Mostly.

EDIT: And when I say “mostly”, I mean marketing ultimately focused on getting people to buy stuff. Not on changing opinion, not on awareness. It’s a deliberately narrow definition for the purposes of this post.

I’m going to try to be concise as I put this out there for your amusement. I say this as I’m inclined to go off on a ranty diatribe about this as I have strong feelings about it. It’s also the position I think I’ll be taking at the second SMC Sydney that I’m part of the panel for next Monday night.

I’ve been working with collaborative projects and communities of common interest for a long time now. In one way, shape or form, I’d hazard about 10 years. In terms of working with and using the tools and classes of software we’re now calling social media – wikis, blogs, social networks, ideas markets, and their various predecessors – I’ve got more than a little experience as a user and implementer of them throughout my career.

Because of this experience, I have well-formed views about what the greatest benefit these tools can offer are. And it’s not in marketing.

Let me start with a a definitive statement.

I’m not anti-marketing. I’m not even anti social media marketing. But collectively the selling component of marketing is possibly the least interesting thing about social media.

In fact, there are some incredibly smart people who work in marketing and really, really understand social media and its benefits. They are trying hard to make a difference. You know who you are (I have my own little list in my head).

But there’s a long way to go before the marketing industry as a whole really gets social media.

I think it’s great that we can measure around community engagement with social media campaigns. However, as someone who’s worked with communities and social software a lot longer than the marketing industry has had its knickers in a twist about it, I find it more than a little amusing that the industry often seems to think that their business is what social media is all about.

Wake up people!

It’s not about how JOO CAN SELL MOAR STUFFZ!!!!!!!

It’s not about eyeballs.

Finding the connectors on Facebook and giving them a video camera and a Summer’s worth of beer does not a connected, nurtured, collaborative community make.

What social media is about is the community. It’s about how much you actually care for them. About how much you connect with them and nurture them. It’s about how much that ties in to your larger, long term business strategy. It’s about innovation and sharing and empowerment and knowledge and building something sustainable over the long term. It’s about people and the way they come together do do something more than they could alone.

And there are few social media marketing campaigns I’ve seen that do much, if any, of that. They scratch around the edges. They say the right words but they have dead eyes.

As a pragmatic Cluetrainer, I get the feeling that most campaigns that seek to incorporate social media wouldn’t know the Cluetrain if it ran up and whacked them upside the head.

Of course, this is all just one person’s view. Your mileage may vary (and I hope it does).

Mostly.

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Like many of you, I am the default user support person for family and friends.  Mostly, this doesn’t bother me.  When it comes to my parents, it can be a bit heartwrenching – I want to offer them the best I can, but they seem to feel their needs come before my work and everything else.  It’s a little bit of a sore point.

Back in early February, my Mum started having troubles with her Dell Inspiron 1150 notebook.  At unpredictable intervals, it either BSODs or bypasses that altogether and drops out to a DOS crash state with a message about being unable to read the hard drive.  It’s quite obviously something I can’t fix myself.  Running full Dell diagnostics on it picks up no identifiable problems (gooood…).

Now this machine is almost three years old, but it’sgood enough for my Mum’s needs. But she does need it.  She needs it for her daily contact with her volunteering groups and Vietnam Veterans Wives support groups.  She’s lost without it.

She’s also very non-technical, so as soon as she tries to call Dell Support, she’s lost from the first phone menu choice.  She just doesn’t understand what they are asking her.  She ends up getting upset and frustrated and rings me to make the call for her.

Here’s the first problem – the machine is out of warranty.   I have spent nine weeks trying to get extended warranty added to a system.  The warranty has been paid, but does not show up against the system.  With no warranty against the system, I can’t even get a support call started.  I call or email the nominated contact for the warranty extension almost every day and rarely receive a call back.  This is atrocious customer service on Dell’s part and indicates a complete lack of care for their customer base.

I have emailed Dell Customer Service about the very unsatisfying experience I am having on this matter.  I hope someone there cares enough to do something about it.

