This is my first post here for a few weeks. Its been all systems go with projects in all directions.

A few weeks back I was at MarketingNow in Melbourne – my very favourite city and some of the best presentations I have heard in a long time.   Stephen Johnson stole the show on the last afternoon but there was some brilliant presentations by Gavin Heaton, Laurel Papworth and the other speakers.

Barely back a week and then to TEDx Auckland which was a high intensity rapid fire sessions by these speakers.

Scott Gilmour – Dreamer, Brenda Frisk – Learning Technologist, Nigel Parker – Technologist; Michael Henderson – Corporate Anthropologist; Dr Robin Kelly – Doctor, Author; Ray Avery – inventor, Scientist, Humanitarian; Billy Gammon – Adventurer; Wendy McGuiness – Reluctant Futurist. Others were Andy Blood, Nigel Parker but the dancing policeman captured the spirit of the day – Constable Glenn Compain.

Last week I had time out for the school holidays. We really wanted to go to Milford Sound and we did. Luckily I wasn’t there for the coffee as Milford and Queenstown don’t rate very well.

A special project I have been working on is called Forum for the Future on the New Zealand economy. I love that in NZ we still have people who want to engage on the big ideas and refuse to leave it to the politicians.

Vision and robust debate is something we need more of and hats off to Rod Oram, Rob Davis and the team at the Unitec School of Business & Creative Industries for launching this initiative.

This morning I posted this over on that blog by way of prep for the event on the the Dairy Sector.

Over at Unitec tonight at 6:30pm we have Dr John Penno on a panel discussion chaired by Rod Oram, with Dr Tim Mackle and other guests from Unitec.

John is Chief Executive of Synlait while Fonterra is the 800 pound gorilla of the industry- sort of like David and Goliath except that a $100m baby company isn’t that small.

We hear a bit about Fonterra but not so much about the rest of the industry. Such as Tatua, Synlait,ViaLactia Biosciences, and other stakeholders like DairyNZ who will be represented by Tim Mackle tonight.

Most New Zealanders are “townies” now and in fact only about 11,000 farmer shareholders supply the bulk of NZ’s milk to Fonterra who export about 95% of their product.

Perhaps we should take a bit more interest than we do.

The Dairy sector in New Zealand is a big deal – but imagine you decide to split from the biggest player (Fonterra) and pursue a different high value added strategy – this is what Synlait are doing.

“Picture this: you run a multimillion-dollar business in an industry that is one of our biggest export earners. It’s a hands-on enterprise that requires technical knowledge and business smarts, daily decision-making and constant risks.

Yet you’re stuck in Commodity Hell, reliant on the whims of international markets, exchange rates, rising costs and consumer trends. You have one customer and that customer sets the price of your product*.

You’d be looking for a better way to do business, right?”

That is the opening paragraph from a background feature on Synlait

(*That part has changed a bit with the advent of electronic auctions)

From Fonterra to new frontiers—how Synlait plans to go from farmer to pharma

To read the rest of this feature go http://ow.ly/tRjC

“They’re the first farmers to split from Fonterra and have caught the industry’s attention.”

“Synlait is talking ingredients for functional foods and nutraceuticals, consumer products with health, medicinal and other benefits that make up a US$40 billion global market growing at 20 percent a year.”

“End game

What really makes Synlait’s long-term investment worthwhile is the prospect of tailoring its products for use in the booming nutraceutical market. Yes, ‘nutraceutical’ is an ugly word but it’s worth a lot.

Think of the space between nutrition and pharmaceuticals and you get a massive industry that includes functional foods like fruit drinks, dietary supplements and a burgeoning industry of tablets consisting of kiwifruit extracts, colostrum or bee jelly protein.

Nutraceuticals also form the basis for infant formula, hospital foods, energy drinks and health tonics. Estimates of the size of the market vary wildly from billions to hundreds of billions, depending on definitions.”

“Along the way, they’ll turn the commodity model on its head. Fonterra “won’t turn on a milk drier for an order of less than 1,000 tonnes,” says Penno. Synlait aims to do short-runs of milk powder at competitive prices, thanks to cheaper transport costs and cost savings elsewhere in the system.”

