As far as Mark is concerned nothing could be further from the truth. In fact he said this year in contrast to last year actually has some potentially great tech being shown as long as you weren’t fooled into believing it was all about ‘location’ as some bloggers would have you believe.

It was that subject that took up a good portion of the show as both Sean and I asked Mark about this so-call location war that was suppose to be the biggest and hottest news to be happening during the whole SXSWi conference.

Here’s a hint: it wasn’t.

Posts referenced in the show.

Why SxSW Doesn’t Suck – SiliconAngle
Why SxSW Sucks – Jolie O’Dell

Enjoy the show

EP26: Mark school’s us on the SXSWi that Jodie O’Dell missed

Each year of the conference the number of people going has been climbing to the point they have seen a 40% increase of people attending this year over last year. That is a crap load of people no matter how you slice or dice it but it seems that just as the numbers are growing so is the undercurrent of feelings that being there is approaching pointless.

Posts referred to in the show.

Why SXSW Sucks – Jodie O’Dell
Chris Brogan at SXSW – 1938Media
The Great Privacy Con of Social Media and Web 2.0 – The Inquisitr

Enjoy the show

EP25: SXSW: Bring on the sponsorships never mind the sharing & learning

via @artlindsey3

Curiously just as we barely had an idea of what Twitter was then or how it would bring about a fundamental change in how we communicate on the web next to nothing is known about @anywhere.

Even though there is a post about the new platform on the Twitter blog it really says very little so we are best to go by what Frederic Lardinois writes over at ReadWriteWeb to try and understand what it is about:

The new platform, for example, will allow users to identify and follow Twitter users on third-party sites without leaving the third-party site. Some of the sites that will soon use this new service include Amazon, Yahoo, Digg, Bing and the New York Times. This, according to Evan, will allow publishers to make sure that their audience is aware of their Twitter feeds, and allow users to follow a site’s or columnist’s feed without every having to leave the site. According to Williams, this will allow publishers to find more followers, and it will also allow Twitter to bring in more users to the site as well as make more non-Twitter users aware of the service.

Even with that bit of information it is still really hard to read the tea leaves as to what Twitter has up its sleeve when it comes to @anywhere.

Yet, for some reason, which I really can’t put words to, I have a gut feeling we are looking at yet another game changer. I have absolutely no direct knowledge of what @anywhere is about or how it will work but I just can’t shake the feeling that there is something really big going on here.

Everyone might be carrying on about all this location crap and some imaginary war that is going on but I have a feeling that what Twitter announced today will have a far greater impact that any silly location game cum advertisers wet dream.

From there we carried on with our new Monday feature for the podcast called Moronic Mondays which is where Sean and go over our picks for the stupidest stories of the past week. These are stories that even though they might have gotten some attention really shouldn’t have mainly because of how ridiculous they were.

Our picks for the last week were:

Any of the hundreds of stories about SXSW and especially when it came to the so-called location war
Andreessen’s Advice To Old Media: “Burn The Boats” – TechCrunch
Eighty percent of corporate bloggers stop after 5 posts max – VentureBeat
Sex.com domain to be auctioned off – Globe and Mail
iPhone Addiction Is for Real, Says Stanford Study – New York Magazine
Harry Smith Undergoes Live Colonoscopy with Encouragement from Katie Couric – mediabistro

Enjoy the Show

EP24: It’s Moronic Monday with our own Moronic General and his pretend war

Note:

Dear DeWitt and the Google Buzz Team,

Just to clarify something based on the note above – I think there is a lot of potential for Buzz or I wouldn’t be wasting my time writing this (or the other posts I have written about Buzz) and even though I personally think you – meaning the whole team (and by extension Google as a company) – screwed up badly on the launch of Buzz that shouldn’t diminish the potential for the product.

There are times though where as a writer, or content producer, who uses Buzz as an auxiliary notification system I really get pissy with you. Unlike the Friendfeed or Twitter; or even Facebook, practice of either just posting the headline or the headline and an excerpt Buzz takes all our content and posts it .

Now how can I say this nicely: NOT!

Seriously DeWitt, Google doesn’t even do that to newspapers in Google News why would you do that to content producers in Buzz. And it’s not just the text either. This also extended to images included in posts. On one of my other blogs - Braincell Soup – I post a lot of art and illustration type posts which Buzz blindly pulls out all of the images and posts them.

