Pieces of me on community...

Five things I love about Microsoft

b2ix — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 22:03:00 GMT

Giving -- As someone who does a lot in the community, I really appreciate the fact that Microsoft spends a lot of money each year to support those organizations where I volunteer. Whether it's matching my time with money, or matching dollar for dollar, Microsoft's commitment to the community is inspiring. Expand this out to some 90,000 employees and the amount that Microsoft gives to the community is staggering.

Learning -- Pretty much everyone you meet at Microsoft is interested in learning about something. Perhaps this is why they have so many incredible speakers come through. Whether it's authors like Malcolm Gladwell, global innovators like Muhammad Yunus, and former President Bill Clinton, there's always someone fascinating that comes to Microsoft to share their thoughts.

Global perspective -- With offices world wide, and software and services that reach well beyond the geographic footprint of Microsoft, the need to work and play well on a global level is always front and center in planning. Having this global perspective is very beneficial in ensuring the right products, services and messaging is delivered. I personally don't know of many places that really take this to heart.

Diversity -- From my perspective, the diversity at Microsoft is comparable to that which you'd find in New York City. Microsoft works with people from all different backgrounds, experiences, opinions, and the like. Not your typical perspective of a Microsoftie, now is it? One new blog that profiles many different Microsoft perspectives is Microspotting

People -- the company would not be where it is today were it not for the passion and dedication of so many individuals. From contract employees, vendors, interns, partners, and of course the full time employees, Microsoft draws an incredible range of smart, talented, and incredible individuals.

It is with that though, I must bid farewell to a company I dedicated my last eight years to (six as a vendor with MSN Games, and two as a full time employee with the teams responsible for MSDN, TechNet and Expression). It's time for me to move on and pursue new opportunities. To all the people in games, community, and elsewhere at Microsoft who I worked with over the last several years, you have my thanks and admiration!

Microsoft Answers beta

b2ix — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:44:00 GMT

I want to congratulate all of those who worked on getting a beta Microsoft Answers up and running. It's great to see the nice integration of social applications like Forums and Social Bookmarks in a very person centric view. What exactly is Microsoft Answers?

A rich, interactive community experience moderated by dedicated support engineers.
One place for people to easily find Microsoft Vista content from Microsoft and others in the community
A series of experiences meant to welcome, help, and engage people

Here are some other folks talking about this.

Where's Brian redux

b2ix — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:23:00 GMT

A few months ago I posted about ways of finding me in between blog posts:

First off is my del.icio.us account. This is where I tag a lot of things that relate to community and tech. Apologies in advance for the random political things that pop in now and again.

Second is my list of shared items from Google Reader. These are a lot of the items that I find noteworthy from the feeds of most interest to me.

Third is my Amazon wish list. I don't really do a good job of removing the ones I've read so it's both things I will be reading and things I have read.

(Note -- friendfeed has all of my del.icio.us, Reader and Amazon stuff all in one place)

Last but not least, I blog in a variety of places:
here -- work
here -- community in general (work and personal)
here -- running (personal)
here -- games (personal, not updated much)
Internally at work

Just a quick update. I've since been using Twitter a lot more, and I realized I didn't list Facebook as an option. So there you have it. More than enough ways to find out what I'm up to with community stuff. See y'all soon.

Community advisory boards help shape our future

b2ix — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:24:00 GMT

A few months ago, I was at the Norman Rockwell Museum and I ran across his "Four Freedoms" series again. I always enjoyed his work and am in awe of his ability to capture humanity in such a poignant manner. As such, in light of our recent community advisory board meeting, I thought the "Freedom of Speech" image was an appropriate image to represent this blog post about the community advisory board. What is our community advisory board? In September, we kicked off this initiative to hear how a cross-section of our audiences use certain features, functionality, and content on our sites. Additionally we want to determine and how we might go about improving those to enhance the overall experience help people be more successful performing their key tasks.

All in all, the whole event went very well, and I wanted to share our strategies as to how we did it. I realize that there are many ways of doing this, and I do not purport what we did is the best way. Rather, it's just the way we chose (and it worked!). Any feedback, suggestions and the like that you have is greatly appreciated.

Identifying key participants

My team spans across many different segments of technical professionals. This is most evident in our MSDN (for developers), TechNet (for IT professionals) and Expression (for designers.) site experiences. Ensuring that we have representatives across these audiences is key in understanding how basic social issues such as trust and reputation factor into decision making. In addition to getting a cross section of different audiences, ensuring that we have a representative sample across company size and location is something we sought from participants. The specific individuals were contacted through our own extended social networks (at least two or three degrees of separation), so the ask was more personalized.

Determining goals

Given our current schedule, we knew we wanted to talk about reputation, broadly defined. More specifically, we wanted to identify key indicators of trust and to get some sense of the priority of them for the participants. On a more tactical level, we wondered if the current way in which reputation is manifested in our forums is the best way we surface this. These items for discovery became the key goals we set for ourselves with the first attempt at a community advisory board.

