Disruptive Conversations

Video: Scoble interviews Gowalla CEO about location

2010-03-11T11:15:25-05:00

If you are interested in location-based services like FourSquare and Gowalla, you may find this video interview by Robert Scoble of Gowalla CEO Josh Williams of interest. This being SXSW week, there will be lots of location-based service news coming out. I'm not using Gowalla, but I've written about my love/hate relationship with FourSquare and I find the whole "location" space quite interesting right now... anyway, I think you'll find this interview an interesting one:

Humor from The Onion: "Nation Shudders At Large Block of Uninterrupted Text"

2010-03-10T11:34:22-05:00

In these attention-starved days when we all find ourselves pulled into the "micro-blogging" of Twitter and Facebook, this particular satire piece at The Onion hit home for me (hat tip to Jon Udell for tweeting the link):

Nation Shudders At Large Block of Uninterrupted Text

My favorite parts:

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

and:

"It demands so much of my time and concentration," said Chicago resident Dale Huza, who was confronted by the confusing mound of words early Monday afternoon. "This large block of text, it expects me to figure everything out on my own, and I hate it."

... and really the rest of it. Great job to the folks at The Onion for poking fun at our brevity-focused world...

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A perfect example of how NOT to pitch a blogger through a blog comment...

2010-03-04T13:10:42-05:00

How many ways can you spell "FAIL"?

You'd think the turkey could have at least filled in my name after "Dear" :-)

Needless to say, I won't be reviewing or trying his service.

(It was someone who is very obviously tracking posts related to a conference I mentioned over on my Disruptive Telephony blog and who seemed to have copied/pasted the contents of an email message into the blog comment, complete with email-type signature. The content was pure marketing-speak and had no personalization whatsoever to my blog. Too bad, because his service does sound halfway interesting... I might have looked it if he had taken a minute or two to personalize his pitch and try to relate it to what I write about. Pitching bloggers isn't rocket science, people!)

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FIR Podcast hits the iPhone (and Android) as an app

2010-03-03T09:15:23-05:00

It was great to learn of the FIR iPhone app and naturally I had to install it right away on my iPhone. (It's also available for Android phones.) It's free, of course, and gives you access to all the podcasts produced under the For Immediate Release brand.

With the iPhone app you have a very easy way to immediately jump to FIR episodes and start listening. When you go into one of the episodes you have a "Play Podcast" link when loads the iPhone's QuickTime player and starts playing the episode for you. You can also follow the "Web Link" to view the page out on the FIR site (where you could see comments). There's also a nice "Categories" screen that lets you see the various different categories of FIR podcasts.

If you create an "account" you can then apparently mark episodes as "favorites", comment on episodes and rate episodes. My one point of feedback I'll be passing along to Shel and Neville is that it's not entirely clear to me where I am creating this account. Is it on the service of the vendor behind this app? (GenWi, the company behind iSites.us) Admittedly I'm a bit more paranoid than the average user (blame my security background), but I'd like to know a bit more about who is going to have my data before I sign up.

Speaking of iSites, they are the iPhone application vendor Shel and Neville used for this app. It's admittedly very cool... for just $25 you can get your own iPhone app created.

Now, the only caveat is that for that $25 one-time fee, you are stuck with the in-application advertising that you see in the image to the left and over which you have no control. iSites does have a $99/year pricing plan that gives you control over ads and presumably they are expecting that a certain number of folks will choose that plan to lose the ads. (I would.)

I obviously just started using the app and I'll be interested to see how using it compares to using the regular "iPod" functionality built into my iPhone. This app has the advantage that you can very quickly get to FIR podcasts and be able to see what is there. Whenever you launch the app it seems to check for the most recent episodes so you are always up to date.

On the other hand, in the "iPod" app on my iPhone I do have to manually initiate the "Get more episodes" process to download new episodes. However, one advantage to the iPod app is that I get to see how far I have listened to any given FIR episode - and it retains that info so with one glance I can see which episodes I still need to listen to and how much more I have of each episode. This is a great advantage when your time to listen to podcasts is rather fragmented.

Regardless, I think it's rather cool for Shel and Neville to now have an iPhone (and Android) app. If you are an FIR listener (or are interested in the intersection of social media, technology, PR and communications), do check out the app and try it out. I'll be curious to hear your thoughts. What do you think of it? Do you see yourself using it versus the iPod app to listen to FIR?

P.S. In full disclosure... if you are not aware, I am a weekly correspondent into FIR, usually on Thursdays, and so I am affiliated with the podcast.

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FourSquare's Problematic Proliferation of Places (aka where do I check-in?)

2010-02-22T13:28:58-05:00

With FourSquare's continued rise in popularity, I have noticed a definite challenge with the service in popular areas, namely... WHICH place name do you use to check-in?

For example, here I am at the Philadelphia International Airport and a quick search on "PHL" in FourSquare gives you 25+ results... with even more that don't use PHL in the text. As the image shows, there are many different levels of granularity, too, with locations being created for specific gates and even for specific seats on flights.

Where do you check-in?

Part of the issue is that in many ways you are incented to create new locations. You get extra points for adding a new location... and may have an easier job of becoming "mayor" of a new place if that is important to you.

There are also times when it is simply easier to add a new place than to wait for FourSquare's servers to "locate" you.

It all adds up to a lot of "places" and some resulting confusion over which place to use when checking in. As FourSquare matures the folks there may need to do some curation and pruning and merging of places. Or perhaps start showing results ranked by number of checkins... or votes... or something like that.

