While I was not in front of a computer when news of Michael Jackson’s death became public, I knew that the news hit the Internet like a tidal wave—it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out in today’s world.  According to CNET News, sites like YouTube, Amazon, Last.fm, Wikipedia , as well as numerous other sites are popular destinations for those wanting a trip down memory lane, access the latest information about the one of the most popular musicians of all time, and purchase his music in droves. It is a sobering and somewhat morbid fact that when a celebrity dies in this day and age, his or her popularity and product sales get significant boosts.   

Farrah Fawcett died earlier that day, which had already elicited widespread reactions from people who remember her iconic hairstyle, her brief stint on the famous TV show, “Charlie’s Angels,” and the overall impact she had on women and men in the 1970s and beyond. I when I checked Google News, I noticed a flood of retrospective articles covering both Michael Jackson’s and Farrah Fawcett’s lives and careers, the reasons for their deaths, and some unsavory reports of the “supposed” deaths of Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum, of all people.  These false reports remind me that the Internet is a haven for rampant gossip and exploitation; none of us should be surprised to hear that email spam exploiting Jackson’s and Fawcett’s deaths have already been sent out to unsuspecting Internet users.

I have never been a big fan of Jackson’s, but when I heard about his death, I remembered the song “Human Nature,” which is my favorite of his from the “Thriller” album. I loved that I could find it on Last.fm and post it on my Facebook profile in minutes. So while there are plenty of morbid curiosity-seekers, spammers, and your garden-variety jerks out there in cyberspace, some of us who are looking for some information and nostalgia, without being a hypocrite.  I consider myself one of them.

At The Women’s Mosaic Book Club meeting on June 17, I realized how much I miss meeting people without the aid of the Internet. Yes, I was emailed about the event and it is posted on the non-profit organization’s web site, but once we came met at the designated location and introductions were made, we went right into the discussion of plot, characters, and themes with no difficulties or awkwardness. It was the first time I remember not noticing anyone constantly checking their phone for messages until our meeting was over. As a book club “newbie,” I was pleasantly reminded of how great it is to share thoughts and ideas with people in a comfortable setting. We were occasionally photographed and video taped for promotional purposes, but this never distracted us from our group conversation. I met people who share my interests, and I hope to meet them again in the future.

So while online book clubs (like Oprah’s Book Club, for example) are great because of the numbers of people that join through the Internet, I’ll take the monthly meetings in an Italian café this summer. Nothing beats meeting people in person…most of the time.

It was a gathering of the early adopters of Twitter and the goal was to share how Twitter is being used across the different industries including: News and Journalism, Politics, Marketing and PR, Music, Sports, Fashion, Publishing and more…

In True Twitter Fashion there were “Twearls of Wisdom” or “Twisdom” or “Twuggets” (twitter nuggets) …now I’m having too much fun ? … to be found in each of the presentations.

Jennifer Palmer said it best

Getting Twitter means being aware of being a part of a large interconnected flow made up of millions of smaller conversational streams and the garnering of this awareness is the real power of Twitter

Twitter and Monetization

Fred Wilson a technology venture capitalist of Union Square Ventures and one of the early investors in Twitter said that “links are the currency of the Internet” and that the value of Twitter is in “the power of the passed link”.  In comparing Twitter to Google “the King of the Internet” he said, “Twitter links convert better than search links because they are recommended by someone you follow and trust.”  Listen to Fred’s presentation.

“Twearls” of Wisdom

Here are more “Twearls” I picked up at the 140 character conference that I wanted to share with you. I am not always sure who said them but it is what I walked away with:

• When old media and new media work together you get NOW media.
• The secret of social media is adding value to the community NOT the number of followers you have.
• Social media allows you to scale your caring.
• Create more value than you capture for your community…and eventually that community will create value for you.
• Your experience on Twitter is only as high quality as the people who you follow and the information you share.
• My blog let’s me go deep. Twitter let’s me go wide…listen.
• The right way is the way that is right for each of us. We all have our “right” way.
• Trust Agents = The individuals that are humanizing the group
• Small businesses are often more used to being close to the conversation than the big companies
• 3 ways small businesses can use twitter: promotion, benchmarking against other businesses, & as a prediction tool.
• Make it fun, short, make someone proud to pass it on
• Never give up control of your product, your brand & your voice
• Twanker = someone who misuses Twitter
• Twitter is about: cluetrain, co-location, compressed context, community, clout

Rules to Tweet By

Short, concise, and to the point. Size does not matter.  You can convey your message in microblogging…be clear, be authentic, and share value…those are the rules to tweet by.

