Ten reasons my buddies might have quit blogging (remember, I call blog posts “articles”):

• Too much time goes into writing a single article
• email inbox is over 1,000 and need to catch up
• too busy reading other blogs
• watching video more than ever – still haven’t seen all the TED videos
• iPad doesn’t provide an easy way to write for the blog (get a keyboard!)
• 400 podcasts stacked up and no longer commute to work so I can’t get through the backlog
• don’t have anything original to say and got tired of repeating what others were saying
• started tweeting and then I didn’t even have enough time for tweeting
• quit blogging for {pick one} summer/trip/vacation/religiousholiday and just never got the energy to start again
• got a real job. (Whatever that is…)

Hmmm…the balance to be struck is between consuming and producing, I think. And consuming is far easier than producing.

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Organizing a tour for 15 geeks was a nightmarish task for TG Co-Founder Renee Blodgett, who worked for weeks to put this one together – much shorter lead time than for previous tours. And her co-organizers Eliane Fiolet and Phil Jeudy, plus two web developers, did a heroic job.

The online developers were tasked with creating the new web site, but I came in for the last few weeks to preside over one of my (current) specialties –  ensuring that we can mash information together in real time. Here’s what it required and what I learned:

{Eliane’s photo-mosaic of the geeks – at left.}

This trip is largely a different set of geeks than for the UK, with only Renee Blodgett, Tom Foremski, Robert Scoble and myself overlapping from the summer UK visit.

The issues: 1) mashup of geek blog posts; 2) Flickr photos; 3) conferencing.

Pickup geek’s writing from their own blogs: The biggest issue is to create a central web site that incorporates information from all of the geeks while they’re on the road. You can’t ask busy people to write up duplicate posts for a central blog — they’re busy writing for their own blogs. So the answer is to syndicate their blog posts — pick up posts from their blogs, copy them to travelinggeeks.com and insert them there, with a minimum of fuss. Ideally this is a 100% automated process. Well, surprisingly, this still is a very hand-built kind of process, although once you’re done, it can run 100% automatically. Underneath everything the site is built on WordPress, which supports blogging as well as more “static” pages. There’s a neat WordPress plug-in called FeedWordPress^[1] that lets the blog read RSS feeds from each geek blog and copy the relevant posts over to the TG blog for republication. But things have gotten more complex since the geeks visited London… now we need to not only bring in blog posts, but we need to deal with Twitter streams, Twitter hashtags, Flickr photos and YouTube channels. Our “bloggers” are no longer simply bloggers.

Mash multiple feeds together: OK, so some of our bloggers have several places where they interact online. The trick is that most of these now present/expose RSS feeds, and you can read and manipulate data from those feeds to create a single mashed feed that contains only the information that you want to use. Yeah, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, all present RSS feeds that let you get at your photo-stream, your video-stream, and your tweet-stream. The trick here is to use Yahoo Pipes^[2] to mash them together. Pipes will read multiple blogs’ RSS feeds, check to see if there are blog entries in a particular category, and then mash only those articles into a new RSS feed that Yahoo Pipes creates. The system is so flexible that not only can it recognize categories, but it can search through the text of a blog entry or any of the other characteristics that typically appear in an RSS feed. If one of our geeks has, for instance, three feeds, Pipes can filter each feed according to different criteria, and then can merge them together into a single feed, with things interleaved chronologically, that I can have FeedWordPress read and digest. (FeedWordPress can’t do this mashing of multiple feeds…)

Mashing the geeks’ photos: On the UK trip we used a couple of tools to help manage photos. One of those was MobyPicture, which lets you upload a photo once and have it copied to your accounts on multiple online photo sites. It’s particularly useful for mobile phone users, and there’s also an iPhone app, which I find very handy. Though I do love Moby, on this trip we didn’t need this kind of multiple uploading, so we gave all of the geeks access to a Flickr group Traveling Geeks, making the membership “Invitation only” but the viewing “Public.” They’ll upload to their personal accounts, mark the photos for the group, and we use the flickrSliDR slideshow maker to then include all photos, even the most recent, in a slideshow.

Zorap: This hot media-sharing space provides video, audio (mp3), photo and other media sharing within a common space (a room). The tech is rather demanding, so it’s not for the faint-of-heart and you’d better have a fast computer, but when it works it is marvelous. Multi-way (not just two-way like Skype) video conferencing is coming of age.

