Social Networks

Social Browsing

2008-10-03T16:20:53-04:00

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with different tools for ‘social browsing’. By social browsing, I mean having the ability to chat with others about the webpages you are visiting. In a sense, people have been doing this for a long time. When I find a webpage that is interesting, I may send an IM to my wife, and we might chat about the page in IM for a while. I’ve talked about websites with other chat tools, from IRC to Twitter and other microblogging sites and to virtual worlds.

I’ve also bookmarked sites that I like using Mento, which automatically book marks to del.icio.us and ma.gnloia, as well as a greasemonkey script that automatically bookmarks to some other sites, I forget which ones right now, since I lost the script in one of my upgrades, and never got around to finding it again.

Yet none of these tools are specifically aimed at synchronously sharing and talking about bookmarks. This is starting to change, and I’d like to highlight some different tools that I’ve been exploring.

The first is RocketOn. In RocketOn you get an avatar that walks around the website you are visiting. You can chat with other avatars that are visiting the same website. As you explore websites, you win prizes that you can use to modify the appearance of your avatar, and who knows what else.

When I first started using it, I chatted with a few different people. However, it seemed that most of them were refugees from AOL Chat rooms and none of them had much of interest to say. I’ve kept the tool running, but normally in a disabled mode, because there is one annoying downside. When you click, most of the time, RocketOn intercepts the click and makes your avatar walk to where you clicked. Not particularly friendly.

Today, I downloaded Weblin. I was struck by how similar Weblin is to RocketOn. At first glance, it does not seem that Weblin has the same level of avatar customization available. The little icon for controlling Weblin sits in the lower left hand corner of the website right on top of the RocketOn control button. I played with Weblin briefly, but soon wearied of it. The one feature that I did like was Weblin’s ability to bookmark a page to various social bookmark sites like Digg and del.icio.us from their control button.

Another tool I tried briefly was Exit Reality. It seemed similar to Weblin or RocketOn, with a little bit of Google’s Virtual World, Lively thrown in. Unlike Weblin or RocketOn, Exit Reality is three dimensional, and you can change the look at feel of a room. However, when I ran it on my machine, it slowed Firefox down to a crawl, and would crash if I went to any complicated pages. So, I disabled it, and can’t figure out or remember how to restart it. Maybe I’ll check that out again in more detail later.

Social Browse approaches things a little differently. Instead of having avatars running around the screen, they are much more like Twitter or some other microbrowser customized for sharing bookmarks and talking about them. They have a sidebar for Firefox, where you can see the latest messages. The sidebar is fairly similar to the Plurk sidebar for Firefox. In addition, they add some buttons to the navigation tool bar, so you can quickly share a link or comment on a link. One final aspect, they have a popup window, similar to GoogleTalk’s popup window so you can see messages of your friends.

However, as far as I can tell, you can only see the messages and links of your friends, and so far, none of my friends on Social Browse are posting that many links or comments that have drawn me into discussions. Nonetheless, I can see this as being a tool that has great potential.

If you use any of these tools, or any other interesting tools for sharing and talking about links, let me know.

Entrecard For Sale

2008-09-27T09:21:13-04:00

Entrecard users are all talking about Entrecard being for sale. In some of the posts some details emerge. Let’s look at the Entrecard model and try to make a little more sense of offering. In many ways, Entrecard is like BlogAds with a little bit of MyBlogLog thrown in. It is like BlogAds in that the user places an ad on the site and receives compensation. It is like MyBlogLog in that it is community based and you can see who visited you and return the visit.

Each time a user clicks on an Entrecard, they receive a credit, as does the person whose card is clicked on. A user can click on up to 300 cards for every blog that they have in the system. There is also a limit to the number of clicks that can come from a single IP address. Currently, there are 3 million such clicks a month. In addition, to place a card on another person’s site, you need to buy an ad slot. Currently, the price rises exponentially based on the number of ads in queue. Unknown sites cost two, four, eight, or sixteen credits. Well know sites go for thousands of credits. The person whose site the ad runs on gets 12.5% of the revenues.

Various suggestions are offered on how to monetize the site. The first suggestion is “Credit Transfer Tax: millions of credits are transferred daily through Entrecard. If you charged $1.00 for every thousand credits transferred, you'd be rich.”

