Dan York on the intersection of PR/communication and the "social media" of blogs, podcasts, wikis, Twitter and more – and the way our conversations are changing…
Those of you who know me well know that I have a long-time interest in typography and publishing design dating back to the many years I spent teaching FrameMaker in the early 1990’s… given that, I was delighted to run across this presentation by Jason Cranford Teague that he apparently gave at SXSW this past week. I like the style of the presentation and although I wasn’t at SXSW to hear his narration, I can gather from his slides some of the points he was making. He does have a point… why do we limit ourselves so much to the default fonts of the web? Let’s use typography more to make more attractive and interesting sites, rather than just settling for the defaults…
If you are interested in location-based services like FourSquare and Gowalla, you may find this video interview by Robert Scoble of Gowalla CEO Josh Williams of interest. This being SXSW week, there will be lots of location-based service news coming out. I’m not using Gowalla, but I’ve written about my love/hate relationship with FourSquare and I find the whole “location” space quite interesting right now… anyway, I think you’ll find this interview an interesting one:
It was great to learn of the FIR iPhone app and naturally I had to install it right away on my iPhone. (It’s also available for Android phones.) It’s free, of course, and gives you access to all the podcasts produced under the For Immediate Release brand.
With the iPhone app you have a very easy way to immediately jump to FIR episodes and start listening. When you go into one of the episodes you have a “Play Podcast” link when loads the iPhone’s QuickTime player and starts playing the episode for you. You can also follow the “Web Link” to view the page out on the FIR site (where you could see comments). There’s also a nice “Categories” screen that lets you see the various different categories of FIR podcasts.
If you create an “account” you can then apparently mark episodes as “favorites”, comment on episodes and rate episodes. My one point of feedback I’ll be passing along to Shel and Neville is that it’s not entirely clear to me where I am creating this account. Is it on the service of the vendor behind this app? (GenWi, the company behind iSites.us) Admittedly I’m a bit more paranoid than the average user (blame my security background), but I’d like to know a bit more about who is going to have my data before I sign up.
Speaking of iSites, they are the iPhone application vendor Shel and Neville used for this app. It’s admittedly very cool… for just $25 you can get your own iPhone app created.
Now, the only caveat is that for that $25 one-time fee, you are stuck with the in-application advertising that you see in the image to the left and over which you have no control. iSites does have a $99/year pricing plan that gives you control over ads and presumably they are expecting that a certain number of folks will choose that plan to lose the ads. (I would.)
I obviously just started using the app and I’ll be interested to see how using it compares to using the regular “iPod” functionality built into my iPhone. This app has the advantage that you can very quickly get to FIR podcasts and be able to see what is there. Whenever you launch the app it seems to check for the most recent episodes so you are always up to date.
On the other hand, in the “iPod” app on my iPhone I do have to manually initiate the “Get more episodes” process to download new episodes. However, one advantage to the iPod app is that I get to see how far I have listened to any given FIR episode – and it retains that info so with one glance I can see which episodes I still need to listen to and how much more I have of each episode. This is a great advantage when your time to listen to podcasts is rather fragmented.
Regardless, I think it’s rather cool for Shel and Neville to now have an iPhone (and Android) app. If you are an FIR listener (or are interested in the intersection of social media, technology, PR and communications), do check out the app and try it out. I’ll be curious to hear your thoughts. What do you think of it? Do you see yourself using it versus the iPod app to listen to FIR?
P.S. In full disclosure… if you are not aware, I am a weekly correspondent into FIR, usually on Thursdays, and so I am affiliated with the podcast.
With FourSquare’s continued rise in popularity, I have noticed a definite challenge with the service in popular areas, namely… WHICH place name do you use to check-in?
For example, here I am at the Philadelphia International Airport and a quick search on “PHL” in FourSquare gives you 25+ results… with even more that don’t use PHL in the text. As the image shows, there are many different levels of granularity, too, with locations being created for specific gates and even for specific seats on flights.
Where do you check-in?
Part of the issue is that in many ways you are incented to create new locations. You get extra points for adding a new location… and may have an easier job of becoming “mayor” of a new place if that is important to you.
There are also times when it is simply easier to add a new place than to wait for FourSquare’s servers to “locate” you.
It all adds up to a lot of “places” and some resulting confusion over which place to use when checking in. As FourSquare matures the folks there may need to do some curation and pruning and merging of places. Or perhaps start showing results ranked by number of checkins… or votes… or something like that.
Right now, as it starts up, the “Wild West” approach (anything goes) makes a lot of sense… but as more folks use FourSquare, it may make sense to provide a bit more guidance in terms of which place name people should use when checking in.
What do you think? What should FourSquare do about this? Or should they do nothing and just let it be as it is?
