Gee - TechCrunch had a post today on When Everyone Is A Blogger, Nothing You Say Is Off The Record.

In a way, isn’t that what we’re moving to?  With Google Search Wiki - I could pretty much comment on any url from any search result, and anyone else who wants to see my comments can.

Look, this story about a Belgian Diplomat and a New York Based blogger is pretty interesting in the level of “over reaction” that happened - here’s the story, according to TechCrunch:

Current Belgian Minister of Defense Pieter De Crem apparently stumbled into a Belgian bar in New York City on Monday evening with his entourage.

Ha, ha, guess he was drunk, or something … anyway - here’s the rest of it….

Following his visit, bartender Nathalie Lubbe Bakker blogged about their visit (in Dutch), talking about how disgusted she was of how drunk De Crem was and how embarrassed she was about his behavior. Worst part, she wrote, was the fact that one of the politician’s advisers admitted to her that the meetings they were there for on taxpayer’s money were in fact canceled because the UN was meeting in Geneva (which is about 330 miles from Brussels).

Clearly, one of the Diplomat’s advisers was out of line - and talked about a sensitive issue in a bar - which unfamiliar people.

He reportedly told her they had decided to come to NY anyway despite being aware of the cancellation because the policital situation here was ‘calm’ and that he’d ‘never visited the city anyway’.

A couple of days later, someone from De Crem’s office had a telephone call with Nathalie’s boss, after which she was promptly fired. This was initially denied by the politician, and it remains unclear if her termination was a direct result of the call or the blog post in question.

Somehow, the story was picked up and got a lot of attention from local bloggers and the mainstream media, which ultimately lead to the Minister having to defend himself about the NY trip in Parliament.

That’s how it is with Social Media happens - it’s the democratization of information - everyone can share - there is total transparency - and it can’t be controlled easily, if at all - but if people relax about it - it’s much easier to influence.

Yesterday, he made a statement to the Parliament admitting that a call was made but that there was never any insinuation about the girl getting fired from her job (which makes me wonder why the call was made at all then).

But then, the story unfolds some more and it ends us being blamed on the Blogger -according to what I just read in TechCrunch:

He also stated:

I want to take this opportunity and use this non-event to signal a dangerous phenomenon in our society. We live in a time where everybody is free to publish whatever he or she wants on blogs at will without taking any responsibility. This exceeds mud-slinging. Together with you, other Parliament members and the government I find that it’s nearly impossible to defend yourself against this. Everyone of you is a potential victim. I would like to ask you to take a moment and think about this.

De Crem added that he’s asked his legal counsel to see which measures could be taken to ‘defend his integrity’.

Needless to say, his statements indicating that ‘blogging is a dangerous phenomenon’ spurred a lot of angry (and funny) reactions in the local blogosphere, making the situation for him much worse than it already was (much like that German politician who blocked the local wikipedia.de website).

Let me just say this - is a blogger now sopposed to go out and get training on what he or she can or can’t say?

The TechCrunch Blogger Robin Wauters takes the point of view that it’s not Blogging that is a problem for the Belgian Diplomat, but that he comes from a culture and time that doesn’t know what to do with this kind of media - and treats it like a news story or news leak, when it’s sharing a personal experience in a blog.

People, and especially politicians representing them, need to wake up and smell the coffee. The world is changing, and blogging is now a big part of it, with all of its good sides as well as its bad ones. Live and learn. The sooner you get the hang of social media, the more you’ll see the opportunities in there rather than the threats.

To be totally honest, I would not be offended if there was some sort of Guidelines no so much what we can say, and what we can’t, but what information needs to be included.  For example, would it have helped if Nathalie Lubbe Bakker pulled at a Flip Digital Camera and filmed the statements?  Or would that be more damaging.

And if the Dimplomat’s party really felt pissed - maybe they should have been more open about it at home, instead of a Belgian bar in NYC - but that’s another story.

