In this version:

• Plugin now checks for PHP 5 at activation, will not allow activation under PHP4
• Checks for zero pages of which user is admin (avoid edge case exception)
• Added link to installation instructions to permissions page
• Added offline-access permission request (some users had not yet granted this permission)

Added “show errors” mode, which when enabled traps exceptions thrown by the Facebook client and shows them to the user

Not really a required upgrade, but it should help folks having trouble, and won’t cause trouble for others.

I will also now close comments on the existing 1.5 release blog post, as it is now out of date.

In general, I’d prefer not to use comments for troubleshooting anyway – please use the support forums for those kinds of items instead.

Thanks

WPBook

So for a while I’ve been working on and beta testing the next version of WPBook. Tonight I’ve just tagged it for release, so it will be available for download shortly. (I’ve already been running it here for a while and testing it on a few other test blogs).

The main improvement in WPBook 1.5 is that it now knows how to use stream.publish, meaning that it will automatically post to your wall in Facebook when you publish a post in WordPress. Your friends should see that notification as well in their streams. (We’re not, however, sending application updates or tracking all users’ user id’s – instead you enter your own userid into the settings and it uses that to post to your wall). Included are attachments (first image attached to the post is used) and excerpts (if you hand craft excerpts they will be used in the wall post).

The other main improvement is that WPBook now requires PHP5, and as such can wrap Facebook calls in Try/Catch blocks. For the non-programmer, this means those awful, dramatic “fatal uncaught exception” error screens are gone. WPBook isn’t doing anything terribly meaningful with those errors yet – still working on that- but at least it traps them.

In this release:

• WPBook now requires PHP 5
• Enables user to post to stream, including to pages. (Must be pages for which you are the admin, to which you have added the app, and which have granted stream.publish permission – link provided in the admin to grant permissions.
• Catches exceptions thrown by the Facebook client. (Doesn’t yet surface those in good error messages, but at least they are caught)
• Fixed, I hope, issue with comments inside Facebook for some users
• Clean up of some admin styles (resized gravatar images as well as some basic hierarchy on options)
• Added Page Options as their own section
• Allow user to select pages to be excluded
• Added option to allow a menu of parent pages at top of the app below the title
• Fixed “Facebok” typo in line line 182 of theme/index.php
• Option to turn on and off page list under content (independent of menu)
• Option to turn on/off recent post under content
• Allow user to set the amount of recent post to show under content (default 10)
• Cleaned up custom header/footer now only one function instead of two (no reason to have two functions)
• Added %tag_links% and %category_links% to custom header footer as well as made archive pages work.
• Set smart default for when Blog Title isn’t set

Next steps?

• Better error handling code – do something with the messages Facebook returns when an exception is thrown
• User selectable theme directory – for users who’ve taken the time to customize their theme
• Threaded comments – likely means requiring WP 2.7, though for error handling (and just simplicity) I’m thinking of jumping right to WordPress 2.8
• Cross-Posting to a commenter’s wall when they comment inside Facebook. (Because it is in response to a user action, I understand they don’t even have to grant stream.publish permission).

What else would you like to see?

Update: Closing comments on this post. For troubleshooting please use the support forums instead.

John Eckman, Jay Batson, Marc Amos, and Tom Herer. Photo (c) Trev Stair

Unfortunately Jake Goldman was ill and couldn’t make it, so Christine Greene agreed to step in and moderate in my place, while I represented WordPress in Jake’s. (See also Trev’s iPhone sketches of myself, Jay and Marc – he was unable to get Tom).

It was a fun night – I’m not sure I represented WordPress as well as I might have with a bit more prep. (On the security question in particular, see Brad Williams’ presentation from WordCamp Boston.)

Here’s the video, broken into three parts. (I’ll replace these links with embed codes once Blip finishes transcoding to Flash)

Part One (20:03)

Part Two (26:57)

Part Three (27:59)

The audio quality on the video isn’t great, and the video itself is a bit off from a color perspective (the room wasn’t well set up or lit for recording, so we’re in low-light mode) but I think it’s watchable. (Thanks to Julian Rex for getting what we could get).

Specifically included are INFDaily, CelebStyle.com, and JustJared – though obviously there are many other picking up this trend, which has its origins in the celebrity stalking watching print magazine world.

The technology, from vendors like gumgum and Pixazza is fairly rudimentary, as described by the Times:

Companies like GumGum and Pixazza tag the paparazzi photos with links for buying the clothes. They hire people to look at photos and match the clothes they are wearing with the same or similar, more affordable items from retailers like Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom and Zappos. (Image recognition technology is not yet sophisticated enough to automate the process, they say.) The companies get a small fee from retailers when a shopper clicks on or buys an article of clothing.

Essentially, the technology turns the celebrity photo into an ad for the clothing the celeb is wearing, endorsement or no:

“Publishers and readers look at it as this really informational resource,” said Ophir Tanz, chief executive of GumGum, which tagged the photo of Ms. Jolie with one of its “Shop this look” badges. “We look at it as an ad unit.”

Celebrity sites are an obvious place to start with this business, but photos all over the Web could be turned into ads or e-commerce portals, said Bob Lisbonne, chief executive of Pixazza. Pixazza plans to add sites that cover travel, sports and interior design.

I see this as further validation of the integration between content and commerce. Why have a magazine brand and a retailer as two completely separate entities, with the information about where to buy what’s featured in the spreads hidden in the small type at the back?

We’ve long said that “Every company is becoming a media company” in the age of the assembled web – and that includes learning how to take advantage of commerce opportunities around content just as much as it means learning to leverage content in the context of commerce.

The event will be hosted by North Shore Web Geeks and sponsored (as in some free beer) by The Atom Group.

North Shore Web Geeks

(I still think of myself as a North Shore Web Geeks member despite no longer living in Newburyport – Salem, MA is still the North Shore, isn’t it?)

We’ll talk a bit about some popular content management systems, including (but not limited to) Expression Engine, Drupal, Kentico, and WordPress. Representing each of those platforms will be:

• Marc Amos, who will be talking about Expression Engine (a proprietary PHP/MySQL CMS with quite cheap licensing for small businesses and free-of-cost licensing for non-commercial, non-profit use).
• Jay Batson, who will represent Drupal (a free and open source PHP / MySQL CMS and web application framework)
• Tom Herer, who will speak about Kentico (a proprietary ASP.NET based platform with what I’d call low-end-of-market pricing for small to medium sized businesses)
• (Fellow WordCamp Boston organizer) Jake Goldman, who will represent WordPress (another free and open source PHP based platform, traditionally more focused on blogging but also increasingly used as a broad CMS)

I’ll be moderating, though I can’t (and won’t) claim to be impartial.

In truth, all of the folks on the panel have worked with a number of different platforms – they’re representing one just for the sake of the panel.

I’m hopeful we’ll get beyond “what CMS is the best” and on to a more nuanced “how do I select a platform that meets my needs, risk profile, budget, and skillset?” or even “how do I figure out what my needs are?” which is where most folks who ask me which CMS to use should be starting.

If not, at least there’s networking and beer.

Working through beta testing on WPBook 1.5.

Let’s see if this gets into my stream. I’m testing publishing to the author’s stream, as well as to pages which have granted stream.publish permission.

The biggest challenge so far is keeping track of who those users are, since WPBook doesn’t currently store any info about who is using it.

(Updated 1/5 – it’s actually 1.4.1 now, as there was a typo in the theme/index.php file – get_exteral_url should be get_external_url).

Last night I packaged and released version 1.4 of WPBook, the plugin I maintain which creates a view of your WordPress blog as a Facebook application.

(For example, see Open Parenthesis as a blog, and then Open Parenthesis as a Facebook app).

Highlights of this release

• Fixed bug which made invite friends link only work on the home page
• Fixed bug in setting for custom/header footer which included a permalink
  (WordPress support topic 306263)
• Added Gravatar support
• Added (experimentally) a list of “pages” as well – this means you should able to use WPBook even if you have a static homepage set in WordPress – just use the url of your home page as the “Canvas Callback URL”
• Removed hard coded references to wp-content and plugins directories
  (See http://willnorris.com/2009/05/wordpress-plugin-pet-peeve-hardcoding-wp-content)
• Removed hard coded reference to config.php, routing Facebook comment submission through WordPress’ built in query parser instead
  (See http://willnorris.com/2009/06/wordpress-plugin-pet-peeve-2-direct-calls-to-plugin-files)

As you can see, this was really more of a bug-fix and code cleanup release, with one experimental functional addition (pages). The one feature I didn’t get to but wanted to was threaded comment support (as in WordPress 2.7 and later). Would users want to be able to set threading differently inside Facebook than outside it? (I’m thinking that WPBook should just follow the settings in the blog it is installed to, with respect to threading – and perhaps gravatars as well, given how integrated with WordPress gravatars have become).