More recently – in NBR – about that milk drier…

milk processor Synlait admits its $100 million equity drive has slowed, it still has plans to double capacity by 2011. NBR http://ow.ly/u12B

See http://ow.ly/ugi4 for more details – Please tweet Questions and feedback to #UnitecFTF.

If you are quick there may still be seats available. ( Guest bios for speakers.)

If we really are to close the gap with Australia then everyone and every sector has to do better but as Dairy and Tourism are huge so we should get informed don’t you think?

One of the recurring themes in online marketing is how balance the demands of creative content generation with the imperatives of structure and management thinking including what is known as the managers timetable.

Paul Graham understands the dilemma very well and writes about this in a recent essay Makers Schedule, Managers Schedule. It is worth reading the whole essay (and as many of Paul’s other essays as you can. )

This paragraph captures the essential conflict between the two timetables.

“When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I’d sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called “business stuff.”

I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager’s schedule and one on the maker’s.”

Being a problem solver in the online world requires all kind of creative and management skills and often the need to flick between different modes and experience sets. As a creative generalist I can switch from sales to business analysis to design to coding to project management and then account management all in the same day depending on the projects and clients.

That is not ideal but for many small to medium sized businesses that is the daily challenge.  If they are lucky they might have a core team of at least three people who can spend most of their time focussed in a particular quadrant.

As the business grows the challenge for business owners is to find people who can inhabit a skill-set and subject discipline in a way that brings out the best in them and their respective teams.

In adland this might be represented by a creative, a suit (sales – account manager /director) and a finance /admin team. There would also be a strategic planner who does much of the navigation between the creative (making) side and the management end of the scale. It is no accident that ad agencies are structured like this.

This type of approach makes sense for software development teams as well. However the creative element in programming is not as well understood as it is in advertising circles and it should be.

Flow State and What the Client really Wants

When working with programmers I often observe them meandering around the code universe in search of what – they are never quite sure  all the time. Certain types of programing  involves chaining functional units together in a sequence to complete several processes and perform an series of actions in a type of language and syntax so that it makes sense to co-workers and obeys certain rules and constraints.

There are different approaches of course but some variation on the simple sequencing of connected actions is built up over time to – lets say automate a business process. Once the basics are built there may be further refinements and testing against known user scenarios and other systems. There might also be optimisation and refactoring to make certain sequences run faster under expected load conditions and there might be a whole separate level of presentation design or user interface experience to consider.

Tech people sometimes talk about this in terms of layers or tiers. What most users see is the presentation layer and that might require a high level of design complexity and much more of a creative element.

The next layer might be the business process / rules engine where just like Chess pieces the code sets can only work in predetermined ways.  The bottom layer might be the data set where the database people talk about tables and fields and database integrity.

The thing is that when wearing our managers hat we often lump all those types of work into a discipline called programming when there are lots really different activities going on.

Every programmer seems to have a different routine for producing “the code”.  They all seem to involve some kind of elaborate warm up where they throw out most of the previous days “work” and start again (or it might be a co-workers code.)

On the makers schedule a programmer might spend an hour or two iterating very small but elaborate steps in a process until they get into more of a “flow state” where they are figuratively and mentally warmed up and can then perform at the peak of their powers.

What the manager wants to do is bill all hours used even if some hours are not as productive as others. From the programmers perspective becomes a little like like warming up to play a piece of music by doing scales and seeming random discursive activities around a “problem” piece.

Programming is like Musical Composition

What programmers and musicians don’t always know is that when they repeat a riff is exactly where it fits in the overall composition and sometimes they just have to code around pieces until the magic appears.

From experience I’ve found that many of the best programmers are also musicians.  I don’t believe that is a coincidence at all.

Anyway what the client really wants to pay for is the golden notes at the end of the second set when the magic pixie dust starts to hit and the dance floor lights up.  That section might be only a few minutes but to get those magic moments might have taken a day of programming or a day in the studio to capture if you were a musician.

As a manager the trick to to try and balance as much of the routine low level coding and making processes with as much of the magic output process to create the best environment for staff to do this.

As managers -we should try to not interrupt the makers flow so we can all get to those golden notes as soon as possible.

Lou Donaldson

This is also the difference between good and great.

