Debbie Weil's BlogWrite for CEOs

Sweets and Tweets Get Traction in DC With Cupcakes and Gov 2.0

2009-11-20T21:06:00-05:00

How sweet it was this week to see the buzz around the third edition of Sweets and Tweets. 70 folks signed up for my social media event held on Nov. 17, 2009 at the very cool Baked and Wired in DC’s Georgetown. The evening event featured free cupcakes and Mark Drapeau (aka @cheeky_geeky) speaking on the topic of Social Networking: the Two Dirtiest Words in Gov 2.0. Thanks also to our sponsor, Neighborhood America, a company that has been doing cool things in the Gov 2.0 space before we called it Gov 2.0. Both CIO Jim Haughwout and CEO Kim Kobza attended.

It’s not clear whether it was the cupcakes (declared best in the nation) or Mark Drapeau (a very smart guy and DC’s most sought after Social Media Bon Vivant) that were the biggest draw. No matter. From left to right in the photo, Mark Drapeau, moi and Neighborhood America’s Jim Haughwout.

Here is a roundup of what folks were saying about Sweets and Tweets:

Excellent write-up by Federal News Radio’s Chris Dorobek (read this to find out what Mark talked about and the Q&A afterward)

A cheeky look at Gov 2.0: Questions for Mark Drapeau by Smart Brief on Social Media

Tech Bisnow (scroll down)

Mention on WUSA-TV by morning news anchor Angie Goff (aka @ohmygoff)

K Street Kate (2006 Miss DC): "You had me at cupcake… "

Microsoft’s Lewis Shepherd on Twitter: "Le tout DC 2.0 is attending"

Tweets aggregated via hashtag #sweetevent

Retweets

Photos

I posted some pics of the event on Flickr. They don’t do the cupcakes justice.

More about Sweets and Tweets

Sweets and Tweets features leading voices from DC’s diverse technology community talking about the use of social media by the public and private sector, from the White House and federal agencies to local startups. The event series is produced and hosted by moi, an author, social media consultant, speaker and card-carrying member of DC’s Digerati since the 1980s. Previous events featured GeniusRocket’s Mark Walsh on crowdsourcing and HHS’s Andrew P. Wilson, who runs Flu.gov.

If you are interested in sponsoring the next Sweets and Tweets, give me a holler at debbie[dot]weil[at]gmail.com.

The Mating of Tim O’Reilly, Washington DC and Gov 2.0

2009-11-20T12:25:00-05:00

New York, NY Had a two-minute conversation with Tim O'Reilly yesterday, standing in one of the wide, wide hallways of the Javits Center where his Web 2.0 Expo took place this week. I knew from his bio that he was a Harvard grad and asked him what year he graduated. '75 or '76, he said, depending on how you qualify it. That's my era at Harvard (I'm class of 1974).

But Tim went through in three years, hence the date confusion. He majored in Classics. He lived in ultra cool Adams House. And then moved off campus. OFF CAMPUS! Too cool and, by Harvard standards, daring. Almost all the students live on campus in the residence clusters, or houses, as they're called.

Meanwhile, I majored in English (not very cool), lived in Winthrop House (because my boyfriend was also there) and felt completely stupid most of the time. It was only after I left Harvard that I realized I wasn't as dumb as I thought.

The new dot com is dot gov.
- Anil Dash, director of ExpertLabs

Which brings me to the point of this post: context is everything. In one setting, you may be one of many. In another, you stick out and your ideas look brilliant.

Tim's outsider status vis-a-vis Washington is precisely what gives his new focus on Gov 2.0 a nice spin.

To be sure, there are a whole bunch of us inside DC's Beltway who "get" that the adoption of and experimentation with social media by federal agencies and by the White House is a revolution - or at least a revolution in the making. Stodgy, impenetrable, glacially-slow-moving Washington government adopting lightening fast, 24X7 social technologies in order to... surface questions, surface answers and spawn new ways of thinking about intractable problems - ? Wow.

The list includes my friend Mark Drapeau, as well as friends and colleagues Peter Corbett, Chris Dorobek, Frank Gruber, Leslie Bradshaw, Shireen Mitchell (aka @digitalsista) and many, many other smart DC-based digerati.

But it took a Silicon Valley insider to pull the curtain and peek inside DC and say, "This looks familiar. It looks like Web 2.0... but wait, it's Gov 2.0. Hell, it's equally significant, if not seismic. I'm gonna start a new conference series, call it Gov 2.0 and take it to DC." (Tim didn't really say that, BTW. I made up the quote.)