Well, not exactly rich. For every million credits transferred, you would make $1000, do depending on how many millions of credits per day you are talking about, it ends up being some multiple of $30,000 per month. That should be enough to keep an early stage startup burning through money too quickly.

However, how much of that is the six million credits paid to people clicking, and however much is paid on advertising revenues? If you include that, I’m probably transferring at least a thousand credits a day. That means I would be charged at least a $1/day to use the system, or $30/month. If I were to be hit with that, I’d leave. It just isn’t worth that much. If there are other transfers, and the charge was on that, it might make sense.

The second idea is to have 25-33% of the ads be to paying clients. With 80 million Entrecard impressions each month, that could be 20 to 25 million impressions. Depending on the CPM charged this could be beneficial.

Currently, Entrecard is making about $2000/month. While it isn’t described where that is coming from, my guess is that it is advertising revenue. The site is currently getting 3,250,000 visits per month. At that rate, it would seem like the CPM rate for Entrecard must be around sixty-two cents. That is over four times base CPM rate that Facebook charges for their ads. At a CPM rate of sixty-two cents, for 20 to 25 million impressions, that could bring in around $15,000 per month. This seems like the most reasonable approach.

Option three is to implement a credit exchange. “If you built an exchange where people buy and sell their credits exclusively through the site, and you take a commission, you would make a ton. “ In a lot of ways, this seems like a variant of the first option which would handle the issue of credits from Entrecard better. Yet there are a few problems here. People are likely to rebel and find ways of working around the system. However, to the extent that a voluntary system that was easy to use were set up, this could be beneficial. Personally, I would like to see credits handled by a third party. There were a few at the gaming show, and connecting to a large micropayment system, ideally one that connects into the gaming world could be beneficial. However, that would probably cut into the profits.

The fourth option is to place a listing fee for items in the market place. There isn’t a lot of business done in the marketplace right now, and if there was a listing fee, I suspect the market would be even less likely to gain traction. There would also be the concern about micropayments. The suggested listing fee was something like twenty-five cents. Instead, using Entrecredits, ideally tied into a micropayment system as talked about in option three would make more sense. However, I don’t see this bringing in much revenue.

So, the only option that seems all that viable is to bring in outside advertising into the system. There are various issues that this would raise. Would the users have the choice about which ads would be displayed? Who would do the marketing to bring in clients? It might make the most sense for Entrecard to investigate a deal with a site like BlogAds or Chitika.

With this, let’s say there is $20,000/month in total revenue. I don’t know what the current expenses are, but that should be enough to cover server expenses and the expenses of a few employees. If things were run on a shoe string, the company could grow organically and build a track record of being able to meet expenses while growing. This would make the company more valuable for investors some point down the line, perhaps when the markets are a little more stable.

Of course, this doesn’t address any immediate cashflow needs that the company might have. Yet to address these needs, it might be better to find angel investors willing to put up enough to tide the company over until it is profitable. Finding a bridge loan or a small business loan might be another good option.

It seems like this should be a viable business if approached properly. That said, there may be other issues, I don’t know about. There are areas where I think the company is not performing well right now, particularly in terms of pricing ads, making sure that the Entrecard credits are stable and less prone to hyper-inflaction, and thinking about how community is built and maintained. However, that is a completely different set of issues.

So, if you’ve got the money, think out the plan and see what you can do with Entrecard.

Identi.ca, OpenID and XRI

2008-09-22T19:25:49-04:00

Recently, there has been an interesting question about user nomenclature in federated micro blogging systems. By micro blogging systems, I’m talking about sites like Twitter, Plurk, Rejaw, and Identi.ca. Right now, Identi.ca is the only one that truly supports the ability to subscribe to be subscribed from other micro blogging systems, although there are some sites that that facilitate exchanging messages between different micro blogging systems.

So, the question of nomenclature: How do you refer to a person on a remote micro blogging system? Typically, users are referred to with an at sign prepended to their username. The problem is that @bob might be one person on one system and someone completely different on a different system. So, to clarify, people have been kicking around ideas of how to refer to people at other systems.

Personally, I like the format @username/system e.g. @ahynes1/identica Concerns are to keep the name short. After all you only have 140 characters to deal with in an SMS message and putting in full qualification can eat up valuable message space. Others have suggested using the at sign as a separator between the username and the system, e.g. @ahynes1@identica To me, that looks cumbersome and kludgy. On my cellphone, where spacing is harder to differentiate, I would be confused about whether this were to the user ahynes1 on the identica system, or to two people, ahynes1 and identica.

