A View from the Isle » Social Media

Requsite Google Buzz Post

Tris Hussey — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:39:35 +0000

Yep, it’s interesting. We’ll see.

EOM.

Tiny Speck Brings Forth Glitch–Something New in Social Gaming?

Tris Hussey — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:22:36 +0000

Flickr is one of Vancouver’s greatest Web 2.0 success stories. Born in Yaletown, bought by Yahoo, and continues to go strong (at least me and my 14,000 photos hope so). Today (like “today” as in midnight Pacific time) Stewart Butterfield’s latest project has a name, a look, and some light shed upon it.

Over the summer Stewart let the world know that Tiny Speck was the new project he was starting, and it would be a game of some sorts. Okay, we’ll buy that. Flickr started out as a game, so, this isn’t a stretch. CNET got the exclusive on tonight’s “launch” of Glitch (don’t forget their Twitter account):

Glitch, at its most basic, is a 2D Flash, Web-based, social MMO with a heavy puzzle-solving component. Or, as the team likes to call it, a “collaborative sim.” Its back story centers on a great but very dark future, and a group of scientists who discover a path back in time to create the optimistic future everyone wants. “The whole world was spun out of the imagination of 11 great giants,” Butterfield, who often speaks in a soft, hard-to-hear voice, said. “So you have to go back into the past, into the world of the giants’ imaginations and grow…the number of things in the world, grow it in terms of physical dimensions, to make sure the future actually happens. So all the game play takes place in the past inside the world of the giants’ imagination.” Images: Stewart Butterfield’s new gaming start-up Practically speaking, Glitch is a social game (see sidebar for more detail about the game) about learning how to find and nurture resources, identify and build community, and proselytize to those around you. It’s not about epic, bloody battles. “Rather than you and me fighting each other with swords,” Butterfield explained, “it could be you and me having rival religious factions battling each other for converts.”

link: Watching the birth of Flickr co-founder’s gaming start-up | Geek Gestalt – CNET News

I’m intrigued. I’m not a big gamer. I haven’t been for years, but there is something here that I’d like to try. Maybe it’s getting in at the beginning. Maybe it’s because (insert movie voice-over) “From the people who brought you Flickr…” caché is just too much to pass up.

Is there room in this world for another game? If Facebook is any indication, yeah. If nothing else I hope this isn’t going to be another Facebook game I’m going to have to ignore and block. Games are great, games that make me pester my friends on Facebook I can do with out, thank you.

Along with CNET’s “and now we bring you…Glitch!” post the companion piece on Stewart’s journey to make Tiny Speck is probably worth more of a read, since I think it gives a little more insight into what is going on in the greater scheme of things.

Interesting how Stewart is unveiling Glitch just as Vancouver is welcoming the world. I think it’s fitting, actually. Flickr revolutionized how we share pictures and is one of the best things to come out of Vancouver, makes sense to launch something when Vancouver is again in the spotlight.

Dispelling Blogging Myths: Blogging Will Get Me Fired!

Tris Hussey — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:21:56 +0000

Getting fired for blogging doesn’t get as much attention as it did in 2004-2005. Back then, the media was a buzz about people getting fired because they were blogging, when, in truth, very few people were actually fired for blogging. Oh yes, some people were fired for blogging, that much is true. I’m sure many of the cases had little to do with the blogging parts as it did with something else going on. However the “fired for blogging” thing did do one good thing, it forced companies to realize that people were blogging and set up blogging policies.

I cover blogging policies in Create Your Own Blog, from Sun’s massive one to the “unofficial blogging policy” from Microsoft: don’t be stupid. Blogging is different than almost anything else you do in your spare time because it is public. If you blog about your boss being a doofus, well that blog better either be private or you’re blogging anonymously because there’s a good chance you’ll eventually get turfed for stuff like that. No, calling your boss a doofus isn’t illegal, it’s just not too smart. You don’t think it won’t get back to him or her? Think again. Oh and the anonymous blog thing? Yeah that doesn’t usually last too long. Most anonymous bloggers who gain any kind of following are eventually revealed (or reveal themselves before being outed by others).

Blogging and your job treads into the territory of other social media and employment. Facebook is now the latest target in the “get you fired” or “keep you from being hired” discussion, and honestly the issues haven’t changed. If you publish something online not only is it there forever, there is no guarantee that something to mark or think is private will stay that way. Just as blogging that your boss is a doofus isn’t smart, tweeting or updating your Facebook status that you’re goofing off when you really called in sick isn’t going to do you any favors. It will get around. Trust me. Maybe not that time or the next time, but it will sometime and you’ll be hooped.

