Digital Biographer™ » mainstream media

Hot diggidy, here’s Dipity! Great free interactive timeline toolkit. August 20, 2008

Posted by David Petherick in : 2.0, NewsPapers, authors, blonging, digital biographer, microblogging, share, social media, streams ,

Sometimes, a name escapes you. This name escaped me when I was referring to an online tool that let you create your own private or public timeline of data, images, or references. Digiddy? Diggedy? Dittley? Bo Diddley? It just did not come to the front of my mind.

The name I was looking for was “Dipity“. Below, you can see how the increasing online-savvy LiverPool Post has made a timeline of 20.08.2008 to celebrate Liverpool’s year as City of Culture.

The service from Dipity is a great way to share images, text and video, and place them into a contextual container which automatically assumes an interactive timeline format. It’s an excellent way to tell a story about an event in a linear patten, but with non-linear input from amny different sources or individual contributors, and it’s worth visiting the site to see some examples of how Dipity is being used.

I’m working on some projects that involve usind Dipity and some of its associated ‘mashup tools‘ to illustrate an individual’s biography and ‘lifestream’ as outlined at British Blogcasting Corporation - and this is, of course, almost made for anything you’d want to call a ‘digital biography‘!

Why it’s taken me 13 years to decide to attend The Next Web this April in Amsterdam… February 4, 2008

Posted by David Petherick in : 2.0, Conferences, Radio, TV, brand, digital biographer, share, social media, startup, thenextweb ,

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

Listen to the Digital Biographer now on BBC Radio Wales August 13, 2007

Posted by David Petherick in : Radio, digital biographer, ecademy, mainstream media, online identity, social media, sound ,

I was pleased to hear that my interview with Adam Walton of BBC Radio Wales yesterday sounded good, was a good three minutes longer than expected, and was ‘top of the hour’ as the lead story.

The programme first went out on Sunday 12th August, is repeated Wednesday, 15th August, and was online in the archive to listen to for a week. You can listen in online (I take up around the first 8 minutes) by clicking the arrow below.

I’d like to thank Broadcaster and Speaker Jeremy Nicholas for his first class advice on preparing for, and handling this radio interview.

Digital Biographer on BBC Radio Wales - Sunday 12th August August 9, 2007

Posted by David Petherick in : Radio, digital biographer, ecademy, mainstream media, online identity, social media ,

I’ve no idea how the 25 minutes or so I spent talking with Adam Walton of BBC Radio Wales yesterday will be edited down to perhaps 5, but we had a good old chat.

There were of course questions related to identity, and I had to clarify that I don’t handle email and messages for my customers — and one great question was — what do I do if my work for someone results in them being offered a writing column or guest blog? The answer… well, you’ll have to listen in.

The programme goes out at 17:03, Sunday 12th August, repeated Wednesday, 15th August, and is online in the archive for a week from Sunday. You can listen in online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/radiowales/sites/mousemat/

I’d like to thank several Ecademy Members for providing some great soundbites for me to consider on the morning prior to the interview here in the Blogs Section at Ecademy: Why has social networking become so important?.

Specifically, my thanks to Dan Field, Samantha Cannell, Robert Greig, Mark Lee, Iain Wilson and Philip Calvert.

Digital Biographer cited in The Times: “vanguard of a social revolution” July 31, 2007

Posted by David Petherick in : NewsPapers, digital biographer, mainstream media, online identity, social media ,

I always fancied myself as a revolutionary… and now ‘The Times’ has made reference to me as the “digital biographer” in an article entitled:

Log on and rediscover the generation gap
Facebook and MySpace are in the vanguard of a social revolution.

The article outlines ‘a vast shift taking place in how a younger generation is defining its social life and privacy‘ and gives a glimpse into the workings on online social networks for those who may find the erms superpoking, wall-posting and hikkuping quite alien.

Although I do appreciate mention in The Times, I had to send them a note to clarify that my prices start from £369, for a profile makeover here at Ecademy - a fact that was perhaps a little more clearly outlined in a BBC interview earlier this month: “Meet the digital biographer“

As a no longer strictly youthful 43, I can imagine that I might want some or all of my youthful scribblings and photographs, so important to my self-image and my peers perhaps 20-25 years ago, to not be accessible to my peers now. Luckily for me (and probably the world at large) there was nowhere to upload that material until I was in my thirties. (I only got a PC in 1985 and email address in 1987)

However, something the article set me thinking about is that perhaps there is a future business model for MySpace, Facebook etcetera in simply allowing people to airbrush their history when they wish to? A “digital eraser” might cost you an ‘administration fee’ perhaps, and a total ‘whitewash’ will involve you visiting several sites, or having an agent act to remove your footprint across different networks. For a more considerable fee, you might pay to have your records sanitised rather than erased, so that you seem like an all round clean living model of perfection to prospective employers / partners / insurance companies / credit agencies?

As a pointer to this trend, there are sites that have aggregated such content and can pinpoint your membership of social networks, and act as ‘reputation lookup’ services such as Rapleaf…

Full article at The Times Online: Log on and rediscover the generation gap

BBC News: Meet the digital biographer… that’s me. July 16, 2007

Posted by David Petherick in : digital biographer, ecademy, mainstream media, online identity, social media ,

I am now officially the Digital Biographer. According to the BBC. I was interviewed by the BBC’s technology correspondent last week, with the results appearing today. The article focuses on my work for Thomas Power at Ecademy who reveals that I am the “digital biographer” who helps to manage his online presence.

I am glad I managed to embed the phrase “digital biographer” in the mind of the interviewer, and delighted it made its way into the headline. It does sound a little more literary and glamorous than ‘blog butler’ or ‘cyberspace concierge’ I think!

>> Read the full article at the BBC Web Site

You’re a Nobody unless your name Googles well - Wall Street Journal May 9, 2007

Posted by David Petherick in : NewsPapers, digital biographer, ecademy, googlicious, online identity, social media ,

It’s official - well, it is if you rate the Wall Street Journal’s front page as authoritative - if your name doesn’t Google well, you can have problems with your credibility - and not just with prospective employers.

You’re a Nobody Unless your Name Googles Well published on the 8th of May 2007, cites the example of Abigail Garvey, who, when she adopted the married name of Wilson, began to be questioned on publications she listed on her CV (résumé) because they weren’t finding the publications in online searches.

In the age of Google, being special increasingly requires standing out from the crowd online. Many people aspire for themselves — or their offspring — to command prominent placement in the top few links on search engines or social networking sites’ member lookup functions. But, as more people flood the Web, that’s becoming an especially tall order for those with common names. Type “John Smith” into Google’s search engine and it estimates it has 158 million results. (See search results.)

Ask.com estimates about 7% of all searches are for a person’s name, and more than 80% of executive recruiters said they routinely use search engines to learn more about candidates, according to a recent survey by ExecuNet. ExecuNet published “Growing Number Of Job Searches Disrupted By Digital Dirt” in June of 2006, which found that “35% (of executive recruiters) have eliminated a candidate from consideration based on the information uncovered online - up significantly from 26% just one year ago.

So, aside from naming your children carefully after a Google search, and including your full name in all online postings, how can you reach the top of Google?

The answer is actually very simple: Join Ecademy: - Just create an online profile at Ecademy, and within as short a timescale as a few weeks, by following simple techniques to add structured information to your profile, and adding blogs and marketplace content relevant to your expertise within Ecademy, Google will rank your name, link to your web content and web sites. The cost is minimal - £10 ($20) a month lets you raise your visibility, as well as become part of a strong business network that’s been growing quietly and organically since 1998, when social media really was not on anyone’s radar.