Read the Pushbutton post from today, for starters.

Or this gem of a post about Facebook URLs. Really, it was the only post you needed to read on the topic.

This one about the future of Google.

This one about pundit books.

Now take a run through your broke-dick blog.  Makes you want to do better, right?  Me, too.

I’ll try to think about what makes people like Anil, Andy or Matt’s site MeFi (which, also, 10 years of amazing) so great.  My hunch:  they actually love the Web; they are in it for the long haul; they’ve been around long enough to see the same patterns play out; they are still fascinated by all of it and like getting you excited about something.

Anyway, Anil’s on the podium.  Stop reading other stupid shit and start training to chase him down. I am.

Got to spend some time with Josh Williams while in Dallas this week.  Love this kid.  Got him to talk a bit about how they found themselves making Gowalla.

Then this past week at Web2Expo, much the same thing. Slides that touted the speaker’s twitter handle as primary identity.

Think of the power of this for Twitter. You don’t need to name the animals. You only need to be the language in which animals speak themselves. For Unlimited Power (mmmwhahahahhaha)

It’s ridonk. Own your namespace. Get a domain, pivot from there. If your domain is your name, so much the better. Please don’t come crying to me when the Goog owns your ‘@’ and that whole namespace gets deprecated. (Hey, extra credit: after everyone in the world is following your Twitter updates, will your food taste that much better?)

• You have a web site already. You are probably blogging. There’s your release mechanism.
• Visibility and awareness should be much less of an issue now. The communication universe is knowable & addressable.
• Some of the regulatory issues propping up wire services have cleared up.
• You want your domain to be the authoritative URL for news about the company, not a third party.
• They muddy your search index.
• Where is your homebase for response?

I suppose an argument could be made that newswires have made some strides in socializing company releases, and since you aren’t in the communications business you can offload that and get back to making better gizmos. But if you’re already working with a PR team, shouldn’t they be showing you how to build and use these tools? This is pretty standard stuff at this point. My guess is that inertia plays a big part in this. We’ve always used wire distribution, the client budgets are created accordingly, we want to maximize coverage, etc.

I’d actually argue against this last point. I think a case could be made that more targeted, more granular ‘coverage’ and interactions are vastly more useful. It all builds, and, very quickly, something like Boxee can end up in paper of record anyway. Take yesterday’s news about Hulu/Boxee: mainly conducted between the blogs of the companies. Maybe there was a press release. If so, kinda useless. Even more so if someone paid to have it put on some proprietary wire service.

So, really: do you guys still do this? To me it would feel like going to record store. You know, without the fun.

• Wednesday, Feb. 11, 6:00, Cohabitat. Adam Keys, Garrett Dimon, Christopher St. John and other DFW nerds will be talking about what we’re working on in a series of lightning talks. “Here’s What I’m Thinking” at the new Dallas coworking space, Cohabitat.
• Thursday, Feb. 12, 7:00, Art Institute of Dallas. I’m doing this month’s talk at Refresh Dallas. Reprising the Personal Informatics thing. Should be fun.

I’ll be setting up shop at Cohabitat, the new coworking space in Uptown set up by fellow Louisiana native and all-around good guy, Blake Burris. Hope to cross paths next week.

Dan Benjamin explains how I’m doing my avatars all wrong. (Those at my talk in Atlanta last November know that I publicly made these same points, acknowledged that my weakness for animation made me do silly manga type things with my avatars, and that inertia has left them all in place. Such is life. Bigger fish to fry.) Dan’s right. Do what he say.

I’m loving QPR, quotidian public radio.

WordCampNola is jumping off 4/10 and 4/11. I might be talking about socializing WordPress on 4/10. 4/11 I’ll be running the Crescent City Classic. And hey, while I have you, I’d like to second The Ryan King’s notion that this *Camp thing has got to go, yo. Yes, Camp now has zippo to do with spinning off of FOO and even has little to do with unconferencing. I think it is supposed to mean ‘cool conference’. Anyway, ixnay. Mmkay?

Scott Beale cracks a cold PBR and tries to get the bottom of what makes hipsters tick.

NYTimes API.

Merlin’s clips thingy is useful. And glad to see (hear) a new podcast. Good, as always.

