technology in translation™

field notes: news & resources for re-linking the food chain

2009-08-19T16:07:28-04:00

Thanks for visiting.

I'm blogging here now:
field notes: news & resources for re-linking the food chain.

And tweeting @localorbit

the new york times puts facebook to good use

2009-01-17T11:06:44-05:00

The New York Times has set up a facebook microsite: suggestions for the 44th president.

They set up a "fan page" on facebook and asked people "What should Barack Obama address first as President?" Answers are posted on their "wall" and they pull them into the microsite, organized by five issue areas and a map that shows where commenters live. It's beautiful and simple - I only wish there were some way to easily embed this into a blog post!

Facebook fan pages may not be useful for every businesses or organization, but The Times offers a great example of using facebook effectively, bringing in video content from the paper, connecting to columnist fan pages, listing the "most emailed" articles and offering subscription discounts to fans. It's worth looking at if you have a fan page or are considering setting one up.

facebook virus spreads - no social network is safe

2009-01-17T10:21:56-05:00

We've learned not to open attachments from unknown sources or click on links in questionable email. Social network users now need to pay attention to a new virus that's being spread through social networks.

This doesn't mean you should become an alarmist - just use common sense when you get messages through your social networking site.

The Facebook Virus Spreads - No Social Network is Safe - NYTimes.com

"Koobface" is the name of the Trojan worm that's been making its way through the social networking site Facebook lately, but to the site's users, it's been simply known as "the Facebook virus." That name will soon become a misnomer, though, because the worm is now spreading outside of Facebook's walls to attack other social networks like Bebo, MySpace, Friendster, MyYearbook, and Blackplanet.
...
What's frightening about the spread of this Trojan is not the worm itself - it's really nothing new in terms of malware - but the way its being spread. Over the years people have learned to be suspicious of unknown links and attachments in their emails, so the virus writers turned to hit us where we're more vulnerable: on our social networks. Here, many people still have a feeling of comfort and security. They don't always have their guard up.
...
You should also keep an eye on Facebook's security page which warns of the latest threats.

The original article was posted on Read Write Web last month.

For deeper information on computer security, RWW has a post on security threats for 2009.

social media and real time election coverage: today's the day to see how the internet is changing the flow of political information

2008-11-04T13:00:33-05:00

If you're wondering about the value social media can add to your work and personal life, today's election is a really good opportunity to look at some use cases.

ReadWriteWeb has published an Election Day Web Toolkit with a comprehensive list of the resources available for voter information, real time results tracking and aggregated coverage of the election. I've put two of the most interesting applications in this post, below. You can stay on this page and refresh it throughout the day to keep up date with election results and conversation.

I encourage you to spend some time looking at what's available, use what you need to help you vote today and keep track of the election results - and then think about how you might employ some of these same tools to solve a communication problem in your work life or provide resources for your community.

For polling information, I've been following fivethirtyeight.com, which has a cautionary post today on Ten Reasons Why You Should Ignore Exit Polls.

Some highlights from ReadWriteWeb's list:

Twitter Vote Report pulls together "tweets" (text messages or micro blog posts) about what's happening at the polls, including how long people are waiting in line in individual locations and maps them for easy access. (For information about Twitter, check out this video.) [Update - the mapping site was working this morning but I can't get the page up at the moment, which may be a traffic issue. NPR has the map on its site here, and if you still have problems here's the text-only vote report.]

Electicker is a one-page aggregator of all kinds of election news.

Report voting problems with video:

Bring a video camera with you to the polls to capture your voting experience on YouTube's Video Your Vote channel. Google is using Google Maps to track these videos across the country - and to see where polling problems might be occurring during the day.
Document the irregularities or other problems you encounter with your cell phone camera, Flip videocam, or other device, and then upload that content to the CBS News social-media site CBS Eye Mobile. Alternatively, you can submit by e-mail to the address politics@cbseyemobile.com. The CBS News Investigates team will monitor those submissions, and may then present select ones in election coverage at CBSNews.com or in on-air reports.

Google Maps is posting real time results on a map, and you can zoom in on state and county results for the presidential and congressional races. Choose a state (or the entire country) and a race from the pull down menu in the left corner, then put your cursor over the map for current results in the county or state you select.

Socialmedian, in partnership with the Washingon Post, is pulling in all election comments and media from sources like Youtube, Twitter, blogs and Flickr photos. You can get a widget like the one below and put it on your blog, your web site or in a feed reader like Netvibes. Or if you refresh this post throughout the day you'll be able to follow it from Technology in Translation.

[UPDATE] Just ran across an interesting widget from Intrade, which predicts the electoral vote distribution using its stock market formula. Okay - it's an odd use of financial language in this context, but it's somehow appropriate to the current economic climate. It's also interesting to think of the electoral college through a market-based analogy (however unintended!).

why social media marketing matters

2008-08-02T11:01:41-04:00

One of the best things about the evolving web is that you can create good content, put it online and then re-use it on multiple sites. And you can find other people's content on blogs and media services like YouTube and Flickr and share it on your site. Slide Share is a place to discover good business information, and it's a particularly rich source for social media thinking.