Right now, as it starts up, the "Wild West" approach (anything goes) makes a lot of sense... but as more folks use FourSquare, it may make sense to provide a bit more guidance in terms of which place name people should use when checking in.

What do you think? What should FourSquare do about this? Or should they do nothing and just let it be as it is?

My love/hate relationship with Foursquare...

2010-02-01T10:03:23-05:00

I admit to not quite being sure of what to make of Foursquare, one of the latest bright shiny objects to catch the attention of the early adopter set... (outside a certain tablet emanating from Cupertino...)

If you've missed all the excitement, Foursquare has been hailed as "the next Twitter" and has had gushing articles like Mashable's "5 Ways Foursquare Is Changing The World", Om Malik's "Why I Love Foursquare and many others on sites like Mashable, GigaOm and TechCrunch. Recently Foursquare has lined up deals with Canadian newspapers (also on CNN.com via GigaOm) and with the Bravo TV network and in mid-January was averaging a check-in-per-second.

All this about a service with a really simple idea: "check in" and share your location with your "friends" and the world.

"Why in the world would you want to do that?" is a natural reaction... kind of like the reaction many folks had when they first saw Twitter.

IT'S ABOUT THE GAME

Given that part of my job (as well as my passion) is to understand the bleeding edge of communication technologies, I'm of course on Foursquare.... but I didn't fully understand the pull of Foursquare until a recent trip to Orlando where my time there intersected with colleague Jason Goecke. Jason lives in the San Francisco Bay area where there are many Foursquare users and while there weren't as many Foursquare users in downtown Orlando last month, I watched as he engaged in a bit of competition with another colleague to see who would be "mayor" of a certain location. (Basically the person who has checked-in the most at a particular location.)

I'll admit that I caught the bug a bit. It was fun - and engaged my fiercely competitive side.

Jason and I then continued a bit more down at ITEXPO in Miami... jockeying for who would be "mayor" of our common hotel. (And when we left, I think he held the hotel and I had the hotel restaurant...) All in all a bit of harmless fun that got a bit of conversation and competition going between Jason and I.

But that's the genius of what the Foursquare folks have done... turning sharing location into a game!

CROWD-SOURCING A DATABASE

It's also a brilliant move on their part because Foursquare is getting the participants to build their location database for them! Tens of thousands of people (or more?) "adding locations" each day... creating the massive location database for Foursquare. At no cost to them. And they've created an incentive... you get more "points" for adding a new location... so if you get hooked into the game, you want to add new locations to get more points.

Brilliant move.

IT'S ABOUT SERENDIPITY AND DISCOVERY

I've not yet had this happen to me, but numerous people have said that in areas with a high number of Foursquare users, they have found out that friends of theirs are nearby and have then met up with those friends. Robert Scoble recently wrote:

Often I’ll check in on Foursquare, see someone I want to meet is nearby, and I’ll text them or tweet them and say “I’m in your neighborhood, want to get together?” I also have had TONS of meetings where other people do that to me. Foursquare has become my favorite rolodex.

I could very easily see this happening for me at some of the events I travel to.

In the same article, Scoble writes about "discovery" by reading "Tips" left by others:

when I checked into Foursquare in Paris, for instance, someone told me that one of the best French bakeries was within walking distance of where I was staying

There are, of course, numerous articles appearing on the web now about how businesses can make use of this for marketing... entering in tips related to their business, offering specials to Foursquare users, working with Foursquare to create custom "badges", etc.

Overall, though, I can see great potential in meeting up with other people I know... it's a good thing.

THE DARK SIDE

I still, though, can't get over concerns about privacy. Sure, I'm a "security guy", so I'm naturally a bit more paranoid than the average person. I've also been working with, using, and writing about online networks for over 25 years now at a fairly deep technical level, so I know how easily data can move around and be accessed. A few years back, I wrote about how "Twitter is Terrific for Thieves" where I suggested that those up to no good could gain a significant amount of info by reading what people are tweeting (which later appeared to be true).

Yet here we are... giving all that information away.

You don't have to try to figure it out... we are saying precisely where we are and when we are there. And more importantly, perhaps, we are saying where we are NOT (like at our home).

Granted, within Foursquare I am only sharing that location information with my "friends" (and hence why I am particular about who I share that info with). Still, it's out there... in a database owned by a small startup... running on some infrastructure I have no clue about...

Even as I use the service, that concern still lingers. The good news is that if you don't want a location you are at to be known, you simply don't check-in there.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION...

I think the reality is that as noted in a recent Mashable article, "Privacy: Managing the New Currency of the Social Web", we all do have to think about what data we share and how that data is stored and used.

As Robert Scoble noted, Foursquare is only one of the many services that are sprouting up around "location-based services"... and the big players are looking at the game, too - Twitter has recently added "local" aspects... Facebook is now rumored to be gearing up to enter.

The good side is that there's a strong potential to connect us in the physical world more closely with our friends... and to help us discover more in our local area or places we are traveling. I can see great potential in bringing people together... creating connections and conversations... all of that is good. How do we balance that with not giving away too much info? Or giving that info to the wrong people? Good questions...

What do you think? Do you use Foursquare or other similar services? Or do you avoid them? Are you concerned about the location data you are giving up? Or do you just view privacy as dead anyway?

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Want to do online video? Get Steve Garfield's new book "Get Seen"

2010-01-12T08:09:15-05:00

I can still remember when Steve Garfield completely blew my mind and opened it up to all sorts of possibilities.

