* Social Media Vulnerabilities: From the New York Times Sunday edition came a report of a Hollywood burglary ring whose members not only targeted celebrities, but used celebrity gossip web sites to figure out when those celebrities would be out partying, so they could break in knowing no one would be at home.

Granted, celebrities aren’t normal people — their movements are tracked and broadcast with unhealthy intensity. And the burglary ring (alleged, that is) doesn’t seem to be composed of criminal masterminds, relying in a few cases on doggy doors and keys left under mats to get inside the target homes.

However, to my eye, we keep edging closer and closer to scenarios that I outlined in my entry, Please Burglarize My House, where criminals, aided by quick Web searches, find the information that we willingly blast out to the world telling people were we are (and thus, where we aren’t — in realtime), plus what we have that’s worth taking, and a whole bunch of other information that’s useful to them.

Folks, this isn’t a moral panic here — it’s just a recognition that criminals adapt to new technologies, too. Postal mail opened up a whole lot of new opportunities for scams that didn’t require physical presence; cars and roads gave new mobility to criminals of all sorts; and burglars could case a house just by using a telephone.

In many ways, there still seems to be a naivete about potential negative impacts of social media on your physical existence, that borders on an adolescent’s invulnerability.

* Social Media and Crisis Communications: Two followups from CrisisCamp — the first is a very literal one, since it builds on conversations between representatives from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft at the first CrisisCamp in DC: At Random Hacks of Kindness, coders got together to build apps to harness social media and communications tools to help improve communication during disasters.

I’m pretty sure I was in the session (primarily as a spectator) where light bulbs went off and commitments were made, so it’s cool to see concrete things coming out of it.

The second item is more of a spiritual successor: The US Navy’s Office of Naval Research awarded a contract to Lockheed Martin to see how social media could be used during disaster and crisis operations. Valued at  a “miniscule” $1 million over 24 months, it shows that social media is a serious, useful phenomena, and that even large, traditional institutions are trying to find ways it can be harnessed.

* One More Thing: Oh, and one last thing — this entry marks my 1-year anniversary as a contributor to the Solutions Are Power blog. (I suppose I should re-read and revisit my first entry at some point.) Time flies — it seems like only yesterday that I barely used Twitter and I still hadn’t yet wasted any time on Mafia Wars. Even so, the social media landscape has changed a lot in just a year, but I’m glad to still be here to write about it.

Thanks to Shashi, Jill, Steve, and the rest of the Network Solutions blog team, as well as to all readers and commenters, for continuing to indulge me. I hope you’re getting as much from reading my writings as I am from writing them, and I hope to continue doing so for as long as you’ll have me.

Apparently, another characteristic of weekend unconferences is that I’m unable to get to them on time. I also forgot my camera (brought the accessories, though) and had a hard time finding parking, so I was a little frazzled — I missed the agenda-setting and first session, so it took me a while to get settled in.

The event was held at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library (aka the DC Public Library), spread between the basement meeting rooms and some of the upstairs lobby rooms. I don’t think I’d ever actually been inside the library before. Access to power and wifi was good (except for one room); outside of some early temperature shifts and the occasional random passerby wandering through the upstairs lobby rooms, the space was fine.

The first session I attended (second of the day) was about developing gadgets for Google Wave, though also covered the essential question, “What the heck is Google Wave and what’s it good for?” (I got my invite and have used it, but admit I still have no good answer to the question.) A lot of attention has been focused on the real-time chat aspect (where you can others’ typing as it happens), though we were encouraged to not get distracted by that and look at Wave more as interconnected, embeddable, commentable document collaboration (with gadgets), without having to worry about servers and protocols, and that it will iterate and evolve according to how users actually use it.

The lunch session I sat in on sought to form organizing committee for a TEDx event in DC; TEDx essentially licenses the TED concept, bringing thought leaders across disciplines to speak (there had been a TEDx Mid Atlantic just this month that’d I’d managed to miss completely). TEDx is the kind of prestige event that I most likely wouldn’t be able to attend unless I was helping to organize it, and there’s no shortage of star power in DC, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

Post-lunch was a neat session looking at free, location-based mashup technologies (that broadened to look at other mashup technologies); I’ll just throw out a bunch of links mentioned including GeoNames, MaxMind, ip2location, GeoHash, OpenCalais, ProgrammableWeb, and my favorite, StupidFilter.

