New marketing is the creation of events, experiences, content, products, and services in collaboration with the consumer. It is the creation of products and services that fill an actual need while creating a community that shares that need.

Google, Twitter and Facebook were initially created by people to fulfill a need. Google was created to manage information, Facebook demographics, data and connection, and Twitter, conversation. Software and hardware review sites emerged to protect consumers from false advertising. Blogs emerged because traditional corporations didn’t listen to their customers, leaving them to fend for themselves. Because of this, it’s much more difficult for traditional corporations to have a voice. It’s been drowned out by more valuable services. And the traditional communication channels have been severed.

In the new web there is no longer one platform to speak from. Social, economic, brand, and lifestyle realities are constantly fragmenting, reorganizing and combining in new ways. Products are easily adopted and easily thrown away online. Additionally, each culture is constantly creating its own dialect, and unless a business understands that dialect and is extremely diplomatic, an online community will be able to see right through a marketing campaign.

There are tools out there that can be used to dive deep into these content networks such as Facebook and Twitter to secure information. Consumers have the power - both to create and destroy. But they also have a very helpful voice, and it’s important to listen to them. Often, they can’t create the products, services, and experiences they need. But companies can, and consumers want to help.

Web vs. Brick

In the brick and mortar world, most businesses have a front door and a loading dock, as well as finite hours of operation. Web designers originally built websites in the same way. But a website is always open, and every page a front door. Thus, each and every page on a site counts. Each page is a representation of the entire company, and must hold its own if accessed out of order and context.
One might think of the Internet as a vast ocean of noise with islands of content on it. Search engine optimization is a process that can bring an island closer to land…often close enough so that visitors can walk onto it. Visitors will generally use a website as a solution if they don’t have to navigate an ocean to get to the data they need.

Search engines can bring in traffic, but there is no guarantee that the content on a site will match what the user searched for. This can be helped along by having a site display items similar to what the user searched for. For instance, Amazon.com and the New York Times both have related posts and products that appear on almost every page.

Interfaces

As more and more companies turn to online software solutions, user interfaces become increasingly important. This is especially true when online collaborative software is used across great distances.

To quote the Urban Planner Paul Elek,

“The point is that our daily existence is normally filled with short walks and passing through interfaces. It is not the number that we remember but rather the poor quality of them and the time spent in moving through them”.

A principle to follow in designing an online experience is the time and number of clicks it takes for visitors to access data. If there is no flow, no calls to action, and no relevant content, then the user will generally move on — and click “no”, or the “back” button.

Users will generally take a route with the least interface changes to fulfill their needs. A good interface blends into the background while maximizing relevant user actions. The interface should also compress together similar steps so that actions do not have to be repeated uselessly by the user. Flickr’s image uploader and title/descriptions fields do an excellent job of this.

A website should contain no unnecessary code, styles, or content. A speedskater has different muscles developed than does an tennis player. There is no “one social media strategy fits all”. A website’s content/structure/links should be developed according to the type of products/services it provides. Conversation, community building and ease of use minimize consumer effort and can be achieved in different ways. It is imperative to pay attention to what communities/demographics need the services/products a site provides. Which avenue is best to play in - is Twitter more appropriate than Flickr? Examining the social media sites a community is drawn to says a lot about how they interact the most comfortably.

The ratio of good vs. poor content online makes filtering necessary. A website can only stand out among the crowd if it offers new and consistently reliable content. Additionally, that content must be accessible by both humans and machines (search engines). The online landscape only allows consumer’s limited time to make decisions. In these kinds of environments, one must alway focus on data accessibility, calls to action, and extremely clear direction. Information that is buried too deep into the site’s structure is more difficult to get to, and runs the risk of not being indexed by search engines. Products should be focused on providing value.

PR 2.0

Some of the first industries to capture digital data real-time were hedge funds and other financial firms. They used something that I’ll call an intelligence dashboard — where different streams of data were needed to make complex decisions. The dashboard allowed users to see many different stocks at once, and companies were able to create a sort of proto-feed that showed many different ecosystems of data at once.

Data Mashups

Services like Netvibes and Yahoo! pipes can be mixed together to offer companies real-time intelligence feeds that show what their competitors are posting on their blogs, what people are saying about them on twitter, and their overall online presence — all in one place.

