Disqus - Latest Comments for netvolution

Re: Being social is hard work!

Phil Ashman — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 01:26:07 -0000

Reflecting on your comments about the election results, although I haven't seen the stats on the voting demographic, I expect the low voter turnout played a critical role in Kevin's success. I would assume his demographic counted for a much higher percentage of the vote than they might have in a full election. Although saying that, I did find it interesting that many of the questions were aimed at him specifically during the candidates' pitch at the Senior's Centre. He certainly has worked hard for this and was rewarded for his effort this time. I think it's an amazing feat for a 19 year old, but equally incredible is how little I hear about this in general conversation. Sadly I would guess there are still a large number of people in Kelowna who have no idea Kevin got a seat.

Here's my 2c on your questions.

If you take a page out of Malcolm Gladwell's book Tipping Point on their being 10,000 hours of practice at a skill to be successful, then the answer to your first question is yes. However, in order to dedicate that much time to a skill it is likely you have a passion and maybe an innate ability. To quote the rhetoric of financial advisors, it's not a guarantee but a good indicator.

As far as hard work compensating for any preconceived bias, I would hesitate to give a percentage because there are so many variables, but it definitely can sway opinion if the right press and coverage makes it known. Obviously a lot of behind the scenes effort can work wonders with a campaign, but the perceived public opinion needs to hear and see you are a tireless worker for it to sway those mulling their decision. Hence the power of social networking and door to door. However there are always those people who are so set in their ways nothing on earth can change their mind.

Re: It’s Great __ But (part II)

Phil Ashman — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 23:33:41 -0000

Great post! It's incredible just how many issues can be, or in most cases could have been, resolved with improved communication skills. I always get a chuckle over some people's division between business and pleasure, because for me they are one and the same. I often find I don't really know a person until I meet with them on a social level. How someone behaves with their personal relationships is a great indicator of their true personality, and for me a good measure of how strong a professional relationship I can build with them. I don't view someone as 'successful' if they only fulfill one side of the equation, no matter how far they rise up the corporate ladder or gain financially.

Thanks for the refreshing read! Now time to unpack the dishwasher and focus on the kids...;)

Re: It’s Great… But (part II)

Phil Ashman — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 22:33:41 -0000

Re: City Council Candidates Not So Social

Phil Ashman — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:07:33 -0000

From a candidate's perspective, I think the technologies we have available today can significantly reduce the risk of a no show event. For those new to online engagement, it is important that their first experience using social networking tools on a professional basis be a successful one. Thus, as you say, a few responsible and positve interactions can go along way toward giving them confidence in this approach.

Re: City Council Candidates Not So Social

Phil Ashman — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:07:33 -0000

Definitely! I'm hopeful that the potential for transparency through online interaction will encourage and hopefully attract more engagement from the community. It ceases to amaze me how apathetic the community can be with municipal elections knowing that it is our local council's decisions that directly impact our lives and our community. Although they are not necessarily more important, these decisions often have a more immediate impact than those at the provincial and federal levels.

From a candidate's perspective, I think the technologies we have available today can significantly reduce the risk of a no show event. For those new to online engagement, it is important that their first experience using social networking tools on a professional basis be a successful one. Thus, as you say, a few responsible and positve interactions can go along way toward giving them confidence in this approach.

Re: City Council Candidates Not So Social

Phil Ashman — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:11:51 -0000

I couldn't agree more! I look for forward thinking representatives. For someone to be entering into public office without an active online presence is pretty poor. Hopefully in the years to come we'll see this improve as the community reach out and question the candidates online.

Re: City Council Candidates Not So Social

Phil Ashman — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:11:51 -0000

Re: Save Yourself: Learning to Lifestream Using Posterous

Phil Ashman — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:33:49 -0000

One thing that confused me when I first heard about Posterous was why would I use Friendfeed and Posterous? But after some digging I finally clued into the fact that Friendfeed focuses on lifestreaming links to your content and activity around the Web whereas Posterous actually stores the content and, from what I can tell, only the content you post directly to Posterous (although you can import your blogs). I must be missing something more with posterous though, because if it were truly a lifestreaming service, then you should technically be able to also record your activity on the internet in a pull in fashion as opposed to it being mostly a push out application. Just thought I'd throw this in for those like me, trying to figure out where this service fits in to their workflow. However I think it was in another post where you mentioned the importance of redundancy in your social networks. I couldn't agree more!

