Not for long posts, but could be fun.

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My long-time blogging friend Steve Rubel has announced that he is giving up on blogging and moving towards lifestreaming–Micro Persuasion: So Long Blogging, Hello Lifestreaming!–which you can find on his Posterous-powered lifestream–The Steve Rubel Lifestream – Daily links, insights, photos, videos and more on emerging technology.–where Steve is dropping bits and pieces from the things he finds online.

Now equally good friends Louis Gray and Jeremiah Owyang feel that blogging isn’t dead and there is still a place for long-form writing–Blogging Is Still the Foundation In A World of Streams – louisgray.com & Is Blogging Evolving Into Life Streams? « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing–and I happen to agree with Jeremiah and Louis, mostly.

I’ve been using Twitter to capture my musings more and more of late and blogging less and less. Okay, recently I’ve been blogging more but that’s beside the point. What I’ve found recently is that while Twitter, and I have yet to try Posterous but clearly I need to soon, is great for short bits, 140 characters is rather limiting.

So I see my blog as the place where I can detail my thoughts in a little more depth. Like Louis and Jeremiah, I also see my blog as the cornerstone or anchor to my online presence. Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed are great, but none of them allow me the control over my online presence like my own blog does.

I think Louis’ graphic illustrates how blogs are the cornerstone, anchor, hub…whatever very well.

As I’ve been prepping for this book and the classes I’ve been teaching I’ve been experimenting with different workflows. Next on the list is Posterous. What of FriendFeed? Considering I haven’t wandered over there in a significant fashion in months, I’m not sure where to place it. FriendFeed became a serious chaff generator. Far more hay than needles.

Granted, I’m sure that I could find a better way to manage it, but that is something for another day.

Are there two camps forming? Is there a “I blog” vs “I lifestream” separation going on? I certainly hope not. We need both kinds of information flows to keep things going. Steve won’t have much to share with Google Reader if we don’t write posts. Scoble won’t have fodder to comment on in FriendFeed if we don’t help to generate it.

Yes, the quick update and summation of a link, thought, etc is great sometimes, but we still need posts of more depth to flesh out and expand on ideas.

Well at least I think so.

Are you blogging more? Are you lifestreaming? There are a slew of questions growing from this centering around how we consume news and information now, but let’s just leave it at this for now.

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I saw Sarah Perez’s write up on RWW this morning about a new service called ParaTweet which is trying to put some control on the discussion:

f you’ve ever been to a conference or some sort of large event, you’ve probably seen a live Twitter stream in action. Up on a big screen in a prominent place, often the stage itself, the live stream tracks the relevant hashtags or keywords about the event, be it a conference, a panel, a meetup, or some other sort of heavily-tweeted gathering. But sometimes there’s an issue with displaying the raw, unfiltered tweets in this way: they can be disruptive. All it takes is one Twitter user trying to be funny – or, worse, a troll saying something rude – to take the discussion off course.
link: A New Way to Mute the Backchannel: ParaTweet for Live Events

If I’m reading this right, what you’d do is make sure that only ParaTweet was displayed on conference monitors, etc instead of Twitter search or Twitterfall. While I this makes sense, the idea of “controlling the conversation” is a little overblown.

Of course the conference organizers can’t “control” the conversation, but what the can do is try to limit the public presentation of it. While this is a good idea, I think there is a huge potential to backfire. What if a controversial topic at the conference takes on a life of its own and the conference organizers don’t want it presented? You can imagine rogue TwitterFalls and searches appearing.

That said, I think for a conference environment it will be something to try, if nothing else to give a cohesive view of the conference. I’d pair ParaTweet with Twitterfall so folks can see the firehose and the filtered version.

Chirp, chirp.

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Seems simple to us, but we’ve also been doing this since before WP.com existed so we can make the distinction easily.

As for features, WP.com doesn’t give you all the features of installing WP yourself, but you don’t have to worry about installs, updates, or servers. Now the question often asked is whether we want or need both services…

Well, it is not like all those thousands of *.WordPress.com sites are going to be happily redirected to new domains. I can only think that rebranding the software would be the (inelegant, or even downright ugly) solution What do you think? Am I blowing this up to be a bigger problem than it is? Is there a better solution? Please share your thoughts in the comments …
link: Is WordPress.com Bad for WordPress? | The Blog Herald

Yes, I think we do. WP.com serves a niche for people who just want a free blog or people who want to have a professional blog, are willing to pay for add-ons like CSS editing and domain mapping, but not have to mess with servers etc.

