The Daily Me is finally arriving with the convergence of social news and tablets

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Last week I wrote about Flipboard and Paper.li: Social news curation hits the tipping point. The news today is that Betaworks, which developed or supported the highly successful Tweetdeck, bit.ly, Tumblr and far more, is working on News.Me, a ‘personalized news service’, in collaboration with New York Times.

While neither organization would say much about it, this will clearly be a social news service that will tap, among other resources, the vast data bit.ly has (presumably) collected on what links are shared on Twitter and other social networks. New York Times invested in Betaworks in its March $20 million Series B, and then shifted one of its early stage products into Betaworks, where it is soon to emerge as News.Me.

In his 1995 book Being Digital Nicholas Negroponte wrote about the idea of a ‘Daily Me’ newspaper, that would provide news tailored to the individual. This spawned a multi-year debate about the supposed evils of the Daily Me, which would mean people wouldn’t be exposed to the diversity of the world and would live within their own navels.

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7 Shifts: The Future of Social Media and Internal Communications

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Melcrum recently released a report on How to use social media to solve critical communication issues, with as usual some great case studies and many practical insights. Go to the report website for a full overview and executive summary.

I was asked to write the closing section in the report, on The Future of Social Media and Internal Communications. Below is my article in full. If you’re interested in the topic also see my recent Thoughts on the future of workplace communications.

The Future of Social Media and Internal Communications

Organisations achieve their objectives by bringing together the talent and energy of many people. As such, the raft of emerging communications platforms today have the potential to literally transform how organizations work. From the 1990s, email fundamentally changed how most jobs were done. Now a wealth of new communication tools are being used to create sometimes dramatically different ways of working.

Based on the rapid emergence of social media and other new communication platforms, there are seven key aspects to how organisational communication will change.

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Will the future of social networking be open and distributed? Here comes Plexus

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I just caught up with my neighbor and fellow futurist Mark Pesce, who over a coffee at our local briefed me on his new project Plexus, which he publicly announced at his recent keynote at Pycon Australia, for Python developers. His excellent speech, titled How Not to be Seen, is below, and the transcript on Mark’s blog.

In his presentation Mark starts with his long relationship with programming and finally moves on to describe his project Plexus, which will provide a new platform for social networks.

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Revisiting the Web 2.0 Framework for insights on the web landscape today

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I have just been requested permission by London School of Economics to use my Web 2.0 Framework in their Management and Innovation of eBusiness program for the next four years. The first part of the framework is below, and the industry landscape further down the page.

Web 2.0 Framework

Click on the image for the original description and full pdf

I’m delighted that the framework is still seen as relevant and useful over 3 years after it was created in May 2007. Certainly the original post continues to get plenty of traffic, not least because an image from the framework still appears on the front page of a Google search for ‘Web 2.0’. The phrase ‘Web 2.0’ has been largely replaced with ‘social media’, ‘cloud’ and similar terms, but the underlying concepts remain valid in understanding what is going on today.

I thought it would be worth reviewing the framework today to see what is still current and what I would change.

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Atlassian makes its Enterprise 2.0 ambitions clear – raises $60 million in first ever external funding

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Big news: Australian enterprise software company Atlassian, creators of popular wiki Confluence, project tracking platform Jira and other innovative software, has just raised $60 million from Accel Partners in what Wall Street Journal reports as a ‘growth equity’ round.

Atlassian has been entirely bootstrapped with no external funding to date, making it one of the larger companies in that situation, given its $59 million revenue in the last financial year. The reasons given for the funding round are to fund expansion in Europe and Asia, acquisitions, and to give liquidity to its employees, who all have stock options. Similarly, Microsoft’s CFO at the time of their IPO said that they didn’t need the money but mainly wanted to give their employees a way to participate easily in the company’s success.

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Facebook tells CNET but not Victoria Buckley they have apologized for Nipplegate

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Well hopefully this story is finally completely done – but perhaps not quite.

I originally broke the news that Facebook had banned doll nipples, reviewed the saga of how they arbitrarily closed down the Save Ophelia protest group, and how, until today there had been major media coverage in 13 countries about this story, but not a peep in the US press.

Earlier today Chris Matyszczyk at CNET wrote Facebook apologizes for censoring doll’s nipples, reviewing the story and closing with the punchline:

I believe many people at Facebook to be extremely nice, reasonable and progressive. In addition, I now spend every day with Mark Zuckerberg’s dictum about the need to share more of myself as my guiding light. I therefore contacted Facebook for comment and received joyous and uplifting news.

Spokesman Barry Schnitt told me in an e-mail: “Our reviewers look at thousands of pictures a day that are reported to them. Of course they make an occasional mistake. This is just an example. We apologized and have encouraged the poster to put it up again.”

