SocialMedia Archives - Page 19 of 26

Useful Links: Multitasking and Media, a persistent Internet, Dreamweaver tip, community building

Nick Bilton on Multitasking and Media is a live-blogged report from (Re)Mixed Messages by Rachel Barenblat from PopTech. Bilton delivered many fascinating gems, which Barenblat captured with quotes like:

What does this mean for newspapers? “We talk about business models,” Bilton says, “but that’s getting ahead of what we really should be talking about — that everything about news is changing.” The devices we access news on are changing. Now we read the news on mobile phones or computers. “I have a different psychological experience with that device, and I’m going to have that same psychological experience with that news, too.”

“The relevance of news is changing.” When Teddy Kennedy died, he says, “that wasn’t news to me.” It didn’t mean anything to Bilton, but to a lot of people it did. “There was a shooting across the street from my house: that was news to me, but not to you, unless you live where I live.” Our concepts of news are changing. By the same token: if someone in my friends network gets in a car accident? That’s news to me. Bilton tells a story about a friend borrowing his cmoputer to check “the news” — meaning Facebook.

“We used to buy newspapers based on the location where we live; now we can get news from anywhere. Our concept of trust is changing. We trust the news media 29 percent and we trust our friends and family 90 percent.”

Bilton created a term “technochondria” in this talk, which @blogdiva quickly pointed out was used incorrectly. See the technochondria tweet and the technophobia tweet from @blogdiva.

Not just media, but education is changing, too. In Newsweek this week, Daniel Lyons wrote The Hype is Right: Apple’s table will reinvent computing. I might add, not just computing, but everything . . .

These devices will play video and music and, of course, display text; they will let you navigate by touching your fingers to the screen; and—this is most important—they will be connected to the Internet at all times. For those of us who carry iPhones, this shift to a persistent Internet has already happened, and it’s really profound. The Internet is no longer a destination, someplace you “go to.” You don’t “get on the Internet.” You’re always on it. It’s just there, like the air you breathe.

You don’t “get on the Internet.” You’re always on it. It’s just there, like the air you breathe. That really resonates with me and sums up a whole lot of how I feel about modern living.

Dreamweaver tip for screen shots may appeal to the Windows users who write material in Dreamweaver. I often write posts in Dreamweaver, particularly if I’m going to include code samples and don’t want to type all those character entities, but I hadn’t thought of pasting the screen grabs directly into DW in this way. Gives you access to the “headless Fireworks” image optimization tools.

How to Build a Community Web Site talks about how the creation of Ottawa Tonight. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – it’s not about the tools. It’s not about the tools. It’s about people.”

Useful Links: social media, celebrity geeks, Yahoo! goof

5 Ways Social Media is Changing our Daily Lives at Mashable is an interesting look at the way the times they are a-changing.

Where the Entertainers are Older and High Tech is an article I wrote at BlogHer about a couple of famous elders who have earned a new star in their reputation by being geeky in the social media world of today that Mashable talks about.

Yahoo! and the Objectification of Women is another story about clueless behavior at tech events. I refer again to the changes in our daily lives that the Mashable article mentions and wonder why anyone thinks they can get away with bad behavior in a time when everything is public.

Useful Links: Tech blogs, the backchannel

Several Tech Blogs Worth Exploring. Oh Yeah, All by Women at JavaWorld is a good source of information for those looking for female tech bloggers, female conference speakers, and inspiration.

Web Teacher has posted about using the backchannel in the past. An event at HighEdWeb in Milwaukee earlier this month resulted in a backchannel revolt that made news in educational circles and serves as a morality tale for speakers and educators in the future. A few reports about the incident:

In my mind, no one should get in front of an audience these days without someone at their side monitoring the backchannel. If you start to bomb, you need to know it immediately and take steps to salvage the situation. If this presenter had realized what was going on, he could have turned off the projector and engaged the audience in a dialog about the topic. Or something. Anything. But instead, he’s now notorious for being a plodding dinosaur in a fast-paced world.

Twitter for Writers

SouthWest Writers is a large organization of writers, most of whom live in New Mexico. This week I presented an introduction to Twitter for the SouthWest Writers group. I explained a few of the reasons why Twitter can be helpful to a writer. The slides are available on SlideShare: Twitter for Writers.

I talked for quite a while (they had to drag me away from the microphone) and the questions were excellent.

