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Posts Tagged ‘expression’

Digital Identity and PodCamp Hawaii

November 12th, 2008
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Last month Hawaii saw it’s first PodCamp/WordCamp. Roxanne Darling of Bare Feet Studios rallied an amazing line-up of sponsors. Over 400 people (including some representing their businesses) came to learn from a diverse and talented group of speakers, who were talking about WordPress and blogging, tweeting, Podcasting (video and audio-casting), Social Media, and Business Uses of these concepts.

What does this have to do with identity?

Everything. The tools we learned about are all tools for self-expression. The Web, audio and video are tools to help us show and explain the world that we are part of. They give voice to the beautiful, the ironic, the funny, and the learning parts of life. We have the power, expanded by these tools, to share our own stories.

What did PodCamp Hawaii have to do with business?

Everything.

Businesses have an identity and express themselves too. Marketers call the business identity a “brand,” and protect it with intellectual property laws (copyrights, trademarks, etc.). Sounds so cold, doesn’t it?

It doesn’t have to be. Businesses can (and many do) use social media tools to express themselves in a more personal way with their clients and customers. Businesses are “reaching out” and learning to interact. Just like any learning process, some are better at this than others. It takes practice.

Coaching moment: we use language to show or withhold respect for others. Before your business engages in using new tools, check your language and metaphor defaults: have you “won” your customers because of “successful campaigns” on the marketing “battlefield?” Or have you welcomed your customers to help make your business successful? The former is closed and hostile. The latter opens doors for all kinds of beneficial conversations.

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TechFest: Stuff you didn’t know you need (2004)

March 5th, 2004
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Seems Microsoft is dreaming about being in your pockets and around your neck, among other places. As if they’re not already? But MS means in a new and different way.

SenseCam, touted as a visual diary of sorts, is designed to be worn around the neck and can take up to 2,000 images in a 12-hour day without the wearer doing a thing. …

Some technology on display at TechFest could soon be available to the public. For example, Microsoft is looking to license technology for identification cards touted as “unforgeable” because they combine a regular picture ID with another, multicolored box that includes a compressed facial image. A card reader makes sure both the regular picture and the multicolored box match before granting access, meaning people couldn’t just simply swap out the photograph on an ID card.

Another project, developed by Microsoft Research’s Beijing office, converts a regular facial image into a low-resolution, cartoonish image. That animation can then be used with instant messaging, to convey whether the person typing a message is laughing, frowning or nodding. It could help solve the problem of understanding the nuance of people’s typed conversations, without requiring the computer and telecommunications power needed to use a Web cam.

Coaching moment: Sometimes it’s helpful to see (or hear) ourselves as others do. A recording of everything we do and say can be very revealing. However, I doubt that anyone wants to play back every moment of a day. We have “downtime” when we’re not at our best. Those may not be the best moments to share, even though they are part of who we are.

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