I’m trying out a new service that makes it easy to safely show your calendar to a colleague or client and let them choose a time to meet — and reserve the time on the spot. It’s YouCanBook.Me.

To use it, you need to also use Google Calendar to keep your schedule. Enter your Google account info in YouCanBook.Me, and it creates a shareable calendar of your future available time slots. Here’s mine:

You can adjust the length of time slots, start and end times for the day, which days are available, and more. This looks like a useful tool for any individual who has to make a lot of appointments — consultants, real estate agents, etc.

It would be less useful for those whose appointments overlap — a hair stylist, for example, who might be cutting one client’s hair while another client waits for a color process to complete. It also wouldn’t work for restaurant reservations, because you’d have to have a separate calendar for every table.

YouCanBook.Me has a counterpart service, WhenIsGood, which helps groups of people choose meeting times that work for all of them. I’ve used WhenIsGood for some time, and while it works terrifically well and is easy to set up and use, I’ve had mixed success in getting people to use it with me. That is, although everyone complains about how tedious it is to have to send emails back and forth to figure out a mutually-agreeable time, some people seem to be unwilling to try out a new solution — even one that’s dead simple to use.

But YouCanBook.Me seem even easier that WhenIsGood. I have high hopes. If you like, you can schedule a time to talk with me about it.

R U a winner?, originally uploaded by tamadhanaval.

Big Big Design is co-sponsoring a fundraising event next Thursday: the MedExpress Ducky Derby.

On August 5, we’re racing hundreds of rubber ducks by floating them down Sullivan Run in Butler. The backer of the winning duck will win $1000.

Tickets to rent a duck for the race are $5. Interested in backing a duck or 5? Contact us and we’ll help you get your tickets.

Proceeds will benefit the Moraine Trails Scoutreach Program, which helps find creative leadership for boys who might otherwise not be able to access scouting programs.

In addition to the title sponsor, MedExpress, this event has been put together with the support of several organizations:
United Way of Butler County
Butler County Young Professionals’ officers
Butler Downtown
Butler County Chamber of Commerce
Big Big Design

Two interesting discussions of personal privacy and online social networks.

First, this article about the permanence of online information and its implications for an individual’s reputation: “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” by Jeffrey Rosen, New York Times Magazine.

We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.

Second, a presentation about designing online networks: “The Real Life Social Network v2,” by Paul Adams. This is intended for designers of web properties, but I believe there’s value here for any organization that’s working to create an online community, including for customer interactions or referrals.

Our friends at Lunametrics are offering a one-day SEO workshop this week, and there’s still time to sign up.

Want your site to show up at the top of Google but don’t want to spend a fortune to get it done? Here’s something most SEO consultation companies won’t tell you: You can do it yourself.

The workshop will be on June 23 from 8am to 5:30pm, at Left Field Meeting Space in Pittsburgh (across the street from PNC Park).

Find out more about the SEO workshop and register today.

Our new officemate, Sydney, originally uploaded by cynthiacloskey.

Anthony has adopted a dog, Sydney. She’s pit bull mix, about two years old, and absolutely the sweetest thing. She’s a little shy around tall men and a lot anxious when Anthony isn’t nearby, but she’s starting to get used to her new surroundings and relax.

Related to my post yesterday about Facebook’s privacy settings: danah boyd posted in more detail about the implications of Facebooks privacy (“Facebook and ‘radical transparency’“). These two paragraphs convey the problem I often see in which people haven’t thought through the implications of the “network” part of social networks:

A while back, I was talking with a teenage girl about her privacy
settings and noticed that she had made lots of content available to
friends-of-friends. I asked her if she made her content available to
her mother. She responded with, “of course not!” I had noticed that
she had listed her aunt as a friend of hers and so I surfed with her to
her aunt’s page and pointed out that her mother was a friend of her
aunt, thus a friend-of-a-friend. She was horrified. It had never
dawned on her that her mother might be included in that grouping.

Over and over again, I find that people’s mental model of who can see
what doesn’t match up with reality. People think “everyone” includes
everyone who searches for them on Facebook. They never imagine that
“everyone” includes every third party sucking up data for goddess only
knows what purpose. They think that if they lock down everything in the
settings that they see, that they’re completely locked down. They
don’t get that their friends lists, interests, likes, primary photo,
affiliations, and other content is publicly accessible.

danah’s full post is well worth your time.

How to navigate Facebook Privacy Settings, from the New York Times

Yesterday the New York Times made a noble attempt to map Facebook’s new, super-complicated privacy settings, via a few well-designed graphics and an accompanying article (“The Price of Facebook Privacy? Start Clicking,” by Nick Bilton, 5/12/2010).

The new opt-out settings certainly are complex. Facebook users who hope to make their personal information private should be prepared to spend a lot of time pressing a lot of buttons. To opt out of full disclosure of most information, it is necessary to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, which then require choosing among a total of more than 170 options.

Users must decide if they want only friends, friends of friends, everyone on Facebook, or a customized list of people to see things like their birthdays or their most recent photos. To keep information as private as possible, users must select “only friends” or “only me” from the pull-down options for all the choices in the privacy settings, and must uncheck boxes that say information will be shared across the Web.