Meanwhile, we learned about another example of Silicon Valley meets DC when Anil Dash of Six Apart fame announced that he has launched a D.C. Do Tank (as opposed to Think Tank) called ExpertLabs. Funded with a $500,000 grant from the (Genius) MacArthur Foundation, and housed under the wing of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, it will connect smart citizens in science and technology with intractable government problems.

As Anil put it in his official announcement from the mainstage at Web 2.0 Expo: "The new dot com is dot gov."

And to that I say, Yes! As a DC-resident for many decades, I can tell you that this is the most exciting of times here that I can remember. Finally, DC is cool.

The New Measure of Cool: Your Number of Twitter Lists

2009-11-11T18:57:00-05:00

I was added to a couple more Twitter Lists today. My total is now ~~190~~ 200. Small potatoes compared with the likes of Robert Scoble (4,297) or Guy Kawasaki (5,743). But it’s a fascinating new metric. It’s the new measure of cool. How many people are really listening to your tweets? How useful or interesting are you? Do you add any value to the conversation? All those questions are answered, in a way, by the number of Twitter lists you’re on.

And by the topic of those lists. I love being included on Female Geek lists, like Social Media Mavens and Femmes Digitales.

Then there’s the awesome randomness of it. I say awesome because I’m becoming an increasing fan of crowdsourcing and the wisdom of the crowd. Neither are perfect. In fact they are messy and imprecise. But over the long haul crowdsourcing and the wisdom of the crowd are ever so much more revealing than top-down pronouncements. Time’s Person of the Year, for example. Why the heck should the editors at Time sit around a table to select this person? And why do we so dumbly accept their choice? Except for You, in 2006, which was spot on.

This challenges everything I’ve grown up with, BTW. I was trained as a print journalist. Editors made the choices. We knew what was best, what readers should hear about and how the story should be shaped. Well, turns out we don’t.

Mashing Up Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook for the Average Joe/Jill

2009-11-10T17:42:00-05:00

With the announcement yesterday that LinkedIn and Twitter have inked a deal, the gradual meshing of your digital footprints continues. 140-character tweets can now appear as status updates on both LinkedIn and Facebook pages. (Note that you can control which tweets appear on Facebook and LinkedIn by tagging them, respectively, with #fb or #in.) Impressively, an @TwitterName in your tweet is also an active link on LinkedIn, meaning that you can click and go directly to that Twitter page.

That's a bit of technology that's ever so clever, as it makes the language of these different platforms seamless. As you may already know, Facebook now makes a clickable link to a friend's page when you start typing a name with @ in front of it.

If the preceding paragraph is gibberish to you, let me translate: say it once online, and it will appear in multiple places. Keep it concise and interesting (140 characters allows more room than you think). Start on Twitter where an increasing number of solopreneurs, small businesses and brands appear and your digital footprint will magically reappear on your LinkedIn and Facebook pages.

And yes, the days of saying, "but I / we really don't need to be on one of those time-wasting social networking sites" are fast drawing to a close. If you can't provide a link or URL defining yourself online, then you basically don't exist. Another way of saying that is, "If you can't be found on Google, you don't exist." Really.

Cupcakes and… Social Networking: the Two Dirtiest Words in Gov 2.0

2009-11-09T21:51:01-05:00

Do you love cupcakes? Groove on social networking? Don’t miss the next Sweets and Tweets on Nov. 17, 2009. I’ve invited the inimitable Mark Drapeau (Washington Life calls him a Social Media Bon Vivant) to talk about social networking, the two dirtiest words in Government 2.0. Social networking on Facebook, Twitter, etc. is not about being social or frivolous or wasting time. Social networking can improve the process of government.

Mark will talk about why social networking is more than collaboration and how it’s OK that the line between work and play is increasingly blurred. Registration for this private, after-hours event at the very cool Baked & Wired in Georgetown (best cupcakes in America) is limited because of the size of the venue. Don’t wait if you’re interested in attending. And if you’re reading about Sweets and Tweets here, use discount code sweeter3 to get 50% off.

Neighborhood America, a very interesting company that has been doing things in the Gov 2.0 space before we called it Gov 2.0, is sponsoring this edition of Sweets and Tweets. Neighborhood America develops enterprise social media solutions for public sector, non-profit and Fortune 1000 clients. One of their private sector projects is the content-rich American Express OpenForum. Neighborhood America’s CIO Jim Haughwout is flying up from Flordia to attend the event.

