Learning: Storify

Today I was perusing my Twitter feed and I discovered a neat little social media tool, called Storify. This tool allows you to compile mentions, images, videos, and more on a particular topic from a variety of social media resources (such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Flickr, and Instagram) to tell a story.

It's an uber easy way to microblog with easy access to linkable news and info sources. It's a great way to tell a story or showcase some research you recently did on a hot topic that may be interesting for others.

I was looking through Google search for a tutorial, and found a great video by CalmYourBeans on YouTube. Check it out if you want to learn the basics of how Storify works.

 

And here is my first Storify project, a little report on the repairs the Washington Monument in D.C. is curently undergoing titled Washington Monument Repairs in 2013.

Managing a Case of Social Media Overload

Over the past couple of weeks I've made a rather severe change to my social media habits. Basically, I deleted my Flickr, Twitter, and Foursquare accounts. The reason: I have been suffering from a typical time-suck case of social media overload.

Of course, going cold turkey always has its risks...for example, I ended up regretting deleting the Flickr account, so I immediately emailed customer support. Thankfully, they were able to restore my account and over 8,000 photos in just a couple of days. Kudos Yahoo! After all, I don't have a backup and it was kind of a rash decision ^_^;

With Flickr back up, I ended up setting the photos on personal, rather than public, access. The only exception was a set of favorite photos that I've captured and consider "special," to use as part of my portfolio.

For those instances I *really* want to share a photo, I just put it on Facebook or Instagram. All my old friends and acquaintances are on Facebook and a large majority has ended up following me on Instagram and Pinterest as well.

I really don't miss Twitter at all. I'm not sure why. But it's great not having to go there every five minutes to post when there's something actually going on in my 3D, real world life. Twitter makes you think everyone cares. That everyone thinks you're witty. That everyone wants to read every little thing. At least, if you don't start out that way, you sure end up doing that soon enough.

Rather than miss out on last-minute news and events, which is what I primarily used Twitter for when I first signed up, I now just check the weather.gov page, local newspaper sites, and RSS feeds more often! It really isn't that hard.

If I miss particular brands, products, music bands, or celebrities I just sign up for their e-newsletters on their websites. Easy peasy.

On Facebook, I'm slowly deleting all brands, bands, products, and stores from my feed and instead opting to sign up for e-newsletters for those that I really want to keep up with. It's made my Facebook feed a lot less manic to keep up with. I'd rather look at cute photos of parties and babies that old friends and acquaintances post, than what a marketing employee posted in support of a company's messaging strategy that day.

With the extra time that I've regained, now that I no longer have my nose in a social media app, I've been able to complete two e-books, started another e-book, and also started a print book. Oh, and I now have more hope of ever finishing Stephen King's The Dome too ^_^;

I'm also taking more deep breaths, stretching my body and getting up to walk, and turning and looking around more often to see what's going on. It's amazing what I've been able to notice now that I don't have my nose stuck in Twitter and Foursquare while I'm out and about. Though I do have my nose stuck in Kindle instead ^_^

I'm wondering whether others in my age range (mid-late 20s to mid-late 30s) are also experiencing this emergent need to unplug, and whether they've taken drastic (cold turkey) measures or just simply tuned out of their accounts for some time.

Social Media Etiquette

I just ran into a great post online (Six Concepts Brands Should Understand About Social Media Etiquette, on CareerBuilder of all places!) about social media etiquette for brands.

If you manage a company account (or two) on various channels online, there's user behavior that you might encounter on occasion, which can leave you doubting how to best react on behalf of your company.

It's a little testy having to communicate on behalf of a company, and be their voice in that particular channel. The article lists a number of potential scenarios, and how to best react to them. The major thread of the helpful guidelines they discuss are:

• Keep your voice volume to a reasonable level.
• Keep your language clean.
• Stay courteous.
• Don’t automatically take it personally.
• Take responsibility for your own actions.
• Don’t ignore or delete people.

It's a great short list to help us step back on occasion and review how we've been approaching communicating our message and building connections with users.

Social Media Buttons

Great article today from Practical Ecommerce about installing social media buttons on your sites, blogs, etc.

iTunes 10

My friend and I were WAY overexcited about iTunes 10. So much so, we stayed online till 10 pm CT when they released it, so we could both download it and compare notes.

Did I mention my friend was in Minnesota and I am in Illinois? IM rules.

my library on iTunes 10 

So we each realized something as we began our respective downloads, mine was a lot faster than his, even though we both have DSL. That was peculiar. After that, nothing much differed. Installation and use was just as fine.

