The “Tagging” book by Gene Smith is out. I am still awaiting a paper copy, but had a chance to look at the online version already. It looks really comprehensive, concise and covering all important tagging concepts. Which is not easy for such a moving target topic.

If you’re an information architect, user experience designer, web designer, product manager or developer it will tell you everything you need to know to design a tagging system. It covers tagging from broad concepts right down to the specifics of interface design and even code. It also deals with issues of social web design, like popularity, social discovery and recommendations, that are germane to tagging. Finally, I tried to touch on some of the broader social trends—like emergence of a ubiquitous, always-on information environment—to which tagging is connected.

There isn’t a large body of research around tagging and there is no widely accepted “tagging theory,” and that made planning and organizing material quite difficult. Much of the conventional wisdom, if you can call it that, around tagging is being challenged by new (and actually quite fascinating) applications of the basic tagging techniques. Librarything, Wesabe, PhotoShelter, Buzzillions are all pushing the envelope of social metadata. This is great, but it made writing the book (and also, feeling confident about the material in the book) harder than it might otherwise be.

 

As we head into the new, very exciting year of 2008, we need to remember and share with our community the “who” and “what” we at MediaTrust believe in and stand for. Our beliefs, philosophy, values are what drives us internally and radiates out through our business partnerships and our community.

What’s in a name?

The name MediaTrust implies an apparent contradiction in terms. The words “Media” and “Trust” are not often paired together because the media industry is not known for trustworthiness and integrity.

We have chosen this name because we are going to change that. Our ancestry is from days past, where handshakes and a man’s word meant something. Our mission is to weave trust and media together into a something that meets the requirements inherent in this new era of Online media.

What is Trust?

trust |trəst| |tr ə st| |tr ʌ st|

noun

1 firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something : relations have to be built on trust | they have been able to win the trust of the others.

• acceptance of the truth of a statement without evidence or investigation : I used only primary sources, taking nothing on trust.

• the state of being responsible for someone or something : a man in a position of trust.

• poetic/literary a person or duty for which one has responsibility : ruler ship is a trust from God.

• poetic/literary a hope or expectation : all the great trusts of womanhood.

The Tenants of Trust in the New Media Landscape

Customers are partners, and strong business relationships are built by earning a partner’s trust.

Business relationships last for years, not days.

Information transparency is not optional. Every customer deserves full disclosure at all times.

A media firm’s obligation to perform: To deliver what they say, when they say it with no hidden costs.

Relationships are founded on handshakes and aligned activity toward a profitable end.

Trust isn’t granted, it’s earned over time by being truthful to your word.

Building Trust in Today’s Landscape

Times have changed, but fundamental business values have not. Used to be, you could trust a man or woman for their word and the look in their eye when you shook hands. Just because there is less personal contact today, it does not men that traditional values can be disposed of.

In this rapidly changing world, virtual relationships do not mean you can ‘get away’ with more or obfuscate the truth. Trust still must be earned, even if there is no physical handshake. Relationships are still built one at a time and are not something that technology will ever replace.

Relationships will always require trust and meaningful dialog between to mutually benefiting parties. Business partnerships are built with care and attention through intelligent dialog and genuine interest from both parties.

Building Trust is a constant, ever-changing process that does not have an end. To grow trust between two parties, you must work together, plan, test, and repeat. Trust requires learning from one another and sharing knowledge to mutual benefit. Trust means delivering what’s been promised and more. Trust means being true to yourself and true to your word.

Our Beliefs

Our belief is that there is a real and logical meeting place where thinking and feeling, intuition and integrity, and intelligence and inspiration come together to profitable outcomes.

MediaTrust holds true that business should be a platform for human ingenuity and innovation, for in this, business serves the human condition best.

Change is constant. By understanding that continual shift requires continual measurement and adjustment, we can arrive at the goal of delivering relevance and genuine human interest.

Our business is a quest of investigation, exploration and discovery…a quest anchored to a consciousness of the role we play as a partner to those who trust us to take them where they want to go.

MediaTrust is a place where ideas are heard, issues discussed, and needs met. Our offices are an environment of collaboration, a place of open communication, intelligent deduction, and creative solutions.

We are new world craftsmen who take the time to understand who you are and what you want to build. Each project is treated as a unique and dynamic labor. We weave a custom solution from our trust of resources, technology, and human ingenuity.