If you have a Facebook account, it’s worth taking a few minutes to understand what information is being shared with other members of the site, whether they’re your friends or the general public.

But the most important rule about privacy online still stands: If you have information that you want to keep private, do not put it online.

This applies to explicit information like data, photos, and video, and also to implicit data like your connections — who you know or have worked for, for example. It applies to your thoughts and opinions, including likes and dislikes.

Keep in mind that sending an email is a means of putting information online. Once it’s sent, you have no control over where it ends up.

British comedian/writer/actor/generally-brilliant-person David Mitchell gets passionate about passion in advertising

Last night I attended an interesting discussion at Pitt, “The Future of the Book.” I knew ahead of time that I’d want to share my notes, and I was curious how others might react to the ideas.

So I set up an event on Cover It Live. It’s a simple-to-use gadget for documenting anything as it happens, and it’s able to integrate content from a number of sources — multiple panelists or contributors, Twitter, Facebook, and logged in or anonymous commentors. I’d seen bloggers use it during events like this year’s State of the Union address, and I wanted to try it myself.

One traditional challenge with liveblogging when you don’t have a nice gadget like this is that you have to decide between adding new updates to the bottom of a post or to the top. Adding to the bottom is easier for the poster and allows a new person to quickly read through what’s happened in order, but once a reader is caught up he has to keep refreshing the page and scrolling down. Cover It Live automatically posts everything in chronological order and refreshes automatically — the refreshes were almost instantaneous last night, so the second I hit Send they were on the widget for everyone. Impressive.

The ability to blend together multiple contributors is also terrific — one person can do the play-by-play, so to speak, while the other provides color commentary like links, images, background info. Last night, as I trying to transcribe what was being said, my friend Norm took a photo of the panelists and host on the stage and posted it to Twitter along with the event tag I’d set, so it appeared in the stream along with my notes. Very fluid.

Cover It Live also has tools for promoting your event ahead of time and providing pre-reading materials.

There are some challenges to using a gadget like this. I’m a medium-speed typist, and I was nowhere up to the challenge of transcribing all that everyone said as they said it. I ended up paraphrasing more than I wanted to, especially since the exact word choices were important in this discussion. But more than that, my assigned task of covering the event meant I couldn’t step back and note my reactions to the ideas. A better way to handle this would be to have a live video or audio stream, plus a dedicated and skilled transcriber, so the event is documented and the Cover It Live host can focus on providing comments and moderating or responding to what others are contributing to the stream.

Once you employ a tool like this, though, you run the risk of distracting participants and attendees, so that they’re more focused on the online chatter about the event (the backchannel) and fail to absorb the actual event itself. The worst case would be to project the stream on the stage along with the presenters; that happened to danah boyd late last year, and she’s written about the unfortunate results and her reactions as a presenter on her blog.  But even when the backchannel isn’t projected — when it’s solely online and people access it through laptops and mobile devices — it has the potential to pull focus. If the presenters are skilled and strong enough, and their presentations or discussions are compelling, the backchannel stays in back; but if a presenter starts to lose control or fade, then people talking on the backchannel will fill the void. As an event organizer, one has to consider how much emphasis is appropriate for backchannel tools and whether they’re appropriate for a given situation.

With that said, when you want to provide live online coverage of an event, particularly distributed coverage, Cover It Live is an excellent solution.

An article in the Wall Street Journal last week (“Entrepreneurs Question Value of Social Media,” Sarah E. Needleman, WSJ 3/15/2010) said that a recent study showed that small firms were having mixed results in their use of social media.

In and among the survey results, the article gives several examples of companies seeing a positive ROI on their social media investment. There’s a common thread among them: Each successful firm has been consistent in using the tools over time, and patient in waiting for results.

Some entrepreneurs say they’ve found early indicators that their
social-media efforts are paying off.

“The people coming from social media have been buying,” says Stephen
Bailey, who oversees social-media and other marketing initiatives for
John Fluevog Boots & Shoes Ltd., a footwear and accessories retailer
in Vancouver with about 100 employees.

As evidence, Mr. Bailey points to a 40% increase in online sales in
2009—the first full year the company engaged consistently in
social-media marketing—compared with 2008 when it was just getting
started. He says he can draw a correlation between those figures and
social media by looking at traffic to the company’s Web site from
Twitter using Hootsuite, a free Twitter-management service from Invoke
Media Inc. Other free services that track Web traffic from social-media
sites include Google Analytics, CoTweet and Lodgy.

“The second we started using social media, it became one of the
biggest drivers of traffic outside of search engines,” says Mr. Bailey,
adding that his research shows these visitors spend as much time on
Fluevog.com as those who come from other online destinations. The
company doesn’t invest in paid advertising on social media, he adds.

John Fluevog Boots & Shoes is one of the companies I give as an example in our workshops on social media, particularly for their use of their Facebook page. Their social media interaction extends beyond Facebook though. On their website they solicit customer feedback, hold contests, and find myriad ways to entertain and engage customers. As Mr. Bailey of Fluevog says, social media complements these other efforts. It’s a useful example of a firm using online networking as part of a larger strategy.