Dare Obasanjo is asking “what is social media?” Frank Shaw (he’s a VP with Waggener Edstrom and is one of the key people helping Microsoft out with its PR) admits he isn’t comfortable with the “social media” term too.

The best way to understand a new media is to compare it to what’s come before? So, what kind of media do you have lying around your house? Probably these:

• Newspapers.
• Magazines.
• Television.
• Radio.
• Books.
• CDs.
• DVDs.
• A box of photos.
• Physical, paper mail and catalogs.
• Yellow Pages.

Now, what about the media (my blog) you’re reading right now? What are some attributes of it that are different than any of the “old media” above?

1. The media above can’t be changed. A newspaper can’t magically change its stories, even if society decides something in them is incorrect. My blog can be updated for all readers nearly instantly if someone demonstrates that I was wrong on a post.
2. You can interact with my blog. You can leave a comment. Call me an arsehole. Etc. Etc. With the above you can’t interact at all.
3. You can get some sense of the popularity of my stuff in real time. How many comments does each post get? How many links does each post get? I can see in Wordpress how much traffic each item gets. You can visit Digg to see voting on my blog’s items. Or, TechMeme to see which blog items got most links in the past few hours. None of the media above do you have a clue about the granular popularity of any of the items until much later after best seller lists are published.
4. With the “new media” you can look at my archives and see all posts. Try doing that with a newspaper. Yeah, you can, if you pay the San Jose Mercury News a fee. But it’s not as easy as it is here.
5. Here on my blog I can mix media. A post could contain text, audio, video, or photos. Not so on newspaper or magazines.
6. Here on my blog I don’t need to convince a committee to publish. Not true with other media forms. Imagine you walked into CNN and said “hey, I have some cool video, can you publish it?”
7. The new media is infinite. The media above all has limitations in terms of either length (a TV station only has 24 hours in a day — over on YouTube, I guarantee they publish a lot more than 24 hours of video in a day) or in quantity (try to convince USA Today to publish a 40,000 word article, or, 500 articles on the same topic).
8. The new media is syndicatable and linkable and easily reused. I can link to your media here, for instance, a few seconds after you publish it. Try doing THAT with any of the above media. Not to mention, my words here kick into an RSS feed which you can then republish using something like Google Reader, if you’d like, or you can copy a sentence out of my post, paste it into your own blog, and say something about what I just said.
9. The new media can be mashed up with data from other services. Check out that Amazon advertisement over to the right. Did you realize that isn’t on my, or Wordpress.com’s, servers? It actually gets served up from some organization I don’t control. Amazon could, if it wanted to, replace the image there with a different book. Or, something else. Many people are putting widgets on their blogs that display various things from places they don’t control. That’s impossible in the older media above.

When I say “social media” or “new media” I’m talking about Internet media that has the ability to interact with it in some way. IE, not a press release like over on PR Newswire, but something like what we did over on Channel 9 where you could say “Microsoft sucks” right underneath one of my videos.

I don’t really care what you call this “new media” but you’ve got to admit that something different is happening here than happens on other media above.

Any other ways that “social media” is different from the older media above?

Maybe we should call it “Media 2.0?” After all, I’m a new member of the Media 2.0 Workgroup (the feed there rocks, by the way).

Michael Gartenberg joins Microsoft. Jeff’s helping to put together an interesting team!

Oh, and Microsoft’s Mix07 conference (which is planned in the group that Jeff is a part of) is getting more and more interesting too. I’ll be there.

I wonder what Ray Ozzie will introduce there. The silence from Ray lately is getting deafening.

Andy Beal asks why Yahoo leaks when Google doesn’t.

Google views its secrecy as a competitive advantage, much like Apple does. They have a strong corporate culture internally that makes it “evil” to leak. How did they do that? Easy. Google’s culture is one of a “David” vs. “Goliaths” of Microsoft and Yahoo. I don’t work at Google and I’ve heard some of the stories they tell each other about why they want to keep Google mysterious to the outside world — they want to increase the time that other companies clone their stuff and secrecy is a huge part of that.

Yahoo, on the other hand (and Microsoft too) needs to gesture to the market that it is changing so that its partners can get on board and help it out.

Companies leak when there’s an advantage to doing so. The fact that we’re talking about Yahoo’s leaks demonstrates that we’re playing right into the leaker’s hands. When Google sees an advantage in leaking something, it will too. Just watch. Just like Steve Jobs is learning he can get us all to talk by posting a letter on Apple’s Web site instead of doing the usual old thing by calling the press into a keynote event.