This is why I’ve always liked Microsoft’s blogging policy: Don’t be stupid. It’s simple and to the point. Yeah I know it’s subjective, but just consider what you’re doing as if on of your friends told you they were going to it or did it. If you cringe and think “Oooh that was stupid…” Well, then you have your answer.

So, no, neither blogging, Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media tool gets you fired, often you do it to yourself by being stupid.

Don’t be stupid.

Writing is harder than both teaching and doing, but is great for learning

Tris Hussey — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 07:02:51 +0000

Something came in the mail today, which has made this whole “book” thing very, very real. No, not money, the book! I won’t even get to hold it in my hot little hands for a few hours yet, but that’s not what this post is about. While I was writing Create Your Own Blog it struck me how hard it is to write a tech book and make sure that everything is right. I would sit down with my chapter outline, start writing and stop. “Wait, is that really correct?”

So I’d go look it up. Sure I had researched various things ahead of time, and when you’re writing about blogging, as a blogger you do have a lot of stuff in your head already, but I wasn’t satisfied with my gut feeling. I tried everything I wrote. Did it work? Was it the most current thinking on a topic?

In the process I learned a lot about blogging, writing, WordPress, SEO, pretty much everything the book covers (here is the official listing from the publisher that has the TOC for Create Your Own Blog). Which, I think, has made me a better teacher, blogger, and writer. So when I started Using WordPress I knew I’d be forcing myself to learn more WP than I had need to learn before. Have I?

Oh yeah.

I’m about 1/3 through the book at this point, and even just writing about plugins (like my list of 45 WordPress plugins from over the weekend) I’ve gotten into install issues, security, and how to choose plugins wisely. Working through issues about video plugins or security plugins, I have delved into areas of blogging and technology that I knew about but didn’t know in great detail.

Now I do.

And it’s a very humbling experience. Realizing that you don’t know everything can throw many authors for a loop. How you handle that realization is what separates good writers and bloggers from bad. I sat back, did my research, asked people I knew, and followed new and interesting tacts through the process. So as I’m working on my second book, with a third in planning stages, I can say that each book I write, even each column for the Observer, I learn something I didn’t know before.

I’m looking forward to having a book launch for Create Your Own Blog soon, and am also hoping the book will give me the opportunity to teach and speak more. To that end, I am available to teach WordPress, blogging, social media, and writing for the web workshops. I am also happy to lecture or speak at conferences or meetings on those topics as well. If you’re interested, just zap me a line on my spiffy new Contact Me page.

Never say never–Facebook Fan Page and Adsense comes calling

Tris Hussey — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:07:47 +0000

Yeah, I’m a well known Facebook curmudgeon and haven’t had ads here on the site for years now, but yesterday that changed.

Sigh.

I’m willing to admit when I’m wrong, or at least when I need to wise up to reality. I know Facebook is huge and lots of people make that the centre of their online universe. I’m just not one of those people. Yes, I’m on Facebook and have a respectable number of Facebook friends, but Facebook just doesn’t provide much for me that I can’t get elsewhere.

Except for events.

And fan pages.

Crap.

I begrudgingly admit that, yeah not using Facebook to spread the word about something even as simple as a birthday party is pretty foolish. So by the same token, I have to admit that having a Facebook fan page for Create Your Own Blog is a good idea for promoting the book.

And so, I put together a simple fan page yesterday (with help from Jesse Stay’s tutorial on Techipedia) that I’ll be working on expanding over the next little while.

I’m very happy to already have a number of fans (after I figured out that I didn’t really invite people in the first place—oops), which I take to be a good sign that people are at least willing to glance at the book. Now to move people from glancing to buying is the next step.

Yeah, need to work on that, well right after the book actually hits the shelves that is.

Anyway, that was just the first of my changes to my social media world yesterday. The second was advertising.

Yes, advertising.

To be perfectly clear I have never been against advertising on blogs, I just didn’t like fussing with it. The partly amount I was earning (next to nothing), didn’t make up for the time I felt I needed to spend cultivating the ads. I decided yesterday that enough was enough and I needed to do something to support my gadget cravings and premium coffee habit.

So I have Adsense on the the site now. And affiliate links to DIYThemes/Thesis. Even though in the last chapter of the book I point out that my site didn’t have ads (it didn’t when I wrote the chapter), I’m willing to answer tough questions about why I started (again) now.

Am I willing to have more ads here on the site? Yes I am. How I’m going to go about selling more space here I’ll talk about in a while. I want to get a solid baseline of data before I change things again.

