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Thursday
24Sep2009

Real-time my ass

DateThursday, September 24, 2009 at 9:57PM

I changed jobs a few months back. In my new job I haven´t had the possibility to dedicate much time to social media. I have barely been surfing through the blogs I subscribe to in Google Reader, and much less hanging out over at Twitter and Friendfeed, or writing here on my own blog.

The funny thing is that I haven´t really missed it. Sure, I do miss a few blogs, but its a surprisingly few. Sure, I do miss stumbling over a great heated discussion over at Friendfeed, and sure, I do miss the platform of my blog to get something off of my chest.

But thinking of it, I am surprised of how little I have missed from my life as a social media junkie. Tonight I am having one of the rare nights where I´m home alone. Furthermore its one of the nights where I am not up for looking at work, not up for TV or DVD´s, not up for chatting away on Facebook.... And I can´t be bothered at all with even opening Twitter.

See that´s the problem. I have just been looking at my 1.000+ feeds over at Google Reader. I skimmed some headlines from a few of my favorite bloggers, and I wondered if it had been a slow news summer. Not that there weren´t any new blog posts - there were a lot actually. They just all seemed so un-interestingly boring.

So while I wondered if it was my new job which had changed my interests so much that I didn´t find any of my favorite bloggers the least interesting, I started getting annoyed with Google Reader due to the eternal slowness of my computer to open feeds in their original source view. Of course I know it has nothing to do with Google Reader, and even though the Google  Corp. can be blamed for many things, it can hardly be blamed for my lousy old desktop computer.

What I wanted was a RSS reader which can show full posts, even for limited info rss feeds such as the newspapers which only give appetizers so that readers are forced to visit their site. I wanted a filter which could scan through the 1.000+ folders and give me only what was interesting to me.

So while I was wondering if my chances of finding such a feed reader would be bigger at Twitter or in Google, and if it would even exist I realized that what I really want is value. 

I WANT VALUE!

I am fed up with getting 500 new Tweets per minute where max. 2 of them has any value what so ever. I am fed up that I never see any people on Twitter that I don´t wanna block immediately because their endless conversation with everyone is of no real value to anyone. I am fed up with entering Google Reader and seeing that even my favorite bloggers have sold out on their integrity and seem to be writing new blog posts not out of passion, but out of a belief that what matters is quantity. And I am fed up that every blogger, and their mama, seems to be publishing some kind of "This is the truth" self help/productivity book in 2009.     

Twitter and the real time web have been hot buzz words for a year or more now. People seem to be dying if they do not get their tweets and rss feeds in absolute real time.

Well, I don´t know if so many people are that busy to need info in real time. But that's beside the point anyway. What I hope for is a return to old school blogging. Of course I know this will never happen in main stream. Twitter and Facebook are here to stay.

But I hope for the return of some old school blogging, where quality and passion will again be central and celebrated values. I will much prefer a well thought through post giving a personal account or providing a new perspective. But maybe its not about either/or.

Maybe all I need is better filtering.  And a fast feed reader which can provide inline view or pull full blog post even from feeds with limited rss info posting.

I´m now on the lookout for new favorite bloggers. Bloggers who write with passion and an ideal that they should provide value, not noise.

Who are your favorite bloggers, and what are your favorite filtering methods/tools?  

AuthorPeter Efland | Comment1 Comment |
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Wednesday
22Jul2009

Why you better consider Posterous 

DateWednesday, July 22, 2009 at 6:39PM

Anyone following my Twitter stream will have noticed that about a month ago I was quite enthusiastic about the blog platform, Posterous.

Actually, I got so impressed with the service that I was seriously considering changing my blog from my Wordpress platform to the Posterous platform. (In the end I ended up changing to Squarespace instead, and am very happy about that, but that's another story).

A few days ago I met up with Vitus. He and a few friends, Steffen and Mille, recently opened a nice little restaurant - emporiUM Escandinavia- making delicious Danish/Scandinavian food, right here in the middle of São Paulo, Brazil (become a fan of emporiUM Escandinavia on Facebook).

emporiUM escandinavia


Except talking about their food, which is just truly amazing, (Ever tried the Scandinavian food? Go try it out - Order online here) we talked about different ways of using social media to market start-ups.

We talked about the fragmentation of Twitter and of the pros and cons of Facebook fan pages versus Facebook group pages.

Now, what Vitus was looking for, was an ultra-simple-to-use platform, where him and his crew could easily broadcast rich media information about their restaurant and their food.

...and this is where it all ties together, and where Posterous comes back into the story...

 

So what is Posterous?