Remember when I posted Steve Ballmer’s email to all employees? I actually had permission to do so from the PR team. Sometimes “leaks” aren’t leaks at all. They are press events designed to get the company’s point of view out to the world.

Here’s Ken Krugler, showing off the search engine for developers named “Krugle.” It’s like Google, but much better for developers. They just announced a partnership with Yahoo too.

Demo. Interview.

Here’s a previous post I made where I talked about my impressions of Krugle after doing this interview.

My favorite quote of LIFT came as I was interviewing Sister Judith Zoebelein, who manages the Vatican’s Web site. I asked her “do you think we’ll soon go to church in Second Life?” and she answered:

“You mean after death?”

She just misunderstood me, but it does show the biases we sometimes bring to conversations. Here’s a picture of me talking with Sister Judith, taken by Ellen Wallace.

This is why I love LIFT. I can talk with someone trying to help kids in poor, rural, India get on the Net, the person who runs the Vatican’s Web site, and CERN researchers, all in the same day.

What a week. See ya when we get back to San Francisco.

Oh, and Laurent, the reason I had my laptop closed was one of the speakers told the audience to close it. I was afraid. Heheh. But, seriously, the speakers were really great. It’s going to be hard to beat LIFT. Most American conferences don’t hold a candle to the diversity and depth of speakers here. Europe has a series of great conferences going that make news. Reboot is coming up too, and Thomas promises lots of great stuff (that’s geekier than LIFT) and there are others later in the year that sound really great. One that is getting good reviews is the PICNIC conference in September.

One other thing. Where’s the corporate support for these conferences? Yahoo? Google? Microsoft? Ask? All the conference planners I’ve talked to say they are having a tough time even getting anyone from the big companies to send a single representative. That’s just lame, although, to be honest, it makes the quality of these conferences a lot higher cause there aren’t so many commercial pitches that you usually get along with such corporate sponsorship.

The political bloggers are working overtime (see Memeorandum’s coverage) because of John Edwards’ missteps in hiring bloggers for his campaign.

I link to this for a couple of reasons.

1) I was on his plane six weeks ago.
2) The lessons here for corporate blog teams are many.

Some lessons here:

1) Hire people who the community will defend.
2) If you want a job as a blogger for a political organization, or a business, you better worry about all those “out there” posts you made.
3) Firing people just makes the problem worse. If you hire them, defend them cause it’s your own idiocy and lack of due diligence that got you here.
4) I’d be more transparent about moves regarding bloggers than either Edwards or, say, Microsoft was when it sent out review laptops to bloggers. Transparency — before a decision is made — will help the community vet moves like these.

What would I do now?

Take the heat and overcommunicate. The more insular the campaign appears the more people will get turned off. It’s time for John Edwards to show up on Daily Kos and take his lumps.

UPDATE: Dave Winer wonders when the New York Times will call off its war on bloggers.

In my comments to the post I made about Steve Jobs’ screed on DRM lots of people are giving me crap for this post. Pretty usual stuff “Scoble’s an idiot.” Tell me something I don’t already know.

But Michael Markman says I should have gone after Steve about movies since Jobs owns a lot of Disney. Why not open those up instead of asking music companies to open up music? Now THAT is an interesting question. Seems that Jobs already has the ability in his hands of opening up the world. Why doesn’t he take it? Thanks Michael for adding to the conversation instead of just calling me an idiot.

UPDATE: Cory Doctorow really deserves the credit for pushing an anti-DRM stance. He even spoke to a very crowded room at Microsoft a few years back to try to get Microsoft’ies to see the light (Bill Gates whined, but didn’t do anything about the issue). Here’s his reaction to Steve Jobs’ memo. Short version: he liked it, but wants to see action now, not just memos.

Had a wonderful day in Basel yesterday. Went and visited my mom’s birthplace (she was born and lived in a house near the Swiss border in Weil am Rhein — her parents ran a restaurant on the first floor, they lived on second). Found it ironic that it’s now a strip club in half of it, and a Chinese Restaurant in the other.

Martin Spedding (he works at Microsoft helping out the local pharma companies, which are very large) gave us a wonderful tour. Starting at the Museum Tinguely. Full of fascinating art pieces built from junk. Highly recommended. After that we walked down the Rhein.