Am I a social media sell out now? No, I don’t think so. I’m a realist/pragmatist. I know that Facebook is a powerful way to build buzz and discussion around a topic/person/book/whatever. It just is, like it or not, it just is. I would be pretty stupid to ignore Facebook and still say that I understand social media marketing. Adsense and advertising? Frankly I’ve been working hard to (re)build traffic on this site and with traffic comes the potential for advertising. Advertising means money. Money allows me to feed, clothe, and house my fiancée and I a little better.

I’d love to hear what you think of these changes I’ve made. Including, you might have missed, a new disclosure link in the footer.

Now I need more coffee…

My 45 must have WordPress plugins. Any to add to the list?

Tris Hussey — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 22:40:02 +0000

Even though it’s been the holiday season, work on Using WordPress hasn’t slowed down only a wee bit. Several of the initial chapters are now in the loving hands of my editors and I’m proceeding full steam ahead. Since crowd sourcing works pretty darn well for getting feedback, commentary, and information, I’m looking for a bit of help with the next chapter in the book: WordPress Plugins.

Us WordPress.org/DIY install users know that there are thousands of WP plugins out there to try. Lots of plugins do the same thing and while there are some standout awesome ones, I’m sure there are some real dogs as well. I have my set of core favourite plugins (even if I don’t have them active at the moment for various reasons), but I want to know which plugins you’d add (or remove) from the list.

In the book I’ve (for the time being) grouped plugins into the following bins:

Interface tweaks
Comments
Caching and optimization
SEO
Metrics and stats
Multimedia
Theme related
Administration
Social Media integrations
Mobile
Search
Miscellaneous (you always need miscellaneous).

I know that there is overlap among the categories. A plugin for a Flickr slide show could be multimedia or social media or Akismet could be administration or comments. Regardless of how I bin them in the end, I want to have as complete a list as possible. To that end, here are my “must-haves” and “I wouldn’t mind recommending them” plugins:

No, I don’t have all of these active (only 21 of them in fact) nor have I listed all 66 plugins I have loaded on my blog, but like I said these are ones I don’t have a problem recommending or using myself.

Now it’s your turn. Are there plugins that should and shouldn’t be on the list? I can’t include every plugin under the Sun, but I would like to make sure who ever reads the book will have a solid list to start with and work from.

Okay, let’er rip!

Update: Thanks to @leonardipaolo for suggesting/prodding me to include links to all the plugins.

Update 2: Speaking of plugins, I was trying one today to check for bad links and while it worked (I think) it also brought this blog to a crawl. Disabled the plugin and everything is back to normal. So, word to the wise, overloading with plugins is just as bad as overloading your sidebars with widgets—it very likely will negatively affect your blog’s performance.

Walking a line of publicity and privacy. Where do you stand?

Tris Hussey — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 04:47:35 +0000

Public or private. Tell the world, tell a few, tell no one. This is one aspect of social media that I constantly struggle with in my life. This evening Raul, Guacira Naves, and I were chatting about this very topic this evening at Blenz. The three of us all have our own stories of the good and bad of public disclosure. I think it’s safe to say the three of us agree that there are no easy answers. By happenstance when I got home what did I find in my feed reader but this post on the whole public-priuvate debate:

Strangely, some people seem rather keen to blame technology for their own increasingly public behavior. There are those who, when confronted with their own public proclamations of their everyday lives, say it was the technology that made them do it. It was there, everyone was doing it, and, no, no, they had no idea that everyone would see it.
Though it’s entirely believable that Facebook and Twitter are full of touchingly heartless engineers who would dearly love for everyone to live as publicly as possible so that they can sell their information to as many advertisers as possible, there might be a little more to it than that.
Haven’t Facebook and Twitter merely lucked into people’s overwhelming desire for, well, fame? Once broadcast media– you know the old-fashioned stuff like radio and TV– proved that fame was a powerful, far-reaching and tangentially tangible currency, we all thought it might be nice to taste a piece of it.
How many of your Facebook friends seem to want their updates to be more interesting, more involving and more amusing those of anyone else in their group? How many of your Twitter community want to prove that they are reading something more important, more current, more intellectual than anyone else?

[From Facebook, Twitter: How we chose to live in public | Technically Incorrect - CNET News]

Do we publicize for fame or support? Are we trying to get more and more attention or just have our say? Recently I, again, had my own reminder of how I’ve chosen to live my life in public online, but my family hasn’t. How I can derive solace and support from my friends, but at what cost to others?

