My mind races to paint a picture of what we’re likely to see next year and what I came up with, is this.

Economy continues to go deeper into recession as Barack Obama takes office in January 2009; the first stimulus package is passed by early Feb and the first money for stimulus flows out of the Tresuary in late April 2009. Unfortunately, the stimulus is too late to help the unemployed and nothing much happens.

A second stimulus happens in late 2009, but 2009 is already a wash out, and it’s not till spring of 2010 that employment starts to grow again, and not till 2011, before it recovers to a pre recession level. I think a third stimulus will happen in early 2010, and that will seal the recovery.

In all, about 2 Trillion Dollars will be spent over the next two years, trying to revive the economy, and that had nothing to do with stimulus going on in other countries at the same time.

I expect the usual challenges that everyone is talking about, but the problem is going to be, how to survive through 2010.

And the problem is that there’s going to be a lot of difficulty around “uncertainity” in when the economy will recover.

Maybe, the best thing Obama can do, at this point, for the economy is bring a sense of certainity back to the markets and to provide as many alternative energy jobs as he can create.

Of course, this is all my own views (no one else’s) and I may be all wet.

We’ll see.

Btw, this post was written on my iPhone, expect the usual spelling and grammar errors.

Jeff said he grew up feeling invisible, he also said he used to work at the Word Trade Center for Cantor Fitzgerld and had he stayed might have been dead (because he would have been up at the top of building 1 in the morning of September 11th).

It’s all about friendship (does some one ask you how you are when they greet you?).

Jeff talks about his kids (twins - 14 year old).

Jeffpulver.com

Where is it going now?

Social Media Jungle, last month.

Btw, I met Jeff Pulver at Leweb last year, but I’m not going this year, and neither is he. Jeff said he found Leweb big on ego and short on substance.

SoCal on Feb 10th and 11th at Puck Building, call for speakers till December 5th.

He is also taking Social Media Jungle on the road and set up breakfasts in 14 cities and invites people who are passionate and have an idea to paticipate or even join him on the road.

And Jeff Pulver says that Social Media is a lifestyle.

And Jeff is going to start doing evening events in 2009.

Ha! I’m glad I came today.

While there really should end up being just a few repositories of the data - instead of a zillion networks, Facebook is the closest to realizing a cloud that can touch most sites:

MySpace, Yahoo and Google have all announced similar programs this year, using common standards that will allow other Web sites to reduce the work needed to embrace each identity system. Facebook, which is using its own data-sharing technology, is slightly ahead of its rivals.   I think that’s a good thing, at least, for now.

In the next few weeks, a number of prominent Web sites will weave this service into their pages, including those of the Discovery Channel and The San Francisco Chronicle, the social news site Digg, the genealogy network Geni and the online video hub Hulu.

Facebook Connect is representative of some surprising new thinking in Silicon Valley. Instead of trying to hoard information about their users, the Internet giants have all announced plans to share at least some of that data so people do not have to enter the same identifying information again and again on different sites.

Supporters of this idea say such programs will help with the emergence of a new “social Web,” because chatter among friends will infiltrate even sites that have been entirely unsociable thus far.

On the other hand, assuming I did not advertise but just took the time to create meaninful content on these keyword phrases, maybe I’d get the traffic, except I would have to really streach what I’m writing about and maybe make up stuff I really don’t know very much about.

And I think that would be doing a disservice.

Or I could go and work on the Google Search Wiki for the keyword phases a care about and make sure I comment all over the place and make sure people know my point of view - and get traffic that way.

I would opt for the latter over the former - as this is the future of Search and is more honest and transparent, in my opinion.

My video footage and voiceovers are going to be used to annotate one of Paul Cezzane’s greatest paintings - Sous Bous - at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

I’ve been glowing about it for the last two weeks, and I got the first message about it on my birthday, November 9th.  While I’d like to go back to Aix (maybe next Spring, with Marsha Wooley’s Denver Art class - if she goes next year) - I decided to not go to LeWeb3 08 this year - even though I’ll be there in heart - because what I really wanted to see was more of Cezanne’s mountain.

Of course, it always helps to go with friends.  Anyway - here are the videos from my Paris and Aix Trip in June 2007 that attracted the attention that lead to this.

And here was my first day in Aix -

But then I came across an excellent post by Kevin Hillstrom on his MindThatData blog titled Measuring Paid Search, E-Mail, And Social Media Influence Via Matchbacks Kevin makes an excellent and very true point that….

” ….we don’t attribute orders to the emerging channels — we simply don’t have business rules to do this, so we attribute orders to the most established channels. But if we focus on influenced sales, we notice that channels like e-mail and paid search and social media play a bigger role, helping cause an order to happen.”

Got it - that’s one of the problems we have to overcome - we simply don’t have the Business Rules set up for MatchBack Attribution where Online Activity, perhaps, precursors (or Co-Enzyme’s according to me) are given credit - because the Business Rules aren’t yet developed to measure those things and assign a value to it.

If you follow the examples in Kevin’s post - and use attribution that he applies in this example - what we get is this:

Each quarter, we produce a table that illustrates, for each channel, direct attributed sales, and influenced sales.

Influenced sales make a huge difference in viewing a “mutlichannel strategy”. In the illustration above, e-mail, paid search and social media are key influencers. They do not get direct ROI attribution, but are clearly used by the customer as part of the purchase process. From a strategic standpoint, these channels should receive strategic attention. Or maybe catalog marketing should not receive direct credit for all orders!