Marta Kagan has put together a great presentation about what social media is and why you need to make it part of your marketing strategy - whether you're a small business, large corporation, activist group, non-profit or sole practitioner. She pulls together useful marketing statistics with social media basics.

What The F**K is Social Media?

view presentation (tags: socialmediamarketing marketing web2.0 socialmedia)

it's easy to create a custom google search engine

2008-02-09T00:42:09-05:00

Most of us have been building a collection of web sites we turn to when we want to do research for business, school, health, activism or hobbies. And just about everyone uses google for broader searching on various topics - but most searches yield thousands of results.

You can combine the capabilities of google with the work you've done as a curator of web sites to build a search tool that simplifies your own research and gives other people the benefit of your knowledge to find better information. It can also promote your site or sites you support - as long as they have a depth and quality of information that will lead to valuable searches.

I've created the search engine below to provide relevant searches on local and sustainable food, cooking, farming and the policy and politics of food and agriculture. It uses 48 different web sites and blogs which have the best information I've seen on these topics - so the chances of getting dead end results are minimal. Try it and let me know what you think.

The home page for this search engine is here.

Read on for information about how to create your own search engine, invite people to contribute to it, link to it - or put it on a web site or blog.

Here's what you do:

Put together a list of links related to your search topics, in a format that's easy to cut and paste from.

Then go to google's create a custom search engine page. You will need to set up a google account if you don't have one.

It's pretty self explanatory. Just pay attention to the formatting tips:

Formatting your URLs

Individual pages: Specifying www.mysite.com/mypage.html will just include the mypage.html page on www.mysite.com.

Entire sites: Specifying www.mysite.com/* will include all the pages on www.mysite.com.

Parts of sites: You can use wildcard patterns to include just certain parts of a site. For example, www.mysite.com/*about* will include only files on www.mysite.com that have about in their name.

Entire domains: You can also specify an entire domain using *.mydomain.com. If you specify mydomain.com, we will automatically convert this to *.mydomain.com/*. If this is not what you want, you can change it back in the control panel.

Select the standard edition (free) - and no ads if you're a non-profit/government/academic organization.

Follow the instructions to complete the search engine. You can add collaborators later if you'd like. And you'll be given some choices about how you want the box to look.

Once the search engine is done, you'll be given a link to the home page, and from there you can manage and edit the search engine.

When you click on the code link from the home page, choose the option to host on a non-google page (unless you are using a google page!) - and, ideally, select the 1 page option. Either will work, but keeping people on a single page makes for a better user experience. The fewer clicks, the faster you get what you need when you're on a site.

You'll just have to add the address of the web site you'll be putting it on before google generates the code for cutting and pasting - so it's one additional step.

You can then copy and paste it to a page on your site, your social network page, into a blog post, share it on a page in google or yahoo groups - or email the code to the person who maintains your site!

library of congress and flickr - folksonomy meets history

2008-01-24T03:33:52-05:00

The Lib rary of Congress has over a million historic images in its online catalog.

Launched in 2004, Flickr is the first social photo sharing service developed using "web 2.0" technology, with comment features, interest groups and tagging to create a rich collection of images and an engaged community of users.

In what may turn into one of the most interesting and useful applications of social technology, Flickr and the Library of Congress are partnering to put photos from the LoC's collection online in a social environment and users to interact with them. (ReadWriteWeb)

A tag is a key word or label attached to a photo, web page, blog post, video or other web-based information. Folksonomy "is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate content." (wikipedia)

As part of the pilot program with the Library of Congress, Flickr has launched a new tagging initiative called The Commons. The Commons encourages people to help describe the historical photos being added to Flickr by institutions like the Library of Congress by tagging them or commenting on them. (ReadWriteWeb)

This means that we can each organize the photos with tags that make sense to us, attach relevant information and add personal perspectives. These folksonomies and comments have the potential to deepen the meaning of the images and create new contexts and narratives for them.

It offers an opportunity for people to discover and participate in conversations about history and culture. It also risks silly, meaningless or false annotations. It's an experiment with precedents like Wikipedia and OhMyNews.

"From the Library's perspective, this pilot project is a statement about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better acquire information, knowledge and -- most importantly -- wisdom," said Matt Raymond, the LoC's blogger-in-chief. "One of our goals, frankly, is to learn as much as we can about that power simply through the process of making constructive use of it." (ReadWriteWeb)

Some tips on on how to explore the archive:

The photos are organized into two sets - or albums) - 1930s-40s in Color and News in the 1910s.

Try browsing the most popular tags for all the photos. If you go a little deeper you can find less frequently used tags like vintagehair or trackandfield.

I particularly like Jack Delano's photos from the Farm Security Administration set.

Try clicking on a tag link like this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/tags/food/

When you're ready to look at a new tag, if you know what you're interested in viewing you can put your cursor in the address bar of your browser and simply change "food" to another tag - such as "railroad", below: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/tags/railroad/.