There are times I honestly come within inches of either just deleting my Twitter account or locking it down to private only. Both of which are over-reactions of course, but this feeling of just screaming “enough!” and pulling back from it all comes from wanting to let some thoughts and feelings out but having to hold them back. It’s that crushing reality that you just can’t be 100% open online without some nasty ramifications. Most of us self censor online, it’s a reality. I think it’s a reality because we don’t have the same granular control online as we do in real life.

I can have a few friends over and talk about things I wouldn’t talk about in public. It’s not as easy to have a private discussion online. I know there are ways. I can have a private blog. I can have a private twitter account and invite certain people to it. Those, however create yet another channel that I have to maintain. What if Twitter offered something like a tweet to group feature. You could make a tweet semi-private. It appears in your public timeline, but only to a select few people. My followers don’t have to change anything, all I have to change is making sure I check off something like [private group] when I send it.

Or maybe the real lesson is that we need to ensure we have strong real-world communities to rely on. People you can call on in the wee hours of the morning when you’re having a dark night of the soul. People who will accept a coffee or beer invite when you just need a shoulder and an ear.

Maybe the public-private question is more of a challenge for finding balance in how we use technology now in our daily lives. Lots of questions and few answers, well except I need to have coffee with Raul and Guacira more often.

Observe, Learn, Adapt, Flourish–All Publishing is at a turning point

Tris Hussey — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 03:27:15 +0000

I don’t buy terribly many books anymore, or magazines, and certainly not newspapers. A bit of an ironic statement from someone who’s first book comes out in January, but I don’t equate publishing with paper. I assume that my books will have more life in digital editions than in paper ones. I’ve been writing in the digital medium far more than I ever have (or will) in works published on paper.

While it isn’t Earth-shattering news that newspapers, at least in print, are dying off. Local newspapers, the hyper local kind that I used to deliver every afternoon as a kid when I was a paperboy (another causality of the Internet age), seem long gone. If the survive at all it’s as a thin weekly paper. In Vancouver The Georgia Straight and Vancouver Observer have thriving Internet-based content. Often some of the best content in both papers are online only. I found this piece in The Economist comparing how the telegraph didn’t kill newspapers, but actually made them what they are today:

The trouble is that nobody knows how to make money in the new environment. That raises questions about how much news will be gathered. But there is no sign of falling demand for news, and technology has cut the cost of collecting and distributing it, so the supply is likely to increase. The internet is shaking up the news business, as the telegraph did; in the same way, mankind will be better informed about his fellow humans than before. If paper editions die, then Bennett’s prediction that communications technology would be the death of newspapers will be belatedly proved right. But that is not the same as the death of news.

[From Newspapers and technology: Network effects | The Economist]

What has caused the biggest problem for newspapers, until now, is that there was no easy business model for continuing print editions. I see eReaders as the solution to the problem. No, I don’t think that many papers can have subscription models like The Wall Street Journal or New York Times have, but if more content can be delivered more easily and more cost effectively online without the noose of a paper edition around their necks, not as much money needs to be raised through advertising.

Classifieds? No, Craig’s List killed those as a revenue stream. And people do appreciate great content, and might be willing to pay for it. But in the end, it will be the ability to pull up the news on our small, slim tablets that will save news, writing, and journalism. We can gather, analyze, connect, and publish information so much more efficiently leveraging technology. The question will be which newspapers will find it more profitable to ditch their print editions entirely first. And what is the magic number of eReaders in consumer hands to make a digital only edition the best solution?

And maybe the biggest irony of all it is RSS will be the technology that will likely be the way we create and manage our newspapers on our digi-slates.

Who said the RSS reader was dead?

I’m an Internet Rogue, thank you.

Tris Hussey — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 04:16:13 +0000

How many times have you read a Twitter profile where the person is a social media guru/expert/rockstar/superstar? I guess we’re all used to it by now, something that we just skim, shrug and more on. Pete Cashmore reflects on this self-description phenomenon today…

That humorous observation raises a legitimate point: A growing industry needs trust and reputation. With social media growing so rapidly and no certification yet established, how do we go about establishing reputation?

Without it, such stats provide fodder for those who would say that social media — which is touching every industry from entertainment to air travel — is simply hot air.

[From There are 15,740 Social Media Experts on Twitter]

I guess if you think you’re a social media expert you are. Good thing we can’t say the same for doctors or lawyers.

