Chris Heuer will co-present with Cisco’s Jeannette Gibson at the Communintelligence Executing Social Media Conference on May 28, 2008. The pair will discuss “Joining the Conversation: Lessons from the Real World,” for which Chris will give a brief presentation titled “Don’t Just Join the Conversation, Participate and Contribute,” which focuses on: why the Cluetrain Manifesto is more important then ever, business being personal and how employees can become your best brand ambassador. You can review the slides here.

I won’t bother with an in-depth comparison right now, but it is seemingly obvious how Friend Feed Rooms replace mailing lists.

We can have them

• public or private
• open or closed (members invite other members or not)
• we can message each other
• we can share links
• we can let people know what we like
• we can have a comment thread
• we get to have it on the Web instead of locked in our email inbox
• it has RSS feed so I can access it in my Google Reader

This is the first real step that I have seen towards what I originally wanted to do with Insytes back in 2005… it still has a long way to go to get that full potential, but maybe I can get a consulting gig with them, or some options or something and I can help them really build it all out as the best communications and collaboration tool on the Web.

For now though, join us in the Social Media Club Friend Feed Room and lets start sharing and learning from each other as it was originally intended

Odd question isn’t it?

I mean, surely Social Media is doing a lot for the cause, helping people spread the word via blogs, organize efforts and make everyone aware of our global climate crisis. Sarah Perez (love her stuff) even has a great post just today on How to Use Social Media for Social Change. Of course I agree, as evidenced by my early post on the Importance of Social Media and Amanda Chapel’s constant attacks against me (which I gleefully laugh at as he continues to give me more attention).

So what made me stop trying to fight my insomnia and get out of bed to write such a seemingly silly blog post at 430am this morning?

During the course of the work I have been doing with Intel lately, I have been researching the enterprise IT market and learning a lot about what they have been doing to reduce power consumption while maintaining performance across all there product lines. This CIO survey from March has some interesting details on “The Greening of IT”. It’s a very big and important topic for the industry and each of us. My friend Bill Kircos from Intel tells me that Intel is the largest buyer of reusable/renewable energy as ranked by the EPA (story on Treehugger.com). They are also extending their Greening Efforts across their operations in other important ways such as removing lead from their chips. Even my wife (Kristie Wells) is researching carbon offsets for her company Joyent.

At the same time, I have been thinking a lot about the big data portability issue (which I fully support) and whether or not the recent Facebook/Google challenge over Friend Connect might mean that we are seeing “The Twilight of the Open Web” (a topic of discussion for next months Social Media Club meeting in San Francisco – details to come).

In talking with some folks at the Executing Social Media conference last night, I mentioned this event idea and Nathan Gilliatt remarked we will always have some walled gardens and I replied with my standard “we can’t have walls, we need semi-permeable membranes”, meaning there needs to be some trust filter to keep the bad actors out and the good actors safe – which is the role Facebook claims to be playing in safegauding its users privacy from Friend Connect sites.

This is similar to the debate around Flickr and Zoomr and an open API for user portability which was basically about (paraphrasing) not allowing people to have all their data and photos transferred to a site where they may not be able to take it somewhere else in the future. As Stuart Butterfield said “we definitely should approve requests from direct competitors as long as they do the same … fair’s fair”. Or as Marc Canter infamously said at BloggerCon IV, “If you’re gonna suck, you gotta spit“.

Now look at the great and hugely popular service that FriendFeed and SocialThing are providing, a true value for sure, but it is duplicating, and in some cases tripling the amount of storage used for the same content.

Was also thinking about TubeMogul, which Tim Street mentioned during a session yesterday and which I also happen to love. It allows you to send your video to any and all of the video sharing sites you want all at once, saving us a great deal of time in distributing our video. Of course, there are also the people who take copies of it and upload it to other servers and other sites…

So these thoughts and discussions lead to me wondering about the impact that all of this data duplication we are creating with our Social Media is creating. Multiple hard drives, redundant systems, ultimately needing to head to a landfill or get partially recycled and replaced. Perhaps it is merely distributing the consumption we would have had anyway, but I have over 8,000 photos on Flickr and if I put them on Zoomr too that would be (@3MB each) 24 GB of extra storage space I am taking up on primary systems, plus backups – then the electricity to run it all.