Basically, Posterous is a blog-broadcasting tool or blog hub, which is controled from the comfort of your email inbox. You could go to Posterous.com to sign up, but just to prove how simple Posterous is, they decided to cut out any tedious sign-up. Instead, simply email: post@posterous.com

Soon after you will receive an email from posterous with a link to your new blog post, and all your blog details, which you can now edit as you wish. 
 

 

 

 

 

Can Posterous replace your "traditional" blog?

Some use Posterous as a traditional blog, but in my opinion, the real power of the service is not to be a blog as we know them, but to be a blog hub.

What I mean is, Posterous is not about pulling people back to your site as a normal blog might be - Posterous is about pushing your content out there where your readers are.

"Posterous is following a social media trend we've seen evolve over the last couple of years, basically asking: "Why pull people from around the web back into your blog, when you can hand them your content right where they are?"".

Social media seems to have come to a cross road where we on the one side find the old school bloggers of the likes of Seth Godin. Seth's blog is his social media centre, and his presence on Twitter and Friendfeed is merely to push out blog posts and pull readers back to the blog.

According to Seth, he does not want to use tools, if he cannot use them really well - nothing is worth doing if its done half-way. I would guess the reasoning is the same for why Seth does not enable comments on his blog, though from my perspective this seems to be supporting a monologue instead of a dialog. Then again, the beauty of social media is that everyone can use it exactly as they wish.

On the other side we have bloggers who tend to spend more and most of their time over on Twitter and/or Friendfeed, and who might even be wondering if their old blog is still relevant in today's social media world. Robert Scoble and his "Web 2010" has been a recent sign of this trend, and to a more extreme part so has Steve Rubel, by completely giving up his "traditional" blog and moving to Posterous.

 

Posterous Special Features

Posterous - The Blog Hub

The number one feature on the Posterous cool features list is the blog hub broadcasting tool. In effect, according to what email address you send your Posterous blog post to, you can decide to where Posterous forwards it. This might sound complicated, but it is really simple. An example will illustrate my point. Lets say you want to create a new blog post, and only want it on your blog (like in the old days). What you would do is, go to your email inbox, write your blog post, and send it to blog@yourdomain.posterous.com. If you want to send a Tweet, but not have it appear on your Facebook, you email it to twitter@yourdomain.posterous.com. Now, if you want to broadcast your new blog post to Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Friendfeed, Facebook etc. you simply email post@yourdomain.posterous.com  - Easy!

 

Email-to-blog feature

As mentioned, Posterous is easily controlled from within your email inbox.
There is a "write new post" function on your Posterous dahsboard, but there is no advantage of using it.
If you can insert rich media in your emails (as for example inline pictures, font and colors) then you have more styling options from your email inbox than you do from the Posterous dashboard.


Posterous bookmarklet

Posterous features a very useful bookmarklet. When you find things from around the web which you want to import into your blog, (such as videos or quotes) you simply highlight what you want to import, and press the bookmarklet. It's as easy as it can be!


Overall ease of use

Someone once said that a tool which is fun to use gets used more.
Posterous is one of these tools. It simply lets you do all the essential stuff and leaves out the rest. It could not be easier to create a new post, or to add tags to your posts.

And that is really all you need. Sure, it would be nice to have the option to set up several pages and categories, and to use blog widgets etc. But most bloggers don't really need all that. A lot of users like Posterous for its simplicity, and if you can live without the advanced features, then you will love Posterous.

 

Groups

The group feature on Posterous lets your blog have several authors (Posterous currently let you have 3 blog groups per account). Creating groups is also a way to enable group members/readers to receive updates from your blog by email.

By enabling "post by moderation" everyone can email updates to your blog, which in effect allow big groups and open forums on your blog.

An example of the open forum was the recent election in Iran, which created quite a bit of attention in the international press. As the BBC and CNN were not too fast to cover the story, Iranian bloggers turned to social media to spread their protests to the world.

Several Twitter support groups (#tag groups) were created to support the Iranian people, with hundreds of updates per minute - faster than even the Iranian intelligence force could close down the IP address.

Furthermore, Iranian blogger, Faramarz Hashemi, created an open support forum on Posterous, collecting all types of social media - blog posts, poems, open letters, videos and pictures, sent via email - from all over Iran which ended up on this open forum supporting the Iran Election (Warning: The Iran Election blog is in its essence not censured, and features some very strong footage and filming).


Google Analytics

Many bloggers like to have a look at the statistics of their blog. If to see the numbers of readers/vistors to their blog, or to see which are the most visited posts, to focus future sentiment doesn't matter.
One of the greater analytics tools is Google Analytics, which is supported by Posterous.

