Image via Wikipedia

On the web everything is in the present, but that doesn’t mean it is presently relevant or even accurate. Timestamps are an essential component of any online content you create.

Timestamps are enormously important to participants with online content. While the content you are authoring may not always have relevance, it will always be on the web, sometimes even after you think you’ve removed it from the web. Numerous sites run archives, others simply scrape content and some folks may even print things out.

Your work may live on after you are gone. However, it will become a useless mess if you fail to provide the proper context. That context is the exact date. 

You may think this is a non-issue, but think back for a moment. If you work and play on the internet you’ve probably re-shared, commented on or been surprised by something you thought was new content but was, in fact, years old. Think about how you felt when it happened. Even if you never re-shared stuff from this date last year by accident, just reading it and briefly thinking it was something new probably made you feel a little silly.

Why alienate possible participants like that?

Any content management system worth its salt has to timestamp its content internally. It isn’t difficult to make that meta-information show up on your site. Some organizations get it, like the Guardian, who removed words like today and tomorrow from web reports. There are many others that don’t however.

I have frequently stumbled upon sites that don’t list the date at all or, just as useless, only list the month and day. Just as bad are the sites which publish multiple posts a day and don’t timestamp them with the date and time of publication. I can’t trust content that comes from these sites, and neither can you, because it is impossible to tell if it is current or relevant.

If you run your own blog, work with a news organization or are just occasionally posting content online do everyone a favor and put the month, day and year right there under the title and author. You’ll be helping to build a better internet.

Related posts:

1. Site upgrade

by welshkaren via Flickr

This is a synthesis post. Since I’m trying to build new ideas that all function in the same space (narrative design/transmedia), here are some ideas combining previous post concepts from this week.

I know I haven’t posted a lot this week, so it’ll be a short one.

In my previous post this week dealing with the downsides of a system like DISQUS or Facebook comments I focused on the issues of SEO and historical record. But I think that there is another commenting issue to address. Comments on a blog post or article are narrative-additive artifacts. This means that comments are part of the overall narrative of your post.

This is true in a general sense, though is not always applicable in the specific sense. Trolling comments, spam or the occasional crazy don’t add any real value or substance to the narrative. However, there are constructive comments, some addressing the post’s content directly, some replying because of a mention in a post, or just a conversation around the content.

With content being built around your post, it becomes an evolving narrative. There are possible tellable events growing right there on your page.

As I discussed in the previous post, a narrative is all about how we tell a story. Comments may and should become part of that. Another reason we need to be even more wary about giving up our control (and possibly losing) site comments.

Did my blogging this week make you think of anything cool? Tell me in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Friday synthesis post: Soundscapes and Bookstores
2. Artifacts: building dimension into your narrative [Narrative Artifacts: 1 of 4]
3. Catch up on Narrative Artifacts

Image via CrunchBase

External commenting systems have become a popular way to increase engagement on a website. But it means giving up your comments to live offsite. What do we lose and is it worth it?

Both DISQUS and Facebook Comments have become immensely popular since release, and rightfully so. Their ease of use for participants on your site is unparalleled and Facebook comments strips away the anonymity that can make internet commenting such a cesspool.

However, by implementing these systems we, as site owners, are giving our comments away. They now live on a server we have nothing to do with. The comments are no longer really connected with our content. If you want to keep the comments, which are arguably a measure of the value of your site, you are forever locked into using these systems.

If you were to move your website, change your URL structure, or change your blogging system these comments often do not move with you.

Facebook comments does away with the ability to link to commenters’ own sites, a disincentive, even if it does cut down on spam.

If you worry about search engine optimization, it seems that Facebook Comments are useless in this regard and, even if DISQUS does offer a link to a commenter’s social media or personal site, it is still limited.

There are plenty of other SEO opportunities that use of these systems excludes you from. Just look at one of the plugins I run on this blog, SEO Super Comments, to get an idea of what you are missing out on.

What if either or both of these systems were to suddenly disappear? These companies provide both services for free and they could potentially be taken away at a corporate whim. Think about this, DISQUS won’t even guarantee you uptime unless you pay the $999/month package.

The most troubling aspect of using these systems is simply this: by using Facebook comments or DISQUS you give up both full control and ownership of the comments on your own site. Control you probably should keep.

Even worse, it seems you will never be able to take that control back.

I know this all sounds somewhat dire. However, professional news organizations are beginning to adopt these systems. These organizations are responsible for recording history. As news gathering has moved to the web, I believe that comments are part of that history. A record of how the average man is reacting to the way our world is changing. A record that news organizations are apparently giving up without a thought.

