Two big new capabilities to note this week: Multiple Haystack Support and RSS Feed Integration. Here’s the skinny.

Multiple Haystack Support

We’ve implemented capabilities that allow a single individual (or, more correctly, a single digital identity as represented by an email address) to belong to multiple Haystacks. This is a big one. We realized early on that we are all members of multiple groups, and various aspects of “who we are” are relevant only in context. More importantly, when an organization is setting up a Haystack, that organization may only want certain traits to appear.

For example, profiles that are in a Haystack that’s set up for a local bookstore might include favorite authors, whereas a Haystack for a medical office would likely want to have a tag category set up for specialty of practice for each doctor in the practice. Since a single individual might belong to both of these Haystacks (let’s say the doctor volunteers at the bookstore on weekends), the profile the doctor needs to put in the Haystack for her medical office is going to be quite different than the one she puts in the one for the bookstore. This new capability easily allows this, and allows different Haystacks to easily capture different “facets” of a personality.

Here’s an example of an individual who belongs two Haystacks, one for the BrainJams unconferences, and one for the recently-concluded MeshForum.

RSS Feed Integration

One capabilty that Stowe Boyd has noted is missing in other enterprise social networking systems is the ability to integrate “live web” aspects into a profile; a profile is typically a “static” construct. (I agree, this is critically important. Since “who we are” will be increasingly defined by the digital artifacts we produce, integrating feeds into your digital identity is a critical capability to have.) Stowe notes that he sees a need for:“…importing RSS feeds of outside information into the profile (I’d like to link my blog, for example)”Stowe, ask and ye shall recieve. (Check danah’s profile in the Speaker’s Haystack for an example.) Haystack profiles have the ability to pull in an RSS 2.0 feed, and the feed parser is even all AJAX-ified and stuff, so that a customer or prospective business contact can view your tags and the rest of your profile while the system goes out and grabs the most recent headlines from your feed.

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Podcast: Customer Relationships, Communications and Enterprise Social Networking

Haystack Updates – April 26, 2006

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Christopher Carfi, CEO and co-founder of Cerado, looks at sales, marketing, and the business experience from the customers point of view. He currently is focused on understanding how emerging social technologies such as blogs, wikis, and social networking are enabling the creation of new types of customer-driven communities. He is the author of the Social Customer Manifesto weblog, and has been occasionally told that he drives and snowboards just a little too quickly.

It wasn’t that I learned a new word, or that I learned an obscure definition that consisted of a word I already knew. Instead, a common word, a word that I’ve uttered and heard probably thousands of times, has been changed in meaning, likely forever.

That word is “creative.”

Now, as someone who has been on the sales and marketing side of the business for a long time, I used to map the word “creative” to something pretty close to the answers.com definition of the word. I used to map it to:

creative: characterized by originality and expressiveness; imaginative: creative writing.

Or perhaps this one:

creative: one who displays productive originality: the “creatives” in the advertising department.

The word used to mean something akin to the above definitions. It also had a number of other overtones: the “creatives” were the people in vintage, mismatched clothing who were “fun to be around” but…ultimately…well, they were the flighty, flaky folks. (You know, the ones who couldn’t hold a steady job.)

This changed yesterday at MeshForum.

Over the course of a conversation, I came to realize that there’s another, truer, sense of the word. One of the other participants stated that he had made a decision to “live a creative life.”

When I first heard that phrase, I naturally mapped the word “creative” to the definitions above. And, since it was uttered by an artist, everything seemed to fit. My worldview was secure in its assumptions.

And then the conversation progressed, and I realized that I had completely missed the point. The word “creative”…perhaps it’s better to explicitly enunciate it “create-ive”…was not meant to indicate “expressive” or “imaginative.” Instead, it was tied to the root meaning of the word create…to fabricate out of undifferentiated raw materials, to bring something new to the world and to bring to life and fruition and success novel, tangible things that have never been seen before.

This idea of “creation” is in stark contrast to the common business tactic of fixing problems. As was stated yesterday, “when you ‘fix’ a broken motorcycle, the best that you can hope for is to end up with a motorcycle that is as good as it was before it was broken.” When you are being create-ive, you bring to life something that is additive, something that propels you, and your company, and society forward.

So…were you create-ive today? Or did you just fix things?

(Dave…thanks.)

Christopher Carfi, CEO and co-founder of Cerado, looks at sales, marketing, and the business experience from the customers point of view. He currently is focused on understanding how emerging social technologies such as blogs, wikis, and social networking are enabling the creation of new types of customer-driven communities. He is the author of the Social Customer Manifesto weblog, and has been occasionally told that he drives and snowboards just a little too quickly.

Contrary to defining blogs as a technology or platform, instead Dash described a blog as “a way to connect.”

