Something that Todd said in a comment on that post resonated:
I found myself thinking that broadcast was the wrong word for twitter, as it tends to start working more like IM over time, only not as isolated.
Looking back at my Twitter stream, most of my tweets (I’m still displeased by that word) are replies to other people, or links to something. I’m not sure why, but I’m disinclined to post tweets that answer the default Twitter question, “what are you doing?”
21st Century IRC
I used to hang out in a Skype channel that included 30 or 40 Vancouverites from the tech community. I’d let in run in the background, and remark on some tech news or bemoan the Canucks as the mood struck me. Twitter has replaced that as a kind of 21st century IRC.
I have a link blog in the sidebar of this site. It’s a kind of clearing house for stuff that interests me, but doesn’t merit a full post on my site. A couple hundred people subscribe to it, and I really don’t know how useful people find it (I’ve never asked).
Now every time I spot a link I’d like to pass on (such as this blog of things that look like a duck), I have to decide whether it goes in Twitter, in the link blog, or both. Both takes too long, and I have yet to develop criteria for what goes where.
I asked, on Twitter, about just streaming my link blog into my Twitter stream, but I got a couple of negative responses. Understandably, people (presumably they were link blog subscribers) didn’t want to get repeated content. When I first signed up for Twitter many moons ago, I did that with my blog’s RSS feed, and somebody told me it wasn’t kosher.
They’re probably right–I find little value in tweets that read “New Blog Post: http://www.verysmallurl.com/fdfdla”. If I want to read your blog, I probably already subscribe to it. Obviously the etiquette on all this stuff is still emerging.
The number of people I follow is up from 33 to 58. The increase is mostly due professional interest (I’m following some top tech bloggers). I tend to give people a trial run, and if I find what they’re writing about interesting, I stick with them.
No Debate Team at This High School
The major frustration that I’ve found on Twitter is that it inhibits debate. I’ve found that it’s nearly impossible to have a cogent argument that doesn’t devolve into sound bites on the platform. I love debate–it’s one of the reasons I spend leisure time online. Twitter seems to act a bit like high school in this regard–either people hurl insults or just talk nice (I know high schools have debate teams, but that’s where my analogy breaks down).
So, the experiment continues. Any suggestions on how I should handle the link blog vs. Twitter issue?
Via TechCrunch, TripKick is thin-slicing hotel reviewing on the web. Instead of just reviewing hotels (far too vague!), TripKick offers user-generated reviews of individual hotel rooms. It’s kind of the hotel room equivalent of SeatGuru:
Tripkick.com is designed to make your hotel experience an effortless one. We prepare you with the little known facts about each hotel room so you can make an educated decision when choosing your perfect room.
Each hotel page on our site offers a variety of helpful information. You can use us before you’ve chosen your hotel, or once you’ve already booked your reservation.
Here’s a sample page, for the the San Francisco Fairmont. The site has a nice aesthetic, though I have serious objections to the way they abbreviate headings. If you check out the ‘Compare Rooms’ tab, they have a table which includes column headings like “GREAT BATHRM” or “OVERSZ”. I may just be an old grammarian, but I miss those vowels.
Rick Segal is a venture capitalist (we almost never write that out) in Toronto. He recently received a business plan in Microsoft Word format (a no-no in the first place, I’d imagine). The genius authors of the plan failed to ‘Accept All Changes’ in Word, thus enabling Rick to view a bunch of their comments in the document. A few gems:
Scratched out “Exchange sucks resources like a vampire in heat”, replaced with “Exchange is resource intensive under certain scenarios”
“Segal used work for Microsoft so skip the name dropping, save it for the afternoon meeting, they are clueless about Redmond.”
“When you talk through this point on your slides, make Chanukah jokes, he is Jewish and will get them”
Make Chanukah jokes? That’s easier said than done. “Hey, uh, if we get our funding near the end of the year, maybe we could get it in eight parts?”
