I picked up a few new books from the MIT Press bookstore and will be sharing my thoughts and impressions of them as I finish them.

First in the queue this weekend was The Smart Swarm: How Understanding Flocks, Schools, and Colonies Can Make Us Better at Communicating, Decision Making, and Getting Things Done.

Thanks to the subtitle, you’ve got a good grasp of the book’s premise. The author, Peter Miller, is senior editor of National Geographic, and wrote the book very much like a solid long read from the publication. The only thing missing was the vivid photography.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and how Peter weaved together various research findings from the study of ants, bees, starlings, and fish. As I read the book, it triggered insights into the Tea Party/Occupy Wall Street movements, while also making me realize what’s been driving behaviors I’ve seen come from people using online and mobile technologies. Anyone wanting to improve what they’re doing to mobilize people will benefit from these insights, too.

Here is a collection of notes I took while reading this 269-page book:

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Briefly and simply, Facebook Timeline is amazing!

What launched globally this week, Facebook now affords anyone to post one’s complete life stream in chronological order. With that the ueber-popular social network introduces a powerful new form to feed back and forward one’s entire live story in one fell swoop.

Think your teenage 1978 Miss America picks alongside your favorite cheesy 80s movie flicks side by side your current day Philip Glass CD collection. All neatly timelined in chronological order and interspersed with plenty *foursquared* bars and clubs revealing exactly when, where and who you’ve been hanging out with over the years.

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Everyone’s buzzing today about Facebook’s plans to open up to third party applications. My first reaction — Finally!

With this change, it is expected that outside parties will (pending the approval of users) have access to the pool of user-provided information streams. In other words, stuff like Status Updates, Wall Posts and uploaded pictures will be able to take on a new life outside of the confines of Facebook.com on 3rd party applications.
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A quick update on my recent ever got pinged by your CEO? post, and some related commentary on online social media in the enterprise world.

Presumably by way of a forward-thinking PR department close to Deutsche Telekom management (indeed my employer), I recently received a LinkedIn invite to connect to DT CEO Rene Obermann.
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We fought it. We resisted. But now we’ve capitulated to the twitter tsunami and have ‘twitterized’ digitalmissive. During the process, though, we’ve noticed something – twitter seems to ‘bounce’ a lot (network-speak for short sporadic outages).

Not surprising, given the numbers: Nielsen has February year-over-year twitter usage growth at 1,374%. That’s well over a factor of 10.

Amazing – and that’s not counting the countless tweets that will now be coming from the new and improved digitalmissive….

In the meantime, will short-term outages contribute to a backlash against the service?

And hey don’t forget to tweet this article – if the twitter’s up at the time.


By most measures, the White House’s first online town hall meeting was a smashing success.

A whooping 104,081 email submissions and 3.6 million votes later, today, the US irreversibly gained a whole new level of citizen participation.

To that point, the White House actually created a namesake post exactly for that purpose.

What should come next, in my mind, would be to ensure that this new-found form of political dialog marketing will continue to be exactly that – an ongoing, productive dialog to and fro the electorate and the elected.

To that point, anyone in digital media building and growing a brand online knows, focused quality discussion across the social graph is not as easy as it sounds.

After all, the Web’s bull horn capabilities are very much a two-way street. And media outlets everywhere are likely eager to pick up on any disgruntled citizen that felt s/he didn’t get a proper response.

So beware White House, from now on be prepared to handle your incoming emails with great care.

It’s all about keeping the conversation going.

I recently attended my first conference by live webcast – Media Summit New York.  Streaming was handled by scribemedia, which did a very nice job of it.  I wasn’t able to sample every panel because they were only shooting in one of the two session rooms, but it turns out there was something about “tele-attending” this conference that almost made up for that…

First, I’ll admit it – while I find the technology to be valuable in certain situations,  I’m by no means out there on the evangelical front lines of social networking (in fact, it’s only recently that we’ve twitter-enabled ourselves here at digitalmissive.com).

As a bit of a skeptic to begin with, I’ve also been a little ambivalent towards the combination of social networking and long-form premium internet video.  I’ve just felt there wasn’t a huge value-add there; that lean-back television viewing is by its nature a primarily passive pastime, and that the average viewer would not care to chat and text while watching their favorite show form the couch – and to the extent internet video is all about the ability to view content non-synchronously, real-time chatting about a show in progress isn’t really possible anyway.

But that was before I had the  experience of chatting and streaming during that first Media Summit panel – compared to sitting there silently in a live audience with perhaps one chance to interact briefly during the Q&A, watching the stream while having the option to freely exchange thoughts and opinions with my fellow cyber-audience members was really exciting.  I almost felt myself wondering if I would actually prefer watching the live stream to being there in person – just for the chatting alone.

Overall,  though, of course the advantages to attending these events in person trumps the live chat advantage – but how ironic, that attendance at panel discussions on the potential disruptive nature of internet video could end up being affected by …internet video.

So, mea culpa.  I get it.  Social networking and video can be cool – especially for events such as conferences.  Back at home on the next generation of internet-enabled televisions, it could be great, too – for sports, politics, and maybe American Idol.

But great enough to make implementing a keyboard-like interface?  I’m still not sure…