Ratio of writers to readers in the SixApart network have changed from 1:40 to about 1:1000 for blogs that are “public facing.”

Two thirds of the users on LiveJournal are female. “A haven for those who want to communicate in a way that’s private and controlled.” On LJ, it’s more like 1:6 or 1:8 of writers to readers.

“You might read 1000 feeds…but you don’t have 1000 friends.”

“Real influence is not measured in raw numbers. Real influence is related to the number of people who you are connected to who really care about what you think.”

“The New York Times thinks they compete with the Washington Post. The New York Times is not competing with the Washington Post. The New York Times actually competes with recipes from my grandmother. The New York Times competes with information from my friends.”

“There are only a couple of different ways to connect. A person can connect at a really high level with 6-8 people, and at a moderate level with about 150 people.”

The most popular community on LJ is “Oh No They Didn’t” … a community of about 250,000 celebrity gossipwatchers. Most of those people watch this information on their “friends” page — they intersperse this information with information from their friends and family news.

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Christopher Carfi, CEO and co-founder of Cerado, looks at sales, marketing, and the business experience from the customers point of view. He currently is focused on understanding how emerging social technologies such as blogs, wikis, and social networking are enabling the creation of new types of customer-driven communities. He is the author of the Social Customer Manifesto weblog, and has been occasionally told that he drives and snowboards just a little too quickly.

Key points: Listening…a person who starts a blog on “quilting” will be indexed in two hours.

Shel Israel tells a story about Vyew, instigated by Dennis Howlett. Vyew listened to the needs Dennis and incorporated feedback into their product within days. Outstanding.

“A startup can get instant global feedback by an audience who cares…it’s R&D on steroids.”

“One of the things that blows me a way is that during the course of a week, I have conversations with people in a dozen countries.”

“Fundamentals are just that…fundamental. But these things take time. Blogging is not the revolution — conversation is the revolution.” — Shel Israel

Q: What’s the difference between a “group” blog and an individual blog?

A: (scoble) Within Microsoft, group blogs are discussed in a committee. They are vetted and approved, they are slowed down and watered down.

A: (israel) I think group blogs are going to get more unfiltered over time. Right now, if you look at the tech sector, the only big one is TechDirt. (Scoble rebuts, that some teams within Microsoft have team blogs that are very popular.)

Q: As people blog, are the able to be more of themselves? I’m interest in the differences between who people “are” when they’re on a company blog? Are people able to be more of “who they are” when they’re on their blogs?

A: (israel) By companies allowing companies to allow middle level employess to blog, they are creating a culture that is humanizing the company. (ed. – BRAVO!). What is happening…we want to remain humans when we go to work. We want the world to know “I’m more than just the person who sits in cube #72X.”

Q: What would you do if you were going to blog about issues you were having at work with a supervisor?

A: (israel) You’d want to think about that. Yes, test the membranes of the company…but dont be stupid. When you blog, don’t do things that will prevent you from getting your next job — digial lasts forever.

A: (scoble) If you’re going to take on your boss, or take on your management, you have to know that you’re taking a risk. Have your eyes open, and that you’re taking on a culture. Go in with your eyes open and know that you’re putting your job on the line. Someone link Mark Jens broke a rule…talking about financial results, and that will get you in trouble in a public company. He poured fuel around his own feet, and lit it on fire.

Q: How do you deal with comments, especially when the comments devolve in incivility?

A: (scoble) I’m now taking the “living room” rule. If a comment is not something that I’d expect to hear in my own living room, I’ll take that comment out. I don’t want to subject my readers to that.

A: (israel) If you have a company, these kinds of negative comments are going on anyway. For me, the big education is in listening to the negative comments. Skip past the first sentence where they call you names, and go to sentence three where they get to the root of their issue. Companies that can do this inch closer to their customers, and the wisdom of crowds sets in, and companies begin to get a lot wiser.

Q: Christopher Allen asked about the “Tyranny of the Popular.” “I want to take the ‘long tail,’ and cut off the head. The ‘popular’ dominates the first twenty pages.”

A: “Aggregators of the popular like Memeorandum are like purified sugar, and you need some fiber in your life.” – Scoble

More thoughts: Howard Greenstein

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Christopher Carfi, CEO and co-founder of Cerado, looks at sales, marketing, and the business experience from the customers point of view. He currently is focused on understanding how emerging social technologies such as blogs, wikis, and social networking are enabling the creation of new types of customer-driven communities. He is the author of the Social Customer Manifesto weblog, and has been occasionally told that he drives and snowboards just a little too quickly.

I keep forgetting about that tool that lets you watch a variety of search services all from one search. Here’s Gada.be’s result for Mix06.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …