Decibel reading from inside the house w windows closed.

Several Southern California Surfrider chapters came together to reexamine the ecological realities of water as they exist today, which looks quite different from when we were in grade school.

Take a look…

The Cycle of Insanity: The Real Story of Water – TRAILER 1 from Surfrider Foundation San Diego C on Vimeo.

Google released its software package “Google Wave” late in 2009, and while it has a wide range of useful features, Wave still hasn’t quite exploded in use. It will.

This video looks back on some of the main events of 2009 — it’s essentially your average “year in review” video piece (though too thin in content for my taste). Still, I like it. I like it as a video piece, and I like it as a creative use of Google Wave. Plus, I like it as a very resourceful way to make a video; telling two stories at once… a story of the year 2009, and a story of Wave’s capabilities.

“Compete with beauty”

Today’s post is a question… What’s your reaction to this phrase? Click on the “comment” link on the left here (or at the bottom of this post) and air your thoughts.

Compete with beauty…

What’s Different About Advertising since the Internet?

With all its strengths, the Internet certainly presents great challenges to advertisers. One of the more promising capabilities of the Internet is to deliver personalized, individual messages to a large number of people, combining reach and targeting — a notion that to older ways of thinking may seem like an oxymoron… you know, like “act natural.”

To combine the best practices from the traditions of direct marketing with the most effective marketing automation tools available today and the most promising methods driving us into the future — this is the marketing challenge presented by the Internet. And, like with most inspiring challenges in this world, the best solutions are not always the most obvious.

Advertising as we’ve known it has changed. Profoundly. It’s no longer the domain of those of us on the advertising side of the fence. Internet marketing is driven by consumers. What follows here is an outline of the significant differences in the state of advertising since the onset of the Internet.

ATTENTION

In the past, and in the case of most forms of traditional advertising, the primary method for grabbing a consumer’s attention is to interrupt, disrupt, irritate, cajole, and basically stop the otherwise natural flow of someone’s attention by interjecting an effective distraction. “We pause now for this commercial break…”

Successful Internet advertising on the other hand is predicated on positioning a message in the proper context in a supplemental manner, and presenting an inviting, curious or valuable proposition. This is why contextualized content integration, content syndication models, and affiliate program are so much more profitable than broad banner buys. This is also why companies who capture permission to dialog with consumers not quite ready to conduct a transaction with their company command higher valuations by analysts, partners and vendors.

BRANDING

Traditional brand positioning requires elements of saliency, value, context, character, personality, voice and emotion. There are two additional elements which any successful on-line brand must convey as well. Any brand represented on-line must be approachable, which means, the company behind the brand must listen to consumers. It’s a two-way communication channel. And second, any on-line brand is significantly impacted by its on-line user experience. Usability, then, becomes a branding issue. Navigation frustration in the on-line marketplace is a brand killer.

REACH

Traditional advertising buys reach. GRPs, its cousins in all forms of traditional media, as well as frequency, are a matter of planning and budgets. The benefits of wide reach and frequency are available to any advertiser and are usually a question of budgets. On the Internet, however, an advertiser’s reach is soon measured by its customer list. Banner buys and portal deals can in fact reflect similar traditions of reach and frequency, but the state of one-to-one Internet marketing has veered sharply toward customer relationship marketing where any advertiser’s reach is their list of current and prospective customers.
In order to acquire customers and intenders, then, advertisers have become content providers, and must earn the privilege of conducting a dialog with consumers. Reach must now be earned and can no longer just be bought.

MESSAGE

An advertising message is embodied in a radio or television spot, in ad copy, in a direct mail piece or even long-form TV. The nature of these traditional media is that these messages are pushed out into the world to consumers, and spread as wide as budgets will allow. Successful campaigns generate a result in the form of a response… a visit to a store, use of a particular phone service, purchase of a consumer good or the likes. Some of these traditional tools drive traffic to a web page. This single response, a new consumer arrives at a web page, is often considered a win for on-line advertisers.

In the new world of Internet marketing, this is where the real opportunity begins. Our challenge as marketers is to provide compelling content at that web site, and to insure that consumers have several good reasons to give you permission to dialog with them; to subscribe to clubs, newsletters, tips, etc. This very act—a consumer granting you permission to dialog—constitutes the fundamental shift from message delivery being pushed out to consumer to consumer pulling the messages they’re interested in receiving.

Our job becomes generating the opportunities for consumers to do so. This is a fundamental shift in the goals of advertising.