Another reason I like the @username/system format is that it fits nicely with XRIs which fit nicely with OpenID 2.0. @username/system is an accepted shortcut to xri://@username/system which can be accessed via the http protocol as http://xri.net/@username/system The at sign is an indicator of a company, which isn’t great. Registering a company in XRI costs $55/year, which is pretty excessive. Nonetheless, I thought it would be nice to register @ahynes1.

A long time ago, I registered =aldon.hynes. I never ended up using it much, other than for some software testing and as a forwarder so people could send me email without knowing my current email address.

As OpenID 2.0 came along and started supporting XRI logins, I found that I could login to identi.ca using =aldon.hynes. I thought that was pretty cool and changed my OpenID delegation to point to my XRI registrar. Unfortunately, many sites do not yet support XRI based OpenID logins, but it seems to be growing.

So, to test things out a little bit, I registered @ahynes1. Initially, I was going to use 2idi.com, since that is where I have =aldon.hynes registered. Unfortunately, for some reason, they wouldn’t take my credit card, so I checked out some other services and found that 1id.com took Paypal and would gladly take my money.

The next step was to set up a few forwarders. I set up @ahynes1/identica to point to http://identi.ca/ahynes1 and @ahynes1/twitter to point to http://twitter.com/ahynes1. So, for any microblogging site that takes @username/system and uses it as an XRI reference, at least my name will resolve in both Twitter and Identica.

With that, I then tested an added benefit. Would @username XRI references resolve properly in OpenID? I logged into Identi.ca as =aldon.hynes and added @ahynes1 as a valid alternate OpenID. So, now I can log into my Identi.ca account by using the OpenID @ahynes1 Pretty cool.

Now, there are people that have voice concerns about XRI. Why do we need XRI if we already have URIs? For me, XRIs are how we identify resources. URIs specify a transport to get to the resource. So, =aldon.hynes, or xri://=aldon.hynes identifies me. http://xri.net/=aldon.hynes is how to get to my identification information over the http protocol. Nice and clean in my name.

The other issue is pricing. $55/year is very steep for registering an XRI corporate domain. I can register a corporate DNS domain for something like $10/year. If XRI is going to take off, the pricing structure will have to change. At $12/year for an individual I-name, it is still a tad expensive, but a little more reasonable.

So, Identi.ca, OpenID and XRI work nicely together. It will be interesting to see where things go from here.

Refining A Digital Dunbar Number

2008-09-21T16:30:38-04:00

A little over a year ago, I wrote about a digital dunbar’s number.

Dunbar’s number, “the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships”. This is typically set at 150, based on the size of the neocortex. However, it doesn’t take into consideration that when you are working online, you can page in and out sets of people, so while your neocortex may only be able to maintain stable relationships with 150 people at a time, using a good digital rolodex, that number can expand considerably.

This raises a new question. Is there a Digital Dunbar’s Number? A number at which point you start getting overwhelmed with spam or declaring email bankruptcy?

It would seem as an expanded Digital Dunbar’s Number would be based, in part, on how well social media tools interoperate and allow you to organize your contacts. Unfortunately, so far, they don’t do all that well.

I explored the interconnectivity of different social media tools a bit last month. Rafe Needleman explored a similar idea this week as he pondered if we were heading towards a crisis in personal syndication overload.

So, we see continued refinement of various microblogging and life stream management sites. Laconi.ca seems to have constant development. New sites seem to emerge every day, and older sites, like Twitter and FriendFeed are coming out with new layouts.

FriendFeed now has features to show the best of a feed and the ability to add items to different feeds. I’ve been doing something similar by using rooms in FriendFeed. One group of friends are people that I know who are interested in blogging about progressive politics at a statewide level. Another group is people that I know who use Twitter from Connecticut and Rhode Island. I’ve set up rooms so I can see what they are saying, in the context of their groups.

It seems as if I’m not the only person interested in this. On Twine, yet another attempt at organizing social media, I was pointed to an article on TechCruch about a group of Mom’s using Twitter and using Ning.

