Over on his “Fleet Street” blog, Dave Fleet has put together a great list of the “42 Top Social Media Tips and Tools“. Very nicely done list!
(And a tip of the hat to Lee Hopkins for pointing it out.)
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social media, tools
If you don’t yet understand why the walls need to come down between social networks, here is this great video from Michael Pick of Smashcut Media (first seen on Particls.Blog):
DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.
Indeed… this kind of portability is exactly what we need. We need to have control over our own information and network. Join the conversation over at DataPortability.org….
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attention, data portability, dataportability, dataportability.org, identity, social media, social network portability, social networking, social networks, walled gardens
Do you ever go to a website on a frequent basis to see if it has been updated? Do you go to a bookmark you have or click on a toolbar icon or even just type in the URL into your browser address bar?
Do you do that for this website? Do you NOT subscribe to the feed but rather just come here from time to time to see if anything new is here?
If not this site, do you do this for another site? How often do you go and visit the site? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Randomly?
I had an exchange today with someone I greatly respect and in the course of the conversation I realized that the reality is:
I don’t really go to any websites these days on a regular basis.
I don’t go to friends’ websites. (Sorry!) I don’t go to my employer’s website. I don’t go to any organization’s websites. I don’t go to my city’s website. Every once in a while I might hit CNN’s web page or a weather site, but that’s about it. I do go to Facebook’s page and Google Apps pages, but I think of those more as applications and communications services.
I don’t have time in my daily work or home schedule… even though going up to my Bookmarks menu, choosing a link and then waiting for the page to load isn’t a whole lot of time, it is some time… and if I get there and nothing has changed, it is wasted time. So I don’t do it.
The only reason I visit a web site these days is generally if either:
1. The website turns up in a search result.
2. I get notified that there’s something interesting there that I should look at.
3. Random times when for some reason I decide to go there, perhaps remembering a URL for a site I wanted to check out.
That’s it. (Note that I do get the content of many websites through the ways I mention below, but I don’t actually go to those websites and see their page.)
As I think about it, my consumption of information online really comes down to five ways:
The key thing is that, with the exception of search:
All the data comes to me!
Email is in my inbox, either on my laptop or my Blackberry. Feeds end up in my newsreader. Twitter I usually read in an IM chat window where I can scan it and search it. Skype groupchats I obviously read in Skype. I whip through and scan the info fast, clicking links if I want to see them and potentially firing off replies. I visit web pages only because I’ve seen an email with info and a link, or someone’s twittered the link or posted it in a Skype groupchat… or because of a link in some item in my RSS feeds.
For better or worse (and I can argue philosophically that it might be worse), that’s how I consume data. Funny thing is, I know I’m not alone. This is the “Web 2.0” way. Let me pull your data in some way and I’ll consume it.
Don’t make me go to your website to get updates. I won’t.
So if a website has an RSS feed (or a Twitter feed), I’ll subscribe and see when there are updates. Otherwise, I’ll probably just only go there on random times when I think of it. Which, unfortunately, won’t be often. I’m living in the blur.
Are you?
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twitter, attention, tools, web, web2.0, RSS, feeds, communication, collaboration
As I’ve written about in the past, I continue to remain concerned that social networks are really just “walled gardens” that are isolated from each other. Late last week, Robert Scoble getting temporarily kicked out of Facebook brought the attention of many of us to “DataPortability.org” and its “dataportability-public” Google Group. Now, today brings word that Facebook, who has usually been a holdout in “open” announcements to date (like OpenSocial) will be joining in to the Dataportability.org project. The news can be found here:
The news is outstanding, really, for those of us who want this kind of data portability. To have basically all the major players working together will be excellent. It would, indeed, be great to have the walls start coming down…
The devil, of course, lies in the details… time will tell whether true actions will emerge out of the DataPortability.org initiative.
Still, it’s a great way to start – and I’ve definitely joined the GoogleGroup mailing list to join in the evolution. Let’s see if the walls can shake a bit, eh?
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facebook, dataportability.org, dataportability, data portability, social network portability, social networks, social media, social networking, google, plaxo
I’ve been too busy to comment on LinkedIn’s announcement of their “Intelligent Application Platform” but there are certainly tons of others who have (see also here). Some of the posts I found most interesting were at VentureBeat and GigaOm.
LinkedIn, naturally, had a blog post with an introductory video that explains the platform.
While Facebook obviously has an enormous lead in terms of developers, it will be interesting to see what traction Linked does or does not gain. They indicate they will be supporting OpenSocial, which will allow developers to make apps that run in other OpenSocial-compliant social networks as well. They also have a strong user base within the business/professional community (include me) which could be quite attractive to developers as well.
In any event, I look forward to watching the announcements from LinkedIn as they roll out this developer program over the next few months.
