This is one lovely collection of highly stylized bird illustrations. A cardinal, pileated woodpecker (pictured), ruby-throated hummingbird and more. If there’s someone on your gift list who sits at the intersection of Peterson’s Field Guides and Adobe Illustrator CS4: The Missing Manual, here’s a definite candidate.
Over the past few years, as broadband reaches more and more communities and mobile Internet access extends its reach, the digital divide has receded into the background. Issues like net neutrality and intellectual property have taken centre stage and taken on new urgency.
But equal access to digital technologies is as important as ever. And this year, the folks behind OneWebDay want to remind us:
Right now, governments, corporate entities and technical elites decide the fate of the most powerful, inclusive communications platform ever created. They’re making decisions about who will have access, at what speeds, and at what price. They’re deciding how to invest in training and education in 21st century communications.
Even the principles that make the Web an open platform for the creativity of every user are in question. The global economy is in crisis, and the open Internet is a pathway to economic opportunity. Everyone should have access, and everyone should help in deciding the future of the Web.
Drop by OneWebDay to find out about events near you.
Updated: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is celebrating OneWebDay – whether by coincidence or intention – with the launch of OpenInternet.gov, a site to promote and discuss a free and open Internet – one of the keystones of equal access to the online world:
Alex’s Harvard post about metrics and the obsessive condition she calls analytophilia has triggered a lot of conversation this morning about the role analytics ought to play in organizational communications.
Which has me thinking about the role tools like analytics play in our personal communications online, too – for better and for worse.
The past few years have seen some fascinating changes as organizations – some tentative, some confident, a few very bold – adopt the tools of the social web. We’ve seen windows and occasionally great big doors opening in the walls that separate businesses, non-profits and governments from the public.
But something else is happening too. Just as the tools of social media are turning marketing into personal conversation, they’re also turning personal conversation into marketing.
To see it in action, look no further than metrics and analytics.
Think of the number of people you deal with via the social web who are obsessed with followers, friend counts and network sizes. Look at the explosion of sites designed to rank your reach and influence on Twitter.
Metrics now lurk at the margins of everything we do in social media, offering to tell us how popular it was, how many folks liked or disliked it, who linked to it, who followed us, who dropped us and how it affected our chances are of going to that great Web 2.0 prom called the A-list.
Get sucked into that, and everything you say and do online becomes strategic… or, more accurately, tactical: “Will this get me more followers?” “I’d like to blog about this, but that will get me more profile.” “How does this move the needle on however I’m measuring influence?”
Awful, right? It would be easy to conclude that metrics and other marketing tools have polluted social media and corrupted personal communication, stripping it of authenticity and spontaneity, and replacing it with calculated manipulation.
But here’s the thing.
We express ourselves for a reason. Yes, there’s a drive to speak out for its own sake – and sometimes we’re just howling at the moon – but usually we want to have some kind of impact.
And often that impact isn’t as shallow as you might believe from the mass media stereotypes of social media. Often the impact we’re looking for is to reach out to someone. Sometimes we’re seeking comfort or offering it. Sometimes we’re sharing a point of view, hoping for feedback, hoping to change some minds, prompt a discussion or shift behaviour.
The metrics available to us are very poor approximations in measuring the potential impact we can have… but they’re a starting point. The key, if we want to keep our conversations authentic and make that impact count, is to remember they’re only a starting point.
It comes down, as it so often does, to intention and attention: doing things with a view to what they do, how they change the world. But we don’t know if we’re succeeding, if we’re on the right track, unless we know what the difference is between what was before we acted, and what is now that we have. Sometimes we measure that difference qualitatively, sometimes intuitively… and sometimes quantitatively, with metrics.
We don’t have those metrics yet. We probably aren’t sure quite what it is we’re measuring. But acting with intention ultimately means answering those questions… and, yes, acting a little strategically.
That’s where organizational communications – disciplines like marketing and public relations – do have something to teach us about our personal conversations. The trick for us as individuals is to apply those lessons with care. We are not our personal brands, and we aren’t organizations, and we don’t have the same goals and needs.
Understanding the difference is the first step toward using the tools of marketing to dramatically transform our personal impact while staying true to ourselves and each other.
A MoveOn.org video featuring Will Ferrell and a lot of other faces you’ll recognize.
(one computer user to another) I never really understood the digital divide until you got a faster, better computer than mine.
To the list of things you can create and share using a Web 2.0 app, add data visualizations. This tool not only outputs (very) pretty graphs, charts and infographics – it gives people access to the underlying data, so they can verify what you’ve done.
I’m dreaming of a world where every news report on an opinion poll would use something like this. Yes, you’d get the horse-race numbers and the broad sweeping trend… but if you wanted to drill down, you could have a look at the raw numbers, do some crunching and come out with your own analysis.
It isn’t the New York Post, actually – they’re well-known for their hostility to any suggestion that things aren’t hunky-dory on the climate front – but a dandy little parody-slash-pamphlet from the brilliant Yes Men.
(one pirate to another) Yarr. I completely forgot it was Talk Like An Internet Geek Day.
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Creative Commons Licence. Please attribute to Rob Cottingham with a link to the content's original page on this web site. For more information, contact Rob at rob@robcottingham.ca.
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