Digital Biographer™

Live, Utterances, mobile, share, sound, streams

Live, Utterances, mobile, share, sound, streams

Bessie is here!

I was delighted to have Fedex bang at my door a little earlier today - and guess what - a whole bagload of goodies from Utterz.com!

I really appreciate this, and of course, my small promotion of Utterz.com is now ready to continue - Bessie will be appearing in a few unexpected places and may be becoming a moovie star in the future.

Thanks to Randy and everyone who helps to make the mooves at Utterz!
Mobile post sent by davidpetherick using Utterz.  Replies.

Live, Utterances, mobile, share, sound, streams

Live, Utterances, mobile, share, sound, streams

Live, Utterances, mobile, share, sound, streams

Live, Utterances, mobile, share, sound, streams

Live, Utterances, mobile, share, sound, streams

Live, Utterances, mobile, share, sound, streams

Live, Utterances, mobile, share, sound, streams

You may have noticed some sound files being added to this blog over the past few days. Well, you’re not alone - the people who run Utterz.com seem to have noticed too, and have created a rotating banner for the site that advertises my content.

I am deeply flattered, and felt the need to reciprocate the attention by writing a little about the site - click the image below to see why I find Utterz such a useful resource to enhance my personal brand online, and do add your own comments when you see the full-size image - you can do so easily thanks to the great Skitch application. I also enjoy the humorous cow metaphor subtly used throughout the site, where Utterz = Udders (Geddit?), so you can ‘be herd, add ‘mooving’ pictures etc.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
Click image for full-size view and to add your comments and thoughts

My Utterz Profile: http://www.utterz.com/~h-davidpetherick/profile.php
HTTV Shortcut: http://httv.biz/utterz/

Utterances, authors, brand, corporate blogs, digital biographer, googlicious, online identity, share, social media, sound, streams digital biographer, personal brand, sound, utterances, video

Live, Utterances, mobile, share, sound, streams

A formal announcement has been made today that Yahoo!, Microsoft, Verisign, Google and IBM will all join the OpenID Foundation as Board Members.

What exactly is OpenID? The way they put it at MyOpenID, which is one of many OpenID providers, is simple and compelling: “Start using the last username and password you’ll ever need. Signing up with myOpenID gets you:

• Secure control of your digital identity
• Easy sign-in on enabled sites
• Account activity reports
• Ability to manage multiple personas for different sites, and a whole lot more!”

I think we all find it very useful to be able to just need to remember one sign-in for many different web sites - and it’s also useful to be able to control the level of information and detail that people can see associated with a ‘persona’ - I can choose to have different information and types of information available for my different social and business ‘personas’. It also means that you can more easily update your details, and not worry that dozens of different sites have what might be out-of-date information.

Yahoo enabled openID a few weeks ago, as reported at TheNextWeb Blog, and with this announcement, OpenID seems to be close to becoming the global industry standard for online identity, where a single sign-on will allow access to entirely separate resources, and it should also increase the security of one’s personal identity, and lessen the scope for phishing and ID theft. The OpenID announcement is rightfully bullish about the progress thats been made.

Last year, OpenID grew by leaps and bounds both as a technology and as a community. At the beginning of 2006, there were fewer than 20-million OpenID enabled URLs and less than 500 websites where they could be used. Today there are over a quarter of a billion OpenIDs and well over 10,000 websites to accept them.

At the same time, they also acknolwedge that although Yahoo!’s implentation was a good start, there is still a job to do to make OpenID “clear and comprehensible to those who aren’t geeks.”

So, is OpenID clear?

2.0, commerce, online identity, share, social media

Live, Utterances, mobile, share, sound, streams audio, profile tips, tips, top ten, Utterances

I was impressed to see Prime Minister Gordon Brown is on Twitter, albeit unofficially hooked up via the 10 Downing Street Web Site RSS feeds. So I added Gordon to those whose tweet nothings I listen in to, so that I can find out what they are up to in real time…

However, it looks like’s Gordon’s idea of real time is a little behind mine. At 15:24, I got notice of his morning press briefing, as shown below. Hey Gordon, it’s the afternoon!

It appears that morning press briefings are only made public in the afternoon. It does take some time to write these things up, I suppose. And then one must have lunch, then check them again, of course…

Actually, I’ll get back to you on this story later…

2.0, e-government, share, social media, streams downing street, gordon brown, rss, tweets, Twitter, twitterfeed

I first got involved in online business around 1995, when I first bought a copy of .net magazine, after I got curious about a startup company in the next room of our business centre, who said they were hosting websites.

Back in 1995, most business people I spoke to didn’t know what a website was, let alone what a good one would look like, so I started to learn how to code HTML using a highly sophisticated tool called ‘Notepad‘, and registered some domain names where a committee of actual people decided on whether or not I could own a particular domain name…

By 1998, I was designing and managing sites for companies like The Alba Centre (a Silicon Glen incubator) Scottish Financial Enterprise, The British Blood Transfusion Society, and for dozens of conferences a year.