 

Custom Url's & Imported blogs

Posterous makes it easy to import your existing blog into Posterous, and gives you the option of using your custom domain URL (so you avoid having to use the ".posterous" URL on your blog).

 

What I would like to see from Posterous

From my Posterous wish list, I would like to see the possibility to add pages. Categories I can do without, but pages would be nice. Then again, this is just me, and most people will do just fine using tags alone, instead of categories and pages.

Themes or customization is another function I would like to see soon, but I've heard that themes will indeed be roled out in the near future, so I guess it is just to have a little bit of patience.

 

All in all, I think Posterous is an very interesting and innovative new blog platform, which continues to add new amazing tools to its arsenal of features, at a mind blowing speed.

Go check out Posterous, and subscribe to the official Posterous blog.
You can also follow the official Posterous on Twitter, as well as its founders, Garry Tan and Sachin Agarwal.


And you...

What's your take on Posterous? Where do you think the future of social media blogging is heading?

 

AuthorPeter Efland | Comment2 Comments |
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Sunday
19Jul2009

Climate & Energy Forum on Friendfeed

DateSunday, July 19, 2009 at 12:59PM

Social Media tools and Climate/Energy are two of my great interests.

I've been reading and writing about social media tools for a while now, and I'm an more or less active participant on many social media platforms.

As mentioned before, a recent job change introducing a focus on Climate and Energy, combined with the recent G8 meeting and the up-coming COP15 summit to be held in my home city of Copenhagen, Denmark, has really awakened my interest to the various aspects of the climate & energy discussion.

The discussions are many, the topics vary, and the same arguments are often made to prove many different points. We have countries, politicians, "media experts", "climate experts", journalists, climate sector spokes people, fossil fuel sector spokes people and the average Joe - all trying to make sense of the facts and figures and to create a sense of meaning to fit and frame their individual understanding of the world.

It is my belief that in all discussions we join, in all conversations we enter, we all have an agenda, no matter how subtle - an idea of where we come from and where we want the discussion to go.

 

Friendfeed Climate & Energy Room

I have earlier written about how to use tools like Twitter and Friendfeed to promote conversations (for example here and here ). It is no secret that even though I like Twitter as a platform, I feel it is much too limited and fragmented to have real conversations.

So, thinking about what I could do to better promote the conversation around Energy and Climate I decided to make a Climate & Energy room over on Friendfeed.

 

Here is how it works

I have imported via RSS feed, some Twitter profiles and blog posts I found relevant, both from mainstream media and individual bloggers.

I want to keep the room open, so if you have any ideas for blogs or feeds which should be included, please let me know, and I will add them.

The room can basically be used in 2 ways:

 

  1. Passive: You can use the room as a master feed, and even grab the RSS into your feed reader. What this means is that instead of subscribing to many different blog posts, you can subscribe to this master feed and use it as a hub for all things relevant to climate and energy. For example, I have imported the twitter searches for #COP15 and for #G8 - meaning whenever anyone over at Twitter tags their tweets with these tags, they automatically appear real time in the Friendfeed Climate & Energy room, next to all the other blog feeds. 
  2. Active: All the above. Plus, everyone can comment on any post. Comments appears in threaded form for all to see - in this way making conversations on Friendfeed so much more powerful than over on Twitter where it is difficult to follow discussions between people. Furthermore, conversations on Friendfeed have two interesting aspects. Participants have the choice to "like" or to "comment" on a post. When a post has been liked on commented on, it automatically re-appears in the top of the feed stream. This in effect means that the more a post gets liked or commented upon, the more it re-appears in the top, making sure other readers don't miss the most important posts. Crowd-sourcing in its finest form!

 

Basically this is how it works. I hope you will get some value from the room, and that you will stop by and join the conversation. If you care about the climate, you should make your voice heard.

Please let me know if you feel there is a feed which should be included in the room.

Go sign up for Friendfeed, if you haven't already. The Friendfeed Climate & Energy room can be found here.

Let me know what you think!

 

AuthorPeter Efland | CommentPost a Comment |
Monday
13Jul2009

Up and running on Squarespace

DateMonday, July 13, 2009 at 9:17PM

I have spent the last couple of days importing my blog posts from my Wordpress platform to my new Squarespace platform. 

I have tried to continue with my old Feedburner feed from my Wordpress platform, but I am not sure if it works.  Well, if you receive this post in a RSS reader then I guess things work as I hope they will. If not, then I probably have some minor things still to work out. 

One thing I have realized is that when dealing with Squarespace, things just seem to work. 

 

So why move to Squarespace?