I was at  the New Work City Kickoff Party Saturday night for a new CoWorking space in Manhattan, the first, actually.   Meant to write about this earlier but life got in the way (and maybe, the NYC Marathon, Sunday).

However, ReadWriteWeb has a Coworking Roundup… explaining what Coworking is all about … basicly, people who could work at home but would rather work in a group setting, sharing the costs.  People need social contact and work is often better done in the company of others than alone.   Here’s the information on New Work City, on 200 Varrick Street.

Here’s some photos I took on Saturday night

Tara Hunt

Guy from Berkeley, Tony, etc.

Sanford

I think it’s going to be interesting to see how many people use the Manhattan Coworking space; I had no idea Brooklyn had a CoWorking space in Williamsburg, right near Bedford Avenue.

At this time, I have no need of Coworking, personally, but I can see it as an alternative to some businesses that actually rent office space now.

Couldn’t sleep, maybe it was the spiced up Italian food I had for dinner last night, or just maybe it’s the Global Markets of Britian, Germany and France that are down an average of -5% morning, suggesting Monday will be another day of losses in the Dow - all too familiar by now - and nail biting.

Nope, reading my RSS Feeds in Google Reader this morning, as my stomach churns, is a Twitter message (which can be one of my “feeds”) telling me about a depressing New York Times article about Facebook…..

“…Awkward piece in NYTimes Magazine makes me never want to organize / attend Facebook meetup: http://tr.im/l4w [Via @serial_consign's blog.]

Actually, the article is titled Facebook in a Crowd and reminds me of three facts - 1) that few virtual friends are going to show up when you set up an event AND 2)  Facebook and a few other Web 2.0 services, are going to be part of the new “glue”  that holds us together as the World Financial System unravels, perhaps, entirely. 3) Maybe there’s a way to measure the influence of a “virtual friend” or an “event” by holding one of them and seeing “who actually shows up”.

As I get tired, and ready to try to go back to bed again, with that sinking feeling that may be part my own exhaustion and part what is going on in the world, or even with my friends, a few that have just been “let go”, and even the uncertainty of anyone’s financial future right now (including my own), even as my body is telling me it’s time to sleep again … my thoughts go to 2 OP-ED articles appear in Monday’s New York Times.

In Paul Krugman’s Widening Gyre there’s the crisis of the emerging markets to get my stomach to churn again, and get dizzy, along with some poetry to go with it, according to Krugman, the Hedge Funds are now failing and it’s taking down developing markets, that were thinking, even recently, of decoupling and thriving as the West declined  ….. but that is not to be … because….

“…..as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

The widening gyre, in this case, would be the feedback loops (so much for poetry) causing the financial crisis to spin ever further out of control. The hapless falconer would, I guess, be Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary.

And the gyre continues to widen in new and scary ways. Even as Mr. Paulson and his counterparts in other countries moved to rescue the banks, fresh disasters mounted on other fronts.

“….The really shocking thing, however, is the way the crisis is spreading to emerging markets — countries like Russia, Korea and Brazil.”

And if that didn’t finish me off, and give me more fatigue to go back to bed - William Cohen writes in  “Shoot the Horses?” that ….

“….a banker friend, and he told me the “unraveling” could go on for ages. I thought he meant the unwinding of all the leverage that had inflated everything from the price of stocks to the price of homes.

But, just to be sure, I asked him: “Unraveling of what?”

He paused, before saying, “Almost our way of life.”

A friend of his, he went on, has a horse farm north of New York City. “I told him, for heaven’s sake, you have to get rid of your horses. Shoot them if necessary.”

That got me thinking.

Are we going to be living on horse meat before we get to the bottom of this?”

Now, I’m really getting dizzy and need to sleep, again, when I read further down in the article:

“…. It’s really a wonder, when you think about it, that there are still two guys in the race to become U.S. president, pulling out all the stops in these last eight days of campaigning to be chosen as the one to face the nightmare.