I had a good discussion about this using another social media tool earlier this week. It seems like the tool that many of us want is something like this: Take something that gathers contact information, such Plaxo Pulse, Spock, Spoke, LinkedIn, etc.. Have it include the ability to group people, probably ideally by tags. Have it pull together all the social media for a person within a group, or with a common tag. Ideally, a user would be able to do it for people that are in a persons own universe, or across the whole universe, the way del.icio.us or Flickr handles tags. For the media gather, it should automatically eliminating duplicates, such as what happens when I use sites like ping.fm, posterous, or hellotxt to send my message to multiple sources. Then it should present a nice consolidated display, where comments can be added that are sent back to the original site as well as being posted on the consolidated feed.

Is that really too much to ask? With such a tool, we could see a giant increase in the possible Digital Dunbar’s Number.

Social Media for the Common Good

2008-09-20T09:42:02-04:00

It is popular these days for people bash social media as the domain of the self-absorbed. Critics ask, “Do thousands of people really need to know that you ran out of toothpaste this morning?” Yet this reflects a very narrow understanding of social media.

As an example, let’s look at two different non-profits that are making good use of Social Media.

The first site I want to highlight is Climb Up, So Kids can Grow Up, a project of the American Foundation for Children with AIDS. I learned about this site from change.org where I was asked to participate. I’m not a climber, so I am not attending any climbathon this weekend.

However, I have been running an ad about that for the past several months. People are encouraged to ‘climb, hike, run or cycle up the structure of their choice, anywhere in the world” in an effort to “increase awareness of the pediatric AIDS pandemic and raise funds for life-saving anti-retroviral (ARV) medication, food, and medical and humanitarian supplies to children affected by HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa”.

I was invited to participate in something that I wasn’t even paying attention to. I found a way to participate that met my current needs and hopefully have added a little to their efforts.

Then, yesterday, I received a message on Utterli, formerly known as Utterz about the Red Cross’s social media efforts.

I checked out the message on Red Cross Chat and wanted to highlight it here. It encouraged people to change their avatar yesterday to a Red Cross volunteer. In some places, it is important for me to keep my avatar distinct from other avatars, so I chose to keep my avatar in my standard format, but simply added a small Red Cross on my sweater.

They also asked people to post widgets. They provide two different widgets. One is too wide, and the other one is too slow. I’ve added the slow one for the time being, but I’ll probably drop it soon. It would be good if they could provide customization options for their widgets, but I didn’t see any.

They also asked people to play PSAs and or videos of disaster responses. They have a lot of great videos, and I encourage you to check out the blog post. I selected just one:

The post ends off with a pointer to online tools which includes a link to The Red Cross’ Social Media Links page. That page includes not only the link to their Twitter stream, but also a link to the twitter stream of nearly a dozen people involved in media at the Red Cross. This is a great example of how none profits should use social media.

In both examples, the organizations used social media to invite people to participate, and provided different types of participation In both cases, I participated a little bit this time, and am more likely to participate in future events, perhaps at a deeper level in the future.

Confronting the Blank Page

2008-09-14T19:23:12-04:00

I’ve done a lot of writing today. Most of it has been for mailing lists, and nothing seems to fit for the blog. Other stuff that I’ve written will make a good blog post when I have some time to sit and think and pull it all together. Yet other than an automated post from ma.gnolia, I haven’t written anything for the blog today, and I feel compelled to do so.

Both yesterday and today, I wrote some long detailed personal emails that I was fairly pleased with. They required some serious thought and good wordcrafting. It felt good to write that way, and I’ve been thinking about my posts on the blog recently. Some of them have caused me to think as I put my words together, but a lot of them have been pretty light.

To a certain extent, that is okay. If I was having serious, weighty discussions all the time, I’d probably be even more boring. Yet I like to engage in serious discourse when I can.

I’ve also been speaking with the folks at sezWho, trying to get their post and comment rating system working more reliably on Drupal. They seem to have fixed most of the problems, although there are a few outstanding minor problems.

With that, I’m starting to get people to rate my blog posts. My welcome blog post has received six ratings, for an overall rating of 4.0. There really isn’t much of anything in the blog post, and perhaps people are using it to rate the blog overall. My most recent Wordless Wednesday post also received six ratings with an overall rating of 3.8. It was a picture of a German Chocolate cake that Fiona and I made for Kim for her birthday. As is common with Wordless Wednesday posts it received a fair amount of comments as well.

Yet my more serious post, the day before about discussions of the nature of authority on a mailing list that I’m on, received three ratings, for an overall score of 2.3. It received one comment, which didn’t really address the main theme of the post. Yet this post stimulated great discussions on two different mailing lists. I wish people who disagreed with what I wrote would leave comments about what they disagreed with, instead of simply giving it a poor rating. I also wish that sezWho would make it easy to see who has given which ratings, and what other posts they’ve rated. Without this, the ratings seem arbitrary and don’t really help to build either community or help further the discourse. I’ve suggested this to the folks at sezWho and we’ll see if this comes in a future release.

So, I sat down, I didn’t have a clear direction of where I wanted to go with today’s blog post, but, in order to stay with at least a post a day, I managed to crank out something. I hope it was interesting and/or informative. For me, the discipline of forcing myself to post every day, has been beneficial, and I think I’m improving as a writer because of it.

What do you think? What should the balance of light and serious posts be? How do we build community and discourse around our blogs? Do you have goals or other things that help you write regularly, or improve your writing?

Ike

2008-09-12T21:25:47-04:00

As Hurricane Ike approaches landfall, I’m spending a little time following what people are saying in Twitter. In particular, using Twitter Local I can get all the tweets from people within twenty miles of Houson and withing twenty miles of Galveston. The Galveston tweets are sparse and don’t say much right now, but the Houston tweets have a lot to say.

The Houston Chronicle has a special section on the hurricane, which is sending out updates to their twitter page. ‘Curfew ordered in La Porte’, ‘Humble Emergency Operations Center open and ready’, ‘POWER OUTAGE UPDATE: At least 164,000 without electricity’

Looking more closely, there are interesting comments: “CenterPoint Energy has said that it expects some places to be without power for at least two weeks.“ So, how do you cope with this? There are lots of good suggestions. One that caught my attention was “Cook meat on a gas stove or barbecue grill and start eating it right away. Share with friends and neighbors.”

While the recommendation may have more to do about not wasting leftovers since you can’t refrigerate them without power, there is a more important message underneath that. We are at our best when we all look out for our friends and neighbors. The list goes on to say, “Embrace good old-fashioned entertainment like games, story-telling and conversation.” This too, echoes the importance of being in community, of looking out for one another.

Another note, illustrates what people are in for: “All first responding agencies (fire law enforcement and medical) will cease operation at the onset of 50mph winds. “

Meanwhile, others are finding other ways of dealing with the coming storm. “Getting drunker and drunker as I await Ikey”, “ike-hurricane is giving me a giant headache” “West houston is like a ghost town - looking for the hurricane parties in my hood” “Walking dogs in 40 mph winds - ike is going 2b nasty” “DAMN! The wind is really now blowing hard here in west Houston! Power outage around the corner!” “Done laundry, got food, full gas tank, cash in pocket, generator works, gas stove, time to relax and watch TV till Ike takes the power out!” “things they’re doing at my family's: semi-filling gallons w water 2 freeze, will put ice gallon in fridge when power goes out 2 keep cool”

Assorted Updates

2008-08-25T20:38:22-04:00

I’m spending time catching up on emails, following the Democratic National Convention coverage on sites like the Friend Feed DemConvention room, and generally tweaking and mucking with computers, websites, and so on.

PVR

Yesterday, I wrote a little bit about the Personal Video Recorder (PVR) that I purchased yesterday for a project that involves recording parts of the Democratic National Convention coverage. Today, I tried moving the connection back into the office. In the process, I was asked if I wanted to update the software on the video stick.

The software uploaded relatively smoothly, but it took a few tries to finally get the new version loaded and configured. However, when I did, it managed to find lots of digital stations. So, I believe I can now get the HD broadcasts I couldn’t get before. In addition, I managed to reconfigure the wiring and I can load watch and record the television from my office.

I’m sharing some of the videos I’m recording and I spent a bit of time nailing down the best format to use. The Pinnacle PCTV stick supports ten different formats:

DVD             640x480 It takes 47M per minute.  Great quality, but too big.
DVD LP          640x480 28M per minute.  Again, very good quality, but too big.
SVCD            640x480 19M per minute.  Okay quality, also too big.
VCD             321x240 10M per minute.  Okay quality.  This is my second choice for formats
DivX Home       720x480 31M per minute.  Very good quality, but too big.
DivX Portable   352x240  7M per minute.  Okay quality.  This is the format I like best.
DivX Handheld   144x176 1.5M per minute. Okay quality.  Small screen.  Not bad for the space.
Mpeg4 PSP       320x240 6M per minute.  Poor quality.
Mpeg4 Ipod low  480x352 12M per minute.  Poor quality.
Mpeg4 Ipod High 320x240 12M per minute.  Poor quality.