The next version will be more of a “feature set” release, and will also be the first version to require PHP 5. Although Facebook only officially supports a PHP 5 client library, I’ve been supporting PHP 4 by relying on an open source PHP 4 Facebook client.

The problem is that many of the operations most requested by users rely on Facebook API calls which sometimes fail. The PHP 5 client handles this by throwing exceptions, which WPBook needs to catch – something PHP 4 can’t do.

What’s coming in 1.5

Here’s my tentative roadmap:

• Threaded Comments – which may mean upping the minimum WordPress to 2.7 for simplicity’s sake. Given that we’re at 2.9 now I think that’s ok.
• More work on Pages. Need to be able to list pages not to show inside Facebook, enable user to set page depth, maybe even show the top level pages as Facebook style tabs across the top of the application? (tricky inside an iFrame app)
• PHP 5 required – this will allow me to trap “uncaught exceptions” which sometimes occur when users submit new blog posts. It’s a cosmetic error but a really ugly one which it happens, and as I use more and more Facebook calls it may happen more often.
• Publish to Facebook’s Stream.publish API when a new blog post is published – this is the most commonly requested feature. (Is it fair to assume the blog author is also the owner of the Facebook application? I had assumed so but that may not be the case – may require the user to enter his/her Facebook UID in WPBook for publishing to the stream)
• Enable publishing to the wall of a Facebook “page” as well as a userwhen a new blog post is published.
• Enable users leaving comments to also publish to the Facebook stream- has to be at the user’s discretion, but WPBook could offer to publish comments both to the stream of the user publishing the comment and to the blog author’s stream.

What else would you like to see in WPBook 1.5? (Not that these aren’t enough).

I’ve also got to start thinking about WordPress 3.0 and the merge with the WPMU codebase, and what impact that has, but I’m hoping that can wait for WPBook 1.6.

The effects are similar to those you’d get by applying filters in Photoshop or Gimp, but all the processing happens on the server, requiring no software install – handy for working on a guest machine or for folks who don’t need the full power of a graphics program but want to stylize a photo.

The process is very simple:

1. You choose an effect (from 40 available, in 10 categories, when I tried it)
2. You upload a photo, from your desktop
3. Rollip generates a preview, in lower resolution, for you to approve
4. Rollip processes the photo

Images processed by Rollip. Top left is original, all the rest are effects the application proides. (Click on the image for full size)

Credits – which are only used in that fourth stage (processing the higher quality full resolution image) and only if the image is successully processed – can be purchased at $2.99 for 15 credits, enough to process 15 high res photos.

I played around with a number of the effects on the image to the right.

Although there are other online image editing suites (WordPress 2.9 even has some basic image editing built-in), I like Rollip’s selection of filters – not so many that it’s overwhelming, but enough to add a bit of punch to an image. (I assume back when TechCrunch wrote about Rollip there was only one filter available?) .

There are competing services and applications, of course, including Photoshop Online – but Rollip is simple, quick, and free (if you are on of the first 15 using the link above) or at least cheap. (The service is also using Google Ad Sense – maybe at some point it will become free if it gets enough traffic?).

Rollip makes no claim to copyright or license on the images you upload or the processed, completed output, and has what I found to be a refreshingly simple terms of use and privacy policy – though I recognize to some folks this reads as a lack of professionalism.

If you’re interested, also check out the Flickr Group, to which people are adding Rollip-processed photos.

What other services do you use to add interest to images?

How can we be sure the speakers we’ve accepted will deliver? How can we ensure they get the feedback they deserve (positive or negative)? Would using a site like SpeakerRate improve the situation?

Scott Berkun's Confessions of a Public Speaker

Berkun’s book isn’t really in the “how to become a better speaker” genre, though I think committed speakers who read it will undoubtedly get better. I’d have subtitled it “What Makes Consistently Successful Public Speaking Nearly Impossible.” Berkun covers all kinds of interferences which prevent talks from being successful, only some of which are under the direct control of the speaker. Room configuration, human physiology and instincts, poor alignment between speaker and occasion, the disconnect between what organizers need and what audiences want, and the sheer difficulty of teaching anyone anything (let alone teaching several hundred people the same thing all at once) all figure into what makes talks go poorly.

(This not incidentally makes the book great reading for conference organizers, managers who send employees to seminars, and people who attend talks as well as potential or frequent speakers).

In the chapter on “things people say” Berkun has a whole section on “Why most speaker evaluations are useless.” He points out that:

Most organizers never bother to collect feedback from the attendees, and of those who do, often it doesn’t get passed on to the speakers. It’s a shame because it’s most appropriate for the organizers to share feedback with the speakers; after all, they invited them to speak, so technically the speakers work for the hosts. But being as busy as they are, the organizers don’t always communicate the data gathered back to the speakers. They ask the good speakers to come back and leave the rest to figure out life for themselves.

Even on occasions where feedback is gathered and shared with speakers, it’s still not very useful as it provides no context. Berkun shares a real example in which his talk was rated by attendees on a scale from “very dissatisfied” to “very satisfied.” But, he points out, just knowing the distribution of the attendees who bothered to fill out the form (129 out of 500 or so in this case) along that scale doesn’t do any good without a comparison:

But the single most valuable data point is how my scores compare to other speakers. Without it, this feedback is useless. Perhaps my scores are the worst of all score in the history of presentations at this organization. Or perhaps they’re the best. There is no way to know.

Berkun points out the feedback speakers really need:

• How did my presentation compare to the others?
• What one change would have most improved my presentation?
• What questions did you expect me to answer that went unanswered?
• What annoyances did I let get in the way of giving you what you needed?

Giving speakers feedback based on this set of questions would be much more likely to improve their performance.

(Aside #1: something about the annoyances question still bugs me. When I was teaching I used to talk about “productive frustration” – which naturally comes from learning something new – as opposed to “non-productive frustration” – which comes from poorly written assignments, badly planned logistics, and other stuff not directly related to the hard work of learning. I think this is the sense Berkun’s after for “annoyances” here but I don’t think it quite gets across. Maybe something more like “What did I do or fail to do that got in the way you getting what you needed?”)

Which brings me to SpeakerRate. It’s a site which lets users give direct feedback on speakers and their talks. It feels to me mostly aimed at speakers themselves, though the site says:

SpeakerRate is a community site for event organizers, attendees, and speakers.

• Event organizers can find speakers, learn about talks they’ve given in the past, and determine who would be a good match for the event they’re organizing.
• Event attendees can provide constructive feedback to speakers, track the talks they’ve attended, and research upcoming talks that they might attend.
• Event speakers can get valuable constructive feedback directly from attendees and find out how they can improve their content and delivery for their next talk. They can also establish a SpeakerRating, which will help them earn future speaking opportunities.

On the surface, this seems to me a great thing: let those who attend talks provide feedback directly to speakers, cutting out the need for event organizers to collect and manage feedback. Thinking about it as a speaker, frankly, it’s a bit frightening. In much the same way that I’m grateful there was no RateMyProfessors when I was teaching, I worry that this might encourage or facilitate the worst kinds of superficial feedback and speaker trashing. What if someone with an axe to grind starts leaving negative comments? Would other attendees come to the rescue of a speaker thus trashed?

SpeakerRate.com Homepage

(Aside #2: As a consultant working with companies who worry about what will be said about their products in social media, it’s quite easy to dismiss their concerns. The conversation will happen anyway, and you can’t be so invested in your belief that your products are superior that you ignore real feedback from real people. Funny how difficult it is to apply this same line of thought when the prospect of being rated on speaker rate arises. Why does this scare the crap out of me, while SlideShare doesn’t?)

Speakers (or, apparently, organizers) set up a page for each talk at SpeakerRate. Users of the site are then given the opportunity to rate that talk and leave comments.