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The digital intensity of weekends – a critical dimension of life we can choose

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Over the last six months, I suppose it is, I have been engaging a lot less online during weekends. Of course it isn’t a coincidence that our younger daughter Phoebe was born just over a year ago. However it is more recently that I’ve pulled back more.

Most visibly I don’t Twitter (that) much on weekends, and these days I rarely return emails on weekends. I used to keep on top of email during weekends.

Anyway, it’s just a personal choice and reality that the cycle of my digital engagement is focused over five days, then I pull back for two days. It’s not that I’m totally off the computer – for example I’m able to write this blog post now as Phoebe is having her afternoon nap and no doubt I’ll be touching base with the world of the web later today.

However it is an absolutely critical dimension to our lives. Some people choose to keep away from technology – or at least a desktop computer – completely during weekends, and even set rules about it. Others keep on engaging in exactly the same way on weekends as during the week, or even intensify their presence as they indulge in their favorite pastime. Many like to keep on top of their communication so they don’t start Monday morning with a backlog to deal with.

How do you spend weekends? Do you connect to the world on the net more, the same or less on weekends than weekdays? And is that how you want it to be?

So much of our future is about us choosing how we use technology.

Facebook’s arbitrary, unwarranted, and unexplained actions: it needs to learn from its mistakes

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VBJ_composite.jpgApologies if you’re sick of this story – I am too. But the latest in this sordid saga needs to be reported.

The background: On Saturday Facebook threatened closing down Victoria Buckley Jewellery’s Facebook page because it showed an unclothed doll (top image at left), prompting widespread media coverage and global discussion. Many mainstream media such as Sydney Morning Herald and London Evening Standard used the original picture, suggesting that they didn’t think it was objectionable.

As Victoria was scared of losing her Facebook page with now close to 2,000 fans, a key way of connecting to her customers and community, she deleted images of the doll from her fan page, and replaced them with self-censored images, black bands hiding what Facebook presumably considered to be ‘nudity’ (middle image on the left). She put the original images on a new Facebook page Save Ophelia – exquisite doll censored by Facebook. Facebook promptly deleted the images from the site, and shortly afterwards closed down the site completely. Given all the offending images had been already deleted, they presumably objected to the discussion of Facebook’s censorship.

The latest: Facebook have now deleted the self-censored image of the doll from the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page, leaving her with nothing (bottom image on the left, though she has now replaced it with an image that contains no trace of either flesh or porcelain, for safety’s sake).

Since Facebook have yet to contact Victoria, or to my knowledge respond to the many media requests for response on this issue, we can only guess what they found objectionable about the censored image. Her chin? The way her legs are crossed? The length of her hair?

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Nipplegate escalates: A faceless Facebook shuts down protest group and proves it REALLY doesn’t like doll nipples

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ophelia2.jpgOn Saturday I first wrote about how Facebook was warning my wife Victoria Buckley that they may close down the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page , presumably because it showed a doll’s nipples.

On Monday Sydney Morning Herald wrote the story up as Now Facebook bans doll nipples. The headline spent 12 hours at the top of the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald online site, and became the single most read story on the newspaper. Since then it has made news all over the world, in leading newspapers such as London Evening Standard and Der Spiegel, and in countries as far away as Timor and Finland.

In fear of losing her Facebook page with its close to 2,000 fans, Victoria deleted the offending photos and posted them on a new Facebook group ‘Save Ophelia – exquisite doll censored by Facebook’ to show these beautiful images of the exquisite doll, and to discuss art and what constitutes nudity.

In response Facebook deleted the doll images on the Save Ophelia Facebook group. A short time later they simply shut down the group with its 500 members, with no indication of what remained to offend after the pictures were gone.

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Facebook’s Nipplegate hits the front page

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Hey, I was there first! :-) On Saturday I wrote Breaking: Facebook bans doll nipples on profile images, about how my wife Victoria Buckley was told by Facebook she couldn’t show nude dolls on her Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page.

nipplegate.jpg

Today the Sydney Morning Herald has featured this as its top story, with a headline Facebook nipplegate row and story by Asher Moses titled Now Facebook bans doll nipples. It says:

Facebook’s prudish police are out in force yet again, this time threatening action against a Sydney jeweller for posting pictures of exquisite nude porcelain dolls posing with her works.

Victoria Buckley, who owns a high-end jewellery store in the Strand Arcade on George Street, has long used the dolls as inspiration for her pieces and hasn’t had one complaint about the A3 posters of the nudes in her shop window.

But over the weekend she received six warnings from Facebook saying the pictures of the dolls, which show little more than nipples, constituted “inappropriate content” and breached the site’s terms of service.

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