Comments about this site

Recently, one person noted that my welcome message said that previous blog entries were listed on the left. Well, they were, until I upgraded to Drupal 6. Then, I moved things around a little, so the list of articles are now on the right.

Another person commented asking if I knew that I had two different comment systems running. Yes, I know that. I actually wrote a bit about it in this blog entry. I may end up pulling SezWho soon. It slows down the site and doesn’t seem to work very well. I’ve contacted SezWho Tech Support and they were going to look at the issues, but that was a while ago, and I haven’t heard anything since.

I should also note that I dropped a lot of underperforming widgets. My site has always been a bit slow because I like to test out any widget that comes along and I’m always slow to remove them. These widgets slow down the site. Now that I’ve removed them, the site may be a little faster.

The Tiara

I was asked if people who pledged to give me EntreCard credits had followed through and some have, some haven’t. Yes, the tiara was small, but it was all that I had. Yes, the girl standing next to me is my daughter Fiona.

Using Social Media

Also, today, I received my first real Shelfari spam. A lot of people feel that Shelfari is spam in and of itself. Miss Anita Weluha wanted to know if I liked the same books as she does. She also wanted to know if I could help her transfer $5 million.

I also received an email from Twitter, letting me know that Sen. Barbara Boxer was now following me. I wondered if this was really part of her organization, or if it was some random spammer. Later, I received an email from “Friends of Barbara Boxer” highlighting her new Twitter account.

Now, its time to get back to paying closer attention to the convention and all the coverage.

Exploring the Tiara

2008-08-23T22:47:25-04:00

At the risk of ruining a good story by explaining it, I want to talk a little bit about the Tiara.

The Backstory

First, let me give you the history. You will notice on the right side of my page an EntreCard. EntreCard is a community website where members drop cards on each other. Each time you drop a card on someone, or someone drops a card on you, you get an EntreCard Credits. These credits can be used to buy advertisements on other people’s websites, objects from the EntreCard shop, or can be bought and sold.

There is also a community forum, where people talk whatever they want. The blogger who writes Designs by Reese commented about being on vacation for a week and seeing the price of advertisements on her blog plummet as well as her ranking as a card dropper. In less than half an hour, her advertising rates were back up to a respectable rate, and she bragging about wearing a tiara and wondering where her scepter was.

eyespi20.com urged her to calm down. Everything is fine, and wondered where Debbie was. Debbie has a blog, Wisdom Hypnosis and often comments in the forum with helpful suggestions about remaining calm and reducing stress in one’s life. Debbie joined in by commenting about losing a tiara she had when she moved, but about how it was one of the best moves she had made.

Reese came back and commented that ‘not many people can pull off the tiara look’. I joined the fun and admitted that I probably can’t pull off the tiara look anymore. People on EntreCard mostly know me by the card that I have up, which pictures my bald head and gray beard. Debbie commented that she would pay to see me in a tiara. Eyespi said she would pony up 1000 EntreCard credits. Debbie picked the word pony and suggested I should appear with a pony. Reggy at fragileheart said she would join in.

Fiona’s riding lesson was this morning, so I told everyone I would pose with a pony while wearing a tiara. Around the house, I tried to find an Tiara. I was hoping I could find one of my daughter’s dress-up tiaras from when she was younger. Like Debbie’s tiara, I suspect that Fiona’s tiaras may have gotten lost in our move. So, I ended up wearing the tiara that my wife wore when we got married.

The picture received several nice comments in the forum as well as on my blog post.

What does this tell us

Lighten up

I'm gonna soak up the sun
I'm gonna tell everyone
To lighten up (I'm gonna tell 'em that)

Well, perhaps the most important part is to not take things too seriously. Somehow, I can imagine Debbie offering that advice as she helps people find calmness and happiness in her hypnosis practice. I think this is particularly important to a wide range of bloggers.

I've got a crummy job
It don't pay near enough
To buy the things it takes
To win me some of your love

Over on EntreCard, there are a lot of bloggers that spend all their time writing about how to make money online. I must admit, I find most of their blog entries dreadfully dull. Granted, I don’t make much money online, but that isn’t really what I’m all about.