The next session I split between a discussion of computer-generated audio and video (I would characterize it as trying to build Anthem, the everything-to-music converter from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency), and a wide-ranging discussion of generalist vs. specialist (which covered everything from the elevation of manual labor, work-life balance, networking and personal growth).

The final session was a pretty useful discussion on how to be a good freelancer; there was a lot of good, though sometimes contradictory info about how to talk to your employer about side gigs, corporate structure, the role of lawyers, accounting tips, managing clients, managing projects and scope creep, and billing.

Because of scheduling, the last session was abandoned (or rather, continued at the bar) — the happy hour included BarCamp participants, as well as the woman-oriented DC She’s Geeky (scheduled at the same time as BarCamp, it may account for the particularly male-heavy attendance there).

For more information, check out posts, photos, and tweets tagged “barcampdc3″ and “barcamp.”

(I am hampered by the fact that I am not a sociologist — not even an armchair one. But let’s ignore that for now.)

I’m getting hung up trying to figure out how much of these generational differences are due to inherent attitudinal differences (brought about by reactions to prior generations, defining historical events, other external factors), and how much is simply due to the technology not being available.

Basically, it’s the question, “Would your parents have Twittered? How about your grandparents?”

The technologically-deterministic view says that human nature pretty much stays constant, so changes in technology are what matters. Because the desire for communication and recognition are pretty constant, you can map the behaviors we see with social media tools now to analogous behaviors in the older offline world. The role taken by Twitter now was fulfilled by… I dunno, malt shop gossip and other real-world social interactions, as well as things like snail mail and physical bulletin boards. The function that Twitter serves now, and those venues served then, was basically the same — social status updating and self-promotion.

Which basically suggests that my teenage self, my parents, and say, the characters from Little Women, would have used social media in similar fashions, had the technology been available at the time. Though subject to the mores, modesties and values of those particular times, which is a pretty huge caveat. Hence the problem of figuring out where the technological factors end and the generational ones begin.

Also, I don’t think it’s true. Some behaviors are just simply new, born of technological change. For example, the idea of nostalgia didn’t really come about until the industrial age (if nothing ever changes, there isn’t anything to be nostalgic about). I’m not sure at what point the metaphor breaks down. Private paper diaries are radically different from publicly published blogs; putting a bumper sticker on your car is nothing like a social status update.

However,  expectations of fame, expressions of reputation, and the existence of microcelebrity have probably always existed in one form or another — first among physical relationships, then in early media-enabled connections, then expanded across online networks. Even something like celebrity culture is nothing new — if anything is new, it’s the expectations of access and the (largely illusory) idea that you can have a deeper, authentic relationship than you could before.

I guess the question really isn’t “Would your parents have Twittered?” but “Would your parents have Twittered the way you Twitter?” Pretty clearly, the answer is no; technological determinism can only go so far, and that’s where genuine generational differences kick in.

For my next entry, I think I’ll take a look at some of the attitudinal differences that influence my own use of social media, and how it differs from those darn kids today.

Does any of this make sense? Please leave a comment either way.

Now that I think about it… you don’t really hear about this anymore. I forget sometimes that VCRs are obsolete; I guess it shows my own generational and technological bias (I still use mine occasionally to time-shift, since I don’t own a DVR or use BitTorrent).

But with other devices with built-in clocks, you don’t run into this problem as much, perhaps because we’ve had 30 years to get used to programming digital clocks using poorly-labeled, non-intuitive, multi-modal, context-sensitive controls; or because clock programming user interfaces have gotten better; or most likely, since most connected devices now automatically program their own clocks (thanks to time signals from a variety of sources).

Using the VCR clock as an example, we see that the first, longest, laziest phase of technological acceptance was a Darwinian sort of familiarity — it required no effort from product manufacturers, just relying on technology users to adapt, or age out of the marketplace. It places everything on users, requiring them to learn the required syntax (education), or at least memorize the steps (training).

(It helps if you’re talking about something completely new — users had no expectations, and we were jazzed enough to be able to do something new, that we were willing to put up with crappy, barely-existent interfaces because that’s the way it was. It took us a while to figure out that things could be better. This isn’t really the case nowadays.)