This version of iTunes changed most of the interface to a gray hue, and added Apple's new music social networking tool, Ping. I'm not really sure what to make of Ping yet. You can follow other people with similar music tastes (yeah, on Last.fm and Pandora you can as well) and follow musicians and groups (yeah, so can you on Facebook, duh). So I'm not really sure what the use of it is.

Apple may very well drop it a la Google Wave. Time will tell. I also don't know what to make with this new default view, where you have album art, album name, song, artist, etc. I kinda hate it. I switched to the regular list view which I used before. I really don't care much for the album cover view.

One thing that I can tell you right now, is that my laptop's gotten worse with this latest install. So much so that it hangs continuously, making surfing, chatting, or pretty much anything quite the chore. This must be a heavy iTunes install. Must be sucking the memory (.99GB) dry outta my ole VAIO.

This sucks because this is the laptop I use to sync my iPhone...and although I was able to share my iTunes music library between two computers using Dropbox, I am unable to get my iTunes on my Mac Book Pro to recognize what apps my iPhone should have. This makes me not a happy camper.

I checked online and pretty much no one supports RAM to fit this make of laptop anymore. Makes me feel antiquated and dusty. In a corner like.

Steve Jobs said during his Apple Music Keynote that the new iPhones OS update would come out in November. Here we go again...can't wait.

Squidoo

There are too many "social media" channels out there...many of which aren't really social at all, but more WYSIWYG tools to quick-publish info out there in a "pretty" template.

Squidoo is pretty much exactly it. I've heard PR/marketing oriented wording such as "lens," "expert," and "meaning." In reality, Squidoo allows anyone with access to the Internet to start up a static blog post page solely focused on a particular topic, to which you can add widgets and content (yours or from another source).

As I was getting acquainted with Squidoo, I developed a "lens" on multiculturalism, which I'm sure will perish, shriveled on the vine as it were.


To roughly summarize what a plaque our prior CEO created, and which an ex-coworker posted on the wall of our office mail room:  "We generally use small words to describe the biggest, most important things: death, love, hate, war, peace. Small people use big words to make themselves seem more important."

Facebook Like?

So Facebook this week gave up on their "Become Fan" button and replaced it with "Like." I'm not sure why but I guess they felt this was important.

So now they released their web like button, which allows you to share/connect with friends and to be recognized on partner sites with a personalized interface. After reading this FB landing page, I found out that the like button shows up automatically on partner sites as you surf.

Here's a screen print of what the message at the top of my FB page looked like. This "web like" button announcement is being called the Connect with Friends.

TheNextWeb.com says you shouldn't ignore the little graph -- or do so at your own peril. *insert suspense music here*
Thoughts? Does anyone care?

Music Roundup and Rant

My iPhone scrobbles differently each time I plug it into my PC laptop. I don't know why sometimes it scrobbles right away, and why sometimes it takes 1/2 hour before the window pops up -- startling me because I had completely forgotten about it.

If you want to know how to scrobble your iPhone played songs to Last.Fm, check out this how-to article from the Apple Bar "Last.fm: 12 Ways to Scrobble" using the official scrobbler program that sits in your taskbar. Or, here's Last.fm's Windows client download (remember to pick the option to scrobble from iPod/iPhone under the settings). I'm still waiting for the day when the iPhone or iTunes will do this automatically tho, which doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon. Drag. Bummer. Shucks. Get your act together guys!

I really am not a big fan of iTunes. I only started using it two years ago when I realized it was kind of the only easy way to put music onto my iPhone. I definitely don't delve into iTunes Store as much as I could either--I find it overwhelming due to the quantity, but easy to search. Gimme torrent finder any day! I only used the iTunes store successfully to rent the movie "9" with a gift card I got for Christmas. That was fun.

I listen to music via the following methods with most popular first:

1. the car radio (first most used) 
2. iPhone linked to car stereo system (second most used) - when the radio gets too redundant--as it often tends to do. 
3. YouTube - usually at work or when someone tells me to try a band or song out, tho lately I've been trying to remember to do this on...
4. Last.Fm - I started using this about three years ago at a friend's suggestion, tho I had been using Pandora successfuly and was happy with the close matches it provided for selected artists and songs. Something I wish Last.fm did better. 
5. iTunes - only occasionally on the weekends.

I was updating my iPhone playlists today and my scrobble window came up. I decided to check out my statistics page on Last.fm and realized that I completely agree with it, it's a great representation of what I listen to. It helps that it keeps track of what I play on my iPhone.

On the other hand...my iTunes...the top 25 most heard songs aren't exactly 100% representative. It may be that it doesn't keep track of the songs I play on my iPhone...or my not using iTunes often enough to represent well.

