Conferences
Follow Friday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/21/2009 - 08:31@conncan @Alex_Johnston @ctgifted @viennateng @mikegermano @onakiser @contactjr @cksample
It has been a few weeks since I’ve written a Follow Friday blog post, and so I’ll explain again my general approach. I write it as a blog post, which through Twitterfeed ends up on Twitter and from there on to Facebook. I try to follow some sort of theme for the week, but this week am combining a few different themes.
First, there is what is going on in Connecticut Education. I’m on the mailing list of @conncan. Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now (ConnCAN) “is an advocacy organization building a new movement of concerned Connecticut citizens working to create fundamental change in our education system.” @Alex_Johnston is their executive director. If your interested in education in Connecticut and especially issues around the achievement gap, I strongly encourage you to check out @conncan.
In following @conncan, I found @ctgifted, the Connecticut Association of the Gifted. I haven’t interacted with their organization yet, but I have long been interested in issues of gifted education.
Changing gears, I want to focus on @viennatang. Ms. Tang is a folk musician that I heard a few years ago at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. I signed up for her mailing list, and last week got a fascinating message. It let her listeners know that she is on Twitter and asked her listeners to joiner her in “a big messy free-for-all multi-way conversation, in a good way.” Last Saturday from 6 to 9 PM Pacific time she was responding to questions. I missed it, but heard it was great fun and hope that she will be doing it again sometime soon. It seems like a great way for musicians to connect with their fans, and I’d love to see other performers do something similar. Oh, and by the way, I like Ms Tang not only because she is making good use of social media, but also because her music is really great.
For my final theme, I want to shout out to some of the people that I met at Digiday:APPS a week and a half ago. Yes, I know, I still need to write up my thoughts on that event. It is coming. Leading the list is @mikegermano of Carrot Creative. He did a great presentation on their group’s work on a Facebook application for Major League Baseball. Other folks joining in a conversation about Digiday:APPS included @onakiser @contactjr @cksample.
So, that’s it for this week’s Follow Friday. Tune in next week (if I manage to fit it in), or other Fridays to see who some of the people I find interesting on Twitter are. Also, let me know who you find interesting out there.
Updates: Anthony Maio, Anthem, Marriage Equality, Sheraton Hotel Racism, and other stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 08/13/2009 - 13:04Here are updates on some of the stories that I've been following.
Anthony Maio
I've written several blog posts about the Anthony Maio case including ones on jury selection and attending the trial.
On Tuesday, the New Haven Independent which has had great coverage of this trial reported that the jury cleared Maio. From all that I've read as well as my one day at court during the hearing, if I had ended up on the jury, I would have concurred with the jury. It has been fascinating to watch not only the trial, and the news coverage, but follow some of the discussions online about the case.
Anthem
About a month ago, I wrote a blog post about Anthem's request for a rate increase. In my blog post, I noted a list of notable politicians that came out in opposition to the rate increase. In spite of the numerous objections, the state insurance commissioner approved the rate hike.
Yesterday, the Attorney General's office issued a press release announcing that the Attorney General, the Healthcare Advocate, and the Insurance Committee Co-Chairs are proposing sweeping reforms of the health insurance rate hike approval process. One of the co-chairs is State Sen. Joe Crisco representing my state senate district. I have written him applauding his efforts. There is a great need for health care reform in our country. We can argue about whether the current public option plan is a good reform, whether we need a single payer method, what should be done to change aspects of interstate health insurance and so on. However, it does seem clear that there is not currently enough oversight of the health insurance industry. This proposal appears to be an important step in getting better oversight of that industry.
Marriage Equality
Some people have claimed that if we allow gay people to marry, it will destroy traditional marriages. Perhaps there is some truth to this. Now that people who have been in long term committed relationships with their same sex partners are marrying in Connecticut and other States, it seems like there are more and more high profile conservative politicians whose mixed-sex marriages are failing. While I don't believe there is any causality here, there is correlation.
Others have suggested that if you give gay people civil rights, everyone will start wanting civil rights.
I like reframing the discussion about marriage equaltiy to talking about those of use who are in mixed sex marriages. Recently, over on Communications Exchange, there was a discussion about mixed marriages. The blogger was talking about marriages between PC users and Mac users. I hopped in and talked about mixed marriages between men and women.
Public Relations and Alleged Racism at the Sheraton Kansas City Sports Complex?
Another story I've been following closely is the allegations of racism in the when the Dixwell Drill Team was evicted from the Sheraton Kansas City Sports Complex. Like the Maio case, this has stirred a lot of comments. What I thought would be most interesting would be to find the response by Starwood Hotels, which owns the Sheraton chain. Last Friday, I sent an email to their public relations department asking for additional information. I wanted to get both sides of the story. I received a brief phone call back letting me know that they had not seen the news stories that I cited but that they had been contacted by another news organization asking for details about the same time that I contacted them. They said they were investigating the incident and would get back to me. That was nearly a week ago, and I have not heard any additional information, although I have sent a followup email asking for details.
