Paul Jacobson

Di Heuser is a single mom with 3 beautiful children and my long time friend. She started scrapbooking in late 2007 and shifted to digital scrapbooking around October 2008. She launched her blog, Legacy4Life, on 27 December 2008 and was accepted as a scrapbooking designer by two scrapbooking stores in roughly July 2009. Why am I telling you this? I’m telling you this because her blog is a reminder of the value of blogging in this age of micro-content and agency powered content streams.

I’ve had a couple debates with people on Twitter about the apparently declining value of blogs and RSS in the face of Twitter’s growth and yet what I see is a departure from the principles and values that underpinned the social media revolution which began almost a decade ago with the introduction of this new medium called “weblogs”, or “blogs”. Despite being an opportunity for more intimate personal interaction, many businesses’ Twitter accounts are maintained by marketing agencies and where those businesses have blogs, their blogs tend to be written by their advisors rather than by someone actually at the coal-face, so to speak.

This trend is more of a return to the command-and-control style interaction that customers rebelled against more than a decade ago and which prompted the famous statement from the Cluetrain Manifesto:

Markets are conversations

Di’s blog is a reminder about some of the values that seem to have been forgotten in modern marketing initiatives on the social Web. It is also a reminder of how valuable and relevant “old fashioned” tools like blogs and RSS are, even as Twitter continues to grow and prominent social media luminaries speculate about RSS’ demise and its replacement by Twitter as a medium for content delivery.

I’ve been chatting to Di about her blog and two things piqued my interest: she mentioned that interest in her blog had picked up noticeably when she started sharing news about her personal life and her family and also that her blog has attracted over 1 000 unique visitors since 1 January 2010 (about 2 days ago). That may not seem like a lot of traffic to some bloggers but consider that the blog launched in December 2008 and is focused on scrapbooking. Di told me that her readers tend to be mothers and grandmothers, not exactly the demographic you would expect to be heavily involved in blogging and online media. Just the same, these scrapbooking women are precisely the sort of niche market books have been written about.

These women are interested, engaged and truly passionate about scrapbooking. Actually, they are passionate about memories and family and when Di shares family and personal stories and experiences she becomes a person her customers can identify with and relate to on a very personal level. This dynamic shouldn’t be new to you if you’ve been involved in social marketing but it does appear to be a dynamic many marketers have forgotten in the race to get their clients on to the social Web. It is also a reminder that blogs and RSS are still relevant to the majority of Internet users and, in all likelihood, your customers too.

There is far too much focus on Twitter and talk about Twitter as the new multi-purpose medium but it still a fairly limited technology, despite its utility. It is really one tool in a toolkit that still includes blogs and RSS. As Di pointed out to me when we chatted briefly about Twitter:

Yeah except you cannot display a layout on Twitter

I realise my insistence that blogs and RSS are still relevant and valuable media on the social Web makes me sound a little old fashioned by Web standards. At the same time too much focus on one or other medium is just misguided. Twitter is a powerful tool and so are blogs, Facebook pages, RSS feeds and even email. I often wonder if all the hype about Twitter has resulted in a complete lack of perspective.

Legacy4Life’s success is due largely to Di’s authenticity on her blog. She shares real experiences with her readers and they connect to her on a very personal level. This is what social media is about.

I have been reading feeds in Google Reader this morning (I prefer Feedly but it wasn’t working this morning for some reason). I use Firefox as my primary browser after being a fairly dedicated Safari user for a while and a momentary Chrome fan. I’m not saying that Safari and Chrome are lousy browsers because they aren’t, they are terrific browsers (although Chrome on the Mac is still a developer build and not feature complete).

The reason why I am a Firefox fan again is that I found the one extension that caused a 20+ second lag in load times (it was a weather extension) and I cut my extensions back to the ones I really like. Many of those extensions are Gina Trapani’s Better Webapps extensions which run on Greasemonkey. One of those extensions is Better GReader which adds some enhancements to Google Reader. One of those enhancements is a range of colours to help distinguish between feed sources. The extension converts the usual Google Reader experience from this:

… into this:

Firefox probably won’t have this edge for too much longer. Chrome for the Mac should be done by the end of the year and version 4 brings extensions capability. It also looks like Gina will probably port her Better Webapps to Chrome too. Better Webapps extensions for Chrome will make a feature complete Chrome a lot more appealing to me although I am really enjoying Firefox again. The one that put me off Firefox initially was its really slow load time. It also didn’t help that Firefox was using so much memory either.