Building a great website is a bit like putting on a jazz concert starting with swing, changing the style to bebop and then closing out the set with a magnificent free jazz blowout.

Programmers can be virtuosos in exactly the same way as musicians where mastery of several languages and idioms can give rise to a new art form. To complete the analogy, as managers we set up the the stage – make sure everything works; the makers practice, practice and practice some more.

We then throw open the curtains on opening night and the makers play a set of predefined musical riffs and hope it catches fire with the audiences feet.

We hope for the same thing when we post a blog or throw open the doors on a new web based community.

In the words of Lou Donaldson (alto Sax) from a 1970 Blue Note recording of the same name.

“Everything I play  gone be funky from now on…
Everything I play gone be funky from now on”

(Repeat with organ, break beats & horn section until it really flys.)

If only it was that easy.

Managers and makers – what do you think? – are we making it easy to produce the best results for clients?

The search for a new business model or new version which makes more sense today is a recurring background story or theme in many business sectors.

A truly great business is one that re-invents itself and especially the business model like Shai Agassi is doing with the Electric car.

Local debate on whether or not paid content models can work has prompted some discussion but in my view we need to dig a bit deeper.

Media businesses who previously were gatekeepers of scarce information could ration out their product or service and earn a very good rate of return. For well over a decade now newspapers and all forms of media are at various levels waiting for a new business model to rescue them.

Classified advertising has left the building, ad blockers, ad blindness and general abundance of news sources means that readers follow the path of least resistance and that is away from mainstream formats.

“Vivian Mercier – famous for describing Waiting for Godot as a play which “has achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats.

What’s more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice.” from Wikipedia

I saw that play a very long time ago and while no- one can really agree on what is happening it seems to be universally relevant and pushes the right emotional and/or idea buttons in the audience who engage enough of the time to connect with themes and archetypes in the play.

At the risk of glossing over the play (go and see it some time) one of the key ideas I took from it was that we often think that if events / people arrived we would recognise them even though we have no real idea of exactly what or whom they might be or when.

It becomes a kind of “we’ll know it when we see it” continuing cycle of hopefulness and disappointment as different outcomes are explored.

This is pretty much the state of play in many publishing businesses now.

When your business model gets turned upside down and news is a commodity it becomes much harder to justify investment in resources to write, collect, edit and compile all of the content into some form of media offering – especially online.

Spinning in the Grave – The three biggest reasons music magazines are dying. By Jonah Weiner (hat tip to @mrinternet (Nigel Horrocks) for pointing this story out.)

“One of the most important historical functions of music magazines has been precisely to speak in a semisecret language that separates in-the-know us from square them.”

reason 3 – Music magazines were an early version of social networking. But now there’s this thing called “social networking” …

Jonah has enough of a story to keep our attention for a few minutes but Godot never turns up.

That is the writing does explore some of the reasons why music magazines in particular are dying but I’d rather read about where they are succeeding and I suspect I am not alone in that thought.

My belief is that successful future publishing business models will be more narrow-casting than broadcasting. They will offer huge depth of compelling content rather than trying to be all things to all people.

The music website that is closest to this model now is Rocks Back Pages which has something like 15,000 articles for a subscription fee. There is a whole lot more community that RBP could leverage off the content but its a steps closer to a viable model.

Last weeks post came out before the Media 7 version where Bernard Hickey and Barry Colman went into the studio with Russell Brown to talk through some of these ideas. (see clip below)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another view on the NBR model is by Bill Bennett over here.

There will be more than one model that will work and the balance of workable formats will change.

Will we know when the right business model turns up?

Will we ever get to meet Godot?

Your comments / thoughts please.

Note: Now that I’ve finished this post I just found out that Alan Rooks wrote about the Paper Industry in 2003 and made some similar comparisons.

I’m just waiting for someone to describe Twitter as the “Godot Syndrome” which turns out to be an actual type of anxiety condition “repeatedly asking questions on a forthcoming event” just like what are you doing? seems to me.

Watching the tweet stream slip by in a tangle of half connections and random combinations at at once comforting and disconcerting – just like waiting for a new business model.