Selecting the right tools

As our participants are scattered geographically, an asynchronous means of connecting people became a key requirement for this initiative. Looking at our existing resources, using a private forum became a natural choice. The privacy options in our forums helped ensure that only the participants are in the discussion. The threaded nature of the forum helped us "contain" discussions on a particular question on a given thread; I would pose one question (related to our goals) and the discussion would follow.

In addition to the forum, we also used an old fashioned conference call for a real time discussion. As good as asynchronous discussions can be, there's nothing quite like a real time conversation for surfacing additional ideas.

To facilitate most of this, email played a crucial role in our tool kit. Email was used to identify prospective participants, in addition to getting them set up with the tools.

Documents/collateral. To help spur discussion, I also pulled together a quick PowerPoint to frame the agenda for the call.

Putting it all together

Emails sent out to identify prospective participants
Private forum created
Background information for forum posted
Background information consists of:
Biographies of participants (collected via email)
Biographies of planning team
Basic forum guidelines and FAQs
Background information on the project, reputation an trust
SkyDrive public share created for possible collateral (ultimately not used due to time)
Welcome message posted to forum
First question posted to forums
Wait a little bit to see if people respond naturally
Emails to specific individuals to spur participation in forums
Direct responses to participants as they posted replies
My replies consisted of any of the following:
Thanking people for participation
Welcoming first time participants
Follow up questions
Second question posted to forum
[repeat 7 - 11]
Third question posted to forum
[repeat 7 - 11]
Create conference call agenda via PowerPoint
Distribute agenda and call in information (via email)
Hold conference call
Take notes
Post notes/key takeaways on forum
Ask others for their key takeaways
Document process
Blog about it :-)
Refine as needed

While it may seem a bit dry when listed out like that, I found the whole experience to be quite engaging. In many ways, this is similar to what happens when you bring together small group of people in a Meetup or Conversation Café. That we opted to do this in an online forum and a call was just the way we did it to help bridge time and space.

Looking back, there are some aspects I would change -- perhaps leveraging a file share like SkyDrive more. I'm also wondering about the benefit of recording conference calls a la Live Meeting or some other set of recording tools. While it can be valuable when it's necessary to be in sync with slides of demos, I don’t think that was really needed for our specific agenda. Those are just some initial thoughts off the top of my head.

Based on the methodology listed above, what would you suggest as changes to explore?

For anyone that's interested, I've embedded a download of the discussion slides in addition to a slideshow of what we talked about during the call.

Recognition and Reputation: The Role of Trust

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: discussion reputation)

Star Trek and the future of the internet(s) courtesy of Microsoft's translation technology?

b2ix — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:22:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Genevieve Bell where she talked about the future of the internet(s). One of the points she raised was that that "There is now an end to the 'anglosphere'" on the internet. More languages, more stories and more context to what is online is fast becoming the norm. From a tech perspective, this raises some interesting questions regarding design and strategy for how we create our online resources. At its most basic, how do you create experiences that work for multiple languages and norms?

This notion of language and communication is central to issues surrounding community. Having grown up with two languages at home, and even more when around extended family members, I always thought it would be great to have a universal translator of sorts, much like they have in Star Trek and other science fiction story lines. Imagine what we could accomplish if we all understood one another? While those days are still a long ways off, we are getting closer.

Microsoft translation technology has been making some great progress lately from both a tooling and a community standpoint. A couple of examples:

Windows Live Translator -- type in text, or translate a webpage into several languages using this free tool

Windows Live Translator in Internet Explorer 8 -- I haven't tried this yet but it sounds like the Windows Live Translator is a "right click" menu option in IE 8.

Windows Live Translator add-in -- have a site you want to translate? All you have to do is add this to your site and people visiting your pages can choose to translate it into another language. See John Martin’s blog for more details.

Windows Live Translation Bot -- chat with a bot, have it translate in another language, and bring in another person to the conversation. The bot will then serve as a translator for you.

Translation Library -- The MSDN Library recently leveraged some of the translation tools and applied it to the Portuguese version of the MSDN Library. Basically, the text is automatically translated and people can make suggestions to improve/edit the translation.

While with any translation, there's room for refinement I think these initiatives are a great start towards that universal translator envisioned by Star Trek. If you feel like translating my blog, I just updated my blog to include the Windows Live Translator add-in.

danah boyd is joining Microsoft Research!

b2ix — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:58:00 GMT

For years, one of my go to people for analysis of social network sites, youth and more is danah boyd. Like Dare, I've been a fan of her research for quite some time, and it's exciting to know that she will be joining Microsoft's Research team in Boston. I have no doubt that danah will continue to push all of our understanding of what is going on in this space, in addition to breaking new ground. Congrats and best of luck in the new job!