The issue isn’t whether the two can co-exist, because MoveableType and Typepad do just fine, it’s how will Automattic brand the two options.

I think all WP.com really needs is a new name and branding. That’s it. Both niches are valid and required, the only problem is the confusion surrounding the name WordPress.

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As Peggy Sheehy, a library media specialist from Suffern, N.Y., put it: “We can’t teach 21st century literacy and assess with 19th century methodology. We have to look at what we really need students to be able to do when they leave us” and we must ask, “what is my student learning outside of school and how can I get them just as engaged?” Right now, it’s a valid point to say that letting kids access mobile devices may discriminate against those who can’t afford the phones or the service. Yet that will change, just as it did with electronic calculators, as these devices become even more affordable, especially if students can access free wireless networks at school. In the work force, what’s important in most situations is not so much the facts you can pull out of your head but your ability to acquire information when you need it and–most importantly–your ability to make sense of it. I’m not saying being able to recall facts from memory is never important. I have to do that nearly every day when I go on live radio. And I often use the Internet to acquire facts only moments before the broadcast and have occasionally had to look up a fact while taking on live radio. What’s most important is not my regurgitation of the facts but my interpretation. The ability to put things into context is hard to measure with the types of multiple choice tests that are commonly used in schools.
link: Kids cheating with tech but are schools cheating kids? | Larry Magid at Large – CNET News

This C|Net post points out the obvious, and why a lot of college exams are “open book”, often the true test is being able to sift through your masses of information to get the nuggets out. Sure just source material to double check a fact, but then take than information and distill it into knowledge.

Tests are supposed to ascertain whether the student has learned something or not. Granted, not every test can or should be open book. I wonder if a history test where part of the test is closed book (there are somethings you need to just know) and the remainder open would be effective?

Honestly I don’t know the answer, educational theorist I am not, but I do think that teaching kids how to rapidly find and process information is a good thing. Also, perhaps, if kids were able to use their notes during a test, they might learn to organize them in a different way.

One can only hope…

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So while Twitter made headlines this week because the U.S. State Department asked them to delay their downtime to help people posting news from Iran, this isn’t Twitter’s problem, it’s ours.

This all adds up to the Twitter Conundrum. The owners of Twitter and other social-networking sites aren’t likely to buy highly available, highly secure, redundant systems and storage of the type common to 24 by 7 production data centers. Their business models simply won’t support big enterprise gear. But does that stop the federal government from stepping in and saying “sorry, you can’t go down right now, not even for a few hours?” No. Twitter, YouTube, and FaceBook have created windows on the world, windows that could in fact change the world for the better. You can’t fail (whale). Here’s the conundrum: No one presently pays a fee for posting to these sites. You get what you pay for or, in this case, you don’t get what you don’t pay for. You don’t pay for and therefore don’t get guaranteed availability or data integrity. Is the federal government now willing to subsidize Twitter so that it can function like a production data center? Probably not. Are users willing to pay a fee to get a guaranteed level of service? Again, probably not, at least not in the near future. Owners of the social-networking sites have managed this conundrum by rolling their own. They get cheap, or even better, free infrastructure and make it work. The power implicit in what they do with the scarcest of resources is truly awesome. Now, as they’re sites become embedded in the fabric of society, can they keep that model going? Perhaps, but they will likely need our help. Remember, e-mail was once a frivolous application.
link: Is Twitter now a critical app? | Data-driven – CNET News

We’ve become addicted to single point source sites that are the be all and end all for a niche. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter…I know that I’m guilty of this as well, but we need to try to think bigger here. What I really want to know is how Twitter is going to maintain a system where lots of people want to join to at least try it out. Wouldn’t letting or building something more decentralized work better?

Maybe it would have been easier for Iranian protestors get out if they had a myriad of services to choose from and those all talked to each other.

The problem is of course is establishing/nominating a server as the “standard” and ensure that we all play nice with each other.

Gee that should be easy right?