It may well be that they are simply being quiet and hoping the whole thing passes over.
Other stuff
I was in New York yesterday for Digiday: APPS. I hope to have some followup blog posts about this shortly. It was a great conference and I have much that I hope to write. My laptop is still crippled and I have too many things going on at the same time. Meanwhile, I've been playing Mr. Mom today and dealing with quite a few random other issues.
Application Development in the Twenty First Century
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 08/12/2009 - 05:26I have been programming computers for over forty years, but it is only relatively recently that the idea of computer applications as advertising tools has caught my attention. I imagine that if anyone had presented this idea to me twenty years ago, I might have joked, “This subroutine is brought to you by Ford Motor Company”. Yet computer applications have changed considerably over the past four decades and so must our understanding of how they may be used in advertising.
Today, Digiday: APPS will explore the issues with some of the brightest people in the advertising space. However, I would like to take a step back and look at it from a different vantage, the viewpoint of an old programmer.
Marketing and advertising people are likely to look at how many people they can reach with an application, and hopefully, how engaged the viewers will become with the application. Hopefully, they will consider how closely integrated the experience of the application is with the application itself.
As an example, one of my favorite areas of exploration is virtual worlds and the virtual worlds space is rife with successes and failures when advertisers step in. When the Obama campaign placed ads on billboards in various computer games, it may not have had much of an effect on the gamers racing around the racecourse and seeing an Obama sign on the side of the racetrack. It was subtle and fit into the experience nicely, but wasn’t particularly interactive, unless something special happened when you crashed into an Obama sign, which I never heard about. Yet it was very effective in generating earned media, which sometimes can be more effective than the ad itself.
Other billboards in other games and virtual worlds have been much less successful and have attracted criticism, ridicule, or even vandalism. On the other hand, successful product integration can happen when the advertisers understand the medium and fully integrate their product in the media. Colgate made smiles in Second Life. Nike sold shoes in one virtual world which actually made you run faster in the virtual world.
Yet what about the developers themselves? What do they like? Friends of mine that develop for mobile devices are not very excited about the current development environments. Getting everything just right to be listed in the iPhone app store can be a significant challenge, even for experienced embedded device developers. This becomes even more of a challenge if you are attempting to integrate your iPhone application with other applications like Facebook. Then, there is always the concern that Apple will arbitrarily and capriciously reject your application.
Friends speak much more highly of developing for Android, but they complain that it isn’t as wide a user base and they long for a development environment that will work across a wide range of mobile devices.
Personally, I’m most interested in efforts to develop a good open source handset. OpenMoko is a project to create an open, Linux based handset. There is a handset available, which appears to be a powerful development environment. Unfortunately, it does not yet include G3 support or a camera.
Over with the web-based side of application development, everyone seeks for better authentication methods. Advertisers and marketing folks want to ‘own’ the individual, and this is best done by requiring users to use an authentication method specific to the application. Yet this is a nightmare for users. They need to remember userids and passwords to many different systems. Google and Facebook are going at it with their ‘Connect’ software. You can login to many sites that I build these days using your Facebook userid and password. Being an open source developer, I like to support OpenId. It allows users to log in with a single userid to multiple systems.
For applications that need to communicate between systems, there is OAuth which allows one application to check to see if a user is properly authenticated with another system. To what extent OpenID and OAuth becomes a key part of advertising oriented applications remains to be seen, but it seems like there are real benefits in terms of sharing data.
Just as my view of what goes into a good application has changed considerably over the past forty years, I expect it will continue to change as new ideas come forward. However, some key ideas need to be kept in mind. Successful application development requires understanding what the users really want and also requires application development environments that developers enjoy working in.
(Originally posted at Digidaydaily).
Painting a Culture of Peace
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 08/04/2009 - 14:09Storrs – Monday morning saw the third day of the UNESCO International Leadership Training Programme: A Global Intergenerational Forum at the University of Connecticut. Delegates from around the world gathered to hear new ideas about how to bring about some of the goals of UNESCO and the United Nations. They were mostly young, energetic, full of hope and anticipation as they established new friendships and learned about various programs.
A key theme for the day was about how to promote a culture of peace. It started off with Dr. David Adams presenting the framework for a culture of peace. Dr. Adams taught psychology at Wesleyan University for twenty-three years and has numerous publications related to understanding the psychological, physiological, and sociological aspects of aggression, war and peace.
He started off by describing how the United Nations arrived at their declaration of a culture of peace. He explored what constituted a culture of war. He referred to Margaret Mead who asserted that war is a social invention and he claimed that no other species wage war. He noted that fear, anger and greed are not key parts of the culture of war. In fact he spoke of Defense Secretary Cheney berating General Schwarzkopf during the first Gulf War for letting anger get in the way of his executing the war effort.
A few of the things that particularly jumped out at me as he described the culture of war was a strong sense of authoritarianism, the use of propaganda, and a focus on competition instead of cooperation. The opposite of this, a culture of peace, includes strong participatory democracy, transparency and the free flow of information and cooperation. For there to be wars, people need enemies and instead of miscommunication and misunderstanding, a culture of peace needs mutual understanding.