Here’s a simple rule to avoid this phenomenon in the future: PDF that mofo.
Yesterday I gave three talks. In the morning, I gave a relatively standard “Social Media 101″ keynote at DocTrain West (thanks for having me, Scott). Anne posted her notes from that talk.
As I’ve said before, I like to keep my accompanying slides bullet point-free. On each slide, you either get an image, a diagram or a few words per slide. Here are my slides from yesterday’s talk, which are pretty much inscrutable without, well, me.
Why do I take that approach?
It ensures that I’ve written a speech or at least an outline outside of the slides. I’ve said this before too, but just because you’ve made slides doesn’t mean you’ve written a speech.
Images become metaphors, and metaphors are excellent teaching tools. I’m currently reading the excellent Made to Stick, and the authors are constantly reinforcing this idea.
My slides look different from nearly everybody else’s. That makes me (and hopefully my ideas) more memorable. Lots of my fellow speaker had terrific ideas, but their slides were, for the most part, banal and full of bullet points. See for yourself. Remember, your slides are your costumes, lighting and set. So do them up nice.
I try to pick beautiful photos. They’re a pleasure to look at. Even if audience members couldn’t care less about my talk, at least there’s something visually interesting going on.
After my talk somebody thanked me for being a bullet point-free zone.
Casual, Friendly and Open
In the afternoon, I was running a workshop on social media tools, channels and technology. It was towards the end of the last day of the conference, and I figured everybody would be a bit bored of PowerPoint presentations.
Instead, I prepared an informal, conversational session around this tag cloud:
As I explain in the talk, I’m actually cheating here. The size of the terms have no application. It’s just a fun, topical way to make a list. The subtextual message is casual, friendly and open.
Sometimes I print these tag clouds out, as in the above photo. Props are usually a good thing, and it’s always fun to have something to wave around.
I put this list up on the screen, and invite people to ask about any of the terms, or to tell stories about their experiences. I prepare by devising little riffs and case study on each term.
It’s certainly not a particularly original or innovative approach, but I find people respond to it in a workshop or other less formal session. The tag cloud provides just enough structure to keep the conversation on track, and enables me to refocus or refresh the topic as necessary.
Plus, it’s more fun for me. I get to learn more from the audience, and the randomness of it keeps me on my toes. In a way, it’s a kind of rip-off of 30 Plays in 60 Minutes.
I really enjoyed “The Bourne Identity” when I first saw it in the theatre (here’s an early, rambling blog post on the film). I also really wanted Matt Damon’s sweater. He wears this kick-ass black, military-style sweater in the film. Of course, he looks way better than I would in it, but that’s also true of togas, house coats and djellabas.
At the time, I imagined a website which tracked what actors wore in movies, and sold real-world equivalents which you could buy. This was back in 2002, and I remember searching for a website that filled that role. I couldn’t find much. I did a few quick searches today, and still didn’t find anything super promising. SeenOn.com looks like the right fit, but it lists all of three movies thus far.
CoolSpotters has the potential to become such a resource, though it seems more targeted at off-screen It Girl bollocks. I read about it today on TechCrunch:
It’s an eye-candy celebrity-focused site that shows users the products celebrities are wearing in various photos. Users can then talk about and, of course, purchase those items.
Users can track celebrities, products, brands, shows (TV, Movies, etc.), places, events, and more. The idea is to show connections between people and stuff. These connections are called “spots†(as in, “I spotted thatâ€Â), and show details on the item. If something is incorrect, users can change or remove it, and add new people and things.
They kind of combine the crowd-sourcing of Wikipedia and Facebook tags (or Flickr notes, if you like) with the smarmy photos of gossip blogs. It’s a smart approach.
They toured with this husband-and-wife duo of an indie band called Mates of State. I liked what I heard, so I figured I’d purchase some MP3s and give them a more extended audition in my music collection. But which songs to buy?
First stop: Wikipedia, which indicates that they have five albums, dating from 2000 to a May, 2008 release.
