|
|
Transcript: Stowe Boyd - /Message
Aaron Strout:
I would like to introduce today’s special guest. We have Stowe Boyd, who, one of my favorite titles I think to date out of all the podcasts I’ve done, he is the front man of Stowe Boyd And The/Messengers. Officially he is the editor of the blog, which has 65,000 followers, if I’m not mistaken.
Stowe Boyd:
Actually, over 70,000 now.
Aaron Strout:
Over 70,000 now, so a latest and greatest update. That’s /Message if you’re looking for it. Welcome, Stowe.
Stowe Boyd:
Hello. Good to be here.
Aaron Strout:
Tell us a little bit about you. I think most people that know you – the way I found you is I’ve seen you speak at a number of different events. You were at Enterprise 2.0 most recently, but I’ve seen you at Office 2.0, I’ve seen you at South by Southwest. I think you started blogging in 1998. Tell us a little bit about Stowe Boyd prior to 1998.
Stowe Boyd:
Wow, so let me think. I got a master’s in computer science in the ‘80s and did a lot of research in programming languages and programming tools, tools for programmers, and so I got interested in how programmers collaborate online. That led to my jumping out in ’94 and becoming an independent after being in a bunch of venture backed start ups and helping to form Rational Software. I jumped out because I was tired of programmers and I wanted to get a little farther down on the food chain into what real people were doing on a day to day basis in the world, in business, in media, and so I started tracking the use of collaboration technologies, and originally I was primarily in the enterprise. That was before the web, but when the web came in, I saw it as a real opportunity to see how new social technologies could have a huge impact and so in 1999, right around the time – in fact, a month before I started blogging, I coined the term social tools in the last issue of my electronic newsletter that I used to distribute as an email attachment, believe it or not, and I saw the light. I’ve been pursuing the social revolution ever since.
Aaron Strout:
Now that’s a good segue into the next question. You talked a little bit about in some of your interviews, on your about me page about being obsessed with social tools, so what is it – I know you gave a little bit of the background, but you’re known for talking about the impact on business media in society, which actually is one of the things I love about you. I was at your talk at Enterprise 2.0, and you definitely ratchet it up a level. I think you talk about it in a philosophy versus just a tactical, this is the way you can improve your business. What obsesses you about these tools and maybe talk about some of the trends that you’ve seen in terms of the impact on business media in society.
Stowe Boyd:
Well, the reason I’m obsessed is I think we have a new kind of tool. These social tools are really different than what went on before. In particular, my characterization of social tools is that they’re not really about more efficient communication, or diminishing latency, and coordination of work in the company, or even more effectively distributing information across the population. It’s really the fact that these are tools that are intended to change the way we interact and so I characterize that as tools that shape culture, and that’s why it’s really interesting to me. The comment you made about my talk in Enterprise 2.0, and actually my most recent one at Reboot just a couple of days ago in Copenhagen, I’m really characterizing what I do now as web throw polish. I’m more interested in how these tools and our adoption of them is changing the way we interact with each other and collectively how that’s changing the course of human history or whatever than I am on the smaller, although extremely interesting area of what’s going on inside of businesses or how people can use these things to run HR, or something like that. Those things are very interesting, but they’re only interesting in a very narrow context, and primarily only interesting to people who care about HR. I’m interested in things that are much more horizontal and a broad brush approach.
Aaron Strout:
So you talk a little bit about how these tools are fundamentally changing us as people. It’s not the web, which was good for ecommerce. Obviously the web changed the way things happened particularly in business, but I like your point in that this fundamentally changes relationships. How do you go into a business and talk about that stuff and not have them give you the hairy eyeball? I think I get where you’re coming from, but that can be a lot to digest, that we’re looking at an era now where everything is different.
Now we have conversations. You can’t just talk at your clients. You can hear them. They can talk to each other. Your employees can talk to each other independent of you. How do you translate that for a business that’s trying to digest that?
Stowe Boyd:
Well, honestly I don’t pursue very hard working with large businesses. I do it if in fact they reach out to me and ask me to come in and work with them, but I found it’s a fruitless pastime, and one that’s not very psychologically rewarding, even if it is in fact financially rewarding. One of the problems with working with large companies is that in general, they are trying to adopt these things only to the degree that they have to. In other words, they’re approaching everything with the mindset of how can we do the least of this that we can get away with, and that’s really tiresome to me.
I had the opposite experience with some companies here in my work with BusinessWeek when they read blogs [inaudible] a couple of years ago, was very productive and fruitful, and a number of other engagements with large companies, but in general, it’s not the sort of thing where I learn a lot of things. I don’t personally walk away feeling, “Oh man, I really have a better insight into what’s going on now,” so I don’t really pursue it very hard, so as a result, I don’t worry about going in and getting the hairy eyeball. I’ve worked the opposite way, so I will go to a conference like Enterprise 2.0, and I will talk about what I’m interested in, and here’s the trends that I think are vitally important that companies need to be aware of, individuals should be, and certainly people that are trying to build tools to get involved in this new emerging market of social tools.