By the way, if you are interested in the stuff that interests me, take a look at my shared feeds page.

(You can probably tell I am a Gina Trapani fan although that doesn’t detract from her awesome apps. She recently published the Complete Guide to Google Wave and is one of the panelists on This Week in Google.)

I just watched a video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech last week at the United Nations’ General Assembly. It is a powerful speech worth watching/reading regardless of whether you agree with him or not. His speech was inspired by a meeting he had about 25 years ago as the Israeli ambassador to the UN with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson who gave him this advice:

… you are going to a place of deep darkness and lies, and if you will light one candle of truth, you will dispel the darkness.

I don’t want to get too political in this post. I obviously have my opinions about what he said. I think this is an important speech and I hope it brings about change. Even if it doesn’t, it is one of those speeches that I hope we, humanity, will remember in future years and decades.

Here is the text of the speech:

Mr. President,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Nearly 62 years ago, the United Nations recognized the right of the Jews, an ancient people 3,500 years-old, to a state of their own in their ancestral homeland.

I stand here today as the Prime Minister of Israel, the Jewish state, and I speak to you on behalf of my country and my people.

The United Nations was founded after the carnage of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust. It was charged with preventing the recurrence of such horrendous events. Nothing has undermined that central mission more than the systematic assault on the truth.

Yesterday the President of Iran stood at this very podium, spewing his latest anti-Semitic rants. Just a few days earlier, he again claimed that the Holocaust is a lie.

Last month, I went to a villa in a suburb of Berlin called Wannsee. There, on January 20, 1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people. The detailed minutes of that meeting have been preserved by successive German governments.

Here is a copy of those minutes, in which the Nazis issued precise instructions on how to carry out the extermination of the Jews. Is this a lie?

A day before I was in Wannsee, I was given in Berlin the original construction plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Those plans are signed by Hitler’s deputy, Heinrich Himmler himself. Here is a copy of the plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million Jews were murdered. Is this too a lie?

This June, President Obama visited the Buchenwald concentration camp. Did President Obama pay tribute to a lie? And what of the Auschwitz survivors whose arms still bear the tattooed numbers branded on them by the Nazis? Are those tattoos a lie?

One-third of all Jews perished in the conflagration. Nearly every Jewish family was affected, including my own. My wife’s grandparents, her father’s two sisters and three brothers, and all the aunts, uncles and cousins were all murdered by the Nazis. Is that also a lie?
Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium. To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity and you brought honor to your countries.

But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?

A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of six million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state. What a disgrace! What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations!

Read more…

We’re heading off to the 27 Dinner tonight like half of Joburg geekdom. I’m looking forward to it partly because we are going to hear from Justin Spratt and Google’s new country manager, Stephen Newton (please no Google PR speak??!). I’ll probably be posting to FriendFeed as we go (look for the comments to this entry in my FriendFeed stream). I am also going to mess around a little more with Qik and try shoot some streaming video on my N97.

I thought I’d try something a little different with FriendFeed tonight and give you am embed of the search channel I set up on FriendFeed for the 27 Dinner. This channel looks for any mentions of “27 dinner” or “27dinner” and includes them:

It should also update dynamically as more entries are added to it.

This week on Twitter was a little like a spicy meal that repeats on you at 2am. Nic Haralambous and Rich Mulholland dredged up what feels like an old criticism about my posts about Nokia and its products (in particular the Nokia N97 which I now own, thanks to Nokia SA – I am one of 4 people who received an N97 as an extraordinary gesture of Nokia’s appreciation for the recent Search for N competition coverage). I wrote about the main criticism that has been levied against me in a post titled “Which rules should bloggers play by?” in which I asked a number of questions about, as the title suggests, what the rules of the game are for bloggers. None of my most vocal critics responded to what I hoped would be the beginning of a debate about this issue which is clearly a pressing issue.

Nic posted a tweet the other day which just irked me.

