JoelFoner.com

News Slam 2!

Please join our global discussion group
every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Feb 23, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

News Slam 2!

This week we’ll be taking another run at “News Slam”. News Slam is a mashup of a poetry slam and a current events quiz show – with a twist.

What is a News Slam, and why are we doing it?

Staying current with world events is always a challenge, given everything else we’re all trying to do in our lives. News Slam is a fun way to catch up with some things going on around the globe while maybe finding a topic we all want to dig into in a deeper way, either in this session or a future one.

I suppose we could even say that this is a serious game, enabled by a virtual world, but… that would be too serious – let’s have some fun and learn some new stuff!

News Slam How-To

Join us! You can find a news item while you’re here, so don’t sweat it if you don’t have any preparation time. If you can spend a few minutes searching, you might find a nugget that will be really interesting, so if you have a few minutes, please feel free to go hunting.

* Anyone and everyone is encouraged to participate. This is not a contest!

* When you’re up, you’ll say two things (in text or voice – either is fine)

1) One sentence that explains a news item about a country other than the one you’re currently living in

2) One sentence that gives your reaction to the news item (either about the news itself, or the way the item is written or presented)

THERE IS A TWIST – you can Read more…

Google Buzz Hands-On Workshop

Please join our global discussion group
every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Feb 16th, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

Google Buzz Hands-On Workshop

There’s been a lot of buzz about Google Buzz this week. We’ve all probably heard about various security concerns, and rather than re-hashing that, I thought we would do something a bit different. This week we’ll have a hands-on workshop focused on two goals:

1) Develop a list of best practices with what we know so far about Google Buzz in “public mode.”

Public posting is the most common mode so far, as people experiment to see how Buzz is, or is not, like the other social networking services that we already know. Some things take a little practice and tinkering, and already there are some key things to know about interacting with Buzz. Let’s find out what we know as a group!

2) Get some hands-on experience using Google Buzz in “private discussion mode.”

Private Google Buzz posting is a feature that has received relatively little coverage that I’ve seen. I think this is potentially one of the “killer app” parts of Buzz, and suspect it will be the usage mode that gets Buzz to be a go-to tool for team coordination of projects and other not-so-public discussions.

I’m going to try to have a web conferencing rig running for this week, so we can have a live shared browser view while working through what we know and what we can figure out.

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

The debates about Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) appear to be continuing unabated. Integrated Marketing Communications, if you haven’t run in to this phrase before, is a set of strategies that remove the traditional boundaries between public relations, marketing, advertising and other corporate messaging, in both the online and offline spaces, to create an environment where all efforts are coordinated in a synchronized way.

These debates repeatedly raise a few questions. Is IMC a winning strategy? Is it the future? Is it the right thing to do? Can it be implemented in an old-school organization? … and others.

Recently I’ve been attending #IMCChat,  a great weekly Twitter Group Chat hosted by Beth Harte (@BethHarte on Twitter) and Anna Barcelos (@abarcelos on Twitter), and after these sessions and a number of side discussions decided that it’s time for me to weigh in.

Many of the arguments for and against separation of advertising, marketing, product management, branding and public relations are internally focused. Questions abound as to the merits of having silos, or silos with communication, or no silos at all, with discussion focused on whether these approaches work for the organization.

Inward-Facing Analysis is Fundamentally Flawed

I believe that any inward-based analysis is fundamentally flawed, that the battle was already fought in public on the social web, and has essentially nothing to do with the “view from inside the castle.”

Why do I feel comfortable making such a bald proclamation? The answer lies in the social media era itself, which I think of as starting around the time of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which was published ten years ago and recently revised. The words of each of the 95 theses seem to be just as powerful today as they were ten years ago, and perhaps even more so.

Three Reasons IMC has Already Won Read more…

Are We Engineering the Species that will Replace Us?

Please join us for a discussion every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Feb 9nd, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

NOTE: Since we’ll be watching some of the videos linked below at the start of the session, We Are The Network is scheduled for 90 minutes rather than an hour this week, to allow enough discussion time for a topic that will no doubt be … large.

Are We Engineering the Species that will Replace Us?

“It’s just science fiction!” We tell ourselves this little white lie about the movies we flock to. We think “wow, that’s cool, and pretty scary, but that could never happen.” The science fiction of the future is starting to happen closer and closer to home, and there are now some surprising signs that we may already have reached milestones on the road to engineering a cyborg (part human, part computer) species that will ultimately replace us.

You may think this is random paranoia, and feel free to say so on the way in, but I challenge you to say absolutely that we’re not on the path by the end… I’ve found it pretty hard to avoid the uncomfortable conclusion that “we will be Borg” sooner than any of us had expected.

In this session we’ll review some real working examples of technologies that would have seemed unbelievable five or ten years ago, and a compelling TED talk that maps out a potential roadmap for our future.

What does this mean for us? How will we get ready for these changes? Where will this head as it unfolds, and what will it mean for our society and humanity in general?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon!

Three things to consider:

1) A science fiction movie trailer, one that we all probably presume is “way” in the future, and a quick explanation of a plot element of another related science fiction movie.

2) Real working engineering results, with proof videos that demonstrate significant pieces of functionality from the movie trailer

3) A compelling TED talk that ties the threads together in a way that will likely make you stop and think.

It’s a fun ride… ready? Here are the links: Read more…