“It’s so easy for technology to squash inspiration.”

This is so true. If you want people in your organization to share more, you can’t dictate to them how to share or what tools to use. That just clamps down on the natural tendency to connect and share, in a spontaneous, organic way.

People think and communicate in different ways. With the interconnectedness of everything social on the Internet, there’s no reason why they can’t use the method that’s most comfortable for them.

Look at how all the social networks appeal to different types of communicators. Google+ is for people who like to write out their thoughts. Twitter is for folks who prefer sharing quick snippets. Facebook appeals more to social extroverts. Pinterest has a visual appeal. And so on. No network is the one right way to communicate. That’s why they can all find space to exist.

And I guess some people still like using old-fashioned email to share and communicate. That’s okay too. What these folks need is an enabler, someone who really gets all the technologies and can set up means to make it easy for them to share, using the tools they are most comfortable with. Perhaps that’s what the “social media expert” will evolve into…

Here’s the piece that inspired these thoughts – Wild Apricot Blog : Don’t Let Technology Hurdles Crush Inspiration.

 Out of Neal Stephenson’s Imagination Came a New Online World
The author Neal Stephenson’s reputation for prescience about the online world is well earned, even if he regards it lightly.

Here is Neal Stephenson’s piece for the World Policy Institute, in which he describes his Hieroglyph theory: Innovation Starvation | World Policy Institute

I don’t have scientific evidence to back this up, but in my gut I know it’s true. I have recently initiated a new habit when I spend 1-2 hours every afternoon doing yoga, cooking and/or reading physical books. I’ve found that this time away from screens helps me feel less stressed at the end of the day. I’ve also banned electronic devices from the bedroom because I think the screens may make insomnia even worse. I know I usually sleep worse when I work on my laptop late at night.

Whenever I go on vacation, I refrain from taking my laptop or other electronic devices with me. A week or a long weekend spent in exile from electronic devices is a real vacation, in my opinion.

Of course, not everyone may be able to handle the immersion in their own thoughts for any period of time, as this commenter on the NYT article points out:

This is exactly backward. The gadgets don’t interfere with mental functions. People who find mental work hard fill their time with external stimuli.

Portable radios and TVs, iPods and their imitators, cellphones, audio books, smartphones, and now tablet computers are bread and circuses, filling the voids in minds that can’t deal with complex abstractions or data that might undermine carefully constructed worlds.

[via Your Brain on Computers - Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime - NYTimes.com.]

I don’t have much to say about content mills, except that once I identify one, I avoid it with extreme prejudice. I also noticed that when you google the term content mill, the first result, “What Is a Content Mill,” comes from a well-known content mill. Irony in action.

Anyway, it appears a backlash is a-brewin’. People want this crap out of their search results. Yeah, me too. Anyhoo, here are some good links on the subject for further reading:

The Search Engine Backlash Against ‘Content Mills’ (MIT Technology Review)
Google, Content Farms & Why This May Be Blekko’s Moment (Search Engine Land)
MediaShift’s Guide to Content Farms (PBS)
Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried and How Google Can Combat Content Farms (ReadWriteWeb)
Content farms v. curating farmers (BuzzMachine)
Content dust bowls (Magellan Media)
The Future of Media Isn’t Free Content, It’s Cheap Content (Metafilter)

The only way you can guarantee online privacy is to avoid free services, including all social networks, altogether. But you need an email account, for instance. Well, there are many alternatives to the free email services. Your ISP, who you are paying to provide Internet service to you, will probably give you one. Or you can pay for an email account with a hosting company. The point is, when you pay for a service, then you have a right to expect a higher level of privacy, as agreed upon between you and the company. (Many people use a free email account for public transactions, like online purchases, and keep a private email account for, well, private communications.)

If you do decide to get a free email account or sign up with a social network, then you should accept right off the bat that you will be giving up some privacy. That is the deal with the devil you make in exchange for free access to these networks. You will no longer have total control over information about you and that you generate. It is best to know this and accept this from the start.

Personally, I like the openness that social networks have brought. I think it fosters communication, collaboration, sharing and understanding of our differences, but that is the idealist in me. Yes, there is a negative side, but that is true of anything with value. I think social networks help us express who we are, and feel okay with who we are.