I can still remember when Steve Garfield completely blew my mind and opened it up to all sorts of possibilities.
It was April 2007 and a whole bunch of us from the from the Boston area had gathered at Boston University for Doug Kaye’s latest Podcast Academy 2… C.C. Chapman was there… Chris Brogan (before he started his ascent to rock star status ;-)… I seem to recall Christopher Penn… it was all the “early days” of podcasting and so by and large most of us knew each other in some way. Many of us were in a local email mailing list for New England podcasters – and we were there to learn from Doug Kaye and the talented list of instructors he brought, but also to learn from each other.
I can still remember Steve up on the BU stage… because in the first few minutes of his talk, he completely shredded the curtain I had mentally erected around this intimidating thing called “video podcasting“.
You see… I had been blogging since 2000 and participating in audio podcasting since early 2005 (with “For Immediate Release“, where I still contribute to this day), but video?
No way! Video was hard… it required expensive equipment… it was difficult to do… it took special knowlege… it was complicated…
And there was Steve, standing up on the stage pointing a silly little commodity point-and-shoot camera first at himself and then at all of us… copying the file over to his computer… and then uploading it to YouTube or his blog or some site… all in the first 5-10 minutes of his talk!
Hello?
Was the awesomely intimidating “video podcasting” really as easy as this???
Yes, it really was that easy back in early 2007 – and it’s gotten even easier today with tools like the Flip camera (I’m holding out for the WiFi one!) and with embedded video cameras in most all new laptops. The online services have gotten easier to use…
[UPDATE:Over on his blog, Steve has actually dredged up a copy of the video of that Podcast Academy 2 talk. I didn’t remember part of how it began (with the online group interaction), but you can see where he started with showing us how to create a simple video podcast.]
Through all the changes, Steve has been there continuing to teach us about how to work with online video… and even more to show us how to do online video through his various projects.
And now Steve’s made it even easier to learn about online video… he’s got a new book out from Wiley called “Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business“[1] which I read on the flights down from New Hampshire to Orlando yesterday. It’s a great book for anyone looking to get started with online video… Steve talks about the tools and what you need to get going… but he also talks about the incredible importance of content and having a solid story… it’s all great stuff…
Even if you have now been working with video for a while, as I have with my Emerging Tech Talk video podcast, you’re bound to learn more that will help improve the quality of your shows. I know that I certainly took a great number of notes that I’ll now look to put into action.
Thanks, Steve, for continuing to share so openly… and I do hope this book helps even more people start contributing videos online!
[1] Disclosure: Yes, this link to Steve’s book and the link on the image both contain my Amazon Associates ID. If you buy the book as a result of following those links, I might make a few pennies. However, this review was not requested by Steve or Wiley. They did not send me a copy of the book. I bought it from Amazon myself.
Once upon a time… a few years back… there were a good number of us who were trying out short-format video “blogging” by way of Seesmic, from Loic Le Meur… but then Seesmic as a company took a detour, created an AIR-based Twitter client (acquiring Twhirl in there), then creating a web client for Twitter, then a native Windows client for Twitter… and in the process morphing “seesmic.com” into something very different.
Along the way of Seesmic’s evolution into something different, I know that at least I (and I’m fairly sure some others) lost track of whatever happened to Seesmic video. So I was pleased to learn today that Seesmic video is still alive at either:
Although it seems that “seesmic.tv” is the one to use based on SSL certificates. Now that I’ve paid attention, I do now see it at the bottom of the main seesmic.com page… I just hadn’t seen it in the past.
His point being that those of us working with online marketing need to think about our content both in terms of how it will appear on giant screens now available and also on the tiny screens of mobile devices.
Naturally, I had to check the analytics for this site and, sure enough, the same two sizes Christopher identified appear in my stats… only on my site for the past month they are at #6 and #7. (Chris’ were at #6 and #9):
Now, granted, when you look at the percentages of visitors using those screens, it’s only 4.7% using the 1920×1200 and only 4.6% using the 320×396, but still, it’s interesting to see. (I also at some point should dig in and look at the trend over time.)
Christopher mentions the need to make sure your website looks good on mobile screens and recommends the MobilePress plugin for WordPress users.
I’ve not used that plugin, but what I found worked very well for the Voxeo blog site was the WPTouch plugin from Brave New Code. As you can see in the image on the right, it displays all your blog posts in a very iPhone-friendly manner. It has other options, too, to interact with the blog site. (But you don’t have to trust me, just head over to blogs.voxeo.com with either an iPhone, iPod Touch or Android phone and check it out.)
I admit that part of the deciding factor was that I really liked the look of the site with WPTouch. If you click on the “down arrow” in the upper right next to the blog name, you also have easy access to the tags, categories and other navigation controls of the blog.