He was responding to a post I published about how Gizmodo covered the N97, not because I disagreed with Gizmodo’s criticisms but because I objected to how Gizmodo covered the topic. From my perspective the Gizmodo post could have been about any brand or product and I still would have objected. It just so happens I saw the Gizmodo post because I have been reading reviews of the N97, most of which have been pretty critical of the device (and most of which I agree with).

I had a brief sms conversation with Nic after I saw his tweet and the one issue which came up was credibility and coming across too strong(ly?) when I write about stuff on my blog, Nokia stuff in particular. The same issue came up earlier today when Rich responded to a silly tweet I posted:

By way of introduction

There are a couple things I’d like to get out of the way here quickly:

• First, the only companies paying me for my blogging are Google and Afrigator and even then my earnings are negligible (I am expecting my first cheque from Afrigator for about R400 or so for a couple months’ ads);
• Contrary to popular belief, I am not employed or otherwise contracted by Nokia (I have a business which I am building);
• I have received a couple benefits writing about Nokia and its products which most people don’t receive (you can read about them on my Disclosures page) but that isn’t why I write so much about Nokia – I do it because I am actually a fan and have been for over a decade;
• I am not a journalist and don’t purport to be one;
• There are no strings attached when it comes to Nokia. In fact, Nokia people have demonstrated themselves to be very much aware of the risk of unduly influencing bloggers and have gone to some effort to avoid doing that.

Where was I? Oh yes, passion …

I outlined my approach to my blog in my previous post on this subject:

I write about things I am passionate about. I believe that this passion means I am incapable of being unbiased about what I write about and I instead focus on being authentic in my posts. I write what I feel, think and believe rather than what I am told to write. That has become my measure of success as a blogger. In doing so I also attract criticism for being too focussed on particular brands or topics. Does this undermine my credibility? I don’t really know and I would rather be as transparent as I can be about my influences and leave it up to my readers to decide how much weight, if any, to give to what I write.

Seeing that the criticism I face is about how much I write and what I have to say about Nokia, I’ll start there. I have always had a Nokia phone. My first phone was a Nokia 2110i back in the late 1990s and I can probably tell you which Nokia phones I have owned since then. There has always been one brand for me (at least until the iPhone opened the door to an alternative). There are about 123 posts on this blog where I mention Nokia (ok, 124 if you include this one) and about 35 of those posts were published from about December 2008 when I first had access to someone at Nokia SA (specifically, Mathia Nalappan, Nokia SA’s General Manager). One of my earliest Nokia posts was published on 25 January 2005 when I wrote about my Nokia 6600 and thoughts about what my next Nokia phone would be.

As you can see, I’ve been writing about Nokia for a while now and that was all about my passion for Nokia phones and the brand. There have been times when I was pretty critical of Nokia (in particular my much reviled Nokia N73 ME) and times when I have been very complimentary. What has changed in recent months is that I have been given access to review units, Nokia people and I even got to fly to Dubai (I have heard that this was pretty controversial and pissed a lot of people off) where I met a number of people from Nokia MEA and HQ and had insights into Nokia’s culture and methodologies which just inspired even more passion about Nokia. This extra exposure to Nokia has been fantastic. I am a gadget nut (phones especially) and being able to test out new phones has been a real highlight for me. Being able to interface with Nokia people in various roles has been even more exciting. I learned about Nokia’s commitment to social media (probably a strong factor behind the decision to send me to Dubai), its customers, its design philosophy and how it sees its devices as components of the social Web. More access + Nokia people who take the time to listen to me = more passion for Nokia and its products.

Passion is also the driving force of social media itself. It is the stuff that case studies are made of and the glue that binds communities that spring up around products, brands, ideas and more. People have always evangelised stuff they really like and criticised the stuff they don’t. They have used word of mouth to spread the word. This is what we all do every day when we share our passions for the stuff we care about. I certainly do.

