Network Solutions – Small business conversations and working together for small business success

Everything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You

It should hardly need repeating at this point: When you post stuff to the Internet, people will see it, and quite possibly use it in ways that you don’t intend. And yet, either people keep finding new ways to make the same mistakes, or other people keep finding ways to use that information.
Two recent cases [...]

Book Shame, Information Hoarding, and Aspirational PDFs

Way back in January, I wrote about how small businesses (and people, too, of course), can share their expertise through social linksharing — that is, instead of bookmarking things in your browser where only you can get to them, publishing them to social linksharing / social bookmarking sites (or any other sites that can be [...]

Event Review: CongressCamp

While much of the attention of the day was focused on tea party protests, I was in DC on Saturday for a different purpose: The CongressCamp unconference, which looked at a specific subset of the Government 2.0 question: How to use social media and online community tools to encourage and support citizen engagement with Congress.

Obligatory [...]

Marketers Killed the Internet as a Medium for Introverts

Recently, I’ve seen Myers-Briggs Personality Type badges floating around on Facebook and other social Web sites. I haven’t retaken the test in a long time, but I used to be an INTJ (basically, an introvert), and I have no reason to think that’s changed in any meaningful way.
It did, however, get me thinking about how [...]

Idealized Avatars, Personas, and Perfect Robot Bodies

I thought I was going to be all clever by talking about a trio of Hollywood movies (out now or soon) that share a common theme of people controlling proxies to interact with the world, then using that as a springboard into a metaphorical look at how we use our online presences… but then Popular [...]

Deaugmenting Reality: When Less Is More

Following up on my entry about augmented reality, I did a little more reading and found the concept that deftly summarized what I’d been clumsily chasing: the Virtual Continuum, where you have the completely real on one end of the spectrum, the completely virtual on the other, and in the middle, a Mixed Reality, with [...]

Not an Event Review: Tap the Collective, Plus Social Intelligence Gathering

Since I arrived at the Tap the Collective discussion (on the application and implementation of collective intelligence) horribly, horribly late, this isn’t an event review, other than to show off a photo of the panelists, link to the Twitter discussions, point to a blog recap, and note that the full video of the event should [...]

Thinking of Ways to Ruin the Internet: The Basilisk

Lately, I’ve been trying to come up with ways to ruin the Internet.
Not by using any means that would get me put on a terror watch list (targeting infrastructure is just so gauche), nor by counting on a well-placed comet or convenient thermonuclear cataclysm to bring about the end of civilization (which would presumably also [...]

Event Reviews: DC Google Meetup and TechCocktail DC 6

Here’s a followup to my entry about DC-area late-summer social media meetups; this week, I went to two of the events from the list.
The first was the First Official DC Google Meetup, at the swank Lima Restaurant and Lounge in DC. (So swank, in fact, that a would-be attendee posted to the Meetup event page [...]

Social Gaming as Social Grooming: Mafia Wars and my High School Reunion

Two independent events have sort of collided for me on Facebook, resulting in something that’s sort of interesting, sort of annoying, and sort of disturbing.
The first event is that I started playing Mafia Wars this month (my excuse that I’m merely doing it to evaluate online gaming mechanics and explore ways to use them to [...]