The Media140 event was held in Perth this week and I attended as a guest blogger.

For me, one of the most interesting things about Media140 was seeing the effect of the Twitter Wall; the web page of tweets with the hashtag #media140 projected behind the speaker or panel in real time. A stream of consciousness about the event, at the event.

Many conferences these days (IT conferences in particular) have a Twitter back-channel; a conversation among Twitterers about the conference during the conference, but the idea that you show that stream in real time to the audience is, I think, a significant shift in conferencing.

I noticed that the ABC-influenced Media140 event in Sydney took a policy decision not to show the Wall in its video of the event. Apart from the obvious potential for people to spam, tweet profanities and send libellous messages, the Wall allows for a diverse commentary and some genuinely funny commentary. My co-blogger @grum was particularly sharp. And we saw the odd situation where panellist @richardgiles was dissing the audience for not asking incisive enough questions. There’s no doubt in my mind that the Wall adds significantly to the entertainment value of the event for those who attend. And it’s far more interesting than watching on-line because you have the tension of the speaker’s reaction to the comment about their bad hair or the fact that they’re droning on.

While experienced Twitterers on stage apparently had no issue with the Wall, Andrew Pascoe, the lawyer from Allens Arthur Robinson who knew little of Twitter was clearly rattled by the idea that he was for a time (1) not the centre of attention and (2) not able to follow the in-jokes. Some of my friends to whom I described the scene afterwards were sympathetic, describing the channelling of attention away from the speaker as rude.

I think most older people would take that line and I don’t think experienced speakers will countenance it in a normal conferencing situation. To me, it’s giving away some reverence for the speaker in return for a higher level of engagement among the audience. Price worth paying. Furthermore, I believe it is an important differentiator for Media140, which could evolve in the direction of Twitter-powered events, rather than events on how to deal with social media.

You can read my other posts here: a tremendously clever joke about media ownership that nobody got, my interview with Brett McCarthy of The West Australian and and an article about time-rich, cynical twitterers. Er, like me.

And if you’re not already doing so, follow me on twitter – @brettreasure

Photo by Paul Pichugin.

Foursquare and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this Internet a new application. The latest venture capital love object is Foursquare, which has signed up 275,000 New Yorkers to a mobile phone GPS app that lets their friends know where they are.

Business Insider details how the app works; you check in when you go to a venue (a place which serves alcohol) and you get points for visiting. Then, if a friend happens to be in the same street, you can meet and have drinks, just as if you’d actually organised it.

The Business Insider article is the normal breathless account of a new startup about to take over the world. The comments on the article tell another story. “I played with it for a few months, and obsessively checked in everywhere… I stopped participating over a month ago.” And “4 square fills up my Twitter with meaningless crap. Well I should say: even more meaningless crap.”

As I understand it, you can limit your Foursquare friends to a subset of your Twitter friends, but I suspect the status updates (which are juvenile in style) go to all contacts. This is spam for most people and will wear thin. If Foursquare can’t deliver this to only your interested subset, we’ll probably see Facebook and Twitter introduce friend categories. “Bar buddy/friend of mother”. Would seem to be a sensible development anyway.

For Gen Y in particular, mobile applications will affect how people meet and what they do when they get there. Although there seems to be nothing particularly compelling about Foursquare it has its own API so developers will build on the functionality. The value will be in creating apps that address specific niches. Groups of teen boys meeting new groups of teen girls. Business people finding the closest available php programmer. I can imagine an app that o.O that’s a good one. Might keep that one to myself :p

I wrote an uninformed blog post after reading articles reviewing Google Wave. I’ve deleted it. Herewith, I hope, a more sensible post written after viewing the Google Wave video that was shown to developers. Although the articles I read were well written I got no sense of the likely paradigm shift until I saw the video.

The lessons are:

1. Video communication is much more powerful than a good review.
2. Watch the video if you want to understand this technology.
3. Bret is a schmuck.

So Wave is an exciting technology and it will profoundly affect web communication.

It’s a new communication platform that simply and elegantly integrates email, IM and applications. But there are four significant technology shifts in the way that it works.

The organisational concepts for Waves are intuitive. Lots of stuff just happens, lots of drag and drop and lots of search functionality.

Wave won’t be live until later in the year, but developers already have access to code and the APIs. So what’s it good for? It’s an improvement in collaborative work applications and has the capacity to seriously knock around Sharepoint. It is the first improvement on MS Outlook partly because it breaks down the barrier between email and web browser. And it looks like everyone’s desktop in 2010.

Just been reading Thom Kennon and find myself in complete agreement with him.

He talks about looking for info on Google’s recent changes to trademark policy. “I first searched in Google for ‘google trademark’ and came up with a mix of old or irrelevant algo results on page one, first timely results below the fold. So I turned to Twitter and searched ‘#google trademark’ and voila — nothing but timely results with a wealth of links back to rich, hot-off-the-presses and diverse content.”

This is exactly Twitter’s strength.

Twitter has become a real-time search engine populated with human-reviewed web links (as opposed to Google which uses non-human search indexing). For contemporary matters, Twitter often produces much better results than Google.

It amazes me that Biz Stone has publicly stated Twitter will not pursue an advertising model (eg. AdWords). That is the PROVEN BUSINESS MODEL you THICKHEAD! See all that screen real estate you’re not using on a Twitter page?? That’s what it’s for! To make you MONEY. Sheesh.