It was April 2007 and a whole bunch of us from the from the Boston area had gathered at Boston University for Doug Kaye's latest Podcast Academy 2... C.C. Chapman was there... Chris Brogan (before he started his ascent to rock star status ;-)... I seem to recall Christopher Penn... it was all the "early days" of podcasting and so by and large most of us knew each other in some way. Many of us were in a local email mailing list for New England podcasters - and we were there to learn from Doug Kaye and the talented list of instructors he brought, but also to learn from each other.

The final session at the end of the last day was Steve Garfield up to talk about "Video Podcasting".

I can still remember Steve up on the BU stage... because in the first few minutes of his talk, he completely shredded the curtain I had mentally erected around this intimidating thing called "video podcasting".

You see... I had been blogging since 2000 and participating in audio podcasting since early 2005 (with "For Immediate Release", where I still contribute to this day), but video?

No way! Video was hard... it required expensive equipment... it was difficult to do... it took special knowlege... it was complicated...

And there was Steve, standing up on the stage pointing a silly little commodity point-and-shoot camera first at himself and then at all of us... copying the file over to his computer... and then uploading it to YouTube or his blog or some site... all in the first 5-10 minutes of his talk!

Hello?

Was the awesomely intimidating "video podcasting" really as easy as this???

Yes, it really was that easy back in early 2007 - and it's gotten even easier today with tools like the Flip camera (I'm holding out for the WiFi one!) and with embedded video cameras in most all new laptops. The online services have gotten easier to use... [UPDATE: Over on his blog, Steve has actually dredged up a copy of the video of that Podcast Academy 2 talk. I didn't remember part of how it began (with the online group interaction), but you can see where he started with showing us how to create a simple video podcast.]

Through all the changes, Steve has been there continuing to teach us about how to work with online video... and even more to show us how to do online video through his various projects.

And now Steve's made it even easier to learn about online video... he's got a new book out from Wiley called "Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business"[1] which I read on the flights down from New Hampshire to Orlando yesterday. It's a great book for anyone looking to get started with online video... Steve talks about the tools and what you need to get going... but he also talks about the incredible importance of content and having a solid story... it's all great stuff...

Even if you have now been working with video for a while, as I have with my Emerging Tech Talk video podcast, you're bound to learn more that will help improve the quality of your shows. I know that I certainly took a great number of notes that I'll now look to put into action.

Being about video, you can of course watch Steve talk about what he wrote about:

Thanks, Steve, for continuing to share so openly... and I do hope this book helps even more people start contributing videos online!

[1] Disclosure: Yes, this link to Steve's book and the link on the image both contain my Amazon Associates ID. If you buy the book as a result of following those links, I might make a few pennies. However, this review was not requested by Steve or Wiley. They did not send me a copy of the book. I bought it from Amazon myself.

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Re-connecting with Seesmic Video... (after losing the URL)

2010-01-11T22:09:23-05:00

Once upon a time... a few years back... there were a good number of us who were trying out short-format video "blogging" by way of Seesmic, from Loic Le Meur... but then Seesmic as a company took a detour, created an AIR-based Twitter client (acquiring Twhirl in there), then creating a web client for Twitter, then a native Windows client for Twitter... and in the process morphing "seesmic.com" into something very different.

Along the way of Seesmic's evolution into something different, I know that at least I (and I'm fairly sure some others) lost track of whatever happened to Seesmic video. So I was pleased to learn today that Seesmic video is still alive at either:

seesmic.tv
video.seesmic.com

Although it seems that "seesmic.tv" is the one to use based on SSL certificates. Now that I've paid attention, I do now see it at the bottom of the main seesmic.com page... I just hadn't seen it in the past.

So now that I found it again, I of course had to record a video:

Based on the info on my Seesmic profile page, it seems my last video was 314 days ago...

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Facebook for iPhone 3.1 - ALL your iPhone contacts belong to us! (HUH???)

2010-01-08T16:39:53-05:00

After installing the brand-new version 3.1 of the Facebook for iPhone application, I started to enable the "Sync" feature to sync my Facebook contacts with my iPhone contacts, when I was VERY put off by this warning screen shown on right:

If you enable this feature, contacts from your device will be sent to Facebook and your friends' names, photos and other info from Facebook will be added to your iPhone address book. Please make sure your friends are comfortable with any use you make of their information.

So my basic issue is this: WHAT IS FACEBOOK GOING TO DO WITH OUR iPHONE CONTACTS?

Obviously the app has to send my iPhone contacts up to Facebook so that Facebook can match up the contact info with the names of my friends in Facebook.

But then what?

Does Facebook then ignore my contacts? Are they stored in Facebook's giant databases? Will they all be spammed with info about joining Facebook? ("Dan York is on Facebook, why don't you join?")

I looked for some kind of privacy policy or other info in the Facebook app... on the iTunes page, on the page for the Facebook for iPhone app. I can't find one anywhere.

I do have people in my iPhone address book who have given me private/unpublished numbers. I'm not really comfortable having all that data sent up to Facebook if I have no idea what they are doing with it.

What's the deal, Facebook?

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Our screens are getting bigger... and smaller... (is your website ready for that?)

2010-01-07T22:08:08-05:00

Over on his blog today, Christopher S. Penn pointed out that, at least according to website analytics, the screens we use to view web pages are getting both bigger and smaller...

His point being that those of us working with online marketing need to think about our content both in terms of how it will appear on giant screens now available and also on the tiny screens of mobile devices.

Naturally, I had to check the analytics for this site and, sure enough, the same two sizes Christopher identified appear in my stats... only on my site for the past month they are at #6 and #7. (Chris' were at #6 and #9):

Now, granted, when you look at the percentages of visitors using those screens, it's only 4.7% using the 1920x1200 and only 4.6% using the 320x396, but still, it's interesting to see. (I also at some point should dig in and look at the trend over time.)

Christopher mentions the need to make sure your website looks good on mobile screens and recommends the MobilePress plugin for Wordpress users.

I've not used that plugin, but what I found worked very well for the Voxeo blog site was the WPTouch plugin from Brave New Code. As you can see in the image on the right, it displays all your blog posts in a very iPhone-friendly manner. It has other options, too, to interact with the blog site. (But you don't have to trust me, just head over to blogs.voxeo.com with either an iPhone, iPod Touch or Android phone and check it out.)

I admit that part of the deciding factor was that I really liked the look of the site with WPTouch. If you click on the "down arrow" in the upper right next to the blog name, you also have easy access to the tags, categories and other navigation controls of the blog.

The key point, though, is that you need to make sure that your website content degrades gracefully as it goes from giant screens to small screens. For WordPress-powered blogs, either of these plugins - or the others out there - will help reformat your content appropriately.

What are you doing on your site to address the mobile audience?

P.S. If you use Google Analytics and want to see where these screen resolutions are for your site, go into GA and then into the report for your site. Click on "Visitors", then the arrow next to "Browser Capabilities" and then finally "Screen Resolutions". Where are 1920x1200 and 320x396 on your site's list in terms of order? Feel free to leave your results (like "#6, #7") here in the comments...

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How NOT to send out an email marketing message... (FAIL!)

2010-01-06T11:13:14-05:00

This just arrived in my email inbox... can you say... "FAIL?"

It's 2010, people, never assume that people have their email programs set to display all images...

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Outstanding list of the "Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2009" from Tamar Weinberg

2010-01-06T08:16:29-05:00

Over on her "techipedia" blog, Tamar Weinberg has pulled together an outstanding list of "The Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2009". It's a LONG list... but Tamar has done an excellent job curating a list of what's been worthwhile to read this year in the social media / marketing space. There's a few I might add... but I can't quibble with any she's listed there.

If you're looking for good info on marketing, PR, social media, search/SEO, and many other topics... you definitely need to read through the list and start following links.

Thanks, Tamar, for compiling this list... it's a great resource for all of us.

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Entering the DSLR world... with a Nikon D90

2010-01-05T09:29:50-05:00

A few days before Christmas I joined the ranks of DSLR owners with the arrival of a Nikon D90, the kit 18-105mm lens and an additional 50mm/1.8 prime lens. (Shown on right, with the picture taken by my iPhone.) Amazon.com had a great price and I decided that it was the time to make the leap.

I had been debating for probably a good 8-9 months as the prices kept getting better and better. My big dilemma was, of course, the almost religious divide between:

Canon vs. Nikon

And, of course, the issue is that you are not just buying a single camera... you are buying into a system. Lenses, batteries... all of that is unique to a brand. The lenses are the biggest issue, because you naturally accumulate more as you do more with photography. I also realized that as a family, we'd probably soon be a multiple-DSLR family and so the decision was for more than just me.

I didn't have a particular historical bias between Canon and Nikon. For most of probably 20 years I shot very large amounts of slide film with my trusty Olympus OM-10, but I put that down probably a decade ago when I started to play with digital point-and-shoot cameras. I looked at the Olympus digital cameras but wasn't impressed... and still have a lingering dislike of Olympus for their proprietary xD cards that were a pain with an Olympus point-and-shoot we owned.

So in my typical Dan-dives-deep style, I consumed huge amounts of online reviews, including all the incredibly detailed ones at DPReview.com... I read Duncan Davidson's "Advice for the $2K camera budget"... I spoke with large numbers of friends... I asked on Twitter... I asked on Facebook... I spoke with colleagues at work... I tried out cameras from friends and colleagues...

I couldn't decide.

You see... all of the folks around me came down pretty evenly on both sides of the divide. Good friends who take incredible pictures and whose opinions I trust used Canon... and other friends shot pictures of the same caliber with Nikon. So in the end I was debating about the Canon Rebel T1i, the Nikon D5000, the Canon EOS 50D and the Nikon D90. The reality that became clear was:

Any of these cameras will take outstanding pictures.

For the typical hobby/home photographer, it's hard to lose with whatever choice you make... you just have to make the choice. As a colleague in Germany said to me in a Skype chat:

But the most important thing is: Don't look forever. Buy now, whatever the choice is today. And go shooting :)

So in the end, I chose a Nikon D90. Why? Two primary reasons:

When I tried it out, the D90 just "felt good in my hands". A purely subjective reason. The controls all worked well for me. I just liked the feel versus the Canon models I tried.
A number of colleagues at work all have D90s and so I have a local pool of D90 users to talk to and learn from.

That was my choice of what worked for me. And I've been VERY pleased with the results... as has my wife... so much so that we have a Nikon D5000 arriving soon as well. :-)

Now that I've made the leap to a DSLR, I find the quality of the shots so far ahead of my point-and-shoot camera that I don't know that I'll be going back much at all! The DSLRs are now also so incredibly easy to use. It's also great just to have the feel of a SLR-size camera back in my hands and to be able to tweak the settings of a shot and experiment and play with photograpy.

I'm having fun... taking a ton of shots... some smaller number of which I'll start adding to my Flickr account once I finish a writing project this week that is consuming all my outside-work time.

Have you made the leap yet? Are you in DSLR land? What was your choice?

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"The Daily Shoot" gives you daily practice in becoming a better photographer...

