I’ve been using the social bookmarking site del.icio.us for a while now to keep track of sites that I want to reference or visit again in the future. I don’t like using a browser’s bookmarks tool because I use too many different browsers and computers on any given day so I need something that isn’t platform or browser dependent.
del.icio.us is a good tool to address this. I can use it for my own stuff but the links that I tag with a key word (e.g. web tools) can then be reviewed by others and vice versa. It’s the whole powerful tagging concept that has become so pervasive on the web in the last 18 months (tagging shows up on all sorts of content sites, including blogs). Very cool for search engines.
In any event, my work in social media optimization has led me to start posting my del.icio.us links as a daily blog posting. This accomplishes two main things. People who visit Julians.name can see what’s got my interest for any given day. It’s true that my links could bore you to death, or they might allow you to find a new favorite site to visit. The other benefit is for me. My site will get better search engine rankings by receiving an automated daily update. If you didn’t already know, search engines love frequently updated sites. While my search rankings really don’t matter on julians.name (because this site isn’t about that) it’s really more to practice good social media optimization practices for our business. Oh, and if you don’t want people to see all of your links you can mark them private (go to your settings once you have an account and look under browser for private saving). There, now you understand the funny posts that began showing up on Julians.name.
Want to know how to do this yourself on your blog? Well, it changes a little based on the blog platform you are using. You can find your own settings by doing a keyword search like ‘del.icio.us daily blog posting nameofyourblogtoolhere’. The instructions below work for WordPress.
By the way, I had a hard time getting mine to work until I found a page that told me that WordPress users don’t fill in the out blog id field (see below). Argh!
Set up a blog category for your del.icio.us daily post (I called mine Daily NetTrek)
Get the ID # of this category (in wordpress you can see this in your manage categories section)
Go to the settings section of del.icio.us and under blogging look for Blogging: Daily Posting
set up the daily posting by clicking on ‘add a new thingy’. This is an automated routine like a chron job that you can schedule to run once per day (the point being to collect your daily links and publish them to you blog for you automatically)
Fill in the details for the add a new thingy job. For a WordPress blog don’t put any value in the out blog id field and your out url is going to be: http://www.yourblogname.com/xmlrpc.php
[tags]del.icio.us daily blog posting, wordpress[/tags]
Seth Godin, acclaimed Internet marketer, author, and blogger had these reminders for those of us who live in the ‘cutting edge’ interactive world (wank wank).
My favorite?
Brazil drinks 11% of the worlds coffee. Talk about living on the edge! I really must go there – apparently there are some serious coffee tweakers in crime there…
Newsvine is a news website where users, or citizen reporters, contribute blog like posts or more traditional news stories to the Newsvine site and community. Notice that I said community – this is not a typical passive experience news site. Like Digg.com, users vote and comment on stories. The amount of votes and comments a story receives determines the overall visibility of your story. Highly popular stories make the front page – other stories never see the light of day. The user generated content is built around a complete, and non-programmed feed from the Associated Press news service. The sheer number of AP stories is really staggering – we’re used to content programmers at media outlets whittling this content down to bite-size morsels for us. I believe Newsvine also features ESPN content.
As you can imagine, the fact that you have full access to the AP wire is both a good and bad thing, but it’s clear that the purpose of the AP content is to give people fodder to have conversations around. That’s the real point of Newsvine. The action is in the conversation that takes place between the readers and author, and reader to reader. You participate in Newsvine by reading, commenting, voting on stories, and writing your own stories. You can also ‘seed’ Newsvine by publishing story excerpts from interesting web sites and stories that you read elsewhere on the net. For example, you’re reading your local online newspaper and there is an interesting story on rising crime rates. By putting a piece of that story on Newsvine others will then come to know about the story, and just like AP, or user generated stories, people ‘on the vine’ can vote your story ‘up the vine,’ and comment.
One thing that makes Newsvine so fun to use is the tools they give users to interact. There are many taken from different successful communication, web, or social media sites. You can make friends, chat, e-mail, create watch lists, and more. What’s really different though are the tools that let you track your interactions and contributions. For example, it’s really easy to return to Newsvine and check on how people reacted to a comment you made on a story. You can track authors, stories, comments, geographic regions, the list goes on. It all brings you closer to the news and the people who are writing it and reacting to it. I’m not even a big news consumer and there’s something about this service that is addictive.