But if you are going to use these services, and privacy is of some importance to you, then you need to become savvy about how they work. When you sign up for a service, you need to be willing to explore, play with settings, try things and see what happens, and learn what the service is doing and why. This means extra work, but as I said, it is not in these companies’ interest to protect your privacy, so you can’t expect it of them. It only took me five minutes of playing with Google Buzz to figure out that my followers were listed on my public profile and to turn that off. That was well before all the privacy warnings came out.

I have some sympathy for people whose email contacts were exposed by Buzz, because this was not an expected outcome. But only to a point. Because you had to participate in that exposure. You had to set up a free Gmail account. You had to turn on Buzz. You had to create a public Google Profile. You had to accept the list of followers/following presented to you by Buzz without making any changes to remove those who were not acceptable to you. At each point, you could stop and ask yourself what the privacy implications of this are. At the very least, you could wait a few days for the issues to surface. It was only a few hours before many news outlets on the web were posting about Buzz’s privacy issues and the fixes for them.

I think this is a good learning moment for all of us. By all means, play in the social networking playground. But remember that these free services still have a cost. Just like in the real world, online the only one you can count on to take care of yourself is you.

Google’s response to the privacy concerns and instructions for protecting your privacy when using Buzz. And Google may offer Buzz independently from Gmail.

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• Facebook CEO Zuckerberg causes stir over privacy (macworld.com)

Social search is a big step forward in personalizing search, and thus making it much more relevant to the searcher. With social search enabled, when you search Google, along with the top results, you will see any relevant information from your social network’s public web postings. For instance, I search for “New York City.” Following the New York Google Maps, official homepages, Wikipedia entry on NYC, etc., I might also see my husband’s review of a hotel he recently stayed at in the city or my friend’s New York photos on Picasa or my colleague’s post about a professional conference there. Which is all stuff I’m very likely to be interested in, because it’s coming from people I actually know.

How does Google know? It all goes back to your Google Profile — and you should go set one up immediately, if you haven’t already. Tell Google what your public blogs, Flickr page, YouTube channel, et al are, and Google will mine those sources for search results for your social network. Tell Google what your Twitter and FriendFeed names are, and it will add your followers to your social network for searching, along with your contacts in your Friends, Family and Coworkers groups and the blogs you subscribe to on Google Reader.

Read more about Social Search from Google’s official blog. Join the Google Social Search experiment. Once you join, you can see the Social results by:

1. clicking “Show options…” next to Web at the top of the Google Search Results, and
2. clicking “Social” in the left nav bar under “All Results”.

You can then burrow down to individual people. Google will show their matches, as well as how you’re connected to them.

Social search is currently in the experimental phase on Google Labs, but it is a really exciting development, with a lot of potential to make Googling even more relevant, personal and timely. And of course, it is yet one more step in Google’s inevitable takeover of the world and future status as the employer/benefactor of all humans. You’ve got to admit, though, it’s still very cool.

Related articles by Zemanta

• What Google Social Search Means For Companies (smtusa.com)
• Google Social Search: Twitter And FriendFeed Highlighted. What About Facebook? (techcrunch.com)
• Google Search Gets Personal: Social Search Launches in Google Labs (readwriteweb.com)
• Google stalks your social circle (theregister.co.uk)
• Optimising for Google Social Search (blogstorm.co.uk)

I have had a peripheral involvement in OPEN as it has developed, contributing ideas and writing when needed, and I have watched it grow from a germ of an idea with interest. Of course, I do think there will be some natural synergies between the project I am heavily involved in, developing open source HR information systems for managing data about health workers, and the goals of OPEN. I am looking forward to seeing how that all shapes up.

OPEN is all over the web, so if you want to learn more, here are some ways to do so:

• OPEN website
• OPEN on Facebook Causes
• OPEN on MySpace
• YouTube channel
• Follow OPEN on Twitter

A couple of days ago, I posted a review of the new iGoogle, which I mostly liked except for a few bugs, and I got a lot of response. (A lot of response for this humble blog, anyway.) All of the commenters completely disagreed with me.