SpeakerRate form showing Delivery and Content

SpeakerRate comment form

The problem is that I’m not sure how effective a simple rating on “Content” and “Delivery” plus a box for unprompted, free text comments is at conveying useful feedback. Wouldn’t it be better to offer a prompt other than “Leave a comment”? Maybe even allow speakers to ask specific questions of their own?

I suppose that the “speaker rating” which comes from some aggregate measure across multiple events would give you some rough sense of how different speakers compare.

But Is the “Speaker Rating” (a single number, which is presented to two decimal places implying a fair degree of precision if not accuracy), enough to really validate a speaker’s abilities?

Isn’t much more context necessary to really understand what a speaker has to offer an audience? Speakers who might be great in one context (a highly technical demo or how-to in front of 30 experienced developers) might be horrible in another context (a keynote to an audience of varied levels of experience).

Have you used SpeakerRate? Have you found it useful, as a speaker, an event organizer, or event a prospective event attendee? Would you recommend it to your neighborhood event organizer?

Earlier this month, Comcast launched Fancast XFinity, their branded name for their version of TV Everyehwere. Essentially, XFinity is a distributed authentication system, in which users prove their association to an existing cable subscription, and receive corresponding entitlements to an online video catalog.

Browsing to a video which requires authentication results in this modal dialogue:

Trying to View Premium Content on Fancast Requires Authorization

Comcast Access (and a specific Movie Player from Move Networks) has to be installed to your machine – and running – to be able to view videos behind the paywall. Comcast Access is an Adobe AIR based application and is available for Mac OS X (intel-based Macs running OS X 10.5 or later) and Windows (XP Service Pack 2, Vista, or 7). No love for Linux and Unix users (which won’t make Comcast Access very popular around Optaros), older PowerPC Macs, or Windows users stuck on Windows 2000. (This also means you’ll have to have or accept AIR being installed on the machine as well). Finally, you’ll need administrative rights on the machine(s) you install Access on – which may restrict some work desktops (a popular place one might want access outside the home).

Installer for Comcast Access on Mac OS X

Users can authorize up to three named computers for access – though it isn’t clear to me yet what happens when you reach your fourth machine (can you un-authorize the first and sawp in the second, as in Apple’s FairPlay DRM in iTunes?).

Once you’ve installed Access (and the Move Networks player) you can authorize the machine it is running on:

Setting up Comcast Access

The process was relatively painless (though I did have to chat with a customer service rep to find my “comcast email account,” something I set up when subscribing to cable but have never used) on my MacBook Pro, unless you count the pain of accepting yet-another set of digital restrictions management (DRM) shackles. Specifically, the Comcast Access Terms of Service make it clear that this isn’t really TV Everywhere. (I’m reminded of one of my favorite The Princess Bride quotes: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means”).

In addition to the platform restrictions, and the requirement that Comcast Access be running as you watch the videos, the TOS notes:

• “You may only install the Software . . . and use Protected Services on Authorized Devices.” – Comcast defines which devices are authorized – they mention PDAs and portable devices, but if your device isn’t on the list you’re not part of everywhere
• On software upgrades: “Upgrades will either be optional, in which case you will be presented with the choice to install such Upgrade, or mandatory, in which case the Upgrade will install automatically and you will be notified after such Upgrade has been successfully installed. By installing and/or using the Software, you consent to such Upgrades being delivered and implemented in such manner.” At least some upgrades might be optional.
• Whose devices can you authorize? “you will not . . . designate as an Authorized Device any device that is not owned and used solely by people then-resident at the service address for your Comcast Digital Cable subscription.” Does this mean that by authorizing my laptop, which I don’t technically own (Optaros does) I’ve violated the TOS? What does then-resident mean: if I’m travelling on business for a week, am I still resident at my service address? What if your roomate moves out – is it your responsibility to de-authorize her authorized devices?
• You also will not “export, import or re-export the Software in violation of any applicable law, rule or regulation of any jurisdiction.” Does traveling with a laptop on which the software is installed constitute export? What if the installer itself is sitting on the desktop? Is it my responsibility to know about the applicable laws in all jurisdictions?

Much (if not all) of this is fairly standard proprietary software TOS fodder, I suspect. DRM systems have to be able to insist on the ability to force updates in case holes in existing versions are discovered and need to be plugged. Controlling the devices (and system software versions) on which the software can be legally installed also helps prevent folks from, for example, hacking a version to run without enforcing DRM.

I wonder how Comcast Access deals with geographic restrictions – can I access premium content to which I have rights as a Comcast customer even while in, say, the UK or Germany where those rights haven’t (potentially) been negotiated?

Or would Fancast, maybe even before requiring Comcast Access authentication, already geolocate my IP and prevent me from requesting material not available in that geography?

Will TV Everywhere be enough to keep cable subscriptions relevant? Frankly, if faster fiber-optic were available at my home address, I’d drop cable in a heartbeat. For me cable is and has been since the mid-nineties primarily about access to the Internet, and only secondarily a way to see a breadth of content on TV. But I recognize I may be the minority there.

Might folks who are not Comcast Cable Subscribers someday be able to purchase a “Fancast XFinity” subscription independent of whether they current have coaxial cable hooked up to their home address?

What will Fancast XFinity, and Comcast’s purchase of NBC Universal, mean for services like Hulu? Is this the beginning of a “return to paywalls” for professional video online?

I hope not. I hope that it’s a first step in the direction of acknowledging the user desire for control, and a first step toward separating the value of the content from the value of the delivery medium. (Just as newspapers aren’t the only or even the best way to consume/distribute news, coaxial cable via subscription isn’t the only or even the best way to consume/distribute professionally created long-form video content.)

Freeing the content from the channel should enable lots of different monetization models, including some form of Freemium access (let users watch the first five episodes of Entourage free, or all free two weeks after original air date) as well un-bundled access (I never want premium sports channels, but many packages include them).

Will the restrictions imposed by the DRM encourage consumers to keep going to unauthorized channels to get content, or will the ease-of-use (so far it has been quite simple) and the low barrier to entry (for subscribers) make this an iTunes moment for online video? (Perhaps this is only possible if/when the service gets extended beyond current cable subscribers and becomes a way to subscribe to premium content online directly).

I think ultimately I’ll want to keep an open source (LAMP) platform because I want to own the data in my lifestream, have backups of it, and be able to move it around as I please. This leaves me choosing between a platform linked to a blog (WordPress or MovableType) or a standalone one (Sweetcron, Storytlr or similar) that just powers the lifestream. Originally I created JohnEckman.com as a standalone lifestream, thinking that the various blogs I wrote for around the web could be aggregated there – but there’s no reason why that couldn’t be a WordPress install as well.

Anyway, what follows are my notes / first impressions – not an exhaustive evaluation certainly but a good shortlist to start with if you’re thinking of running a lifestream.

First, the open source platforms

WordPress with the Lifestream plugin by David Kramer from Enthropia Labs. You can see this one in action on Open Parenthesis.

WordPress Lifestream Plugin Output from Open Parenthesis

I really like the plugin’s approach, which is to leverage WordPress and enable you to put your lifestream up as a page, as well as providing a widget you can put on your blog homepage. (Of course you can use WordPress without using the blog engine at all – in which case it is more like the standalone options). It’s very simple to install and configure, and supports a wide variety of places from which you might want to pull feeds:

Lifestream Plugin for WordPress Add Feed Screen

The Lifestream plugin can group items by day to avoid clutter (days when I work from home and listen to lots of tracks on Last.fm, or upload 30 photos to flickr, that single source can easily overwhelm a lifestream) – though that isn’t available for all feed types. The plugin is also themable and extendable, which is key – you can add feed types, custom icons, or change display options at will.

Movable Type Open Source edition with the ActionStreams plugin. I was very excited when the Action Streams plugin came out, and set up JohnEckman.com on MT just to be able to run it. Heck, I even wrote a few plugins for Action Stream parsing. However, I’ve been really lax about staying up to date with new releases. Having a number of blogs already on WordPress makes it far more likely I will keep that updated. I know many folks use and love Movable Type but its mental model of how a blog works is just not in synch with mine the way WordPress is.

MTOS based Lifestream from JohnEckman.com

That said, if you’re used to Movable Type’s approach, using the Action Streams plugin certainly provides a flexible, pluggable, themable way to aggregate your lifestream.