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Banning of access to YouTube in schools by the Victorian Government will do less than nothing to reduce bullying. It’s totally und utterly the wrong approach. Big Brother governance has never worked in situations of this nature and it never will. This action fails to address the problem where it occurs – criminal activity by a small minority that ultimately leads to penalisation of the majority for the criminals’ actions.

As a kid who was pretty nerdy at school, I know about bullying. I understand the consequences for those on the receiving end and I understand the terrible difficulty in dealing with the perpetrators. If they can be identified.

I’m surprised, too, by the statement attributed to Director of Australia’s High Tech Crime Centre, Kevin Zuccato. I’ve had the privilege of being at several events at the same time as Kevin. I’ve heard him speak with expertise, and in the short conversations I’ve had with him, he seems an incredibly smart guy. So, hearing him blame social networking sites for an increase in bullying sounds to me like he’s being advised badly.

The answer here is manifold, but here are my thoughts. First, penalise the criminals harshly. Make them face the full force of the law for activities such as assault and aggravated assault (which this case seems to be). Second, require parents to actually parent their children. Too many kids these days are allowed to run wild, with little or no discipline or structure. Now, I’m largely a libertarian and think kids should be fairly unfettered. But there’s an obvious limit and antisocial behaviour and criminality exceeds that limit

This really has absolutely nothing to do with YouTube, or MySpace or any other social networking site.  It’s not social networking sites that are responsible for increased bullying in schools. If the Internet didn’t exist, there would still be bullying, just the form would be different. There wouldn’t be any fewer occurrences.

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Over at Application Generation, Forta Blog and at An Architect’s View, there’s yet another iteration of the “long term viability of ColdFusion” discussions going on. Peter Bell, Ben Forta and Sean Corfield are all smart cookies, and more than adequately eloquent on the subject matter. That said, here’s my $0.02.

• Adobe spent a lot of money acquiring Macromedia and the goodwill that went with its developer community. Macromedia before did the same thing when they acquired Allaire. Dumping CF, or any other of the “Macromedia” apps is probably too expensive a proposition to be seriously considered.
• The “ColdFusion will go Open Source” idea is speculative at best and more likely simply spurious. There’s no buzz about it, except amongst those with potential alternate agendas.
• Despite the fact that CF has never had adequate, or even decent marketing it has a significant installed user base that want to keep it.
• Adobe continue to do the ColdFusion name a great disservice by failing to make it a major, viable alternative to Java, .NET, RoR, PHP or insertflavorofthemonthplatformhere.
• The net entry cost for ColdFusion is under US$5000 for hardware and software. That’s cheap. Even cheaper if you outsource your hosting – HostMySite will do the job for you for less than $US20/month. Developer licenses are free, so development cost is effectively nil plus developer time.

I’m preaching to the choir here, as CF users, we all know how good it is and how easy to develop with it is as a platform.

Read the articles linked above for deeper insight. Then, put pressure on Adobe to make ColdFusion a serious viable alternative to the big players. Then, and only then, will ColdFusion’s future be assured.

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Mike Arrington of TechCrunch has posted on CrunchNotes about his unhappiness over the supposed conflict of interest disclosure issues some seem to have with him (see the buzz at Techmeme).

Now, unless I’ve completely misunderstood what’s going on here, I just don’t get it.

Mike Arrington seems to me to make it abundantly clear when a possible conflict of interest may occur. He’s forever stating when his has a finger in the pie in one of his Crunch Network posts. “I invested…” or “I advised…” or “I something else…” Isn’t that clear enough?

Okay, I see that some folks might think it better that he just not post at all, nor even have a colleague post, but that’s not what TechCrunch and its sister sites are about. They’re about getting the buzz out there. About openly discussing the good and the bad in the new web world. And they’re not afraid to call a spade a spade. More than once, Mike has laid the smack down on a company he’s somehow involved with, and revealed himself to be so. He’s also prepared to give kudos to his potential competition. And to piss off his sponsors by naming them when he doesn’t like what they’re doing. This all looks very transparent to me.