Let’s talk about me again

Social media is another of my passions. I use social media every day and have difficulty imagining/remembering a time when I couldn’t express myself the way I do. I can be pretty intense when I am really excited about something and I put that down to my obsessive-compulsive tendencies. I mentioned earlier that I am not a journalist and don’t claim to be one. I say this because there seems to be an expectation that bloggers behave like journalists. I don’t subscribe to that philosophy. Blogs are a way to express yourself and while there are many excellent journalists who use blogs as effective tools (Simon Dingle and Duncan McLeod are two journos who I respect tremendously and who blog in addition to their other work), there are also many people who use a blog as a way to have their say. I am one of the latter group of bloggers. I write about the stuff I care enough about to set aside a couple hours per post to write about. I don’t claim to be unbiased at all. Rather I believe that my passion for what I write about makes me inherently biased and I don’t make any apologies for that. I do my best to be accurate when I report facts but you tend to get a lot of wild opinion from me too. Ultimately it is up to you to decide for yourself if what I write has any value to you and, if so, how much.

This idea of passionate blogging is hardly new. Nic runs the popular SA Rocks blog which is all about passion for South Africa. Rich is, to me at least, passion on two legs and his passion for his family, freebording (not sure if I am spelling that correctly), whichever brand of rock/music he goes for, tattoos and more seeps out of his various online spaces. In fact, when I think about being passionate about what you do, I immediately think of Nic and Rich who I both respect and am continuously inspired by.

This blog is one of my outlets and one of the brands/companies I am passionate about is Nokia. It may not be the most popular brand/company amongst my critics but I dig it and I therefore write about it. Perhaps the comment that I write like Nokia pays me is an apt comment because it implies a certain degree of motivation and drive to write about Nokia except that motivation isn’t money. It isn’t even about the access I have to new phones (although that does fan the flames) or even the fact that Nokia sent me to Dubai (I loved the business class flight, no question, and I really enjoyed meeting the people I met). I write about Nokia because I have been a Nokia fan for as long as I have owned a mobile phone. Nokia may not make the best mobile devices in the world but there are other reasons for me to be passionate about Nokia and that is why I keep talking about Nokia.

I’m not going to argue with my critics about my credibility. Credibility isn’t about how I see myself, its about how you see me. My only suggestion is that you read what I write, compare what I have to say with people who regard as credible, authoritative or whatever your measure of value is and decide for yourself what value my posts have for you. There are a couple things I don’t do. I don’t write positive posts in exchange for payment in cash or goods. I also don’t allow companies to unduly influence my posts in any other way. I also don’t appreciate suggestions that I do these things and I especially don’t appreciate any suggestions that I am being dishonest.

Ultimately, though, it is up to you to decide for yourself what to take from my posts. I’m just sharing what I am passionate about.

Gizmodo really irks me. I have been reading Matt Buchanan’s coverage of the Nokia N97 and while I agree with some of the comparative criticisms when looking at the iPhone 3Gs and the N97, his posts are completely over the top and sensationalist. Here is an example from his initial review post about the N97 titled “Nokia N97 Review: Nokia Is Doomed“:

I don’t even know where to start the hate parade I want to unleash on S60 5th edition. Nokia’s managed to make RIM’s BlackBerry Storm OS retrofit look like a work of art. And when legacy (sorry, mature) software runs into a crappy half-assed UI, it’s a steaming pile of suck on a slab of garbage toast. All I could think about was how badly I wanted to shove Android onto it. Since I have nothing nice to say, let’s keep this part short.

This sort of writing may appeal to Gizmodo readers but it certainly doesn’t appeal to me at all. Gizmodo is supposed to be one of the authoritative tech blogs on the Web and it seems to need to resort to this sort of junk writing to get attention.

Now, this criticism isn’t based on my disagreement with the criticisms of the N97 when comparing it to other modern smartphones like the iPhone 3Gs. I don’t disagree with many of the concerns raised but I have far more respect for blogs like MobileCrunch and podcasts like the gdgt podcast for the way they discussed the N97’s limitations (here and here, respectively).

Anyway, I did my social media thing this morning and posted a comment to one of Buchanan’s latest posts which I took a screenshot of in case it isn’t published for some reason:

I wasn’t much of a Gizmodo fan before but I don’t have nearly enough respect for the blog now to consider it a worthwhile source of news, for whatever my opinion is worth.

About 45 people came together in two locations for the inaugural alt.conference events held simultaneously in Cape Town and Johannesburg on 4 July. I came up with the idea for alt.conference a couple months ago during a conversation with Hunter of Genius, Max Kaizen. It was an experiment in a few ways. On one hand I had never organised something quite like alt.conference before and my regular schedule made for an interesting few months. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, alt.conference was an experiment in how to arrange something a little different from the the usual conference many of us are accustomed to and, at the same time an event that was appealing to people who were already involved in the social media space.