There are wide implications to giving up your comments to an external system and if you are considering it, you should think long and hard on the topic. Will you be using the same content management system forever? Are you willing to give up control?

My context.

When I moved from Blogger to this WordPress install on my server, I had assumed that my comments came with me. Others who have made the move seemed to have no problem. It was only when looking at one of my more popular posts when I realized that almost all my comments had disappeared.

The comments still reside on DISQUS, but there is no way to export them or, even if I were to install DISQUS on this site, re-attach them to their appropriate posts. These comments and the conversations I had on those posts are permanently lost from public view.

Is that what you want for your own content?

EDIT: Please read DISQUS’s excellent reply below. It is worth noting that all my dealings with DISQUS have been uniformly positive in the past.

Related articles

• Mediaite’s Comment System Will Be Changing To Disqus (mediaite.com)
• Handing comments over to Facebook is a double-edged sword (gigaom.com)
• Disqus 101 (djfupdates.com)
• Do blog commenting systems matter? (arikhanson.com)
• Traffic Report: Why pageviews and engagement are up at Latimes.com (niemanlab.org)

Related posts:

1. Friday synthesis post: Are comments part of your narrative?
2. Facebook Bans News of SpeedDate.com
3. A Few Good WordPress Plugins [Update]

Image via Wikipedia

Entrepreneurs are often told to fail quickly, but when you’re a writer, your primary product is content. What can you do to build the same mentality into written text?

When start-ups seek to fail frequently, they’re really aiming to try new things and to not be afraid to throw out what doesn’t work. If you publish often, the same mentality should apply.

1. Explore your topic.

Don’t be afraid to go obscure and see what works. You can find out if your audience is interested through Google Analytics, tracking click-through rates or using tools like Lijit or Apture which track searches people make on your site.

As you develop more content, you can build on what interests you and your audience. Don’t be afraid to throw out odd or off-beat content and don’t be afraid to go another direction if there is no response.

2. Take a stand.

Emotion-free analysis does little to engage readers. Take a look at any media outlet and you can see the mix of opinion with reporting. Find something that you can get passionate about and write about it. Feel our your topic and see if there is a place where you can carve out your own stake. Run your content by others, see what topics interest them and where you can build your own stake.

3. Be controversial.

The web is a notorious echo chamber. There may be times when there’s something that you and masses disagree on. Don’t be afraid to take them on. If you are saying it, there are probably other people thinking it.

4. Modify your style.

The internet has a style book, so do most writers, but when you are building your own content you’ve got to find your own path. Examine your text to see what sort of unique phrases you use and build on them to make your content stand out. Establish a dialog with readers through your writing, building on what creates responses and throwing away the stuff that doesn’t.

Related posts:

1. 6 Ways Evernote Fails and the 1 Reason I Don’t Uninstall It
2. Old vs New Media – Creative Commons, Wikipeidia and Post Scraping – What is Grand Theft Content?

Image by ShashiBellamkonda via Flickr

Someone realized that TBD was doing the worst thing in the world for Allbritton, telling the competition that they could compete.

The cut-backs issued to Allbritton Communication’s grand experiment TBD were surprising. First the outlet cut community profit-sharing, than Allbritton paired the organization down to just a website and put it under the purview of a TV guy, finally, the site received enormous staff cuts. It’s clear that the site is now pretty much dead and the ambitious community hub and hyperlocal media convergence that Jim Brady planned for will never see the light of day again.

The reason Allbritton shuttered TBD has been a point of speculation. While the assumption is advertising, it doesn’t seem like Allbritton really gave them a chance to try. There have been other speculations as well. TBD garnered world-wide attention for its novel approach and Allbritton has succeed with new media projects before. There was a lot that TBD did right. So what did they do wrong?

TBD made the ultimate mistake, empowering potential competition.

The Allbritton experiment offered ad placement on local blogs, together with a revenue sharing scheme. In reality, the split was not very good. TBD got the lion’s share of revenue. However, it did succeed in substantially changing some bloggers’ mentality . For many, the idea that their website, that thing they did out of passion, could be worth anything was a surprise. In addition, the fact that TBD highlighted their content, meant that someone was actually reading.

Aggregation of news is a great idea, but there is a significant tripping point when your own horse is in the race, you are creating a site in which your own content competes for eyeballs with content made by outsiders. TBD put the content created by bloggers in on the same level as media made by various Allbritton outlets.

It seems clear that TBD was empowering the local bloggers that made up their community. While this might be a great idea in theory, trying to do so from within an established network of media outlets presents a whole host of conflicts of interest for the parent company.