Of course, the dot com bubble burst around 2000-2001, with so much money following ridiculously optimistic business plans, but many survivors from that period are still strong and active today.

Here comes something new…
But around about 2003, a new type of web site started to appear, as what I considered to be a natural evolution coinciding with the high penetration of broadband internet connections into homes and businesses: sites with features that broadly are known as Web 2.0…

These sites allowed the addition of comment, collaboration, and content from those that use the sites. Blogs began to break news ahead of mainstream media, comments about a book by readers offered more credibility than publishers’ puff, and people began to use video sharing, file sharing, mobile access… and social networks.

Where we stand today, site concepts and names that did not exist a few short years ago are massively successful, and the numbers in monetary terms, and this time around, also in end user terms, are massive. YouTube. Facebook. MySpace. PayPal. Skype. Last.fm. Bebo. And the older companies (hardly business veterans, any of them) still have some smart moves and serious revenue - Amazon, EBay, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft.

New entities like Twitter, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Pownce, Slide, Notchup and Ning are growing rapidly in online areas that simply could not be conceived a few years ago. The barriers to entry for sites that can grow virally are lower than they ever have been before, and a new breed of VC is eager to find and fund the next big success - and these VCs are not just in the Valley. They are in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Zurich, Milan, Tel Aviv, Stockholm, Dublin, and beyond…

The Next Web HotSpot
This combination of factors forms the business and intellectual hot spot where The Next Web has grown since its inaugural conference in Amsterdam in 2006. This is the showcase for the best of the new web, debating the next moves, providing a forum for the key thinkers, best commentators and important players to meet, and creating a momentum in its own right that has led to thenextweb blog becoming a highly regarded source of news and critical commentary for entrepreneurial startups, VCs and industry commentators in Europe and beyond.

Last year’s Next Web conference included speakers such as Scott Rafer, CEO of MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo), Rod Beckström, author of the #4 best business book of 2006 (Amazon Editors’ Picks). Deborah Schultz, former Marketing Director for Six Apart, Dick Hardt, Founder and CEO of Sxip Identity, Michael Arrington of Techcrunch, one of the most influential individuals and investors in the Web 2.0 sphere, Marc Canter, founder of MacroMind and Broadband Mechanics, Tariq Krim, founder and CEO of Netvibes, Felix Petersen, founder and CEO of Plazes.com, Saul Klein, Venture Partner at Index Ventures, VP of Skype and a Founding Partner of the OpenCoffee Club, Tapan Bhat, Yahoo!’s vice president of Front Doors, driving strategy, product management and programming for the primary starting points to Yahoo!, Jeff Clavier, one of Silicon Valleys finest, most respected and leading investors.

This year… more than 700 delegates are anticipated from over 20 countries, and confirmed speakersRobert Scoble, Tech Geek Blogger & Author of ‘Naked Conversations‘, Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, and Gil Penchina, CEO at Wikia, and Leah Culver, Co-founder and Lead Developer of Pownce, a social messaging application.

Amsterdam’s ease of access from all over Europe, its cosmopolitan charm and essential cool also add to the list of very good reasons to attend this compelling conference.

Those on the organisers’ wish-list (to be confirmed) include Meg Whitman, President and CEO, eBay; Marissa Mayer - Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google; John Battelle - Author ‘The Search’; Esther Dyson; Loïc Le Meur - Executive Vice President and General Manager Six Apart Europe, Marc Andreessen - Serial Entrepreneur, founder of Netscape; Kathy Sierra - co-creator of the bestselling Head First series; Nicolas Negroponte - co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of the MIT Media Laboratory; Eric Meyer - Standards Evangelist; Jason Fried - co-founder, 37signals.com; Kevin Rose - Founder and Chief Architect Digg; Dave Sifry - CEO, technorati; Jon Udell - Web/Internet consultant and author; Jeff Jarvis - Blogger, journalist, publisher and columnist; Chris Anderson - Author ‘The Long Tail’ Jim Clark - Serial Entrepreneur (Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon, etc); Dave Winer - Software developer, author, blogger.

The time is now…
I’m going to be there, because I can’t think of a more interesting and exciting time for developments in the online sphere. Everything is in flux, and the recent aggressive takeover bid for Yahoo! from Microsoft just goes to show that change, evolution and revolution have become ‘business as usual’.

The inexorable rise in online commerce (97% of those online in the UK bought online in 2007) lets everyone know that the new business battlegrounds are almost all digital, and this conference focuses on who’s going to be providing the tactics, the new weapons, and where the battle lines will be drawn.

Two years ago, around 10 percent of the world’s population (627 million) had shopped online. Today, this figure is up 40 percent to 875 million. Source: The Neilsen Company

See you at The Next Web. Visit
http://2008.thenextweb.org/register/ to register - Early Bird Registrants save €200 on registration for this 2-day event.

• Follow The Next Web at Twitter - http://twitter.com/nextweblog

2.0, Conferences, Radio, brand, digital biographer, share, social media, startup, thenextweb