Let’s fast-forward a year to October 2009. The U.S. unemployment rate stands at 10 percent. Crime is up across the country. The economy is shrinking. No arm-twisting from the Treasury has managed to restore the broken confidence between borrowers and lenders. Banks, the few still standing, are holding fast to their cash. Property prices are down more than 25 percent from current levels.

The Dow is still heading south as people get used to the idea of stocks trading at no more than 10 times earnings, rather than the much higher ratios our former leveraged world delivered.

New buildings stand empty all over New York because at the end of a boom — that’s to say right now — a lot of new construction comes to market. Exports, long a bright spot in the economy, have plummeted because of a rising dollar. The deficit and national debt stand at unprecedented levels.

The hedge fund industry is decimated — its model of flipping cheap borrowings into leveraged bets around the world has blown up — and one desperate, even contrite, former master of the universe has just sold a Rauschenberg for $9 million less than he paid in 2004.

People still have way too much debt, and the collateral for it keeps evaporating. They are angry. Civil unrest is stirring.

I ask you, Senator McCain, Senator Obama, do you still want the job?”

To finish me off, but give us some hope again, maybe a new WPA program, a New York Times Editorial: As China Goes covers how China is doing what we should be, and spending money to stimulate it’s own economy, and support it’s people, which seems like we need to emulate, and hopefully, will emulate soon, with new leadership:

“….To get China’s consumers to spend, the government will need to spend more at home, investing in public works projects and providing more social benefits — including health insurance and pensions — so its citizens don’t feel they have to save so much for a rainy day.

This is clearly in Beijing’s interest, though China’s leaders are still clinging to the old export strategy.

China is already feeling the impact of a slower world economy. Both economic growth and export growth have braked sharply. The slowdown threatens job creation, direly needed to absorb millions of rural Chinese seeking employment in the cities.”

If anything, all of this stuff I read, which helped my stomach churn, or made it stop, is meant to highlight just how interconnected our world is now - how different it was from 1929 or 1932, in that those systems that were put in place to prevent the Great Unraveling that his happening now, were meant to safeguard on a national level - but no one thought the world would be so interconnected then, as it is now.

And now, time for bed, again - if only for a few hours - till I wake up and read the news, all over again.

Final session at WordCamp NYC tonight, and I’m totally saturated, especially with the subject of the last post on security, plus, I did not cover Jen Simmonds who spoke about Video on Wordpress.

Jeremy started at NYT in 2006, in April 2006, started launching blogs at NYT, 152 at present. Active blogs are being written to once a month (65 blogs).

The idea is blogs that are presently not written to (sessions, like Tennis) are still valuable is something the speaker had to win support for.

When a stakeholder came to ask for a blog to develop content and concept, you end up being their therapist, it takes a lot of effort to explain blogs. There are about 500 bloggers at the New York Times, many can’t even operate the default dashboard.

There is a smarter way to deal with this; people need attention to grow, and giving them the right attention to grow.

The Dry Method - documentation on how to use the product could be put in a single place, so when dealing with stakeholders, you can interact at the most important level if their need.

90% of our time is based on administration with people and it seems to make sense to streamline it.

Communities that read a NYT blogs, a particular blogger, building tools for more meaningful discussions.

The Annotated ….. Post a entire speech, then have readers comment on what they read, then take a reference to the comment as a link back to the comment from that section.

Most blogs at the NYT today are at 2.5.

Paul Krugman’s blog is posting several times a week and his column is published twice a week, so a distinction between opinion vs commentary vs blogging.

We started an internal blog at the NYT called “On The Blogs” to distill information about blogging so it doesn’t need to be repeated over and over again, with every new stakeholder.

Well, I feel I have covered as much as I could today and iwabt to catch a SMX East party tonight, briefly, before heading home.