I found out about TBD’s dropping of community advertising as soon as it happened, but not from a usual source. I monitor the local blogger meetups as part of my job and a member of the group sent out an e-mail to the list talking about the decision TBD had made to drop the service. Within minutes, the next few e-mails sent to the list were all about new ways to monetize blogs and where to find sponsors.

Was TBD’s ‘failure’ due to being unable to monetize in a short time, conflicts between staff silos, or brand failure? Perhaps these all contributed to the great experiment’s downfall. But I think someone at the top realized that all of TBD’s community aggregation and promotion was creating competition with Allbritton’s established media.

By empowering bloggers, TBD was going to make it harder for Allbritton to make money, simply by creating a larger number of venues for advertising.

I think that this potential competition for already difficult to sell online advertising played a serious role in Allbritton’s  decision to shut down TBD’s main operations.  Taking this perspective, their actions make sense; the move to decrease community focus, the shut down of community advertising before everything else and the eventual elimination of almost all of the community managers. There wasn’t enough time to evaluate if TBD could sell ads, but there was enough to see the positive reaction of the community and make assumptions on where it could lead.

TBD was doing something great, it was elevating the online community it covered and building bloggers up into responsible community journalists. Through process of selection, TBD influenced the community blogs creating something like beat reporters and it helped them understand that their work was worth more than a few Google ads. It would be hard to think of something more impressive, or more threatening to an established multi-outlet media company. Though TBD’s layoffs were a sad day for the state of journalism, from Allbritton’s perspective, I can see how it would be the right choice.

In retrospect, I think that part of the reason that AOL picked up Huffington Post was because it realizes that it faces the same frightening conundrum as Patch spreads. By soliciting community contributions and paying community members for freelance content, Patch is essentially training the next generation of citizen journalists. Rather than give them the opportunity to start-up their own little outlets, diluting advertising potential, I suspect that we’ll soon see a platform for local Huffington Post-style sites through Patch. By providing citizens with a platform and publicity AOL will face less of a threat that contributors might striking out on their own.  Not to mention, the content will be on AOL’s platform, so they pretty much own it.

Is there a lesson that future start-ups can take away when seeing TBD’s loss from this perspective? The obvious answer is: don’t try being an aggregator when your parent company owns multiple media outlets in the area. There is also a less obvious path for the future.  Own the platform.

Multi-site content management systems are so easy to set up these days. I can think of at least three off the top of my head. Setting up a business model around this isn’t hard, establish yourself, give community members easy entrance and exit with their existing content to the platform, provide them with better tools than they could get at Blogger or WordPress.com, promote the hell out of them, advertise against their content. There is no reason why HuffPo’s model couldn’t be adapted to local.

It’s clear that TBD’s biggest problem was the threat it created by showing people that they need not be part of the church of journalism to create content valuable to the community and earn money with it. They didn’t need to go to journalism school, have a pedigree, or write in AP style. They just need to be dedicated, honest and to create quality content. Considering how many mainstream media journalists seem to lack those very principles these days, it’s clear that empowering citizen journalism was really TBD’s biggest threat.

Your opinions?

Related posts:

1. Huffington Post and AOL: 5 things to take away
2. Old vs New Media – Creative Commons, Wikipeidia and Post Scraping – What is Grand Theft Content?
3. Putting the I in Journalism

Here is a random picture of a cat by Kevin Steele via Flickr. It looked thoughtful, so I thought it might fit.

I’m thinking for Fridays I need to do something different. Perhaps put out a few quick ideas, pulling on previous posts. I’m going to give it a try today and you should tell me what you think down in the comments.

The idea is this synthesis post. Since I’m trying to build new ideas that all function in the same space (narrative design/transmedia), here are some ideas combining previous post concepts.

Considering transmedia and music along with new bookstores:

I was thinking more about the potential use of music and sound to transmit information on a layer usually unused by the media. What about better use in the physical world as well?

Directional speakers are becoming more common. Why not use them to build more sound into the proposed bookstore’s environment? Authors and publishers are creating more audio and video content to accompany books, lets incorporate it into the shopping experience.

I’m not talking about random ads. When you step in front of a shelf filled with an author you can have them talking about their books. You can play podcasts of short stories by the same author. When customers step into a section, they could step into an area that would play recommendations or new releases for that sections.

Twitter chats and narrative-parallel artifacts:

I was wondering about the potential of Twitter-based narrative-parallel artifacts. The concept of the Twitter sidebar (or even the Twitter story) has been pretty well executed by Storify.

What I’d really like to see however, is the implementation of a live Twitter chat with experts around the release of an article. The archive can than be attached. It seems fairly simple, perhaps someone has done it?