But I noticed something else in common with all the comments: frustration. I don’t think that frustration stems from the new iGoogle so much as the way Google rolled out the changes and the lack of options Google gives its users.

For one thing, Google makes it nearly impossible to give feedback or request support on their free services. Their official blog doesn’t even take comments. My husband has been trying to make a relatively simple change to his Gmail, and not only does Google not allow the change, but they provide no way for him to get in touch with them to request the change or ask for help.

Well, Google is a free service. They don’t have to offer support.

I think that’s wrong. I use several free Web tools that offer excellent support. WordPress.com always responds in a timely and helpful way to my support emails. Hiveminder provides an option for reporting bugs or requesting features right on their interface. I have tweeted about problems I’m having with a software program and gotten an unexpected response from the software developers who are monitoring Twitter. Similarly, I have blogged about free tools, and the developers, who are obviously keeping on top of the blogs, have come by and commented.

Why doesn’t Google do this? Is it just too big? One of the reasons I blogged about iGoogle was because I had found a couple of pretty serious bugs, and I had no other outlet for reporting them.

People are pretty ticked off with Google for the changes made to iGoogle. The changes were made suddenly, without notice. There is no choice between old style and new style. And there is no way to let Google know directly how you feel. No wonder there is so much frustration.

I know Google is a monolith, but I think there is an opportunity here for a company that offers free services comparable to Google’s quality and is in touch with — and actually listens to — its users. Right now, the sense I get is that Google completely discounts its users — at least, its non-paying users — and that won’t cut it on today’s web. No company can afford to ignore any of their customers.

Google may think they’re too big to care about the users of its free services. I think they’ll fiind out they’re wrong.

Please keep the conversation going, and tell me what you think in the comments.

Related articles by Zemanta

• New iGoogle gets a mixed reception
• The new iGoogle – the good and the bad
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View the presentation

About Web 2.0

• The Machine is Us/ing Us — a video explanation of Web 2.0
• Best Practices in Using Web 2.0 in Nonprofits – a wiki explaining Web 2.0 tools and how to use them
• Guide to Social Media – a wiki specifically for nonprofits wanting to understand and use social media tools
• NetSquared – a TechSoup project supporting responsible adoption of social media tools by nonprofits
• Resource Sheet: Organizational Blogs – a long collection of resources about organizational/nonprofit blogging

Blogging Tools

• WordPress
• Blogger

Nonprofit Blogs

• IntraHealth Informatics Blog
• The INFO Project Blog
• MobileActive Blog
• Oxfam International
• Poverty and Growth Blog (World Bank)
• UNICEF Fieldnotes
• OrangePolitics.org

Blogs About Nonprofits Using Web 2.0 Technologies

• Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media
• Nonprofit Technology Network Blog
• Social Signal Blog
• The Bamboo Project Blog
• Wild Apricot’s Nonprofit Technology Blog
• Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

The Blogosphere (finding blogs of interest)

• Technorati — Find tagged content on all blogs
• Global Voices Online — Aggregates content from blogs from non-Western locations
• Nonprofit Blog Exchange – Aggregates content specifically from nonprofit blogs and about nonprofits that blog

Into Web 2.0

• Tumblr – microblogging site
• Twitter – microblogging site that integrates with text messaging and instant messaging (IM)
• del.icio.us – Tag, organize and share bookmarks
• Stumble Upon – review and rate web content
• Digg – read and vote on web content
• NGO Post – read and vote on web content discussing social welfare initiatives
• Flickr – share, view and comment on photos
• YouTube – share, view and comment on videos
• SlideShare – share, view and comment on presentations
• Wikipedia – world-famous collaboratively written encyclopedia built with a wiki
• Wikibooks – collection of collaboratively written textbooks written using wikis
• Facebook – well-known social networking site originally focusing on college students
• LinkedIn – professional networking site
• Dogster – social networking site for dogs
• Causes on Facebook – nonprofits using Facebook to promote causes and raise money
• IntraHealth Informatics’ Flickr site – nonprofits can share interesting photos to generate interest