Nevertheless, I know all these different apps are too overwhelming for the average user, which is what I believe Facebook is trying to address. They want to be the majority's posterous/friendfeed combination.

Interesting times.

Re: Could Google Reader Become the Next Friendfeed?

Phil Ashman — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:57:05 -0000

I also rely on FriendFeed for my 'send to' functionality. Although I like the idea of commenting directly within Google Reader it does bring up the same dilemma as FriendFeed. Should I comment on the post directly on the Blog or within Greader? I think the power of keeping it within google, is that if you develop a close nit community of people whose opinions you value, then you have yourself a somewhat moderated comment system. I think this would work well for popular sites like Techcrunch where you might have 200+ comments for an article, but for more intimate blogs that don't see a lot of comments, it's probably more valuable to comment on the blog direction.

Re: http://www.zoliblog.com/2009/03/17/are-you-left-brained-or-right-she-can-tell/?nucrss=1

Phil Ashman — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:39:10 -0000

When I first looked at it straight on, it was clockwise. Wouldnt switch on me.

However, if I looked down and away to the right and used my peripheral vision (left eye toward the screen), then it would spin anti-clockwise. If if I looked down and way to the left (right eye toward the screen) then it would flip back.

Awesome illusion!

Re: Why Facebook is Failing Me

Phil Ashman — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:11:16 -0000

It'll be interesting playing around with the new facebook updates to see if this is going to help.

Re: Mashable, Disqus and UberVU Launch Social Media Comments

Phil Ashman — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 03:19:58 -0000

Just looking down this list of comments I think it's quite easy to see what the issue is going to be. I'm sure you'll get to select which social media systems to include, so It'll interesting to watch which applications people end up importing into their blog comments. IMHO, for example, I can only hope that most sites using this don't incorporate the Twitter stream. Twitter is not a great platform for commenting, and I think you'd distract from worthwhile comments. Does disqus allow tracking of comments on sites that don't have their comments powered by disqus? Like coComment for instance?

Re: Why Facebook is Failing Me

Phil Ashman — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:09:51 -0000

I've been
commenting

about the same thing recently. It is definitely an issue that I believe Facebook has an uphill battle to overcome. I've long had a separate FB account for Business & Friends. Being an instructor I just found it the only way to separate my personal from my professional activities. However even doing this I've yet to see much if any in the way of business activity on FB. I've continued this over into most of my social network circles. However as some of the excellent comments above have mentioned, most people haven't taken the time to be so diligent with their media distribution.

How I handle my social media input seems to be like a torrential rapid lately; spiraling toward finding the most efficient way of handling things. However I think we'll see more applications look to ways of data mining aggregators; similar to Feedly. This has been my latest darling. I've always wanted to love Friendfeed, but it is just too fragmented for my liking. Feedly allows me to hone in on good discussion within Digg and FriendFeed without having to follow too many people in those applications directly. I think the comments to this post are indicative of the fragmented commenting that exists within Friendfeed. There are probably many other people that have reshared this blog in FF and have comments other than those listed in your FF comment section (about 10 according to my Feedly minibar..;)..). However judging by the number of comments posted directly on this blog as opposed to Friendfeed, it seems most people still like to come directly to the source; my preference still.

Let's hope the big networks get this dialed in pronto!

Re: Thanks and Lessons Learned

Phil Ashman — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:19:47 -0000

I think I'm going to use that one! "My thinking is never final..." Couldn't agree more.

Re: Thanks and Lessons Learned

Phil Ashman — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 01:42:16 -0000

Sounds like you're talking from experience! It is true that we open ourselves up for scrutiny, but I think as professionals, most of us keep this in the back of our minds as we post. In addition, in making this conscious decision, we know we are going to have to thicken our skin.