The key point, though, is that you need to make sure that your website content degrades gracefully as it goes from giant screens to small screens. For WordPress-powered blogs, either of these plugins – or the others out there – will help reformat your content appropriately.
What are you doing on your site to address the mobile audience?
P.S. If you use Google Analytics and want to see where these screen resolutions are for your site, go into GA and then into the report for your site. Click on “Visitors”, then the arrow next to “Browser Capabilities” and then finally “Screen Resolutions”. Where are 1920×1200 and 320×396 on your site’s list in terms of order? Feel free to leave your results (like “#6, #7”) here in the comments…
Over on her “techipedia” blog, Tamar Weinberg has pulled together an outstanding list of “The Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2009“. It’s a LONG list… but Tamar has done an excellent job curating a list of what’s been worthwhile to read this year in the social media / marketing space. There’s a few I might add… but I can’t quibble with any she’s listed there.
If you’re looking for good info on marketing, PR, social media, search/SEO, and many other topics… you definitely need to read through the list and start following links.
Thanks, Tamar, for compiling this list… it’s a great resource for all of us.
A few days before Christmas I joined the ranks of DSLR owners with the arrival of a Nikon D90, the kit 18-105mm lens and an additional 50mm/1.8 prime lens. (Shown on right, with the picture taken by my iPhone.) Amazon.com had a great price and I decided that it was the time to make the leap.
I had been debating for probably a good 8-9 months as the prices kept getting better and better. My big dilemma was, of course, the almost religious divide between:
Canon vs. Nikon
And, of course, the issue is that you are not just buying a single camera… you are buying into a system. Lenses, batteries… all of that is unique to a brand. The lenses are the biggest issue, because you naturally accumulate more as you do more with photography. I also realized that as a family, we’d probably soon be a multiple-DSLR family and so the decision was for more than just me.
I didn’t have a particular historical bias between Canon and Nikon. For most of probably 20 years I shot very large amounts of slide film with my trusty Olympus OM-10, but I put that down probably a decade ago when I started to play with digital point-and-shoot cameras. I looked at the Olympus digital cameras but wasn’t impressed… and still have a lingering dislike of Olympus for their proprietary xD cards that were a pain with an Olympus point-and-shoot we owned.
So in my typical Dan-dives-deep style, I consumed huge amounts of online reviews, including all the incredibly detailed ones at DPReview.com… I read Duncan Davidson’s “Advice for the $2K camera budget“… I spoke with large numbers of friends… I asked on Twitter… I asked on Facebook… I spoke with colleagues at work… I tried out cameras from friends and colleagues…
I couldn’t decide.
You see… all of the folks around me came down pretty evenly on both sides of the divide. Good friends who take incredible pictures and whose opinions I trust used Canon… and other friends shot pictures of the same caliber with Nikon. So in the end I was debating about the Canon Rebel T1i, the Nikon D5000, the Canon EOS 50D and the Nikon D90. The reality that became clear was:
Any of these cameras will take outstanding pictures.
For the typical hobby/home photographer, it’s hard to lose with whatever choice you make… you just have to make the choice. As a colleague in Germany said to me in a Skype chat:
But the most important thing is: Don’t look forever. Buy now, whatever the choice is today. And go shooting 🙂
So in the end, I chose a Nikon D90. Why? Two primary reasons:
When I tried it out, the D90 just “felt good in my hands“. A purely subjective reason. The controls all worked well for me. I just liked the feel versus the Canon models I tried.
A number of colleagues at work all have D90s and so I have a local pool of D90 users to talk to and learn from.
That was my choice of what worked for me. And I’ve been VERY pleased with the results… as has my wife… so much so that we have a Nikon D5000 arriving soon as well. 🙂
Now that I’ve made the leap to a DSLR, I find the quality of the shots so far ahead of my point-and-shoot camera that I don’t know that I’ll be going back much at all! The DSLRs are now also so incredibly easy to use. It’s also great just to have the feel of a SLR-size camera back in my hands and to be able to tweak the settings of a shot and experiment and play with photograpy.
I’m having fun… taking a ton of shots… some smaller number of which I’ll start adding to my Flickr account once I finish a writing project this week that is consuming all my outside-work time.
Have you made the leap yet? Are you in DSLR land? What was your choice?
It was great to 
It was April 2007 and a whole bunch of us from the from the Boston area had gathered at Boston University for Doug Kaye’s latest 
Once upon a time… a few years back… there were a good number of us who were trying out short-format video “blogging” by way of Seesmic, from 
Christopher mentions the need to make sure your website looks good on mobile screens and recommends 
A few days before Christmas I joined the ranks of DSLR owners with the arrival of 