Jake McKee talks about how he and his wife upload the same photos to their different Flickr accounts, what if they switched and then switched again. Of course, we also have a ton of different equipment we are using for creating and consuming media. Just today I had my M-Audio podcast rig, my Flip video camera, my phone and my iPod sitting in front of me next to my 3rd iBook/MacBook. The impact of manufacturing and disposal and power consumption of all this stuff we are using is just huge.

Of course, this is, most importantly, the method through which the whole of our society is improving, growing smarter and becoming more connected.

It’s obviously ok for the storage folks bottom lines and the power company and even me as a Social Media evangelist, but is Social Media bad for the environment? Shouldn’t we all be thinking more about Storage Conservation instead of Duplication?

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  Why does everything suck?: Disqus And Profy — First Step To Totally Portable Blogging

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  Great post on how to make Blogging portable… WhyDoesEverythingSuck – good job Hank Williams

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  (tags: blog portability socialmedia)

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  free SWOT analysis template and method, free swot analysis

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  Great sample SWOT template with simple questions to help frame the more important issues. SWOT\’s are actually good tools to look at your business relative to the market – been a while since I used one…

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  (tags: analysis business howto learning management presentation research strategy tips tools tutorial)

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  Second Life Research

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  A few interesting notes on this blog, not updated frequently.

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  (tags: secondlife research)

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  Cases 2.0 / Cases 2.0

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  Interesting set of case studies on Enterprise 2.0

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  (tags: 2.0 bestpractices enterprise2.0 management resources social web2.0 wiki)

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  The CEO Refresher

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  Great source of insights on management and leadership for executives. Never heard of it before today…

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  (tags: innovation leadership learning management marketing models strategy)

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  IBM Resource Center

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  Really great social media campaign from IBM in partnership with Digg. This is really good social media marketing.

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  (tags: digg socialmedia smp smplaybook socialmediaplaybook socialmediamarketing marketing)

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  How Second Life Affects Real Life – TIME

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  Really interesting piece on how our online interactions influences our real world behaviour. Some great research going on at Stanford…

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  (tags: culture identity research secondlife technology virtualworlds socialmedia stanford)

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1. Don’t think I have the time
2. Don’t have anything valuable to say
3. Don’t think I have anything valuable to say
4. Everyone else has already said what I wanted to say
5. Not in the mood
6. No one is going to comment on the post anyway
7. Not allowed to write about what I am working on
8. I want to make sure my wife’s blog gets all the attention
9. My first amendment rights have gotten enough exercise lately
10. …Twitter

So why don’t you blog more often?

Friend and social media enthusiast Erica O’Grady alerted me last night to a little legal dust up that forced the Digg like site with a woman’s touch to change its name from Sk!rt to Kirtsy.com

I met the founders briefly during SxSW and think they are some pretty cool women. While I am bummed they had to go through this, am very happy it is earlier in their growth. Might even be just the sort of thing that gets them enough attention to bust out over the top and get some real traction with new users (though having all the current users updating links on their posts and sites has gotta be tough).

The Bloggess has a great and snarky post that gets into some of the details (and a bit of the speculation regarding the allegedly evil penises behind the forced name change). Ellen Centor has a more legally oriented retelling of the tale on Blogher, complete with some of the dates and legal reasoning behind it.

Update: to make it clear, I think Morriss was within its rights to seek the protection of the courts on this (as anyone with a legal background who reads the account on Blogher will tell you) they clearly have been working on a digital strategy for their new site and brand for some time as you can tell by visiting their site Skirt.com and reading the story behind the publication, which includes the many years of history the editor has in advance of this little dustup.