When it came to briefing our fantastic speakers, I asked the speakers to speak about something relevant to social media and to keep it relevant and engaging for people already in the biz, so to speak. Beyond that I left it up to them to decide what to speak about. I was really curious what they would talk about. I also came up with the idea what I loosely called the “ideastorm” session (not my term although it did seem to fit quite nicely). I asked Gaby Rosario, Allan Kent and Max Kaizen to facilitate these sessions (Gaby and Allan in Cape Town and Max in Joburg). The idea I had for this session was to treat the audience as a panel and stimulate discussions about social media related topics. Aside from that I similarly left it up to them to decide how to run that session.

I ran the Joburg event which was hosted at Vox Telecom (thanks to Lantz Mattinson who helped get the venue connected and set up for us). After a series of small technical hitches (for a change our MacBooks gave us hassles!) were off to a terrific start. I won’t go into the various sessions in any real detail here because I hope to publish videos from the sessions soon (well, as soon as I can get the video off the tapes, edit it, export and publish it … you know, soon!) but there were a couple things about the event which a couple people commented on and which I believe were significant.

For one thing we were all inspired as South Africans working in our respective fields. Between Justin Spratt and Nic Haralambous, we realised (or even confirmed our feelings and thoughts on the matter) that doing what we do here in South Africa gives us a number of advantages. Despite the global economic crisis, we are well placed to succeed in South Africa for a variety of reasons, not least of which a renewal of faith and interest in South Africa as an innovation hub. I have had this growing sense for a while now that nations we usually look to as leaders in tech and on the Web like the United States are, in fact, almost primitive in some respects when compared to South Africa. We are also not as exposed to the world’s financial woes and may even begin to recover a lot sooner. Add increased bandwidth in the years to come and South Africa could well become an even better place to be as a Web professional.

Another important realisation that we came to was that despite a powerful obsession with the tech we use to engage with each other online (whether that tech be Twitter, Facebook, Twitter apps, mobile devices or browsers), when it comes right down to it, social media is more about being social than it is about the media we use to achieve that. Carl Spies and Walter Pike spoke passionately, reminding us that this social media revolution we participate in daily is a hi-tech return to a very human form of interaction that we forgot about. Social media is a celebration of our humanity and of our relationships with each other. The tools we use are just that, tools.

By the time we reached the end of the Joburg session it was clear that there is a need for these sorts of gatherings. They are a terrific opportunity to get together and talk. Max commented to me that there was quite a bit of conversation taking place in the kitchen during the breaks as people went through there to make tea, coffee or grab something cold to drink. This wasn’t at all intended but worked out well nonetheless!

I was also watching tweets coming out of the Cape Town event and everyone there seemed to have a fantastic time thanks, in no small part, to Paul Cartmel and the New Media Labs team who hosted the Cape Town event (and who I hope will host it again in future). If you’d like to get an idea what happened in Cape Town, be sure to check out Allan Kent’s post. Allan was kind enough to MC the Cape Town event as well as facilitate the ideastorm session with Gaby.

My thinking behind having the two events occur at the same time was to encourage a flow of feedback and information between the two events via Twitter and FriendFeed and I think that worked pretty well. There seemed to be a lag with the Twitter stream into the FriendFeed channel but there was a pretty strong flow of comments, reports and feedback throughout the day which left a pretty rich record on FriendFeed. You can find pretty much all mentions of the event which used either “altconf” or “alt.conference”, certainly on Twitter.

While this post really doesn’t do the events and the people who attended/spoke/facilitated justice, I enjoyed being part of it tremendously. I am constantly reminded that we are surrounded with such smart, savvy and compassionate people who do amazing work. We have access to incredible talent and we saw some of that talent on display at alt.conference.

Once again I would like to thank all our sponsors and all the people who helped make this possible in their way. No contribution was too small and without them all, alt.conference may not have been the success it was.

We have already started talking about the next alt.conference later this year. There are still so many things we would like to explore and experiment with. I’d like you to be part of that so head over to the alt.conference site and sign up. Participate in the ongoing conversation.