Web 2.0 Expo New York 2008 highlights

b2ix — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:57:00 GMT

This past week, I had the honor of going to O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo in New York City. Overall, it was a great event that allowed me to connect with some of the great minds in the industry in addition to learning a lot.

Some highlights from the conference:

Tim O'Reilly's keynote -- as someone who is passionate about community first and foremost, O'Reilly's call to action for us to focus on what matters really hit home for me. Community -- not limited to technology, is what brought me to Microsoft. I think tech has a big role, but ultimately the measure of it's true worth is what does it mean to everyone else? How does it solve the really big problems of facing the environment, global health, civic participation and so on? Thank you, Tim for calling attention to what really matters.

Clay Shirky's keynote -- I've always appreciated Shirky's insights in bringing much needed depth and focus to looking at how community affects social interactions. Looking at the so called information overload problem through the lens of broken filtering methods changes the conversation, in my mind, and helps us all focus on problems to tackle

Genevieve Bell's presentation -- Much like the keynotes by O'Reilly and Shirky, this session (and her abbreviated keynote) brings a different perspective to the Web2.0 space. As an anthropologist for Intel, Bell brings rich insight and poignant questions for the future direction of how the internet impacts social interactions. How this physically shapes our environment, and how it changes our experiences with technology and each other present many new challenges and opportunities for all of us.

Avinash Kaushik's presentation -- Focused on the topic of analytics, Kaushik gave a great overview of how we effectively measure and analyze what is really going on with the Web2.0 space. Kaushik provided great insight, and gave a thoroughly entertaining presentation for a topic that can be quite dry at times.

Joshua Porter -- where to begin? Porter is great! A must read in my list of feeds, I appreciated the opportunity to attend both of his sessions, in addition to dialoguing with him on issues of reputation and recognition. (thanks also to Bryce Glass for the clarification of your definition).

Other highlights -- connecting with folks from all over. Whether it was with folks from Etsy, Lithium, Cisco, Chile, or old colleagues it was great. Additionally, New York has always been my kind of town and it's a great place for something like the Web2.0 expo. Thanks to everyone involved!

Social Bookmarks v1 released

b2ix — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:11:00 GMT

A few months ago we previewed a version of Social Bookmarks that enabled technical professionals to:

store urls of interest to you
share them with others
explore what others share

Now we're ready to open it up even more. With the new release of Social Bookmarks on MSDN, TechNet, and Expression new scenarios are enabled:

Follow a person's bookmarks -- follow a bookmark feed of a specific person or a bookmark feed of a person by tag. Put another way, this is tag drafting
Bookmark on sites you own -- use our Social Bookmarks widget (English language for now, other languages in the weeks ahead) to make it easier for others to save your page as a bookmark
Support for 11 new languages -- all to be rolled out in the next several weeks -- Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish
Import existing links -- from your browser favorites or from Delicious
Browse other users -- see who else is bookmarking and follow their feed of bookmarks
Report a bookmark -- if you see a bookmark that you believe to be questionable, report the item to Microsoft for review

We would not be here were it not for your feedback, and for the work of an incredible engineering team. Thank you! Congratulations to all involved! Now get out there and bookmark :-)

More than bookmarks are coming to MSDN and TechNet...

b2ix — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 02:26:00 GMT

John recently wrote about the broader vision we've been working towards here for technical professionals. Rather than rehashing the whole thing, I encourage you to see what John has to say, and to stay tuned for these updates. With my passion around the intersection of community and technology, I'm quite excited about this coming to fruition on sites like TechNet and MSDN.

Sara Ford publishes a book, changes lives

b2ix — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:19:00 GMT

One of my colleagues, Sara Ford, just finished her first book on Visual Studio tips and will be donating all author book royalties to create a scholarship fund at the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College for anyone living in her hometown of Waveland, LA MS. Wow! Not only will the book be an incredible resource for VS developers, the scholarship fund is huge! Talk about community building... :-)

From Sara's own words:

I am donating 100% of my author book royalties to create a scholarship fund at the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College for anyone living in my hometown of Waveland, Mississippi, which was destroyed during Hurricane Katrina. The Save Waveland Scholarship Fund will give preference to math and computer science majors.

USA Today referred to Waveland as The Town That Vanished. After witnessing the devastation first hand six weeks after the storm, I vowed that I would one day do something that would make a difference. With Microsoft matching the donation, I feel that day is today.

Congratulations on this great accomplishment, Sara!

Is love more powerful than the web?

b2ix — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 02:10:00 GMT

With two high profile product launches being a bit bumpy (here, here) I can't help but wonder if the all of the love for their products (and the spread of love via social networks) is causing strain on the underlying infrastructure.

Course, from a community standpoint, this sounds like a good problem to have.