2010-01-04T09:32:21-05:00

Did you get a new DSLR camera over the holidays? (I did!) Or do you have one and want to get inspired to do more with it? Or do you not have a DSLR but just enjoy photography? Do you want to push yourself to try out more ways to make images?

If so, grab your DSLR, point-and-shoot camera, iPhone, mobile phone or whatever other camera you have and head over to "The Daily Shoot" at:

http://www.dailyshoot.com

You can naturally just browse through the pictures that other photographers have taken, but it's also very easy to get involved yourself:

You start by following @dailyshoot on Twitter.
Each day at 9am US Eastern a new "assignment" comes out.
You take a picture and upload it to Flickr, Twitpic, yfrog, The Best Camera or a couple of other photo sharing sites.
Then... you tweet out the link in a reply to @dailyshoot with the assignment's hashtag, like I did here:
Your picture will then be added to the pages of the Daily Shoot website.

That's it. See the assignment, take a picture, upload it, tweet it.

There's no time pressure... you don't have to have it in by any certain time. You can do it today, tomorrow... or whenever. You can go back and do past assignments and post them. You can just do scattered assignments whenever your schedule permits or when you have the interest. It's all about self-motivation and giving yourself a reason to play with your camera and push yourself to do more with photography.

It's also about learning from other photographers. You can go to the Assignments page and browse through the photos that are contributed for each assignment. The site nicely opens each photo in a new tab so that you can easily keep going back to the assignment page to see the other photos. (In Chrome I'll command+click each photo (I'm on a Mac) to open a bunch up in different tabs to look at them.) Here was the assignment about "yellow"... it's fun to see the different perspectives on the assignment.

You can also view the pictures from each individual photographer, so if you find someone's photo you really like you can then see the other photos by that photographer (hint: click on the name of the photographer underneath a thumbnail on the Daily Shoot site). Here's my page of photos. Here's Duncan's much better page.

It's fun to do... and a way to learn more about and practice the art of making images.

The Daily Shoot is the brainchild of photographer Duncan Davidson (pictured on the right) and programmer/consultant Mike Clark. I've been a fan of Duncan's photography back from when I first saw the great photos he shot at eComm 2009. I've enjoyed his writing on his blog about photography. Here are a couple of his posts I liked:

ADVICE FOR THE $2K CAMERA BUDGET
FLASHONOMICS: BUYING FLASH MEMORY
IT TAKES A TEAM TO PHOTOGRAPH A TED (fascinating glimpse into conference photography)

I've also met him at a couple of events now and he's just a really decent and great guy. He recently wrote about how the Daily Shoot site has evolved and I look forward to seeing where it goes.

Meanwhile, today's assignment is out... I'll have to see if sometime today I can find something interesting to shoot that is circular...

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My 3 Words for 2010...

2010-01-02T03:09:48-05:00

As we enter 2010, I've long been a fan of Chris Brogan's approach of sharing his "three words" for the coming year (and have enjoyed his postings on the topic over the last few years)... and this year thought that, in keeping with one of my own goals, I would share my three words for 2010:

WRITE

May 2010 marks my tenth year of blogging across the various sites I have, yet 2009 was a challenging year for my writing.

Sure, I wrote many posts here, on Disruptive Telephony, on Voxeo's weblogs and other places. But nowhere near the number of posts I wanted to write - and not with the regularity I desired. My queue of post ideas is up in the hundreds at this point... and as usual I wake up each morning with my head exploding with stories to tell.

Now, 2009 did have some unusual challenges for me personally. For starters, at the beginning of March, I took on a new role at Voxeo heading up all of our external communications. No longer was I just our "lead blogger", but now I also had responsibility for all marketing, PR, analyst relations, collateral, trade shows / events and everything else in "communications". Plus I now had a team of 4.5 people scattered across two continents. There was admittedly a good bit of a learning curve on all the broader pieces of how we were telling our story, how to bring that all together into a cohesive plan, and how to work with a new team. The second factor was that in late April, our second daughter entered the world bringing with her all that glorious joy... as well as all the intense sleep deprivation... these two factors together meant that making time for writing (and being able to do so coherently!) was challenging at best.

But as 2010 dawns, the story is different. Sure, it's shaping up to be an absolutely crazy-busy year at Voxeo with all the great work we have underway, but I've got an outstanding (and growing) team and we're working together real well now... and the daughter? Well, at 8 months she's still not sleeping through the night all the time, but I'm either getting more sleep or just getting used to sleep deprivation.

So my big personal goal for 2010 is to return to telling more stories... writing about the changes happening all around us... chronicling the revolution we are in the midst of ... in the ways and means through which we communicate... that is the story of our time... and I want to get back to doing my part in telling that story.

INTERACT

As much as I want to write more myself, I also recognize that there are a great many other people out there weaving together the threads of this larger story. In 2010, I want to interact more with others... pointing to their stories... commenting on their posts... sharing their work with others. Sure, I've tweeted out many links, because that's easy, but this year I want to be a bit better about engaging in deeper conversations, either through actual comments or responding through blog posts, podcasts, video, whatever...

HEALTH

I'm 42 years old. I have 7-year-old and 8-month-old daughters, an awesome wife and great family and friends in my life. I also have a job that I love and a passion and drive to succeed and do ever more. I work long hours and travel a fairly significant amount... and I love what I do. The downside is that in recent years I haven't been paying enough attention to keeping the body in the best shape... I want to be around for a good long while, and this year needs to be one in which I make some changes. Not just in dropping some weight, but in integrating physical activity on a regular basis. As a home office worker, it's easy not to... but I need to... and maybe by publicly stating it here I'll actually get my tail in gear this year to make it happen. ;-)

So that's my list.... Write. Interact. Health.

