The best place in the world is here and now
This month got away from me with work, some stuff getting done around the house and travel, it’s been good. Today I finally got a little time and it was not raining to get the monthly picture from the back window.
The autumn is certainly here and I do need to sweep the leaves from the deck. That will be followed by probably do my least favorite job getting onto the roof to clean the gutters. But the view is beautiful.
I was talking with my leadership at work about BWE and of the questions that got repeated time and time again was exactly what is social media? What does it really do? And perhaps most often, why is it important?
I’ll try to answer the final one of those, and why I see a problem.
At it’s most basic; Social Media is a tool for bringing people together, sharing ideas and thoughts. Now a lot of that (including, I suspect, what I write) is background noise, but there are some really spectacular gems out there.
It’s been given credit for many things; from grand ideals like enabling the protests of Arab spring to allowing us to share rambling thoughts, as long as it’s less than 140 characters.
The Internet really has changed the world we live in, it allows us to connect with people we would be unlikely to find offline. This can be a huge force for good, it brings unlikely communities together, or has the power to lead us down dark little paths, some of which are very well trodden.
It all starts with a small conversation; this builds and builds into something potentially very cool. We all like to belong to groups, we like to feel we belong and that’s a very natural human trait. The Internet allows us to engage in ways unknown 10 years ago, it allows us to follow, to connect for the sake of connection and that is a very, very powerful force.
Anyone can produce content, and this is the power of Social Media. It is an incredible tool to engage and provides a place for everyone that has something to say, to say it.
Lets be clear there are some brilliant, creative people in the blogging and writing business, and until the last decade never had an accessible platform to show their talent.
And this is what social media does, it creates that platform for people to share, educate and connect.
What is there to say about BlogWorld 2011?
So much and this is just my first thoughts, I’ve got a lot of notes, audio and interviews to go through yet. There are a few more posts to come.
This is my second BlogWorld Expo, last year it was in Las Vegas and was a really entertaining three days. And while LA may be the center of the media universe, Vegas really was a blast last year so this has a lot to live up to.
OK, so what’s BlogWorld? Simply put, it’s largest new-media conference in the world. It’s a massive coming together of social and new media types for three days of meetings, sessions and parties. It’s about meeting people (good god I hate to call it “networking”), spending time with friends and understanding where we are as a group, what’s changed and finally a little crystal ball glazing as to what’s next.
I came away with a huge long list of things I want to try; both here and on another couple of projects I’ve ben working on.
For me it’s the learning and meeting people, I do this for fun and don’t want to be a blogging superstar. I just don’t have the energy or creative talent that those people do, but it’s always interesting to talk to them and see their take on the world. It’s quite frightening how much energy people like Ewan Spence, Kevin Pollak, Cecily Kellogg, Kelby Karr or Srinivas Rao have.
Friday night I ended up drinking with some people from my new favorite publisher. It’s a long time since I’ve been up that late drinking, Peter and Shannon from Wiley came close to drinking me under the table, I missed a lot of the Saturday sessions dealing with a hangover. Thanks to Wiley publishing for the pile of books, the advise and encouragement. It was an awesome night, but either you guys can drink, or I am a total lightweight.
The best session was probably the Friday night keynote by Ford CMO Jim Farley. He started talking about his role in leading Ford into the world of new media, how a company has to give up control and let the consumer’s message become the companies’ message. That’s the big-company issue, to engage people in an authentic way means the same people, both inside and outside the company, get to be part of the telling of story of Ford and their products.
I’ve finally got to the point where I admit I have a problem, I’m an addict and now the Sounders year is done I’m not sure what I’m going to do about it.
Lets take baseball as an example; I’ve watched maybe 3 or 4 baseball games all year. Then all of a sudden twitter went crazy with people talking about game 6 of the World Series. I put down the paintbrush, switched on the TV and spent the next couple of hours watching one of the most astounding games I’ve ever seen.
Sports are a big part of my life. Other than a little rallying I don’t take part in organized sport anymore. In the past I’ve played a rugby and football, never to a particularly high standard, but I’ve always had fun and certainly enjoyed the social side of the games.
I’ve been wondering what about sport that draws us in in such a way. First up is the drama, the whole on any given Saturday thing, any team can have a bad day, a little tough luck or a bad decision or two and loose.
There was a huge miss-match last week, Aldershot (League-2) hosting Manchester United (current Premier League champions). On paper The Shots have no chance, and indeed United efficiently dispatched them 3-0, but before kickoff there were thousands of Aldershot fans thinking, “Just maybe it’s our night.”
That thought is what makes sports so special. We get to watch the story unfold knowing that no director or writer has predetermined the outcome, and that uncertainty draws us in and can give us the rush that brings us back.
It all came to a halt last night and no one should have been surprised, after Saturday the odds of playing in the conference final Sunday were long. And that’s no ones fault other than the players that put on the atrocious display in Salt Lake Saturday night.