Although they were bright enough to buy the leading Twitter search engine (Summize), Twitter have completely missed the boat in the way they’ve integrating it on the home page. It’s a key feature but has been buried.

Google had better hope that no-one smart buys Twitter. Despite what you might read elsewhere, it’s Google’s only serious challenger.

Ad Age reports on Ford lending 100 new Ford Fiestas to especially selected bloggers in exchange for their independence and a share of their souls. 4000 applied but only 100 were young, good-looking, could string two sentences together and had the sycophancy gene. I’m being harsh; the dozen or so bloggers I checked out were interesting enough. A couple of B-grade celebs snuck in there but they’ve chosen people from diverse backgrounds, skewed towards creative types. The totality of the their output – Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and blogs is aggregated on the Fiesta Movement site.

It shows again the progressive credentials of large American companies. They leap into new media because they are hungry for first mover advantage and the publicity that results. The combination of new media and big business is newsworthy (don’t ask me why) and the Fiesta Movement will generate millions of dollars in PR.

I saw a Forrester report that said Japanese consumers were more engaged with social media than Americans but Japanese businesses were slower to develop social media applications than Americans. I’m guessing this is because their media are less willing to give free publicity just because business has discovered a new marketing tool.

Of course, the potential of this promotion is not just what the bloggers say about the Ford Fiesta on their blog but the effect that 100 different streams of writing/video blogging have on the web more broadly; the conversations about the conversations.

It’s risky for the brand because bad things can happen when you surrender control of the message to people who don’t have a stake in your brand. They might be just a little too honest, though from what I’ve seen so far, they’re all too excited to be critical.

But there is a risk too for the bloggers, whose readers may find the car references spurious and commercial. Could damage their franchise but I think 95/100 will finish well in front. In all, I believe this is the biggest and boldest social media experiment in the world today. My hunch is that it’s going to work extremely well. And if it does, the new media dollar has just been revalued.

Here’s Judson Laipply’s fairly compelling video application to be included in the 100:

The marketing term for this is a No-Brainer.

Overuse of old internet memes such as ‘i can haz’ or ‘pwnage’ suggests a lack of original expression. Too much repetition is tedious.

Learn to spell the word ‘the’. Most of you are not teens or twenty-somethings. Stop faking it.

I’m really not interested in the fact that you’re going to bed. Really.

It’s nice that you are looking forward to something but know that it’s okay to keep some things to yourself. Just go to bed.

We know it’s boring at the airport but there is no need to inflict your boredom on us. As a general rule, your travel plans are of no interest.

Telling people how many followers you have is just sad.

Pontification is no substitute for original, witty, unusual or profound thought.

It’s a fine line between hero-worship and sycophancy. Get a grip.

Go ahead punk; Twitter that I’m snarky.

I have a relation who’s a famous retired sportsman; a household name. He returned to his home town and wanted to join the local golf club, which had a waiting list. The membership officer explained to my famous relative that no, he couldn’t get an accelerated membership. He would be positioned at the bottom of the waiting list. When he recounted this to his 90 year old mother, she said, ‘well; looks like you’re not as important as you thought you were’. Which brings me to social media, in particular blogging and micro-blogging – tools like Twitter.

Reading through Rob Antulov’s summary points of the Future of Media session on Media and Social Networks; wanted to discuss this one: ‘many companies about which conversation occurs online are NOT tracking this conversation, so are missing out on a unique opportunity to listen and engage with some of their passionate consumers’.

Are those consumers who use social media any more passionate than other consumers? I don’t think so. How are they different to other consumers? They use technology more so they might be more passionate about technology but I think the passion ends there. As technology early-adopters they are more likely to be educated and affluent but from a market research viewpoint, this renders them uninteresting. They are not a representative sample. If I’m selling a mainstream product I’m interested in the opinions of a cross-section of consumers, not an elite niche. So much for the Passion Argument.

There are two other arguments often advanced for companies expending effort on social media. One is the Influence Argument, the notion that social media early adopters are more influential in the public realm than Joe Dokes, Couch Potato, passive media consumer.

At risk of heresy, Matt Cutts and Robert Scoble are no more influential on mainstream consumer opinion than Joe Dokes. In their own limited areas they exert influence; no argument. If you don’t know their names, I’ve made my point. Broader society is unaffected by blogging, micro-conversations and micro-blogging. The capacity of social media to influence mainstream media, and hence the mainstream, is pathetically small.

Then there is the PR Argument; that a company can use social media to initiate positive conversations on the Internet and beyond (cue Buzz Lightyear) or respond to an adverse story before it gets a head of steam. Poster child for this is Southwest Airlines, which responds in near real time to Twitter users who mention the airline when they Tweet (blog).

I’m afraid this is influence at the margins. If Qantas had been using SouthWest Airlines’ approach would it have stopped or influenced the mainstream media blitz that followed their recent in-flight explosion? Not a skerrick.

I don’t think social media is an advertising medium or even a PR medium. It is a new kind of word-of-mouth and word-of-mouth derives from your staff and your policies (in that order). The capacity of your marketing department to drive it is negligible.

Well what is social software good for? Access to the knowledge of informed people is a biggie. And you would have to say it has great potential as a tool for personal branding and personal promotion. If you own a business (particularly a tech start-up) and you want to raise your profile, invest hundreds of hours in blogging and micro-blogging – you might very well build a following.

But it’s not probably not going to make you more passionate or influential than Joe Dokes.

From a conversation with Myles Eftos