2009 was a great year... 2010 looks even better... what are you going to do with this precious year? What are your three words?

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Summarizing the Attention Wave concept of packaging news releases

2009-12-11T15:31:22-05:00

Back in September, I started talking about the idea of creating an "Attention Wave" - of building a package of content around your news release. The whole idea is that:

The opportunity has never been greater to tell your story in your own words.

And that in particular in our attention-starved time, one way to potentially attract more attention to your news is to create a "wave" of stories associated with your news. Instead of simply a single story that appears as a tweet and is then missed... there may be six different stories from you from different points-of-view, plus an audio podcast, plus a video on YouTube... plus stories from other people about your news. It's a series of tweets and retweets that do get attention from people on Twitter (for instance).

Here are the posts I put up on the series:

Over the course of 2010, I have a number of other posts I'd like to write in this series. I'm also looking for examples of people and companies using an approach like this that can be highlighted.

Thanks for all the great comments and feedback I've received about this concept - and I'm looking forward to writing more on it in the months ahead.

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The Incredible Danger of Facebook's New Privacy Policy - And How to Protect Yourself

2009-12-10T10:41:49-05:00

Let's be very clear. No matter what the blog post or letter from Mark Zuckerberg may say (or update blog posts), Facebook's new privacy settings have far less to do with "making privacy simpler" than they do with one simple fact:

Facebook has "Twitter-envy".

Twitter is essentially the center of the public "real-time web" and is getting all the attention, hype and buzz. Facebook is not getting that attention and wants to be your single portal to the Internet.

Facebook wants you to share your information PUBLICLY.

The new "Privacy Policy" is not so much about protecting your privacy as it is about getting you to make more information public.

Let's be clear. THAT is the goal. If Facebook were serious about making it easier to protect your privacy, the recommendations would be different. The "making privacy strong" theme is spin. And judging by articles I'm seeing in the mainstream media, it's working. Now, to be fair, there are some improvements, like the ability to change the privacy settings of each post you make, but that improvement is overshadowed by the larger danger.

THE DANGER

The fundamental issue is that when you are brought into the new "privacy transition tool", the "recommended settings" are that you share all your status updates, links, photos, videos and notes publicly. Not just with other Facebook users, but with the entire Internet. By accepting the recommended settings, you are agreeing to make all the info you put into Facebook accessible through search via Google, etc.:

So all those silly status updates you wrote? Found in Google. All those "private" photos of your family that you previously just shared with friends? Found in Google. All those longer notes that you were sharing with your friends? Found in Google. Whether or not you are single or married? Found in Google.

It is a fundamental shift in information sharing from being inside a private walled space to being in an open public space.

Everything you publish - available to everyone on the Internet.

The danger I see is that many, if not most, people will simply accept the recommended settings. And suddenly information they thought was kept more private will be shared with the world.

HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF

My recommendations are very simple:

1. Do NOT accept the recommended settings. Choose "Old Settings" in the Transition Tool.

2. Go into the Privacy settings and examine all settings. Click the "Privacy" link at the very bottom of a Facebook page or going into "Settings" in the upper right corner and then click on "Privacy".

3. Change who can see your profile information. Click on "Profile Information" to decide who you want to see information about you.

4. Change you can see your contact information. Click on "Contact Information" to decide who can see your contact info:

5. CHANGE WHAT YOUR FRIENDS SHARE ABOUT YOU! This is a critical one. Whenever your friends go off and play one of those games like Mafia Wars or Farmville, or take one of those zillion quizzes, they are sharing information about you, including with "game developers" who have questionable backgrounds. Everytime any friend of yours adds any Facebook "application", they are sharing info about you.

Click on "Applications and Websites" to see where you can turn it all off:

Personally, I've unchecked all of these items. If one of my "friends" on Facebook decides to start interacting with a new Facebook application, that is their choice. But I don't necessarily want that external company or organization to get all this information about me.

I admit that I find it rather annoying that Facebook provides no way in its new "Privacy Transition Tool" to change these settings. You have to go into these settings to change it.

6. Change what information is accessible via search. Click on "Search" to change whether you want your information to be found via a Google Search:

If you go through each of these panels and make sure the changes reflect how you want your information shared, you'll wind up in a much better space with regard to privacy.

THE EVEN GREATER DANGER

There is an even greater danger to privacy lurking in the fine print:

Facebook has reclassified what is "publicly available information". Your name... profile photo... and friend list are now "visible to everyone". And guess what?

There's nothing you can do about that (except, perhaps to not use any applications).

It's just the price of using a walled garden service like Facebook where a single company is in charge.

THE DISAPPOINTMENT

I understand Facebook's business need to push people to share more information. They feel they need to be the center of the "real-time web"... and they feel that Twitter is in a better place to be that. But I find it annoying and frustrating that so many users are now going to find their "private" information publicly accessible out on the public Internet simply because they accepted the "recommended" settings.

Bad move, Facebook.

5 Ways To Conquer Writer's Block

2009-11-24T09:31:32-05:00

When people find out that I'm a writer, one of the questions that I often get is "so what do you do when you get stuck writing?" or "how do get over writer's block? When I answer "crank loud hard rock" they usually look at me funny... and then I of course say that what works for me may not work for them, etc., etc.

Since I've been asked, here is what works for me... perhaps it will help you as well.

NOTE: I am not talking here about a block in "coming up with ideas to write about". I have NO PROBLEM with that... every day I wake up with my head exploding with stories to tell. What I'm talking about here is the "Chapter-1-rocks-and-Chapter-3-will-be-awesome-but-to-get-there-I-have-to-somehow-make-it-through-the-dreck-of-Chapter-2" kind of block. When you *have* to write something and the text is just not flowing.

These steps below are also after you do the obvious steps to eliminate distractions like... shut down your email, sign off from Twitter, get rid of the Facebook window, sign off from Skype and all your other IM clients...

So here's my list:

1. IMAGINE YOURSELF SITTING ACROSS THE TABLE FROM SOMEONE - You are in a cafe... or an office... or your living room... and someone asks you about the topic you are trying to write on. You explain it to them in a natural conversation... think about how the flow would be if you were just talking one-to-one about whatever the topic is. Then try to capture that flow in your text.

2. CRANK LOUD HARD ROCK - I'm serious! Turn your music up very loud. And I mean "peel-the-paint-off-the-walls" loud! Crank something loud and hard. No quiet ballads here... just crashing guitars, screaming vocals, etc. Being a child of the 70's and 80's I'm partial to that era... in particular some of the harder songs of the Scorpions, AC/DC, etc. And I find it works best for me without headphones... just letting it echo off the walls in my home office. (Sadly, with young children around this is no longer quite as possible as it was before.) I can't explain why this works... maybe it's the blocking out of everything else? I just know it works for me.

3. STEP AWAYYYY FROM THE KEYBOARD - Leave the computer. Go outside. Breathe the fresh air. Walk around the block. Go for a bike ride. Go for a swim. Go for a ski. Go for a sail. Whatever works for you.... just leave the electronic world, get some physical exercise, get the heart pumping and the blood flowing.

4. FIND ANOTHER PLACE TO WORK - Sometimes you just need a change of location to unblock the writing flow. In the era of laptops, this is easy to do. Go to another part of your office. Go home if you work in an office. Go find an "office" if you work at home. Find a cafe (just don't get distracted by people streaming through). Go sit in a park. Go outside and sit under a tree. Or alternatively go find a room you can shut yourself in. Just change from where you normally write.

5. DO SOMETHING ELSE MENTALLY CHALLENGING - Perhaps what is needed is just to fully engage and focus your brain in some other activity for a short period of time. For me this may take forms like:

Programming/coding - Outside all my PR/marketing work, I enjoy the occasional bit of programming. So I'll take a break to play with some new language... or play with a bit of code in some way. These days, odds are I'd toy with tweaking WordPress, building a Tropo app, or playing with Clojure (with which I have a bizarre fascination probably dating back to my extensive Emacs LISP use 20+ years ago). I'll go off and try something for a half-hour, maybe, and then return to the writing.
Writing somewhere else - Writing to overcome a writer's block? Sure... I'll go off and write something on a completely different topic. (Kind of like writing this article!) Focus on writing some solid blog post or article. Something that engages the brain.
Wood working - I have a tiny "micro-lathe" down in the basement where I very occasionally turn wood to make pens or other small objects. It demands intense focus so you don't mess up the wood... and it goes along with #3 above of getting away from the keyboard.

Whatever the activity is... for some of you it might be video games... or photography... whatever it is, the key point is that you are completely focused and, for that short time, you completely forget about that huge writing task that is dragging you down.

The goal with all of these is to shift your brain in some way so that you can move through whatever block you are suffering and start the text flowing again. And if none of them work... well... sometimes you just have to start typing and typing and typing... and slog through it somehow.

Do any of those resonate with you? What do you do to get past "writer's block"?

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Wow! DisruptiveConversations.com looks quite horrid on the iPhone!

2009-11-22T21:29:01-05:00

Well, I admit that I didn't quite realize how horrid this site looks on an iPhone. But when Ryan Schoeffler tweeted me such a message, I knew even without looking what was wrong.

And yes, I'll fix it. ;-)

You see, back in 2006, TypePad, who I use for hosting this Disruptive Conversations blog, Disruptive Telephony, Blue Box and a few other blogs, didn't have the range of layout options I wanted. Specifically, they didn't have the three-column layout with a main column on the left and 2 sidebars on the right - and that was what I wanted.

So, not having an issue diving into code, I hacked on the site.

I dove into TypePad's "Advanced Templates", learned the language, learned the structure and built off a TypePad Hacks post from early 2006... all to build the template for this site and for Disruptive Telephony. It worked very well. John Unger over at TypePad Hacks even gave me an "AHA! Award" for my redesign.

However, it was a hack. And sometimes... hacks break.

And so it was that about a year ago, I had to re-style Disruptive Telephony after one of my posts completely broke the layout. By this time, TypePad had come out with an "official" layout of "3 columns with a big col on left", and so I moved DisTel to that layout. The good news ever since was that not only did the layout no longer break (and the few remaining IE6 users could read the site! ;-) ) but that also I could make use of new TypePad developments which were not easily available to users of their "Advanced Templates".

I need to make the same move here on Disruptive Conversations.

It just... takes... a... chunk... of... time...

Maybe this week... maybe next... but yes, iPhone users (and I am one myself), I hear you. Thanks for caring enough to tell me.

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The Single Biggest Reason Why I Can't Yet REALLY Use Google Wave

2009-11-20T18:12:36-05:00

I'm a big fan of Google Wave. A huge fan in fact. I've written about it, posted a screencast about using it in conference collaboration and have much more about it in my writing queue. I love the promise of the Wave protocol that will allow for distributed/decentralized collaboration that is in line with "The Internet Way". I've been a long-time fan of the XMPP protocol that is underneath it all. There is so much great potential in Wave.