Jeff Pulver created a great event and pulled together some of the forward thinking minds in celebration of this revolutionary change in the way we all communicate and the micro ways we are all influencing and shaping the way we connect with each other across barriers of proximity and across cultural divides.

So, I have recently created “Share on Twitter” functionality and link on the Webgrrls Wisdom blog and you can use this functionality too…for your blog and for extending your brand.

Here is how it works

When readers click on the “Share on Twitter” link after they are finished reading the post,  the following twitter entry automatically gets posted to their twitter account:

Currently reading on Webgrrls: Title of Blog Post & Shortened url to the blog post (ie. Currently reading on Webgrrls: Book Clubs for User Experience Professionals http://tinyurl.com/kmm9oy)

Now, when you do it, of course, it will have your blog name and branding information

Here is a step by step guide on how you can implement this feature on your blog:

1. Click the download button below to download the plug-in file to your computer.
   
   
   
2. Uncompress the downloaded .zip fil and Upload/FTP the tinyurl-functions.php file to your Wordpress /wp-content/plugins directory
3. Activate the TinyURL Function plug-in in your Wordpress Admin area.
4. Add the following link code to any of your theme files, where you want the “Share on Twitter” link to appear.

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=Currently reading on Webgrrls: <?php the_title(); ?> <?php echo get_tiny_url(post_permalink($id)); ?>” title=”Click to share this post on Twitter”>Share on Twitter</a>

That’s It! it is a easy as 1,2,3,4…Good Luck and get blogging and of course Share it on Twitter!

I work in online user experience for Barnes & Noble, so this is right up my alley. Plus, I’m always hesitant to join book clubs with friends because I can be a little particular about which fiction books I read. This is why the idea of a professional book club appeals to me so much. I have an ever growing list of fiction books I want to one day get to, but I wouldn’t mind a little help from my peers in choosing which books on user experience are the most relevant at this very moment. And I’d be thrilled if a group of peers wanted to read it at the same time and then link up to discuss—especially if it’s done leisurely over a glass of wine.

It looks like I’m not the only one excited about this idea. UX Book Clubs have sprouted in Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, the Middle East, and all over North and South America.

Boxes and Arrows, which features articles on information architecture and design, recently had an article profiling UX Book Clubs. In the article, the founder, Steve Baty writes, “In early Nov 2008, I started to talk to a few people about the idea of a book club in Sydney to discuss User Experience (UX) books….And then something surprising happened, people liked the idea so much that they started doing things to make it happen.”

Even if you don’t have one in your area, or if you can’t attend, you can still benefit. Each group gets an individual page on the site to post its mission and the list of books the group has read. Not every group has a robust page up yet, but still the rest of us can get ideas by digging through the various lists. It’s also interesting to see what the hot UX topic is in different parts of the world.

Here’s how the group describes itself on the website:

The UX Book Club seeks to enhance the abilities and knowledge of user experience professionals from information architects and interaction designers to visual designers and usability specialists to augment their understanding for excellence in UX practice, ixd design theory while building a passionate local community. Subjects of interest to this club span design theory, design research and user experience research practices and processes. The books include the strategy and business of design, UX design theory and history, methodology, usability research, and the ethics of UX professionals, while networking and having some fun….

And if you don’t see your city on the list, go to the UX Book Club site to start your own!

Data is KING

Tim measures and tests EVERYTHING… He says “from wording to read time…test it all”…learning as much as you can about your user will help you serve your audience better and help you make more sound promotional decisions. Tim uses Crazyegg.com tool to figure out user click patterns on his sites.

Determine your target market

Before he started marketing his book, Tim decided on the demographic he was going after…first, 18-25 tech savvy males and secondly 18-25 tech savvy females.  He advised to identify your demographic well because if you try to target too many people you won’t sell anything.

Go Where the Bloggers Go

Tim spent $25,000 on the book launch. $18,000 was “wasted on a PR firm”…the PR firm he worked with was not “accountable or measurable”. He spent the rest of his budget meeting people in person as “the e-mail channel is too crowded”.