Making these intelligence dashboards takes time and research, but the value added (not to mention the time saved) by the implementation of a centralized data source is immense. Also, it’s powerful enough for agencies that manage multiple clients, because the entire system fits into one browser window with a series of custom, labeled tabs.

All brands have an analog version of this, and some have a digital one — but all brands need it. Google Alerts is a quick and Intelligence dashboards are capable of handling the data generated by global and local brands as well. They can monitor Flickr photos, news items, blog posts, ect. Anything online, and anything in motion. Companies who do not monitor their own brands run the risk of their brands

Community

A websites’ user base should be voluntary - it should be providing a comfortable nesting ground for user actions. Youtube allows its users the space for their communities to interact, and does not force them to interact in a specific way. New tools should be created to move forward the voluntary community’s ability to reach their goals. In doing this, the creator must be able to understand what the user’s needs are, and then help the user to get there step by step. Instead of major site redesigns, tools should be being found by the user during normal routine actions. This will allow the user to ‘discover’ that tool for themselves and then determine, over time, the best use of that tool.

Explicitly stated actions or rules for the user to follow are confining and dictatorial. Suggestions are better (See Tumblr - a user-based and created space to post quotes, pictures, and videos (a sort of microblog with media…but with less interconnectivity than Twitter). The database/user experience must expand more from the side of the users and the system must be mutable enough for the to move with the space of the user.

About

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and New Media consultant living in Portland, Oregon. You can find her on Twitter @caseorganic, or may contact her via E-mail at caseorganic at gmail.com.

photo credit: Martin Pettitt

 

 Hazelnut Tech Talk Episode 12 [16:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (389)

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Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo

This episode features Mario Landau-Holdsworth, an economics major and entrepreneur from Lewis & Clark College. He’s originally from San Francisco, California, and has helped his cousin Valerie Landau with her binary glove project. The project has brought him into contact with Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, and many other movers and shakers in Silicon Valley.

We talked about what makes an application addictive, designing tactile devices to interface digitally, using typewriters in Starbucks, Animorphs, blogging in an ape costume, Arduino-powered character recognition, the Russian Space program, Shiloh-Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, and a house that survived three major fires.

Link to Mario’s new project: Digital to Analog Ape

He’s also on twitter at @thelinguini.

To a user, every click is a time-value liability. Every tab is a waste of time and space. The key is to reduce the amount of clicks needed .

Mozilla’s Ubiquity is concerned with reducing the time and space it takes to transfer user relevant information.

Do I trust that Mozilla will reduce the time-value liability incurred by the many modern managers of heavy data flows? Maybe.

The project is headed by Aza Raszin, Head of User Experience at Mozilla Labs and founder of founder of Humanized, Inc., and  Songza. As an interface showcase, including habituatable pie menus instead of linear menus; few icons; a high density of content and a correspondingly low amount of interaction[1]; undo instead of warnings[2]; and transparent messages [3] designed not to break the user’s train of thought. In the week after launch, Songza was used to play over 1 million songs.

Raskin is also the creator of Algorithm Ink, a port of the Context Free Art to Javascript. It has had artwork created by such computer luminaries as Ward Cunningham. Yesterday Vihn showed me Algorithm Ink at Aboutus.org (where Ward Cunningham currently works). It was very curious and elegant.

A cyborg (shorthand for “cybernetic organism”) is a symbiotic fusion of human and machine.

Humans have always developed technologies to help them survive and thrive, but in recent decades the rapid escalation and intensification of the human-technology interface have exceeded anything heretofore known. From satellite communications to genetic engineering, high technologies have penetrated and permeated the human and natural realms.

The Augmentation of Biological and Mental Landscapes

Indeed, so profoundly are humans altering their biological and physical landscapes that some have openly suggested that the proper object of anthropological study should be cyborgs rather than humans, for, as Donna Haraway says, we are all cyborgs now”.

Time and Space Compression

The distance between individual and community will continue to decrease, and those products and services which decrease the amount of time and space it takes to create an action will be the most successful. Actions and devices will become lighter and lighter, and the social will continue to become more and more mobile. The convergence of various technologies will result in rapid learning and communication never imagined before.