As you explore the Library of Congress archives, use the opportunity to explore the features of a well-designed social media site. Frankly, there other photo sharing services which take less time to learn, but none offer the features and level of community engagement of Flickr. For more help, start here.

If you're so inclined, participate in The Commons. The LoC has said that it plans to keep the photos on Flickr as long as there's activity and interest. Flickr hopes this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world. So add your own tags and comments. The more thoughtful people who help flesh out these archives, the better the results of the experiment.

new Pew reports challenge assumptions that internet usage limits face-to-face contact

2008-01-02T13:52:26-05:00

A recent report by the by the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that teenagers (a.k.a. digital natives) use telephone and face-to-face contact for their primary social interactions. A second report finds that 18-30 year olds are more likely to use public libraries than any other age group.

While neither report was specifically designed to explore how online engagement affects offline engagement, both indicate that young people use the internet to supplement, rather than replace, social contact and participation in civic activities.

Results from a survey about how people use online information searches to solve problems

challenge the assumption that libraries are losing relevance in the internet age.

Libraries drew visits by more than half of Americans (53%) in the past year for all kinds of purposes, not just the problems mentioned in this survey. And it was the young adults in tech-loving Generation Y (age 18-30) who led the pack. Compared to their elders, Gen Y members were the most likely to use libraries for problem-solving information and in general patronage for any purpose.

Furthermore, it is young adults who are the most likely to say they will use libraries in the future when they encounter problems: 40% of Gen Y said they would do that, compared with 20% of those above age 30 who say they would go to a library.

Pew's study on Teens and Social Media finds that

Despite the influx of digital media into their lives, teens continue to rely on telephones to keep in touch with their friends.

While text-based digital communication technologies are increasingly prevalent, the telephone continues to reign as the instrument of choice when teenagers want to interact with their friends. However, those who have cell phones and those who are avid internet users have different communications profiles from the entire teen population.

Face-to-face contact still matters.

All of these technology-based communication methods still do not replace face-to-face communication for many teenagers.17 In the general teen population, 31% of the teens in this survey reported that they spent time with friends in person doing social activities outside of school every day, 34% of teens reported that they did so several times a week, and 24% of teens reported that they spent time in-person with friends after school at least once a week. Older teens – the very people who are more often using other forms of communication like cell phones or instant messaging – are more likely to report spending time with friends in person doing social activities outside of school every day or several times a week than younger teens.

Across the spectrum, the communication activity that changes the least is the frequency of face-to-face encounters; 31% of all teens have this kind of interaction with friends every day outside of school; 34% of cell phone owners do so; 35% of multi- channel teens have such encounters; and 38% of social network site users have in-person meetings with friends every day.

As dana boyd comments:

What Pew's data shows is that online participation correlates with offline participation. They are not able to show causality (and they do not try to claim that they can), but such a correlation still contradicts the ever-present myth that online activities cause a decline in offline activities. Of course, don't misread this correlation in the opposite direction either. In other words, you cannot say that if you get a group of teens involved online, they will also get involved offline.

Her highlights are worth checking out if you don't have time to read the entire report.

an introduction to social media: TCG Fall Forum slides and references

2007-11-10T17:42:48-05:00

Thanks for a great panel and conversation this afternoon at Theatre Communications Group's Fall Forum. Here are the slides from my presentation.

Links to relevant articles and sites are on my del.icio.us account, here. If you have other links that might be useful for people, you can add them to your own delicious bookmarks and use the tag "fall_forum" (learn more and set up an account here if you don't have one). Then, if anyone searches for fall_forum on the del.icio.us site, any links with this tag, from anyone's account, will turn up in the search results.

Two of the best places to start exploring more about what this new web is about are Michael Wesch's video definition of Web2.0 and Common Craft's "...in Plain English" shows.

For a skeptic's look at possibilities for a not so distant future, EPIC 2015 is a riveting video.

| View | Upload your own

Learn more about SlideShare, the service I've used to upload this presentation and embed it in this blog post.

technology in the arts conference next week

2007-10-02T14:18:10-04:00

On October 13th I'll be co-presenting a workshop with Brad Carlin about putting social media into practice at Carnegie Mellon University's Technology in the Arts Conference in Pittsburgh.

We're going to discuss some of the things we've been learning through the online community we're developing for SITI company and we'll also take a look at tools that can help centralize all the things you read, save and share on the web using a custom start page, such as netvibes, and creating personal media channels enabled by tools such as Splashcast.

We'll contextualize them for arts organizations and discuss how these services offer useful ways organize media, presentations and resources related to exhibits, performances, education programming. It's a hands-on session in a computer lab, so participants will be able to try the tools and we'll walk through the set up together.

I'll leave you with a somewhat related quote I'm thinking about today - from one of the very few biz books I think is an important read:

...innovation is less about inventing and building physical things and more about orchestrating or coordinating good ideas.

Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams - Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.