist documenting news and events in downtown Vancouver. Greg says he also enjoys producing catchy video reports of local events and venues he attends, often through the unique perspective of his helmet cam. I haven’t met Greg (yet – hopefully I will next week) but, well, I guess he is a bicycle courier, and I’m glad I finally found such a blog. Bicycle couriers – don’t you think they’re ideal people to have a blog? They see a lot, both on the streets, in the dark corridors of CorporateLand and in the deep, frustrated eyes of law office receptionists. Plus they have their own rather quirky perspective (or am I stereotyping, Greg). Anyway, to stay with the music theme – enjoy Greg’s video of the Star Wars theme on bagpipes.
Marketing
Staying with the creative theme, let’s move from music to creative marketing ideas. Ethnicomm, a marketing blog, has a post on 7 steps towards becoming more creative . I know, there are lots of blog posts out there but what I found interesting that in addition to the usual suspects (“go against the flow”, “be inspired”) there are also ones that I don’t come across that often, for example
Chatter incessantly.
The more you talk, the more you expose yourself to opportunities to have a conversation with someone. And if you tie this in to point #1 above [“go against the flow”], even better. Just be careful that you’re not always talking to yourself. The barista at your local Starbucks, the cab drive driving you to your innovation seminar, the math teacher at your child’s school, the annoyed and tired looking gentleman on that transatlantic flight can all help with your verbal rapid prototyping efforts.
(Uh – what are verbal rapid prototyping efforts? Is that a new word creation?)
Interior design
Gaile Guevara has a blog that showcases modern furniture and other interior design articles (artifacts?), like the jelly chairs you can see gracing this post. There are a great many links on her blog, which I really like – what I’m missing, however, is a sense for what Gaile does. Does she have a store? Does she offer her services as an interior designer?
Author and Grow Rich! In 12 hours!
I guess we could still put this in the category of creativity although what Glenn Dietz from Sarnia, Ontario, is mostly about is – you guessed it: making money from books. Not just $27 ebooks but something that brings in $10,000. In this post here about – well I guess it’s about market feedback – if I get it right, he talks about flowcharting one’s thoughts. That sounds interesting. I hope he’ll write more about it.
Canucks Blog – Cory Schneider
I have to confess that I’m pretty much in the dark when it comes to hockey and our Vancouver team, the Canucks. (Although, staying with the topic du jour, I think that sports has quite a lot to do with creativity). Fortunately, that doesn’t prevent me from at least trying to get to know about their online activities; maybe I’ll even learn something? Let’s take Cory Schneider’s blog. I like how he just tells his story; it’s almost an old-fashioned type of blog, just a little diary – perfect for someone with fans who are eager to get a glimpse of the lives of a sports celebrity. In this entry, he talks about getting to know the team – and I even about music! His favourite band right now is 3 Days Grace (also a group I hadn’t known, so thanks for introducing me to them, Cory!)
Hardcore Accounting
Ok, finally here’s a blog that has nothing to do with creativity. (Or does it?) Through MBA Explorer I found out about Krupo’s A Counting School – Hardcore Chartered Accountancy
since 1494. I was curious about “1494” and after googling for a moment, was reminded that was the year when the Italian monk Luca Pacioli, “the Father of Accounting” published the first book written on double-entry accounting. The title of this exciting book is “Everything about Arithmetic, Geometry, and Proportions.” A 500-year bestseller. Hey, maybe we can get Glenn, our author specialist, to write something about it!)
At any rate, here is an interesting entry by Krupo, Trainwreck of economic logic. He compares professional services that cost money with those that make money. Krupo just alludes to these concepts, saying that he would not “fisk” the referenced article that spoke somewhat disparagingly of people who “only” cost money. Thus, Krupo introduced me to the term “fisking”. In all this time in the blogosphere I had never come across it but apparently it’s widely used, meaning “a point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or (especially) news story”. At any rate, I would have liked to hear more about this; I think it would make for an interesting conversation about all kinds of things, for example, the difference between long-term and short-term economic benefits, something of interest not just for accountants but ordinary folks, too.
That’s it for this edition! As always, if you know of a Canadian blog that fits what we’re doing here (and we’re looking particularly for non-IT bloggers; IT blogs are already getting a lot of exposure) please let us know by using this submission form. The next edition will be out on October 18, 2008.