• Twitter, Politics and Movements | Epicenter | Wired.com

  On the top-level question, my point of view is that the remarkably frictionless (and easily surreptitious) means of communication that is Twitter provides to activists new opportunities to disrupt the established order, be they legitimate or not. And that this doesn’t necessarily happen overnight.

  tags: government, Twitter, politics, podcast

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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I’m speaking today at CBI’s 2nd Annual Conference on emerging media for Pharmaceutical and Biomedical industries. You can follow the Twitter stream using #Pharma as the tag. Here’s the presentation. A compendium with more detailed notes will be published later.

You can also link directly to The Real-time Consumer (RTC): Twitter Primer for Pharma if the embed isn’t viewable.

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The US State Department asked Twitter to delay its scheduled maintenance to keep the service up:

Reuters: “We highlighted to them that this was an important form of communication,” said the [unnamed U.S.] official of the conversation the department had with Twitter at the time of the disputed Iranian election. He declined further details.”

As exciting as this development may be for helping Iranian victims of tyranny, we aught to consider its implications for the relationship between government and enterprises which offer social media services. There is no doubt that social software and communities like Twitter, FriendFeed or FaceBook spur and extend the reach of democratic voices. Nevertheless, we must always be on guard for manipulating forces which often work against the dilution of their powers.

FriendFeed Discussion (if you can’t see the embed below, here’s the link):

What are your thoughts? Contribute here on the FriendFeed embed above or comments below.

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This post is a bit of an experiment in what could be called expansive blogging. I’ve been thinking about the so-called Real Time Web: what it is, what it means and how it will impact the way we do business, collaborate and lead our daily lives. In a couple of weeks, I will be talking about how the Pharmaceutical and Biomedical industries can leverage real-time communities. What I’ve been thinking about lately is the time component of the Real Time Web. Time is something we take for granted: but there’s more to its history than we realize. Time for re-think.

Rather than devote a complete traditional post on the matter, I’ve decided to embed a FriendFeed riff that I started earlier. Feel free to join (the link is here if the embed isn’t viewable):

As I mentioned earlier on this blog, I’ve been investing a little more time with FriendFeed because I think it offers a great community-enhancement to the kinds of activity that take place on Twitter. I will write more about what I’m up to soon.

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I follow all kinds of people (and some bots) on Twitter. I read all sorts of blogs and books. I rarely watch TV anymore but I know what happens there. I’m an information omnivore, so I keep a pulse on our culture. I hear the drone of one theme in our modern world: Success. I witness  it when parents talk to their children, when self-help authors pimp their latest books, when social media gurus give their readers variations of the same pep posts. Success! Success! Success!

Here’s a fundamental problem: we all, one way or another, fail to live beyond a few years. That’s a big failure when you think about it, at least from a certain angle.

And living forever in this world isn’t the only thing we fail at. We fail at a great many things. We fail at the things we’ve never experienced. We fail to see truths set in front of our noses. We fail everyday and fail to see those failures.

Our culture’s obsession with success perhaps speaks more about our fears than it does about our ambitions. Why is there such a fear of failure in our culture? Why is it shamed so much in our schools (where it’s sometimes used as a weapon), in our homes, in our workplaces, in our communities, in our media? I think we are paying heavy prices for our failure to experience failure.

You see, if you spend your life without any intimacy with moments of failure, with death, with loss, then you set your life upon a course of disappointment. Our culture’s obsession with success is really an obsession with only one part of our passion-complex: our desire for pleasure, be it the pleasure of pride or accomplishment. But we have other emotions, other spaces we all are born to inhabit: like grief.

It’s important to grieve. We don’t like to talk about death because we don’t know how to grieve. We don’t like to talk about failure because, ultimately, we don’t know how to grieve. A culture, or a person, who spends every moment focused on success never gets to practice grief. As you get older, that grief (which is a garden) dries up unless tended to once in a while.

A healthy culture welcomes grief, clutivates it, and in the process grows successfully. It doesn’t talk about success: it just does what it loves to do, which is to ensure that its members live fully. The ancients, for all of their insane or brutal rituals and habits, cherished things we seem hell-bent to banish. They appreciated the beauty that surrounded them, respected the mystery of existence and were keenly aware of the dangers inherent in life’s turbulent flows. For them grief itself was a gift.

Fast-forward to our evolving world of social media.

We’re all still trying to sort out what it means to live in a streaming, “real-time” state of affairs. One thing we know is that things are getting faster and faster and the rate of acceleration is accelerating. Which is to say, things are more likely to fail than succeed. This is an important thing to know in the 21st Century.