All my iTunes Songs: 2,530

Top 25 Most Listened on iTunes

Last.fm Top Artists: DM, Ennio Morricone, Garbage, Nickelback, Lily Allen

Top Tracks: Kaiser Chiefs Never Miss a Beat, Depeche Mode Wrong,  Does It Offend You Yeah? We Are Rockstars, Goose Bring It On, Coldplay Clocks

No surprise to me that the top songs on Last.Fm are my Carz playlist songs, since I usually...listen to my iPhone in the car. I love the songs that iTunes categorizes as my top 25 most heard, and completely agree, but my Last.fm list best represents my likes. I think it comes down to use, because I use Last.Fm more than iTunes due to the scrobbling on the iPhone and just in general I guess. I wish my iTunes would keep track of the songs I play on my iPhone -- wouldn't it make sense?

What are your favorite players or scrobblers?

Online Content Delivery

I have to admit it. I was caught up in the hype surrounding the Steve Jobs press conference keynote address announcing the new iPad.

It's hype at its best when they make you believe they're releasing a revolutionary piece of technology rather than a shiny new gadget that will make them roll in even more dough.

What did I like about it? I can take my Google Reader with me in an überlight Internet appliance that won't hurt my eyes or require too much zooming and scrolling.

If and when I decide to purchase one, I would more than likely use it to check my social media, my Google Reader, and to look up newspapers and magazines due to the great portrait/full page view option that other Internet appliances don't currently afford me (iPhone, landscape laptop screen, etc.)

So I got to thinking as soon as I finished watching the keynote a few days after the event...how does Joe Schmoe use the iPad -- not the fad nuts who go buy whatever's new just to show off their latest status symbol. What does Joe need to accomplish with this tool?

The word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet tools they're releasing are great and work hand in hand with the App Store model they want to create to enhance revenue streams. But the fact is, we don't know how people are going to use this until it gets out of the tech-geek realm and into real folks hands. I bet teenagers and twenty-somethings might like seeing all their Facebook and MySpace (don't forget Twitter) stuff on one page, but what else will everyday people use this for and how does this impact content and the way we need to present it to them?

And so as I keep struggling with the implications for content, UI, and design for the iPad and the other appliances and copy-cat/catch-up efforts that will surely follow...I ran into a great blog post by Chris Brogan, titled Build Ecosystems for your Content -- catchy eh? -- and everything was going fine until I reached the following statement:
"easy first step is to strongly highlight the opportunity to get your blog sent to people via email (more people use email than read blogs). That’s the easy opportunity."

It creeps me out, that statement there. Does it really matter that email use is more prevalent than blog hits? Or does this statistic emerge from actual data collected from blog email subscription requests? What about the 152 RSS feeds I scan daily on my Google Reader? Whatever, the statement serves as a bit of a wake up call for many content creators and managers out there.

Content creators really need to integrate and cross-reference all possible channels to create visibility and expand reach--and more importantly create an immediate and instantaneous value proposition and deliverable to the reader.

The importance of cross-feeding, cross-linking, or whatever you want to refer to it, should never be underestimated. This goes hand in hand with creating content and the user interface that work for each channel, to help your audience be your friend and keep coming back.

What do you think?

Tech Classes Alert: O'Reilly

I used to read O'Reilly manuals for Windows back in '99-'00 - just found out through someone's post on Twitter that they offer classes (!). There's a neat, free course titled: Learn to Build iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

It's FREE, you didn't misread. Check it out.

Twitter Trends and Retweet Updates

Twitter news about two new projects/releases today: Twitter's trending topics fix, and their roll-out of a Retweet tab.

Trending topics sometimes feature obscene or obnoxious terms because of people with lots of time and strange senses of humor. The RT tab project entails making RTing much easier than all that darn cut and pasting (sure, probably doesn't add up to more than nanoseconds in all truthfulness, but annoying none the less) we've had to endure to this day.

Posting to Facebook and Twitter

There's a great how-to page on Mashable about how to post to and from Twitter and Facebook.

Apparently there is a Twitter app on FB that you can use! None showed up when I searched months ago, it's either new, or my search results failed me.

You Know You're a Twitter Addict When...

Hilarious blog post on Tremendous News about us poor Twitterati, real-life-phobes. Had me in stitches.

Instant Messenger Aggregators

I got tired of Digsby. I need to reread their FAQ and other info to get re-energized about using it. I may have gotten lax and am missing out on all the great features it boasts and that originally made me want to use it. I sometimes find it annoying. I can't see people's avatars in the conversation window. Why is that?

And I'm getting a ton of IM spam, but this I believe to be fault of my Facebook profile's info tab--which may be crawlable apparently.

