Category: SocialMedia

Useful links: Full background, Accessible Themes, Student Guide

How Full Page Background Images Affect the User Experience give some interesting points about full page backgrounds that I’d never considered. Plus a link to a how to at CSS Tricks if you want to try out a full page background.

Accessible Joe announced a project to create accessible WordPress themes called Cities. He’s working on one for Los Angeles. Karen Mardahl @kmdk is working on a Copenhagen theme. For Syndey, Australia, there’s Lisa Herrod @scenariogirl. Char James-Tanny @CharJTF is working on one for Boston. Jennison Asuncion @Jennison has one going for Toronto. All these new accessible themes will be available free through wordpress.org. @AccessibleJoe asks that you DM him on Twitter if you’d like to participate in this project. You can join one of the existing teams mentioned above, or organize for a new city.

A Student’s Guide to Web Design contacted me on Twitter, so I checked them out. Their purpose is, “equipping students after graduation for the design industry.” Recent grads might find a useful community there.

Useful Links: Meritocracy, Primers, Binder fun

you keep using that word is a passionate rant about the word “meritocracy” in response to the post I linked to yesterday called A primer on sexism in the tech industry.

With even more response to that primer post, Laura Sanders wrote A primer on sexism in the tech industry – by an actual girl. Then Kathy Sierra send an email to Faruk Ateş, who wrote the original post, and later gave him permission to publish her email.

On a lighter note, were you on Twitter last night during the debate? I was, and was surprised by how inane some of the tweets were. But you know what, perhaps humor is the only response to politics in our time. Here’s a TechCrunch report about some of the fun people had at the expense of the Romney: ‘Binders Full Of Women’, Romney Gaffe, Gets Tumblr And 200k Likes On Facebook. It’s just amazing what the Internet and social media allow in this day and age – sometimes we forget that.

 

Useful links: Hacker vs. Maker, Social Media, Prebooks

Hackers and Makers: Language Matters is from Curious for a Living. She said, “Yes, language matters. Especially when we’re inviting community. What feels more welcoming to you: A hackerspace or a Maker Faire?”

NIce summary of how the candidates are using social media in the 2012 election. Do you think it makes a difference?

CSS: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition by Eric Meyer is a post about much more than the latest edition of Eric’s CSS opus. It’s about how books are marketed, sold, packaged, distributed and even conceived of as entities. As far as I know, O’Reilly is the first publisher to do something like this. I don’t think O’Reilly will be the last. Even if you aren’t interested in the latest CSS book, you need to read this post.

I tweeted about Eric’s post yesterday. He doesn’t completely share my opinion. Here’s a part the conversation Eric and I had then. (By the way, have you noticed how impossible it is to embed a complete conversation from Twitter? Twitter decides for you what tweets you want to include. This is a patchwork and not complete.)

 

 

 

Useful links: BioWare, targeted ads, headers on Twitter, Coursera

BioWare Co-Founders step down. Gaming has been good to these two, who are retiring from the company they founded to do other things.

Rob Weychert used his turn on The Pastry Box Project this month to talk about Hulu advertising and how it is supposed to be tailored to individual interests but fails at the task. Makes me think about how Klout is often spectacularly wrong about your influence or how Facebook shows you ads for things you absolutely hate.

Guess you heard the news that Twitter is now using a header image something like Facebook’s big one. I already changed mine to something similar to what I use on this blog. You’ll find the option in Settings > Design and then scroll down the page to find Header.

Coursera is growing. If you are an educator, you need to be keeping an eye on it and what it means.

Ever wonder where the idea of social media got started?

I truly doubt there are many people out there that have not at least attempted to use some form of social media. Even some of the most isolated areas in the world are getting internet connections, and sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are often the first destinations. Social media is just a regular part of modern life, these days.

But how did the entire concept of social media sharing come to be? What sparked the phenomenon?

The Origins

How The Idea of Social Media Sharing Came to Be
Credit: Khalid Albaih

This is extremely hard to answer. Because really, social media sharing is just a slightly adapted idea that has been used online for a long time. Links have always been shared from one site to another. Livejournal and copycat sites used to have lists of blogs that person read. RSS feeds allow for subscriptions that were an early form of following.

Of course, you also have the other social networking sites that have become dinosaurs today. Sites such as Friendster and Myspace, which technically had this concept through “friending”. Though the modern equivalents like following on Twitter did not catch on.

So, where did the concept of social media sharing come from? It depends on how you look at it. The best answer is probably that it is a concept that developed from many directions and other platforms.

“Following” Found In Nature

How The Idea of Social Media Sharing Came to Be

The question of examples of following in nature was brought up on Quora back in 2010, and it is an interesting way of looking at it. Ants follow one another by scent, as one user points out. Lemmings follow one another by movement. Swarms follow the same kind of pattern.

But really, any kind of mass habitat culture will have following within its infrastructure. Humans are very much the same, in how we observe those both in our lives, and those outside of it. Just look at the popularity of tabloids and celebrity gossip blogs.