MediaTrust believes that dialog drives change, innovation, and continuous improvement. This dialog between all of us makes everything we do and everything we are, better.

Our concerns are driven by mutual interest, shared values, real and lasting relationships, and our obligation and passion for innovation.

We are clear as to purpose and outcome, strategy, tactics and all that goes in-between.

Trust is our guiding light and it is easy to navigate by. It is either there or it is not. With us, it will always be.

Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons.

About Howard Rheingold

Writer, artist and designer, theorist and community builder, Howard Rheingold is one of the driving minds behind our net-enabled, open, collaborative life. Read full bio »

As Howard Rheingold himself puts it, “I fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension, then plugged my computer into my telephone and got sucked into the net.” A writer and designer, he was among the first wave of creative thinkers who saw, in computers and then in the Internet, a way to form powerful new communities.

His 2002 book Smart Mobs, which presaged Web 2.0 in predicting collaborative ventures like Wikipedia, was the outgrowth of decades spent studying and living life online. An early and active member of the Well (he wrote about it in The Virtual Community), he went on to cofound HotWired and Electric Minds, two groundbreaking web communities, in the mid-1990s. Now active in Second Life, he teaches, writes and consults on social networking. His latest passion: teaching and workshopping participatory media literacy, to make sure we all know how to read and make the new media that we’re all creating together.

“With his last book, Smart Mobs, the longtime observer of technology trends made a persuasive case that pervasive mobile communications, combined with always-on Internet connections, will produce new kinds of ad-hoc social groups. Now, he’s starting to take the leap beyond smart mobs, trying to weave some threads out of such seemingly disparate developments as Web logs, open-source software development, and Google.”

BusinessWeek

 

LESS Silos = MORE Relevance

Our interactive lives started with random behavior thru surfing the web.The random disconnected web then led us to the second major behavioral change which allowed us to search the organized web. We are now entering the third behavioral shift in our interactive behavior pattern, which breaks down the silos of the internet and connects the thread of relevance to us and everything that we do. Now that we have searched and found. We now want our interests to find us thru more relevance and less clutter. Silobreaker is a new tool that follows these foot steps heading into the new dawn of the age of relevance.

From the mouths of SiloBreaker:

“Silobreaker is one of next generation of online search services for news and current events that delivers meaning and relevance beyond traditional search and aggregation engines. Its relational analysis and explanatory graphics provide users with unparalleled contextual insight into the news stories of the day.More than a news aggregator, Silobreaker provides relevance by looking at the data it finds like a person does. It recognises people, companies, topics, places and keywords; understands how they relate to each other in the news flow, and puts them in context for the user. The graphical search results enables users to quickly and easily understand connections, trends and topics or navigate deeper into the most relevant stories for them. No other news search service provides such an extensive suite of contextual tools in the industry today.Silobreaker pulls content on global issues, science, technology and business from approximately 10,000 news, blog, research and multimedia sources. With the engine’s focus on finding and connecting related data in the information flow, Silobreaker’s user tools and visualisations are ideal for bringing meaning to content from either today’s Web or the evolving Semantic Web, or both.”

This is an interesting tool to use and a great example of the silo “less” interactive world we are heading into. A world of open, modular and interconnected platforms. Let us know what you think of Silobreaker. 

 

 

I think it is important to find visual tools that help us connect concept and reality. In this talk by Hans Rosling organized by TED we see the importance of understanding our data and the power of data visualization in our ever increasingly complex world. Rosling’s use of data shows us how a picture says a thousand words and explains to us how important it is for information to be shared, accessible, identified and visualized because information on the internet is cumulatively growing. As we move into the semantic thinking web there will be a need for info graphic visual tools to explain the web’s complex data.

I am always thinking about what drives and makes our company and its culture unique, fresh and contemporary, as well as what drives us to grow and flourish. As the CEO of MediaTrust, it is important to me that our organizational culture and technology stay in sync and drive each other as we move forward. Many times visual tools that communicate this concept become important influencers of our companies heart and soul. I think this video from the TED “ideas worth spreading” web site says it all. Inspiring innovation that demonstrates not only the fine line between art and engineering, but the synergy between them as well. This type of work makes me feel passionate and inspired! Innovative work such as this is illustrates how we can approach our industry, our partnerships and our relationships

TEDTalks star Theo Jansen’s talk inspired me to think about the infinite realm of possibilities. I encourage you to watch his presentation us to think about what is possible.