Bernard Hickey has a fine debate going over at his blog on Interest.co.nz since last Friday

Opinion: How to profitably publish financial news online for free

July 17th, 2009

By Bernard Hickey

“Earlier today NBR publisher Barry Colman announced he was going to charge a discounted NZ$89 for a six month subscription to see about 20% of the news and commentary at NBR’s website. He argued it was only a matter of time before the business model of free news online collapsed and media generally was at a ‘tipping point in The Great New Journalism Adventure.’

I agree that we are at or near a tipping point for a great new journalism adventure and I’m having a ball embarking on that adventure. But I think Barry has tipped the wrong way and I’d like to suggest another better and more profitable way.”

Read the rest of the over  at: Opinion: How to profitably publish financial news online for free and feel free to make comments there as well.

Very good to see references to Clay Shirky and some of the others thinking about business models and the future of online publishing. See( Rise of Social Capital and Media Activism)

I wrote the following comment on that post:

The best thing about this is the debate. First off NBR & Barry Colman have done well for a very long time – but to a certain extent they are trapped by their own history and cost structures.

Now – hands up everyone here who makes more $ than Barry Colman out of media publishing. Respect for that – but there will be even greater respect for publishers who take the model forward and continue to create value for everyone which is a different paradigm entirely.

Crap bloggers don’t really last while I can think of more than a few reactionary columnists in MSM who don’t deserve reading but who are piggybacking off the back of a larger brand which tolerates them.

When Murdoch bought Dow Jones there was a lot of debate on print vs online. Some of which we covered in 2007 media-meltdown-or-new-era-dow-jones/ (Thanks Raf for mentioning that.)

There is one subscription model variation that has been tried a few times and I think it certainly seems to work. It is sponsored access to a members only space.

Not sure who is doing this now but it works by giving short term access based on a sponsor paying some / all of the costs. So when I try to click through to one of the featured articles I see a message which says XYZ sponsor will give me a free pass of for x number of days/accesses.

From a publishers viewpoint you can then put sponsorship messages in front of the “hot traffic” flows and everyone wins. (FT does something like this.)

Also in terms of membership style access there are systems which apply micro payment charges to each different unit of measure but typically this is easier to manage by more of a flat fee access a zone or multiple zones.

Rethinking business models is not easy – witness the music industry who are still largely in denial over this – but it will come.

If you haven’t already have a look at The news business- Tossed by a gale from May ‘09 at Economist.

P.S – Go over to the post and add your comments there or here is good too.

Helping clients plan to get the best out of their WordPress sites is something that I really enjoy.

Having a theme library loaded and switching between them for instant changes to “the look and feel” is a fun moment in the discovery planning process.

For non – WordPress users a Theme is effectively a website design “skin” that overlays the content. It works by providing a filtered view of the text (XML) content.

For more technical users we are talking about combination of stylesheet (CSS) and some core function code (pages, posts, comments) which is written in PHP.

At the visual level this is fairly easy. For example if the client has an existing site structure we would look to match the colours, and general look and feel with a similar theme that has 1 , 2 or 3 columns. We may be also looking for menu layouts, header functions, plus sidebar and footer configurations.

Part of this is to understand the branding context and also if there is an existing format whether that should be kept if if there is a more optimal layout.

What we would then do is match fonts, include branded headers and other brand ID assets on a theme that was as close as possible but sometimes it can be quicker to build a new theme that to find one that matches up.

Way back in ‘97 there was programme called Net Objects which did something similar in packaging various components together with a set of styles and saved all of the information into an object called a NOD probably some kind of early XML file.

The great thing about that programme was the user interface for applying “styles” really simplified the menu and navigation processes by including all the image icons and button type files along with it.  I used that for many years for fast prototyping of sites and to replace PowerPoint for presentations as it was faster and easier.

Fast forward 9 years to 2006 – WordPress was coming of age with newer more visual releases although from memory I think that Joomla had a bigger range of theme like styles at the time.

But by late 2006 when I started this blog there were some great themes around for WordPress and having used lots of content management systems before I was ready to try something a bit more open ended.

Where to Search for WordPress Themes?

The best place to start is WordPress.org theme library. This is because the 800+ themes there have been sorted into some kind of taxonomy and at least partly vetted by WordPress developers and enthusiasts. This is important for two reasons.

