Getting an online identity from before you are born is just the beginning of a life online

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The invention of the graphical web browser in 1993 was the moment that ‘getting online’ became meaningful, when we could start to post ideas, photos, and more that anyone in the world with an internet connection could access. However you needed a certain amount of tech knowledge to do that, and it was only from around 2000 that it began to get easy for anyone to blog, post images, share personal media among friends, and a little while after that to upload videos for the world to see.

Those born in the last five years, in this era of ready online sharing, have rapidly gained online identities, sometimes pretty much at the same time as their parents. Internet security firm AVG has done a survey showing how quickly these images are posted to the world.

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Holidays in Fiji – yay!

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We are about to leave for Fiji! We planned our holiday a couple of months ago, when we realized this was one of the only times I could carve out before the end of the year. Since then I’ve been too busy to appreciate the fact that it’s coming up, though knowing I’m about to go on holiday has made my intense schedule a bit easier to cope with. I will realize that it’s real when I arrive there.

We went to Fiji just over a year ago, a few weeks after Phoebe was born, and Leda hasn’t stopped talking about it since then, so it will be great to get her back there. It’s an easy destination to get to and spend time in.

I have long thought that a great holiday is one in which you start thinking things you couldn’t even imagine before you left. One week is a bit short to allow submerged ideas and perspectives to emerge, though I think they might, as I play with the kids in the pool.

Back soon!

Newspapers become irrelevant and media is reborn by 2022

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On Thursday I am giving the closing keynote at Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum conference in Sydney. I gave a sneak preview of some of what I will be covering, leading to a wide variety of coverage including in The Australian, by Roy Greenslade in The Guardian, on The Inquisitr, and on Mumbrella (including a rich discussion). I will also be doing some interviews on ABC radio tonight and tomorrow.

Below are my pre-talk primer notes – more detail coming in a bit:

By 2022 newspapers as we know them will be irrelevant in Australia. However the leading newspaper publishers of today may have transformed themselves to thrive in what will be a flourishing media industry.

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Word of mouth in Australia vs US – Apple is a stronger brand Down Under

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At our Future of Influence Summit conference last year Sharyn Smith of Australian word of mouth agency Soup was one of the key local experts to speak. Given that Australian companies have been a fair bit slower than the US to take up broad word of mouth initiatives, it’s good to see what Soup are doing.

Soup has just released research on word of mouth in Australia they commissioned from the dominant US firm researching the space, Keller Fay.

Apparently Australians have 67.8 branded conversations each week, of which almost two-thirds are positive. Below are the headline results with a few quick comments

Top brand for overall word of mouth (both positive and negative)

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Source: Soup

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A belated hooray! iPhone will finally get an external keyboard

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Last year in intense frustration I wrote It is totally INSANE that you cannot use an external keyboard on an iPhone. It is absolutely crazy that I have to carry around other devices to be able to touchtype on the move.

With the launch of the iPad with external keyboard capabilities (and large on-screen keyboard) I was getting worried that they weren’t going to give the iPhone a keyboard in order to differentiate the devices.

Fortunately Steve Jobs has just announced that iPhone OS4, due out in the Northern summer, will include Bluetooth keyboard capabilities. Again, it is totally insane that it has taken this long – the iPhone has always had Bluetooth, it’s just that Apple deliberately crippled the ability to use it for keyboards.

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This means I’m likely to continue with iPhone for a little while. The latest Android phones were beginning to look very tempting.

Of course there are some other nice features in OS4, notably multitasking and enhanced camera and video capabilities. But the keyboard is for me the critical one.

Keynote presentation on Future of Interactive Marketing at IPZ09 in Istanbul

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For those who were at the fantastic IPZ09 Interactive Marketing Summit in Istanbul this week, apologies for the delay in posting my keynote slides – the hotel bandwidth wasn’t adequate to upload them and I’m only just back at home.

For those who weren’t at IPZ09, note that these slides were designed to accompany my keynote and not to be useful by themselves. However they may still be of interest.

The slides can also be downloaded as a pps file, which includes the movies but not the animations of all the frameworks as I explained their implications for marketers. See here for the Social Media Strategy Framework in English and Turkish.

I’ll be writing more soon about what I covered in my keynote and my (very favorable) impressions of the Turkish digital market.

Social Media Strategy Framework in Turkish – Sosyal Medya Strateji Çerçevesi

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Now having launched version 2 of our Social Media Strategy Framework, we will release it in a variety of other languages.

Since I am giving the opening keynote at IPZ2009 Interactive Marketing Summit in Istanbul on 21 October, we will kick off with the Turkish version, and release the other translations over the next couple of weeks.

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Click on image to download pdf

Please share this with any Turkish speakers.

Also be sure to let me know if you can suggest any improvements to the translation.

In the wake of the death of venture capital: Finding a balance between the incubator and VC models

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There has been a lot of talk lately that the VC model is broken – here is a small selection of what has been being said recently on the topic:

Forbes: Venture Capital’s Coming Collapse

EarlyStageVC: Traditional Venture Capital Sure Seems Broken – It’s About Time

VentureBeat: The VC model is broken

Fred Wilson: Is The “Traditional Venture Capital Model” Broken?

Mathew Ingram on GigaOm: Is the VC Model Broken? Far From it

New York Times/ Bits: Do Web Entrepreneurs Still Need Venture Capitalists?

HuffingtonPost: The Death of Venture Capital as We Know It

There are manifold reasons for the VC sector’s challenges, not least the vastly lower capital requirements of the typical web start-up of today.

One of the poster-children of the new wave of seed capital has been Y Combinator, which provides very small amounts of capital to kick-start new ventures.

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A Manifesto for the Reputation Society: it’s coming soon!

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One of the key themes at Future of Influence Summit 2009 on August 31 / September 1 will be the emergence of the ‘reputation economy’, and how value is being created in that space.

Howard Rheingold, who has been deeply involved in this space since the 1980s, and has demonstrated his prescience by writing – among others books – Virtual Reality in 1991 and Smart Mobs in 2002, will be doing a keynote at the conference.

In our recent conversation about influence and reputation Howard mentioned the 2004 article Manifesto for a Reputation Society, which appeared in First Monday. I saw this a number of years ago but had forgotten it. It is in fact a great overview of where reputation may go. The abstract reads:

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The best visuals to explain the Singularity to senior executives

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Tomorrow morning I’m doing a presentation to the top executive team of a very large organization on the next 20 years. Most of what I will cover will be general societal, business and technological drivers as well as specific strategic issues driving their business. However as part of stretching their thinking I’ll also speak a about the Singularity.

As such I’ve been trying to find one good image to introduce my explanation, however I haven’t been able to find one which is quite right for the purpose.

Ray Kurzweil’s Six Epochs diagram below is great and the one I’ll probably end up using, however it is a bit too over-the-top for most senior executives. The Universe becoming conscious is beyond the ambit of most strategy sessions.

Source: Ray Kurzweil, Applied Abstractions

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