CyborgCamp

Amber Case is a founder of CyborgCamp, which will be held in Portland, Oregon on Nov. 22, 2008. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

Speaking

She recently spoke at Portland’s Interactive Convergence Conference on “From Telephone to Tweetup: An abbreviated history of technology and social exchange“.

Download

You can download her thesis on Cell Phones and Cyborg Anthropology here. It is titled “Cell Phones and their Technosocial Sites of Engagement”.

Urban Grind North West is, I think, the predominate manufacturer of Twitter synchronicities in PDX” - Jeremy Wilkin, via Twitter.

An amazing discussion happened today between a number of Tweeple, namely Gabriel (@sirgabe) and @jerwilkins of Tinderbox Creative. Of course, @brampitoyo was there, and @donpdonp & @pdxflaneur also stopped by. Also, @xtalwiese was there for a bit (but had to leave for Psychology class in the middle).

I wish I could have typed more about what was said during this encounter, but it was too loud at Urban Grind to use a tape recorder. The following is a brief recap.

A Discussion Begins

The conversation started with various subjects, business cards were exchanged, and favorite websites were visited and recommended. But quickly the conversation turned towards the future of technology. A bit of Cyborg Anthropology was discussed (as @jerwilkins knows a classmate of mine who took Cyborg Anthropology a year before me), which morphed into a discussion of the new physical and sensory boundaries Internet access has given humans.

Amber: With a cell phone, the capability of your ear has been expanded thousands of miles. With a computer, your hands can take you to Japan and back in seconds. With the profiles you’ve created, you can literally be in 400 places at once, while others interact with the pieces of yourself you’ve saved different times and spaces.

Bram: What is that called? Omniscience.

Amber: Omniscience, Omnipotence. There is such a great extension of the self/senses occuring!

A Short History of the Telephone

Amber: There was a lot of controversy when the first phone came out. Some people couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that one would enjoy going into a closed room to talk at the walls. To disembody a voice, the essence of one’s character, and pipe it through a device, seemed literally insane!

Then came the cordless telephone. There’s a story behind this one. Innovation comes in amusing ways.

I met the grandson of the inventor of the cordless telephone at an SEO conference in February. He told me that his grandfather was sitting in a comfortable chair while watching television when the phone rang.

He said that he didn’t want to make the effort to get up and answer it. (In reality, he was a WWII veteran and had lower back pains from his time in the military). George Sweigert actually used a part from his washing machine for the invention, and in doing so created the cordless telephone to releive the efforts of the handicapped (more on this on the Wikipedia article on George Sweigert).

And with the arrival of the mobile phone on the scene, speech suddenly became mobile. The ability to talk in virtually any segment of time and space became available (provided reception existed).

The Rise of Mobile Communities

And now, communities also becoming untethered from time and space. As time and space compress, so does the amount of space it takes to represent community. People are coming back into social interaction from the formerly fragmented, private world of the suburbs. The current economy simply cannot withstand the amount of luxury and waste an expanded and separated social reality takes to run smoothly. I was reading a book at the Library of Congress on Urban Development that had a diagram of the back and forth flows a city makes when it expands to suburbs and then contracts back into itself. It’s a natural cycle, and we’re seeing a move back in with the help of mobile technologies and mobile communities.

With Twitter, it’s like having a mobile social group on hand at all times. Little friends in the palm of your hand or on your screen. An entire community that goes with you, wherever you are. A lot of people can Tweet with friends and family and stay connected across vast distances while at conferences. Formerly the speed of E-mail and Letters did not afford a level of real-time response that signifies belonging to a community.

Technology as a Mediating Vector

Jeremy: Technology I’m curious about the effects of these mediating vectors.
The cell phone instantly appearing, and then the fact that suddenly every has this amnesia about living before the cell phone’s existence.

The Emotive Epoch

Gabriel brought up the concept of the “Emotive Epoch”.

“Have you heard of it?” he asked us. “It’s a set of Emotional Hotkeys. You can send hot keys to any sort of emotional brain signal you sent out. You can use these to control games.”

Amber: Cool, so if you get really angry in Photoshop, a new file could be created!

Gabriel: (laughs) Yeah, it might be a little tricky for applications that aren’t games.

Jeremy: Using EEG readings and biofeedback mechanisms as interfaces is really starting to blur physical and mental boundaries.