We are counting on broadly-available wi-fi support at most of the venues in Paris. Orange is supplying us with 3G connectivity to fill in when we can’t find wi-fi. Over the last two days (on my way to Europe) I have used a 3G iPhone tethered to my MacBook while on the California Zephyr (rail in the US) for 5 hours, and wi-fi on American Airlines (excellent bandwidth) within the US. So more and more I’m becoming accustomed to haveing a connection wherever I go.

[2] Yeah, I’ve used Yahoo Pipes for some time now.

[3] Yahoo Pipes has a problem with Typepad-generated “categories” that took me some hours to puzzle out. Typepad “categories” have an extra layer that appears with the XML of an RSS feed that makes filtering impossible if a post has more than one category. Rather than create a whole inscrutable article about it, let me point out that a solution has been developed, which consists of breaking the categories out into a list and then processing the elements of that list rather than trying (unsuccessfully) to parse the malformed feed. I’ll have to write an article on this later.

The post Building out infrastructure for a Traveling Geeks tour appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Earlier, in London, some of us had similar conversations with companies who are implementing social media strategies to be in closer touch with their customers. One of the companies I spoke with, in a conversation held under Chatham House Rule (meaning “not for attribution” or “off the record” in US press terminology), the head of customer support told me he had opened a Twitter account, reviews around 500 tweets a day, and helps between 10 and 50 dissatisfied customers resolve problems they’d been having with his company. This apparently takes him only a small amount of time (an hour or two, from what he said) and generates a huge amount of goodwill at very low cost, for his company.

I’ve been advising my clients for at least the past year to not worry about “attracting eyeballs to their web site” but instead to focus on making there presence felt “wherever the customer lives online.” In the case of my customers this means setting up Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts, and then using those to engage in genuine conversations with customers – not one-way marketing-speak.

Oops, almost forgot – listen to what Susan has to say about all of this!

She calls it Social Influence Marketing and it has three core components: 1) Social Listening; 2) Participation; 3) “Appvertising” (Give-to-get).

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Of course this is a fundamental human tendency – to do things we’ve seen done elsewhere. In criminology it’s called “copycat crimes.” And certainly these regimes consider those who do this kind of thing to be criminals.

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A tweetup (like “meetup”) is a face-to-face meeting of people who previously only knew each other through Twitter. For some of the well-known geeks, like Robert Scoble, who has over 95,000 followers on Twitter, this could be a big thing – Robert might be able to fill the room just with his own followers who happen to be in London that night.

Where I stand right now, at 165 followers, maybe a couple of you will know someone who’d like to meet the geeks – reserve a place in advance online.

The post Join us July 5th, in London, for a tweetup appeared first on Sky's Blog.

We’re starting with well-known accounts that have had problems with impersonation or identity confusion. (For example, well-known artists, athletes, actors, public officials, and public agencies). We may verify more accounts in the future, but because of the cost and time required, we’re only testing this feature with a small set of folks for the time being. As the test progresses we may be able to expand this test to more accounts over the next several months.

We ran into a problem with an account purporting to be the office of the Dalai Lama [OHHDL] in 2008. The account looked like it might be real, but turned out to be someone impersonating the office. But it wasn’t exposed until more than 10,000 people had started following the Twitter account.

This move on Twitter’s part will be welcome.

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• Less Customization. Yea sure, you can add a few backgrounds and change a couple of fonts; but Twitters ability to customize is nothing compared to Myspace or even Facebook.

[Sky] This is totally on target. If you think back to your first encounter with MySpace (if you indeed had such an encounter) you remember the wild abandon with which people customized their MySpace pages. It was like the wall of your teenage bedroom. (I drew on my wall with magic marker – a desert scene with dunes and a camel caravan all around the room.) So, yes you can’t customize your Twitter page much at all (a single photo) and comeon (!), Twitter isn’t really a web experience – it’s about texting!

• Why Not Text. Pretty much, twitter is just another texting platform. You’re sending out mass texts to all your friends online. Thats cool, but why not just use your new Blackberry to do that

[Sky] Yes, totally! That is the point — Twitter is TXT. The real point of Twitter is that it is real-time. Facebook and MySpace, even though they have feeds, are not fundamentally real-time TXT platforms. Now, I will say that my buddies use Facebook all the time to post photos and share them, pretty much in real time, and I like Facebook much much much more because of this. But what the blogger missed is that plain TXT to your friends is not a group experience, while Twitter is a group TXTing experience! That’s the whole point. You and your followers are participating in a real-time group TXT experience.

• Applications. Facebook and Myspace are filled with all these cool applications teens love, as well as the ability to post countless videos, pictures, and other fun things.