Sweetcron an open source application built using the Code Igniter framework – see this one in action at nastyhack.org/sweetcron/.

Sweetcron based Lifestream

Unfortunately, the original developer has since moved on to other things and no replacement has clearly emerged yet. I like that it operates as a kind of standalone platform, not tied to a blogging engine, and gives you good theming potential – but I worry about the long term prospects for the project without a clear leader organizing and directing contributors. On the plus side, there are many great themes for Sweetcron, and if you’re familiar with code igniter as a framework .

Storytlr – what was once a SaaS option but has ceased operations and released their code as an open source project – you can see my lifestream at nastyhack.org/storytlr/.

Storytlr based lifestream

There will be some work to do make the project more amenable to self-hosting (it was built to operate as a service), but it has the benefit of starting from a solid working foundation, not starting from scratch.

They’ve also got a multiuser version, something which was often requested for Sweetcron but wasn’t forthcoming. (Will the WordPress Lifestream plugin work on WordPress Multi-user, which is being merged into the core code in 3.0? Don’t know yet).

Hosted offerings:

Chi.mp My Account) – Hosted service which serves as an OpenID provider as well as aggregating your lifestream. Integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, any RSS feed. Also enables you to import contacts from online address books. Seems to have gotten stuck on some old photos in its Flickr import and is failing to import newer content? (Haven’t spent much time troubleshooting here – mostly using it as a backup OpenID for when my primary one fails). Their focus has always been on enabling you to own your own data – allowing you to export all of your contacts and updates out of the site as a zip, which they still do, with appropriately microformatted content throughout. If I were to rely on a hosted version, this would be my top pick.

Flavors.me (My Account – but check their user directory for better examples) – Hosted service, supports (as of 12/24) flickr, tumblr, twitter, vimeo, last.fm, facebook, goodreads, netflix, and generic RSS. Gets bonus points for using OAuth appropriately and not requesting usernames/passwords where they aren’t necessary. Offers some basic layouts and admin-side design flexibility (fonts, colors, backgrounds, and the like. (See this great review on the Lifestream blog for more info).

FriendFeed (My Account) – Arguably the giant in this space until getting acquired by Facebook. Probably keep this around as long as it exists, and do sometimes follow folks here, but not somewhere I’m spending much time anymore.

Plaxo Pulse (My Account). Plaxo seems to be where my less internet-savvy family and friends get updates. Folks who aren’t on Facebook, or Twitter, or spending lots of time reading blogs and other RSS feeds, but get a periodic “pulse” from Plaxo of what’s going on in their network. For that reason alone I’ll probably never take it down. They’ve also got Joseph Smarr and John McCrea, who’ve been pushing for the open social web, open standards, and data portability. (Updated: Smarr’s moving to Google). They’re supporting OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, and other new standards as soon as they are introduced, and I like that they’re good web citizens (and have continued to be, post acquisition by Comcast). That said, it still feels to me like a downstream destination for a specific kind of consumer, not the central place I’d think of as my lifestream.

Ones I haven’t set up or tried to use: Lifestream.fm, AIM Lifestream.

What are you using? What have I missed out on altogether?

Hard to fit the talk into 30 minutes with time for questions and roadmap – there’s so much more I want WPBook to do – hopefully I can find the time soon.

I also took the opportunity, naturally, to promote WordCamp Boston, coming January 23rd. See you there?

Looking forward to watching sessions the rest of today and volunteering this afternoon / tomorrow. If you’re here, stop me and say hello.

My talk is one of the Saturday Sessions in the Beginning Developer track. (Hopefully not a rating of my development skills as evidenced by the plugin’s code, but reflecting the intended audience).

Here’s a quick blurb:

You Got Your WordPress in My Facebook!: Developing WPBook. WPBook is a plugin that enables users to turn their self-hosted WordPress blog into a Facebook application. Full web posts are viewable within the Facebook context, including embedded multimedia. Users can comment using their Facebook identity, and comments (and comment threads) are shared between Facebook users and regular blog readers. WPBook uses a deceptively simple set of actions and filters, along with the Facebook API, to create a relatively high degree of integration. In this talk I’ll go over the basics of how WPBook works, the current challenges in terms of meeting user requests, and some of the solutions currently in development.

WordCamp NYC looks to be an amazing production: good location, large crowd, and a solid group of speakers, including a Sunday keynote from Matt Mullenweg himself. Tickets are still available but I would not be at all surprised to see this sell out, so register now.

I’m also leading the organization for the first-ever WordCamp Boston, on January 23rd, 2010. We’ll be hosted at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development center, which is a fantastic venue right in Kendall Square.

Tickets aren’t on sale yet, but there is an announcements google group if you want to be notified when they do go on sale, and an organizers google group if you want to help put the event together. There’s also a design contest for the logo (enter by November 11th please!). I expect to open a call for speakers shortly.

Given all the interest I’ve seen and heard around Boston from end-users, SEO and affiliate marketing folks, developers, and businesses small and large in WordPress as a platform (including .com and .org), I suspect WordCamp Boston will sell out as well – so sign up for the announcements list if you think you’d like to attend.

1. Paul Gillin: “The Future of Media is: Small, Aggregated, Inclusive, Community-driven, Conversational, Fast, Flexible, Experimental.”

2. New from the PCF: Video WTF?

First, a great presentation given by Paul Gillin at the Inbound Marketing Summit yesterday. Covered very quickly with dense references the shifts in mainstream media:

Second, Video WTF?, a great new site from the Participatory Culture Foundation (who also bring us Miro and and Make Internet TV) which will be helpful to those of you (us?) who are making the future of media:

VideoWTF: Questions and Answers About Video Production, Video Camera, Editing, Publishing, and et cetera

Kendall Square, Inbound (Photo by Eric Kilby, cc-by-sa license)

For those not from around here, in Boston the mass transit system trains run by the MBTA, and popularly called the “T,” are generally marked with inbound (going towards downtown Boston) and outbound (going away from downtown). The exception is four stations in the middle of downtown Boston, where the concept of Inbound and Outbound gets a bit tricky, since (and this is very much a Bostonian perspective) you’re already at the center of the universe, so everything is outbound.

Heart of the System (Photo by Eric Kilby, cc-by-sa license)

What does this have to do with marketing? I’m getting there.

Inbound marketing is defined in opposition to outbound marketing, most clearly in this post on the hubspot blog:

When I talk with most marketers today about how they generate leads and fill the top of their sales funnel, most say trade shows, seminar series, email blasts to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and advertising. I call these methods “outbound marketing” where a marketer pushes his message out far and wide hoping that it resonates with that needle in the haystack.

[. . . ]

Rather than do outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out, I advocate doing “inbound marketing” where you help yourself “get found” by people already learning about and shopping in your industry. In order to do this, you need to set your website up like a “hub” for your industry that attracts visitors naturally through the search engines, through the blogosphere, and through the social media sites. I believe most marketers today spend 90% of their efforts on outbound marketing and 10% on inbound marketing and I advocate that those ratios flip.

While there was lots of great content at day one of the summit, it felt to me like there was a natural tension between those who still think of the job of marketing as being to spread professionally crafted messages – to shape the market by getting your brands’ story out there before or more loudly than anyone else’s – and those who have started to think of the job of marketing as being to humanize, to listen, to engage with communities.

A great example of the latter – listening to and engaging with communities in a real human voice, was Kodak’s Chief Blogger (@kodakCB), who talked about Kodak’s expanding social media programs, how they leverage content created by their customers, and their current initiative to create a “chief listener” to supplement their other efforts. Similarly, Justin Rasmussen (@thisisjustin) talked specifically about humanizing technology and many folks spoke about the need to maintain relationships and the important of human thinking (and empathy) over the importance of platforms.

At the same time, other sessions seemed overly focused on shaping, defining, and dominating the conversation through outbout techniques. This included a session on PR as a way of “getting the word out” (which focused on sending out press releases, and “social media releases,” but also noted that PR has to move away from essentially doing interruption marketing to the press on behalf of brands) and email marketing (isn’t email by definition outbound? I guess one does opt-in, but it still feels very outbound to me). The final session of the day, from Tim Street (@1timstreet) was focused on “how to make your videos viral,” and focused on spectacle, story, emotion – and the need to hire a pro to create video for you.