To learn about blogging, he attended the CES expo.  He would join blogger conversations by listening and if he did not understand a term, he would ask.  Although that made him seem ignorant, eventually people asked him what he did and he would tell them that he was writing a book.  He would not pitch the book or himself and in fact, never asked the them to review the book….he just elicited questions and EMPHASIZED that he did not think the book would appeal to them, except for about five pages of it.  Tim says “Nobody has time to read the whole book but everyone has time to read 5 pages”.  His goal was to obtain 20,000 evangelists — not customers but avid fans, 3 months before the launch of the book.

Sell around the product

To create a fast-acting meme, Ferris says you need to do the following:

• Phenomenize: “identify and name a legitimate societal shift or new phenomenon….to best spread a message or product, sell around it by discussing larger issues surrounding its creation: the person (himself in this case), the changing social landscape, and emerging trends.  No one cares about your new software, but the reasons it needs to exist might ‘make for a great TV segment on 20/20.’”
• Polarize: “Good stories and trend-spotting, told unapologetically, will create both supporters (”That’s the solution!”) and attackers (”It’s a fraud!”). The battle and ongoing debate this generates is the fuel needed for word-of-mouth wildfire”.
• Communitize: Ferris encourages community creation for your online users. He encouraged his readers to create their own communities on the social networking site Ning and there are currently 12 different mini-communities that were formed to date.

Tim left us with two inspirational parting thoughts “Plan big but test assumptions and Doing the unthinkable is easier than you think”.

This session set the tone for what would turn out to be a great day 1 at the MediaBistro Circus hearing great insights about open source publishing, the future of books, magazines, newspapers, blogging, and the distribution and consumption of content, how customer behavior is evolving around technology, the best way to employ data so your company makes money, integrated marketing partnerships and of course meeting some really great people.

Today I came across a site that made me incredibly happy. It’s called Songs to Wear Pants To.

Andrew, a writer and composer, creates full songs based on ideas users submit on his site. He rummages through the requests and picks ideas he wants to turn into songs. Of course, for a fee, you can make sure your idea gets lyrics and a melody. He then sells his original works for 99 cents each. You can buy entire CDs for $10. The albums are appropriately named GREEN PANTS, BLUE PANTS, and PINK PANTS.

Here are just a few examples of user requests:

• Can you write a really Bass guitar filler song about being a fish that is learning everything about the world around him from his tank?
• i think you should make a song about see-through grumpy unicorns.
• Write a song about why Finland is super-cool, with a little guitar solo!
• Compose a jingle to a product, real or imaginary, that should NEVER have been invented, but somehow has gotten popular. It would probably be like 10 seconds or so.
• How ’bout a rap song in which none of the lyrics contain the letter “e” ? (You can check the lyrics).

So dream up something cool and make your request as specific or open-ended as you like. And as Andrew says, “Get your own song!”

What is Web 3.0?

In the Web 1.0 phase of the web people mostly publish read only websites with very little interaction.

Web 2.0 opened up the doors for us to creating read and write content, where publishers could publish data and users could interact with the data by commenting with text, voice, or video (Blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook)

Web 3.0 is about creating a more “intelligent” Web.  It is a way for us to tell computers  how to take the enormous amount of data that already exists and each of us generate on a daily basis and deliver it to us in a more meaningful and usable way.  Web 3.0 promises to take away the repetitive tasks that machines can do at a fraction of the speed, and enable people to do what is uniquely human… to simplify and humanize our online experience.

Web 3.0 is a collection of technologies that consist of the semantic web, linked data, natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence, mashups, & APIs.  Regardless of the specific technology the core idea behind Web 3.0 is that when your information is organized you can extract much more meaningful and actionable insight from that information.

Real World Uses for Web 3.0

• Finding relevant information fast - When you look for anything, 90% of your search is wasted on looking through the wrong info. Wolfram|Alpha is attempting to solve the search problem.  It is not a search engine but a “computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.”
• Serving Contextual Ads – Peer39 uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence to look at the structure of a sentence and interpret word meaning.  It’s semantic text analysis relies on synonyms and relationships between concepts, rather than just keyword search.
• Connect better with friends – Glue, developed by Adaptive Blue, enables you to connect with your friends on the web around the things you visit online. Glue is powered by semantic recognition technology that automatically identifies books, music, movies, wines, stocks, movie stars, recording artists, and more. Glue works hard to make it easy for you to find out what your friends think about things you’re visiting online.
• Share knowledge and information – Twine is built on the semantic web technologies and it’s aim is to connect people with each other “for a purpose”…it’s sole purpose is to share and organize information you’re interested in.
• Simplify tasks at hand – Ubiquity is an extension for Firefox, that empowers users to control the web browser with language-based instructions and allow everyone (not just Web developers) to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.  Watch the great demo video on how it works.
• There are many more companies that are at the forefront of leveraging the Web 3.0 technologies.

