Cam Balzer's Web-Cite

Aphorism for the times?

In good times, prepare for worse. In bad times, prepare for better.

Just trying it out! Whaddya think? Should I make it a life strategy?

-- update: Caveat: This aphorism may not apply to THE Times--or other newspapers--in these times.

The line between flogging and word of mouth

Whatever else it produced, P&G's recent social media "hackathon" (of sorts), it gave one blog maven a first-hand experience of the inherent challenge of marketing to your personal network:

The fact that P&G was willing to experiment publicly (especially in the wake of recent backlashes, e.g. Motrin) is courageous. They took us all right out there on the limb with them, but for some of us climbing back down before we broke any of our personal network's branches, was the only thing to do. ("Hey Buddy, Wanna Buy a T-shirt?": Notes from Inside P&G's Digital Marketing Hack-a-thon - Jory Des Jardins)

Let's hope all parties involved bear this lesson in mind when the ask consumers to "participate" in their social marketing campaigns...

aakash nihalani: 2D or not 3D?

This is really bold and utterly ephemeral all at once. Carves a 3D space out of completely mundane (two dimensional?) surfaces: aakash nihalani's Flickr Photostream and see the street art section of his site: www.aakashnihalani.com...

Kind of resonant with El Tono: this and esp this...

Workforce 2.0

Gary Hamel on Managing Generation Y - the Facebook Generation - WSJ

If we're up to Generation F already, I'm f'ing old! Hamel applies some of the rallying cries of web 2.0 to emerging workforce expectations. Obvious conclusion: the open source, long tail, collaborative meritocracy of the web doesn't bode well for the established structures of doing business.

Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For

Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For.

Social amplification in action

Citysearch: Each Item Shared Through Facebook Connect Generates 30 Clicks. I've heard anecdotal results like this before but here it is in print. Those are pretty compelling results, esp at a cost of, um, FREE!

the old dies before the new replaces it

Great essay by Clay Shirky on the dying newspaper model: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

It's gonna be an interesting and unsettling couple of decades while the new social bargains get sorted out. A time, Shirky says, for lots and lots of experimentation with some of the least likely taking hold and reshaping reality.

Viva la revolucion! And I say that fully cognizant of Shirky's warning that "Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen."