[Update 2008-08-07 after the gig] Thank you all for helping us creating a wonderful gig in Naantila! Here are my slides (pdf); a direct link to my livestream recording (via Nokia N95) at the bambuser service; and the livestream through my ”old” laptop at the Ustream service. Some of you e-mailed mobile photos, see the bottom of this page for the results. And here comes [later] a link to a new post that exibits an autoproduced trailer video of todays gig, as well as a comment on the Presidents ventures…
Special credits: I am gratefully indebted to Bob Sprankle for all his, and other pioneers, gratiousy shared explorations of new ways to educate children. Besides the Room 2008 ”Wicked Wikipedia” I learned about The Get out clause and A Swarm of angels through Bob’s recording of  Clarence Fisher and Darren Kuropatwa speech at BLC08. My good artist friend I Awake created the music. Finally, without the excellent house tech set up by Woltti my peformance would have been severely crippled.

SATU ry is the Association of Independent Producers in Findland. They are currently mapping out the schedule for the number one annual media event in Finland. That is, the Media & Message 2008. The event will take place on August 6-7, 2008, in the town of Naantali, close to Turkku. I have been asked to during 45-60 minutes present some thoughts and suggest:

Re:think media for our future

Today we are barely recognizing that social media most likely will transform mankind even more than the printing technology, books, and television did. Are we prepared? What is really going on? What do you want to do with it?

Media is commonly interpreted as a way to convey information between two or more parties. This includes the more narrow idea of mass media. That is, media that sends one message to many recipients. What we see right now, for example through the ”social media” lens, is dramatic changes where individuals explodingly converse with other individuals. Hence we turn to new models, theories, and tools to use ”social media” effectively and efficiently. But other phenomena such as recommendation systems, mash-ups, cloud computers, the semantic web, and sentiment analysis are typically overlooked. Richard have those in mind and will share his ideas around Social media in 2015.

What do you think? Does it sound interesting, too academic or just incomprehensible?

[Update 2008-08-06]: fixed this SlideFlickr show (all may not show up here, extra images sent via e-mail have the the mandm tag)

For several weeks I have had the intention to publish a post about my experiences with mobile Internet (will come soon :-). In addition I wanted to contribute with some reflections on the issue as a comment to For Immediate Release (FiR). Even more so after Neville Hobson, who together with Shel Holz produce FiR, this Tuesday blogged  Experiencing 3 mobile broadband. I planned to record my comment on Wednesday evening so it could make it into Thursdays episode. But I did not find the time.

Yesterday (Thursday) I spent together with a group of bank managers (Swedbank and independent savings banks, Sparbanker). During the morning we had a wonderful session with the fascinating speaker/consultant Fredrik Härén. When Fredrik entered the stage I used my Nokia N95 8Gb to produce a short livestream video clip (in Swedish) via bambuser. Bumbuser is a Swedish startup, similar to Qik, but with a different approach when it comes to the streaming technology.

One of Fredrik’s topics is creativiy, perhaps that gave me The Idea. I thought…what if I would record my FiR comment as a part of the afternoon session with the bankers. Thought and done, I immediately used my HTC Touch Cruise to the send the following tweet to Neville (jangles at Twitter, note time stamps are BST, i.e. GMT+1, relative to when I copied the messages):

@jangles I plan to do a live (with audience) FiR audio comment about mobile broadband in about 5h 08:51 AM April 10, 2008

Remember, I did all this (livestreaming, twittering, and more) while listening to Fredrik’s presentation and his interactions with us in Swedbank’s meeting room downtown Stockholm. One (1) minute later, presumably still at home in Wokington, Neville replied:

@weconverse that’s great, Richard. Look forward to hearing your recording! 08:52 AM April 10, 2008 from twhirl in reply to weconverse

Around five hours later I arrived at the point in my own presentation where we took a look at podcasting. I demonstrated the FiR website and played a short clip with listener comments from Monday’s episode. Unfortunately I had left my Edirol R09 mp3-recorder at home. But besides accepting text comments and e-mail with mp3 file attachements, FiR also uses Mobatalk (pka MyChingo). The Mobatalk service appears as a widget on any web site that allows visitors to make live recordings through their web browser. In front of the group I hit the "Record" button and started to talk, keeping an eye on the level meter. Maybe three minutes later the folks in the room pointed out that the recorder had stopped. We all realized that Mobatalk had a two minute limit.

OK, I like to do experiments and test the limits of my (and the audiences’ :-) capacity. But this was kind of too much. Besides doing it all live, time pressed, speaking English, and a very sketchy outline of what my comment should include, the darn widget stopped me. While thinking "poor Neville who has to edit togheter two comments", "how much of what I said was recorded", and "what is most important to say during two minutes", I hit record again. When done I clicked "stop", "send message", and told the group that perhaps it would be part of the next episode. Then we continued our meeting, which included great thoughts and cases from Anders Lundkvist (Springtime) and Henrik Torstensson (Stardoll).

Those of you that have worked as consultants for banks know that it sometimes is impossible to be connected to the Internet from inside their offices. In this case I had a WiFi connection for my laptop, but no mobile coverage. Therefore it took some time before I read Nevilles:

@weconverse got your 2 Mobatalk recordings, Richard, thanks. Will be in today’s FIR. Recording later today. about 20 hours ago

Eager to see how things unfolded, I kept an eye on the streams through my twitter account the same evening. Here are the FiR production related tweets from Neville (he made many more):

About to record FIR 335. Boy, will this be late today. about 16 hours ago

Phew. Just finished recording FIR 335. Need another r&c now. about 15 hours ago 

Well into audio editing FIR 335. Break now for bite, back in 45 or so. about 14 hours ago

Some of the editing is a bit dodgy, I reckon, but FIR 335 is almost there. Final mix including a pretty cool podsafe music track. about 12 hours ago

RSS subscribers – FIR 335 coming your way via RSS feed. Show notes and direct d/l links soon. Plus one FIR Cut. about 11 hours ago

FIR 335 posted. http://tinyurl.com/5vvx5o about 10 hours ago

I went to bed before Neville published the result, he is amazing (and overslept this morning :-). In any case, you can enjoy the result in FiR 335. My comment appears 35m20s into the episode. But listen to the whole thing – it is as always packed with valuable stuff.

Thank you Neville!!!

[Update 2008-04-12] Check who spotted the above out:

Mobasoft @weconverse Just read your blog post. I’m glad that MyChingo (aka Mobatalk) was able to help you. Paid members get 30 minutes, not 2 ;-) 04:06 PM April 11, 2008 from web

[Update 2008-04-07] I just got the message that SEB has changed their plans and ”cancelled” the event.

SEB are developing their organisation for market- and information management as well as their corporate brand. Now it is (the first) time for the managers working within those areas in the Nordic countries as well as Europe to meet. In that context I am fortunate enough to provide some inspiration and questionmarks.

[side note, over the years I have provided at least four gigs, and advice in other contexts, for SEB as well as Swedbank. Interestingly enough I am not a customer of those banks. Skandiabanken, where I have my private fortune (well…), have neither responded to my constructive criticism, nor approached me with any kind of interest…]

The what is there, why it is important follows here. When we say xxxx, what do we mean?  Consider the sentence:

Regarding the Swedish discussions about Public Service, not a single one of the ideas suggested by Richard Gatarski sucks.

My point here is not the content of the sentence, but its sentiment. That is, "the attitude, thought, or judgment prompted by feeling". I hope that you find my attitude towards my own ideas are pretty positive. In other words – I do not suck.

In a comment to my previous post Adam Nussdorfer suggests that I should do a Google Suck Index (GSI) with "Gatarski sucks". Of course I did, and currently the result is zero hits. The same goes for the Swedish translation "Gatarski suger". Good enough, eh? The only problem is that soon there will be at least one hit (this post). And if one of you blogs about this post and include "Gatarski sucks", Google will have two hits. Long-tailing around for some time and the GSI for my name would at first sight look terrible. So, I need to rewire your brain behind the current blink at GSI.

In a post in his company’s blog Adam refers to the Business Week article Love the customers who hate you. There Jeff Jarvis, famous not only for his Dell Hell experiences, tells the readers to check their GSI. Read the article, because Jarvis’ advice on what to do with angry customers are insightful and valuable. The same goes for the lead story Consumer vigilantes and the podcast episode behind it.

But Google finds words, not sentiment. Hence you must think beyound hit counts – that is the important lesson here. Regarding my little person it does not matter much, because you (if you are human) can easily scan the few hits to grasp the sentiment(s).

Let us take a more complex, yet illustrative, example. A Google search for (without quotation marks): cheap monday are not comfortable, gives me 2.580.000 hits, and cheap monday are comfortable gives 1.660.000 hits.  Do not assume that means that the majority of the Web stuff about cheap monday’s jeans is about how unconfy they are. Actually, the first 10 hits on the "not" search goes to retailers and fashion promoters. Clearly, we (humans) can not analyze the dominating attitude(s) here by looking at hit counts. We need help.

Machines capable of interpreting feelings and meanings have become more important than they were when I defended my dissertation Artificial Market Actors in 2001. The issue of meanings was not in my focus, although I sort of grasped the importance. In other words I am not the expert here, others are (let us know :-).

As I noted a few posts ago (in Swedish), what most likely will come in handy is "Sentiment analysis". According to (the current) Wikipedia definition it is an:

"area of natural language processing, computational linguistics and text mining. Generally speaking, it aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic. The attitude may be their judgement or evaluation (see appraisal theory), their affectual state (that is to say, the emotional state of the author when writing) or the intended emotional communication (that is to say, the emotional effect the author wishes to have on the reader)."

For sure not a new field, but something I believe anyone interested in market conversations must learn about and contribute to. Note, this goes far beyond Google and similar search engines. Sentiment analysis, and related fields, are useful for intelligence in all kinds of social and other media.

The other day I was doing some ego surfing or as I prefer to call it, market intelligence. To my surprise, at the top of the Google results list for "Richard Gatarski", I found a sponsored link. Apparently one of my customers bought an adword bundle that includes my name (gig next week at The Conference). That triggered some moments of reflection. Can’t say I am terribly concerned. Rather more thinking about if that (unclear)  is something I could capitalize upon. If nothing else, the other guys at my office envy me. Their names did not reveal any (namenapped) sponsorships. Does your?

Now to the even cooler thing. A Google search for "Wednesday Relations",  the name of the company who organizes The Conference, rank the weconverse blog gig entry as number five, and second if one excludes sites owned by Wednesday Relations.