Where is the initiative for readers to click through and actually read our blogs or God forbid sign up for our RSS feeds? Simple – there is none.

Look I realize that the majority of the people using Buzz couldn’t give a shit about our [content producers] feelings when it comes to this but Google should. Every day that goes by it is getting harder and harder for us to get people to visit our blogs or read our RSS feeds.

Sorry but we aren’t doing all this work to provide content for Buzz to get eyeballs with (and any future advertising). We do this hoping that people will find what we have to say, or show, compelling enough to click through to read, or subscribe to. By sucking in everything the way it does Buzz removes any initiative both from our potential readers and also us the writers/producers.

I do have a suggestion but I’ll get to that in a minute.

The other real big problem with how Buzz displays our content is that when it is one of our blog posts there is know way for the reader on Buzz to easily tell that there is a title or that there is even a link to the original post (of course your expand post to read is easy to spot)

Hell you treat Google Shared Items from Greader better than our original content

In a post on Buzz you said this in reply to Dare

To be honest, I couldn’t care less whether people use Buzz itself to post updates. I’d be just as content—probably moreso—if people used blogs again, but with all of the advantages of real-time push and a social graph. For me Buzz is partly just an early adopter of the decentralized protocols that will power other sites (including my own) someday. If Buzz gets people thinking along those lines again then I’d say it is a success.

If this is indeed the case Buzz is going about it the wrong way but I do have a suggestion – content grandularity.

By this I mean give content producers a series of options on how Buzz can treat their content when pulling it in for example

• just the headline
• the headline and either a set character length excerpt or a variable one set by the content producer
• headline and full content
• in the case of multiple images either none, one or all

With that part off of my chest there is one other thing that is really important from a content producer point of view and that is – just what the hell is Google’s social media roadmap?

A while back Google launched with much hot air and hype the whole Google Friend Connect initiative and there is sat like a lump of coal. Now we have Buzz coming on the scene also with a bunch of hype about how this is going to be the social network of the future (okay maybe I’m being a little liberal there).

Which is which here guys? Seriously, where are we suppose to be putting our efforts to help Google achieve its objectives?

Look I may not be the biggest fan of Google but I want its social initiative to succeed because I don’t want this to be just a Facebook world (shoot me now if that is going to be the end result). The problem is Google is acting like a schizophrenic school kid – we don’t have the faintest clue where you are going or what you want so there is nothing we can to to help or evangelize.

For example on both this blog and on WinExtra I have the Friend Connect widget but I am now asking myself why and I don’t have answer. I don’t because Google doesn’t seem to know itself which leaves the very people who could be doing everything possible to make Google’s social media efforts a success out in the cold.

So where does all this come together DeWitt? Are we really wasting our time or is all this going to come together at some point and make some sense?

Content producers might not work at Google but in some ways we are, or should be considered to be partners since it is our content that helps make Google – and now Buzz – what it is.

So how about treating us as such for a change and without a lot of empty platitudes.

Sincerely,

Steven Hodson – just another content producer wishing Google and Google Buzz all the success it deserves.

This week I was betting heavily on that Techmeme would be loaded down with regurgitated SXSWi stories; except I was way off as iPad crap seem to be the flavor of the hour. We did manage however to start the show of with a bit of a rant over a $5 million bonus  (not counting stock options) for 6 months worth of work – nice Job if you can get it.

Posts mentioned in the show.

Apple Estimated to Have Taken 50,000 iPad Orders in First Two Hours – MacRumors
Apple iPad — model A1337 — phreaks the FCC – Engadget
iPad ‘Mute’ button magically turns into ‘screen rotation lock’ – 9 t0 5 Mac
Google to strip unique client ID from future Google Chrome installs – Download Squad
Tim Cook Receives Bonus of $5 Million and Stock for Performance During Jobs’ Absence – MacRumors
Formspring prank story plagues Twitter – The Inquisitr (OMG did some-one goof?)
Brightkite’s Sneaky Plan To Get Regular Users Into Location: Group Text – TechCrunch

Enjoy the show

EP23: Techmeme Fridays and no obscene bonuses for us

This of course was the spark of tonight’s show with myself and Sean where we start of with a bit of interesting news that it appears that Twitter is going to be rate-limiting people at the conferences. No, I’m not joking.

From there we branch out into a larger conversation about this inane go0-goo-ga-ga over location based web apps and services.

Posts referred to in the show

Twitter to SXSW: You’re Using Our Product Too Much. – New Comm Biz
Revenge of the Cable Guys – BusinessWeek

Enjoy the show.