In the past I’ve been impressed by Salt Lake, but after the last couple of games I think they have been shown to be typical MLS thugs. That’s not their problem, they play a style that works for MLS. It’s a league problem and Seattle has not built a team that’s equipped to play physical play-off football in that way.
The front office and coaching staff somewhere decided that they would build a team that played in the right way. They invested in young, talented players and put together a team that, when they are on, play about the prettiest football in the MLS. And that is something I can get behind.
I’ve no idea why, but this makes me smile.
Tonight a small lover league team took on Manchester United in the League Cap in England. As expected Aldershot were well beaten, but that is only part of the story. Aldershot was the first club I followed closely, I went to a lot of games with Pete, a neighbour of my parents.
Aldershot is quite the story, they went bankrupt, “saved” by a 19 year old who went to prison for some dodgy tax stuff, went bankrupt again and then became the first professional league club to go under since Accrington Stanley in 1966.
Tonight was described by some as “the biggest game in the clubs history”, not sure about that, but the climb back through the leagues back to professional football. . It’s not about the money, it;a about what a club can mean to a community and what is great about sport.
Paul Fletchers blog tells the story very nicely.
Some time in the early morning Sunday New Zealand beat France to win the Web Ellis Trophy in the Rugby World Cup. Now, I’m sure the Kiwi and Kangeroo on Greenlake was heaving at three in the morning when the final whistle blew. New Zealand were red hot favorites, lets just say the Kiwis at work were feeling confident on Friday.
It ended up being a lot close than many expected, including me. I thought that once the Haka was done the French were going to get roundly spanked. The game was not a wide open advert for the game, it was a tough defensive battle that either side could have won.
As fascinating as this is, it’s not what was remarkable about the game. It was live on one of the major TV channels, that was the good bit. I was able to sit at home with a glass of wine and enjoy live rugby. Yes, a wide open classic would have been nice, but unlike England’s victory in 2003 I did not have to go looking for a bar with the game on in the early hours of Sunday morning to enjoy the spectacle.
Over the last month there has been a lot of rugby on a couple of channels, and much of it, including all the USA games, have been live. OK it could be an indication of how much money NBC sports has left after paying for the Olympics, but I am a fan of this.
Saturday at work I got into a discussion over rugby with one of ex-pat friends. He’s from the North of England where they play Rugby League. I come from the South of England where we played Rugby Union.
Having one of my periodic looks through my stats this evening and I discovered a number of things. First that my “there is no such thing as anonymous” still holds true. Despite using fronting service to hide their identity, a certain user from Kirkland spent almost 45 minutes surfing my site late last night through one of those sites that promise to keep your identity hidden. Only thing is that they don’t work too well, while the IP is masked, everything else seems to appear.
The second is that over the last few months I’ve had almost 3000 hits for a very specific search term be directed to my site via Google. Yeah, I noticed a certain search term was coming up a lot, and did not think too much of it, certainly never enough to look at the numbers in detail. I don’t get that much traffic that I would fail to notice close to 1000 additional hits a month. I figured they were a search-bot scanning the site or something similar.
I looked and they were all searching on one term (a name actually, 2+2=4 in this case) and were clearly targeted at my front page. What’s more they were all coming from two sources, a blackberry in New York and a server at a university in Seattle, both via the same search engine.
I spoke to one of those people who know these things, who helped me modify my code to stop counting those. It’s nice to have smart, geeky friends who understand code, I can put up with a little snorting at my puny efforts in order to get rid of some of this background noise on my stats. Anyway he explained to me what this was and what it achieves.
It all comes down to search term ranking. If a search is continually made linking A to B (with A being the search term, and B being the website) the search engine algorithms promotes the site up the ranking when that search term is used. So that in the future when A is searched for it will automatically link with B. Think of it as the opposite of search engine optimization and that’s about it. I’ve an idea who is doing some of it, but utterly puzzled as to why someone wants to make this link, but I’m discovering more and more all the time, so there we go.
Not a game for the ages, but tonight we saw some world class players show how effortless this game can be. We also saw the difference between victory and loss can be wafer thin.
This was the last game of the champions League group stage, Seattle were already through and Monterrey (the defending champions in this competition) came loaded and needed a result to ensure qualification for the knockout stages next spring.
Among the talent on show tonight (and Monterrey has plenty of it) was Humberto Suazo, a top class player who spent last season with Real Zaragoza in the Spanish top flight. He looked like he was going to do something special every time he got the ball. Add Argentinian Cesar Delgardo, Mexican Luis Perez and the rest of the international and this was an excellent team Seattle took on tonight.
Seattle fielded a side with seven changes from the squad that started Saturday against San Jose. This included Brian Meridith making his first start for the club in goal.
Monterrey needed a win tonight and opened the scoring three minutes in when Dario Carrena got onto the end of a lofted through ball from Suazo. A defensive breakdown when no one pressed the Suazo. It was a nicely taken ball and the keeper never really had much of a chance.