When people started this trend I was using the title “Social Media Concierge”, but I dropped it eventually as more and more people were getting into the whole social media consulting game. This isn’t to say that I don’t do social media consulting, which I do on occasion, I felt that when everyone and their brother was jumping into the pool the best way to stand out was to just get out of the pool. Pete’s point about building reputation is bang on, much like being a “web expert” in the past. There isn’t a gauge of who is and who isn’t, and those who don’t use the title are often the ones who actually are the experts in the field. There is a Catch-22 to building a reputation as an “expert” in social media, which Mack Collier might call the “rockstar” factor and I’d call the follower factor regardless, it’s the same thing. We are most likely to pay attention to the people who are already getting a lot of attention (i.e. lots of followers on Twitter). Maybe we need to consider as well Mack Collier’s call for looking for fewer rockstars and more great ideas:

So how do we change this and bring more voices into the mix? I have some ideas, but definitely want to hear yours as well:

1 – Spend less time identifying the ‘rockstars’ and more time focusing on the great ideas. I am as guilty of this as anyone. I want to make sure that everyone knows how smart my friends are, but by labeling them ‘rockstars’, we are unintentionally ranking people. If David is a rockstar with 20K followers and 15K blog readers, the unintentional message may be that your ideas are less valuable if you only have a fraction of his followers/readers.

2 – Stop focusing on numbers to determine influence. I get why this happens. It’s quick and easy, it’s score-keeping. You can quickly compare your number of readers or followers or comments to someone else. But it isn’t always (ever?) accurate. Is it an absolute that if I have more Twitter followers than you do that I am more influential there than you are? Or if you have more than I do, that you are more influential than I am? Of course not.

3 – Listen closely to new ideas from new voices, and magnify both when you hear them. So many of us complain about the ‘fishbowl’ mentality in the social media space. A great way to counter that is to bring new voices with fresh takes into this space. Introduce your network to someone they might not have heard of previously. Yes we all know who the ‘rockstars’ in this space are, so show us who’s next.

I’m not going to claim to be some kind of social media saint following, retweeting, and linking to anyone and everyone. Not a chance. I have the friends and colleagues that I follow and pay attention to. I know that like most people I have my own little fishbowl that I swim in and look at the world through. Trying to claim otherwise would be just as dishonest as saying that I know all there is to know about social media.

I think we can all strive to pass along the links of people who just have great ideas. I’ve been upping my RSS feed subscription numbers and looking for new blogs to read. I used to subscribe to tons and tons of blogs, only to skim most and mark read half the time. Now, I’m making more of an effort to read and share more. I’m sharing through Fever now so you can subscribe to that feed. I don’t always share the most obscure stuff, but I try to share.

And…what’s the point?

So it’s hip and cool to be a social media expert. It’s fun to gather Twitter followers by the thousands for fun and profit. What Pete and Mack are both getting at is that maybe we’re reaching expert saturation. We’re all experts. And so if we’re all experts maybe what we need more of are…

more teachers.

Can Twitter Make It?

Tris Hussey — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 21:53:03 +0000

Sometimes, especially after this week’s Twitter DNS debacle—Internal Twitter Credentials Used in DNS Hack, Redirect-Twitter Email Security Blamed for Latest Hack—, I wonder if Twitter really has what it takes to make it in the long haul. It certainly took them long enough to get basic scaling working. At least now a simple Apple announcement or single conference won’t completely take Twitter down. If this is the second hack that Twitter has suffered because of, I’m guessing here, poor email and password management then do they have the management chops to succeed?

Reading GigaOM this morning on startups, and thinking about something to limber up the writing muscles, the number #3 startup killer struck me as something that maybe Twitter hasn’t been very good at:

3. Failure to Weed or Seed Soon Enough

We’ve written about how to hire, fire and mentor and why to remove underperformers quickly for superior teams. Our message is simply that you can never eliminate underperformers soon enough and that you should always be looking for superior talent. Superior people make excellent technology and develop appropriate processes.

[From Top 10 Internet Startup Scalability Killers – GigaOM]

Has Twitter been holding on to people and practices too long? Have managers been reluctant to be hard asses? Sometimes when you have been given responsibility for something, you need to step up to the plate. Case in point.

To write Using WordPress I’ve reduced the time I spend with M2O but I still have responsibilities over the servers and such. Earlier this week I emailed everyone that we had to be serious about passwords. I had been thinking about Twitter and written a lot about making good passwords for Future Shop and the book and realized that I knew that at least a few of the passwords people used were bad. Like epically bad.

Yesterday afternoon, thinking about it again, I realized that most people take password security about as seriously as drier lint so I did something that probably earned me a lot of curses: I forced everyone to reset their Gmail passwords on their next login.

Yep, probably damn freakin’ annoying. I didn’t stop with active team members either, all active email accounts that had been set up for people (believe me there is going to be some house cleaning again in that department come Tuesday). Are people pissed at me? Maybe. Frankly I don’t care. I realized that if I wanted to avoid a Twitter-like debacle, I needed to put a stake in the ground and say that this is serious business.