More info about the next Sweets and Tweets and register here.

What Does “Writing 3.0” Mean to You? (Quick Poll)

2009-11-05T16:14:01-05:00

Results of my quick poll, "What does Writing 3.0 mean to you?" suggest that most folks (39% of respondents) assign a 3.0 to the kind of concise writing we do for Twitter or Facebook. Others mention co-creation, collaboration, wikis or "nothing." 22% say Writing 3.0 is "the way to lay down your best digital footprint." And 10% say, "Forget writing, video rules." You can still take the quiz here.

No Punditry: Just Exploring Twitter Lists

2009-11-03T23:01:00-05:00

No need for me to wax expert on Twitter's new List feature as Mashable, TechCrunch and many others are doing that. (Here's a video showing how to create a List.) Frankly nobody is an expert yet. We're all curating (creating lists, culling them, joining others, etc.). Here's my round-up of Washington DC tweeps whose 140-character musings I find useful or entertaining.

Women

I will point out that the number of lists featuring smart women in tech or social media is very cool. Examples here and here and here. Listorious notes lists tagged women and social-media-divas and all-the-geeky-ladies.

Twitter List Widget

You can grab the Twitter List widget here. Apologies, can't display here. It doesn't seem to work inside Expression Engine, which this site is built on.

Fall Leaves: Stop and Look

2009-10-25T22:29:00-05:00

I have this thing about trying to get the perfect picture of fall leaves. This was on a rainy day, taken with my Canon G10, a great all-around small camera. Below is another pic I snapped with my iPhone with blue sky behind the trees. Both were taken in my neighborhood from almost the exact same vantage point.

Sneak Preview: an Updated Site Design and New Logo

2009-10-21T19:58:00-05:00

If you're not interested in Web site design, stop reading right here. If you are... take a peek at my redesign by the clever folks at Viget, featuring an "illustration" of yours truly as well as my new logo with the @ sign, designed by the talented Erick Anderson. Erick won the logo contest I ran on Genius Rocket. More on that later.

I've gotten positive and negative feedback on the illustration. Mostly negative. So we've decided to put a headshot there instead. (Below is a very rough mock up. We're still fooling with the background colors.) The illustration is an interesting idea. But doesn't feel quite right. One colleague called it "off brand." A Facebook friend called it "playtime." Another longtime colleague said simply, "Away with the avatar; we want to see Debbie." And one of my grown children said, "OMG who is that scary lady. Get rid of her."

We'll also be adjusting the background colors to make my new logo "pop." The goal of the redesign is to make clearer what I do (i.e. consult and speak) and to de-emphasize my blog.

I'm not a blogger. I'm someone who blogs. According to Technorati's just released State of the Blogosphere 2009, that puts me in good company. "Professional part-timers," as Technorati calls them, are one of the biggest segments of the blogosphere. And of those, 72 percent blog to attract new clients.

So while blogging is an integral part of my public face on the Web, it's no longer the only way I lay down a digital footprint. I Twitter more than I blog, I post regularly to Facebook and I've recently become a much bigger fan of LinkedIn (which has a new set of interactive features).

Stay tuned. The new site won't be up for several more weeks.

Useful Links

Technorati's State of the Blogosphere 2009

Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra's slidedeck on the 2009 findings

Next Best Thing to Attending BlogWorld Is Visiting the Home Page

2009-10-13T12:14:00-05:00

You've heard about live blogging, video streaming and live tweeting from an event. Don't forget a good old-fashioned home page crammed with content to make you wish you were there. I can't attend BlogWorld this week in Las Vegas (I spoke at BlogWorld '07) but anyone can learn a ton about this high octane event by visiting www.blogworldexpo.com.

On the home page are preview video interviews with keynote speakers like Guy Kawasaki, Kara Swisher and Scott Monty, links to the Twitter page (transparently written by conference organizer Rick Calvert), an active Facebook event page and Flickr photos from BlogWorld 2008. There are also clearly labeled hashtags.

Hashtags are a way of aggregating everyone's tweets about a similar topic or event so they can be more easily found. This year it's #bwe09 on Twitter and #blogworld09 for Flickr photos.

There's also the obvious content for those interested in attending: an easy-to-spot register button and a button for hotel info (always a consideration in Vegas).

One quibble

One quibble with the page design: the full conference agenda is hard to find. You have to scroll way down. And I don't see a Twitter stream, either from @BlogWorld or using an app like TwitterFall that aggregates tweets using #bwe09.