RELATIONSHIP

So, the moment a consumer becomes engaged in a dialog with a content provider (advertiser by another term) is the moment that company takes on the responsibility of conducting a relationship with that consumer. Any company doing business on the Internet had better measure its business potential and current value in terms of the life-time value of each consumer. That “life time” is determined by a company’s ability to maintain that relationship.

So, any company with customers must hold every employee responsible for contributing to a positive relationship with each and every customer. That process begins with the advertising efforts in that all company material must embody brand characteristics and engender a welcoming, servicing attitude. Every customer touch point needs to further that relationship without fail.

In the traditional world, “customer relations” were not considered an objective of the marketing department, but the domain of the customer service people, or worse yet, some out-sourced call center. Those days are over.

CONCLUSION

Overview of Primary Differences Between Traditional & Online Marketing

One-to-one customer dialoging including rich-media is a reality today. Customers are in the driver’s seat. The success of Internet marketing will be a function of our ability to put these new models to work in the proper context. Those who do this will be rewarded both personally and professionally. The Internet is a two-way street, and driving on the wrong side can be fatal. Only one lane belongs to marketers; the other belongs to consumers. Use the best vehicles available, and drive safely.

Ross Teasley
Nov. 1999
Published in The Advertiser, magazine of the Association of National Advertisers

[ photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ajlvi/109542125/ ]

Here’s a video slideshow of the Dana Point Historical Society’s 2009 Endless Summer Event at Doheny State Beach. This was the main fund-raising event for the year and included a home tour, a Hawaiian BBQ luau, a boat tour and a silent auction. A portion of the proceeds went toward rebuilding the original 1930’s adobe wall and entrance to the park.

As a board member of the Dana Point Historical Society, I’m proud to have been able to help make this experimental event a success. The Historical Society is a cornerstone to the Dana Point community, civic life and philanthropic efforts, and everyone — from ticket buyers to sponsors to volunteers — made this year’s event such a warm and supportive day.

My social network got significantly more social this week. (That’s a good thing, by the way.)

A few days ago, a Tweet shimmered in the raging river of the Now Web’s constant flow and caught my eye.

Mozilla Service Week.

Mozilla, in case you aren’t familiar, is the open-source software foundation which grew out of Netscape and produces the most popular open-source software on the planet, FireFox, an Internet browser. Here’s the “big idea” from Mozilla’s website, http://mozillaservice.org:

What Is Mozilla Service Week?

This week – September 14-21, 2009 – we’ve asked individuals to step up and make a difference by using the Web to better their community. We’ve looked for people who want to share, give, engage, create, and collaborate by offering their time and talent to local organizations and people who need their help, and its not too late to get involved.

Mozilla believes everyone should know how to use the Internet, have easy access to it, and have a good experience when they’re online. By utilizing our community’s talents for writing, designing, programming, developing, and all-around technical know-how, we believe we can make the Web a better place for everyone.

There’s a good idea, I thought, and was moved to action; so I tossed out this tweet and an invitation:

Well, the online community here in Orange County responded big time! We came together and drummed up an idea to provide volunteer technology and related services to local nonprofits who are struggling with this world of social media, Internet 23.0, the Now Web, or whatever you want to call the Internet today.

OCGood.org is Born

Over one lunch and one coffee-klatch, we decided that as our service during “service week,” we would volunteer our time and effort to mid-wife this group, OCGood, which will in turn be of much greater service to local nonprofits than we could be individually.

So, here it is: OCGood is a group of energetic, committed, service-minded professionals in Orange County California who volunteer services to struggling non-profits in our communities.

There are two parts to the effort: I WANT TO HELP and I NEED HELP. This is the essence of the whole good idea: connect those willing to help with those who need it, right here in our local community.

Next Step?

Let’s get together in a relaxed atmosphere, talk a little more about how to go about this mission, and spread the word about what we’re doing.

We’re meeting Thursday, Sept. 17, from 7pm – 10pm at
Salt Creek Grille in Dana Point.

We have some cabanas reserved on the patio. Salt Creek Grille has great $3 appetizer specials and $3 grey goose & bacardi drinks, plus free valet parking.

Please RSVP at either of these links:

Here’s a link to to a Twitter Invite.

Or here on this Facebook Event page.

Please come chip in, and come ready both to help and to ask for help.

IMPORTANT: Please invite all your friends and colleagues who might be willing to help (even if you can’t make it to this event — there will be more opportunities to help), and tell everyone you know with ties to OC nonprofits who might benefit from the help.

