“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot masturbate” – Dave Barry

I don’t do meetings any more. I used to do a lot of meetings. But not any more.

The change from meeting to tweeting – where a series of brief exchanges (each a maximum of 140 characters) can make up the content – has been brought about by a variety of factors over the past 15 years or so – but here are the ten factors that I think are critical.

1. IN GOOGLE TIME
   I no longer have a phone book, business directories or yellow pages. Those were essential when I started my first corporation in 1993. But now, I use Google. On my Nokia N86, as I move.  As a result, I have less patience for slow ways of doing things – I am impatient. I demand speed, efficiency, and immediate results.

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This article was originally published at Digital Biographer, also written by David Petherick, in January 2008. That’s Eight. A year ago. I think it still is very relevant a year later…

The significance of social networks is now starting to become obvious to the marketing departments of larger companies, largely due to two factors – 1) Traditional advertising channels are proving less and less effective and 2) Marketing and advertising agencies have started to realise where people are spending their time.

They have seen the writing on the wall – with one particular statistic likely to be a challenge for many a marketing manager: “Social networks will become the dominant channel for viral marketing campaigns – email has been the dominant channel for viral marketing campaigns since the mid 90s, but social networks will overtake it in 2008.”

Another fact that’s staring marketers in the face – a tipping point that only has one further hurdle to clear: “In October 2007, Social Networks accounted for 7.7% of upstream Internet traffic to all other websites, making the category the second most important source of traffic after Search Engines.”

The next hurdle of course is for social networks to become a more important source of traffic than search engines. That’s a whole blog of its own, however.

An article in this morning’s Financial Times is entitled “Business urged to woo social network figures“, and uses language very firmly couched in the tradition of ‘moving product’ and the pages of publications such as ‘Campaign‘. This all suggests to me that although businesses may have woken up, they have not actually smelt the coffee – they still have the urge to sell cereals.
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I am a ‘Keeber-biograph‘, meaning Cyber-Biographer.
This is a term I came across when searching through Yandex, the Russian search engine that’s been in the news recently, and which is rightly proud of the fact that, thanks to them, Russia is one of only four countries where Google is not the significantly dominant search engine.

The term was coined in a blog by Maya Kim, in the context of an article by Steve Rubel entitled ‘Three Emerging Digital Careers to Watch‘ and I was interested to see that only one of the three terms Steve had used had been expanded and given further clarification using English terms in the context of a Russian blog.

Steve’s term of Super Cruncher was unchanged, and Chief Customer Experience Officer was simply translated into Russian as ‘Head of the Department of Quality Service for Clients’. But his term ‘Digital Storytellers’ was translated into Russian as ‘Cyber-Biographer’, and also expanded to include the English terms ‘digital storyteller, cyberspace concierge, blog butler, ghost blogger, digital biographer‘.

I recall the terms ‘Cyber Concierge’, ‘Blog Butler’ and ‘Ghost Blogger’ were used when BBC News 24 wrote about my work as a Digital Biographer over a year ago, but I was surprised, and quite delighted, to find this reference being made. (For those of you who may not be aware of the fact, I speak fairly good Russian and am also known as ‘The Digial Biographer‘.)

I like the term Digital Storyteller – it’s a good description of some elements of my work. But I still think that ‘biographer’ is closer to describing things accurately:

biography

noun ( pl. -phies)
an account of someone’s life written by someone else.
• writing of such a type as a branch of literature.
• a human life in its course : although their individual biographies are different, both are motivated by a similar ambition.

I had the pleasure to talk to Amazon’s Vice President Worldwide Architecture, and Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels, at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam earlier this month, and asked him about what’s next for Amazon’s ‘Kindle‘ product… just click on the arrow below to listen to our discussion, or click the image to go to utterz.com for other options.

Dr. Werner Vogel, Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com, talks about The Kindle. And what’s next, of course…

Mobile post sent by davidpetherick using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

I first got involved in online business around 1995, when I first bought a copy of .net magazine, after I got curious about a startup company in the next room of our business centre, who said they were hosting websites.

Back in 1995, most business people I spoke to didn’t know what a website was, let alone what a good one would look like, so I started to learn how to code HTML using a highly sophisticated tool called ‘Notepad‘, and registered some domain names where a committee of actual people decided on whether or not I could own a particular domain name…

By 1998, I was designing and managing sites for companies like The Alba Centre (a Silicon Glen incubator) Scottish Financial Enterprise, The British Blood Transfusion Society, and for dozens of conferences a year.

Of course, the dot com bubble burst around 2000-2001, with so much money following ridiculously optimistic business plans, but many survivors from that period are still strong and active today.

Here comes something new…
But around about 2003, a new type of web site started to appear, as what I considered to be a natural evolution coinciding with the high penetration of broadband internet connections into homes and businesses: sites with features that broadly are known as Web 2.0…
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Gmail (or Googlemail if you’re in the UK) keeps on improving. And its free. And you never have to delete anything, and it’s pretty good at dealing with sp*am… yes, I like it. But I just came across a blog from Google with 5 great time-saving practical features I did not realise existed…

5. “Archive and next” shortcut
4. Share mail searches with friends
3. Browser navigation and history
2. Bookmark emails
1. “Filter messages like this”

• Official Gmail Blog: 5 little-known Gmail features you may not yet know about >>

PS: If you don’t have a Gmail account, just ask me to send you an invitation – email david dot petherick at gmail dot com

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I was pleased to hear that my interview outlining my work as “The Digital Biographer” with Adam Walton of BBC Radio Wales broadcast on 12th August sounded good, was a good three minutes longer than expected, and was ‘top of the hour’ as the lead story.

You can listen in online (I take up around the first 8 minutes) by clicking the arrow below.

I’d like to thank Broadcaster and Speaker Jeremy Nicholas for his first class advice on preparing for, and handling this radio interview.

David Petherick is the Founder and CEO of Clarocada – but he’s also “The Digital Biographer” according to the BBC…

“I’ve no idea how the 25 minutes or so I spent talking with Adam Walton of BBC Radio Wales yesterday will sound when it’s edited down to perhaps 5, but we had a good old chat.” said David.

All of this follows on from the BBC article which appeared on 16th July “Meet the Digital Biographer“, which detailed how David had been working for some months as the “ghost blogger” for Thomas Power, Chairman of business networking site Ecademy.

“There were of course questions related to online identity and the corporate / personal persona. I had to clarify that I don’t handle email and messages or blog comments for my customers, but do write blog content. It’s a fascinating area, and Adam said he’d like more time to talk about this – one great question was — what do I do if my work for someone results in them being offered a column or guest blog? The answer… well, you’ll have to listen in.”

The programme goes out at 17:03, Sunday 12th August, repeated Wednesday, 15th August, and is online in the archive for a week from Sunday. You can listen in online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/radiowales/sites/mousemat/

David would like to thank several Ecademy Members for demonstrating social networking in action, by providing some great soundbites for him to consider on the morning prior to the interview here in the Blogs Section at Ecademy: Why has social networking become so important?.

Specifically, David’s thanks go to Dan Field, Samantha Cannell, Robert Greig, Mark Lee, Iain Wilson and Philip Calvert.