The Internet marketer in Shannon and me is also fascinated by the triggers that cause people to react to content. I wrote a humorous comment on someone’s story last night and I had more votes (by far) on my comment than all the other comments. This was especially interesting to me because NO ONE in the conversation thread, the author or readers, acknowledged my comment. When you read the comments they were very much interacting and talking with each other – but not to me. Because of the Newsvine voting functionality, I learned that readers liked what I wrote, but I also found out that what I wrote did not induce a conversation. This is pretty powerful stuff for a blogger or marketer to learn, given that a major goal of both fields is to connect ideas and people and create a relationship that is relevant, engaging, and interactive.
Did I mention that it’s also just fun being part of the community? I’m enjoying the exercise of writing stories more in the voice of a reporter, vs. a blogger. The wider scope of the audience requires you to explain things in more general terms, which contrasts with a blog where you can assume readers have some interest and expertise in your subject matter to begin with. Except for general purpose blogs like Julians.name that’s aren’t about anything at all (apologies to Seinfeld).
Shannon and I are excited by the opportunity to expose a new audience to our blogs while also connecting with writers and people we might not otherwise find in the blogosphere. We have already seen some lift in traffic on our blogs from the stories we’ve posted on the vine. That was true even before we made it out of the Greenhouse which is impressive given the Greenhouse’s limited audience (more on the Greenhouse in a minute). It’s also yet another venue to increase our expertise in the emerging field of social media optimization (a useful term coined recently by Rohit Bhargava). BTW: Shan has published a couple of pieces on social media optimization, (SMO) on our online recruitment marketing blog EXCELER8ion. I originally used the term social network marketing (you’d never know I was a marketer) but fortunately Rohit’s term saved me from the most unfortunate use of the acronym SNM… Anyway, to wrap your head around SMO, think search engine optimization (SEO) type practices applied to social media like blogs, forums, wikis, Newsvine, RSS, MySpace, Flickr, etc. You can also check out the new wikipedia definition for a just-so description of SMO
Which is a perfect segue to explain our post title and the picture below. And you thought I’d never get to it. When you first start using Newsvine your stories don’t automatically appear everywhere on the vine. There’s a proving ground where you have to contribute stories, vote, comment, and otherwise interact with fellow users. People find new users by going to the Greenhouse (there’s a link on the left side navigation of the Newsvine web site). If they like your content, which includes anything you’ve written or ‘seeded’ from another news site, they vote for you. This voting, combined with all the other aspects of interaction (commenting, voting, etc.), eventually get you out of the Greenhouse and into the general community. Why didn’t they just call it the dog house? The message is clear, the more you interact and use ALL of the Newsvine features, the faster you climb the Greenhouse leaderboard and the quicker you get out. Not a bad way to teach people how to use the tools either. People on the top of the page are the closest to graduating to the general community. You’ll be shocked to learn that Shannon took this as our latest venue to compete. I started out way ahead of Shannon but within a day she was nipping at my heals in the Greenhouse, despite my head start. Very early this morning, while Shannon was sleeping, I staggered (careened even) down the halls of the vine, voting, seeding, commenting and even posting to see if I could push myself out of the Greenhouse. But, try as I might, I couldn’t get into the number one position – never mind out onto the vine. Not only that, while Shannon was sleeping, my voting for her stories inched her up a couple of spots (I’m taking full credit) so that we were right next to each other – with me on top, just as it should be. I took the screen shot shown above because I didn’t know how long it would stay that way. Good thing, because this morning when I logged in, you couldn’t find either of us in the Greenhouse. I guess this means that we’re bona fide members of the community now. It feels a little like graduating from Kindergarten and moving into grade school, sad, terrifying, and exciting all at the same time.
There’s even a revenue model thrown in for you budding authors out there. As Newsvine grows their advertiser base (something they’re still struggling with at present) you get compensated for the traffic you receive from the stories you publish on your column. I’m sure this won’t amount to much for most Newsvine contributors but you can expect some authors to make some real cash (the author receives 90% of the money from the ads that show up on their stories in their column – Newsvine gets 10%). Speaking of columns, here is Shannon’s.
Want to see Newsvine’s 60 second tour? Sure, now I tell you! Hey, you came here to read me didn’t you?