1. Some themes have hidden code in them which might be advertising or worse. See the theme authors guidelines which aims to prevent  “hidden, paid or sponsored links in the theme. Links back to the author’s site are fine.”
2. More importantly this library provides a structure for searching where you can filter searches by types such as fixed or variable width, number of columns, main colour, features and subject which are called theme tags.

This generally provides a  range of visual templates and ideas for a wider search in other theme libraries.

In the past the searches haven’t been very precise possibly because some of these tag and taxonomy rules haven’t been fully applied and because some theme authors game the system by loading up on the equivalent of all possible keywords.

Frameworks and Coding Considerations

Having worked with dozens of themes now it is clear that under the skin many of them can be traced back to earlier building block models or frameworks.

Every install of WordPress comes with a default theme sometimes called Kubrick and that one along with K2 and others. More recent core themes are Carrington, Thematic and Sandbox.

Thematic  describes its Theme as

“a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, and a whole community behind it.”

Another excellent theme  is Thesis. One of the first serious themes that I learned from was Chris Peasons Cutline series.

As Chris puts it- here are 5 more reasons to look deeper into the code and overall framework of each theme to save hassle later on.

“As a serial site developer and blogger, I’ve found that the most valuable tool one can have is a refined template system that solves fundamental development, design, and publishing problems, including:

1. SEO and careful attention to in-site link equity
2. an “em” -based approach to element sizing (pixels are nice, but “ems” are by far the most accessible – and therefore the best – choice)
3. polished typography with finely-tuned geometrics for maximum legibility
4. an aesthetically pleasing layout that favors usability and clarity over extravagant presentation
5. forward-compatibility (I like to call it futureproofing)”

Put more simply – picking a great theme now which has “good bones”and optimal features can save a lot of time later on. Some themes come paired with a series of plugins for say featured content and a number of themes come as a kind of half-way house with extensive theme options for those not so comfortable with stylesheets.

Theme options allow user to make changes to a style at a higher level by ticking an options or using other present menu re-combinations to make changes without needing to ever see the CSS code.

An example of this approach would be something like the Atahualpa which come with something like 300 “theme options” and personally a style sheet looks easy after that.

It is described as follows and the links below are tags that can be used for searching.

“Version 3.4 – Atahualpa is a WordPress/PHP/CSS Framework that lets you build your own unique, professional and browser-safe WordPress theme: 1-5 columns, fluid or fixed width, rotating header images and over 200 theme options. Tutorials, downloads and support at the BFA WP Forum

Tags: threaded-comments, theme-options, custom-header, custom-colors, flexible-width, white, sticky-post, translation-ready “

StudioPress Themes offer another approach where a set of plugins have been pre bundled with a theme and page templates are somewhere closer to a magazine style format.

Magazine syle themes generally have a larger number of columns like a newspaper and would tend to have a category menu as well as featured content sections and even special video or audio panels.

In summary most clients start out looking for a particular look and feel but there are other more practical considerations which could benefit them by saving time and money if the selection criteria is deepened.

As a WordPress practitioner I would steer clients towards some of the other functional considerations like “does it play nice with key plugins ?” and is the structure fully transparent and robust for scaling up and working with other applications which will be the next frontier.

There are other considerations but perhaps you can write in with your comments and questions on what you think are most important when choosing a great WordPress Theme.

I know some great planners and architects in Auckland and other cities.

So why is it that every time we get a chance to do something important in the city – it is all presented as a fait accompli by some bureaucrat or other vested interest at break neck speed and in a brain dead way?

Is vision and town planning mutually exclusive?  Certainly seems like it.

I liked the Jasmax bridge /tunnel idea a few years back. Doesn’t matter that it won’t fly. It was a much better way of engaging debate than we usually get and showed a boldness of vision lacking in the present city management milieu.

If this is the way that a united Auckland council is going to operate than who needs it.

I personally think the super city is being set-up to fail so that the choice parts can be privatised when it becomes obvious that it won’t work.

Where is the vision and the passion and the grass-roots support?

Here are two projects from NY that are worth reflecting upon.

“In this video, Friends of the Highline co-founder Robert Hammond tells the story. ” I found this video at CoolHunting.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And Majora Carters story  still resonates even after a few years it – is still inspiring.

