managing media

So, as I move towards a more coordinated social media engagement I find there are tools for coordinating between things... of course not all of my things. For example Hootsuite.com, Cotweet.com and Tweetdeck.com all seek to facilitate a coherent online presence -- some for organizations with multiple folks supporting the same on-line streams. From what I can tell, Hootsuite is the preferred tool at this point (2010); although I note it does not support Blogger or Blogspot (i.e. this use) .... sigh. However, the free version of Cotweet doesn't support more than twitter (not even Facebook) ...

No doubt more tools, evolution of these tools and the ever popular public demand will lead to improvements some day.

Happy Holidays and best wishes for 2011.

WAVE ebbs, what's next

OK, so I've been doing all of my real Blogging (not often enough) at with the IEEE Computer Society President's Blog ... but my ability to do that ends in December 2010, so I will need to revitalize this channel if I'm going to have a related voice over time.

In the window of time from my last post to now, I note, with some sorrow, that WAVE has passed. The two things I found it did well, and it leaves a gap to my awareness are:

1. Concurrent meeting minutes ... a few folks in the same meeting sharing their minutes as the meeting proceeds - I tried this with a few associates, and found it provided an additional element of insight to the meeting. Twitter here is not the same since there is no treading, and limited text.

2. Maintaining a shared travel schedule ... so folks who need to know where and when I'm going can see that, and at the same time folks who have input can queue up those things. In theory this is a variation on a special purpose calendar, but there is value in having no "dates" listed where there is no travel involved.

So... More to come in this Blog in the future as I lose my bully pulpit.

Wave momentum slow

Metcalf's law indicates that value of a communications technology is proportional to the size, or perhaps more importantly the percentage penetration of that media ... I might add within a critical community. I understand that one of the first phone systems was installed at the Shaker Colony in Canterbury New Hampshire ... they wanted to avoid the need to travel from building to building to communicate with each other. That probably got good use, given 100% penetration within a critical community.

Google Wave, as far as I can tell, is currently constrained by it's 'invitation' bottle neck. Only primary invitees can invite others (I'm second tier, so I can't initiate invites) ... and if you can't connect your waves with others, then things don't reach critical mass and take off. Of course if Google opens the flood gates, then their resources could be overwhelmed by either success, or any significant bugs.

When I encountered a wave Bug recently, I found there was no real way to report it (you can post it in an online community that apparently some Google folks track, but there is no "here's a bug" reporting and tracking system apparent.)

Good news: we do have a preliminary IEEE dialog started in Wave ... but only three of use actually have accounts (sigh)

Google Wave -- emerging

Ok, so now I'm one of the Wave-irrati (or whatever folks who are 'in' the Wave preview world call it) ... and I hope to find out if I can post wave entries here (which is what was demonstrated in the video -- http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html )
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While I can envision many uses, I hope to explore those applicable to professional societies such as IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society (ok and the Society for the Social Implications of Technology) where I am active in the leadership team(s).

So more to come as things emerge.