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Turns out that Victoria’s Zero One Design thinks so too because they are giving the museum help to take their technology to the next level. Chris Mathieson, who is both my friend and Exec. Dir. of the museum, is understandably excited about this whole thing. Given that the museum is already pretty tech savvy, I’m expecting something really cool about this…

The Sponsor a Museum program offers one Canadian museum the chance to take their museum—whether it be via their website, online gallery, or collection management tools—to the next level with the assistance, skills and grunt work from the self-confessed museum tech “geeks” at Zero One Design. “We have been working exclusively with museums, galleries and cultural institutions for twelve years, and we enjoy sharing what we’ve learned,” explains David Alexander, CEO of Zero One Design. “The Vancouver Police Museum has an incredibly diverse and eclectic collection. We’re keen to find new ways to share it with the public online.”
link: Police Museum Wins “Sponsor a Museum” Support

If you want to hear about Vancouver’s seamy side, you need to take in one of the Sins of the City walking tours. This is where you get the real deal history of Vancouver and some great insight into the city as it is right now.

Congrats Chris and the whole museum!

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Introduction to Audio and Video Podcasting TRIS HUSSEY Learn the basics of audio and video podcasting from one of Vancouver’s social media specialists in this one-day, hands-on workshop. Students learn how to record, edit, encode, and post audio and video podcasts. Topics include: hardware, software, how to add music and titles, where to post your podcast, search engine optimization and how to host a live Internet radio show. One day is all you need to get on air and podcast with confidence and ease! IM 805 S09A Sat, Jun 6, 9am-4pm; UBC Robson Square. $350+GST.
link: UBC Computers, Media and Technology – Multimedia Summer Programs 2009 – Summer Workshops

You can register as late as Friday, here is the direct link to register for my podcasting course (only 10 spaces left!).

The following week I’m teaching a half day course on building a website with WordPress:

Learn how to make a professional looking website using the WordPress blogging platform with little to no coding required. Led by one of Vancouver’s WordPress and social media experts, this half-day workshop teaches you how to use WordPress to build dynamic, elegant and professional looking websites quickly and easily. Learn the settings required to turn a WordPress blog into a website, how to tune it for search engines, what plug-ins to install and how to choose the right theme for your website. You don’t have to know how to code to have a great website, you just have to know how to click. IM 810 S09A Sat, Jun 13, 9am-12noon; UBC Robson Square. $175+GST.

This is a course that grew out of my WordCamp Whistler talk and later talks on how to use WordPress as a CMS to build a great (and easy to update) website. If you’d like to attend this course, here is the direct link to register for my WordPress course (about 10 spaces left!).

While I am nervous to be teaching for a full day this weekend, I am excited as well. So, so many things have changed since I sat in this very place (I’m getting my intro to the UBC Robson Square computer labs) and learned about podcasting from Roland Tanglao and Dave Olson at the first NorthernVoice back in 2005.

I’m going to dig up some of my early podcasts for the class, for comic relief if nothing else.

Both courses are hands-on. Expect to be recording and being recorded for the podcasting course and leave with a workable website for the WordPress course.

I suggest bringing a flash drive with if you attend. You can bet that I’m going to have goodies for people to take home with them.

Hope to see you this or next Saturday!

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We’ve heard about the 60% drop off rate (which means that a 40% stay, which is still pretty damn good and there is no metric for people who come back in a couple months) and now we’re hearing that the majority of people don’t tweet, but use Twitter as a source of information:

Although this may sound strange at first, Twitter really is more like Wikipedia than, say, Facebook. Twitter is not so much about connecting with your friends, it’s about broadcasting information. Although it doesn’t necessarily take much creativity to create a tweet, only the most creative users actually persist in tweeting every day over a longer time period. However, Twitter is also similar to a instant messaging tool, which should have a very different curve, with a larger proportion of users contributing to the number of overall tweets. It seems that Twitter’s micropublishing component is winning over its chatting component.
ink: Twitter is Not Your Average Social Network

Wow, you think? Twitter is one of those tools that is almost completely flexible. You can use it to gather info, send info, chat, read, discuss. There aren’t “rules”, per se, on how to get the most out of Twitter, but there are some tricks that help you get the most out of Twitter more quickly.

• Follow news feeds like CBC, BBC, CNN, ZDNet, etc. These tweet feeds give you great value with little effort. You’re not going to get a firehose of information, just a nice steady flow.
• Group the people you follow. Regardless of whether you use Nambu, TweetDeck, PeopleBrowsr, or Mixero you need to put people into bins in order manage the flow. I “follow” about 5700 people, but can only really track a fraction of them. I group friends, news feeds, colleagues, and TwitFic into separate groups. This gives things context and focus.
• Find your friends and affinity groups on Twitter. It’s a lot easier to use Twitter when you can “listen” to people you know. Most people I know who left Twitter and later came back, left because there was no one there and came back because their friends were there.