Empires rise and fall in a culture of war. Dr. Adams spoke about the fall of the Soviet Union which he experienced parts of first hand while he was doing research in Russia. He looked back to the fall of the British Empire and the fall of the Roman Empire. He expressed a belief that the American Empire was bound to fail, perhaps fairly soon. His hope was that a culture of peace could take hold before the next empire emerges, but expressed doubts and a sense of urgency of developing a culture of peace rapidly.
Yet as I look at our country, it has survived in part because of commitments to principals in a culture of peace. Yes, our democracy is not as participatory as it could, or should be. Yet there are many that work hard to make it more participatory. Our culture does not value the free flow of information or transparency as much as it should, but again, there are many that work hard for this as well. Perhaps most importantly, there are many that are working hard to promote mutual understanding between different groups of people.
The second speaker was Joanne Tawfilis, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Art Miles. The Art Miles Mural Project seeks to create twelve miles of murals, covering twelve different themes and build them into a pyramid to float down the Nile River in 2010 for the International Day of Peace. In terms of murals produced they are approximately 80% there.
Yet in many ways, the murals themselves are not what really matters. What matters is living out a culture of peace by working collaboratively to come to understand one another. The process of painting these murals is an important part of promoting a culture of peace.
Ms. Tawfilis spoke about how they have worked with people from different cultures and different locations to help them learn about one another share ideas and create a mural together. As I heard about this, it struck me that this would be a wonderful project for Beecher Road School to undertake with a sister school in China.
Many of my friends pray for peace, visualize world peace, or try to find other ways of expressing their desire for a more peaceful world. Ms. Tawfilis and her friends work for peace in a much different and more concrete manner. She recognizes that peace begins with each one of us individually promoting a culture of peace. The murals are a great way of doing this. Other great ways include working towards getting people more involved with their government from the local level up to international governance, and by people working together for a free flow of transparent information. The Internet can be a great tool for this, and hopefully this blog post will do its little part in helping people think about more concrete ways that they can work for peace.
SIFMA: Struggling for Relevancy
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/16/2009 - 18:56For years, I’ve attended the Technology and Management Conference that takes place every June at the New York Hilton. Years ago, it was known as the SIA Technology and Management Conference, but back in 2006, the Securities Industry Association merged with the Bond Market Association to form SIFMA.
Since I cover a lot of conferences as a blogger, last year I asked for and received press credentials to the SIFMA show. The person working for SIFMA at the time was very helpful and not only made sure that I got my press credentials but helped me connect with people from firms that were participating at the conference and their public relations representatives.
(People interested in my posts about last year’s show might want to check out Technology Management Conference, Unstructured Data, and High points and Low points of the Technology Management Conference, Day 2.)
So, I was a bit disappointed when I learned that my contact from last year was no longer with SIFMA. Even more disappointing was the email I received from Haley Mustac
Manager, Global Communications at SIFMA.
Thanks for contacting us, and for your interest in SIFMA's TMC event. Our press passes are given only to working press--reporters and editors who are employed or contracted through a single publication, rather than writers who occasionally contribute articles and/or op-ed pieces, or write for their own websites.
So, there you have it. Bloggers and freelance journalists are not welcome this year. In these days of cutbacks in traditional media, SIFMA is moving backwards to only accept the decreasing ranks of traditional journalists and shunning those in the new media.
This seemed even more strange in these days of upheaval in the financial services industry where the industry could use whatever good coverage it can get.
So, I decided to dig a little bit to see what I could find. One story I found talked about the SIFMA Layoffs. Last October, SIFMA laid off about 25% of their staff. A few days later, Barack Obama won the Presidency, and soon afterwards, Richard Hunt, senior managing director for government affairs left SIFMA. Hunt had previously been a top aide to Former House Ways and Means Chairman, Jim McCleary (R-LA).
December saw more difficulties for SIFMA when Bernie Madoff’s brother Peter stepped down from the board of SIFMA. The Madoff’s had long been involved with SIA and SIFMA.
How things have changed since the SIFMA merger back in 2006, when Jeffrey Birnbaum of the Washington Post described SIFMA as a Lobbying Powerhouse
The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, with a budget of $80 million, is the main mouthpiece for the financial services industry…
When added together, SIFMA's political action committees gave more than $1 million during the 2006 election season, putting the organization in the top 25 of all PACs. Its combined $8.5 million in spending on federal lobbying last year placed it in the top 30.
Yet, perhaps, there is another aspect to the story. Today, one week before the show opens, I received an email from SIFMA to let me know that I could still register for the conference at half price. Seems like they must be having problems getting people interested in attending. Maybe firms that are receiving TARP money are thinking more seriously about their attendance at trade shows. Yet, perhaps the people that really need to reconsider attending are the vendors.
It is difficult times in the financial services industry, and now, more than ever, they need an effective trade organization. Unfortunately, SIFMA does not seem to be fitting this role.