No matter where you work there are always those individuals who make you want to give your head a shake (and maybe their's too..;)..), and when you open yourself up to the Internet you now have an increased probability of exposing your thoughts to a much greater number of those personalities globally. Nevertheless, I think the positive usually outweighs the negative, and if something drastic happens then you just have to roll with the punches and take appropriate measures in proportion to the level of discomfort the event evokes. Many people have been hurt online, but that is the risk we take for the freedom we have. I try to keep optimistic and hope I am lucky enough to have a high percentage of positive encounters and few if any extremely negative and possibly damaging ones. However it is easy to remain positive when you haven't been at the butt end of an online assault.

Re: Thanks and Lessons Learned

Phil Ashman — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:13:17 -0000

Love the quote!

I couldn't agree more with your perspective. At the post secondary level I'm dealing with many students who have had no guidance in managing their digital footprint. I even have some students doing vlogs that could make future employment exceptionally difficult.

Re: An observation of Web 2.0, Apple and Openness

Phil Ashman — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 02:40:13 -0000

Couldn't agree more. I've long argued that Apple blew it with their insular approach to the MAC in the 80's and I thought that they were doing the same thing with the IPOD. I figured history would repeat itself and the usual wave of cheaper, open, less restrictive clones would ride in and gobble up that market from them. Boy was I wrong about that market! Their brand name has really powered them through on that front. I've never owned an apple product, and I've definitely given them a fair shake, but I find they just don't play nice with everything else and are missing that little extra bit of 'openess' I seem to need....and now the IPhone seems to be what everyone is raving about....maybe that'll be the one that grabs me.

Re: My Media Center Solution...finally.

Phil Ashman — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:22:59 -0000

Well, I'm not sure this was an appropriate comment for this particular post, but I'll throw a response back at ya. I'm sorry you don't find some of these tangents interesting. Since I assume you are talking about the PC Hardware class, I must ask whether you would prefer me to just chalk and talk fact after fact the whole class? You don't have the vantage point of seeing everyone sitting in front of you, but I can assure you that these interludes and tangents (most of which add value to the material we are talking about in my opinion) bring many a student out of their slumber, or sometimes re-engages them in the class.

Anyway, I appreciate the comment. I hope this provides a bit of insight into the method behind the madness. I think you would find the process much more beneficial if you used the my 'tangents' as a time to interact, contribute and share your knowledge with the class rather than switching off and wishing I'd just stick to the book.

Re: Why Twitter can't be conversational for me (Scripting News)

Phil Ashman — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 02:05:11 -0000

The only reason I have twitter around is because some of the community I reach out to use Twitter. Quite frankly, Friendfeed satisfies everything I get out of twitter, but is way more flexible and definitely caters to the threaded conversation. Once again it all comes back to where your community resides. For me, most of my real-life community resides virtually on Facebook, so that is where my FriendFeed utlimately winds up. In fact if Facebook had the lifestreaming capability of Friendfeed I'd probably find myself moving away from FriendFeed.

I find the noise on Twitter (and FriendFeed for that matter if you don't filter well) horrendous. I still think people should twitter their professional lives independently of their personal ones for obvious reasons. For instance, on a personal learning network side of things, I couldn't care less what a person had for dinner, but I do care about an informative blog entry. I think we'll hear more of this as these apps become more mainstream and used for content aggregation.

Re: What Is Social Bookmarking?

Phil Ashman — Fri, 02 May 2008 03:06:36 -0000

Just installed and played around with Diigo and I must say it has a slew of cool features. However a killer feature for me is the ability to be able to cache the web page if the link no longer exists.

When trying to figure if Diigo supported this feature, I saved a bookmark in Diigo and went to My Bookmarks online,. I saw a cached option underneath the bookmark, but it unfortunately just lead me to a page that said "this bookmark is not cached" and "click here to go to the original". I searched around for an way to force it to cache the page, and noticed that if I click on "comment on the whole page" from the Diigo toolbar THEN it caches my page along with my comment, or annotation as it seems to call it. Not sure if there is another way to force Diigo to cache the page, but this works.

Diigo certainly appears to be more powerful than Furl and I guess with Yahoo now owning it one can only hope it is here to stay.

Re: Do You Want In On Live Mesh?