It’s hard being an artist - and even harder to confess I don’t know where that path will lead (right now, no where in particular) - I did a long post on the difficulties of being an artist at one of my other blogs where I write about Art, when I have something to say …  Yet more thoughts about painting when it’s hard to paint.

My post about the difficulties with Art is worth a read, especially if you liked my recent thoughts about engagement mapping and social media monitoring.

But here’s the thing - I have been thinking of Art from the standpoint of a solitary creator, which I often, am, - and running into dead ends and ruts - but little has been written, from a Social Media perspective about Art (I know some will dispute that - but given all the creativity we’ve seen in media campaigns - you’d think some of that would filter beyond, say, the ITP program at NYU, but I haven’t really seen it presented that way, at least, not that I’m aware of.   I also don’t see anything really out there, in Social Media, that’s there to “support” artists - in the way I describe in my post on Yet more thoughts about painting when it’s hard to paint.

Recently, an artist friend of mine, Scott Draves, who I’ve interviewed here and on my other blogs, created, what I’d consider, in retrospect, to be “Social Art” or Art that is User Generated, via the Electric Sheep Screen saver which is altered by all those who are running the software.   The funny thing is, there seems to be almost nothing written on how Social Media can support or enhance art, or artists.

No doubt, it’s easy to see why …. besides all the problems I alluded to in my post on why it’s hard to paint (above), taking time out to do Social Media, to even figure it out - would be a major drain against the time to do art … unless, as an artist, Social Media became part of the way you do art and promote yourself.   In a post at Beth’s Blog on Backtype: Another Listening Tool - Who’s Talking About You In The Blog Comments? Beth Kanter explains just how much time Social Media takes.

I think, in a way Scott Draves stumbled upon User Generated and Social Media before those labels were applied in the way they commonly are, today; the video I embedded here is worth viewing.

Anyway, I wanted to finish up this post (I’ll be at WordCamp NYC on Sunday, October 5th, 2008) by saying that Social Media ought to be used, in a more constructive manner, to bring artists and colloboration together - and perhaps, to deal with some of the issues I wrote about at Yet more thoughts about painting when it’s hard to paint.

A lot of my friends are in Las Vegas at this moment, there various parties focusing around BlogWorld - I had the chance to go but passed on it - particularly the party tonight at the Hard Rock Cafe thrown by Buzzlogic, I would have gone to LV just for that - but I found that I simply can’t do it all - at least, because I’m not totally a master of my own time. I found some early footage of Blogworld here - BlogworldExpo 2008, Las Vegas Warm-up.

And in a way, Blogworld would have been great for me to attend, as Sebastian and I are building our BlogSpeedWay.com blog network.

With all the activity of late - and a new Press Pass to SMX East (have to work out how I’m going to attend it) and waiting to hear back about LeWeb3 08 (I’d like to speak) and SES Chicago - plus attending Emetrics DC …. you’d think I had enough. But the reality is - I haven’t.

I got the speaking bug and want to go all the way with it.

Having said that, this week was full of activity here in New York and some of it was at Web 2.0 and I did take some video of the show but didn’t get a chance to upload it - that will be later this weekend. I gave my pass to a friend for today as I knew I would not attend on Friday - and it sounds like the best was left for last - according to a post at UgoTrade

O’Reilly: “What Will You Do With Web 2.0?”

Tish does really good posts that are well researched and thought out - and people say that I write a lot!

Actually, I had some excellent sessions today at OMMA Global and am glad I went - though I did miss the ComScore Breakfast - but I more than made up for it with the other sessions and meetings I had.

And that reminds me about one more thing - I crystallized some feelings and ideas I’ve had for a while today - and it happened as I left OMMA Global today.

For one thing - I’ve had a tightrope to walk - but won’t go into the details - however, I will say that I work best when I can define myself, my own role, and how I execute tasks, decide what is important organize my role in that fashion.

My sense, however, is that no organization is fully going to allow that. Sad about that, though I understand why that is.