I really don’t mean to pick on individuals or categories – and I’ve worked with some very smart PR folks, email service providers, and video artists who totally “get” the value of listening to customers – but it felt to me like these sessions represented the outbound meme: craft professional content and push it out as a way of reinforcing your message.

While Chris Brogan’s “Listening is the new black” was my favorite tweet, and the concept of dropping the “engine” from SEO my favorite concept, the #ims09 stream was quickly polluted by a variety of spam from the explicit and pornographic to the more subtle “we’re here at #ims09, come talk to us about our products” kind (which I think is still marginally spam – certainly “interruption marketing”). Twitter as a conversational, inbound marketing tool was being turned into an interruption based, outbound, spam engine.

It will be interesting to see the contrast between the ProjectVRM summit at the Berkman Center next week and the Inbound Marketing Summit. If Doc Searls, founder of ProjectVRM and one of the co-authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, can be said to represent former marketers who abdicated from marketing on behalf of the customer, does the Inbound Marketing Summit represent marketers who stayed in marketing but are nevertheless learning from Cluetrain how to be better marketers?

If markets are conversations, is the job of marketing to “own” and “define” that conversation by pushing out messages, or to listen to that conversation and help companies make better offerings more closely aligned to the needs of the customer?

What should the balance of “inbound” and “outbound” be in your marketing programs?

Outbound Platform (Photo by Andrés Monroy-Hernández, cc-by-sa license)

Maybe a better way to think about it is that there are good and bad ways of doing both inbound and outbound marketing. Email newsletters can be a great way to reach interested customers who’ve chosen that as their communication preference, and applying the lessons of professional storytelling (and the 100+ year history of film craft) to your company’s videos is a great way to improve their quality and potential relevance to users. At the same time, setting up “listening” channels in social media doesn’t necessarily mean a company actually plans to hear what users are saying in those channels.

Ultimately it comes down to finding the appropriate balance and sincere intent. Marketing has become humanized, and the voices of real people inside and outside the organization need to play a role in the conversation. If your intent is to dominate rather than participate, perhaps in the end it doesn’t matter whether you’re using outbound or inbound techniques to get there.

It’s about your digital footprint: the sum total of all the interactions your customers, prospective customers, fans, antagonists, employees, suppliers, and partners have with your content and services throughout the entire Internet.

A quotation in a recent post on the Inc. Technology blog, It’s Not About Web Traffic Anymore, put it this way:

It’s not about getting people to come to my web site anymore. It’s about getting my content; my videos,my articles, my event promotion announcements, on YOUR web site. That’s what I’m paying attention to now.

– Barbara Scala, Founder of Bloom

I agree wholeheartedly, but remember that “YOUR web site” might be a Facebook news feed, it might be a blog, it might be an link from YouTube sent via IM or a tweet. It’s no longer about getting folks to come play in your garden, but about making yourself available in all the places folks might already be hanging out.

Private Garden (Photo by surprise truck, cc-by license)

Your web presence (which should be a combination of sites, blogs, microsites, and official presences in social networks) is still critical, of course – as the place to which folks will often go for more information, to sign up, to interact with you – but if your efforts stop at the sites you own and control you’re missing out on the majority of the web.

Optaros Beer, which was free as in freedom but not as in beer

Of course, as r0ml pointed out in a masterful OSCON presentation in 2008, we do have a corresponding word in English to libre – Liberal, or Liberty. Maybe if we’d been calling it “Liberty Software” or “Freedom Software” all these years there’d be less FUD.

Two recent posts crossed my blog reader on the challenge of value versus cost. Now that so many content creators are taking approaches similar to free software via unconferences and creative commons licenses, we need to remember that “free” in these case does not mean without value and does not have to mean without cost.

Chris Brogan at Gnomedex (Photo by turoczy, cc-by license)

First, my friend Chris Brogan writes about why the Inbound Marketing Summit isn’t free (in the sense of no charge to attend):

When you run conferences, everyone wants in for free. It’s understandable. Times are tough and people don’t have as much money. . . . The ticket price is $695 to attend (unless you know @dmscott, @justinlevy, or a few other people, who have codes for VIP discounts).

Otherwise, you’ve gotta shell out to get in.

There are lots of reasons why it isn’t free, of course, not the least of which is that running the conference means incurring costs:

The venue, Gillette Stadium, is home to the New England Patriots. They charge me money to be there. The food costs me money. The power, the booth construction, all that stuff. This is simple, right? It’s a transaction. I ask people for something, and they tell me how much it will cost. Sometimes, I get a discount if I buy in bulk.

Chris goes on, though, to talk about the difference between a cost focus and a value focus, encouraging us to think in terms of value:

Don’t ever feel embarrassed to charge for value. Never apologize that something costs money if you’ve determined the value of it.

The irony is the the Inbound Marketing Summit now has to compete – for mindshare if not for actual audience, since I don’t know what the actual attendee profiles of the two events look like – with PodCamp, an unconference he co-founded a few years ago.

PodCamp’s model is to charge nothing or a minimal fee (this year’s PodCamp Boston did charge $50 ), attract sponsors, and encourage all attendees to speak on topics about which they have knowledge. (PodCamp itself was modeled after BarCamp, which was originally created in juxtaposition to FooCamp, which was an exclusive, invite-only event for “Friends of O’Reilly.”).

Just as the increased volume and quality of so-called “amateur” content has put incredible price pressure on “paid content” online, the increased frequency and quality of unconferences (*camps, tweet-ups, social media breakfasts, and the like) has put tremendous downward price pressure on more traditional conferences. They aren’t the same thing – any more than fan videos are the same as Hollywood movies – but they are enough alike that people naturally compare them. There’s a personal ROI calculation that goes into conference attendance (which includes not only the entrance fee but travel cost and the opportunity cost of time spent), and the presence of “free” or “nearly-free” alternatives has an impact.

Amanda Palmer (Photo by McWonthelottery, cc-by-sa license)

In another field heavily hit by price pressure related to digital distribution, Amanda Palmer writes about why she’s not afraid to ask for money:

artists need to make money to eat and to continue to make art.

artists used to rely on middlemen to collect their money on their behalf, thereby rendering themselves innocent of cash-handling in the public eye.

artists will now be coming straight to you (yes YOU, you who want their music, their films, their books) for their paychecks.
please welcome them. please help them. please do not make them feel badly about asking you directly for money.
dead serious: this is the way [it] is going to work from now on and it will work best if we all embrace it and don’t fight it.

Amanda and Chris are both in a difficult position, trying to demonstrate consistently the value of something intangible and make their living from it. Both demonstrate that stepping into new territory – experimenting with new revenue models, new ways of sharing value with communities, and new ways of interacting with audience(s) around intangibles like art and knowledge – isn’t some magic path that enables you to avoid all the thorny questions about value. If anything, Chris and Amanda are leaping headfirst into the storm, trying out new ways of sharing value and determining cost, and in the process hitting these issues head on.

Who gets to set the value of an experience? The performer? The audience?

What happens when the audience values the experience differently than the performer or organizer? What if you determined the value of a conference after attending it, rather than before?

I know I’ve been to many a “professional conference” where if I could I’d have demanded a refund, or felt like my time would be best served by walking out rather than staying put for the complete conference. I’ve also been to (and helped organize) “free” conferences that were packed with value.

Similarly, I’ve paid for CDs or concerts which ended up being disappointing, and seen free concerts or downloaded free music (legally!) from artists who blew me away. The link between cost and value is tenuous at best, which is something I think most consumers know intuitively.

Which brings us full circle to free and open source software. (The ambiguity of “free” is one of the reasons some prefer the term “open source” – though for others this is the problem with “open source” – that it lacks the key ideological valence of “free”).

Libre (Photo by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³, cc-by-sa license)

Understanding the true value of free and open source software means recognizing two key aspects:

1. It isn’t just that you have access to the software without cost, it’s that you also have access to the source code, enabling you to examine, understand, and modify its behavior to suit your needs
2. It isn’t just that you can obtain software under an open source license, but that there is a community attached to that code, in which you are invited to participate. (Though, to be fair, not all open source communities are equally open – some commercial open source companies do limit participation in various ways)

If the dominant reason for your interest in FOSS is that it will be free of charge, you will likely end up disappointed. (This is equally true of folks for whom the primary reason to attend a BarCamp or PodCamp is the free or cheap price rather than the conversation and open space approach to coordinating content).