Doug Bowman on the new Gmail buttons.

Why Matt Jones is my new bicycle.

He sees mobile as something of a super power device and described something he calls “bionic noticing” – obsessively recording curious things he sees around him, driven by this multi-capable device in his pocket.

“Making maps and taking photos and sucking photons out of the city and putting them up on Flickr. It’s the thing I can’t do without now – this remembering machine,” he said.

He’s frustrated with the disembodied way that we engage with mobile devices: “beautiful shiny plastic things with some gangly bag of mostly water tapping away on them”.

“We should be an embodied person in the world rather than a disembodied finger tickling a screen walking down the street. We need to unfold and unpack the screen into the world.”

You are receiving this email because you are an EPM customer, Mayer on Marketing, TLLDA or Datafile reader, have requested product information, been featured in an EPM publication, been referred to us by a colleague or are a marketing leader.

Tony, Josh and I all tried to give an answer, but, as I recall, they sounded kind of lame. Naturally, you Twitter something in this type of situation. I did, and here is a juicy discussion that ensued on Friendfeed.

It’s obvious that most don’t care for the name, connoting that community *is* actually something that can be *managed*. Kevin Marks has a great rundown of Web community types thinking through this type of lingo: offering tummler, moderator, conversational catalyst, curator, connector and other words that magnetize thinking in a different place than ‘manager’. Check out Heather Gold’s Google Talk on ‘How to Be a Tummler.’ (More of Heather’s writing on what she calls ‘open source management’, including a video chat with George Oates.) Deb Schultz usually has a lot to say on this as well, ie this presentation of hers on community evangelism or her talk on weaving.

Aside from what we call the process and the gig, what they *do* is another thing altogether.

Susan Mernit:

Smartly ride herd on the cattle, the cowboys, the ponies and the coyotes.

Robert Scoble:

So, a community manager is someone who keeps an already-existing community happy. Who listens to the community and takes care of problems. Who finds new content and other things for that community, IE, who feeds that community.

Adam Darowski:

My favorite part of the role is sifting through all the great feature requests and recommendations, getting free user feedback on how to make your product better.

Dave Winer:

They hang out in the community and rep the company and its products. Apologizes if the company screws up. Encourages people to choose the company’s products over the others. Helps people find the right person in the company to work with. Retains their humanity, and generally takes the customer’s side whenever possible. Quits if the company acts in an unprincipled way, so they act as a guarantor of the honesty of the company. A canary in the coalmine. Best if it’s the CEO of the company.

Jeremiah pointed to a post of his outlining the 4 elements of what community managers do.

You’ll notice that people are all over on this. As it should be. For me, what matters are the practices that emerge out of grooming and growing healthy communities, and they need not apply elsewhere. So, it depends, is kind of my answer. Look to people who have done great work in this area already: Heather Champ, Tara Hunt, Jake McKee, Derek Powazek.

It’s something I’ll try to notice more and write more about. As we see job descriptions with the term, I’d like to steer people away from thinking of community as a place to do Advertising By Other Means.

I did a general talk about thinking through the impact of social design decisions. Great fun. Thanks to Jeff and the magnificent team of Lullabots.

A good Dave McClure rant.

I like your face. A sweet lil heartsong by Randy Reddig.

Emmet launches.  Huzzah for Janice & David.  A way to tell stories about how we’re all connected.

Work on stuff that matters.

Umair has been on quite a roll. Go read it all, subscribe, do both, read some aloud to your children tonight, sing it.

Zeldman shows us that he could easily chuck this Web stuff and just write.

Andrew Chen runs the numbers on freemium.

WordPress.tv has oodles of WordPress screencasts.

The lastest episode of TheSocialWeb.tv tackles the combo OpenID/OAuth stuff Plaxo & the Goog did. Nice.

When the going gets tough, Web geniuses go back to making great things. Their experiments make our Web rich & strange. It will happen again this time, too. Rest easy. Narendra Rocherolle’s PowerTwitter is an example of such a goody that makes other goodies that much more pleasureable. It’s a FireFox plug-in that amplifies your experience of reading twitter.com by rendering shortened URLs more readable, adding a search box on the front page, integrating Facebook status messages, showing inline videos & photos, baking in retweet functionality, expanding the pool of ‘@’ messages you’ll see, and so on.