I don’t know if Twitter feels the same way about their system or service. I wonder if Ev, Biz, and Jack still think of Twitter as a lark. Millions of people don’t think Twitter is a lark. Millions of us rely on and use Twitter as a key informational tool. I think we need to remind the folks at Twitter that it isn’t a lark. That having lax password security isn’t a good thing. Again the call to decentralize Twitter should be ringing in our ears. We need redundancy. We need a server that people can install themselves. Maybe Twitter should bite the bullet and make a deal with Google to allow Google Apps for Domains to host replicant Twitter servers and build an actual architecture like we have for email.

I think until Twitter steps up to the plate, gets serious, and is no longer a single-point-of-failure service we have to question whether Twitter can really make it.

What skills will make the best journalists? Tech ninjas to rule the roost?

Tris Hussey — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:48:44 +0000

Journalists seem to always be taking it on the chin. If it isn’t that their craft is dying (which I don’t think is true) or their publications are failing (okay that one is true), now it’s that in order to be agile journalists, keep employed, and be relevant they need to be programers too? Wow, harsh.

As the news industry looks to reconstruct its suffering business model, the journalists of today must reconstruct their skill sets for the growing world of online media. Because of cutbacks at many news organizations, the jobs available are highly competitive. News companies are seeking journalists who are jacks of all trades, yet still masters of one (or more).

2010 will likely be a time of transition as today’s journalists catch up to learn the multimedia, programming, social media, and business skills they’ll need to tell their stories online. These new skills are especially relevant to startups that are looking to hire multi-skilled and social media-savvy journalists. Below we’ve gathered some skills that are quickly becoming basic requirements for the journalist of tomorrow.

[From 8 Must-Have Traits of Tomorrow's Journalist]

Okay, I give, I’m blowing this a just a wee out of proportion, but I think what is more accurate is that journalists just need to adapt to the new tools, outlets, and opportunities that social media and Web 2.0 bring to them. Gillian Shaw of the Sun and Mathew Ingram of the Globe & Mail epitomize the transition that journalists have needed to make in order to stay on top of the game. Fine, both Gillian and Mathew are tech reporters and friends, but still both of them keep up, experiment with new toys and tools, and I don’t think I’ve heard either of them kvetch about the state of their papers. I’m sure they both think about the state of their papers, but I suspect that they both see that a nice, steady transition to providing more and more content online (and in some cases online-only content) for their papers is the place to be.

While I do write a column for the Vancouver Observer, I think of myself as a padawan journalist. I have a lot to learn about how to “do it right”, but I’m catching on I think. Regardless, I think what is a more apt prediction is that journalists, like all knowledge workers, need to continue to hone skills, learn new technologies, and adapt to an ever-changing sea of technology. In the end, yes, the tech ninjas will rule the roost. The people in the newsroom who can have google search results waiting for them at their desks because they did a google search on their smartphone (or netbook) in a story meeting or know enough to set up their own hosting account and unleash a myriad of tools like Fever and Yahoo Pipes onto the Internet to be their own personal info minions, those are the journalists (and knowledge workers) who will rock the news world in the years to come.

Hmm, maybe I should trade some journalism mentoring from Gillian for showing her some advanced info ninja skills…

Time for a new look at “content federations?” Building our hand-crafted content together.

Tris Hussey — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:52:01 +0000

The big topic at the moment, even as evidenced even by Fever/Chill Pill–

Is Mike Arrington’s post on the demise of hand crafted content—The End Of Hand Crafted Content—then followed by several sage responses:

Which makes me think about the early days of professional blogging. When people decried what I was doing, that professional blogging would lead to crap content. Maybe it has in the case of Demand Media (and others), but I also think what I started doing in 2004 paved the way for more bloggers to make money as bloggers for Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, TUAW, and all the other big content-driven sites. These content-driven sites that did a damn good job at toppling the mainstream media for dominance of the media megaphone. But there’s a (somewhat) new challenge out there sites rife with quickly written content that might answer a question or provide links to resources, but little else. We’ve had mass content sites for a while, they aren’t terribly new, just the tools for promotion and buzz building have gotten better.

The question that’s being raised today is can content like I, RWW, TC, TUAW b5media produce survive when we’re out-posted and out-linked by content farms. I think we can, if we work more together than apart. If we’re serious about good content, then good content needs to be supported. Sure, Doc Searls has a valid point that he has been producing great content for years. So have I, and I’ve supported myself through the other things that come with great content (consulting, etc), but I think we have to do a little more this time around.