“Majora Carter is dedicated to fighting “environmental racism” in her hometown of New York’s South Bronx. She’s working not just to hold back the polluters who target neighborhoods like hers but to bring back the green..”

“In an emotionally charged talk, MacArthur-winning activist Majora Carter details her fight for environmental justice in the South Bronx — and shows how minority neighborhood suffer most from flawed urban policy.”

Now back to planning a future for Auckland. “The council will be calling for designs on how to transform the sheds soon and wants to get work underway by the start of 2010.” Lets offer some visionary and useful ideas for this project.

It is easy for us to say the stupid shed on the waterfront is yet another dumb idea that we don’t want and the super city is also not a smart trade-off between community and getting things done.

But we also need to make submissions on this and other projects.  Is super-city (for example) just another giant power grab by a few people disguised as better local government  or am I being a bit too cynical?

We should take note of planning submissions like this one from GL2030 Submission on the Supercity which argues against the supercity.  Or write a better one.

We do need far better governance – but we also need better visionary thinking on city planning. New York’s Highline and Hunts Point Riverside Park can show us the way.

We have a chance to be bold and build communities – lets get some vision in the mix. What about it Auckland?

Update: 10 July 2009 Interesting to hear Phil Goff’s take on the National Party and Rodney Hide.

Interview from Werewolf Magazine

(Phil) Goff : Take the Super City as an example. I mean, Rodney Hide is quite clearcut in what he says. He wants to privatise the assets of the Auckland region – the ports, the remaining shares in the airport, the water supply.

Ah, Bill English said in an unguarded moment on tape, that he wanted to do that as well but not necessarily in the first term.

The fact that they have emphasised the first term as the constraint on privatisation is a clear indication that they will move, given the chance, to privatise in the second term.

As one of the organisers for Wordcamp NZ I’m very interested in what happens at other wordcamps around the world. They are community based events organised around WordPress users of all shapes and dimensions globally.

Next week I’ll write about WordPress themes but today a good place to look at is the roadmap and a bit of history from the key Wordpress founder.

“At WordCamps Matt Mullenweg attends he gives an update on the roadmap for WordPress including some updates on where the platform is now and generally providing a deeper context for users and developers alike.”

Here is the video (57m) from recent SAF WordCamp which had 700 attendees and is probably the biggest wordcamp so far in the 6 year old history of WordPress.

Description: Matt Mullenweg delivers his State of the Word presentation at WordCamp San Francisco 2009

Video shot & produced by Dave Curlee & John P. Post-production by Michael Pick.
WordCamp Location

San Francisco 2009

WordCamp Dallas in this coming weekend and I’ll be following as best as I can from here some of the discussions via twitter and other blogs from that event.

WordCamp UK is in July and we have WordCamp New Zealand on August 8th which is about 42 days time if my math is correct. Hope to see you all there.

See the Wordcamp Schedule for others

Until very recently the trade-off between richness and reach with media and communications tools on the internet has seen mixed results but we are very close to some exciting breakthroughs.

This means news is old when it gets through the media process as savvy consumers have already engaged to some extent in a myriad of ways (mostly online) and this alters the secondary ripples and impacts as well.

The difference between a one to many message and a conversation will continue to be endlessly debated across a range of media and platforms.  It has become much clearer that the overlap between micro-blogging (clogging ?) tools, mobile phones, other user generated content and mainstream media is now producing social dividends and all kinds of unintended and positive consequences.

Social capital has its own momentum and we see everything from instant tweets on earthquakes and elections to a scary washing machine with 15 thousand fans on facebook. Most mainstream media is filtered by the editorial process to become more of a news product. This is good for manicured medium but for a real-time news ticker social media tools are raising the stakes and in a very good way.

Twitter, Facebook blogs and other instant commentary now allows real time crowdsourcing for the equivalent of a live cross on camera – only better online for the most part. I was reminded of some of this when I heard a news item on radio about how Twitter had delayed a crucial update so as not to interrupt the flow of news from Iran.

That this was a news item is interesting in itself but ironically the Twitter maintenance had been and gone by the time the news got on the radio and that was very stale news to the Twitterati who had all moved on hours before.

There were three insightful perspectives I took notice of this week regarding the rise of social capital in these ways.