The second phase in the maturing technology was largely design-driven improvements, adding step-by-step menus and displays using natural language and clearly labeled controls, and even introducing layered-on services like VCR Plus codes to make things easier for people.

It also means having a better understanding of how people actually use things (which is why I’ll bet that the most used button on your microwave oven is “Minute Plus” or a functional equivalent). It’s more of a matter of will, recognizing that usability is important, and accepting that the costs of adding friendly controls was worth it.

The third phase — “it just works” — represents the maturation of technology, where tasks like setting the clock aren’t just made easier, they’re made unnecessary and completely hidden from the user (as in the case of, say, your cell phone, which gets everything from the network). It becomes part of the overhead managed by the device and the network — at the cost of a little control, maybe a little privacy.

Because so much of what we deal with these days is software, and because design and usability have moved closer to the head of the class since we see how it drives adoption (Apple, anyone?), and because we place more emphasis on usability testing and feedback from the marketplace, the third phase isn’t really the third phase anymore: We not only expect things to work, we expect them to work the way we want them to, without having to figure them out. Which is a huge change from the expectation that we need to figure something out to make it work, and throwing up our hands when it doesn’t

I wonder what the modern equivalent of the VCR clock flashing 12:00 is, as the signifier of technological incompetence or refusal? A wireless router that still broadcasts a default SSID (”Linksys”) is one, or anything that  shows that the default settings haven’t been changed, I suppose.

I have a few other candidates, but they mostly present as attitudinal choices (refusnik/Luddite stuff — people who choose not to engage with the technology at all).

Have your own flashing 12:00 candidates? Have we lost something, expecting things to work automagically without education or intervention? Leave a comment.

Sure, maybe a lot of it didn’t make any business sense (we all found that out a few years later), and I didn’t even pretend to understand the actual technology that powered it, but I was pretty confident that I “got” what it was all about. Though even now, I’m not exactly sure what that was (or is), though we had plenty of buzzwords that we used to try to lay out the boundaries of the space: many-to-many, disintermediation, on-demand, always on.

There were plenty of people who didn’t get the Internet, though; they were marked (often proudly, perversely) by the flashing “12:00″ on their VCRs, and we often called them “Mom & Dad” — it conveniently marked the generational divide between folks who may have, perhaps, used computers as adults, versus people who grew up with them during the boom years of personal computing, when it moved from the realm of hobbyists to the mainstream.

During those introspective pauses, I used to wonder: Even as we made fun of those folks who didn’t get it (in retrospect, largely because the technology hadn’t matured enough to make things easy for people to do things without a lot of tinkering), what technologies would come along to shove me into that generation gap — what technologies would I just not be able to get, that would mark me with the flashing 12:00?

I figured it would be some sort of thought-controlled interface — maybe direct-brain controls and sensory inputs right out of sci-fi (just as a global network of interconnected computers had been sci-fi). But the reality has been much more prosaic, as there are plenty of things that I don’t get in the Web 2.0-ish world.

For example, take Friendfeed: In theory, I know what it is — a status aggregator and publisher, that along the way has morphed into a conversation tool in its own right. In practice, I never got it and never used it.

In a broader sense, all this federated, distributed stuff makes me a little uncomfortable. Sure, I know that we control our publishing, which means that (in theory) our data and digital selves are portable and not tied to any one provider anymore, which means that my Foursquare can update my Twitter which goes to my Facebook (and I’m sure the Friendfeed is in there somewhere), but in my heart of hearts, I still think in terms of having a home base somewhere that I can control.

Another thing I don’t get is lifecasting. I understand the hows, I just don’t get the whys — at least, not in any way that matters.

Related is a lot of stuff that goes to mobile technologies, especially the desire to be continually, socially, geolocated. It still creeps me out.

The more I think about this, the more I see that these generational technological differences are actually just attitudinal differences. I’m planning on posting a followup entry (or two), but in the meantime, if there are things that you just don’t get, please leave a comment below.

I thought about turning my illness into an entry discussing how the CDC and other public health entities are using social media to monitor and respond to conversations about H1N1 and other health topics. Or maybe fashioning some clever way to connect the metaphor of viral distribution back to actual viruses.

