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I would first like to say that Motley Crue totally rules...so the title of this blog goes out to my man Nikki Sixx.

Second, I would like to tell you about my friends Marissa, Torben, and Travis and the short documentary film series they are putting together. These are good people and they are building something beautiful and meaningful because that is what they like to do with their spare time. The series of short documentaries they are producing center around the concept of things being lost and things being found. I will let the video do the rest of the talking:

Looks cool, right? I have a lot friends that inhabit the Independent Film world and the whole process is a lot of blood, sweat, and tears...and I can assure you that these three have have paid their dues and then some. So much of building a project like this comes down to finding the money. Technology has certainly democratized the industry considerably, but nothing is 100 percent free. So part of this post is a plea to help their worthy cause.

But what has really caught my attention on this project is how the filmmakers are going about raising funds. They are using a fun little website called kickstarter.com. Kickstarter has been around for a couple of years and its mission is to help creative people (artists, inventors, musicians, etc.) raise money for their endeavors.

Participants put together an online presentation as to why their idea should be funded. Then they set a target amount they want to raise, and they have 30 days to meet that goal. So let's say your band was trying to scrape together 5000 bucks to cut a record. They would put together a webpage on Kickstarter that told the story of the band, and maybe had a video featuring one of the new tracks. Friends and fans would be asked to contribute to the undertaking, and sort of like a PBS fund drive, there would be different awards for different pledge amounts. So maybe at the $10 level fans got a free digital download of the new album, and at the $100 level they got the CD and tickets to a VIP launch party. You get the idea...your fanbase is basically pre-ordering and choosing their level of commitment.

The catch (and of course there is a catch) is that if you don't meet your goal you don't get the dough. Your backers' credit cards only get charged when and if you get that $5000. This allows for the good ideas to be funded and the bad ideas (or at least the poorly marketed ones) to be washed down the sewer of the marketplace. Go onto the website and you will find thousands of examples of projects that got off the ground using this formula. It is powerful stuff...but I think it is only half the story.

What makes Kickstarter and the other "crowd-funded" sites (like Indiegogo) exciting is all of the uptapped potential for people who don't have a project of their own. So let's say I don't have a band or a movie or an art piece knocking around in my noggin, but I want to feel like a part of a local creative scene. I get on Kickstater and I look up my town and I start contributing to projects that appeal to me. Let's say I was a drummer and I was looking for a band to join, I can find bands that have a similiar style and work on cool projects, contribute to their cause and the next time they are auditioning I would have a pretty nice in. If you were scheduling gallery space, or booking studio time, or renting video equipment you could make contributions and start conversations with exactly the kind of clients you would like to have. it is more than just networking...it is supporting a scene, and in turn being a part of that scene.

That's where this stuff gets really powerful...when creative people and their supporters can easily form communities great things happen. If you want to try this out for yourself check out the Lost and Found Series page on Kickstarter right now. Donate as little as 1 dollar and bam! You are part of the scene.

I was driving back to the hospital after grabbing some lunch today when I heard a rebroadcast of Terry Gross's interview of British historian Tony Judt. Judt died last week from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (what we in the States call Lou Gehrig's disease).

I had never heard of Tony Judt before but from the interview, recorded just this past March, he seemed like he had his shit together. There was one particular section that really caught my attention:

GROSS: You know, many people, when afflicted with a disabling disease, turn away from God. You were brought up in a secular Jewish home.

Mr. JUDT: That's right.

GROSS: And you remained secular. So has being sick changed any of your personal views about religion?

Mr. JUDT: No, but the no is very straightforward. I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or indeed multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself. But there's a big but which enters in here.

I am much more conscious than I ever was, for obvious reasons, of what it will mean to people left behind once I'm dead. It won't mean anything to me. But it will mean a lot to them. And it's important for them, by which I mean my children or my wife or very close friends, that some spirit of me is in a positive way present in their lives, in their heads, in their imaginings and so on.

So in one curious way I've come to believe in the afterlife as a place where I still have moral responsibilities, just as I do in this life, except that I can only exercise them before I get there. Once I'm there, it'll be too late. So no god, no organized religion, but a developing sense that there's something bigger than the world we live in, including after we die, and that we have responsibilities in that world.

I really liked the idea of your legacy, how you are remembered by the ones you leave behind, as your afterlife. You own that legacy and it is your responsibility, and (as awful as this sounds) this life is the only time allotted to build positive personal brand management.

Certainly this idea is elegantly expressed in the final moments of The Sonosopher when Alex Caldiero remembers the final words of his dying mother, "Remember me...and pass me on." Caldiero goes on on to say that memory is immortality, "Immortality doesn't exist in freaking heaven; immortality exists in the human mind and the human soul."