If part of the power of Demand Media and others is scale then we can fight back with scale of our own. What if there were customized WP-MT plugin like Zemata or Outbrain that pulled recommendations only from posts within a federation of sites? Sites where great content is the rule, not exception.

No, it wouldn’t be easy and yes, it would lead to “I’m good enough for…” discussions. However considering one of the biggest issues is the inter and intra site linking of content farms reinforcing and augmenting the SEO value of the posts, I think this is worth a look.

Or maybe we need to summon back the blogroll and be more in the habit of linking to each other.

Or Techmeme could launch a widget like I’ve talked about to show “related posts on Techememe”.

Regardless, in the end what we, as crafters of content, need to remember to do is: keep crafting great content.

Lately on Techplanations: Headset Contest, Gifts for Geeks, Basic computer fixes, and Telelympics Part 1

Tris Hussey — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 21:27:43 +0000

Things have been pretty active over on my Vancouver Observer column, Techplanations. WIth the holidays coming up I had to cover gift ideas for geeks: Getting Great Gifts for Geeks and since we all need to stop talking on our cellphones while starting in BC starting in January I have a review of some Motorola headsets and a contest to win a headset or hands free car device–Do You Have a Headset for Your Cell Phone?.

Because the column is about helping people use technology better (and fix it when it breaks) I covered the very common–My Computer Won’t Boot! What do I do?!?–which I’m sure many of you have lots to had to that topic in the comments.

Finally I’ve just published part one of a multi–part series on telecommuting during the Olympics–Welcome to the Telelympics! Telecommuting For The 2010 Winter Games. The first installment covers laying the groundwork for working from home. Next week I’m going to dig deeper into setting up your router, getting software you need, and prepping your workspace.

Have more tips for telework? Let me know here or in the comments on the column.

Of course if you have suggestions for future Techplanations columns zap me a line at tris [at] techplanations [dot] com.

Remind me again, why don’t we live blog as much anymore?

Tris Hussey — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 06:28:19 +0000

Way, way back in 2005 I started live blogging at conferences. Blog Business Summit was the first a) blogging related conference I attended and b) the first conference I live blogged. From that point on I got to be pretty well known as a live blogger. It even got me into conferences and my travel expenses paid so I could live blog and cover a conference for companies. I think, in fact, I got pretty damn good at live blogging. I had my own style as well, a mix of transcribing and commentary on the fly. Often my live blog posts were more stream of conference consciousness than “real” writing.

Then something changed. Shel Israel hits the nail on the head, that something was Twitter:

Then along came Twitter. Obviously, I considered this also important and revolutionary. I still do. But it has occurred to me that this, faster, easier, shorter way of reporting through “live tweets” has replaced the longer, deeper, more thoughtful social media form,at of live blogging. It has done so in a very short period of time and my sense is something is being lost.

Tweets by their nature are terse. An audience members usually says who is speakig & maybe the topic. A rave review is the that she or he “rocks.” But the coverage of what is actually being said is reduced. So are the questions and comments coming from outside the room.

I have noticed this year, that there were fewer live blog posts at conferences I was attending that there used to be. But I wondered if that was partly because my path has veered to some degree from the tech sector where live blogging had been so strong so recently.

[From In loving memory of live blogging - Global Neighbourhoods]

I think the switch for me was in 2007 (yes only two years later), when during Gnomedex the Twitter backchannel was much more interesting that the people on stage (for the most part). Because Twitter was becoming so compelling, it was hard to be a part of that conversation, listen to the speaker and write. Over time I found it much more enjoyable to watch the Twitter stream (assuming that Twitter was up) and listen to the speaker than to write. I know, how shocking, listening to a speaker at a conference.

As I’ve tried to live blog since Twitter (A.T.?) I’ve found that I really don’t enjoy, much less remember, the speakers. If it weren’t for the fact that I’d lose them, I’d write notes with pen and paper if there was a thought or idea I wanted to remember. Like Shel, I miss the commentary that we used to get from live blogs. I miss someone taking the time to thoughtfully work through presentations and maybe drawn a common thread among them. Maybe even take a contrary position to the speaker (in a respectful way of course) and help everyone learn a little more about the topic. Push the boundaries, challenge us, make us, God forbid, think.

Why don’t I do this? If I was so good at doing it, why don’t I take some notes during a talk and then write something up later?

Time, audience, effort, and money.

We seem to have less and less time at conferences to just sit and think (at least I don’t seem to) and that time is needed to sit and write something worthwhile while the topic is still relevant. Is analyzing a keynote two days later really have much of a point in our hyperspeed news world? I don’t think so. That time needed leads to the effort required. And time and effort both connect to money. Even if I’m not getting paid to live blog, I could be working on other things that help pay the bills.