But then I realized that with my clogged sinuses turning my mind to mush, the deepest contemplation I’ve pursued recently has involved gazing into used tissues. Prodigious work, no doubt, but not very useful to the world at large.

Similarly, I looked into, then abandoned a few lines of inquiry relating to physical status updates and social status broadcasting and… something. (It pretty much trails off from there.)

Even looking into that old standby, my heretofore-reliable slushpile of socially bookmarked del.icio.us links, yields a scattershot collection, nothing that I could unify into a coherent theme, especially in my semi-addled state.

So, instead, I will talk about the importance of redundancy and backups when it comes to your social media efforts. (And I’m not talking about hardware or software here — I’m referring to people.)

Here in this blog, I’m fortunate to be surrounded by great bloggers and a superb management team who can pick up the slack when I or another blogger falls behind in posting, whether it’s due to travel or conferences or getting knocked down (in this case) by a literal virus.

For your own efforts, you want to minimize single points of failure for your social media monitoring and communications. At the very minimum, it means making sure that administrative rights and passwords are distributed (in a secure fashion), so that in the event of the dreaded “hit by a bus” scenario, your operation doesn’t grind to a halt.

From the authoring side: In a less-imperfect world, you’d have a diversity of voices, blogging, Twittering, and otherwise representing multiple aspects of your organization, who can take over when you’re unavailable. After all, in addition to helping to provide backup in times of crisis, building in redundancy and extra capability also helps to distribute the load in more routine times.

But what if you’re a one-man (or woman) band, where you’re doing everything yourself? That (to employ a well-worn rhetorical delaying device), is a great question. I don’t have a great answer, other than to say that setting and maintaining expectations through transparency and honest communications (see again: first paragraph) is probably your best bet.

Also, remembering that microblogging, or more passive, less authorship-intensive lines of communication like social linksharing or retweeting can help fill the gaps between your more robust works.

Finally, you can always do this — throw things open to your audience. Hey, what do you think — what coping strategies do you employ when you’re pressed for time but you need to feed the beast? Please leave a comment below.

Now excuse me while I go gaze into a tissue.

This, by itself, is only slightly interesting; as with any technology — dishwashers, automobiles, air conditioning, telephones, TV, cell phones — there are always folks who’ll find reasons not to use it, for reasons ranging from the pragmatic, to the quixotic, to the perverse. And inevitably, those refusers will diminish as the technology evolves from novelty to utility to necessity.

(Also, I note that some of the Facebook refusers profiled were merely lazy, since instead of taking a principled stance and quarantining themselves from the people and information transmitted via online social networks, they simply relied on their non-boycotting friends to relay the information for them.)

To me, the interesting bit is the idea that people who aren’t on Facebook exist in a kind of un-person / non-entity state of being, and how that represents a radical change in attitude from the pre-computer era — a paradigm shift, sea change, or gamechanger (depending on which era’s jargon you prefer), brought about by the dominance of digital media and interconnected networks in general, and the ubiquitious convenience of online search in particular.

My thinking goes a little something like this:

Previously, if something didn’t have a physical presence, it didn’t really exist. Now, if something doesn’t have an online presence, it doesn’t really exist.

Consider: In pre-Internet days, the only presence was physical, so we only really thought we knew someone or something if we could see, talk to, and touch it directly. Anything outside that model — early virtual relationships  like BBS, amateur radio, telephone party line, or pen pals — wasn’t quite “real.”

Nowadays, knowing something really means the ability to find, store, and send it online.

Looking at the example of the Facebook refusers, we see people who don’t participate don’t have presence, even in those platforms where the online interactions are strongest when reinforcing offline relationships. (I’ve mentioned a related theme before, “When you don’t post, you don’t exist.”)

More importantly, it holds true for goods and knowledge that exist as physical items in the real world — say, old books that haven’t been scanned in yet; a property record that isn’t in an accessible database; or an antique that hasn’t been documented online: Because they’re not findable via Web search or interlinked database, because they don’t have presence online, we can’t know then or even know about them unless we venture offline, so they don’t really exist.

Now, sure, there have are plenty of things that didn’t and don’t really “exist” — economies, trust, reputations, patriotism, love, etc. — but have always been convenient for us to act like they do. But here I’m talking about things that actually do exist as physical items in the real world, but because we’re cut off from them in our daily, digital, online lives, they’re out of the loop.

