SXSW Is Dead, Long Live SXSW!
How the SXSW of old is gone. In its place, a powerful festival of Internet industries has arrived.
internet
7 Daunting Challenges Facing Marketers
Marketing today remains a great challenge, in large part because of the consistently changing technology and media landscape. Informational sources (conferences, blogs, etc.) consistently address these challenges yet the issues persist.
It may be time to take a step back on a macro level and look at how education and information sources are meeting these challenges.
Here are the seven daunting difficulties for today’s communicators, each followed by an idea or three on how to address them. Please add your own thoughts.
The Bulgarian Principle
On Tuesday night, I sat at the Livingston table for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)’s 100th anniversary. As I blogged a few weeks ago, the ADL was started to fight antisemitism by my great grand uncle Sigmund Livingston. The keynote speaker was his excellency Rosen Plevneliev, president, Republic of Bulgaria.
Part of the evening included a retelling of Bulgaria’s resistance against Nazi Germany during World War II, an effort that saved its population of 48,000 Jews. Bulgaria saved these lives, not by direct conflict, but through red tape dallying and eventually exposing Nazi demands to export the Jews through the American media.
This commitment to basic human rights in the face of the greatest evil and bully we have seen in modern times just stuns the mind.
Frankly, if you care about change, if you believe that people can make a difference, this sterling example of principle stands out. It’s what we live for, a beautiful testimony to what unwillingness to yield to wrongness can achieve.
Tim Berners-Lee: You Can’t Quantify Potential Influence
The highlight of my SxSW experience this weekend was meeting Tim Berners-Lee, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. I took the opportunity to ask Sir Berners-Lee what he thought of social influence metrics like Klout, Kred and PeerIndex.
His response was remarkable, but before I share it with you let me frame the scene.
Sir Berners-Lee is clearly a savant. He is so brilliant he struggled with the bloggy attention he received at the IEEE SxSW reception. When he talk, he gestured somewhat wildly, and was clearly aware of the surrounding cameras. It was exactly how I imagine Einstein would function in this 21st century world of cameras, tweets, and instant access… Like a brilliant wild person forced to live in a zoo.
I immediately recognized time would be short with this man, that he would move on quickly. So I listened intently.
Read More »Tim Berners-Lee: You Can’t Quantify Potential Influence
Future of the Internet: Networked or Shallow?
SxSW starts next weekend, and the whole sector will be focused on the immediate future of the Internet. It seems fitting that the fifth “Future of the Internet” survey was released last week by Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. More than 1,000 people participated in the study, including me.
From the report’s executive summary: “Technology experts and stakeholders were fairly evenly split as to whether the younger generation’s always-on connection to people and information will turn out to be a net positive or a net negative by 2020. They said many of the young people growing up hyperconnected to each other and the mobile Web and counting on the internet as their external brain will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who will do well in key respects.
“At the same time, these experts predicted that the impact of networked living on today’s young will drive them to thirst for instant gratification, settle for quick choices, and lack patience. A number of the survey respondents argued that it is vital to reform education and emphasize digital literacy. A notable number expressed concerns that trends are leading to a future in which most people are shallow consumers of information, and some mentioned George Orwell’s 1984 or expressed their fears of control by powerful interests in an age of entertaining distractions.”
True Blue
True blue — loyalty in your views and causes — is an admirable quality. Blue means more culturally, too. It can mean feeling down. When I consider this blog over the past year and half — really since I began… Read More »True Blue
Beware of Pedestals in the Attention Economy
Danah Boyd wrote a fantastic post last week about Internet fame and its negative impact on individuals. It is easy to buy into the rock star kool aid when people frequently sing your accolades (and fallacies) online and at events,… Read More »Beware of Pedestals in the Attention Economy
Overvaluing Twitter
Image by puuikibeach Given the increased focus on “Twinfluence” thanks to measures like Klout, there are many organizations eager for success with so-called influencers (at least by Twitter metrics). Though some of these measures integrate more than just Twitter, they… Read More »Overvaluing Twitter