David MacGregor captured some of these dimensions reproduced below: (Thanks David)

“The social media phenomenon really does change my perception of the way forward. I have less and less regard for brand messages that are virtuoso – you know the kind I mean – the spectacular set pieces of yesteryear, film making fetishism in microcosm. Today I am more like to be receptive to messages that have far greater relevance and, oftentimes, utility – which might be expressed by the facility for me to understand more or engage more with the message personally.

The scale of my engagement is relative. The simple facility to comment or offer and opinion is sometimes sufficient and demonstrates the thought that I, like other people, want to be heard and acknowledged, rather than simply being yelled at or sung a silky siren song by spruikers.”

David writes very well on this an many other related topics. He also notes that all of this discussion is much less compartmentalized than it used to be. And that is a good thing in my view.

“I find it difficult to separate marketing, advertising and brands from society as whole. A challenge for business is surely to overcome the ‘them and us’ model of mass communications to really open the way for more inclusive dialogues.”

Nat Torkington on National Radio caught my ears with his comments on the role of Twitter and other micro-blogging formats in Iran. What was particularly good was the way he managed to make “secure open web proxies” sound interesting and also kept the listeners from being distracted by the mechanics in that wonderful mellifluous mode of his.

Less mediation is also highly attractive to celebrities. Micro blogging of tweets via re-tweeting has helped make a difference and we will continue to hear about the ramifications of all this.

TN: Technology with Nat Torkington from Thursday Technology expert and  Nat Torkington discusses online dating scams as well as Twitter’s role in the Iranian election protests.(duration:14mins 28secs)

The impact of these new technologies on groups and individuals is sounding a bit more like the second wave of alternative media as foreshadowed all those years ago by Noam Chomsky. In a sense we have now the tools to manufacture dissent.

Clay Shirky manages to summarise many of these key points about the rise of social capital and media activism over at TED Talks.

Clay says:

“New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere, as an alternative to centralized and institutional structures, which he sees as self-limiting.

In his writings and speeches he has argued that “a group is its own worst enemy.”
Shirky is author of Here Comes Everybody.

One point Clay makes is the increase in professional amateurs – something we wrote about some time back and was a topic for another great TED talk by Charles Leadbeater which was  called “The rise of the amateur professional” see the 19minute video on TED. Charles said

“Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can’t.”

If the video embed doesn’t display on your device try this TED link for Clay Shirky.

As Clay notes we are watching “The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.” How to cross pollinate conversations and mass media in real time. We now have a “many to many”  communications channel.

Note: Local TV stations has all improved their websites recently as they finally begin to understand they are less TV and multi-channel amplicasting is bigger ironically just as viewership on their broadcasts drop – their website traffic is going up and changing the business.

Amplification of tweets gives rise to far more authentic news sources than we have seen – ever!  Citizen reporting has flow on effects and when those stories follow the news we begin to see social transformation.

Asynchronous media and the amplification of all the surrounding content eco-systems is a big deal and we should be using this for good connections. Consumers are producers are consumers. The network itself is ubiquitous and omnipresent.

There are no single messages any more and media participation is higher than ever. Media revolution is here.

What do you think ? My twitter ID is @dialogCRM feel free to tweetback.

As always you can tweet this below and leave a comment or reply to the tweet for this post on Twitter. You can also engage directly with the three / four sources I have used today.

• To follow and engage with David on Twitter go to @joegreenz
• To follow and engage with Nat on Twitter go to @gnat
• To follow and engage Nat on Twitter go to @CShirky
• To follow and engage withTED on Twitter @TEDchris

For the past 3.5 years I have been using WordPress to power this blog and also as a content management framework for a whole series of other websites that I develop and/or manage in some way.

Ironically I haven’t posted specifically on the WordPress publishing platform until now. One of my key activities to to assist brand owners with online marketing and fairly often we need to revisit their existing website to reposition their content in a more marketing friendly way.

Over the next few weeks I will post a series on the best use of WordPress for websites starting from today.

“WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. “

If you visit the main wordpress.org site which is the home to self-hosted version you can view the full range of options and extensions. The first point that most people notice is the 5 minute install.