I flip through my Twitter channels to keep an eye on things. I add and remove people from groups to tune the info. Yes, I spend a lot of time with this, but you don’t have to. You aren’t likely to follow 5700 people, so your challenges won’t be like mine. Find the people than topics you’re interested in, read, listen, retweet, reply, then you’ll start to feel connected.

Twitter can be great or boring. Twitter really is what you make of it.

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Or is it as Steve suggests, blogging is “slow”:

Meanwhile, Steve Rubel, author of MicroPersuasion, who has been blogging on that site since early 2004, said that to him, blogging seemed “slow”, when contrasted with the lightning fast communications seen from tools like FriendFeed and Twitter. He made the analogy that when you take the time to compose a blog post and you launch it over the wall, that readers have to look it over and make a choice as to whether they will respond, or if they will simply hit ‘J’ in their RSS reader and move along. In contrast, he said sending a note to Twitter was like introducing ants in someone’s house, making them immediately take action.

link: Today’s Real-Time Web Makes Blogging and RSS Seem “Too Slow” – louisgray.com

Looking at a screenshot from the hot Twitter client Mixero you can see in a glance the amount of information present. News, friends, replies (I hid DMs, sorry guys), all in one place I can skim, click, skim, RT in seconds:

I would wager that this isn’t always a good thing. I would wager that what we need is the web-equivalent of the “slow food” movement. Something where we take a few minutes to read a post, consider a post, then write our own opinions of the post in something greater than 140 characters.

I know that I’m fighting an uphill battle here. I know that even my own info gathering trends fly in the face of the “slow post” movement, however what if we paused and wrote more?

Naw, that won’t work, we might get more original ideas and lord knows that we don’t need anymore of those in this world !

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Future Shop was starting up blogs to go with their existing community forums and they were recruiting about six Canadian tech bloggers to write the blogs for them.

I was very interested in the opportunity. Why not, I do love writing about tech and helping people, Future Shop recognizes the value bloggers bring so this isn’t a volunteer thing, and, yeah, I thought it would be pretty damn cool to be one of the select few to be doing it.

All humility aside, I think it is a great honour to be considered and chosen. This isn’t something I’m taking lightly or as just a neat thing to do now and then. Not to mention, I’m in some pretty amazing company:

• Mathew Kumar
• Paul Hunter
• Buzz Bishop
• Brad Grier
• Klaus Boedker

Not too shabby. Pretty awesome group to be lumped in with, in my opinion at least. The Future Shop Tech blog officially launched today and I wrote the standard “Hi, I’m Tris, I’ll be your blogger this evening…” intro post last night to be ready for today.

I’ll be publishing 3-5 times a week on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays. My posts will be what you’re probably already used to: tech reviews, tips, advice, and photography. I also want to make two things very clear from the outset: yes I’m getting paid, no Future Shop is not muzzling any of us. We have some editorial guidelines, but none of those include “you can only say nice things about our key suppliers…”.

You should know by now that even if I’m given something, I don’t just give it a glowing review. I like to be balanced and fair. Nothing is ever perfect. Even my MacBook Pro is awesome as I think it is could be better (the keyboard is good, but not great I think).

I welcome feedback, story ideas, and all the rest.

So, let’s see what fun we can have now…

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Web-based collaboration tools and strategies has been one of my professional passions for a decade now. Beyond that I always thought it was cool, I started telecommuting in 2000, so needing easy and complete solutions was high on my priority list.

Over the years, I think I’ve tried nearly all the solutions around with varying degrees of success and failure. Almost always success or failure has been determined by either the willingness of the team to adapt and change or the ease of use of the tool. Even a tool that has the potential to save time, money, even your precious sanity will fail if it isn’t intuitive and easy to use.

Can blog engines provide a solution?