If, on the other hand, you’re interested in being more able to experiment, being more agile in your ability to stand up new experiences and launch new sites quickly, and being less tied to traditional “lock-in” licensing agreements, you will find much to love in open source platforms and solutions built on them.

Just don’t forget that value is being exchanged, even if costs are not.

You may not be paying for access to the source code, but that doesn’t mean you should not expect to invest in all the other aspects of the solution. (The expression “free as puppies” is sometimes used to draw this distinction – you will need to manage, support, and maintain any solution you build or acquire, which you can do yourself or pay someone else to do for you).

Street Performer Gets A Tip, Photo by ceajaegirl, cc-by license)

Google’s new offering, SideWiki, makes Brands in Public look very web 1.0. Why make consumers come to a third party site just to see all the comments about a brand, when you could put them right next to the brand’s site?

SideWiki, which requires installation of the Google Toolbar, lets you add comments to any web page. You can comment on the page as a whole or on specific highlighted text within the page.

Here, for example, is the Ford Motor Company home page with SideWiki showing (click for full size):

Ford.com with Sidewiki comments showing

Those of you who’ve been “on the internet” for a while will recognize the concept – it’s not really a new idea, having been tried by Third Voice (in 1999!), Me.dium, and even Microsoft (“Smart Tags” anyone?).

However, it now has the force of Google behind it – and it links those comments to your Google Profile, providing a nice centralized view of your activity, as well as the ability to share those comments via email, Twitter, and Facebook.

Will brands rebel, chafing at the idea of random internet users leaving post-its all over their carefully controlled and designed brand presences? (See the discussion at Google Webmaster Help – only way is to block all users with the Google Toolbar, which is rather like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face).

Will brands embrace the opportunity, adding SideWiki into their social media monitoring tools, responding to comments, and claiming the top spot on all their pages? (Sidewiki allows the page owner to rank comments, including putting the official page owner note at the top of the list).

Jeff Jarvis at first saw Danger in Sidewiki, writing:

Google is trying to take interactivity away from the source and centralize it. This isn’t like Disqus, which enables me to add comment functionality on my blog. It takes comments away from my blog and puts them on Google. That sets up Google in channel conflict vs me. It robs my site of much of its value (if the real conversation about WWGD? had occurred on Google instead of at Buzzmachine, how does that help me?). On a practical level, only people who use the Google Toolbar will see the comments left using it and so it bifurcates the conversation and puts some of it behind a hedge. Ethically, this is like other services that tried to frame a source’s content or that tried to add advertising to a site via a browser . . . .

So this goes contrary to Google’s other services – search, advertising, embeddable content and functionality – that help advantage the edge. This is Google trying to be the center.

One can definitely see Google asserting a direct relationship with the end user here, and disintermediating the hosting site – whether you provide comments or not Sidewiki will provide them for you.

It feels different than Disqus or the other examples since it happens “on” your domain – or at least appears to. Is there some fundamental line crossed when third parties operate on your domain without your consent?

If so, what about GreaseMonkey, or AdBlock Plus, or Stylish, or any of the other browser plugins which change the look and feel or functionality of sites?

Sidewiki is yet another reminder that the user is in control of the experience, not the marketing team – how will brands react?

You can find that plugin here: Twitter Tools StatusNet (and should be able to find it soon on wordpress.org).

What I hadn’t realized at the time was just how Twitter Tools itself worked, and what that meant about the StatusNet plugin.

Twitter Tools follows all of your tweets, not just those which you enter via WordPress or generate as new blog post notifications. What this means is that using Twitter Tools in combination with the StatusNet plugin, everything you post on Twitter gets also posted to the StatusNet instance you’ve configured.

Everything you post on Twitter, regardless of it’s source: desktop client, SMS, web client, etc.

This means you’ve got to be careful. If you use Identi.ca, for example, and have your Identi.ca account configured to cross post to Twitter (which is a popular option) you’ll create a loop. You post to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, where Twitter Tools finds it and (with my plugin in place) cross posts to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, and so on (repeat until someone tells you your account has gone crazy).

So, you’ve got to decide which service (Twitter or StatusNet) you intend to actually post to, and which you want automatically fed cross posts.

• Post to Twitter, auto-cross-post to StatusNet. This is what I’ve decided to do. I post to twitter, through all the usual methods, and I let Twitter Tools cross post my tweets to Identi.ca. I have different friends/followers on each, and this way the conversation gets shared.
• Post to StatusNet, auto-cross-post to Twitter. This you can do with existing StatusNet instances, and if you do, be sure NOT to install the StatusNet plugin for Twitter Tools.

Hope some of you find the option useful.

Control! (Photo by Faramarz Hashemi, cc-by license)

One of the principles of the assembled web says:

Your brand is not what you say it is, but what your prospects, customers, partners, and employees say it is. In short, your brand is what the Internet says it is. You influence this not through marketing but through creating appropriate experiences and getting users exposed to those positive experiences. (Micro-interactions are ultimately assembled into and become brands).

One site which demonstrates this quite well is Noah Brier’s Brand Tags which presents the user with a brand and asks for a one word (or phrase) tag. The results for BBC, for example, include (in descending order of priority):

news, british, tv, quality, england, television, reliable, english, smart, bbc, boring, radio, top gear, intelligent, serious

Whereas Fox News gets these results (again in descending order of priority):

biased, conservative, news, lies, republican tv, liars, right wing, bias, crap, evil, propaganda, boring, simpsons

Interesting that both end up with “boring,” though I suspect the BBC is happier with its results than Fox News. (Yes, of course, it’s not a fair sample, since the population drawn to Brand Tags may not be representative of the whole population – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t meaningful.)

There’s also a battle mode, in which two brands are presented and the user chooses which “wins”:

Brand Tags in Battle Mode - Which Brand Winds?

Current winners on the leaderboard? Adidas, Google, Pixar, Apple, BMW, Nike, Lego, Coca-Cola, YouTube, and Ferrari make up the top 10.

This week, Seth Godin and Squidoo launched something they call Brands in Public, which is essentially a microsite containing aggregated information about a specific brand from throughout the web, offering the brand owner the opportunity to respond (albeit for a cost). As a starter set, they created 200 “sample pages” for major brands.

Filter Control (Photo by JavierPsilocybin, cc-by license)

Godin claimed the pages offered not exactly control, but an opportunity to influence brand perception:

You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time.

The Squidoo offering would bring together what users are saying about your brand throughout the web:

If your brand wants to be in charge of developing this page, it will cost you $400 a month. And once [we build] the page, the left hand column belongs to you. You can post responses, highlight blog posts, run contests or quizzes. You can publicly have your say right next to the constant stream of information about your brand (information that’s currently all over the web–and information you can’t “take down” or censor). You can respond, lead and organize. If a crisis hits, your page will be there, ready for you to speak up. If your fans are delighted, your page makes it easy for them to chime in and speak up on sites around the web.

Of course, not all brands were so happy about the fact that Squidoo had created this centralized place to find feedback about them. Meghan Keane of Econsultancy put it the most bluntly (Give Squidoo $400 a month. Or your brand gets it):

Squidoo is providing a forum for brands to monitor, control and influence their reputation online. But rather than letting brands set up their own pages, Squidoo is doing it for them and dangling control over the site for the $400 monthly fee.

If that price sounds like a threat, it is. If Brands in Public becomes a space where people go to learn about brands, it would be in a company’s best interest to influence the way they’re pictured there. It’s up to them to decide if it’s worth paying Squidoo $4800 a year to influencethe way they look in the space.

As a result of the criticism (of which the above was just a single sample), Godin and Squidoo have changed course, and will be only setting up Brand in Public pages for brands which request them. Godin explains:

One way we tried to encourage that was to build 200 sample pages, pages brands could adopt. Alas, some people felt that this was inappropriate, so we’ve recalibrated and we’ll take those pages down before the end of the day.

When a brand wants a page, we’ll build it, they’ll run it and we’ll both have achieved our goals.

So is it band hijacking (taking over control without permission) to set up such a focused page? Isn’t that essentially what all the real time search engines already do, under the radar?

Compare the search results from, for example, Spezify for a brand against what would have been on the Brands in Public page: isn’t the only different the claim to offer some opportunity to respond?