[Sky] Can’t deny it. Facebook is a really rich environment within itself, while on the other hand Twitter is just TXT — except that this is changing daily as new sites are springing up that use the Twitter RSS feed and pull that information together in new ways. As a software architect, I would point out that this is simply a different architecture – the result can be similar.

• Social. In myspace and face book, teens join groups, whether its related to their school, a musical association, or other interest. Twitter doesn’t have that ability for social connections – on twitter, you simply follow or you don’t. Teens like the feeling of cliques and groups, and they like meeting new people without finding out everything they do.

[Sky] I don’t get it, sorry. You can set up your Twitter account so that people need you permission to follow you. If you do that, then you effectively have a group. So what’s the difference? (The difference is that you have to actually do it.)

• Time. Teens aren’t yet in need of a “professional” platform to display their thoughts. Teens are short in time, and the addition of a Twitter account just takes up more of their time. So rather than waste time, they’re content with texting, facebook, and myspace.

[Sky] This is BS. Twitter can be connected to Facebook so that you only have to post one place. It takes no more time to use Twitter than to use Facebook. But, this does point out that teens are as likely as anybody else to be resistant to new popular products — if they see Twitter as just another platform that wastes their time, then they won’t use it. I use Twitter a lot and actually much more than I use Facebook. It’s easy, streamlined, and single-purpose. Maybe I’m more open to innovation than teens are…?

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He was talking about their geographical locations. Among the answers, one person pointed at a Yahoo Pipes application that puts pins (each corresponding to one follower) onto a world map. I‘ve written about Yahoo Pipes before — it’s a web service that lets you “visually” create an algorithm that reads RSS feeds and manipulates them. Pipes can filter, put together, count, limit and obviously do a lot more. I have created a Pipes application that filters several RSS feeds and then makes them available for insertion on a blog.

Robert has tens of thousands of followers, and is a heavy-duty user of social media (web and otherwise) services. We’ll be in London in July with Traveling Geeks.

Here’s what it came up with for my (first 100) followers:

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If I drop this message into my Tweetstream… “@quinnovator That was a great idea you had the other day!” …who sees it? Specifically, do all of my followers see it? This would be like sitting at a dinner party, wanting to ask a question of the person next to you, and shouting it out so everyone could hear it.

I was SO CERTAIN that all of my followers would see everything that I tweet, that I just didn’t believe it when Cathy Moore said (in this conversation on the Learnlets.com blog) “Yes, @ replies you use in the chat end up in your stream, but the only followers who see them are ones who also follow the person you replied to (unless they’ve changed their settings so they see everything you say to anyone). It’s a compromise rather than a perfect solution.”

Bolstering my opinion, Twitter Support even says “What is the difference between an @reply and a direct message? – – An @reply is a public message sent regardless of follow-ship that anyone can view.  A direct message can only be sent by someone you follow, and is a private message that only the author and recipient can view.” This made me believe that all my followers would receive my replies to @quinnovator because of the “regardless of follow-ship” phrase. (Although the word “view” could mean it can be viewed on the web but isn’t sent to your followers. A technicality, but perhaps that’s the key.)

Well, Cathy is right. Twitter claims that if a tweet starts with @username then it is sent to that person and those who follow that person. And it’s not sent to your followers, except for those who follow @username, and those who have specially asked to receive all replies sent by anyone/everyone they follow. They are parsing your tweet more carefully and now have two distinct ways of dealing with @username in a tweet  – replies and mentions. (This March 26, 2009, help page defines replies and mentions – and perhaps gives us a clue that this was implemented in March 2009.)

If you check your Twitter Settings (Settings/Notices) you’ll see this pop-up menu, which gives you a choice of seeing all @replies or limiting so you only see those to people you follow. This leads me to believe that if I follow @aaa and he tweets “@bbb hello.” then I will not see this message unless I also follow @bbb. I tested this with my friend @quinnovator, and it works as advertised.

I specifically want to see @reply messages because that’s one of the ways I find new and interesting people – referrals from my friends, let’s call it. Consequently I chose “all @ replies” in my settings.

Case closed.

Related to my earlier article about TweetChat as a Twitter-based mechanism for chats or meetings, here is more conversation on similar issues.

Ross Mayfield asked some questions and started a good discussion comparing Twitter, IM^[1] and forums. He started by asking these questions:

• How do you explain to new Twitter users how it is different from IM?
• How do you explain the difference between Twitter & Email to the email generation?
• How is Twitter different from a Forum?

[1] IM: Instant Messaging.

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