The more you’re willing to face your fear of failure, the better your chances of succeeding at the important things in life. Take a close inventory of your failures and thank them.

Don’t be so brainwashed by our culture’s insistence on success. Our general culture is itself a failure. Which is why it’s so obsessed with success. Be wary of calls to “climb to the top” or “fly high”.

Angels fall fast from the sky. But roots grow deep in darkness.

Tend to your garden of grief. One day, or one long night, you will find yourself alone in that garden and nothing that you accomplished will accompany you in your dark time.

The question you should be asking yourself right now: Will the flowers deep down in my bed of grief be dead when I need them or will they be fresh enough for me to have things to care for?

It’s OK to fail. The universe gives you that permission. Don’t let the Success Fools fool you into being only a half-human.

Being a fully-grown human being takes a lot of failure and grief. Invest in being human. The returns are priceless. Literally.

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John G. Self wrote a post today concerning executive compensation among hospitals. For technical reasons I was unable to leave a comment, so I’m leaving it here. It’s an important topic, and one that certainly stirs passion, especially in the wake of the collapse of financial institutions last fall. Read John’s post and then read my reply:

John,

Well-articulated post and I agree with the general sentiment concerning the recruitment and retention of executives with talent and vision and incorruptible commitment to stakeholders.

Yes, there is a back-lash to executive compensation: some of it merited, some of it uninformed, some of it part of the scapegoating mechanism invoked in any crisis.

Yes, CEOs have it tough. But you know who also have it tough? Nurses. Doctors. We aught to include the compensation for nurses in your argument as well: you can have the best CEO in the world running a hospital, but it’s for naught if the nursing staff isn’t compensated well. If I were the CEO of a hospital and my nurses weren’t compensated well, I wouldn’t be asking for a raise for myself until they and other staff received the compensation, resources, support and respect they deserve.

I also think that too often “qualified CEO” means high-paid CEO. Over the last 20-30 years, many companies entered a mad race for the “best and brightest” and so they settled on compensation as the way to attract that talent. But there’s always diminishing marginal returns: a CEO who was paid $250,000 per year yesterday isn’t going to perform twice as good if his salary goes up to $500,000. Boards of Directors need to get away from that way of thinking and get more creative. After all, they’re beholden to shareholders and its their right and duty to make their companies places executives would love to lead.

Yes, compensation is important. But so is knowing that the work that’s done is meaningful and something worth pursuing in its own right. If it isn’t, then what you are left with aren’t talented executive leaders. Instead, you’re left with overpaid, mediocre and unpassionate MBA grads.

It’s unfortunate that we permitted executives in the financial sector to abandon the backbone of capitalism (investing in the long-term) for the belly of insatiety (short-term gain). And now CEOs in all other sectors will feel heat from the public.

True executives lead. They invest in trust, they sell hope and they share the wealth accrued by the communities they lead. The more CEOs do that, the more likely the public will once again entrust them to execute the noblest tasks of capitalism. When that happens, the compensation will be a pleasant side-effect.

Until then, CEOs will have to do what the rest of us must now do: work harder, be more creative than ever before, exercise financial discipline and aim to be remarkable for remarkability’s sake.

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Thank you for subscribing to, and participating in, my little show about nothing. I know some of you read the posts here for several different reasons: many for my healthcare posts, others for my weird but somewhat philosophically investigative takes on disparate topics like Twitter and LSD.

I started this blog a little over a year ago for several reasons, including an interest in how the web and the technologies and communities it weaves influence us all. I wanted a basecamp for my corner of the web and chose to blog primarily under my own vanity domain because I have such an insanely diverse array of curiosities and experiences.

One area of interest that seemed to occupy my attention was how the health care industry could improve its presence on the web. After playing around over the years with different kinds of social media, I came to appreciate Twitter most of all. I can’t exactly put my finger on it, but I felt that Twitter was a disturbance in the force, a disrupting community-building technology that would eventually come to change how we communicate, how we collaborate, how we interact with other technologies. So very early on, I set my thoughts on how Twitter (or its analogues) could fit into healthcare. 

I didn’t know many healthcare peeps who were deeply involved with the newly evolved online tools and communities. And from scanning the healthcare blogging scene, I was kind of disappointed with how far behind the healthcare blogosphere seemed to be. After a year, I know a lot more healthcare peeps who seem sincerely passionate about bringing social media to healthcare (or perhaps I should say healthcare to social media). I plan on a future post citing some of you who have entered my network. I feel fortunate to have had honorable encouragement. For now, know that I hold gratitude to new friends.