Well, tool vendors certainly have to be aware of those things, and the great majority of my work is from those tool vendors just saying, “Okay, we would like to get Stowe’s advice about this,” so that’s really my orientation as a business in terms of where I spend my time making money. The last question you asked about what are the trends, well, there’s a number of them. I think the one that’s most interesting that I’ve been pushing as a central mean in my collection of ideas over the last couple of years – one of the things that I’ve really been pursuing hard is the whole notion of flow applications, so these are applications that are what are considered son of instant messaging, the second wave of communication based on instant messaging principles, and they are having a very big impact on how people interact and perceive the internet as a space for collaboration and interaction, and those are things like the Facebook mini feed, Twitter, Jaiku, and now dozens of other people that are trying to push into that space, and the basic characterization of those is that instead of presenting you with a web that’s made up of a bunch of pages with hyperlinks and that allows you wander around, clicking from place to place, instead you’re using some kind of a page that is being updated automatically or a client running on your desktop where the information that’s of interest to you because you’re following individuals, you’re following certain kinds of stories or whatever, they find their way to you.
They just pop, and as a result, it allows us to operate in a different way in a different state of mind where things will just arrive, and I can glance at my Twirl client for example when I’m using Twitter and just see that so and so has said such and such, or Jim has checked in someplace, or Mike isn’t feeling too happy today, or Jane is getting on an airplane and flying to Europe, and I have this awareness of peoples comings and goings, their state of mind, what they’re doing, where they are, and who they’re talking with, and that enlarges my consciousness. In a sense, I can keep track of hundreds of people, where they’re going, what they’re up to, what’s important to them, and I can use them ultimately as a filter on the world. If five or six of them in a hour all talk about a similar thing, some news event, or someone’s leaving Yahoo, or a new tool that has come out, I can say, “Oh, this must be of interest. Let me go look at this because so many of my friends are registering this,” and I can use them as an early warning system, and that general notion of these flow apps, and the using of your social network as a way to filter the world, and taste the world, I think that’s an incredibly fundamental shift, and it has huge impacts, so I talk about it as a new era for the internet, the web of flow as opposed to the web of pages, and that’s gonna be very big.
Aaron Strout:
So that’s a cool way to think about things, and I’m a big fan of Twitter myself, and talk regularly to some of our Mzinga clients and some of my colleagues, but I like that concept of tasting the world and early warning system. I’m gonna ask you a little bit of a curveball question, and you can choose to dig as deep in it as you want, but there’s recently been some sniping among – I’ll not name names, but some leaders in the social media space, and I’ll bucket you into that category in terms of someone that really I think does a nice job at being very professional and staying above the fray, so the people in question have given a little bit of a black eye to social media in the sense where I’ve seen a lot of comments where like, “I can’t believe these guys are the folks that are supposed to be leading the industry, and they’re punching below the belt, and sniping over videos and puppets.” Any comment on that and whether that really is gonna set the movement back a little bit or thoughts in general?
Stowe Boyd:
Well, just in general, I think it’s funny. It’s almost funny that people are always coming back to this notion that somehow what we’re doing on the web should be kinder and gentler. This is a recurrent theme. It comes up all the time that some new turmoil comes up where people are calling each other names, and Dave Winer gets mad at Adam Curry, or Mina Trott gives a silly talk at Liblogs, or LeWeb, or whatever it was way back when, or I get involved in a tussle with Shel Holtz, saying that he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about social media, and it’ll flare into real invective, and people are personally insulted, and there’s all kinds of spit, blood, and tears all over the web, and then there’s always a backlash. There’s a call for a more stately and courtly interaction, but I think it’s just nuts.
I think it’s crazy. I think on one hand, the kinds of things we’re grappling with are vitally important. The things that we’ve involved in, in discussing the future of the web, or how people might or could use the web for the betterment of their company, or advancing good ideas, or whatever it might be, these are obviously central issues to people’s careers, their businesses, and maybe dare I say it, advancing humankind’s interests on the web, and so the notion that somehow we should pull punches and not call people idiots when they are, or not draw hard lines, and when people cross over to them to the other side, that we shouldn’t point at them and say, “You’ve broken the rules,” all of those things are valid. It’s legitimate to say someone said something that’s dumb, and we could all try to say we’re playing patty cake here, but we’re not, and this is important stuff, and we’re adults, and it should be okay for us to have an open discourse in which it is permissible to say someone is wrong headed about something, and if they’re not willing to change their tune, you can say that they’re stupid, honestly, or evil, even.
This stuff is just as important as global warming, or the political process, or the European Union ratification of the new constitution, it’s equally important, and so it’s no surprise that blood will boil and people get heated, and that’s inevitable. I do all the time. I’m always in the middle of some fray with somebody. I actually am not at this moment. Well, actually I take it back. Even today I got in the middle of a fray.