EP22: Location, location, location … eh who cares

Yesterday my boss over at The Inquisitr Duncan Riley wrote an excellent post about there being a trust crisis looming when it comes to the so-called social media experts that have proliferated like some bad weed. As he puts it

I’m sad to report that in March 2010, the crisis is here.

My first pointer was at the Media140 conference in Sydney in November 2009. I hold no grudge against the organizer, who I’ve since learned is fairly switched on. But she was compromised by the sponsors, and the speakers who she was forced to line up. I’ve never been as gobsmaked before to see speaker after speaker get up and say “I’ve been on Twitter for 6/12/18 mths because I was told to join by my boss/ someone told me I should join and this is my experience.” Apparently being on Twitter for 5 minutes gave these people the license to speak for 5-25 minutes on being a social media expert.

But that was November.

In March, the madness has become like an outbreak of the plague, particularly among the PR/ Marketing crowd, not only in Sydney, but mostly.

Vincent Ferrari from Shamable.com adds this to the discussion

Don’t take my word for it. Go to your Twitter stream and look through the followers and see how many “Social Media Consultant / Expert” titles you see. My guess is that you’ll see a lot of them. What does that mean, though?

Precisely nothing.

In 2010, we’ve been so enamored with the idea that everyone is equal and everyone has a voice that we forget that sometimes expert experience is necessary. Companies will take their social media campaigns to their CEO’s 15 year old nephew who’s “good with the Myspace” and not even think twice, then wonder why social media failed them. Instead of hiring a company with marketing experience, they go with the first person they find who has a Twitter account and ask them to lead their charge.

The converse is also true. Companies have no problem shelling out millions to a campaign manager because they claim to be an expert and have no actual PR experience, no marketing background, and no measurable and definable skill, and, as before, will blame social media for failing them.

It is also a subject that I have been talking about for some time here going as far back as early 2009.

March 2009 - Social Media vs. social media – there is a difference

Instead all we get is nothing more than a fancy shell game of buzzwords intended to convince companies that the guru’s version of social media can bring untold benefits to their businesses because of the very number of followers those gurus and self-proclaimed experts can generate. These mavens and gurus point fingers at things likeFacebook and the 175 million suckers just waiting to believe that companies want to talk to them.

June 2009 - Calling all Social Media experts …. oh wait there aren’t any

Okay maybe the headline is a little over blown, but for the larger part of Social Media I think that it holds pretty well. I have stressed here many times how I think that the majority of marketing and PR people who have jumped on the Social Media bandwagon and now proclaim themselves as experts and gurus are full of shit. In fact they can be the most dangerous type of person a company can hire.

November 2009 - Social media guru life expectancy maybe not as long as they hope?

The main reason for feeling this way is that Social Media as we know it has only been around for a very short period of time and really to be a guru – all knowing expert – means you have spent the largest portion of your life studying your area of guru-pize, not 18 or 20 months. The ‘time’ of the Internet might be faster than our real life time frames but not that fast.

Then in January I wrote about how companies needed to understand that Social Media wasn’t about some new department or manager title. It was about the company realizing that Social Media is about the company – everyone in the company.

If you have a communications department then they should be getting Social Media. If you have a PR department or firm they should be getting Social Media. If you have a product support department they should be getting Social Media. If you have a customer service department they should be getting Social Media. If you have a CEO, a COO, a CTO, a CFO – they should all be getting Social Media.

My opinion hasn’t changed in the least, unless of course you count becoming more convinced every day that the whole social media expert thing is just the newest STD. Which considering the fact that I receive just as many Twitter follow requests from these jerks as I do from sexual enhancement spammers I might not be to far off.

As you can tell from that tiny rant Sean and I tackle yet another stupid idea for creating revenue for bloggers which then leads into the really mind-boggling money they want for the glasses you will need to watch 3D television.

We end off the show talking once more about how much of a bad idea it is to try and build a business around another company’s services that can get yanked or changed at any time, not to mention the fact that the company might decide that what you are doing is a good idea – good enough for them to do as well.

Posts referred to in the show

Out: Blogging for dollars. In: Blogging for pennies – VentureBeat
Cost of glasses show just how ridiculous this idea of 3D TV is – The Inquisitr
Trust And Safety - Twitter Blog

Enjoy the show

EP21: Blogging for pennies. Ya that’ll work.