I consider myself a mediocre polymath: a review of my career will reveal that I’m largely a chameleon. I simply can’t settle on one trajectory in the way that our culture inculcates us to set into. My curiosities are too wide and deep to niche myself to death. Still, we all need a focus. I expect that my future blogging and tweeting will reflect the changes which I’ll undertake in the months and years ahead. This is a relentless century: we all need to keep building and working and networking and changing.

Earlier this year, I formed a corporation to house my business interests. In between working full-time as a contractor, a husband and father, it’s challenging to get a business rolling. These are interesting times and I believe now is the best time to start a business. As interesting developments transpire, I will keep you posted.

In the meantime, I invite you to comment on my blogging. I ask you:

• If my posts (or if you’re following me on Twitter, my tweets) interest you , why? 
• Am I too “all over the place” or do you actually prefer diversity of content? 
• Are there any topics you’d like me to write about? 
• What are your least and most favorite posts? 
• What strengths, perspectives or themes do you find most worthy of building upon?

I welcome your feedback.

Again, thank you for being here. It’s been a pleasure to read your comments and since Twitter is my favorite place to hang out, I’m glad you’re there with me too. Cheers!

Sincerely,

Phil

(Oh, and btw in recent days, I’ve had a renewed interest in FriendFeed. I’ll give it a couple of weeks and see if I”m still interested. I’ll let you know if I glean any insights into its use or uselessness.)

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• Some most Productive & Fun to use Twitter Tool/Services | TechieSouls

  tags: twitter, apps, applications, productivity, communications

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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• [Video] Twitter is Definitely Going Mainstream | Andrea Vascellari

  We’ll be sick of Twitter if not already (and I’m a fanboy).

  tags: twitter, humor, mainstream

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Twitter was once so useful to us. Now that all the celebrities are jumping on the bandwagon, Twitter will die. The party’s over. This is what the latest mantra among a bulk of the Twitterati seems to be these days. This line of reasoning may make sense for many other web services, but not for Twitter.

Long before Twitter became a mainstream buzzword, the Twitter stream was already jammed with social media ‘experts’ who told everybody else how to use Twitter. The good leaders among them helped spur Twitter’s use and eventual popularity. All of the talk about Twitter on Twitter could have killed Twitter, but it didn’t.

But many of the same bloggers who practically pleaded with the world to “start listening” and “joining the conversation” are now reviled or wigged out by the rising popularity of services like Twitter. Does this make any sense? Inasmuch as I understand what celebrity-status can do to (or for) Twitter, I think much of this latest bitch-festing falls under the category of “WTF?!”.

Of course celebrities with millions of followers can’t follow-back meaningfully. Of course they won’t be able to interact with every single fan all the time. That doesn’t mean they can’t use it creatively. Why wouldn’t they use Twitter? It’s as much their right as it for Scoble or you or me. I want Kelso to raise money for Malaria (even if it’s a PR gimmick). I want Brad Pitt tweeting about poverty (well, maybe not tweet as much as lead). I want the Martin Luther King’s of the world to tweet, even if they can’t possibly follow everyone back. I want famous peeps to be remarkable in ways they couldn’t via traditional media. They can’t be if we don’t let them.

What, pray tell, is the point of services like Twitter if they’re only used by the Geek Squaderati? The whole point of Twitter is for it to become popular (at least from the aspect of its public crowd-sourcing potential).

How Twitter Can Make It

Twitter’s open API is its salvation: for all of the third-party clients that have been developed, we still haven’t seen the best of them. Applications for Enterprise, for instance, have yet to realize their full potential.

Will Twitter’s popularity bring more noise and misguided marketing tactics? Surely. That’s where third-party clients come into play. Filtering is another tool.

As long as creative and innovative clients and features continue to evolve around Twitter, the service will only get better and more relevant. As users realize the utility of micro-sharing, other custom-built “Twitters” will likely spring up too.

Use Twitter, Don’t Let It Use You

So forget about Kelso and Oprah if they bother your “purists” sensibilities (but pay attention to Shaq, ‘cuz his tweets are hilarious). Twitter offers celebrities and news organizations tons of opportunities to be remarkable – and it’s up to the rest of us to help guide them in the right direction (unfollow can be a strong signal).

The Beatles didn’t start sucking because they became famous. And if they did, nobody had to buy their records.

Let’s start building creative applications for Twitter.

Let’s start using micro-sharing technology in health care.

Let’s start building good stuff like clinical trial applications that connect sick people with the right Pharma organizations.

Let’s start leading tribes of philanthropy using Twitter to make the lives of others less painful and more wonderful.

In short, let’s exploit Twitter’s popularity, not whine about its well-earned popularity.

We got what we wanted. Now let’s deal with it.

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