I would add that immortality also endures via the artifacts we left behind, certainly the physical objects we used but also the writing and art we managed to produce. As an ethnic Mormon I have inherited a strong cultural legacy of journaling, but I dare say no other generation has more extensively chronicled their lives than the social media generation. And I don't see a decline in the curve toward self reporting coming any time soon. The twin factors of our self-obsession and the eternal nature of digital information on the internet will provide our descendents with reams of material that will make the pioneers look like camera-shy wallflowers in comparison.

The big question that Judt and Caldiero bring up is will our successors benefit from us? Will our pursuit of a noble and moral life be recognized? Will we be featured on My Parents Were Awesome? I really appreciate Judt's notion that legacy management is not for the edification of the individual who dies. "It won't mean anything to me. But it will mean a lot to them. And it's important for them..." Living my life for someone else...just one of the things that I am just beginning to ponder during my first 24 hours of being a dad.

Recently danah boyd (not a typo...Ms. boyd is, shall we say, hooksian in her approach to capital letters), of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, tweeted the following question:

So I decided to do an informal survey of my collegiate Twitter followers, and was surprised to find that the majority of people who responded said Chrome was what they used. I recently started using Chrome as the primary browser on my media center. But for my laptop and my work computer I use Firefox almost exclusively. I like Chrome, but I don't yet see the real need to make a switch. Am I now relegated to the older generation of the Internet simply because I don't use the new browser like all the cool kids?

This worried me a bit so I asked my friend Anne, Utah Valley University's Director of Web Resources Services, to give me a breakdown of the browsers used to connect to the public portions of the UVU home page. Here are the results for the last 30 days:

1. Internet Explorer / Windows 365,962  44.36% 
2.  Firefox / Windows 217,124  26.32% 
3.  Safari / Macintosh 108,676  13.17% 
4.  Chrome / Windows 62,047  7.52% 
5.  Firefox / Macintosh 40,370  4.89% 
6.  Safari / iPhone 5,984  0.73% 
7.  Chrome / Macintosh 5,525  0.67% 
8.  Safari / Windows 4,741  0.57% 
9.  Safari / Android 2,924  0.35% 
10.  Firefox / Linux 2,776  0.34% 
11.  Safari / iPod 2,577  0.31% 
12.  Safari / iPad 2,310  0.28% 
13.  Mozilla / Windows 697  0.08% 
14.  Chrome / Linux 587  0.07% 
15.  Opera / Windows 434  0.05% 
16.  Mozilla / Linux 420  0.05% 
17.  Safari / (not set) 410  0.05% 
18.  Firefox / SunOS 216  0.03% 
19.  Mozilla Compatible Agent / iPhone 128  0.02% 
20.  BlackBerry9530 / BlackBerry  89  0.01%

The first thing that I was struck with right away was how many damn people still use Internet Explorer. No wonder there are so many complaints of worms and viruses on our network! Because so many employees use the uvu.edu website everyday it is hard to to tell exactly from these numbers how many students are using IE. But even so, close to 50% of UVU users are experiencing the internet on one of the lamest browsers known to man.

Now compare the UVU numbers to the overall browser market share numbers:

That means that everywhere else the numbers for the top two browsers are eerily inverse (IE in all its versions at 31%, and Firefox at 46.6%). Weird!

So getting back to the results of my informal Twitter survey (in which I simply asked "What Browser do you use?"), 71% of students who responded said they used Chrome. Since I generally regard my Twitter Friends as the most savvy of all my social media groups I can only conclude that Chrome is the new black and that soon the masses shall follow.

So which browser do you use? Why? And does it really matter?

The wife and I were sharing some cheese sticks at Iggy's yesterday when she looked at me and said, "You are a Connector". Errin is reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell right now, and I read it last week so I wasn't confused by her impromptu diagnosis. Gladwell sees Connectors as the folks that not only know people but also get their kicks connecting people. She is right...it seems my favorite sentence in the world is, "Well then you need to talk to this guy".

Right now I am reading Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith which explores the concept of Connectors within a social media context. While Trust Agents is not nearly as a elegant as Tipping Point it does have its moments. I am particularly intrigued by their notion that the open nature of the web has made it impossible to impersonate being a Connector. They argue that Connectors can only be effective (trusted) when they connect for pleasure and not for financial gain, but that money tends to follow the people who would connect for free anyway.

Tipping Point and Trust Agents make the case for a motivation that transcends dollars. Do you think your online activity is solely motivated by the need to connect? Do you make some connections with the hope that they will one day monetize?

When you want a taste of Provo's unique local culture make sure and stop by one of Krispy Kreme's convenient locations.

Last night I found myself at a meeting of the Social Media Club's Utah Valley chapter (http://smcuv.org/). For those who know me that probably seems a little out of the ordinary. I am not usually the guy who goes to these types of things, mostly for the fear that a MLM pitch might break out. But last night I picked up a couple tidbits, and had some tasty buffalo-chicken stuffed French bread.