And all of the above boils down to audience. The RSS-reading, Twitterpated, blog skimming audience seems less interested in live blogs now. If something that takes me a while to write generates some discussion and attention to my blog/site/books/classes then it’s worth it.

No, it’s not all about audience or attention. Nor is this all about money. I still write, and am writing more of late, because I love it. However, this doesn’t mean I’m naive to the fact that what I produce has inherent value. Maybe if a group of us social media smarty pantses, tried to work together at a conference…

As I’m writing this out, and thinking at the same time, I wonder if we’re heading toward some kind of content conundrum. While social media has earned its place as “media”, I think many bloggers have lost that edge we once had. I know that I have. With proliferation I think we’ve smacked into the quantity-quality problem. And this is a problem that, if the media barons are clever enough, could re-energize traditional media into a place where they can again have more mindshare and market share.

Huh, live blogging as a potential savior of media, writing and journalism. Not a bad premise. Good thing I’ve started writing for a paper, huh?

Who are your social media friends, really?

Tris Hussey — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:17:45 +0000

How many “friends” on Facebook do you have? Twitter? Foursquare? LinkedIn? If you’re like me probably “lots” is a safe answer, but there’s a problem with the term “friends” or “connections” because we use these tools to define our personal, professional, and informational networks many of the people on these lists aren’t really friends at all. I’d venture to say that, for Twitter especially, the majority are less than even acquaintances. My friend (and I mean that in the sociological way) Chris Brogan probes into this sticky problem as he culls his “friends” list on Facebook:

Our friend behavior matches what software developers have designed. It’s not exactly written by sociologists. In some ways, the software forces us to behave in certain ways. In others, it opens up new ways to think and build relationships. It’s a mix of benefit and drawback (like all innovation, I suspect).

[From The Problems With Friends Lists]

I’m often tempted to go through Facebook and “unfriend” a lot of people. I think there are probably close to a hundred people on that list that I might not have talked with in over a year or even at all. Having lots of “friends” or connections on social media/networking sites is supposed to be a badge of power, honor, and influence, but at the moment I’m wondering if this practice is diluting our real friendships.

I have a private Twitter list (now thankfully synced and managed through TweetDeck) that I call “Friends” and another called “Colleagues”, these are my two most important lists, even more than my public News list because these are the people with whom I interact with both professionally and personally. I’ve found myself lately looking at my Friends list and asking…Is this person a “friend” or “colleague”. This isn’t a slight, it’s just a fact that early on my definition of friend and colleague (I used to call the column “Folks”) was pretty broad, so now I’m reining things in. I’m moving people around into different bins in an effort to better match the social media definition with a sociological one.

It’s that connection that you need to keep your friends closer and enemies on Google Alerts.

This is just a private compartmentalization though, I’m not “unfollowing” them on Twitter, I’m just shifting them around. Yes, there are a lot (the majority in fact) of people who aren’t in either of those two columns, which isn’t surprising is it when my current following list is over 5000. What about something far more (semi)public like Facebook? There, as Chris says, the idea of “unfriending” someone can have huge sociological overtones to it (I’m so unfriending you on Facebook now…), but frankly I don’t think it should in most cases. Maybe it isn’t a bad thing to go through an be able to say “do I know this person?”. Mark Evans’ post today on social media and the loss of privacy which I have to agree with and the realization of that made me look at Foursquare very differently recently. A number of people, including 6S Marketing’s Chris Breikss pointed out that Foursquare is so personal that maybe a little caution in accepting friend requests might be in order. Do you really want that person to know where you are? I know that I can’t really use Twitter or any social network as a soap box or unfiltered dumping ground of the stuff that rattles around in my skull. It’s public anyone can read it. So and while I might really want to say something, chances are that I won’t.

Now that the genie is out of the bottle, I can’t pull it back. I can’t make my tweets private and maintain credibility in social media. Not only that when I want to say something in public I wouldn’t be able to. It’s the crushing reality that now more than ever, knowing who your real friends are is extremely important. It’s that connection that you need to keep your friends closer and enemies on Google Alerts. There are people who you want to share a lot with, and others you don’t. And while this has always been the case, I think at present with our world-wide culture of over-sharing, we might need to reflect and pull back.

Ask yourself: Who is most important to you in your life? Who do you want to hear from and be heard by? Who is a friend, and who is a mouse clicked connection? Who do you really know? Any maybe most importantly…

Who really knows you?