Among other things, we’ll be planning an OC-based unconference for nonprofits.

So, please come on over and help brew up something good in OC.

Please RSVP at either of these links:

Here’s a link to to a Twitter Invite.

Or here on this Facebook Event page.

Workforce housing is a major problem in Orange County. It is essential to a sustainable, functional local economy. Just ask the Orange County Business Council.

Earlier this month, the community center in San Juan Capistrano served as the venue for a public community dialog about housing organized by The South Orange County Alliance for Housing Our Communities, with the woefully brutal acronym SOCAHOC, which, the emcee soon told the audience, was pronounced “Sok-a-whok.” Like I said: brutal. But that’s neither here nor there.

The point was to host a public discussion of “cities’ legal responsibilities to develop affordable homes in response to economic, environmental, transportation and social demand.” The format of the event started with a few minutes of open conversation at each of the 15 or so round tables in the room, with the objective of having each table write down questions for the panel. Then came some opening remarks, a moderator and a panel of four presenters.

The mayor of San Juan Capistrano, Mark Nielsen, gave opening remarks and offered some context for the day’s discussion. Some highlights:

• Orange County income threshold for affordable housing: $65k per year for a family of 4
• Housing isn’t just a policy “issue,” it is at the base of Maslow’s pyramid of needs: shelter
• There are inherent problems with in-lieu fees as an alternative to fulfulling regulatory housing requirements
• Renovating a neighborhood with fair housing covenants is an idea whose time has come because it can:

1. uplift existing neighborhoods
2. provide economic stimulus for local tradesmen
3. increase affordable workforce housing
4. meet regulatory and social responsibilities

Bring Your Company to OC. Leave Your Employees Behind
The moderator was Michelle Hart, Director of External Affairs at the Orange County Business Council. In her initial remarks Ms. Hart commented that her organization gets several inquiries each week from companies who are interested in relocating their businesses to Orange County. The conversation invariably crescendos with excitement as they talk about all the advantages OC has, until they learn the overall housing costs. Then those conversations crash and burn.

The lack of workforce housing options in Orange County is an obstacle to economic growth in Orange County.

Affordable/Inclusionary/Workforce/Fair/Senior Housing
Dr. Victoria Basolo, Associate Professor, UCI Dept. of Planning, Policy and Design, discussed how affordable housing fits into the overall process of community revitalization. In very general terms, these factors tend to generate “positive effects:”

• Projects of under 200 units (larger tend toward negative effect)
• Higher quality design and management
• Structures not heavily concentrated in one location
• Structures designed to fit in the character of an existing area

Another question is: How do we define “positive or negative effects” of affordable housing? Almost exclusively, studies of this question have measured only property values in the surrounding area. Are there other ways to measure the “effect” of inclusionary housing on the neighborhoods where they are created? How do surrounding residents feel about workforce housing some time after they are lived in, for example? Dr. Basolo had some interesting things to say about that question.

Also, there are some policy problems with the government programs that fund inclusionary housing, namely that most programs require a project to include a large number of units in order to qualify for funding, despite the fact that the data show high concentrations of these units tend not to benefit overall revitalization.

Legislative Landscape
David Barquist presented an overview of the regulations currently in place regarding housing and sketched out the landscape of new and pending legislation, largely focusing on SB375 and regional planning initiatives. This will have an impact on local governments in ways that are not yet clear and are causing a lot of debate. The undeniable fact that workforce housing is a regional issue (not just a city-by-city issue) and therefore should be addressed on a regional level adds complexity to the effort to implement solutions.

Green Building Practices
Phyllis Alzamora, Executive Director of the Urban Land Institute, spoke about the costs of not doing environmentally sensitive development, and the benefits of doing so? Here is a video clip of her presentation (sorry, don’t have her slides).

The costs of continuing to develop housing with no regard for sustainability include obesity and losses because of climate change. Building healthy communities means connecting people to jobs, promoting walking and biking, and creating opportunities for people to connect and fortify a sense of community.

• A Center for Housing Policy study from 2006 figures that for working families earning $20-50k/yr in the Los Angeles area, 59% is spent on housing and transportation. That leaves only 40% for food, clothing, healthcare, and everything else in life.
• Every dollar saved by working families through finding lower cost housing, .79 is added in transportation cost
• “Drive until you qualify” is not a viable approach to a live/work balanced life.