For me the real benefit of these kinds of events comes in the thinking that I get done afterward. Same goes for when I read a good article in Wired, or stumble upon some cool little nugget online. Call it "expanding my paradigm" if you want to be a tool about it, but basically these kind of experiences get me out of my rut.

So social media was on my brain while at a meeting this morning. I work for a college and the last 6 months I have been on a committee that puts on an annual symposium concerning Civil Rights and Martin Luther King. It is a good cause so I volunteer my time and my talents (mostly graphic design stuff). This morning we had our postmortem where we talked about what we did right and what we did wrong. As so often happens when you get a bunch of old guard academics together they started talking about Facebook and Twitter and how we should have used social media to drum up interest in the symposium. Academics know that these tools are powerful for two reasons: 1. They can't keep their students off of it during class. 2. Everything they read tells them that "this is important...this means something". But they don't know what it is and they sure as hell don't know how to use it.

So when clueless people get around to confronting the whole Facebook/Twitter thing they tend to treat it like traditional media. After spending 10 minutes saying that posters and flyers get lost in the noise, they suggest doing things like blast e-mails and fan pages and spam tweets. It is like they want a whole new way to have their message ignored.

I explained briefly that the power of social media is not in how it approaches mass communication, but in how it approaches interpersonal communication. If social media is treated like traditional mass media it becomes noise. Messages need to be personalized.

So let's look at our case, where the problem is getting students and faculty interested enough in our symposium to actually participate. In the past our attempts at solutions have been flyers, printed invitations, posters and the campus LCD screen network. These physical manifestations of our message are important and they do get noticed. To eliminate them completely would be a mistake. But the main problem with these messages is that they are not personalized. And because the nature of how they are produced they can never be personalized.

Attempts at PR or advertising using social media often fall into a similar trap. An impersonal message gets spammed out to everyone on a friend list and somehow we feel all Web 2.0. Our friend list becomes a junk mailing list, and the message gets treated the same way, maybe even worse because this crap has come from a "friend".

If we consider these people friends we should treat them as such. When we are looking for participation, for someone to buy into our idea, we need to make that invitation about them. What are they going to get out of it? In the example of our symposium, imagine a student getting a Facebook message from a professor that personally invites them to join the event. As a friend we know what they are interested in (and if not their profile pretty much spells it out) and we can tailor our message to them. "I thought you might be interested in this session...I know you are looking for vita material for grad school...I think this is a great way to share your unique perspective."

This means more work, more interaction, and more willingness to accept the fact that some people you know and like simply won't give a rat's ass about what you are doing. These messages shouldn't go out to everyone. Be selective, be personal. And damn it...be social.

For the past week or two, folks at my employer (Utah Valley University) have been trickling into the school's Yammer site. For those of you not familiar with Yammer it is basically an intranet Twitter. Only people from your company's domain (in our case, uvu.edu) can join. You can create various groups, follow co-workers, tag and index topics, and fill out things like organization charts.

The strength of Yammer is that unites people who face similar problems (in our case a massive state-run bureaucracy running on a skeletal budget) who might not normally converse with each other. My role in my office might be unique, but chances are there is another person doing a similar job for a different department on the other side of campus. Yammer allows me to shout out an issue or question and watch the crowd come to my aid.

What is interesting about UVU's Yammer right now, and this seems to be the case with most social media channels in their infancy, is that the community is small enough to be helpful. Twitter was downright hospitable in the early days of its evolution when you were just happy to find somebody else using it. Once the spammers and the phishers and the marketing trolls got a hold of the system it changed the nature of the conversation forever.

Yammer has a built in limit to its size that should prevent it from devolving into the Twitter of today (I still love Twitter and use it everyday, but I wouldn't consider it really helpful). The only comments you see on Yammer are from folks with your same domain address. It would be nice if the collective knowledge base was broader, right now the participants are the typical early-adopters (nerds like myself), but the small size seems to increase people's willingness to share what they know.

But I fear if it gets too big the candid nature of typical twitter-like conversations will be hindered by a fear that everyone is watching. This subject came up today when my buddy Don and I were talking about one of the school's vice presidents jumping on the Yammer-wagon. What happens to a social network when the boss is watching? Are the same kinds of conversations possible? Is their a chilling effect?

Recently there has been a movement among some forward-thinking companies to use the tools of Web 2.0 to increase workplace candor.

If employees are allowed to be honest in their complaints about their environment, those in charge can be more responsive to their needs. As an employer I would want unfiltered access into what my employees really thought of my latest initiative. This kind of candor is only possible when folks feel free to speak without fear of retribution.

Of course this kind of free-flowing dynamic also depends on a community that is committed to a constructive attitude. Think of the Yammer network as a Wiki–an environment that is constructed, maintained, and some cases policed by its own members. Right now that vibe exists on my company's network, but it will be interesting to see if it continues as usage increases. The Geeks Greeks said a perfect democracy could only exist amongst a limited amount of participants, it will be interesting to see what that number is on Yammer.

VEG