This is, of course, not due to any changes in intrinsic value (to the extent that such a beast exists), but represents a shift in attitude — it boils down to what we consider “visible” and “knowable.”

Anyway, just a thought. Please leave a real comment below.

Frankly, I’m somewhat surprised that I’m still allowed to register for some of these (”Hey, buddy: Give someone else a chance for a while, okay?”)

I especially like unconferences that expose me to sectors and people addressing social media and online community topics from directions with which I’m less familiar, which was the case for this weekend’s PublicMediaCamp, a BarCamp-style unconference centered around how public media organizations (think NPR, PBS, member stations, and “viewers like you”) can use social media technologies to help collaborate, engage audiences, fundraise (I think coincidentally, this is also NPR’s fall membership campaign), distributed content, and do all that great online stuff.

Here’s my obligatory shot of the session board:

For full recaps, notes, photos, attendees and whatnot, see the PubCamp Wiki, and check the by now de facto / de rigueur social transcript and backchannel that is the Tweets tagged with #pubcamp.

Since I fell under the category of “public media enthusiast,” I was gratified by the presence of actual public media folks, not just from the HQs and big shops in DC, SF, and NYC, but also from affiliates and stations all across the country. (I think the distance travel award goes to John Proffitt, hailing from Anchorage, Alaska.)

Now, I don’t pretend to know all the intricacies and nuance of public media, but I note that there’s an intersection of interests that gives them a very particular set of challenges to social media adoption. I leave it to someone else to try to visualize this into some sort of neat diagram, but you’ve got the relationships between national organizations and local stations; producers and broadcasters; stations and funders; big stations and little stations; and the ever-present (in every sector — for-profit, non-profit, government) tension between institutionalized interests and groups that are trying to do new things.

Some of that tension was evident in the early session (I got there towards the end of the first session, even with the organizers accommodating my schedule by pushing back the start times due to some road closures); you might think that public media would be all one, big, happy family, but throw in resource constraints, organizational inertia, and uncertainty among traditional media companies and news operations, and things are rarely so rosy.

From the session on Disaster Response and Social Media, we were reminded (or informed for the first time, for me), that in many cases, even in this connected age, small community-based stations are often the sole media provider for their community — a particular mandate for public broadcasters — so if they don’t do it, it doesn’t get done.

Other themes that popped up included the role of APIs to share and repackage information, and the ability to leverage national organizations to scale up communities and share knowledge (shocker: public media can be just as siloed as government and the private sector).

Also, I know that “curation” is the in-phrase right now (in the context of managing communities and featuring user-generated content), and it was definitely in full-effect here.

I have to say that, even though I don’t think I was able to add very much, I got a lot out of PublicMediaCamp, I thought that this inaugural event was incredibly enlightening and a useful model for regional followups (keeping the momentum going and coming out with concrete deliverables is a common unconference challenge), so we’ll see what happens.

I’m not trying to shirk my responsibility — I was very definitely in violation, and since I can be kind of… unmotivated when it comes to fixing things around the house, the letter was pretty much what I needed to finally goad me into action.

Now, most people have a love/hate relationship with HOAs. On the one hand, they handle administrative functions and help maintain property values by enforcing standards. On the other hand, you do give up certain rights, and people often chafe under what they consider overly restrictive, inflexible, legalistic covenants (that they’ve voluntarily agreed to abide by, remember).

Anyway, the point of this isn’t to rehash the HOA debate. Instead, I want to look at ways that HOAs might be able to use social media tools to help modify people’s behavior, as well as provide some concrete benefits that might make compliance less of a pain.

Reporting Violations: Snitching vs. Civic Duty

At the beginning of the process lies reporting and notification: Someone needs to spot the transgression, and tell the homeowner. Sure, you could do any variety of anonymous / identifiable, public / private reporting systems, but context matters, especially when you’re talking about your neighbors. A nifty e-government / Gov 2.0 citizen problem reporting tool (like mySociety’s FixMyStreet in the UK) probably wouldn’t go over so well in the HOA context, since you’re basically ratting out your neighbors (you have to live next to these people, remember), even if it is ultimately for everyone’s benefit.