Gabriel: There’s also The Audeo. It’s a voice box for people with Lou Gehrig’s Disease that helps people create queries via thought and then spits them back out as text to speech.

In the tests, they had people thinking a question in their minds, and then getting the feedback as text to speech in their headphones.

It’s incredible. Imagine thinking a search query to Google and then getting the response back in speech.

Jeremy: Yeah, (pauses) …”thanks Wikipedia!”

Amber: It’s interesting that these technologies are emerging because of a human pain. The fact that there is now a lot of money pouring into charities that support research to eliminate/solve human pain and suffering.

Jeremy: It’s kind of like Buddhism, really. Suffering is almost a vehicle of expansion.

In the beginning we start with the idea that something is inherently something that it should not be, and we ask ourselves, “how do we make it something that should be?

That plays really well into the hands of technology.

Amber: And in the Tao, there’s the concept of oneness and wholeness. Humans have always had this idea that they are separate from others, especially in suburban areas, where space is privatized, and personal vehicles abound. And there’s the moment when a child first recognizes the image in the mirror as a reflection, or an ‘other’, or of the mother as ‘other’.

Jeremy: The concept of ‘I’, instead of the idea that we’re all just extensions of this same basic thing.

The saddest thing is the words I, Me, Mine, like “this is the space that is me”.

Gabriel: There’s this norm that exists in identifying things by boundaries, but the box is just in our minds and we don’t realize that this box is inside out.

Jeremy: I think transcendence is about dissolving this box.

Gabriel: Then perhaps technology is a vehicle — we persue transcendence through technology.

Amber: What we’re experiencing right now is like a replica of the industrial revolution. The beginning of the 20th century saw massive amount of patent filings and new technological developments. It also saw the carving up of minor roads and the construction of massive buildings and highways.

Today we’re seeing all sorts of patents are being filed, but they’re being filed for ideas — for intellectual property. All sorts of new roads and buildings are being built, but they’re being built online. The difference is that tearing up a highway to make a redirect in the past cost millions of dollars and many months.

Now the time and space it takes to reroute traffic can be done by the simple implementation of a 301 Redirect, and this probably takes the relative equivalent of $20 of time and skill to pull off.

Jeremy: So then these redirects are protocols — symbolic protocols, of a more literal construction of highways. Data highways.

Amber: Yes. We’re becoming a more organic society as this happens. Traffic can adapt to changing conditions, and roads can change to accommodate new locations. The shape of space makes users move, and the direction and number of users shape space.

Sociologist Emelie Durkheim said that as a society matures, the whole of it changes from a mechanical state to an organic one. Things begin to flow more smoothly.

Cell Phones as Biological Cells

Amber: A cell in the human body has a phospholipid bilayer that keeps things out while keeping the important cellular organelles within its center. At the core lies the DNA of the cell, while the more temporary RNA that the cell uses to duplicate information has more mobility, especially in times of the protein manufacturing that goes on inside the cell.

In computing, the DNA is equivalent to hard drive memory, and the RNA the Random Access Memory, as RAM is more temporary memory. But there’s also the channel protein, which lets information in and out of a cell (on a cell phone this would be the imput keys), and the identification protein, which allows the ID of the cell phone to relay to cell phone towers. So cell phones really function like cells. The macro and the micro are self similar. We’re a self-similar universe.

Jeremy: Everything is based on organic data. Lots of machines are based on things that only animals can do. Airplanes, helicopters, ect.

——–

A Brief Note on E-mail and Twitter

Amber: In biochemistry, chemical reactions are helped along by catalyst. It takes a certian amount of activation energy for a chemical reaction to occur, and if there is not enough activation energy, the reactor halts and never happens.

The activation energy to author an E-mail is often higher for the user than a short tweet in Twitter, and thus a user, once acclimatized to the Tweet-space, will find that the profile to interaction ratio is higher than one’s E-mail list. The reduction of time and space that exists in the world of Twitter acts as a catalyst for greater communication.

Greater communication leads to smoother and more enjoyable conversations in real time and space, as Twitter members are used to conversing quickly about a number of things. Bram Pitoyo and I also noticed that everyone we meet from Twitter is highly involved with a particular interest, be it a company or a project or talent.