P.P.S. Hey Shannon, the race is now on to increase our Vinacity. See you at the finish line.
Update Two things. First, it would be quite ironic, but now that we’re no longer in the Greenhouse, we don’t appear to be anywhere. Even areas where there wouldn’t appear to be ANY competition for our stories. Perhaps all our commenting, publishing, and voting DID get us in the dog house? Only time, and an even greater scouring of Newsvine help, will tell. Next, I had a thought for a feature. Just as we can vote on stories and comments, wouldn’t it be great if we could vote on specific written passages of a story? What a tremendous help it would be to the author to understand how their piece was received, was relevant, or which parts packed the most punch? It would be similarly useful to all Newsvine readers to see what parts of a story were considered to be of the highest import, or quality. It could work much like the Seed feature. The user would highlight the text that they wanted to vote on, or promote, and then hit a ratings or voting button. You could also place a visual indicator in the stories to show hot spots of the story. I’d call this feature ‘passages.’ There you go Mike, your next cool Newsvine feature.
Update September 5, 2006
The day after I wrote my last update my stories started making it out on the vine. Seems like it was probably just a database refresh ‘thang.’ Not only that, but I’m a ‘Featured Writer’ on the home page today and I’m also featured on the sports section.
I want to give a shout out to Ronald Lewis, who I found via way of Newsvine, for introducing me to Gabcast. Here’s Ronald’s Gabcast channel if you want to have a listen. This is my fist podcast using their service and so far, so good. I had no trouble setting up a channel, posting this podcast using their phone podcasting tool or publishing it on my blog. I’m interested to try their conference calling feature to see how reliable it is. Given that it’s a paid service, and I won’t have to use my phone’s three-way calling feature to conduct interviews as I’ve done with Odeo, I suspect it will be more reliable to use. The conference call service gives you 30 free minutes to try it, after which it is paid, which seems like a fair shake Gabcast’s part.
I gave the new Flock browser a multi-day trial and sadly, I have to kick it to the curb. The developers are on the right track and once they have the speed and functionality improved I’m likely to be a big fan. For now, I’ve done my duty and sent them my feedback in three separate support cases where I encountered browser crashes, a consistent and significant browser lag problem (only on my Mac, not my PC) and the remainder of my wish list for improved functionality.
The functionality improvements that I would need to see in order to use Flock include:
support for posting to multiple blogs (this was wrong on my part – my apologies)
editing blog posts (not just publishing new posts) (there is a workaround for this according to an e-mail I received from support)
ability to save a draft post TO your blog vs. the current options to either publish to your blog or save locally
HTML preview function (similar to Writely or the control panel of WordPress)
Everything else I tried worked well and I really like the interface design, integrated toolset and the nice RSS reader. I’m sure that by the time the developers make it around to the 1.0 release it will be really solid. For now, my Mac has NO lag issues running Firefox, Camino or Safari so I can’t accept that this is anything other than a Flock issue.
Speed update 8/31/06. I tried using Flock again today and found the same dissapointing speed on the Mac. Still running smoothly on the PC.
Flock is an open source browser based on Mozilla’s Firefox code that features tools that make it easier to plug in, write, edit, and play with today’s social networking tools like blogs. It has a built in blog editor, drag-and-drop photo commenting, and integrated photo uploading for today’s most popular photo service – Flickr. I’m writing this post on Flock. The integrated RSS feeder is really pleasing to the eye as well. I actually shelled out money (something I’m loathe to do for software) for the Mac RSS reader I’ve been using (NetNewswire) which is highly acclaimed. So far, I like Flock’s more. So, here’s a little blog love from Julians name to Flock. Try this browser and let me know what you think. I’ll let you know if I stick with it and what I don’t like. Oh, and don’t forget to try out the web snippets feature.
Dad and I were talking yesterday about blogs and some of their communication characteristics and what makes them valuable. One of the things I love about my Dad that makes him truly unique is his ability to connect history with current events and topics in a highly entertaining and educational way. I reckon that he honed his oratory skills as a college lecturer over 20+ years and that’s why he does so well with it. On the other hand, his style wouldn’t get him anywhere if he didn’t have all that interesting content to go along with it. If you want to hear a ten minute snippet of this phone call just click on the Odeo link below and listen on your computer.
