Everyone’s Blogging

These slides from the training session for the Brighton & Hove Chamber of Commerce last week. Let me know if you want us to come to your event or run a bespoke event or Masterclass.

More details on our Social Media for Good course soon (looks like next date will be Oct 3 in Brighton).

Covers a bit of an introduction to social media and blogging, plus some questions to get you thinking about your own context, opportunities and challenges.

Some good thinking in the room and animated conversations. Quite a few organisations ready to get blogging and exploring integrated social media in more depth.

A few of you made pledges are you walked out the door about your goals and intentions, so let me know how you get on!
Thanks to all for your warm feedback and to those who helped make it a positive event, especially Lorraine Bell (BCP), Tania “Radiance” Fullerton (Brighton Steiner School) and Fay McDonald.

Twitter stumbles, and there goes the neighbourhood

Witness the emotional committment of Twitter users.  Wow, people love it, really want this thing to work, and really love to moan about it as the fail whale displays more and more often.

Twitter looks back on track after a shaky few days back there, which shows that all is not well in microblogging land, and there’s something wrong with the microblogging model, but that’s a topic to take up later.

Having Twitter get slow, turn off features, or just not respond has started to get really annoying.   We’re inclined to include Twitter as an emerging tool to use to build and attract community. But without stability, it’s not going to work predictably . How can we recommend building twitter into a social media campaign?  Well, we can’t really.  Or we have to accept Twitter as a somewhat flaky, sometimes useful tool.

And worse, with Twitter going up and down, there goes the neighbourhood.  People pick up and leave to one of the fifty other microblogging services that are growing up in the shadow of twitter and waiting for users to fall out of the Twitter tree.

Trouble.  We’re never going to find each other if we’re spread across tens of different services.

But then again, we want Twitter, in its lovely cuteness, to work.  But that makes it a monopoly with a secret or currently secret business model.

Tricky.

So, my big needs in microblogging are:

1. I want something reliable that works
2. I want something that accesses most people (that want to be involved)
3. I want it to be long term sustainable, not a monoculture or monopoly with a secret business model

To meet these three, we’re going to need to do some internet-level architecture work to support microblogging and ambient status.  Basically, we’re going to need to:

1. Develop some standards for microblogging messaging
2. Develop standard ways to connect microblogging services together
3. Allow users to migrate from one service to another easily– and use more than one service at once
4. Ensure some level of reliability in messsaging
5. Make sure the whole thing can scale up to the current level of global SMS usage and beyond

This looks a lot like what we have for the internet email architecture.  It took a long time to get organised, and it has some problems, but it is a mostly universal service with lots of servers, providers and clients.

There are a bunch of people talking about these sorts of standardisation. I’ll review the efforts in a later post and see where we are headed.  My guess this is going to take a while and we are going to have some early-adopter pain in the meantime.

Key point:  At some point Twitter is going to have to open up and interwork with other microblogging services.  And that is the moment, in my opinion, when they will really succeed.

Why I Love Social Media

Sometimes (like now) I am up late tapping away, when I could be back in bed with Ian McEwan - or my husband at least. I start wondering why I’m so big on this social media stuff. Well here’s a response I wrote to a post on Will McInnes’ blog that reminds me why.

It started a long time ago.

On writing (& social media)

When I read this, I also include social media (eg. blogging / photo sharing / social networking).

Commentators like Clay Shirky and Charles Leadbeater tend to be a bit snobbish when it comes to acknowledging the inherent human need to be heard, to share, to tell our stories.

Lawrence Sanger told me he was worried about non-experts getting together to construct their own knowledge. But he would say that.

I say - do it! Experts be damned. Speak your truth, and find others that share it.

[[ Just be careful about checking the facts that really matter. Which is not what we are talking about here anyway. The subjective realm is far vaster than many wish to acknowledge.]]

Writing is egalitarian; it cuts across geographic, class, gender, and racial lines… vice presidents of insurance agencies…factory workers…lawyers, doctors, gay rights activists, housewives, librarians, teachers, priests, politicians…

We all have a dream of telling our stories – of realising what we think, feel and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.”

Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones

Orwell on sincerity

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity

When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

- George Orwell

…

Added 9 July

This post has sparked some intriguing debate. Makes me want to suggest people read Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. And of course Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and Manjushvara’s Wolf at the Door.

Any other recommendations?