I like Wordpress a lot, its one of my favorite blogging platforms. But I just seemed to never really be happy with the presentation of my blog. I always wanted to change the layout of the site and the presentation of my posts, so I ended up moving from theme to theme. But they all seemed too rigid too limited. 

 

Customization

Squarespace is highly customizable. You can pretty much change any part of your site in any way you want, without any html or css skills at all. This site for example is made completely without any use of extra css. 

However, if you want to and if you got the skills, you can add extra css and ajax to the script, making it even more customizable. 

Another cool thing about the Squarespace customization is that it is highly flexible. You can easily add or remove anything from new pages to new sidebar widgets. 

 

Speed

I have never seen a blog platform as fast as Squarespace - its just amazing. The pages load so fast, its like working with a hyper fast internet connection.  

 

Feel

There's just something special about using a tool you really think is cool or fun to use. I guess that's how Mac users feel (I have still to buy my first Mac -  One day, one day!). Well, Squarespace got that coolness to it, that just makes it really cool and fun to use.

 

Intuitivity

Squarespace has a small learning curve, but after a few hours any first timer user will feel Squarespace to be second nature.

 

Analytics  

I noticed somewhere that you can set up Google Analytics with your Squarespace account (as well as Feedburner - as I have tried to do here). I haven't yet set up Squarespace with Google analytics because Squarespace comes loaded with its own analytics tool box, which not only look super cool, but also seem to give you information about all the essential stats - and leave out the rest. 

 

Easy Import/Export

Like anything else on Squarespace, importing or exporting blog posts from Wordpress/Blogger platforms are dead easy and straight forward. I'm sure this goes for importing/exporting from other platforms as well btw. 

 

 

What I would hope to see from Squarespace

There are a few things I have noticed in the first days of using Squarespace that I would like to see in the future.

 

Sidebar Widgets 

It might just be me who have had a few learning problems, but if I'm right Squarespace is not very good at working with sidebar widgets in HTML format. I tried to incorporate a Lijit search bar as well as a disqus comments widget. None of them succeeded, but I am not sure if the problem lies with Squarespace or with Lijit and Disqus. 

 

Disqus Comments support

I understand that Disqus does not support Squarespace as of now. I hope this will change one day soon, as I really liked the Disqus comment tool. However, I don't like it enough to move back to Wordpress, so if Disqus does not support Squarespace, I'll hope that my readers will be using the great and platform independent Backtype.

 

Feedburner RSS support

Well, as of yet I am not sure if my Feedburner feed actually works here. I guess I will have to wait and see if this post appears in a RSS reader, before I can claim that Feedburner does not support Squarespace.  I will make an update saying if it does or not work.

 

In sum, I guess its quite obvious I'm thrilled by my move to Squarespace. If you are fed up with your old Wordpress/Blogger account, then why not spice your blog up and move into Squarespace. You know this is where the cool kids hang out. 

One important thing I just want to let you know before you run over to Squarespace and get dissapointed with me for not mentioning this: Squarespace is not completely free. There are various price packages on Squarespace according to what you're looking for.

Basically the cheapest package costs US$ 8,- per month. However, if you want a blog with your own domain (meaning without the .squarespace.com attached) then it will cost you a mothly US$ 14,- (if you use one of the promotion codes you can get a 10% discount. I suggest you support Leo Laporte and use his "Twit" affiliation code. All you gotta do is to go to squarespace.com/twit and then you'll get a 10% discount, and support Leo.

Oh, and one last thing. You can get a 14 days free trial over at Squarespace - no strings attached - so don't just take my words for it. Go on and try it out for yourself.   

Let me know in the comments what you think. I hope you will enjoy it as much as me!

 

AuthorPeter Efland | CommentPost a Comment |
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Sunday
14Jun2009

How Friendfeed is my Twitter Power House

DateSunday, June 14, 2009 at 6:14PM

What value do you really get from the people you follow on Twitter?

For me, I get pretty much zero value from my Twitter followings. And the same goes for my followers btw.

Some argue that the real value of Twitter comes not from the number of followers, but from following the right people.To some degree I will agree with this point of view, but I still think its not enough. There's missing a filter to make Twitter a valuable investment for the time spent there.

My main problem with Twitter is that it is too fragmented. There is simply too much irrelevant fluff being tweeted.Few people have something of interest to say to many people very often.

Others argue that the best way to use Twitter is to see it as a waterfall. According to this point of view, we don't have to read all tweets from all our followings all the time.We can simply log in once in a while and see if there is anything of interest going on. That too sounds quite un-productive to me.

 

 

Is there value on Twitter?

So why am I even on Twitter? Is there any value to get from using it?