Aside: Google just switched to German on me. Why does it assume I speak German just because my packets are coming from Germany? Grrrrrr. Ich spreche kein Deutsch! It should know that I’ve been hitting it from this computer for months from the United States and that that is my home base. I can’t even read Google now, so I have no idea how to change the default back to English. I just did a search on “Rhein” and it took me to the German Wikipedia, too. Double Grrrrrr.

Along the way he was raving about his new Microsoft Home Server.

The problem with the Home Server is going to be marketing. Already mentions of it have totally died off. Geeks already know how to setup their own servers, so don’t think another server is needed. People like my aunt are barely computer literate, so have no idea that a server exists or what it’d be useful for (and, since the geeks don’t exactly get thrilled about the idea, they sure aren’t going to take the time to explain it to her).

It’s too bad, too, because if they could just spend a bit of time listening to Martin they’d see there’s a really great reason to get a Home Server. First, it’s a headless server. Just bring the box home, plug it into your router, and control it from other PCs or Macs in your house. Second, it’s a great way to store music, photos, videos, and works with Xbox 360’s Media Extender technology. That’s another thing that’s hard to explain to people. It’s one of the coolest things about Xbox 360: that it can play music, photos, videos stored on a PC or Home Server kept somewhere else in your house.

Martin explained the Home Server is very good at backing up your stuff and gets faster and faster at that over time due to incremental backup technology built for Windows Server 2003. He also raved about its remote-access features so he could get to his home stash of photos and such, even when he travels to Microsoft in the states.

Anyway, getting a pitch while walking along the Rhein was a lot of fun. I hope to interview Charlie Kindel (he runs the Home Server group) when I visit Seattle later this month right before the Northern Voice conference.

Oh, another aside? If you search Google for “Microsoft Home Server” you don’t find any Microsoft Web site in the result set. Same if you search on Live.com. Even the official Microsoft Home Server blog doesn’t show up. It’s even harder to get marketing success when your own blog and home page don’t show up on your own search engine!

Anyway, tonight we’ll be be at Martinsbräu in Freiburg at 6 p.m. See you there! Everyone is invited. Oh, and my cell phone works just fine, albeit is very expensive to answer. +1 (425) 205-1921.

I’m in Freiburg, Germany, until Tuesday, and Martin Spedding, a geek who works at Microsoft, wants to get together. I’m so blessed to have readers in almost every little town in the world. Anyone else want to get together on Monday night? Where’s a fun place to meet?

UPDATE: A few things about this were misunderstood. More on those in a second. First, I just talked with John Furrier, PodTech’s CEO, and we’ve decided not to accept the honorarium that PayPerPost offered to us for having me speak at their show. I’m very honored at the gesture, but think it’d be best to keep my speaking deal what it is for everyone else and PodTech now has a policy of not accepting these kinds of honorariums/speaker fees.

Regarding my deal. I generally still don’t like PayPerPost. They haven’t paid me to change my opinion about them. They are providing travel expenses to provide a service (a speech) and that’s it. I’ll give them every bit as good a speech as I gave at Google two years ago (where I had one of the top-rated speeches at its Zeitgeist event). PayPerPost did not have any restrictions on what I could say on stage, nor have they asked me to say anything specific (or even nice) about PayPerPost.

UPDATE2: here’s the PayPerPost blog where they tell more about “PostieCon.”

Here’s my previous unedited post:

+++

Next week it’ll be announced that I’m keynoting at a conference planned and sponsored by PayPerPost. This is my first speech where I’m not only having my travel and expenses paid, but they are covering my salary too. That check will not go to me, but will go, instead, to PodTech, who is paying my salary. I’m sure that the deal I got is different than from other speakers, but I think it’s important to disclose my deal and it’s important for me to disclose ANY commercial activity on my part.

I know this conference will be controversial — one way to get discussions among bloggers broiling is to bring up PayPerPost. Certainly more controversial than speaking at Gnomedex, LIFT, or Northern Voice or something like that.

Why do it then? Cause I’m a capitalist and because I think that blog advertising is something that we should talk about. Disclosure is something those of us who accept payments are figuring out how to do. I didn’t do it well last weekend. Microsoft didn’t do it well when they handed out laptops. And I’m still not that satisfied by PayPerPost’s disclosure policy either. I’m sure we’re far from seeing the last controversy here.

Anyway, I’m off to Basel by way of Frankfurt. See you at LIFT (who did pay our travel expenses too, but not my salary).