Archive for 2008

Cyber-Biographer makes it to Russia.

I am a ‘Keeber-biograph‘, meaning Cyber-Biographer. digital-biographer-russian
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.

Will Amazon be your digital publisher this year, or next?

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

Why it’s taken me 13 years to decide to attend The Next Web in Amsterdam…

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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