So I grabbed myself a sliver of apple pie and a mate chocolate, and went on trusty Lifehacker.com and looked up instant messenger. The majority of the results are Mac friendly IM programs, but I found a couple possible solutions. One is Miranda. I've used Trillian (and hated it) and Pidgen (didn't warm up to it). So here I am again trying. I appreciate Meebo's online availability no matter where you are, but it's still missing something as well.

I used Google to search and found a neat, considerably recent post on Mashable about the top IM aggregators. Wouldn't you know? Digsby is #1 for Windows.

Technically, I shouldn't even bother to have any IM software, since I have absolutely no one to talk to over IM. Everyone talks to me over FB's IM utility or my wall these days anymore. *sigh* It doesn't hurt to learn new stuff tho (silver lining) ;)

Songs in Code Meme

Apparently someone started a funny meme on Twitter, that's all the rage. It's the songs in code Meme.

Here's some examples:

1. NickHodge do like RT @andrewdotnich: assert Soon(you.isHome()); #songsincode less than 20 seconds ago from TweetDeck
2. robdixon video.bat: "del radio.*" #songsincode MS-DOS no less :) less than 20 seconds ago from TweetDeck
3. jymmysim while (it.work && it.make && it.do){ us.harder().better().faster().stronger(); } #songsincode half a minute ago from TweetDeck
4. webinista for($i = 99; $i >= 0; $i--){ echo 'bottles of beer on the wall: '.$i; } #songsincode half a minute ago from TweetDeck
5. estellevw (turnAround % 4 == 0) ? "bright eyes" : ((EveryNowAndThen % 2 == 0)? "fall apart" : getALittleBit(rand(4)) #songsincode

Fox Valley Twibe

Tweeples interested in mingling with fellow Fox Valley residents don't be scared and dive on in!
Sign up at http://www.twibes.com/group/FoxValley and remember to use #FoxValley when posting.

Social Media and Exhibitionism

I'm oftentimes puzzled at how much visibility into my personal life and likes/dislikes my social media involvement provides. For a professed introvert whose #1 favorite sport is people and behavior watching, that certainly seems like a contradiction.

I've heard before in the media "concern" that our continuous stream of sharing through Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, et al., is creating a very vane and overbearing attitude in people. But is it really? The latest item I've read on this issue is featured on psychcentral.com under an article titled "Is Exhibitionism the New Modesty?" -- which is counterintuitive at best from just seeing the word choice in the title...but looking closer through the article, what I learned from the author is that:
"Perhaps it’s not 'exhibitionism' so much as trying to be more 'real' and 'in the moment' with the people we care about — our friends and family."

I believe the answer lies in investigating (something hard to do) what the emotional objective is when someone shares personal information AND expects or receives a response. If the interest in posting information about onself is self-agrandization, or a temporary or artificial rise in self-esteem due to the attention, then yes, this is a case of vanity. If the interest in posting information is to reveal the same sort of information about oneself that is usually shared with friends and family through a lunch or coffee break conversation, then not so much, is it?

It's a little different posting what you ate for breakfast on Facebook to friends and family (who apparently haven't unfriended you yet for a lack of interesting things to say!) vs. driving around in a Maserati Quattroporte with a strikingly tall, blond girlfriend.

The use of the Internet and the speed at which information can travel, and the many uses social media is offering us, is not only changing our behavior as we use it, but more importantly, it requires a shift in how we think about it and its effects. I find the use of the word modesty and immodesty very old fashioned in a psychological or technology/social media context. When things are moving so quickly and our society is advancing in the means it uses to communicate, it merits that we modify our shared language and thought process as we approach and discuss the repercussions.

For an example, in looking at successful Twitter users and Twitter spammers, the difference is usually simple...the spammers tend to engage in two, self-isolating activities:

• continuous push of self-serving information/shameless self-promotion
  
• no effort to dialogue with others, sharing useful information w others/learning from others
  

Eventually, those individuals engaging in these spamming activities find themselves with no one following them, therefore the emotional return on investment they're banking on (to boost that old ego) does not provide them the artificial high they so need.

It's the mark of a smart and responsible individual to be self-aware and emotionally intelligent. Dignity and courtesy not only are good discipline, but produce positive, long-term results--particularly in online interactions.

A Facebook Spoof

Hamlet Facebook Version

Someone wrote out a brief version of Hamlet as if it had been a story told through Facebook's news feed. So find this little treasure here.

Measure Your Twittering

There's lots of tools out there to measure how well you're taking advantage of Twitter. There's also articles popping up and posts on Twitter about how to best leverage this channel.

My favorite tools right now are, if a little superficial, proving helpful. They are:

• Twitemperature
• Twitter Grader (great sense of humor)

How do you use metrics for your Twitter presence? What other tools are out there?