The challenges of Web 3.0

• Creating structuring data – unfortunately, the first step in making Web 3.0 a reality is in the web developer hands. Web developers have to start using RDFa and Microformats to “mark up human-readable data with machine-readable indicators for browsers and other programs to interpret” (get more info about the differences between RDFa and microformats ). During his presentation at the conference, Aza Raskin, head of User experience of Mozilla Labs, stated that “we have the chicken and the egg problem”…we know RDFa & microformats are good but no one uses them because there are very few use cases right now for the general public to widely adapt the practice and use cases can’t be created until the public starts to mark up their data.
• Sharing Data across the Web – Another challenge that we are facing is convincing organizations to share their data so it can be re-used in a more functional way.  In the Web 3.0 world, content developers have to get over the notion that users have to come to their website to get the information they need.
• User Interfaces – Deciding the best way to display the massive amounts of data in a usable and meaningful way will be challenge for all of us and we will all have to experiment with what works best.  One of the ways to solve this problem is to open your application code to users via an API and let the users decide how they want to consume your data by developing their own interfaces for the devices of their choice.
• Indexing and Scaling all the data – The semantic web will not happen any time in the near future because of scale…the technology is just not there and right now it’s impossible to index all of the content from all of the people creating content in the world.

Web 3.0 is still in it’s infancy and we still have a lot of challenges that need to be solved.  According to Peter Sweeney, Founder & CTO of Primal fusion, in order to push Web 3.0 through we have to have another “industrial revolution”….”In 1996 Web 1.0 was just about getting us online. Web 2.0 was revolutionary. Getting consumers involved in content was absurd until companies started doing it”.

I recently discovered a wonderful new use for the Flip: user testing. The small device allows user experience professionals to effortlessly capture user tests while allowing them to go to the participant. Until now, I’ve found it cumbersome and expensive to record any sort of usability session. But now, for around $200, you can have a portable video recorder to bring with you—in your pocket. This lets you go to the user and observe them in their natural environment—something that has previously been challenging.

When I was at IBM’s Silicon Valley Lab about four years ago, we had a usability lab with a not-so-inconspicuous “tree cam” that supposedly made people less conscious of the fact that we were filming them. Like participants didn’t notice a big fake potted plant with a 10-inch camcorder and wires hanging down! (I’m sure they’ve upgraded since then.)

I’ve also been on teams where we’ve rented out usability labs with sophisticated equipment that recorded both the participant and the screen itself. That nifty set up is great for us researches, but I’ve heard users say that it makes them uncomfortable because so many large device are pointing at them and recording their faces.

Last week while we were observing shoppers on Barnes & Noble.com, all we had to do was sit the phone-sized camera on the desk and aim it at the computer screen. The most AV set up we ever needed to do was to prop the camera up on a book if we needed to raise it an inch to better capture the screen.

You just push that big red button to start recording, and then you push it again to stop. Only the participant’s voice, not face, was captured.

I was skeptical about the quality of the video. One warning is that you’ve got to remember to speak up and keep reminding your participant to speak up. The mic isn’t the best. But the screen was clear to see. And we also were able to capture when people pointed at areas of the screen, (something I’ve lost in the past when the screen is recorded by software).  Here’s a screen cap from what we recorded during testing:

This small and relatively inexpensive device has removed most barriers that have inhibited us from doing more user testing in the past.

I found two great tools, backed up all of my twitter posts and followers and now I’m happy as a lark

Tweetake is a very easy to use tool that lets you backup your followers, friends, favorites, direct messages and tweets in a single click.  The software exports your selected data into a CSV file, which can be opened with Excel or any text editor.  To get started, just enter your Twitter username and password

Tweetbackup is also a very easy to use tool.  Right now you can only export your twitter posts and according to Tweetbackup you would be able to export your friends in the very near future.  Although this tool is more limited than Tweetake in the export options, I do like that you can export your posts into different formats…RSS, HTML, and TEXT.  Another neat feature of this tool is the Restore feature, which allows you to restore your posts to Twitter from an existing backup.  You can also backup multiple profiles and do not need to enter passwords to do the backup(s).

Do you use other tools?  Share them with us in the comments section.