My friend the communist
Holds meetings in his RV
I can't afford his gas
So I'm stuck here watching tv

Likewise, many of my friends in the political blogging world are on their way to Denver for the Democratic National Convention. I’ll write more about this later, but I find many of the more serious political blogs also dreadfully dull. I can’t imagine that they get many people, other than those already sharing their views to make it through their blog posts.

Build community

C'mon people now,
Smile on your brother
Ev'rybody get together
Try and love one another right now

Beyond that, successful websites are about building community. EntreCard does a good job of that. Other tools do good jobs of that. You need to tie them all together. What matters is the mesh of social media, and not simply just a blog. I think that is where a lot of bloggers as well as companies trying to get their message out online make mistakes. They focus on too small a community, trying to build bonding social capital instead of bridging social capital, or they end up being just a broadcast oriented site.

But that is a different topic that I want to explore more in coming posts.

So, check out EntreCard and related sites. Find a broadbased community where you can talk, listen and have fun, and if you do something crazy online, let me know.

Video Prep for #dnc08

2008-08-22T12:21:16-04:00

During the past week, many of my friends who are going to Denver spent time exploring different tools that they can use to get their message back to their family, friends, neighbors and constituents. Even though I’m not going to Denver, I have been playing with new tools as well, helping out friends and, as always, looking for new online tools.

This week, a lot of the focus has been on video, so I thought I would highlight a few of the different tools.

http://www.mogulus.com

Mogulus claims to be the most powerful live broadcast platform on the internet. You can use their platform to mix live video with videos that you’ve imported from other sites like YouTube.

As a powerful tool, it also takes a little bit of getting used to. Yesterday, I loaded some clips in, mostly that I had shot of various events at Falcon Ridge, and set up a ‘Clips from Falcon Ridge’ storyboard, which plays automatically when I am not broadcasting live.

Today, I brought in a few clips from other sources. Jen Just has uploaded a couple videos to YouTube about her preparation for going to Denver. Her video of all the materials she has received is particularly good.

Lon Seidman put up a nice video about the equipment he’ll be bringing to Denver to capture the moment.

I recorded my own segment as a lead in to these segments which I added to Jen’s and Lon’s segments into a ‘Convention Prep’ storyboard which I also added my auto-pilot on Mogulus. I also enabled both of the Mogulus storyboards to be played as part of video on demand.

I also spent a bit of time trying to figure out the best way to do live broadcasts on Mogulus. I’m not very good at it yet, but I’m getting better. I may try some live broadcasts at some point.

http://www.zannel.com

Zannel is an interesting new player on the market, that seems to have an interesting marketing approach. Word is that they will help cover expenses of some of the bloggers going to Denver if they agree to post content on Zannel. Already, there are some good test messages up. For example, be sure to check out some of the videos from Steve at Uppity Wisconsin.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to import video from Zannel into Mogulus, but I have managed to add their feed into FriendFeed. Zannel also has the ability to feed other systems, but because of possible feedback loops or duplicate entries, I haven’t set that up yet.

http://www.seismic.com

I’m getting into Seesmic a little bit more now that I have a few friends there. Adrianne from Black Women in Europe and I have been having a nice discussion as she prepares for Denver. According to the most recent update, as of this post, she is in Washington DC, has a new laptop and is going to meet some good blogging friends there.

http://ustream.tv

Adrianne spoke about problems with Ustream. I found it cumbersome and like the other video services better. I don’t know of anyone using Ustream for broadcasting from Denver. If you hear of anyone, let me know.

http://friendfeed.com

So, how do we tie all of this together? Well, it seems like FriendFeed might be a particularly good service to use. I’ve set up the FriendFeed DemConvention room. This is a big messy feed. If I find a social media feed from someone that is going to Denver, I add it. We are approaching sixty different feeds going into the room. You have to scan through to see which entries are interesting or not. In addition, when I recognize people who have joined the room, I make them administrators, so anyone can add feeds to the room.

A different approach has been done by Andy Carvin. He has set up the FriendFeed DNC08 room. This room only has eight feeds coming into it, however they are feeds from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and FriendFeed that are tagged in one way or another as DNC.

So, it looks like there will be lots of interesting online content to find and view.