Phil Ashman — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 02:13:46 -0000

b/c I totally dug ozzy's 'Groove' back in the day before MS basically butchered it down with office 2007. I'm now dying to jump on board of his next baby. I'm a big fan of the whole cloud computing idea and wanna see how they evolve this product within the social networking realm.

Re: Friendfeed, Twitter & Pipes

Phil Ashman — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:46:17 -0000

No problem! Yea there's been a real migration from twitter going on this past weekend as Twitter encountered some serious down time. Of course it doesn't help when someone like Scoble sounds the death knell!

http://snipurl.com/257r7

Re: Tell Me About Flock

Phil Ashman — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:56:29 -0000

Good review! I had heard about flock, but never took the time to really investigate the features. Do you actually use it yourself? If so have you found your use of flock's features diminish with your use of friendfeed?

If facebook would only allow the minifeed to become an unfiltered stream of all my friend's activity that I could pull into friendfreed, I don't think I'd need any of the extensions that flock has to offer. My only concern is that the many of the options offered by flock are just not as good as the standalone apps I use. ie Twhirl, Windows Livewriter, GReader etc....

I do like the possibility of the offline/online bookmarks though! Thanks for the thought! However that firefox extension you pointed me to for Del.icio.us probably provides that functionality. When I get a moment I'll give it a shot.

Cheers.

Re: What Is Social Bookmarking?

Phil Ashman — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 22:46:25 -0000

When you say sync, do you mean going into Furl and manually importing your existing bookmarks? I think I had discovered that in the past, but never really looked into a way for my to sync behind the scenes like foxmarks. For instance if I add a bookmark/favority locally, then I need it to syncrhonize with my Furl account in the background at a regularly scheduled interval. Now that would be cool! Either way I do love the cached pages. I sometimes just take a snapshot of the news.google.com page just for posterity!

Re: What Is Social Bookmarking?

Phil Ashman — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:17:58 -0000

Great post by the way..;)

I love the concept of del.icio.us, but I just found that I didn't have the time or energy to visit the site and benefit from the social networking aspect. In addition I discovered that what I really wanted was a way to synchronize my favorites and share them with the world. Couldn't quite get del.icio.us to do that for me and had a bit of a mental block switching from my organized bookmark heirarchy to tags (I now use the firefox extension foxmarks to do this).

I use Stumbleupon mostly to channel surf the net when I feel like just vegging (not often enough these days!) and when I find a cool site I flag it, which will then share it with everyone in my FriendFeed and consequently all my friends on facebook. I don't use it a bookmark store per say, but if I find it it stumbleupon then I'll add it there and possibly add it to my local favorites.

However neither Stumbleupon or Delicious cache pages for you, so that is where Furl fits in for me. Finding an efficient fit for all these social networking apps is a neverending task....and somehow Kevin Rose manages to find time to go climbing almost every day!..;)

Do you know of an app that would allow me to share my local favorites in firefox and keep it synchronized?

Disqus - Latest Comments for netvolution

Re: Being social is hard work!

Re: It’s Great __ But (part II)

Re: It’s Great… But (part II)

Re: City Council Candidates Not So Social

Re: City Council Candidates Not So Social

Re: City Council Candidates Not So Social

Re: City Council Candidates Not So Social

Re: Save Yourself: Learning to Lifestream Using Posterous

Re: Could Google Reader Become the Next Friendfeed?

Re: http://www.zoliblog.com/2009/03/17/are-you-left-brained-or-right-she-can-tell/?nucrss=1

Re: Why Facebook is Failing Me

Re: Mashable, Disqus and UberVU Launch Social Media Comments

Re: Why Facebook is Failing Me

Re: Thanks and Lessons Learned

Re: Thanks and Lessons Learned

Re: Thanks and Lessons Learned

Re: An observation of Web 2.0, Apple and Openness

Re: My Media Center Solution...finally.

Re: Why Twitter *can't* be conversational for me (Scripting News)

Re: What Is Social Bookmarking?

Re: Do You Want In On Live Mesh?

Re: Friendfeed, Twitter & Pipes

Re: Tell Me About Flock

Re: What Is Social Bookmarking?

Re: What Is Social Bookmarking?

Re: Why Twitter can't be conversational for me (Scripting News)