I’ve got a lot of distractions these days, just a lot of things going on, and I like what  Gary Vaynerchuk has to say (literally) about not being scared of being distracted.

It’s possible I might run into Vaynerchuk at Web 2.0 or a related event next week.

I’ve been back in New York most of the day; still trying to figure out Webmetricsguru.com disparity between RSS Feed traffic stats/ Sitemeter stats and overall, getting the site looked at by Google after the damange Know More Media did to it.

It’s nice to finally be in the control of my blog - though I am waiting on some things such as the template update (which hasn’t happened yet), some plugins to be added and stuff like that.

Meanwhile, I had some footage I took from South Park and Buzzlogic’s offices yesterday that I just uploaded.

I was thinking how much Web 2.0 (which may include Web 2.0 and Web 4.0 and maybe even Web 5.0 - whatever that is actually called) is about peer to peer sharing of data with users and the generation of wealth from the content those users create on a site.

Having that in mind, having South Park called the “Center of Web 2.0″, along with good coffee, as you an see in my video, peeked my interest to know more.

Yeah, I saw the original home of Twitter and how people are relaxing in South Park - how culture in San Francisco for techonology is alive and strong.

On the other hand, I’d still much rather live in New York City - but I can see why many people like San Francisco.

Still tired from the trip - and I can’t believe I’ll be out in Hollywood in 10 days for Virtual Worlds Hollywood.

Hope you enjoyed the online video, by the way!

I think How Does Facebook Know I'm Jewish? post by David Berkowitz was pretty amusing and interesting - I've meet David at several conferences and events in New York over the last 3 years or so, most recently, last week.

David saw this ad

I'm Jewish too, but I've never seen that ad, and I'm on Facebook, alot. David was intrigued - was this some new targeting capability that Facebook turned on and he didn't know about yet?  He wrote in his blog post:

"…But how? How did it do it? I don't list my religion (or my politics) on my Facebook profile. I don't even have those Israeli flag Facebook apps.

Some plausible theories are that the marketer used some combination of targeting around my city (New York), alma mater (Binghamton) and entertainment interests (The Daily Show, Seinfeld, Everything Is Illuminated).

Some less plausible theories: top secret Jew-havioral targeting algorithms… perhaps that's what'll be unleashed at Facebook's F8 next week.

Or it's just targeting people who look Jewish. I tried calling and emailing Katan Adventures, which ran the ad."

Turns out the answer was less complicated than one would have supposed - but via the power of Social Media - the targeting worked more powerfully than if it had reached David via some other way, I feel.  According to his blog:

"..Here's what Katan wrote back:

Hey David -

I assume you are from NY?  In order to reach Jews who haven't listed their religion on Facebook (which, by the way, is the vast majority) we run ads in metro areas with large Jewish populations and try to grab their attention with ridiculous lines such as "hey jew" but we obviously get a lot of wasted clicks with this strategy as well.   And some angry emails.

Seinfeld fans is a good idea though.  And maybe Zabar's fans, but I'm sure that is a small group.

Thanks for your interest and if you ever want to pass along any online marketing ideas, we'd love to hear them.

 

So … just by using an established way of targeting, along with Social Networks - the result became more powerful and more personal.

That reminds me - I wrote a post about just how powerful Social Media can be in

Nikki Shannon LIVE @ The Cutting Room - Social Media Worked!

Last week I went to a tech karaoke event just before the 4th of July - it was a lot of fun and I took footeage of it but didn't have a chance to put it up - now I am.

Tweetups I go to in New York City are alot of fun - (I wish I spoke and photographed better on my own footage - oh well, some people have the gift of that, and I'm not one of them)

The interesting thing is a lot of top technical people are the people who I socialize with - and I would say, there's a lot one can gain from having fun, and learn about what's hot in technology.

Besides, I had a good time, and my new WAA Co-Chair, Leticia Colen, was sitting to my right - (I have 3 co-chairs now for the Social Media Committee of the WAA).