learnandteachonline.com

In strolling through my referrer log I discovered a SocialRank site that aggregates news from elearning blogs: Learning Signal. Nice! I'm subscribed. Here's how the intriguing new SocialRank site works, from the MindValley Labs blog. Not sure if I'm mischaracterizing it, but it seem a little like a cross between Techmeme and Mahalo? No?

MindValley, parent and incubator of SocialRank, looks like an interesting company. It's located in Kuala Lumpur. Staff is on the young side. It's sad how an old fart like me can resonate with a stirring description of the character of a workforce and company mission, then totally know I'd never fit in when I see a group employee photo.

In a different section of my stats report -- keywords -- I see something that wasn't there last time I studied them. Are hackers or spammers making use of MS Live Search for some nefarious pursuit? I see more Live searches than Google searches recently, and the terms they tend to seek are "account" and "username." What's going on there?

While the cool kids talk of nothing but socializing, Microsoft and Google, with their health records initiatives, will be going to the bank.

When I heard each and every Democratic candidate say in a recent debate there will be required electronic recordkeeping in healthcare, I thought "somebody's going to clean up."

Don't you think sometimes the Silicon Valley gang is so obsessed with shiny and hip consumer fluff that it misses real business opportunities -- and that it's part of a myopia that makes the bubble bigger and more fragile? I'd even go so far as to say that what they often seem to be selling is youthful coolness itself, a frighteningly intangible commodity!

With Dems in real control of the U.S. government in a couple of years, it would be smart to anticipate a ton of reinstated and new regulation, and think about the online opportunities. Many Web 2.0 principles could apply. Consider mandated training, for example. Lots of government regulations require organizations having a given number of employees to offer training on safety and other topics. Much of it has gone online, but companies have to buy it. What if it were offered on a free model, like social apps, which could be supported by advertising?

OK, I just reminded myself I was going to try just that with harassment training, based on free materials from California. Such training is required in California, and is starting to spread to other states. The training also can be used voluntarily by companies who care about these matters (or wish to appear to care).

I'll use Moodle. I'll let you know how it goes.

According to a story in the NYTimes, the newest Microsoft MP3 player has a software overhaul.

Under the old rules a user who received a squirted a file from another user couldn't pass it on. That's possible now but each Zune can only play the shared file three times, even if its rights are not protected.

MS is thinking hard about DRM, and will offer a large library of unprotected songs, along with a place on the web to get all social about them.

The Times article leaves a lot of unanswered questions. I'm with Dave. It would have been nice if bloggers had been clued in on this announcement. There could have been a lot more informed discussion. Maybe that's what they don't want, deep down.

My questions:

- I wonder if they still have that crazy deal to give over a percentage of each player's purchase price to a record label (was it Universal?) and if other labels haven't clamored for and been granted the same deal.

- Why limit unprotected files? There shouldn't be any restrictions on podcasts.

- Considering the Gates Foundation's interest in education, I wonder if they've considered educational uses of the file sharing feature. Like squirting lectures or guided tours. It's such a unique feature, it seems like they'd try to get more creative with it.

Here's the Zune press website with specs and stuff. Ah, Edelman is handling the launch. Maybe that's a clue to why no blogger involvement, some perceived risk of the important Christmas announcement reeling out of control.

Mary Jo "Thorn in Microsoft's Side" Foley says the MS answer to Google Docs will actually be a SharePoint space hosted on a Microsoft server. You can sign up for a beta now. Here's the FAQ.

I can see an IT manager of a medium-sized organization allowing this before letting users go to Zoho or Google. Especially if it's a Microsoft shop. The promo pages look nice and safe and corporate and boring -- not like whippersnapper online apps sites that are almost certainly made by commies. ;-)

Now, when you start a new document in Google Docs it can be a PowerPoint-like slideshow in addition to the word processing or spreadsheet choices.

I played around with it and found it easy to use when creating a brand new deck, very smooth. Haven't tried importing a .ppt file.