I do believe Twitter can provide value if used correctly. I will argue, however, that both the numbers of your followers and your followings have no direct value. If you can't expect that most of your followers will see what you tweet, then a following of 50k becomes somewhat meaningless as a network effect.

Apart from direct up- and downstream networks (followings and followers), which I for the sake of clarity call meta-networks, most people are connected to various sub-networks. By sub-networks I mean the intangible networks of people we are following or which follow us, and with whom we have a particular interest in common, an interest which most likely aren't shared by many others in our meta-networks.

This fragmented attention network means for me that the real value of Twitter comes not from our networks, but from search and filter. Third party Twitter apps, such as Tweetdesk allows us to put people into groups. But still, it doesn't really cut it. The filter options aren't good enough. There's still too much noise and too little signal.

Enter Friendfeed.

 


Twitter on Friendfeed

Friendfeed is my Twitter client of choice. It is customizable, flexible, extremely powerful, and it simply lets me cut out as much noise as possible.Basically we have three tools on Friendfeed which are relevant for this purpose; Lists, Smart Filters (which now are called Saved Searches) and Imaginary Friends.

If you haven't done it already, go to one of the Twitter-to-Friendfeed apps and import your Twitter clients into Friendfeed (at least the ones who have a Friendfeed account).You can put all your Twitter friends in one list called "Twitter", or do with them whatever you want, this is just an example.

 

Imaginary Friends

For the people you follow on Twitter which does not have a Friendfeed account you can import them as imaginary friends. Imaginary friends are created under the "Friends" list - where in the bottom it says "Imaginary Friends". Thats it. Simple.

As Friendfeed is powered by RSS feeds, Imaginary Friends can of course also be from any where else on the web which supports RSS. This could for the purpose of Twitter, be the RSS feed output from Twitter Search. This becomes useful when we talk about lists.

 

Lists

If you created your Twitter list as mentioned above, then you have a few interesting options. First, you can add/remove friends, meaning you can decide which of your friends should be on this list, or another. This should be obvious.Second, you can add any of your imaginary friends into the list. This could for example be on any topic where you have made a Twitter Search.

You can choose whether you want to import a person as a Imaginary Friend from their Twitter personality or if you want to import them as a Custom RSS feed. But before you decide, please note one powerful difference. When you import a person from Twitter you get all their tweets, as you would expect. Now, if you follow a person on Twitter who belongs to a lot of sub-groups, and you don't necessarily want to listen to all the person's tweets, you can solve itby making a Twitter Search like this: "topic of interest" from:"person's twitter handle".

This is an example where I searched for tweets from me, inwhere I mention Ruby (Ruby on Rails is my newest obsession). Notice the search input.And the best thing is you don't get all my other tweets which might be endlessly uninteresting for you.

 

Smart Filters / Saved Searches

The Smart Filters, or Saved Searches as they are now called on Friendfeed have some additional interesting function. This one is just one of the obvious saved searches which will bring value for Twitterers on Friendfeed:

Include entries from:All Friendfeed users. Keyword/quality filters contains the words:service:twitter contains ...OR ...
Fill in the dots with as many words as you want to track on Twitter.

This will give you all Friendfeed users, filtered only for the Twitter service, and tracking your search topics of interest.Unfortunately it is not possible to import the RSS feed from a saved search into a list, which would otherwise have been quite powerful.

 

 

Power up your Twitter Friendfeed lists with Google

If you think Twitter isn't enough and you really wanna spice up your Friendfeed Lists, you can search for your topic of interest over at Google News and Google Blog Search. Enter your search topic and copy the resulting RSS feed into your friendfeed list as an Imaginary Friend.

Here is the result of a search for "Friendfeed" on Google News 
Here is the result of a search for "Friendfeed" on Google Blogsearch

Combine these tools and you can make some quite powerful Friendfeed lists.
Oh, and in case any one was in doubt. When you import Tweets into Friendfeed you can of course reply directly from Friendfeed into Twitter as any other Twitter app.

 

 

Manage your Twitter & Friendfeed from Gmail

Now that you have set up Friendfeed to manage your Twitter life, you can choose not to use Friendfeed. As metioned by Jesse Stay from Staynalive, Friendfeed Lists can deliver new items and comments directly to your email inbox, or via IM (if you use Gmail).

Basically this means that you can control both your Friendfeed and your Twitter accounts directly from your Gmail without leaving your inbox.
You can read here for more information on how to set up your Friendfeed account with IM Gtalk.

That's it, I hope you found it useful. You're welcome to leave a comment. And remember, now you have no excuse to waste time on Twitter no more.

AuthorPeter Efland | Comment3 Comments |
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