I found this FaceBook data visualization tool created by Ivan Kozik called Nexus. Nexus creates a graph of your social network and finds commonalities between  your friends.Your can see and activate the tool HERE

It calculates friend similarity , and highlights links between friends who share interests and groups. While the generated image is static, browsing the connections is dynamic: clicking a friend node shows who they are friends with, as well as all commonalities with mutual friends.

Its a great tool to visualize how your friends are connected, which interests they share and the friends you have the most in common.

Photosynth is a truly innovative technology that will drive the semantic web (web 3.0). Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in a standing-ovation demo. Using photos of often snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. We look forward to seeing how bright minds leverage this amazing technology to provide connections among user generated data sets.

I want to thank the IAB Internet Advertising Bureau for publishing guidelines for lead generation. They were developed in response to law makers and law enforcement officials scrutinizing how users’ contact information is gathered online. We need more support in disseminating information that will prevent deceptive practices that hurt the reputation of the interactive marketing community.

The main topics of sensitivity in lead generation included ads that solicit free iPods as well as deceptive use of the word free, and dubious credit card offers. Among other things, the IAB will clarify the meaning of the word “free.” The guidelines also elaborate on what the FTC encouraged advertisers to do for transparency in terms and conditions.

The guidelines will be more of a road map than rules and the IAB will not enforce them or demand compliance. Publishers are asked to adopt the standards for the industry’s well-being and to avoid more federal interference.

 

Brian Morrissey adweek http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3i55bff7bc1a68ecef566a2850d389d8f3

 http://web2.forrester.com/forr/reg/campaignlogin.jsp?lr=/Marketing/Campaign/2/1,6538,1234,00.html&RegistrationID=1-BWLU12&regmode=marketingtrial&iCampaignID=1234

Forrester Research believes today’s ad agencies are not well-structured to take on tomorrow’s marketing challenges, needing to move from making messages to establishing community connections.
 
In a new report, the research firm paints a grim view of the current state of advertising, which it believes is in “a world of hurt” because consumers are tuning out the messages the industry is predicated on producing. Instead, it believes shops need to be organized around communities, not disciplines. What it is calling “the connected agency” would not only know certain communities but also be active members of these groups. Pushing messages would give way to encouraging voluntary engagement, and ongoing conversations would replace time-based campaigns.
 
“I can’t say there’s an agency now that’s the agency of the future,” said Peter Kim, a Forrester Research analyst and co-author of the report.
 
The research firm is certainly not the first to assert that agencies haven’t kept up with changing consumer habits and technology. Accenture in November said the shift from analog to digital media is catching shops flat-footed.
 
In Forrester’s view, a simple fact is driving the need for wrenching change in how advertising agencies are structured: consumers increasingly do not trust marketing messages. Instead, they rely on advice from friends and others in their various communities to make product decisions, while using tech tools to tune out ad messages they deem irrelevant. On top of that, consumer media choice has made the notion of a “captive audience,” other than during some sporting events, a thing of the past.
 
“I don’t think agencies are going away,” Kim said. “They’re going to be the ones that help marketers to communities of mutual interest.”
 
He anticipates agencies made up of community members — moms, for instance, helping Procter & Gamble play a constructive role in communities of other mothers. 

Since marketers will continue to focus on results from their marketing, particularly as digital media makes it easier to track, advertising agencies would get geekier, Forrester believes.
 
Despite these changes, Forrester said creative and media agencies are still built around the mass model: to either produce messages or distribute them. Digital agencies have gone farther, in Forrester’s estimation, in centering their businesses around “interaction,” but it finds them lacking in the branding skills of traditional shops.
 
Clients are finding their agencies wanting. Forrester quotes one marketing exec calling agencies “a necessary evil,” rather than a strategic partner to grow his business. Another complains, “Most senior ad execs appear more comfortable with conventional channels, which they claim are ‘integrated’ because they have tacked on a Web site.”
 
“The first step [agencies] need to take is with digital integration,” Kim said, adding that the organization of agencies around specific skill sets is the root of their problems.