There's no sign of its name, "Presently," that was being thrown around pre-launch. It wouldn't make sense for it to have a separate marketing name within the context of the Docs interface. You'll recall they dropped the "Writely" name, too, when the independent online word processor was acquired to become part of the suite.

I have hopes for online office suites, but have to say that my self-imposed trial to do without MS Office for six months at home did not work out so well. I found that I needed certain advanced features both in a word processor and spreadsheet that Google Docs couldn't manage.

ZDNet's Google blogger didn't like the presentation tool, but its education blogger did. (Anyone else find the ZDnet education blog a little k-12-centric? When I read about higher ed online learning I find I'm able to apply more of it to corporate training.)

Elinor Mills on Cnet last week asked the question "Want to 'converse' with advertisers?."

No, not really. Anyway not the way they seem to want to do it.

She covered the Conversational Marketing Summit, and came away feeling wary of the whole deal.

I can't help but view conversational marketing as a thinly veiled attempt by the ad industry to insinuate itself into the popular social media craze. Calling it a "conversation" makes it sound benign and implies that it is consensual.

Yep yep yep.

Still, I do think there's a place for talking to customers that PR people don't get because they are stuck thinking in terms of image. I don't think people want to talk about a marketing slogan like Microsoft's and Federated Media's dumb "People Ready" campaign where they asked for reactions to top bloggers' takes on the slogan. That's pretty much having a conversation about nothing.

Online types do like to get into the nitty-gritty of products, and that makes you think the conversation might better be taking place in the customer service arena. Let people talk to product managers and developers and designers. Leave the PR types -- with their exclamation points and "lively language" and their messages -- right out of it.

Update
Bonus links: Doc Searls, a Cluetrain brother, brings the
marketing conversation topic up to date. Also check out this other great post from Doc on NYTimes Select, the Times' paywalled service that came down this week. He quotes from one of David Weinberger's chapters in The Cluetrain Manifesto. So amazing how well the ideas in that book have held up, but then when it came out it just felt so true, I'm not surprised it's endured.

I really like the way Kara Swisher writes, and it cracks me up how she allows that she covers Yahoo obsessively.

I'd like Yahoo to find itself, and be cool again, and not get acquired, especially not by Microsoft.

Looks like the much anticipated launch of Google's wiki and presentation package slipped. It didn't get announced last week at Office 2.0, says Rafe Needleman on Webware.

Still, it seems like Google isn't actively trying to hide their run at MS Office the way they seemed to be doing a year ago.

Know what I'd do to pry the door ajar to the enterprise space? Make some breakthrough feature for the calendar, because of course sometimes you want reminders about work-work you have to do at home, but of course you don't want to use Outlook for it. I use web Outlook, and can access Outlook through Citrix and I still don't want to use it at home -- don't want to feel obliged to look at it except on whole work-at-home days. It doesn't help that web Outlook must be viewed in IE for it to look and work at all well.

Plus, IT managers might not feel as strongly about letting go of the calendar as they would about cutting loose from Outlook for mail.

BTW I had a work-at-home day last Friday and watched part of the panel Rafe moderated at the Office 2.0 conference. He did a nice job. Crack-me-up part: when he invited Sridhar Vembu, Zoho's CEO, to remark on a question, he'd say, "Sridhar?" And every single time it sounded to me like he was saying, "Sweetheart?" Lonely homeworkers have to find some sport, and need to talk back to somebody or something, so each time I'd say, "Yes darling?"

The language on the live.com team blog annoys me. I won't be caught up in the enthusiasm just because of some exclamation points.

More important, I notice the live.com folks speak of "shipping" which I understand is a term used in tech circles even if the product is not tangible. It's a point of pride to ship and the word is kind of cool in a hip capitalist Jobsian sort of way. Still, I think I'd feel better about Microsoft if the live.com people seemed to embrace the live nature of the project and didn't cling to terms better applied to disks and cardboard.

MSDN TV video about Simple Sharing Extensions. 15 minutes.

Thanks, Alex.