15 Megabytes of Fame

One of my coworkers told me that social media was no longer about having 15 minutes of fame, but having 15 megabytes of fame. And those 15 megabytes can be unevently distributed across many sites and times.

Next time there will be a better portrait of the discussion. I am slowly practicing towards an adequate representation of events.

Today there was a Lunch and presentation at Nemo on using Ning for customized social networks. Dave Allen, Director of Insights & Digital Media at Nemo, introduced Rachel, who demonstrated the customized functions of Ning.

Dave Allen:
The purpose of this lunch and demonstration is to create a sort of town hall meeting.

Nemo is a 11 year old company that is unique in that it has managed to develop itself professionally without any sort of Press Releases or major media at all.

We have 5 blogs that function outside of Nemo, as well as an Private internal networking that we’ve been using to demonstrate the capabilities of blogs to our employees. It is a place for experimentation and messages.

We feel that in Social Media everyone is running around on different race courses. All are doing their own thing, but no one knows where the finish line is.

The five outside blogs are not integrated with each other. We hope to use Ning’s capabilities to create PR 2.0 and Social Media for Nemo.
We’ll be releasing the new version of Ning in September that will network all of these blogs together, and will serve as a force to expand Nemo’s online presence and capability.

BLOGS:

• Pampelmoose

• Social-Cache

• StudioNemo

• Strangebeautiful

• NubbyTwiglet

We hope to add:

• Ink Show

• Yourblog.com

And:

NemoHQ.com (coming soon)

In addition, other blogs will be linking to Nemo, and these blogs and our own will run through Ning, which provide linking to everyone in the world.

The Ning Presentation:

Rachel:

I’d like to talk about how you or a brand can use a social network. People are currently using social networks to connect with other people. The Internet can be used to replicate any sort of media. Newspapers, television, art exhibits and flyers can be duplicated and be functional online.

The truly native behavior of the Internet is two-way. So is a social network. In media terms, the Internet is the only place where people have a depth conversation of two way in many forms of media. In photos, media, discussion forms, and blogs.

Because of this, people are responding to social networks in huge numbers.

The early days of the Internet saw two major services; AOL and CompuServe. AOL was a fantastic service for the general public because it taught people how to be online — how to use chat and E-mail..

And when a company like Nike wanted to be on the Internet — it would post its page on AOL.

Then Netscape came around and allowed people to jump on the Internet from site to site without constraints.

Now we have Facebook and other applications that teach us how to be social online. They allow us to post videos photos, news feeds.

Ning is a platform for the creation of your own branded social network.

It allows you the opportunity to control and expand your brand to your biggest fans. When you have a Myspace page, that page’s community is comprised of Myspace members and friends, but the data is owned by Myspace. You don’t get to keep data on your own community, and your visitors are constrained to Myspace’s look, feel and format.

By having your own social network, you can show what your features will be and your member’s social information. You can have your brand really expanded.

You can thus have your own online hub. If you think about a brand, it’s really spread across the net. It allows the people who are talking about you on Youtube, and those who have found you through promotions with companies like Eventful, Facebook and Myspace.

General online fan groups comprise a very fragmented image. You don’t have any centralized space to really collect your tribe.

Centralization of data allows them to meet each together while connecting with you. It eliminates the barriers that divide fans up into different social services.

You can then use those different touch points across the web, on those different blogs, to gather them into a tribe on your own social network. Then you can give them access to RSS feeds, embed codes, and they can spread your image across the web as your own personal street team .

We’re three years old, based in Palo Alto California.

We raised 60 million dollars back in May. If you build a social network on Ning you’ll know that you’ll be online for a long time. We’re not just going to evaporate. We have about 65 employees, almost of which are geeks. Your network is up fast, and runs smooth. We have a large engineering team. This team is always thinking about what social networking features you need in order to have the most social network for your brand.

—-
Case Study: The ImSaturn Social Network.
Saturn simply went to Ning.com and created their own social network without even calling us. Saturn has really created their own social universe.
Events and Bloggers

They have a lot of events they sponsor. For instance, they’re a sponsor of Project Runway. They recently sent one of their advertising directors out to blog about the experience. They have a Saturn blog/event/picture of the day. They’re running many different groups. There’s the Saturn Tuners Club, which was actually started by Saturn blogger. His blog is advertised on the front page.