Technorati Tags:
facebook, linkedin, applications, apis, platforms
Over on my Voxeo blog site, we are using WordPress MU which is based on WordPress 2.3 and includes a very nice “tags” feature in addition to categories. This allows you to do things like have the “tag cloud” that you can see in the right sidebar of our “Speaking of Standards” blog. It’s quite nice but in working with the blog site, we ran into one major annoyance – none of the offline blog editors on the Mac seemed to support WordPress 2.3 tags. This resulted in a bizarre posting process where if you wrote the post offline you then needed to login to the site to go back and add tags to the post.
Thankfully, a quick search brought me to a post back in September indicating that marsedit already supported WP 2.3 tags! All that is required is to go into the View menu (when writing a post) and choose “Keywords Field”. When you enter in keywords, those are then automagically mapped to WP 2.3 tags when you publish the post. VERY nice!
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marsedit, tags, wordpress, wpmu, wordpress mu, blog editors
Earlier today I participated in a audio book review of “WordPress for Dummies” with FIR co-host Neville Hobson (I am a weekly “correspondent” into the FIR podcast). The podcast is now
online on the FIR site and I will also be cross-posting the podcast notice below as well. It was fun to do the interview with Neville and overall we both were very positive about the new book. (You’ll hear my one main point of criticism, which was not so much with the content but with the way it was presented.) If you are working with WordPress – or thinking about it – I would definitely recommend you check out this book.
NOTE: Neville cross-posted the podcast notice on his blog and the book author has responded with a comment.
One of the most popular platforms for creating and managing a blog is WordPress. From its origins in 2003, WordPress has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.
A new book, WordPress For Dummies, has just been published, with explanations in plain English about WordPress and how to use it.
Written by Lisa Sabin-Wilson, WordPress for Dummies covers blogging basics, choosing a hosting solution or setting up a host, developing blog content, syndicating blog posts with RSS, launching a specialized blog (including podcasting, photoblogging, mobile blogging, and videoblogging), and even earning revenue. It includes help on every aspect of installing and using WordPress, illustrations from real-world WordPress blogs, step-by-step tutorials on key topics, and insights from bloggers who use WordPress.
FIR co-host Neville Hobson and FIR correspondent Dan York discuss their take on the new book, looking at various aspects of the overall content, and concluding with their recommendation about the book.
Download the review here (MP3, 12.6MB, 27mins 37 secs), or sign up for the FIR Book Reviews RSS feed to get it and future reviews automatically. To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the twice-weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, sign up for the full RSS feed.
Listen to this podcast now:
Voxeo
If you have comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future interviews, email us at fircomments@gmail.com; or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America) or +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe); or Skype: fircomments; or comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR; or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.
Podsafe intro music – On A Podcast Instrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.
WordPress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc
Paperback, 384 pages
Published in November 2007
ISBN: 978-0-470-14946-1
Available online now from Amazon.com and other outlets.
Technorati Tags: blogging, danyork, fir, nevillehobson, wordpressfordummies, wordpress, wordpressmu
The folks over at Mozilla have now released the first beta of Firefox 3. More information can be found here:
It is of course posted with the warning that this is for development and testing purposes, i.e. don’t install it on a machine where using Firefox is critical. Some reviews are already appearing: ZDNet and CNet. I’m sure there will be more articles about it in the blogosphere as the days go on.
Being a chaser of bright shiny objects, I’ve naturally downloaded it and will be giving it a try myself. I’ll post here my opinions as I start using it in daily work. What about you? Are you going to try it out? (Or wait for another beta or release?)
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, one of my tasks in my new role with Voxeo is to create a “blogs.voxeo.com” blog portal for the blogs the company will create. Given my interest in open source, I’ve been investigating options there for a “corporate blog portal”. Why open source? Primarily because I’m a huge control-freak and I want to be able to control all aspects of the portal, even if it means diving deep into source code. So my first inclination is to investigate open source options and then if I can’t find something there that meets my requirements, I’ll move on to commercial software.
On first-glance, though, it would appear that there are two viable open source options out there:
Both options look good. Both let you use the zillion WordPress plugins out there. Both provide front-end portals. Both can be customized to the nth degree. Stay tuned for more analysis… and if any of you reading this have used either of them, I’d appreciate any insight you can offer.
Technorati Tags: blog portals, blogging, lyceum, voxeo, wordpress, wordpressmu
Longtime readers will know that I have been a huge fan of Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer offline blogging editor (see what I’ve written about it). In fact, I have to say that WLW is the ONLY application that I severely miss now that I’ve moved to MacOS X (sorry, neither ecto nor marsedit yet measure up to WLW for me) and I’m actually considering running Parallels just to be able to use it. To me, it is that good.
So I was delighted for all the Windows bloggers out there to see the tweet from Neville pointing to the Microsoft blog entry indicating that “Windows Live Writer 2008” is now available. You can download it now.
If you have never used an offline blog editor and you are on Windows, do check it out. I’ve been using offline blog editors for most of the seven years I’ve been blogging and once you start… you’ll never want to go back.
To all you Windows users, enjoy! Me? I’m thinking of firing up Parallels to give the new release a try…
Technorati Tags: blogeditors, microsoft, windowslivewriter