Mark “SCIP” Walker on Internet Fundraising

Mark Walker from SCIP has long been supporting local charities and communities with IT services. Not just through all the work SCIP does in information and computer technologies, but also via the very happening SCIP group email list, which brings people together all around the South Coast.

If that’s not enough, Mark is now researching how to help local charities raise funds via the internet, including a bunch of region specific resources. That’s all part of his role as ICT Champion  for the south east of England.

Read his post on this and the rest of his blog here.

We like lots of the same stuff (To Kill a Mockingbird and Atonement for a start), so it’s great to have found you Mark. Don’t you just love social media for short cutting all that “getting to know you” stuff. I think you can tell a lot about a person by the music/books/films that inspire them.

Scholarships available for next course

30 June, 2008

5:00 pm

Our Social Media for the Third Sector course is starting soon. Keep 11 July free for the group learning day, and make a commitment before early July so we can work with you on your learning needs analysis.

That’s if you want a taste of a truly educational, capacity building package, and not just a quicky training day.

We are looking for two motivated people / organisations to award 80% scholarships for Part One (and potentially, Part Two).

If you ‘get’ that social media is essential knowledge to:

• build stronger relationships with your stakeholders
• get attention online and in real life
• raise funds
• collaborate creatively and build innovative approaches to social and environmental challenges

.. then apply here.

Find out all about the way we give and support real learning here.

Any questions, just pick up the phone and talk to Libby on 07968 687 107.

As of today, there are still places available, and we won’t decide on the sponsored places until 30 June. But the earlier you apply, the better.

Word Play

Absolutely, totally, loving… wordle. (Try typing that without making it worlde). Tah Gra.

Click through for the big zappy version and make your own.

Give us a link in the comments so we can see what you make. So keen to see social media being more visual and creative.

As Claus Oldenberg put it so well..

“Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete of all communication.

That set of faces, top left: FaceMap

For the new nodestone banner, I made a little application that goes and builds that set of faces that you see on the top-left banner of the nodestone.com. This post is all about the why and how of that.

We were looking for a way to visually represent the human nature of social media. We’ve got the nice, nodey logo, but where are the people? All the people. All the faces, so that leads us to a bunch of avatars or icons with people’s faces.

Now there is a facebook app called FriendGrid which goes some way there:

But, too big and not enough faces for what we are looking for.  We needed something wide to fill that banner space.  Also, those question marks send the wrong message, no?

So, then, how hard is it to get that set of avatars photos, scale em down and place them in a single image?   Not hard at all, it turns out.

I turned to Twitter.  Twitter users are prety good at uploading avatars, and accessing them via the API is pretty straightforward, so I wrote a quick app with Google AppEngine to accept a twitter username and password and then fetch the avatar URLs and display them in a block.  It worked nicely, so I meddled with the display of the images, got them in a suitable sized block in a browser and screen captured them. I used the Gimp to manipulate the image a bit and make the fractured right hand end. Done.

Next features I’ll add:

• Add more source twitter IDs, so the starting set can be our friends, not my friends.
• Follow friends of friends until we have enough unique faces, this avoiding duplicates
• Remove the ‘no avatar’ images
• Do the actual image manipulation to build a single image from all these.
• Auto-update the nodestone banner once a week or something as friends change,

Sometime over summer I’ll tidy up and publish the app over to AppEngine and let you all know.

Bringing in the New

We are in the middle of adding redirects for authenticblogging.com and presencelabs.com over to our new home at nodestone.com.

Surprise!

Hopefully it isn’t a surprise that you’ve landed here, but if it is, let me explain.   Libby Davy (of authentic blogging) and I (Graeme Sutherland of presencelabs.com) are putting our work and blogs together into nodestone.com.  So, we’ve built a new blog with the content of both of them, and I’m just now cutting over to the new site.

Basically, it should be business as usual once the transfer is complete. In the meantime, there might be a few little issues wih locating your favourite pages. Bear with us for the next few hours on that.

We hope you enjoy the new site.  We’ve had fun making it.  (Except for the late nights and the hard bits :-)

Technical Stuff

Don’t read this unless you care about the technical details of the changeover.

We’re basically putting in permanant redirects (301s) from the old domains to nodestone.com, with a bit of special redirect magic applied to make sure that old url parts map to the new ones.  This means (at least in theory) that google will still like us in the morning, and all our old paths will go somewhere relevant.  Permanent redirects also mean that records get updated permanently, so things like feed readers should get the new feed address if they have half a brain.

That’s all.  I’m off to arrange the nameserver changes for authenticblogging.com.   Ciao.

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