Do you have a theory as to the true origins of social media sharing as a concept? Let us know in the comments!

Guest Author Jessy is the business and social media blogger for Business registration database, the free tool giving your business profiles more online and social media visibility.

Image Credits: 1, 2.

3 Tips for Educators Who Don’t Know Jack about Twitter

Do you keep getting the advice that you should be using Twitter? And do you keep ignoring it?

Twitter can be daunting for someone who doesn’t feel really on top of the whole social media thing. It’s overwhelming if you look at all of one piece. But you can separate out small pieces of Twitter that you may find useful and helpful.

I want to help you find the way to separate out the pieces, put them in usable containers, and let the rest flow on by without worrying about it. What follows are several ways you can narrow down the Twitter stream and make it manageable.

Who You Follow and the @ Symbol

Even the most inexperienced Twitter user knows that you follow people and people follow you. You want to be selective about who you follow. Follow people whose tweets you truly want to read. You do not have to follow everyone who follows you.

When you sign in and open Twitter in your browser (or in some app like TweetDeck), you see messages sent by the people you follow. Depending on how many people you follow, you may see only a few tweets, or they may roll by fairly quickly.

You also see tweets that were retweeted by people you follow. I’ve highlighted examples in the image.

twitter stream with retweets circled

Retweets do spread your message around to more people, so they are considered a good thing to be appreciated.

Looking at the example tweets in the image above, you notice that a tweet can include the name of another Twitter user – for example @ESPN – or a link to an article or web site. Tweets can also include hashtags with keywords – for example #GameDay.

Using the @ symbol indicates a Twitter user. You can address your message to a specific person this way. You can click the person’s name and go to their profile to learn more about them and follow them if you want. Or you can just mention someone in passing using the @twittername knowing that they will see your tweet.

Using Hashtags and Searching

Hashtags followed by keywords are useful for following a topic rather than a person. Often events or causes have special hashtags. I recently attended WordCamp in Albuquerque. The hashtag for the event was #wcabq. Because everyone at the event knew about the hashtag, they used it when they tweeted about the event. That made it very easy to search on #wcabq and see all the tweets about the event in one place.

twitter search results

Hashtags can help your tweet get seen and retweeted. Recently I wrote a post on this blog about accessibility. I tweeted it, but I didn’t include a hashtag. Later I realized I’d overlooked the hashtag for accessibility (#a11y – which is an a, 11 missing letters, and a y). I tweeted the same link again with a hashtag. I got more traffic to my post and I got retweets the second time. There are people and businesses who maintain a constant search for whatever hashtag they are interested in so they see and perhaps respond to every tweet on a particular topic. One of the most common uses of Twitter is to search for some bit of breaking news using a hashtag.

In a classroom, a hashtag can be used to follow tweets on a particular topic of discussion during the class period.

Using Lists

It’s easy to create a list. Sign in to Twitter in your browser. You should see something like this in your sidebar.

twitter lists

Using the Lists link you can do two things. You can create a list. You can also see other people’s lists that you are on. You can click on one of your lists (after you’ve made some) and see only tweets from the people on that list.

twitter lists

You can add someone to a list whether you follow them or not. When you are looking at a person’s profile, you see a pull down menu next to the Follow/Following button. Use it to select either add to or remove from list and pick the list you want that person on. You can put a person on more than one list.

add to or remove from list

Some people use lists to separate out the people they are really interested in and seldom look at tweets from everyone they follow, they just look at their special list.

I use lists to aggregate tweets I don’t want to miss into a daily paper using paper.li. For example, I have paper.li pick up all the tweets from my list of the women in web education and create a daily paper for that list. Once a day I get an email that the paper is ready, and I can get 24 hours worth of tweets from the educators on that list in just a few minutes. This is a big time saver for me; I never miss a tweet from a people I really am interested in. Other people who are interested in web education can follow my list. Anyone can subscribe to and read the daily paper.

These three tips – finding the right people to follow, using hashtags to find what you want, and using lists to narrow down what you read – can take Twitter from an overwhelming rush of chatter to something you are in control of and can use to achieve your particular goals.

 

What technology makes possible and a question

I’m reading an inspiring book called What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers. It explains all the ways that technology has enabled us to return to “the sharing and exchange of all kinds of assets from spaces to skills to cars in ways and on a scale never possible before.”

At collaborativecomsumption.com there are dozens of examples of websites where you can share, exchange, swap, barter or, sell collaboratively. The list is a gold mine.

Here’s a video explaining what collaborative comsumption is all about.

One thing I searched for on the site and couldn’t find was a recommendation of helpful open source software that might let me build something for my own little neighborhood such as a tool borrowing resource or a ride exchange. Do you know of such a pre-built but modifiable software package? I found a few on Sourceforge, but nothing that looks exactly like what I want.

I’m working on a much more in depth post about the notion of collaborative consumption that will be published tomorrow on BlogHer.com. If you are interested in learning more, check there tomorrow afternoon.