Thanks Bill!

b2ix — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:55:00 GMT

I don't know if Bill's actual last day will be like the video below, but I'm sure it will be memorable. Thanks for all the insights, vision and humor all these years. I look forward to seeing all of the wonderful things that he'll be doing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for years to come.

Video: Bill Gates Last Day CES Clip

Notes on "The MAIN model for understanding tech effects on credibility"

b2ix — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:06:00 GMT

I recently ran across a fascinating paper in MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning by S. Shayam Sundar titled, "The MAIN Model: A Heuristic Approach to Understanding Technolgy Effects on Credibility." Given the work that we're doing on recognition, this paper on credibility seemed rather appropriate to dig into for more detail.

Early on, Sundar lays the foundation to say that credibility cannot be effectively determined by considering solely the source of the information. Specifically, Sundar says, "Ultimately though, source, message, and the medium credibility serve as nominal cues -- a given source is perceived as credible or not, a given message element is perceived as credible or not, and likewise a given medium or media vehicle or channel is perceived as credible or not -- that provide mental shortcuts for effortlessly assessing the believability of information being received."

Instead, Sundar goes on to explain the value of using a cues and heuristic model to better understand how technology plays a role in helping people determine the relative credibility of a site, piece of content, person, etc. The model Sundar proposes is based from ten years of research from The Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State University -- Modality, Agency, Interactivity, and Navigability (MAIN).

I won't go into the rest of the paper, but suffice to say Sundar explores the various aspects of MAIN in more detail. While I found the framework quite interesting (especially as I think about how that may apply -- or not -- to MSDN, TechNet and Expression), what I get most from reading papers like this is a fresh perspective on issues I deal with day to day. I also find myself making multiple connections to areas of study or examples in real life I would not have thought of before. For example, when talking about heuristics ties to Interactivity, Sundar wrote "Users may be likely to evaluate the system's credibility positively, just as they would evaluate a person with whom they hit it off." While I joke with my colleagues that all of our work with social media is no different than that of a dating site, the image that popped into my head when I read this was that of a chemistry.com commercial. Thinking more on this, there is something to be said about the chemistry that occurs between people when they meet. It would seem that based on how a site triggers (or does not trigger) heuristics tied to interactivity, there may or may not be any chemistry with those coming to the site.

Another example of making connections that otherwise would not have existed were it not for reading this research paper is on this notion of being a good conversationalist. Over the course of a week I've had a series of conversations on the personal skills (or lack thereof) of others. One situation was when someone commented that this other person only talks about themselves, never asking about others. The other situation was when a father jokingly talked about how he taught and modeled social skills to his son through a book (it worked!). Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but when Sundar talks of "the real value of interactivity is that it gives the user the ability to serve as a source, and not just a receiver of communication"...I think of the need to be a good conversationalist. As someone working on social experiences, how do the experiences we provide, and the sites we publish help or hinder the notion of being a good conversationalist? How are we having a conversation with those who come to our experiences? How do we facilitate the ability for others to be good conversationalists with one another?

Anyway, those were some of my take aways from Sundar's paper. I'd be curious to hear if others had similar thoughts. If you had different insights, I'd love to hear them as well.

Recognition / Reputation one more time

b2ix — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:56:00 GMT

I seem to be on a recognition kick lately. In addition to running across the reputation patterns the other day, I just ran across a great presentation by Bryce Glass on getting started with reputation systems.

Again, I personally think the notion of reputation being discussed is being blurred a bit by things I would consider to be recognition aspects...but maybe it's a toe-may-toe toe-mah-toe debate. Regardless, there's some great questions raised in the presentation. I'm still digging through it, but hope to post a more thoughtful response in the future. Thanks, Bryce!

Time travel with Social Bookmarks?

b2ix — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:49:00 GMT

Some people have visual memories. Others say that smell is the strongest stimulation for memory. For me, I can remember the context in which a particular event occurred. More specifically, I can often remember what I was doing, where I was, and all of that when I came across a website that was of interest. In the past, this would lead to an inordinate amount of time trying to re-create my steps rather than doing my job.

Fortunately, with Social Bookmarks, I can now find the key words or phrases associated with a given url saved. All I have to do is click on a tag, or series of tags and my list of items gets narrowed down to the key pieces of information I need -- ultimately saving time, and letting me tackle the work I need to do at a given moment.

How does this relate to time travel? Simple. I recall that I ran across a website that had interesting information about a particular topic -- say "search." I am then able to see other search related items and can see where in a timeline I saved them. Being able to recall when, where, and that whole context in which I encountered the resource...I'm essentially walking back through time :-)

Loosely related, going back through one's bookmarks also helps me prevent the "Shiny Object Syndrome" that many of us face. It's also a refreshing way to counter what may be a re-wiring of our brains thanks to the afore mentioned Shiny Object Syndrome

Thanks to Bob for the inspiration of this post.