Relying on social shaming (say, via a public violations bulletin board) is counterproductive: We’re talking about stuff that’s out in public (so it’s redundant — people can already see violations); private reporting is open to abuse; public reporting would probably be seen as nagging and might lead to retaliation.

This is probably one of the reasons HOAs and property management companies are popular — the nasty task of reporting violations is farmed out to a faceless entity who everyone can blame: “Hey, I don’t care that your fence is falling apart, but those nasty so-and-so’s at the management company…”

Turning Sticks into Carrots

On the other hand, maybe social collaboration tools could come into play when it’s time to fix stuff. Say a HOA does quarterly checks — the folks who document the violations could offer people a way to opt-in to partner up with other folks with similar problems. For example, do-it-yourselfers could pool resources (say, buying paint, or sharing tools), so instead of everybody individually buying stuff and having leftovers that go to waste, collaborating on a group buy so people end up paying for just what they need.

Alternately, people could band together to negotiate a group discount on repair services for stuff they can’t or don’t want to handle (say, tree services).

Nothing prevents people from doing this now, of course, but online tools make collaboration and resource-sharing a lot easier, in a way that’s more neutral and that doesn’t require anyone to stand out and call attention to themselves as a violator.

Anyway, depending on where you live, HOAs seem to be a natural target for social media-enabled services — there’s a built-in constituency based on geography and common interest; there’s an acknowledged authority to deal with that (bonus) has mechanisms for enforcement; and each HOA aggregates potential consumer demand for local services.

If you’re a small business that’s tried targeting HOAs, or have a HOA experience you’d like to share (a positive one, please — I think we’re up to our eyeballs in HOA horror stories), please leave a comment.

This isn’t in an existential, “Can one ever truly know someone?” kind of way — I’m literally thinking, “Who the heck are you and I how do I know you?”

Oftentimes, it’s because I only know them by a nickname or online handle, whereas the network uses their real name (as in the case of Facebook). Or they’ve changed a name along the way. Or it’s simply an old connection that I’ve just drifted away from.

Most of the time, though, it’s because a person’s presence in my social network simply reflects a momentary connection — say, an introduction at an event or party — but they’re lumped in (probably alphabetically) and given the same weight as people with whom I have much stronger, even lifelong, connections. Unless I was diligent and added tags, notes, or categorized them in the proper group — anything to put them in an identifiable context — it’s up to me to remember the distinctions.

Of course, this isn’t a new phenomena — we ran into the same problem flipping through paper address books,  Christmas card lists, Rolodexes, or Filofaxes. Online, it’s simply more accessible, both to ourselves and to others.

The 7-Year Friend Itch

This past summer, an academic paper came out and quantified this occurrence, saying that our friend networks (that’s in the broader, traditional sense, not just online) turn over every 7 years.

At least, that how it was popularly reported. I don’t know that anyone has actually read the paper, since the full text doesn’t appear to be online. Also, the 7-year figure just reflects the fact that the study period ran from 2000-2007, which also means that we don’t really know the full scope of how social networking tools affects that behavior, especially if those online interactions are an integral part of the network from the get-go.

Generally speaking, though, the 7-year figure feels right. In your youth, your social network centers around school, which has some built-in stopping points, forcing turnover. Once you get out of school, most of your friend network probably revolves around your workplace, and as we get older, in addition to personalities, tastes, and interests changing, there’s a fairly fixed set of life-altering milestones that directly affect our friend networks: people move, switch jobs, date, break up, get married, have kids, get divorced, and die.

In the online context, we can also have to add in the behavior of people flocking to, and then abandoning particular social networking platforms. Even with robust import / export tools, switching networks is an opportunity, to lose or explicitly dump connections.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how online engagements affect overall friend turnover. Which will be the more powerful affect: The constant influx of new people (if it occurs at all — for example, my Facebook friend growth has slowed to a trickle at this point) displacing old people, or the online components reminding us of and reinforcing existing connections.

To the extent that they don’t already exist, maybe social networks should add in tools that shows us the people we haven’t touched online in a while, maybe moving them to an “inactive” category, either to act as a prompt to get back in touch, or to clear them out so we can focus our attention on the friends du jour.

How does the 7-year friend turnover number work for you? Do you think online connections will increase or decrease that figure? Leave a comment (especially if you haven’t touched me online in a while).