Archiving Twitter chats and finding local people on Twitter using FourSquare:

I’d love to see someone do a project archiving and displaying random interactions among local (to each other at least) Twitter users. I bet a collage of them would be pretty interesting to see.

It would be fun to see the emerging minor stories of the normal people around us.

The new bookstore and 750 words:

Consider the following:

• People who read often like to write.
• People who write often write in bookshops.
• People like to show off that they are writing.
• People like using game systems.
• People like NaNoWriMo.

When you sit down in a coffee or bookshop you can log into a local version of 750 words (geo-targeted or something). Watch your word count and everyone else’s word count go up in real-time. Rewards are given every hour or so to fastest writer, writer who targets certain senses, writer who uses the most complex words, etc… Then build timed events using this type of system for NaNoWriMo, give a free something to the first writer to reach the daily targeted word count.

WordPress plugins and narrative-parallel artifacts:

I mentioned it in both articles, but it is worth mentioning again. We need better ways to offer content integrated into text. Amplify is one, as is the Popupper. However, Popupper doesn’t even work very well. This is a golden opportunity for someone to build a useful WordPress plugin. Perhaps I should give it a try?

Did my blogging this week make you think of anything cool? Tell me in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Friday synthesis post: Are comments part of your narrative?
2. Brick-and-mortar bookstores have a future. It’s mobile.
3. 4 Step Social Media Strategy – MEGA [Re-post]

I stumbled across a really nifty tool today called 750 words. As you may have noticed, I’m really trying to increase the amount of writing I do, starting with (hopefully) two blog posts a weekday. However, sometimes you may want to do regular writing without it being public. In comes 750 words.

The site stems from the idea that writing daily is good exercise for the mind and that sometimes you just want to dump your brain into a document without having to worry about coherence, SEO or an audience. It accomplishes its goal handily.

You sign up to the site using Facebook Connect. The user is then presented with what is pretty much white space with a word counter at the bottom of the screen. Then you type. Boom, mission accomplished.

The site has a number of other nifty features. It turns the process into a bit of a game, issuing monthly challenges, assigning points and a leaderboard, and even discovering all sorts of interesting statistics by running a semantic engine over your writing. You can also designate statuses in each post through what is essentially a short-code. You can also receive badges and see how other people (including followed friends) do with their writing.

It can also be set to lock after a period of no activity, so you don’t have to worry about your inner most thoughts being seen by the boss while you are on the way to the bathroom.

All that being said, I think the most beneficial element of the platform is its simplicity. The perfect setting to let the words just flow out. Burn those bad words and when you finally hit something good, you can bring it to the public.

On the other hand, there is always penzu if you are looking for military grade encryption for your thoughts. Of course, the caveat when it comes to ‘privacy’ on the internet is that your data exists on a server somewhere and it is therefore never truly private.

Credit goes to Kevin Loker, from whose tweet I found the site.

No related posts.

Image via Wikipedia

Looking to start your own WordPress site, or just improve a current one? Here are the WordPress plugins that I love best.

After The Deadline

I think that there are very few things, other than real people, that can help you become a better writer. Word definitely does not do it. After The Deadline does. After blogging with After The Deadline over the last two weeks I’ve actually seen my writing improve.

This plugin performs checks on both your grammar, readability and spelling. I highly recommend it.

Akismet

Kill your spam. Just kill it. Then stomp on it so it can never hurt anyone else again.

All in One SEO Pack

Build SEO juice with what is, as far as I can tell, the best plugin for this purpose around.

CommentLuv

Allow your users to automatically link to their latest blog post. I think it’s pretty useful. You should comment below and try it out. Tell me what you think.

Do Follow

Your spam is blocked, so give your commenters some credit and let them get juice from links they post.

FD Feedburner Plugin

Allows you to redirect your RSS feeds to their equivalent on FeedBurner, which is much more friendly. I even use it on this site to redirect individual category feeds.

Google News Sitemap Feed with Multisite Support

Just started using this when my old Sitemap plugin stopped working. Not sure how I feel about it yet. I’m open to suggestions, any better ones out there?

More Fields

I use this to build custom fields for displaying odd, different or unique things in posts. On this blog, it is most prominently used for the subtitle. It is simple and easy to use. Great if you set up a site for non-tech people and want to use custom fields.

podPress

Just the best podcasting plugin.

Popupper

I really like the ability to have little tooltips to add an upper dimension to my posts. This plugin throws out some odd errors and doesn’t allow you to edit pop-ups after you’ve created them. It’s not as good as I’d like, but I haven’t found anything else.

Do you know a better plugin for doing this? Please tell me.

PubSubHubbub

Is this integrated into the WP core now? If it isn’t you should get it. This plugin allows you to push real-time RSS updates to compatible feed readers.