The Saturn community space is really respectful of the Saturn community and helps them to get their own words out. They’re very respectful of the universe of different bloggers and clubs. How can they take these different groups who are part of different parts of the web and bring them all into this world.

Saturn sponsors a lot of events. You can see these events “Rally Customer Appreciation Day” on the event calendar.

At this point a freelance designer sitting next to me said, ” ‘Have a Saturn experience!’ That’s marketing right there.”
Widgets

Then there is a page to give their members all sorts of different widgets. Photo, video, and music players can be added to your site as well. These allow your brand’s supporters to share your videos on Facebook, or add them to MySpace.

——-

Case Study: AskPatty.com

Kiss my Astra (Patty is a women’s car dealer blogger. She’s pretty popular, so you can start to create news about what you’re doing on your own social network.

–

Case Study: Greekster.tv

Greekster is a Pizza Hut branded social network. It’s just targets to college students and those who are a part of fraternities and sororities—the ones most likely to order pizza. It’s very event focused. There’s a Hot or Not section for that allows members to become stars on the front age.

—-

Case Study: The Good Charlotte Network: Beating Paparazzi to the Punch

Good Charlotte’s main website is actually built on Ning. Two members of Good Charlotte are using their blog while on the road. They are also currently dating Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. This means that they are constantly getting harassed by camera crews and media.

To combat this, they’re blogging and taking pictures themselves and posting them on the social network in order to control their own stroy. By controlling media first, through Ning, they are beating Paparazzi to the Punch.

Now news outlets like Press Magazine are going back to the Good Charlotte to get the news, instead of taking the news themselves.

The latest blog pot is about a move about the Bra Boys, a epic about Australian Surfers. They use the Ning portal to point to the Bra Boys website from Ning, thus acting as a promotional interface.

Merchandise

They use the social network to sell all of their own brands, like the DCMA Collective, and band merchandise is linked to their Ning Site.

Good Charlotte’s page uses Ning’s capabilities to form the questions that one can asks their members when they set up their profiles. You can ask certain questions to really let he members to express themselves.

People are allowed to modify their own CSS on the page.

Then there’s the Good Charlotte Facebook page. This page links back to www.goodcharlotte.com, and a Ning photo player shows the GC’s photos on the Facebook network page. They work in unison to for more powerful promotion.

Case Study: Maloof Money Cup

Maloof Money Cup, the World’s Greatest Skateboarding Competition, is based in Orange County.

They embedded a bunch of YouTube videos come from their social network which runs on Ning.

And there’s my.maloofmoneycup.com that only allows people who are competing in the skateboarding event to become members of the page.

There’s the latest activity feed. Just like on Facebook you can see what your friends are up to.

Case Study: The SXSW ‘08 Insiders Guide.

Those who were attending South By Southwest were able to use the website I created by Ning as a community device.

Another good part about the database is that you can export all member data by .CSV and import it into a php email database.

People fill that out and you can export it into you own CRM database.

http://www.SXSW.ning.commain/feature/add

There are tons of featured widgets that allow you to bring pretty much anything into the applications. From the main page, a widget can be edited or modified.

In the end it adds up to a very concrete CMS.

It really gives you the ability to make your own experience online and really bring people into your own space.

—-

Questions from the Audience

CMD Agency:

You look at the big sites like Myspace/Youtube/Fllickr. That’s where the eyeballs are. Lots of clients want their own community, but there’s a question of how to balance the control you get from a privately branded site like on Ning vs. the social focus that is available on Myspace (which is where all of the visits are focused).

Rachel:You have to think about what’s most appropriate for your client. They are using our photo player here to populate their Facebook page.They have 67,000 pans of Good Charlotte on their Facebook page.

This makes Good Charlotte capable of gathering an audience on their Facebook page and gather their audience which also happens to be on a Facebook page.

A lot of Saturn members are blogging. Saturn found some Saturn members that were good bloggers, so then they featured the blog posts of these members. Ning allows you to use your community to generate content for you.

AlphageekTV: Why did the skateboarders lock the community to members of the competition only?

Rachel: I imagine they anted to make the competitors be the celebritities of the site and have hte members forcus in on them ..