Next stop, eMusic, where I’m a subscriber. eMusic only offers their first three albums. eMusic says their most popular songs are, in order, “Ha Ha”, “The Kissaway” and “Fluke”.
To Amazon. Amazon claims to stock four albums, but one is, in fact, just an EP. Plus, they say that the 2004 album is Mates of State’s “latest release”. Clearly this is not the case. Top songs on Amazon: “Goods”, “Along for the Ride” and “Jellyman Kelly”.
Next, the iTunes store. I don’t usually buy from them, but I figured I’d have a look. iTunes lists six albums (including the EP). Confusingly, one album is listed twice. Assuming the 2008 album isn’t out yet (though why isn’t it available for pre-order?), iTunes has the most exhaustive catalog. Most popular songs: “Goods”, “Along for the Ride” and “Fluke”.
On YouTube, the top videos are for the songs “Fraud in the 80s”, “Get Better” and “Fluke”.
Finally, there’s Last.fm. The most popular songs there are “Ha Ha”, “Think Long” and “Like U Crazy”.
Finally, I visited the band’s website. Why did I go here last? Because band websites are often lousy, and rarely help me to answer the question “which songs should I buy?”. I see that their forthcoming album isn’t out to May 20th, 2008. Their first single is out, though, and the video features a scooter rider in rabbit mask:
There’s clearly little consensus out there on the best three Mates of States songs. Is there a market out there for a website that just answers that question? It could be FirstThreeSongs.com. It could grab data from the above (and other) sources, and produce a reasonably definitive three song starter list for every band on the planet.
Last year, while in Malta, I had the not-very-original idea to launch a series of RSS aggregation sites in the style of PopURLs.com. There’d be one for food blogs (MenuBender.com), one for marketing blogs (Promophobe.com), one for movie blogs (BestBoyBlues.com) and so forth. The fun part, really, was choosing the domains.
You can actually see a bit of a prototype at BestBoyBlues.com. I hadn’t actually put the blogs in yet, and the design was pretty basic, but you get the idea. I was going to use a Digg-esque voting mechanism to let the communities choose the sites. I planned to run advertising, and give half the profits to charity.
I got a little ways along with the project, but then got busy with work, writing a book, swimming in the Med, and so forth. I was reluctant to do it in part because I’m inherently lazy, and knew if would be a lot of manual work and then a ton of promotional effort. It’s been nagging at me ever since.
Happily, I can let it go, because Guy Kawasaki would have eaten my breakfast, lunch and dinner with the recently launched Alltop. It’s a ‘digital magazine rack’ of blogs and news sites, organized into specific categories. I like the implementation a lot–it’s minimalist, fast and the website choices seem to be pretty rational. I think it’s a bit lame to have a ‘Women’ category in among ‘Dads’, ‘Celebrities’ and ‘Twitterati’, but I suppose it’s reflective of the web’s social structure.
This will also be a boon to marketers trying to find online influencers in a particular category. It’s still a tricky prospect, and a site like this will definitely help.
I just received this message from the always popular ‘noreply@mybloglog. com’:
Hi there MyBlogLogger!
From your IP address it looks like you’re browsing the web via the Web 2.0 Expo public wifi. Drop on by the Yahoo booth (#901) and learn more about what MyBlogLog is up to, we’d love to see you.
I was at Web 2.0 Expo yesterday. I guess they searched through all the MyBlogLog IP addresses, found the ones that matched the Web 2.0 Expo wifi IP address, and emailed us. The message is something like “we used this unintentional digital artifact that you left behind to identify where you were, and then contacted you about something happening in that place”. Weird.
I can’t decide if this is clever or creepy. Or possibly both. On the one hand, I admire their moxie. On the other hand, I never gave MyBlogLog explicit permission to correlate my IP address to a physical location. Do they need my permission, if the only people aware of that IP-location pair are me and them? What do you think?