I had played with the original Prologue theme when it was launched about a year ago. It was pretty useful then, but I didn’t have something to apply it to (not that I didn’t try to use it). I had heard and seen demos of the successor P2 and thought that there was some potential, but I didn’t get it until I read Matt’s post about how Automattic uses P2 internally:  How P2 Changed Automattic — Matt Mullenweg

The part that brought it all home was the video:

Now that’s when the light came on. I saw a lot of potential there. It would be great to be able to have our team at M2O use it to update projects, scripts and ideas. The problem was that if I wanted it to be most useful it needed to be on the public Internet, but still private to just us. Being able to update/use it from iPhones and Blackberries would be important, and I wanted to add a little twist using Twitter. So here’s how I did it:

• Basic WP 2.7.1 install
• P2 theme
• Registered Users Only plugin
• WordTwit and WPTouch plugins from my friends at Brave New Code

That’s it. Okay there is one more thing. I set up a Twitter account with its updates protected to post updates to from the blog. This way the team can be updated via Twitter, but the tweets aren’t public.

Will it work?

I think P2 is about as easy as it can get. It even highlights for you the new items since your last visit. It can stand alone using Prism or Fluid to make it an “app”. What’s left? What’s missing? Getting the team to accept and use the tool. Since I think there is a lot of potential here for projects, classes, updates, and messaging I’m going to keep at it in hopes that I can get some momentum.

There are some special tweaks I’m going to look into, but that is another story.

Interested in my P2 collaboration solution? How would you improve on it? What’s missing? Would you use it? Ah so many questions, but that’s half the fun isn’t it?

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Anyway, Salome. This is a Strauss opera and I have been told that it is, umm, rather different than the others I’ve seen thus far. Of course being opera there is the standard fare of death, lust, sex … you have to wonder if there is some kind of operatic checklist.

Salome is the story of King Herod, St. John the Baptist, and the lustful (and rather twisted) Salome … yes, yes there will be necrophilia.

Regardless, the regular gang is collecting here, Kimli, Tanya, Rebecca, Raul is finally joining us, but Monnique is missing this go round.

Oh, and don’t expect an “Intermission update”, no intermission in this only 103 minute opera. I’ll give updates later. And sorry no tweets from the floor, because I left my phone at home.

Since I can’t say much about this opera, how about a preview of next season…

We have Nixon in China, Norma (complete with Druids!), Marriage of Figaro, and Madama Butterfly. Certainly four operas I want to see! I saw Butterfly (Sheila’s favourite opera) in HD at the ScotiaBank Theatre (a Met Opera rebroadcast), and it was wonderful, but I do want to see it live!

Quick update here. Got back from the tour that Terry gave us. Very simple set this time. Raked stage, rented from Seattle Opera.

As I said above, there is the severed head of St. John the Baptist in the show. Oh and it’s a good one. Cast from Greer Grimsley himself. And don’t forget the blood sponge! Gotta love an opera with gore.

The show is going to start soon…I suppose I should give you my impressions later.

Of course I will

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Why aren’t you making money?

Why are you so unstable?

Why can’t you be like your older brother Facebook, he’s got a business model?

And now, why don’t users stick with you for more than a month?

When MySpace and Facebook were at the stage that Twitter is at today, their retention rates were, according to Nielsen, twice as high – and they’ve now stabilized at nearly 70 percent. Twitter’s high rate of churn will, if it continues, hamstring the service’s growth, says Nielsen’s David Martin: “A retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure … There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point. [Twitter] will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty.”
link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The fickle Twitterer

Yes, yes I know a large, stable, user base is key to a site’s/service’s success. That isn’t something I care to debate, per se. What I think is absolutely key here, and why Twitter is going to emerge on top in the end, is that Twitter isn’t just a service, it’s a game changing new way of messaging.

Facebook and MySpace weren’t extremely new, even for their time. You built a personal corner and then found friends to connect with. Not revolutionary, it was evolutionary no doubt, but not revolutionary.

Twitter on the other hand really has changed things. Something that isn’t email, isn’t SMS, isn’t IM. You still have friends you connect with, but it’s more about talking than staking a claim on the Internet.

So, fine, Twitter might lose people after a month. I think “losing” them is a little harsh. I’d call it “hiatus”, I have a feeling people will be back, just like unused and dormant AOL accounts, when Twitter hits the next big jump.

Twitter will become more and more central to rapid messaging and as such maybe “dormant” accounts might really just be places where people receive information, but don’t need to log into Twitter to get.

Let’s not cast Twitter in a dying phase just as it hits mainstream attention. Time will tell, and I’m thinking it will be told in 140 characters or fewer.

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