Big Deal PR: What I’m always curious about is the flexibility of a system. What kind of programming help do you need in house in order to adapt it, and how adaptable is it? Is it at all possible to optimize it for search engines/?

Rachel: We’re constantly updating all of the tabs and widgets like so that search engines can always find it. When we upgrade we don’t just do it once — we constantly improve it, so that because search engines are always changing.

If you know a little or a lot of CSS, or you’re a PHP developer, you can use our API’s get access to our source code and really ad in your features.

That’s our job, to really help link you into your community through a completely customizable interface.

Angie, Freelance Designer: How long does content remain up and live, and the space parameters?

Rachel: Content goes up as long as you want to. Not sure of the dimensions, bur can ind out that information for you.

Question: Bandwidth limitations on your site?

Rachel: Secret: We’re not charging for bandwidth and storage right now. Everyone will get 100 gigs of free bandwidth and 10 gigs of storage. After that, you’ll be charged $9.99 a month for an additional 100 gigs of bandwidth and 10 gigs of storage.

Question:
As an Admin can you limit the size of uploads that users can upload?
Do you also have the ability to link back to other sources to use their bandwidth?

Rachel:
We give you 10 text boxes, and you can embed in any third party information in them. We’ll be putting our fill weight behind OpenSocial. We’ll be supporting third party social applications. The members of your social network will be able to add an open social app onto the first page.

Question: Can you do custom Javascript in those text boxes?

Rachel: Yep — custom javascript, custom hacks … hack away!

—–

That was the event. Overall, I learned a great deal about how brands can use multiple sites to set up campaigns/communities across formerly disparate social networking sites.

A cyborg (shorthand for “cybernetic organism”) is a symbiotic fusion of human and machine.

Humans have always developed technologies to help them survive and thrive, but in recent decades the rapid escalation and intensification of the human-technology interface have exceeded anything heretofore known. From satellite communications to genetic engineering, high technologies have penetrated and permeated the human and natural realms.

The Augmentation of Biological and Mental Landscapes

Indeed, so profoundly are humans altering their biological and physical landscapes that some have openly suggested that the proper object of anthropological study should be cyborgs rather than humans, for, as Donna Haraway says, we are all cyborgs now” (The Cyborg Handbook, by Cris Hables Grey).

Definition, from Powerset, a Wikipedia compendium, on Biogenetic Structuralism.

A cyborg, short for “cybernetic organism,” is a being that is part cybernetic machine and part organism, a term coined by two NASA scientists, Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline (1960, reprinted in Gray 1995). These men suggested some of the advantages for space exploration of altering the human body with machines.

The group’s analysis of the cyborg is grounded in the findings of modern neuroscience. The perspective is grounded upon the presumption that human consciousness and culture are functions of the human nervous system. In other words, consciousness is as much the function of the brain as digestion is the function of the stomach and grasping the function of the hand.

Their reasoning and research led ultimately to a four stage account of the evolution of the cyborg — a natural, but special case of the evolution of technology as a whole. The group hypothesizes that the emergence of the cyborg is following these stages:

• Stage I: Replacement or augmentation of the human skeleton. Examples: wooden leg, hook for lost hand, armor, false teeth, etc. This has been going on for centuries.

• Stage II: Replacement or augmentation of muscle. Examples: mechanical hand for lost hand, other prosthetic devices, mechanical heart valve, replacement of lens in eye, etc. Began to emerge in the mid-20th century.

• Stage III: Replacement or augmentation of parts of the peripheral nervous system, autonomic nervous system and the neuroendocrine system. Examples: bionic arms and legs, pacemakers, automatic biochemical pumps, etc. Emerging in the later 20th century.

• Stage IV: Replacement or augmentation of parts of the central nervous system. Examples: video “eyes” for blind, Air Force cyborg fighter plane control, etc. Rudimentary steps in the later 20th century.

My Role as a Cyborg Anthropologist

I became a Cyborg Anthropologist because I knew that the relationship between humans and computers would only increase in importance in the coming century. As a Cyborg Anthropologist, it is possible to apply traditional anthropological methods to the study of human computer interaction. I use ethnographic methods that combine qualitative and quantitative analysis in order to optimize human productivity and healthy practices during an area of intense development.