	Direct Sales	Influenced Sales	Index
Catalog Marketing	$10,000,000	$1,200,000	0.12
E-Mail Marketing	$1,000,000	$4,000,000	4.00
Paid Search	$2,000,000	$4,000,000	2.00
Other Online Marketing	$1,000,000	$1,000,000	1.00
Social Media	$100,000	$3,000,000	30.00
Mobile Marketing	$100,000	$1,000,000	10.00

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.

Found it hard to post much to any of my blogs today, even thought I tried - my mind was “tired”, yet I did post - but mostly to Facebook.

What I found was that I had ideas that I shared with a friend or two, or responded to my Facebook News Feed, either to sign up for events I’ll go to next week or to comment back on posts to my wall, or as a comment to something I posted earlier.

And that got me thinking of what I was doing was giving back though interacting with my Social Media feeds as opposed to blogging, so to speak.

In fact, that’s one thing I notice about Robert Scoble, with all the posts he shares in Google Reader with me, sometimes, what he’s doing in that way, touches me a lot more than his actual blog posts - and his notes on the posts he is sharing is often more contextually relevant to me than his writings, which I tend not to read all that much.

In like manner, I found myself putting more energy into sharing stories in Google Reader and taking the time to post a note with the share (that gets picked up by Friendfeed and also goes into my Facebook Profile (feed)),  plus developing relationships with real and virtual friends that might not be immediately tangible yet, function as a precursor or co-enzyme, to action.

I could have as easily just written focused on posting to my blogs - but instead, I found my self interacting with my Facebook News feed - or emailing a friend, or perhaps I would twitter  something (I didn’t, today) - and much of that activity would appear to be invisible (even though it’s not) - maybe some of it shows up in my Friendfeed - but all the work I did - what I gave, is just as important as any blog post (what about an iPhone painting?) I might do.

Hey, I’m not looking for the wisdom of crowds…

So, I want to put forward two ways of looking at giving, along with if that co-relates to Engagement, or not.

Today, my “giving” or engagement with interacting with my Facebook News Feed, was externally driven -  today is Thanksgiving Holiday (or was the Thanksgiving Holiday - it’s actually early Friday morning as I write this), if I was at work, or if it was another day, maybe I’d not be interacting with my Social Media feeds as much; I don’t think the externally driven factor and be ignored - it has to be a factor.

The other thing I want to put forward is a way to evaluate involvement in Social Media - the simplest way, at this point, is to co-relate the following :

1. Time spent on Social Media Site (compared to all the time spent online) - note, that can be looked at individually (all the time I spent on Social Media vs. all the time I spent online, period) - or in mass, all the time the internet population spent on Social Media vs. what they spend on the rest of their online activities.

I’m even willing to forget the number of times Social Media sites are visited vs. all sites.  By the way, looks like MySpace is having a problem since February - people are spending substantially less time there.

2. The number conversations taking place (this could be measured by the instances of interacting with a feed, such as the Facebook News Feed, or Twitter (Feed) or Friendfeed.  You can probably add them all up - and compare them to the overall internet audience.

The problem is that most of the conversation activity won’t show up - it’s AJAX, every time I comment on my Facebook or Friendfeed - a new page is not generated - for now, I need a proxy for conversations and the best I can come up with is Page views per visit - but it’s a poor proxy - but better than none at all.

There is some interesting research on Facebook that says that some activities you do are more “engaging” by nature than others (see this video clip to get a sense of that)

Perhaps this can all be combined into one metric - but what this really gets back to is there are many activities that are precursors to Social Media, to Engagment, in fact, but that are not measured - you can say the act of “Engagement” makes the assumption what ever needed to preceed it, happened.

But I would think that you do need to measure what preceeds an event or action - hey, I can take an exam and ace it, but doesn’t it also count how much I studied for it?

Anyway, enough of this for tonight - I just wanted to close out today by giving Thanks to all my friends, to my family and give form to the idea that we need to look at the whole picture.

I’ve found, it’s really hard to translate from one medium to another - the painting looks one way on the iPhone, when it’s saved on a laptop, it looks a lot duller.   I tried to get the painting to look as much like it really looks to me, while I did it.

Also I put a link to the Collecting Smiles site so you can see how I painted it.

Personally, I’d be fine with the Death of SEO, as expressed in Marketing Pilgrim -

Google’s SearchWiki Is Here To Stay: Is This The Death of SEO?

Yeah, I’m so sick of Search Conferences that try to take the same gruel and, over and over again, repeat the “dogma“, the usual link stuff, content stuff, reputation stuff.

According to a report from Danny Sullivan it looks like Google’s much talked about SearchWiki is here to stay. Most of the clammer about this new Google feature is focused around a user’s inability to turn it off. While there are several browser plugins available to hide the SearchWiki functions, for most users the SearchWiki is now a permanent part of the Google search experience.

Google’s SearchWiki is a new feature that allows for users to organize search results and make comments. The reorganized results only show up for the user that made the changes, but the comments are made public.

While it seems that most are concerned about turning the SearchWiki off, few have highlighted the effects that this new feature will have on SEO.

At first when I read about SearchWiki I thought that this was the end of SEO. How am I supposed to implement the perfect strategy to manipulate SERPs when all users have to do is click arrows? But now, I think its anything but that.

Now that users are given the ability to reorganize search results it means that listings on the first page are much more valuable. Here’s why: after a user has selected a handful of listings that they send to the top of their SERP, they have effectively locked out the rest of the listings.

Also, the user’s selected listings are saved based on URL, meaning that if another search query is run where the same URL comes up, then the listing/URL is automatically at the top.

Meanwhile, Google is there, listening to whatever anyone is saying and then telling you to forget about 99% of it and just focus on content.

Well, at least, Google came up with a meaningful alternative in the Search Wiki - and it was just what the Doctor ordered.  I lost confidence in Google for a while - but with the Search Wiki - I gained it back.