phil baumann online

It’s good to know how Web 2.0 ‘works’. Or how Web 3.0 might work. Or 4.0. Or…well you get the idea. Marketers and moms and Spiderman are still figuring it out. So are you. Me too.

Picture the web as a rubbery gamer. It links and threads and weaves with a stretchy fiber. As you link and thread and weave, you yourself become a rubbery gamer. Once involved, you’re in a rubbery relationship. You become the web and the web becomes you.

So: the web is rubbery and it grows everyday. There’s countless ways to work with the material. It can be fun to bounce around the moon-walk and play with the other kids. You can blow your own tiny bubbles and watch all the other pretty bubbles float about the carnival.

One thing about this rubber-sheet geometry is that bubbles go pop every now and then. Once you’ve mastered your bouncing and bubble-blowing techniques, the Rubber expands and the game changes.

In an ever-stretching world, it helps to understand the relationship between surface area and tension. Too much tension: pop. Not enough: flop. When you flop you lose, regardless of the surface area that you canvass.

The worst thing about the web isn’t that you’ll lose. There will always be new games to invent and play within the rubbery web.

No, the worst thing about the web is this: everyday, it’s getting easier and easier to stretch yourself too thin, go pop and disapear.

If you enjoyed this post and want updates subscribe to PhilBaumann.

Tags: Web by Phil Baumann

According to a post on Twitter, my credibility is unknown. I (partially) disagree of course because I know what my credibility is. But the online community really doesn’t know what it is (at least not yet). So let’s see what can be known about my credibility (and yours).

I’m glad that I was given an opportunity to have my credibility evaluated out there among the *Twitterverse*. So here it is, that indiscreet Tweet:

From this Twitterer’s perspective, the Tweet is true, absolutely true. This person has no way of knowing my credibility. And it aught to be questioned by anybody following my online activity (as well we all should do of everything we encounter online).

But this Tweet raises a particular question: when is credibility relevant?

MY CREDIBILITY
If you read my current About statement, I don’t claim to be an expert in everything, especially social media (as many are famed to do). I simply state the boring facts of my background, as an RN with a pied array of disparate experiences. My claim to social media is simple and unpretentious:

“I am currently interested in how individuals and organizations use social media tools to improve the way things get done.”

Since I don’t claim to be an expert in social media, the relevance of my credibility can only reasonably be expected to be limited to my general character: whether I am a liar, a snake-oil salesman or evil-doer par excellence. That sort of credibility gets determined over time, by users, by the things I say, Google, etc.

OUR CREDIBILITY
If any of us becomes specialized and experienced in a particular field, then our specific credibility becomes relevant. Nobody wants a random schmuck to just walk into your house and fix the plumbing just because he claims to be an expert or have has a website or blog. But that doesn’t mean we all have to be experts in order to speak our minds or to add something to an ongoing multilogue (getting tired of *conversation*).

Wikipedia discusses credibility and specifically references a mouth-watering proposition called Prominence-Interpretation Theory. You can download that exciting product if you’re hot and bothered. (It uses big words and multiplication to establish its own credibility.)

Basically, it comes down to what users notice (Prominence) and their judgment about it (Interpretation). And it’s an important topic, especially since the rate of information flowing our way is accelerating at an accelerating rate. The arithmetic is straightforward:

Prominence X Interpretation = Credibility Impact

Good luck crunching the numbers on that one. Intuitively, though, what’s our Credibility Impact? My number’s pretty low online, but not because I’m a bad person. The arithmetic says that I have to leave it up to computational and human algorithms, and so do you.

So if you’re an expert in social media, make sure you take that bold Twitterer’s implied advice to heart, regardless of his or her intriguing intentions: establish and prove your credibility. It’s good for your health and your reputation. And it will eventually boost your authority.

WESTERN UNION and SO MUCH FOR CREDIBILITY ABSOLUTISM
Western Union used to be a telecommunications authority, likely with a high credibility rating. It’s still doing OK. But the credibility it had in 1950 didn’t exactly get it the gold medal forty years later on the interwebs, did it? What credibility did Google have in 1998? Yahoo! had credibility, perhaps more so in 1998 than Google (just a supposition). And yet Google’s current stock price (one measure of credibility-ranking) suggests that its credibility gap is a lot smaller than Yahoo!’s. Go figure.

The basic point that I’d like to make is that the interwebs (or innernets as I heard once from a credible authority) has given us all a chance to contribute ANYTHING (from original insights to totally random BS and everything in between).