Looks to me like there are a few “industry” types who just want to protect themselves and get some traction for their name in the marketplace. The whole thing is a giant beat-up on the part of those criticising Mike Arrington.

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Is it possible to have iCal send invitations as a different user? The default behavior seems to be that it sends as the last Apple Mail user to send an email. Frankly, this isn’t what I want. I want to be able to choose to send invitations to events related to work from my work email address.

The real hassle is, of course, that I have to use the red-headed child that is Exchange/Outlook Web Access to read my work email. This means I can’t export the work calendar to iCal from OWA, nor can I read my work email from Apple Mail, as we have no IMAP access (and aren’t getting it). We also can’t auto-forward work email to private accounts.

I think I’m cruelled up the wazoo in getting this all to work together. I REALLY want it all in one simple place, but I think I don’t have a hope…

I’ve tried the whole Gmail/Google Calendar think for several days, and that isn’t really cutting it either. Unless I commit to doing everything from Gmail/Google Calendar, which I’d rather not. I’ve also suffered previously with the abomination that is Apple Mail, Entourage and iCal trying to play nice. Bleah.

Suggestions? Ideas? Software?

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Of course not.

Despite the coolness of the item, and the great cause associated with it, the iPod nano (PRODUCT) RED isn’t available in Australia. This sucks big time.

Anyone out there in the US prepared to get one for me? Paypal from me to you.

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AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!

Sorry. Had to do that.

This story from the UK (via boingboing) and a story out of Sydney I heard on ABC NewsRadio this morning in which Jewish students at Sydney University are having to wear baseball caps over their yarmulkes in order to avoid being targetted in racial-religious attacks; Muslim students are being targetted too. This all points to a growing intolerance of cultural diversity and pervasive fear of difference (especially when those who are different might be “terrorists” – bullshit!) in Western culture.

I’m sure the point can be argued, but to me, this all smacks of small-minded xenophobia brought on by the anti-terrorism fearmongering of our governments. This is NOT the culture I was born into. Australia used to be a largely tolerant society, along with its cultural neighbors – the UK and the USA.

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UPDATE – And another link about this. This time from someone who intimately knows about security and how it ought properly be implemented; Bruce Schneier.

As mentioned before, I take the risk of real terrorism, very seriously. But I’ve got a big bee in my bonnet about the latest fearmongering taking place. A thorough reading of the news reveals it’s all more of the same from the usual suspects; Bush, Blair and their collective sycophancy clubs.

Here in many places (1, 2, 3).

And the public who never read a newspaper or watch an independent news broadcast get sucked in deeper.

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I purchased my late-model 15.4″ PowerBook from Domayne in Canberra on November 26 last year. Since that time, it has had two logic board (motherboard) replacements; thus I’m on logic board number three now. The most recent replacement was done by Mac1 here last week. Here’s the timeline:

26/11/2006 – Purchase
May 2006 – Mac1 replace logic board after RAM slot failure (symptoms – freezing and reboots)
August 2006 – Mac1 replace logic board after fan failure/overheating (symptoms – frequent freezing, kernel panics)

Now, I’ve noticed over the weekend that the battery on the PowerBook no longer charges. It’s excited to tell me, in fact, that it’s going to take 531 hours to charge. The power plug constantly glows orange, and a battery test (pressing the button on the battery) gets me a single, rapidly flashing, LED. Plus, the reassembly job done by Mac1 is a little ordinary – the hex screw above the power jack nearest the screen on the left side isn’t screwed all the way in and I don’t think the top shell surrounding the keyboard is seated properly.

I’ve called Mac1 and they’ve asked me to bring it in again. Now, their turnaround on repairs is 3-4 days, minimum. Frankly, I’m over the whole thing; I just want a machine that works consistently.

Does anyone else have experience in getting a replacement machine out of Apple without surrendering the soul of their firstborn? Is there a way to get directly to Apple to get this stuff sorted out? I bought a PowerBook specifically for hardware and OS reliability. Seems to me like I may have made something of a bad choice, at least as far as this machine and the series of logic boards in it is concerned…

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