SEO Super Comments

Pumps comments up with extra SEO juice. Not sure how well it works yet, not enough comments.

Sharedaddy

Creates the nifty sharing bar on the bottom of this post. I need to look up the CSS to make it appear on the top. I’d prefer the option to have it show up in both places.

Subscribe to comments

What it says.

Twitterlink Comments

Allows users to input their Twitter handle into the comments field. Once again, a great encouragement to get commenters in theory. So far not working in practice.

upPrev

Allows you to have the nifty slide-out button that appears when you scroll down on a post.

WordPress Mobile Pack

So far the best plugin I’ve found for making your WordPress site mobile compatible. Even makes the back-end mobile friendly.

WPBook

Allows you to create a WordPress app out of your blog.

WP Emphasis

With a double-tap of the shift key you can now link to words or sentences in any of my posts.

WP Super Cache

If you are ever fortunate enough to have an article go viral, this should keep your server from crashing.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

I use it to create better engagement in my RSS feed. It just automatically lists related posts at the end of an article. Pretty useful.

Bonus round!

FeedWordPress is the plugin I use to feed other blogs into my aggregator site at http://aramzs.me.

If you want to embed Tweets frequently, Twitter Blackbird Pie is the way to go.

Eliminated

BackType Connect

BackType decided to go subscription. So they just turned off their plugin without telling anyone or changing anything or giving you any options. I don’t like them anymore. I’m looking at IntenseDebate as an alternative.

Related posts:

1. A Few Good WordPress Toys [List]
2. WordPress Gives in to Google on Real-time RSS
3. Announcing P2 for Kindle! A WordPress theme for notes and collaboration

Image via Wikipedia

It has been a long time since my first introduction to this site. A lot has changed, including the name, my purpose and my topics. I guess it’s time to explain why the site is called HackText and what the point of all this is.

When the blog started, I didn’t understand that the word I wanted to use was transmedia. The concept of building a universe around a narrative, one that is additive, not repetitive. A universe of connected narratives that could appeal to all the senses by taking advantage of the unique media platforms on which they could be build.

As I explored, read and researched using transmedia as my lens, I discovered a number of perceptions of transmedia as a concept:

• Both the media and individuals really want to use transmedia methods in their storytelling.
• People were calling the franchising of content (reusing the same content over multiple formats) transmedia.
• Most seemed to be more interested in fracturing a narrative and scattering it over media platforms then actually creating an additive experience.
• Narrative doesn’t only infuse transmedia concepts, it infuses everything, but people seemed to be missing it.
• Few seem to be fully taking advantage of any media platform, video, interactive or otherwise.
• Those who did try to fully take advantage of the various platforms available rarely met with commercial success.
• There is an ever expanding number of tools and platforms for both creating and consuming texts, but, mostly, we keep publishing the same plain options.

What is a text?

I could try and rephrase this, but Wikipedia just does it better:

A text … is a coherent set of symbols that transmits some kind of informative message. This set of symbols is considered in terms of the informative message’s content, rather than in terms of its physical form or the medium in which it is represented.

Simply put, in the context I’m using a text is the composition of the basic symbols we use to communicate in the form of a narrative.

Why would I want to hack a text?

There are a number of good reasons to hack a text. For one thing, we are stuck in a rut. We have an ever-growing potential to revolutionize the way we create and consume narratives and we just don’t. Even worse, when the rare person makes an attempt, he seems to get shunned. When we get beyond the buzzword, most transmedia attempts lean towards franchises and, even within the multiple storytelling elements, rarely are the media forms used to their full potential.

Part of the new purpose of this blog is to explore (and sometimes test) the ways we can break these traditional media formats open and build transmedia elements on top and inside of standard texts, allowing greater interactivity and building hooks into texts that reach out into the crossing narratives that make up a transmedia world.

Besides that, well-hacked texts can be profitable, especially online, where SEO is a hugely important field and, when done well, builds narrative just as ably as any other technique.

How can we start hacking a text?

Well, that’s what I intend to discover. I believe that there is an overarching set of narrative concepts and techniques that can be applied to texts to create better transmedia. One of the first principles of this theory is narrative artifacts. I hope to discover or research these basic concepts and use them to build up new methodologies for expanding texts with modern technology.

Oh and I hope to apply them, here and elsewhere.

Why Hack Text and not Text Hacker?

The title of this site is an exhortation! Go out and hack text!

Related articles

Related posts:

1. Carnival of Journalism: Hack your life with the Kindle, After the Deadline and more
2. Expanding your narrative with parallels [Narrative Artifacts: 3 of 4]