Is the problem rather that the Brands in Public pages offered too little value, in terms of what influence they would enable a brand to exert?

How different is this from the model of Get Satisfaction, which creates a community around given products or services and offers product/service owners the opportunity to participate? (Check, for example, the Nike Community which is actually supported by Zappos not Nike). I don’t believe GetSatisfaction gets permission from brands to enable their products and services to be discussed – is that brandjacking?

How should brands attempt to influence the perception customers, prospects, employees, and partners have of them, and share freely across the web?

I tweeted the other day what I think is a better way of completing that sentence, and I’m reposting it here in hopes someone finds it interesting and starts to spread it:

If Facebook were a country, the citizens would have revolted and demand a better terms of service already!

Alright, I didn’t tweet it quite that way, but I like that wording better and it still fits in 140 characters.

How would you finish the sentence?

If Facebook were a country . . . .

Or maybe, what other memes should we start based on the same structure:

If Twitter were a country . . .

If LinkedIn were a country . . .

Think Outside the Box (Photo by debaird™, cc-by-sa license)

On the distribution front, one of my favorite track sessions was “Joining the Party: Publishers Can Play and Prosper in the Social Media Sandbox,” during which Alan Levvy from BlogTalkRadio said:

Of course content’s got to be everywhere, because audience is everywhere.

I also found Sang Kim’s discussion of how communities built by brands can leverage personalization (another much hyped technology of the late 90s returns) to really encourage folks to engage, by recommending groups and discussions that seem relevant based on user profile or user action before registration.

In one of the keynotes, Darrell Huston from Microsoft showed off what they called a “multiscreen” experience branded for Harry Potter – on Web, XBox, Surface, and mobile phone. Interesting stuff, albeit quite clearly a product demo of the Microsoft World. (I couldn’t help but tweet out a link to the Surface parody which came out at the same time as the original product).

The whole notion, central to the Assembled Web, that the days of artificial scarcity, ignorance arbitrage, and driving eyeballs to sites are over was heard throughout the conference, really. The world now is all about getting your brand, your content, and your interactions or transactions in front of people where they are.

The goal is to be ubiquitous and useful, not to interrupt and distract – and this is true whether you’re a consumer brand, a business-to-business enterprise, or a media company.

Ubiquity (Photo by Mike Willis, cc-by license)

On the innovation front, another good track session was the horribly mis-titled “The Most Creative Social Media Campaigns of 2009” which really covered best practices and lessons learned from social campaigns, but also broadened into an interesting discussion about generational gaps. I worried at first this would descend into a “the kids are crazy” versus “the old folks don’t get social” discussion – one I particularly hate as I’m demographically old but behaviorally young in that equation – but it actually evolved into a nuanced discussion of mentoring, cross-generational understanding, and the business of retaining the creativity and innovation of a startup while scaling into a bigger more established firm.

Again, later, on the main stage, the discussion kept coming back to the notion of innovation as being that which will distinguish the survivors from the causalities in this difficult economic market. (If the theme of day one was that this is an age of uncertainty, I’d say the theme of day 2 was that innovation is the way out of that uncertainty, or at least the best possible response to it).

There was a panel which asked whether Madison Avenue had a future or not, but given that it was composed of senior agency execs, it’s not too surprising that they felt it did – so long as they kept the focus on getting rewarded for innovative new ideas.

Personally this made me wonder why it is that we so consistently associate innovation with startups – is it just a strong pro-entrepreneurial bent to US business culture? Is there something about an organization of more than say 50 employees that makes it impossible to innovate? (Or is the magic number more like 500?) Was the undercurrent I was feeling more about a suggestion that large advertising agencies can’t or don’t innovate, because they’re too focused on media planning and traditional creative?

Innovate (Photo by Uncleweed, cc-by-sa license)

The Assembled Web is not experienced as a set of discrete web applications and sites, neatly separated from each other and organized into categories: it’s an indiscriminate field of content, functionality, and people interacting in multiple contexts and in unpredictable ways: like life.

New web applications are assembled from other projects/applications/frameworks/services, sometimes on the server, sometimes in the browser, sometimes in the cloud. People’s accounts, identities, and networks come with them across sites, applications, and contexts.

How should enterprises not only come to grips with this bewildering confusion but thrive in it?

By embracing the assembled web and participating fully in it.

Assembled Web First Principles:

1. You should always be thinking multi-site, multi-interface, multi-project. If you think you will (always) only have one interface to any given set of content of functionality, you’re mistaken, and you will paint yourself into a corner.
   
   
2. Success on the web is no longer (if it ever really was) about driving traffic to your site, or keeping eyeballs there once they arrive. It’s about engaging audiences everywhere they already are. It’s about improving the size, quality, and velocity of your “digital footprint.” Ubiquity is the target, not exclusivity. The danger is not that people will say bad things about you but that you will be ignored.
   
   
3. Your brand is not what you say it is, but what your prospects, customers, partners, and employees say it is. In short, your brand is what the Internet says it is. You influence this not through marketing but through creating appropriate experiences and getting users exposed to those positive experiences. (Micro-interactions are ultimately assembled into and become brands).
   
   
4. Design is critical, and design is not about pretty shiny objects. It’s about usable interfaces, in the sense of traditional HCI (Human Computer Interface) design, visual design, and technical design. Creating usable experiences for users and usable projects for developers are both essential, and to ignore either is to invite failure.
   
   
5. The internet itself, like the *nix operating systems on which it (almost entirely) runs, is a set of small pieces loosely joined. Every project you do must be composed of smaller discrete components communicating with each other. The corollary is that every project you do must also be composeable or consumable by other projects – including projects you know nothing about. This is true across multiple projects (within your organization and outside it) as well as over time within a given project.
   
   
6. The difference between “behind the firewall” and “out in the cloud” is trending toward zero. Same for the difference between employees and contractors, customers and prospects, competitors and partners. If you’re still thinking in terms of intranet, internet, and extranet, remember that the difference between them is (from a technology point of view) entirely arbitrary. What differentiates them is business processes and decisions.
   
   
7. There is no defensible reason to invent a proprietary standard wherever an open standard exists. In fact, even where no open standard exists, great efforts should be extended to create one, rather than implement a proprietary version.
   
   
8. Working in isolation from the rest of the internet is inherently limiting and dangerous. This is true whether you’re a one-developer shop or a 5000 developer IT department in a Fortune 100 company. Collaborative engineering with appropriate participants (which almost always means open source licensing arrangements) is required. Why continue to work alone now that the Internet exists?
   
   
9. Consumer Technology is beating Enterprise IT, and soundly. If your “in-house” IT can’t compete with a consumer-grade provider available “on the web” you need to catch up and compete or concede the function.
   
   
10. Small incremental releases are essential. It isn’t just a question of not putting too many eggs in one basket – it’s also about lowering the cost of failure and therefore raising the level of innovation. Don’t accept quarterly releases of functionality, or even monthly. Web applications should change hourly or at least daily. The web is live, not pre-recorded.

Like the original, it’s long (9:21 in this case) and as Kawaja said in presenting it, lends itself to the elegiac mode – he wouldn’t quite say media is dead but it’s hard to write a catchy lyric about the era in which large mainstream media companies faced downward revenue pressure:

Interesting video for the luncheon keynote at a conference on online media, marketing, and advertising – but it hits on much of the industry’s current malaise.

The good news, such as it is, is that John Battelle challenged Kawaja to write an upbeat song on the state of the media – send your suggestions to @tkawaja.

See Also: Wall Street Journal coverage of the song

Now that Twitter Tools is at 2.x, Alex has provided an API for enabling additional posting.

So I wrote a plugin for his plugin: Twitter Tools – StatusNet.

It leverages the API he provided to post your tweets (on new blog post creation or via the sidebar form) to a StatusNet instance (default is Identi.ca but it can be easily changed to another). (In case you missed the announcement, the software formerly known as Laconica, which powers Identi.ca but also other sites, is now known as StatusNet).

Given that many StatusNet instances also already cross-post to Twitter, my plugin enables you to suppress the actual posting to Twitter that Twitter Tools does. (You can have notices posted to both Twitter and your StatusNet instance, or just your StatusNet instance without Twitter).

What it doesn’t do is provide all the functionality Twitter Tools provides – digests of your notices, a sidebar widget containing latest notices. If you cross-post to twitter you can use all that functionality from Twitter Tools natively.