But I can't really use it today.

Not yet, anyway.

It's NOT because of the common sentiment I hear about not having anyone to communicate with on Wave. Between Voxeons trying it out, PR/marketing folks associated with FIR trying it out, and a whole lot of other early adopters I know, there are probably easily 150-200 people that I could use Wave with.

And I very definitely can use Google Wave for PUBLIC Waves like those I described for conferences in my screencast. For public waves, it's great and works well.

But I can't really use it for true collaboration with a team a people - and therefore can't really push Wave to see what it can do.

WHY NOT?

Two simple pictures illustrate the issue:

and:

Figure it out?

Yes, indeed....

THERE IS NO WAY TO REMOVE SOMEONE FROM A WAVE!

Like I alluded to earlier, no big deal for a public wave. Public waves are by definition, well,... public... and so anyone can join in a public wave. And anyone contributing to a public wave should realize that anything they type there is potentially visible to everyone. It is an annoyance that you can't leave a public wave... but that's it.

(Note: the Google Wave team did hear the cries from Wave users and have allowed anyone to remove a bot from a wave. So bots can be kicked out, but not people.)

THE PROBLEM

I'll give you two examples, though, where this is a huge problem.

First, imagine that you are trying to use Google Wave to collaborate on, say, a news release for your company. The content of the wave is confidential. You invite your team into the wave and you all work on the document. Then, because the current Wave user interface is, um, not entirely intuitive, one of your team members accidently adds someone from outside of your company into your confidential wave.

OOPS!

There is no way to boot that person out. In fact, via Playback, he/she can see everything you have ever typed into that wave... every edit... every snarky comment...

All you can do at that point is: 1) appeal to the person's brother/sisterhood as a fellow early-adopter to excuse the problem and try to pretend they don't see everything going on in the wave; and 2) start a brand-new wave (copying content over) that includes just your team and not this person.

Not ideal solutions.

Second, let's say that you are working with a team of people and one of the people decides to leave the team. Maybe they quit or are fired from the company. Maybe they start a competing project. Whatever the case... you don't want them to have access to the Wave any more.

OOPS!

Again, no way you can remove them. The best you can do is go up to the upper right corner of one of the "blips" in your wave and do the "Copy to new wave" command... and then add everyone to this new wave.

I recently had to personally do this for a wave of 25+ people. Not a fun experience, particular because the current Wave UI only seems to let you add one person at a time. So I had to create the new wave and then figure out who all was in the old one and add them one at a time to the new wave. It didn't take a long time... it was really only a few minutes... but it was a pain. And then I had to flip between the old and new waves to be sure I had brought everyone over.

And then, since everyone would still see the old wave in their inbox, I had to change the title of the old wave so that people would not go into that one and would know they could archive it to get it out of their Inbox.

SOLUTIONS?

As The Complete Wave Guide indicates, it's not necessarily an easy problem to solve due to Wave's collaborative nature. Having said that, the problem has been solved in the IM space in places like Skype Group Chats, IRC channels, etc. Now, federation isn't here yet, but Wave's distributed and decentralized architecture could add some interesting syncing challenges to this issue - but yet it still seems to me to be solvable.

As "GeekLad" notes in "5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready, it's an issue of lack of any real kind of "access control". I agree with with GeekLad that something like this kind of system needs to be in place:

Allow the wave creator do add/remove any participant from a wave.
Allow the wave creator to assign/modify the following permissions that can be set at the wave and participant level:
Permission to add bots to the wave.
Permission to invite other participants to the wave.
Permission to remove participants from the wave.
Read-only or read/write access to the wave.
Permission to grant/modify each (or all) permissions for other participants and/or the entire wave.

That's what we need.

Access control and the ability to remove participants from a wave.

Until that time, as much as I dearly want to be using Google Wave for all sorts of collaborative development... I won't... I can't in good conscience do so with private information.

Here's hoping that the Wave team does give us this feature real soon now... until then... I'll keep using it for public waves, and for non-confidential private waves... but I want to use it for so much more...

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Disruptive Conversations

Video: Scoble interviews Gowalla CEO about location

Humor from The Onion: "Nation Shudders At Large Block of Uninterrupted Text"

A perfect example of how NOT to pitch a blogger through a blog comment...

FIR Podcast hits the iPhone (and Android) as an app

FourSquare's Problematic Proliferation of Places (aka where do I check-in?)

My love/hate relationship with Foursquare...

Want to do online video? Get Steve Garfield's new book "Get Seen"

Re-connecting with Seesmic Video... (after losing the URL)

Facebook for iPhone 3.1 - ALL your *iPhone* contacts belong to us! (HUH???)

Our screens are getting bigger... and smaller... (is your website ready for that?)

How NOT to send out an email marketing message... (FAIL!)

Outstanding list of the "Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2009" from Tamar Weinberg

Entering the DSLR world... with a Nikon D90

"The Daily Shoot" gives you daily practice in becoming a better photographer...

My 3 Words for 2010...

Summarizing the Attention Wave concept of packaging news releases

The Incredible Danger of Facebook's New Privacy Policy - And How to Protect Yourself

5 Ways To Conquer Writer's Block

Wow! DisruptiveConversations.com looks quite horrid on the iPhone!

The Single Biggest Reason Why I Can't Yet REALLY Use Google Wave

Facebook for iPhone 3.1 - ALL your iPhone contacts belong to us! (HUH???)