A couple of months ago I started this notion called the twit pitch, where I said I don’t want people to send me these endless, ridiculously long, impossible to decipher PR emails. I just want them to send me a 140 character, at the most, twit pitch that tells me what the idea is and if it’s interesting, I’ll follow up with them, and if it’s not, good, I’ve only spent ten seconds of my time. I haven’t spent three and a half minutes trying to work through it, and this is because I was going to the Web 2.0 Conference and I was getting literally dozens of these things every day, and one day I realized if I just opened them, read them, and closed them, even if I didn’t do anything else, the nature of email, and opening and closing email, and so I’m having to file them and delete them, meant that I would be spending an hour and a half that day, and I said, “I can’t do this. I just don’t have time for this, and why do these people think I want to,” so I wrote a post saying, “Twit pitch is the way you should try to schedule time for me at this conference,” and it took off in a big way, and it was written in BusinessWeek.
Everybody wrote about it. It was all over the place, and today somebody got an invitation to some group that some guy has created called Pitch PR or something like that and it basically just appropriated the idea, created a new group, and just created a different tag inside of Twitter to get people to send pitches to him, and I said, “This is crazy. It’s just appropriating the idea.” He gives me credit for inventing it, but then he wants people to pitch to this other tag, so it’s gonna divide the world up, and I said, “This is dumb. Why do this,” and he responded on my blog, “I’m not really trying to do that, so you misunderstand,” so I’m in the middle of another web fracas.
Aaron Strout:
Well, it’s good. It keeps the conversation exciting. Last question –
Stowe Boyd:
Never a dull moment.
Aaron Strout:
Never a dull moment? Well, especially that’s one of the beauties of Twitter and social media in general, if you follow the right people. To that end, my final question. This is the one that I ask everyone. Who influences the influencers, so I’m sure you read hundreds if not thousands of blogs every day or on a weekly basis. If there was one that you could call out that you pay more attention to than others, one that you could only read for the rest of your life, whose blog would that be and what’s the rationale behind that?
Stowe Boyd:
I don’t think that’s a valid question, because I would never be in a situation where I could only read one blog. In an artificial situation, I’m on a desert island, and there’s a single can with a single string to the mainland –
Aaron Strout:
Someone’s faxing you someone’s blog posts every day on your desert island.
Stowe Boyd:
Yeah, I honestly don’t know who I would pick in that situation. I don’t know if it would be one of the dark, erotic, reverse cowgirl kind of blogs, because on a desert island, I would like to be entertained in a different way than I am here in my office in Virginia, thinking about work, but clearly over the years I’ve been really strongly influenced by a collection of media and social thinkers, David Weinberger, and Jeff Jarvis, and Jay Rosen at NYU, and Doc Searls, and people like that have had a profound influence on me over a very long period of time, but I’m also spasmodic. There’ll be periods of time where I really won’t read much blogs at all. I’ll go for weeks, especially when I’m traveling or working with clients, and the only read at the most superficial level, I’d look at some feed reader or something, and glance up at the titles, or I’d go look at Techmeme, or now I’m using this feedly thing that’s built on top of Google Reader, but then other periods of time I’m intensely devoted to reading three dozen blogs, and I’ll read them every day for several weeks, and I phase in and out, so there is no consistency in that aspect of my life, and I used to read Anne Zelenka at WebWorkerDaily. Anything she wrote I wanted to read, and she left, and she’s gone off and doing other things, and so now I don’t even read WebWorkerDaily except when it pops up as part of one of these Techmeme pile ups on something I find interesting, and so now I found my whole model of reading is reversed.
I find that somebody mentions something or somebody links to something, and then I’ll go try to find the pileup. I’ll go to Techmeme or some other place, FriendFeed, and I’ll try to find the commentary and the collection of posts around some issue, and I’ll try to read five or six different viewpoints, and I’ll try to synthesize my own view, and link to all those people, so I’ve got a different model now, and I think part of the reason is that the conversation’s moving out of the blogs. It used to be the conversation was in the comments on the blogs, but now this new collection of honestly, flow apps that are being devised that sit above the blogs, where conversation has moved into the place where the flow is fastest, and that’s places like Twitter, and FriendFeed, and recommendations inside of Google Reader that become streams now inside of my feedly account, and I spend more time in there now looking at the commentary, and then based on how active the commentary is, I swim back, if you will, upstream to the original stories, so it’s different, because it used to be that the stories were the center of everything and that’s where the comments were as well, but it’s changed now, and so the whole dynamic of reading is shifting, and I’ve shifted with it.
Aaron Strout:
I love that answer, so even though you’ve answered it differently than I asked the question – basically what I’m trying to do is get insight into how you think about it, and that actually was one of the most original and innovative answers, and I tend to agree with it personally. That’s how I’m digesting all of the social media today.
Stowe Boyd:
Yeah, it’s a pretty scattershot world out there these days.
Aaron Strout:
Which can be a good thing and a bad thing, but it’s always interesting, as we talked about earlier.
Stowe Boyd:
Yep.
Aaron Strout:
So thank you for joining us today. It’s been a pleasure talking with you on this day before the 4th of July. We’re talking to Stowe Boyd who is speaker, front man of Stowe Boyd And The/Messengers, and a well known blogger/editor of the blog, /Message. We hope to see you soon.
Stowe Boyd:
Thanks, brother.
Thu, Jul 03 2008
|
|
Thank you very much for the great information.Thanks<p><a href="http://www.tacticalpantsupply.com/" title="511 pants">511 pants</a></p>