Examples. If you need an inguinal hernia repair, credibility is the difference between a speedy recovery and a painful death from infection or intestinal ischemia. If, however, you want a new perspective, an opinion, a fresh synthesis of old ideas, or a synergistic perspective from the infusion of multiple experiences, then credibility is secondary to your inspiration of that content. It’s up to you to be a good speneralist.

PRIMING OUR INTUITION PUMPS
Credibility is one king in content. Obviously.

But so are: insight, creativity, skepticism, freshness of perspective and the right to be wrong and standing up corrected. And those features of an independent mind are important tools in the ongoing construction of useful and falsifiable intuition pumps.

It’s those pumps that drive knowledge and civilization forward. What are your intuition pumps? Are they credible? Or “merely” inspiring? Could they spring hope? Or leaks? Upset the stodgy status quo? Break a cold heart open and warm it?

This is my credibility: a synestheisa of metaphors. They’re meant to enliven and spread good memes in an often bad world. They’re powerful tools for evangelism, conveyance and leadership. Take them, use them or toss ‘em into the drains Lethe-wards to be sunk. Time will tell if my online credibility matters to anyone, including myself.

Be true to thyselves, friends, especially when nobody else believes you. Mahalo!

---

This post made possible in part by an alert from TweetBeep. It’s a great (free) reputation management tool. I received no payment or solicitation for the shout-out, just remarkable service.

---

If you enjoyed this post and want updates subscribe to PhilBaumann.

Tags: Web by Phil Baumann
1 Comment »

How come we spend money during a Boom and then save it during a Bust? If we did things the other way around, don’t you think we’d all be a lot wealthier?

There was once a time when our cleaver ancestors needed to exploit the good times and salvage the bad. Food went sour quickly; predation was merciless; abundance was scarce. But they understood the fundamental connections in the natural order of things. It didn’t take them long to learn not to eat ‘n excrete in the same spot. They learned, the hard way of course, that if you killed everything in sight, you’d have none of it to eat later.

Unlike our ancestors, the vast majority of us have around us what we need–food, water, shelter, clothing, safety from predation, warmth, coolness, transport, medicine, you name it. We don’t have to chow down scarce food that suddenly arrives on the plain. We can spread our needs out over time. We can plan things in ways that our ancestors never could. We have accomplished so much that they would be proud of and yet we squander everything they loved: time, food, fire, discipline, nature, culture, presence of mind.

Biological evolution shot us right out of the selective cannon and the culture we created hurled us to the moon and beyond. And yet our souls suffer a dissatisfaction that’s tearing us apart. Why? Just what is it we’re not satisfied with?

Our ancestors knew life was inherently unsatisfying. The Hindus knew we were part of a much larger party going on in the universe and they respected their part in the game. The ancient Hebrews understood the unifying glue that held it all together and their faith beyond themselves remains steadfast to this day. The Buddhists realized that everything that happens takes place right now and they’re still content to sit still and breathe, knowing the satiety of an impermanent world. And the early Christians saw redemption in the suffering of all beings.

Perhaps we need to better understand how our ancestors figured it out. Perhaps we just need to know that there’s a bigger game in the world, that there are unifying patterns to recognize, that sitting and breathing and paying attention to our minds’ velocity are what we really need to focus our lives around.

The time to get out of depression is when your happy. When your happy, you’re supposed to take time to reflect on your happiness: the things you have, the problems you don’t, the people responsible for it. You’re supposed to spend your attention on these small things, nurture them into big shiny things around your life. Then when bad things happen, those things you enkindled are big and bright enough to show you through.

You can think your way into a clinical depression just as much as you can think your way into a global economic depression. If we paid attention to the things that matter during good times, the things that don’t matter wouldn’t bother us during bad times. We’d be happier more often, so we could save during a Boom and spend during the Bust. And we all be richer and happier.

If you enjoyed this post and want updates subscribe to PhilBaumann.

Tags: Business, Web by Phil Baumann

Finally a new design for viewing the web through clean well-lighted places! Hemingway meets search.

Addict-o-matic is a new search tool that offers users a simple but cleaver design for search results. Pages are returned that display tiny elegant windows of live sites. It’s sleek and from what I’ve seen reliable.

Aside from the visual appeal of the layout, the concept of aggregating search results by source benefits users’ ability to better determine the reliability, quality and relevance of content. Users can personalize their view of the web. For publishers this could be a rich source of blogging beats.

It’s an amazing service that helps us confront the problem of abundance of data versus scarcity of meaning in a world heading toward infinity.

URL: http://adictomatic.com

If you enjoyed this post and want updates subscribe to PhilBaumann.

Tags: Blogging, Web, Web 2.0, improvement, technology by Phil Baumann