If you’d like to replace Twitter throughout Twitter Tools with your favorite StatusNet instance, you can hack away at Alex’s plugin directly – the same basic concepts I outlined before would still apply.

How to Be Useful (Photo by Robert Banh, cc-by license)

I used to be fond of saying that the best advice for content-centric businesses on the web was a simple commandment:

Above all, be interesting – everything else will follow from that

Being interesting is still necessary, of course – if you’re trying to create a content-centric business and your content isn’t interesting, you’re in big trouble.

But is being interesting sufficient? In an attention economy, where interesting content is ubiquitous, and what’s truly rare is the users’ attention? In an era where every company is a media company?

In the era of the Assembled Web, where consumers expect to find content, community, and commerce pervasively and persistently throughout their online experience, is it enough to just be interesting?

I think we’ve got to set our sights higher than just being interesting, and aim to be useful. The new commandment might be something more like:

Above all, be useful. Provide value – what your audiences understand as utility on their terms – and everything else will follow from that.

This applies to companies which are only now realizing they are media companies as well as formerly-only-media-companies who are now realizing they need to be more. Put differently, if every company is a media company, that those businesses which were already media companies also need to think about what other utility they provide above and beyond the experience of interesting content.

This Shop is Useful (Photo by Robyn Gallagher, cc-by license)

Two quick examples, from the world of iPhone applications. (The same tenet – above all, be useful – would apply equally well to Facebook applications, iGoogle widgets, and plain old web applications).

Whole Foods’ recipes application not only uses the phone’s location to do traditional store locating, it also allows you to search recipes based on what ingredients you’ve got at hand.

Whole Foods' recipes application provides a store locator, but also lets you locate recipes matching what you have on hand

Sit or Squat (sponsored by Charmin) also takes advantage of location to help you locate the nearest public restroom, but adds community in the form of user ratings and comments. If you’ve ever been traveling in another city and in search of a clean bathroom (maybe even one with a changing table) you can imagine how useful such an app can be.

Charmin's sponsorship of Sit-or-Squat provides a branded presence for them but also adds value for the user

Both applications also, of course, provide a branded presence on the users phone to their sponsoring companies – but that’s secondary to the primary utility they provide.

As you evaluate web strategies and offerings, what role does utility play? What difference would it make for content-centric businesses to shift focus from “create compelling content” to “be useful”?

Useful Arts (Photo by dipfan, cc-by license)

It’s truly a must-read if you’re interested in how large brands are engaging their customers through social media. In the Introduction, Ben Elowitz (of WetPaint) and Charlene Li (of Altimeter) claim:

While much has been written questioning the value of social media, this landmark study has found that the most valuable brands in the world are experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement. The relationship is apparent and significant: socially engaged companies are in fact more financially successful.

So now we know it pays to be social, but it is important to note that by “social,” we’re talking about deep engagement, not merely having a presence.

But there’s an interesting rhetorical slip there – in the space between “a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement” and “it pays to be social” we’ve crossed the gap between correlation and causation.

First, the correlation, which is well encapsulated in this set of graphs:

Correlation of Social Media Engagement and Financial Performance, from The ENGAGEMENTdb Report

So it certainly seems that among their sample at least, the companies which are the most engaged – the Mavens and the Butterflies – are experiencing consistently better financial performance (as revenue and as gross margin) than the least engaged – the Wallflowers and Selectives.

Photo by avlxyz, cc-by license

But does this mean that “it pays to be social”? Are the most engaged brands financially successful as a result of their engagement in social media? Are the most financially successful brands more likely to engage in social media (perhaps because they’ve got money to spend or at least less downward pressure on related budgets)? Or, perhaps, are high degrees of social media engagement and positive financial results BOTH correlated to some third variable not identified, like superior services and products, strategic leadership, corporate cultures of openness, or something else?

The reality is that based on the data presented in the study, we don’t know.

It may help to recall your first-year statistics class in college, and the correlation between ice cream sales and murder rates. Murder rates rise and fall in concert with ice cream sales, but that hasn’t lead to urban ice cream bans (at least not that i know of). Instead, the general theory is that both murder rates and ice cream sales are positively correlated with warmer weather. (Good summary here).

Am I suggesting that the Altimeter Group and WetPaint need to go back to first-year stats? No – they’re smart researchers and clearly understand the distinction, writing in the body of the report (page 7):

While these findings do not necessarily imply a causal relationship, they still hold powerful implications. Social media engagement and financial success work together to perpetuate a healthy business cycle: a customer oriented mindset stemming from deep social interaction allows a company to identify and meet customer needs in the marketplace, generating superior profits. The financial success of the company, in turn, allows further investment in engagement to build even better customer knowledge, thereby creating even more profits — and the cycle continues.

This suggests a more nuanced reading at once more accurate and less surprising. Companies taking the approach of ignoring customer feedback, and producing products and services without a deep understanding of what the market wants, are less likely to be successful. Similarly, and at the same time, companies who take some portion of the profits and invest in ongoing relationship with customers are more likely to continue to produce successful products.

Which, in fact, is exaclty what makes the report truly useful. The qualitative, best practices section, which covers Starbucks, Toyota, SAP, and Dell, is where the real value is.

Figuring out how your enterprise can leverage social media for business success is a process which requires significant customization to your industry, markets, products and services, brand legacy (or lack thereof), competitive landscape, financial state, and broader business strategy, but looking at the examples of highly engaged companies (who are also financially successful) is a good place to start.

Social software is stuff that gets spammed

Well if that’s the case, now even share-my-powerpoints site SlideShare (follow me there) is officially social.

Here’s an email I got yesterday via SlideShare:

Hi jeckman,

jane209 sent you a private message on SlideShare.

******
hi I am jane,single girl looking for honest and nice person, whom I can partner with.I don’t care about your color or ethnicity.I’m sending you this beautiful mail,with a wish for much happiness. I am looking forward to hear from you. Write me on (janegab42@yahoo.com)God bless. thanks jane
******

You can reply to jane209’s message by clicking here.

Now, as much as I like the sentiment that Jane209 is looking for someone with whom she can “partner,” that she doesn’t care about my color or ethnicity, and that she wishes me much happiness, I’m going to have to go with the “report as spam” link on that one.

Photo by ehnmark, cc-by license

I’ve submitted two panel proposals this year – each is described below with a voting link.

The first is Who Pays for Content?: Re-evaluating Paywalls. As described in the proposal:

Everyone knows Stewart Brand’s statement that “information wants to be free,”. Less well known is the other half: “information also wants to be expensive.” If no one pays for content, and no one clicks on ads, how will we fund online initiatives, applications, and sites? What could drive users to pay for content? What has, historically, and how can we learn from that?

I think this is a very timely discussion that hits at the core issues for SXSW attendees – what funds the work so many of us do on the web? What models other than advertising and pay-for-content will work in the assembled web?

The other is What’s in it for me? Open Source and Interaction Design. This builds on the video podcast I did as part of last year’s extended content program. As an open source developer and advocate who has also long been a promoter of the value of interaction design, I want to broaden awareness within the interaction design community about why licensing matters. From the proposal:

Open source advocacy has generally focused on the perspective of developers, for whom access to source code is a real need and the opportunity to change or extend functionality is a practical possibility. But what about the interaction design community? In this talk I explore why interaction designers should care about free and open source software.

You’ll have to register to vote, of course. You can also leave comments here or in the panel picker itself.

See you in Austin in March!

The goal of the presentation- a sanitized (client references removed) version of one given to a client this week – was to talk about:

• Social Media (and specifically how to get started with it)
• Facebook (and other social network applications)
• The iPhone (and other mobile platforms)

It certainly loses a bit in not having the voice over – sorry I couldn’t record it but much of the discussion was really client specific and less useful outside their context – if I get time maybe I’ll do a walk through and record a voiceover.

I tried to place the requested agenda items in the context of what we’ve been calling “The Assembled Web” for the past couple of years, connecting the specific social computing initiatives in a broader framework, one which involves:

1. The convergence of content, commerce, and community – as they grow out of the previous web eras
2. The notion of the Digital Footprint – taking your brand presence (across all three Cs) to where users are, and engaging them throughout the Internet

I hope you find it useful – please do comment here or on SlideShare.