Sense and Sensibility and Social Media

A lesson on social media etiquette came my way yesterday while I was participating in a Twitter chat for writers. It starting me thinking about the many changes in sense and sensibility that I’ve adopted, almost unnoticed, since I stepped into the social media world.

Let’s start with yesterday. I’ve been actively researching how writers use Twitter for some time. Tomorrow evening, I’m giving a talk on Twitter for Writers to my local writers group, SouthWest Writers. As part of the preparation for that talk, I’ve joined the #writechat discussion on several Sunday afternoons. Everyone participating in the chat appends the #writechat hashtag to their tweets. The hashtag makes it possible for all the participants to follow the conversation. Sounds reasonable enough, right?

After I’d made several tweets during the chat, this tweet from briandigital came into the chat discussion. I know Brian, we’ve met in real life at some of the Albuquerque geek events. I wasn’t offended by his suggestion that my etiquette for Twitter chats needed rethinking. In essence, he said that prepending every tweet to a chat with an @reply would hide most of those tweets from my followers’ Twitter streams. This seems very sensible advice to me–many of my followers have no interest in writing as a field of study. The simple practice of @replying to another tweet in the #writechat Twitter stream would save many of my followers from a volley of tweets of no interest.

That simple change in etiquette, or sensibility, or consciousness–whatever you choose to call it–started me thinking about other changes social media has wrought in my life.

Much of what has changed for me is because of my work as a Contributing Editor at BlogHer. As part of that job, I have expanded my reading habits to include all sorts of blogs that go beyond the narrow focus on web design and development that formerly populated my RSS reader. My RSS subscription list has expanded. I follow people on Facebook and Twitter and Linked In that I might never have known existed. I learn from them. I now have a different view of politics, technology, gender, race relations, humor, accessibility, pop culture, books, social action, age, parenting, food, green living, and many other topics. Had I not reached out to discover new ideas and new writers on those topics, I would still hold my former limited view of the world.

It’s an expansion I cherish. It makes me a better person. I maintain a narrow focus here on Web Teacher, but my behind-the-scenes thinking has changed significantly.

The process advanced slowly. I didn’t think about it as life changing as each forward step landed. Brian’s small wake-up call on Twitter etiquette yesterday turned the light on the individual pixels to reveal a bigger picture.

What has your experience been?

Find People to Follow on Twitter

How can new users of Twitter find people they want to follow? There are paid services that do this for you, but I think it’s better to grow the list of people you follow more organically.

Use Twitter’s people search. It offers ways to search by name, email, or on other networks. This tool gives you a way to find people you already know or have contact with by Gmail, Yahoo or AOL.

You probably know the names of many people who are thought leaders in your field—you’ve read their books and blogs, seen them at conferences. Try entering their names under Find on Twitter and see if you find them. This may or may not find someone who is actually using Twitter, depending on how they entered their information and name in their profile. Sometimes the Twitter people search results aren’t helpful. For example, if you want to follow Opera’s standards advocate Chris Mills you find a lot of people named Chris Mills, but not the guy you want. Opera’s Chris uses Chris David Mills as his Twitter name, but if you don’t know that, you can’t find him using the People search.

Most people whose blogs you read have a Twitter badge or widget on their blog that invites you to follow them. Use those links to find and follow Twitter accounts.

Use search.twitter.com. The advanced search feature has all sorts of useful options. You can search on location: your location to find people in particular geographic areas.

The advanced search offers options to search by word, phrase, hashtag, language, reference, date, attitude, and even whether a user’s tweets contain links. If you have an interest in a particular topic, for example #accessibility, you can search for that hashtag. You may discover some interesting people to follow who are tweeting on the topic.

Many people recommend others to follow on Fridays during the event called #followFriday or #FF. Check those people out when you see suggested names. You will find people who interest you this way.

There are events using tweetchat on various topics. Each chat topic has a hashtag. A chat I enjoy is #writechat. When you log in to Tweetchat you can easily watch all the people chatting on the chat topic and find thoughtful and helpful people you may want follow.

The lovely thing about using tweetchat is that it automatically appends the chat hashtag to the end of any tweet you post during the chat.

As you advertise your own Twitter account and participate on Twitter, people begin to find you. When you receive an email telling you that you have a new follower, use the link to their profile to decide whether you want to follow them. It’s important to check out new followers to your account so you can either follow them back, ignore them without prejudice, or block them if they appear to be spammers.