I spotlight this because Narendra is the kind of guy who doesn’t get nearly enough attention. 30Boxes was the first example I can recall of someone really trying to think through integrated lifestreaming and using dynamic social data. And he’s done several other things since then. You can listen to an interview I did with Narendra some time ago. You should pay attention to what he’s working on. It’s a clue.

Maybe he doesn’t get enough attention because marketing dorks like me are taking up too much of the oxygen. See, we’re good at talking and telling stories, and that’s sometimes easier than listening to some code dreamer try to explain something so that everyone can understand it. So things like TechMeme and those gooby most retweeted lists are heavily overweighted with talky marketing dorks. And under representing the true army of geniuses upon whom we rely for a better and better Web.

We can fix that. When you find something really interesting, do a little bit of digging to find out who made it. See if they explain some of the thinking behind it. Watch what they are bookmarking, go hear them demo something. You might even just (*gasp*) ask them about their work and then go tell some of your friends about it. Blog it. Connect them to your friends and clients. Or you can just go back to reading about funding, M&A, layoffs and other things that sort of feel like they are about the Web. They are as much about the real Web as the Food Network is about the magic of sharing a meal.

I think you should pay attention to:

Matt Webb

Tom Coates

Jane McGonigal

Ben Cerveny

Jyri Engestrom

Matt Jones

Mike Migurski

Alex Iskold

Matt Biddulph

Ted Rheingold

The magnificent minds at Get Satisfaction

Scott Rafer

Larry Halff

Andy Baio

David Recordon

Joseph Smarr

Jeff Veen

Like all lists, this one is incomplete and of the moment. Make your own. Share it.

Want to reenchant yourself with the Web?  Look at it closely.  And show me other things that are handmade and full of heart.

Musing about the changing nature of our personal sites, and I see the ‘Table of Contents’ approach to blog posts popping up a lot. You can see a great example of it at Wilson Miner’s new, chic site. (Love his work.) Not only commercial blogs (GigaOm, the Gawker blogs), but also personal sites, as we try to surface more of the varied stuff we are doing across the Web.

Along those same lines, I’m wondering if the Row of Favicons is becoming the accepted way to present our identity array. Works fine for nerds like us, but not very descriptive for people unfamiliar with those other services. If you are a book lover, I don’t want you to miss my LibraryThing account, for instance. I love this look, and appreciate the economy of the idea. Just thinking about this as a pattern we all start using.

Ben Ward offers up some extended, nuanced thoughts about making the OAuth experience better, musing about what can be learned from Facebook Connect.

I love this talk by Jeremy Keith — a lightning tour of systems thinking.

Zeldman on his redesign thinking for An Event Apart.

Josh Porter reprints a great note from Garrett Dimon on designing in public.

A few posts from 37Signals on the decisions behind revamping the Highrise marketing site.

I like the way Eric Norlin thinks, and I’m pleased to tell you that I’m going to talk about user generated context & system design at his new Glue Conference. It’s in Denver in May. Check it out.

Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone have a growing wiki for their book on social design patterns.

Dan Benjamin has a great post on what he calls the Personal Web, trying to suss out how blogging, twittering and social network activity mesh.

Check out this list of responses to a question about audience and the creation of art over at Ze’s site.  Thoughtful answers.

While we think Toobla will be interesting to lots of people, I’d like to get feedback from the following types of folks:

*  The People Formerly Known As Bloggers:  now you’re the kind of person who has a baker’s dozen of sites you add to all the time.  Toobla might be an interesting way for you to archive & represent some of the things you find on the Web or even make yourself.

*  Event managers and marketers: you can use Toobla to show live streams, a master schedule, an open backchannel, a flickr stream of photos from your event, etc.  An embeddable window into your event, ideal for people there in person or following on the Web.

*  Collectors.  Yesterday you were the one emailing all those links around to funny things. Today you might Twitter or Tumble the same stuff to let people know.  Toobla might be just the thing for your combination of packrat/showoff tendencies.

If this sounds at all interesting to you, please drop me a line at brian [at] toobla [dot] com, and include a line or two about why you want to test out Toobla.  It’s still rough & tumble, but if you dig playing with alpha stage Web toys, let me know.