I have been using a basic Twitter plug-in to auto-tweet new blog posts to my twitter account. It was always a little fussy, and recently it seemed to stop working — maybe something related to the recent WordPress update? No matter, it seemed a good time to go looking to see what else was available. And so far Twitter Tools is looking very promising. It can be set to pull in Tweets that contain a specific hashtag — allowing selective tweet-posting of new entries. And, assuming this message makes it over to Twitter, you can set your posts to go go to Twitter as well. The big question is how it will work with posts originating from other external tools, like ScribeFire, or scheduled posts — both of which I do a lot. We’ll see…
I get a fair amount of useful information off of my twitter feed — in fact it is often more informative than the RSS newsfeeds I follow. But Twitter, Facebook, Yammer and the rest of the live streaming applications share a common problem. If you want to refer back to something that floated by several days, weeks or months ago you are pretty much out of luck. The noise factor is not an issue when monitoring the stream live. I mean sure, there is plenty of noise, but it is easy enough to filter it out as the garbage floats by. But try to dig through items from the past and the noise quickly overwhelms. Anyone got an answer? Or is do we just need to accept that we must leave the past behind — even if it is digital?
Facebook understands the noise problem, and that it has only been exacerbated with the prevalence of third-party application notifications. They’ve tried to solve it, but haven’t really nailed a way to determine the quality of a post.
After about 20 days Twitter deletes every tweet you’ve made unless you marked it as memorable. This is so sad. There are many interesting people on twitter saying, on occasion, quite memorable things. It is all being gradually lost unless there’s someone deliberately collecting it.
If you think you have what it takes to Ignite a crowd, here’s your chance – But remember, you only have 5 minutes! We’re not accepting proposals just yet, but we want you to start thinking about your topic – A topic that is entirely up to you.
Just yesterday I had a request to create a tool to collect some follow-up responses from our staff regarding a recent university-wide workplace survey. So we need something simple, easy to maintain, quick to launch AND that collects the responses in a format that permits easy and flexible reporting. As I recently demonstrated our WordPress MU installation makes it easy to launch a project-specific site which includes user-login tied to the school’s central user authentication system. So simple-easy-quick — doing this through WordPress gets me at least half-way there. And I remembered a recent suggestion in my Twitter feed to look at the WordPress Surveys plugin.
The plugin is pretty simple and written clearly enough to make adjustments easy. And most importantly it utilizes a table structure that is normalized, and well structured, which will work well for the eventual reporting needs. I did do some hacking around in the code to change some of the default behavior — mostly just commenting out features we didn’t want. These would lend themselves well to some additional options in the plug-in settings — maybe I’ll get around to adding those in at some point. When it comes to the reports I’ll also go into the background, using PHPMyAdmin to grab the tables directly — again it wouldn’t take much to add more flexibility into the WordPress admin panel options for the plug-in, but I’m still running in the quick/simple mode here. And with the help of the Plaintxt theme it is up and running.
The plugin could be quite useful for all sorts of user feedback on a site, not just surveys. The nicely structured data collected in plugin-specific tables would make reporting really flexible.
Screenr offers a new service to make screen recordings and share them via twitter and other web sites. It looks easy enough, so I decided to give it a spin with a quick WordPress MU demonstration. When you launch the recording tool, it lets you set which area of the screen to record. You push play and you’re off and running, up to 5 minutes in length. When done you can preview the video and then it gets automatically deployed in web and iPhone versions. No edits, fancy fade-ins or other effects — but in the video arena and enforced simplicity is probably best. Do it right the first time, post it and move on (spoken as someone who has spend hours perfecting a 4 minute video!)
When completed Screenr will automatically post your video announcement to Twitter. It takes 5 minutes or so to process the video — about as long as it took me to write this post. So here it is:
Yammer use took off in our workplace late last year, but since everyone has returned from the Christmas break interest seems to have dropped off somewhat. Maybe something like TeamBox, with its richer toolset, might be more attractive. Teambox organizes communication around projects. Users are members of projects, and a project has communication divided into conversations, task lists, pages and files. The concept seems to have similarities with Google Wave, but at first glance the user interface seems a lot more familiar. And TeamBox is open source allowing installation on your own server — so you can own the data. And can customize the app (built with Ruby on Rails). Now I just need a project to test it with…
Community: Teambox is a public open-source project. Installing:If you want to run your own server with Teambox, some knowledge of Ruby on Rails and UNIX is very recommended.
The Twitter-like UX is familiar and fast, and the interface seems simultaneously lightweight and robust. For project management and team collaboration – including distributed teams – we can see this application going over very well.
I recently read Jaron Lanier’s new book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. It was a gift, and while I hadn’t heard anything about the book, it looked promising. Lanier is an early internet pioneer counting early work with virtual reality (and coining the term itself) among his accomplishments. And the basic premise of the book — essentially a contrarian view of the current state of internet culture — is interesting. A regular practice of challenging common assumptions and examining choices made along the way is healthy. Unfortunately Mr. Lanier’s arguments are poorly supported, and often based on inconsequential or incorrect assumptions. I’m not going to recap his whole argument here — check out the linked articles instead. But here are a couple of points inspired by ideas exposed in the book:
The hive mind/crowdsourcing vs. the individual: Does aggregation of content occur to the detriment of individual effort? Are we starting to fall victim to group think passed on through the Twitters and YouTubes? That’s one way of looking at it. However my experience is that the Internet today offers more opportunities for individual content to find an audience than ever before — you’re reading this, right?
Is the free economy hurting indvidual artists, killing the profession of content creation, and lowering our culture to its lowest common denominator? If you’re in the newspaper, colllege textbook, sheet music or music distribution businesses you’re sure feeling a big pinch. Yes there is a shift going on, there have been casualties, and it is not clear where this is going. But there is no returning to the pre-internet golden days. And new business models will evolve — people are still willing to pay money for content and services that they value — the trick is to figure out what those are.
Perhaps the bigger question is whether there is anything to really worry about. In this month’s issue of The Atlantic, How America Can Rise Again raises the point the our country through its history regularly sees doom and gloom just around the next corner in the midst of abundance. Thomas Jefferson was as sure the country was headed to hell as today’s Fox news pundits. With the abundant flows of information, outlets for individual expression and rising opportunities for social interaction is there any fundamental problem with the Internet? Sure there is room for improvement and contrarian views are useful in exploring how these further.
Today, the futurist Jaron Lanier warns in his persuasive new manifesto, You Are Not a Gadget, the danger is less that our network of machine intelligence will fail than that it will endure—that Web culture, and its chiliastic faith in the superior wisdom of computers, will triumph.
He argues that old — and bad — digital systems tend to get locked in place because it’s too difficult and expensive for everyone to switch to a new one. ..It can sound plausible enough in theory — particularly if your Windows computer has just crashed. In practice, though, better products win out, according to the economists Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis.
In checking out a Tweet, I caught a nice feature on Posterous.com. You can leave a comment identifying yourself via your Facebook or Twitter account. I don’t actually know if this is through OpenID (more likely it uses their basic APIs) but it is nicely executed, and eases the path-to-participation.
. It was a gift, and while I hadn’t heard anything about the book, it looked promising. Lanier is an early internet pioneer counting early work with virtual reality (and coining the term itself) among his accomplishments. And the basic premise of the book — essentially a contrarian view of the current state of internet culture — is interesting. A regular practice of challenging common assumptions and examining choices made along the way is healthy. Unfortunately Mr. Lanier’s arguments are poorly supported, and often based on inconsequential or incorrect assumptions. I’m not going to recap his whole argument here — 
Reverend
Andre Malan
Matthew K. Gold