“Housing has always been this competitive sport and there has always been a negative connotation to being small.” There is a movement afoot now to live in smaller homes as a response to the credit crunch, rising energy prices, and global warming. “The small house movement and small house blogs are teaching people to live with less. Many are being built with vintage or salvage materials,” which might last longer and definitely have less overall environmental impact.

Benefits of building green?

• 40% of raw materials humans consume are used in construction
• 40% of builders say green building helps them market their homes in a down market
• Smaller, taller homes built closer to transit sources preserve more open space and wildlife habitat

Ms. Alzamora also reported that Met Life built some market rate rental apartments in Irvine which include a community garden, gourmet cooking classes, a dog park, community room and fitness centers. A number of builders are looking at community gardens as a way to eat and live healthy, “but it isn’t enough to just have some garden space, because many of us don’t even know how to cook them anymore.”

A quiet chuckle slowly rolled through the room. She paused and said, “I know, it’s a nervous laugh, isn’t it?”

See this post for an overview of TransparencyCamp. What follows here is a report on one session within TransparencyCamp, aka #tcamp09.

Citability

Well, to be accurate, the session was called “Architecting Solutions for Archiving and Citing Government Data.”

Lead by Silona Bonewald and David Strauss, the idea here was to present and discuss what exactly is needed to create on-line citations of legislation that are reliable, authoritative and permanent. Think of it this way: we need a way to create hyperlinks directly to individual paragraphs within every piece of legislation which are as accurate as the citations used in legal documents for court proceedings.

Court documents are precise (if they aren’t a judge will toss the lawyer out of court), but are decidedly not convenient. To check the accuracy of a citation, or to read the text being referenced, one has to either go find the book (access can be time-consuming or expensive or both), or search online sources (often PDF files) which can be equally expensive.

The goal is to establish a standard method for creating paragraph-level citations of legislation, marked with date and time (because they sometimes change over time and we need to know what rule was in force at any point in time), that will be a permanent link (so your great-grandchildren can use the same link 30 years from now get the exact same material), and stable.

1. Paragraph level citation
2. Date and Time stamped
3. Permanent & Stable

Silona and David are part of an initiative called “The Citability Project,” or “Citability.org” which seeks to create open source standards to address these problems.

One of the problems with online legislation as it exists today is that “Government websites are ever changing and cannot be cited. Content changes without notice or accountability.” That last word, accountability, is the latch-key to why the goal of Citability.org is so worthy. Transparency in government is as yet an ill-defined term in general, but what isn’t lacking about the term is the basic idea that transparency in government attaches accountability to whomever is responsible for something within government.

Citability.org is working in an open, collaborative way to establish some principals of archiving for legislation, some functional technical solutions for paragraph level citing, some watchdog capabilities by using the Internet Archive, clonable server protocols and independent verification tools like digital signatures to verify sources and to establish full accountability.

Check out their work at: http://www.citability.org and their wiki at: http://citability.pbworks.com/

The non-profit organization Sunlight Foundation, together with Google, hosted “TransparencyCamp West 2009,” a two-day unconference on transparency in government, to convene…

“a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, developers, NGOs, wonks and activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent and meaningfully accessible to the public.”

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants”
– Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

What is “transparency in government,” anyway? Here’s an outline as applied to federal government, but the ideals are relevant to state and local government as well.

Transparency and Open Government Directive:

• Transparency: Government should be transparent.
  Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.  Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset.
• Participation: Government should be participatory.
  Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge.
• Collaboration: Government should be collaborative.
  Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government.

Photo by Heather Bussing.

So, on this balmy August weekend, I and about 150 people from all over the US, (Canada, Brazil, Russia, and Israel too), came into Building 40 on the Google campus in Mountain View California to talk about transparency. Since the format was as an “unconference,” there was no formal agenda, though the folks from Sunlight Foundation layered a little bit of structure by giving opening and closing remarks, setting the time schedule, and facilitating a few things along the way.

The participants included plenty of heavy weights from the non-profit, government, technology, and academic sectors, as well as a healthy showing of both professional and civic activists and journalist. I was personally thrilled  when I arrived and learned that Esther Dyson was there (and a little star-struck, I have to admit, but more on that below), whose writing and activism has influenced me.

Plus, for some reason, she reminded me of my dear sister; so I had this unfounded warm feeling toward Esther, which was in direct opposition to feeling shy toward her.

Photo by Heather Bussing.

