Here are my slides from today’s session at podcast expo.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kathleengilroy/sets/72157602208076053/ 

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We have just launched our first test of dynamic ad insertion on our negotiation podcast series.

Starting today, a message from Bill Ury advertising the Program on Negotiation monthly newsletter will run on all of the Otter Group Negotiation Tip podcasts, as well as on the PON’s own podcast series.

We are using LibsynPRO’s state-of-the-art dynamic ad insertion technology. To increase distribution we have to arrange syndicate the podcasts to an opt-in audience of over 1.3 million key business and legal professionals. After the initial campaign completes, the PON series will be quickly refreshed with new marketing messages from a variety of sponsors.

I will be demonstrating this technology and our program at my talk on Saturday at Podcast Expo: Building a Multimedia Publishing, Consulting and Learning Programs Around Your Podcast, Saturday, September 29th at 2:00 pm. Please come and see me there to learn more.

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Some interesting new statistics released by facebook:

42 million active users (double the number one year ago when it opened up registration and growing at more than 200,000 per day since January)
More than half of Facebook users are outside of college (85 percent of US college students still use Facebook)
More than half of active users return daily (users spend an average of 20 minutes on the site per day)
Facebook is the top photo sharing application on the Web
There are more than 6 million active user groups on the site
More than 80% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on the Facebook Platform

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I have been spending a lot of time on Facebook these past couple of months and believe that it is really a game changing way of interacting online. While Facebook has been serving the “C” generation (a term Peter Friedman, Liveworld’s CEO uses to describe the Community-Connected group of people born after 1975), I believe that Facebook––or another social network with facebook’s features and characteristics––will become a must-have piece of the professional knowledge worker’s basket of tools.

So what is it about facebook that makes it so compelling and useful? Why has it attracted 40 million users?

Facebook works because it was built – for starters – from the outside in. It was designed to serve the specific needs of an offline community. Because of its provenance as the online platform for Harvard students, it was crafted to serve very specific needs of how small connected groups of people interact.

And rather than being one size fits all, Facebook was designed to serve large numbers of micro-communities. The only thing you see inside facebook is what is going on inside your community of “friends.” Nothing feels extraneous. The people in my network matter to me and so what they are doing also matters. I don’t really care about the larger universe and inside facebook I am not exposed to it.

Facebook has a few critical features that have enabled it to serve the needs of a very large number of people.

First it is organized around networks. I am only a part of the Boston network, which I don’t really use. But I can imagine being actively involved in any workplace or college networks within facebook.

The next critical feature for me is the news-feed/mini-feed system. When I log into my facebook home page, I have an complete feed of all of the activity in among my collection of friends. So I can see things like which groups people have joined, which applications they have added, which events they are attending. I can also go to the home page of one of my friends and see a consolidated view of their activities. This is really at the heart of the facebook experience and is why I use facebook so extensively. I maintain a fairly large network of professional “friends” and it takes me almost no time and effort to keep up with what they are doing.

Facebook also enables the formation of groups with very flexible administration. Anyone can start a group. And groups that offer value grow extremely quickly. Groups are very tactical. And because they are so easy to form they can be used and then discarded. I am a member of a number of groups but I tend not to participate in them because they are not directly linked into my news feeds.

Facebook is completely integrated with your phone. I’m not a “texter” but I can see how using your phone as your interface could be very useful.

Finally Facebook has opened its API to third party applications. The Application Programming Interface allows third party apps to talk to Facebook. There are over 4,000 new applications on facebook now. I am using the iphoto/facebook integration tool which allows me to publish my photos from iPhoto directly to my facebook page.

While the initial applications that have been written to facebook are very much oriented to the consumer and for personal use, I imagine that there are applications in the pipeline geared to professionals. We are working on one for Swift our new platform for bringing conferences onto the Internet.

In my research on facebook I came across this very astute analysis by Peter Brantley at O’Reilly who says:

Regardless of the ultimate fate of Facebook, the set of characteristics that it has established - the sense of community; user control over the boundedness of openness; support for fine grained privacy controls; the ability to form ad-hoc groups with flexible administration; integration and linkage to external data resources and application spaces through a liberal and open API definition; socially promiscuous communication - these will be carried with us into future environments as expectations for online communities. Facebook is an empty wasteland for people who have not climbed over the hump of use. For those who have active community within it, it is this generation’s Lotus 1-2-3.

So I want to throw this out for discussion. Are you using Facebook? Do you agree with my analysis of its success? Do you believe it is this generation’s Lotus 1-2-3?

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I have been using Jungle Disk with Amazon's web services to provide back up to my computer files. Last week Jungle Disk issues a new release and it has finally achieved a reasonable user interface. I can easily set up automatic back up for my files. Once a week I back up my desktop — where I store new stuff — and my itunes music and iphoto libraries. Once a month I back up my Documents directory — where I store older stuff. Should the worst case scenario happen — my laptop is lost or stolen — I have a very good system for retrieving my critical files — no matter where I am.

Files are uploaded through an icon in the finder once you log into Jungle Disk. Files are limited to 5 gigs per file.

I am storing about 29 gigs at a cost of $3.29 per month.

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I am just returning back from a summer holiday (delayed by 4 days by a bad car in Indiana) and it feels like a good time to review what I learned this summer.
For me this was the summer of APIs and Facebook. We have been working to build our new Swift service for conference organizers and publishers. You can read about it here. As we were working on the user interface, Jaime Chamorro suggested that we use the Google API for managing our analytics and reporting. That suggestion opened up a whole area of exploration in using many web 2.0 api’s to manage all of the services that surround the core offering of a podcast directory. This is really a very new way to think about software. Rather than write all of these features into our platform, we are simply tying them in through their APIs (application programming interfaces).
As part of this process I’ve been actively exploring facebook and while it has some issues as a robust enterprise platform, it really is a very sophisticated communications and collaboration system. I like the way that when someone in my network adds an application or joins a group, I get notification of it through my facebook page. I look to others with more sophistication than I have to vet things for me and so when Andrew McAfee or David Cancel do something on facebook, I’m likely to explore it more deeply.
I also really like the group structure. Groups can be very easily formed and membership in them propagates rapidly across the network. I think this has a lot of potential for learning.
I’ve also really enjoyed working with Paul Fitzgerald this summer. I worked closely with Paul for over 10 years in the 80s and 90s and then he went off and bought an arts magazine which he has subsequently sold. He is now heading up the sales effort for Swift and it is a thorough pleasure to be working with him again. It makes such a big difference when you work with people you thoroughly trust and like so much. I’m glad to have Paul actively back in my work life.

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I am working on developing a boot camp called High Performing Web 2.0 and am testing Windows Live Writer as a blog posting tool. 

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