Adam Purcell from Newcastle, NSW, released a how to video last week on the 5 minute WordPress install including an installation of New Zealand’s very own WP -eCommerce Plugin. It’s a demo not a tutorial though but it does give a fast summary.

I wrote a comment along these lines. This is the kind of background I often use to explain some of the WordPress process for new users.

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The video had over 5000 views in 36 hrs.

Tune in over the next few weeks as I summarize thoughts about Themes and Plugins and provide examples of new ways to use WordPress.

Here are three great post insights on how twitter is changing the game for all businesses.

The three featured writers are Andrew Dubber, Dr Mark Drapeau and Laurel Papworth. 

Andrew Dubber has just noted that this is one of the top posts on his site this year. Read Andrews full post here. Adding context and interest. It has special interest for musicians.

“Steve Lawson, one of my top must-read music business thinkers, wrote a blog post today that explains Twitter in the face of some terrible journalism. I caught up with him for lunch in London and we had a chat about it.

Quite predictably, I made a video.” (Note: Included below)

Steve Lawson from Andrew Dubber on Vimeo.

 
Dr Michael Drapeau made some comments over here on on a post by Brian Solis. It is a long comment but deserves a good long read. Brian Solis is also worth checking out – THis comment was in response to a post by Brian Solis called “Is Twitter a Converstaion or Broadcast Medium”. 

“When I wrote “Expand Your Twitter Base” I commented that people should look at their last 40 tweets to see if they’re generally interesting. 

People can use Twitter however they please. But many people using it for “conversation” are speaking 1:1 with someone, and saying things that are not generally interesting. (@myfriend OMG so funny!) There’s no context, no proper nouns, no generality. There’s nothing compelling that makes people want to follow you in that example. 

Twitter is used *most successfully* as a broadcast medium within which some content can be discussed in a general way. This is like a radio talk show host making statements and interviewing a guest, and then taking a few questions. If all he did was take phone calls from his friends and have brief “conversations” that would not be a hit show. 

Brands and popular people alike do not need to converse with everyone who asks, nor reply to every comment made about them. It’s not clear that this approach has help Comcast any – they get some good blog stories and their hardware is still the source of heads banging against walls. 

What is far more valuable is for brands and people to provide information that they think is interesting and adds value to some audience, who can then comment on it. No one can effectively control who follows them on Twitter; thus, people will high followed/following ratios tend to be “popular” by definition. Unless they are truly famous, they are generally adding value to the mix, unlike many, as the statistics show (who have few followers and/or even ratios). 

Clay Shirky describes Wikipedia as “co-creation without collaboration.” There, as with Twitter, very few people are responsible for the overwhelming majority of content development. While a wiki and microsharing are different, on Twitter maybe the 10% of people that contribute 90% of the tweets can be thought of as subject-matter experts who would write an entire Wikipedia page. Sure, some edits are made, some discussion ensues, but they are the “knowledge broadcasters” and the other 90% of people are the gardeners and readers. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that. In theory, everyone is getting something out of the complex system.”

Mark’s earlier post on HOW TO: Win Friends and Twinfluence People is also an evergreen type of article which has a top 10 list and concludes with this advice below.

“The Bottom Line

There aren’t any secrets. You get out what you put in. Work hard, add value, and don’t rest on your laurels. Note what’s happening in the news, and in life. Always evolve; adapt to your environment. Embrace trial-and-error and a spirit of lethal generosity. Take risks. Be surprising. Be awesome.”

Online reputation management by Laurel Papworth. Laurel is based in Sydney and is clearly a star writer and marketing evangelist. There are many great posts on her website – however a good place to start is here.

What I like about Laurels posts is that she often uses diagrams so the visual element is there as well.

“Reputation
Reputation is the long tail of your content. Have you been naughty or nice. Asking questions – or answering them? Asking for stuff – or offering? Giggling with a great sense of humour or snarking off with rude words? You want a bad boy rep? YA GOTTA EARN IT. Anyway, you get the general idea. One blog post, one tweet, one facebook status does not build your reputation. It accumulates over time.”

As always your thoughts are welcome here. 

• To follow Andrew on Twitter go to @dubber
• To follow Mark on Twitter go to @cheeky_geeky
• To follow Laurel on Twitter @silkcharm