A Personal Aside

As people began to arrive and before the opening remarks, folks were setting up laptops, and generally doing the meet and greet. “Hi, I’m Ross,” I say to the guy next to me at a table while firing up my laptop. “Dmitry,” he says with a thick Russian accent. I can’t resist the temptation and ask if he’s Russian, which clearly he is… from Krasnoyarsk, but now works in IT for the District of Columbia, DC government, and has for many years. I explain that I studied Russian in college, and we both go back to our computer work. I figure we’ll continue the conversation later.

Then, while I’m deep in my laptop, I overhear a woman introducing Dmitry to another Russian. I look up and I get an instant knot in my throat… it’s Esther Dyson introducing Dmitry to Ilya, a member of the Russian Duma and head of their hi-tech subcommittee.  It’s not like I would have known a Russian Duma member by sight, mind you, but the knot in my throat was from the rush of A) seeing Esther Dyson for the first time ever, and B) that my first encounters here at Transparency Camp involve Russians. A large part of my professional life, you see, was spent in Russian publishing, but this had nothing to do with why I came to Transparency Camp, for crying out loud. What are the odds?

Plus, the sight of these two thoroughly modern Russians from well east of the Urals just did not jibe with Ian Frazier’s delicious New Yorker article about his travels in Siberia I’d just read the night before on the plane ride from Orange County.

So, I naturally want to meet these people, but I’m still stuck on the unlikely coincidence of what’s happening in front of my eyes. I’m sitting at the Google offices for a government transparency conference… Russians?

I’m not part of their conversation–just sitting at the table a couple feet away–when I overhear Esther mention she just spent time in Russia, and now I’m thinking: great, I’ve got an ice-breaker to use to introduce myself to Esther as well as Ilya. The thing is, though, as I’m thinking about the ice-breaker, I’ve suddenly become aware that I’m “star-struck,” (and I’m staring at them, uncomfortably).

This realization catches me totally by surprise. I grow flush with embarrassment and retreat to my computer screen, before I even realize it. In fact, I’m a little flustered (in my head I hear: “Ross, you’re star-struck by Esther… nah nah… You’re embarrassed… star-struck… really? Isn’t that cute… come on, you’ve met plenty of famous writers… wow, I really am… this isn’t going away”) ; so I pack up the laptop and walk away with an odd smirk on my face, entirely confident I’ll create the opportunity to meet each of these folks later.

Let’s Get This Unconference Started

Time for the opening remarks: “we are the Sunlight Foundation… Thanks to Google for the use of this great space…” etc. By the way, this conference was totally free for attendees, thanks to The Sunlight Foundation and Google, including food. Super cool, if you ask me. I mean think about it, there are people out there who are donating significant money to Sunlight in order to cultivate more tools and techniques for the future of the American political process. To you donors: we get it, we see the value, and appreciate what you’re doing.

The first order of business was a challenge to everyone in the room: introduce yourself to the audience using only three words. Well, start with your name and any affiliation you want to mention, then add three words–no more, no less–to describe your interests. It’s harder than you think… “local civic engagement” is what came out of my mouth.

Photo by Heather Bussing.

After that, the group started posting discussion topics on the wall and the conference agenda started taking shape, in that self-organizing, unconferency sort of way. Here are the sessions I chose for the first day:

1. Architecting Solutions for Archiving and Citing Government Data
2. MapLight.org — Money and Politics, Demo & Tour, Backend Research Tools and API
3. Health Transparency Discussion
4. Mapping Power and Influence Networks
5. Transparency vs Privacy
6. Bootstrapping Open Data in Your City
7. Civic Engagement — Building a World Class, Scalable Model in Silicon Valley
8. The “Apps for America” Initiative — A First Look at this Open Source/Open Data Software Development Contest

I’ll blog about most, if not all, of those sessions separately, but for now here’s a sampling of some of the questions that came up through the course of the weekend:

• who owns local government data?
• how does one reward social good? does a social act deserve a social reward?
• should government just make data available, but not create the user interface for that data?
• how do we usefully index government video streams?
• who owns video streams of government events?
• who owns commercial data sets purchased by government offices?
• what are the best practices for starting a government open data or transparency initiative? Policy, advocacy, grass-roots?
• how can we structure a functional public dialog about end-of-life choices and healthcare?
• how can we teach and scale up the specific skills of responsible media consumers today and in the future?
• how can we separate bias (or opinion) from fact in journalism?
• how do we make incomprehensible jargon & gov-speak more accessible?
• what was missing from Transparency Camp West?

What do you think? Are any of these question interesting to you?

Also, here’s a link to a useful blog post about some of the sessions:

http://news.bitchbuzz.com/transparency-camp-the-bottom-line.html