If you saw my previous post on Odeo you saw that I was going to use them for podcast recordings. I went through all the testing and found the setup to be very easy. The instructions on their site VERY clearly and emphatically state that you must hit the pound key on your phone when using their phone recording feature or the recording won’t save. I got my interview started, rang up Odeo and got the recording started (the tone telling me the recording was on came through loud and clear). I had a beauty of an interview, and VERY carefully hit pound at the end of the phone interview to save the recording and….nothing. Nada, Zilcho. I hit pound about 5 more times before acknowledging that I was done. I hate Odeo. Did you know that Odeo (actually Odiar = to hate; Odio = I hate) in Spanish means HATE. Shannon, told me this a few hours after I stopped screaming my hatred for Odeo around the house (this lasted for a few hours). If only I knew before I used their service.
Lesson learned: use a good old fashioned analog tape recorder backup if you’re going to use a digital solution. I should have done some more testing as well. Reporters say they always take physical notes as a back-up, even when they’re recording their interviews – this is clearly why.
P.S. I contacted ODEO tech support but they couldn’t rescue the recording. Big surprise.
I performed a test of Odeo’s podcasting tool today with Max. Specifically I wanted to see how their phone-podcasting tool worked so that I can use it for recording various phone interviews I perform. I’ve got one tomorrow on hurricane protection for my blog abigwind.com with a VP of Engineering over at a well known public safety organization. Should be fun for Julian the Cub Reporter.
Here’s a link to play the mp3 file of my podcast in your browser. You can also right click on the link and download the mp3 for your iPod or other mp3 player. One last option: You can also click on the ODEO link to go to their site and listen there. My ODEO phone podcast test
You can also subscribe to my RSS feed and play this podcast directly from iTunes or another audio enabled RSS tool by clicking on the RSS link on the footer of my blog.
Just a quick word about a nice web tool that Shannon found recently. In our business projects for EXCELER8, especially when supporting business blogging, we come across the need to have simple web-based applications to support various end-user blog editing. Picture editing, image optimization, ftp, etc. You’d be surprised to see how hard it is to find some applications in a web-based thin client. One of the things we needed for a recent project for business blogging at a large company was a web-based FTP tool. Why would you need a free web-based FTP tool when your client is a major international company? Because getting the access permissions to install an FTP client on your client’s computer requires a trip to the dark side (The IT department). In this case it would have meant letting IT in on the secret project. And that just couldn’t happen because it would mean a multi-month delay. Yes, I do hate self important, big company IT people who have the need to control everything despite lacking the business acumen to accompany their technical skill-set. But never mind that.
We’ve lurked there since it went live earlier this year but now we’re taking the time to get involved.
Why didn’t they just call it the dog house? The message is clear, the more you interact and use ALL of the Newsvine features, the faster you climb the Greenhouse leaderboard and the quicker you get out. Not a bad way to teach people how to use the tools either. People on the top of the page are the closest to graduating to the general community. You’ll be shocked to learn that Shannon took this as our latest venue to compete. I started out way ahead of Shannon but within a day she was nipping at my heals in the Greenhouse, despite my head start. Very early this morning, while Shannon was sleeping, I staggered (careened even) down the halls of the vine, voting, seeding, commenting and even posting to see if I could push myself out of the Greenhouse. But, try as I might, I couldn’t get into the number one position – never mind out onto the vine. Not only that, while Shannon was sleeping, my voting for her stories inched her up a couple of spots (I’m taking full credit) so that we were right next to each other – with me on top, just as it should be. 
I took the screen shot shown above because I didn’t know how long it would stay that way. Good thing, because this morning when I logged in, you couldn’t find either of us in the Greenhouse. I guess this means that we’re bona fide members of the community now. It feels a little like graduating from Kindergarten and moving into grade school, sad, terrifying, and exciting all at the same time.
One of the things we needed for a recent project for business blogging at a large company was a web-based FTP tool. Why would you need a free web-based FTP tool when your client is a major international company? Because getting the access permissions to install an FTP client on your client’s computer requires a trip to the dark side (The IT department). In this case it would have meant letting IT in on the secret project. And that just couldn’t happen because it would mean a multi-month delay. Yes, I do hate self important, big company IT people who have the need to control everything despite lacking the business acumen to accompany their technical skill-set. But never mind that.
