In true blogger community fashion, Sixapart, the folks who make typepad are giving away free accounts on their blogging system just for journalists.
This is a low cost, if no cost way to get into blogging, and they are offering payment as well, but the details of the payment plan are not immediately spoken of on their web site. The assumption here is that this is going to be somewhat of the standard pay per hit model, based on the number of hits and the number of ads that get clicked on or are sponsored for the web site.
It is great that there is a large rush to the gate, the part that should have everyone’s attention is why did it take sixapart giving something away for free (which journalists could have gotten just about anywhere) and start learning on their own. Much like Tech Flash, the new brain child of John Cook and Todd Bishop, both Journalists, shows that the blogging model works for Journalists.
Before they left their respective news papers, both were (and still are) highly regarded in the technology reporting field. They did all this on their own, and in some cases despite their parent organizations or their former employers. They took their own destiny in their hands, saw the writing on the wall and just went and did that one.
Good on sixapart, nice way of doing this, but, and everyone should be asking this over and over again, is why didn’t these folks jump on blogging years ago when it was becoming obvious that journalism was heading in this direction.
tags: journalism, bail out plan, all the rage, sixapart, cool, news, idea, value
I’ll be trying to grab a slide presentation from last night where a business group was talking about how we need to develop a better approach to dealing with students, blogs, and the expectations of people coming in to the education process. This is going to be a hard change for eduction, it breaks the silo, web 2.0 breaks down the ivory tower and asks people to talk to each other.
There are many great educators out there, but they do not understand the social landscape that students are bringing with them when they come into the school. We have baby boomers teaching genX/Y and Millennial, if there was ever an age gap, we have it in our institutions of higher learning.
Students are running circles around their instructors, they blog, text, facebook and friend each other in the class, which the instructor with their death by powerpoint every Monday morning from 8 to 12 does not get nor understand. More troublesome is that not only are they blissfully unaware, they are also not interested.
Changing eduction, and the paradigms that go along with it needs to happen, but will be a long, politically challenging process for people, students, instructors, and management across all college lines. There are shining examples of what could be done, and what is being done, but much like corporate blogging five years ago, those examples are few and far between.
Education can benefit from Web 2.0, if you back and look at the Socratic Method, or how we taught before the standardized and formalized education processes that we currently use, the collaborative viewpoint of education suited humans for over a 1000 years. We learned from people who wanted to teach, and fought to keep students. Even in Ancient Greece, students talked to each other. The more popular the instructor, the more students tried to get into the their classes. This worked great for many thousands of years.
What made the instructor popular was the approachability, the expertise that the instructor was known to have, and the word of mouth advertising from other students. Today the whole idea of instruction is not student centric, it is research centric. The best part is that by using Web 2.0 tools, blogs, wiki’s, and the rest of it, we can have both. We can have the collaborative learning model used a thousand years ago, and still come up with research opportunities, and provide input into the credibility of the instructor.
The problem is that this is contrary to how education is run now, we live in our silo, our ivory tower, and communication is difficult. We exist behind pay walls for information, instructors are not effective in communication when the power structure is different. We don’t collaborate with students, we lecture, and hope that some of it sinks in long enough to pass a test or other measurement of learning.
This is where it gets interesting, with good community management, good blogs, good wiki’s, and a collaborative learning environment we not only meet the expectations of students coming in to the education system, but we create more valuable employees for business. If a student blogged before they got to college, blogged through college, and then the company wanted them to write on their corporate blog, they are already there and ready to go. They already know how to manage comments, they know how to work with their readers.
Same for Wiki’s, same for twitter, same for video, podcasting, and everything else. We also need to teach the difference between personal, corporate and professional blogging. Schools have to teach these tools, use those tools themselves, to engage the students where they are already.
It is an exciting time to be in education, because we can literally reinvent this industry, the question is how to overcome the fear of change.
That is next, dealing with the fear of change within the educational system.
tags: education, web 2.0, students, management, blog, blogging, blogger, twitter
The relationship economy posted a great article pointing out that in the last three years social media jobs have grown some 325%. The problem though is how you make sure you are hiring the right people for the job. Since we are looking to adopt and manage social media at work, we will need a social media manager at some point in the future and this is exactly what I will be looking for.
1. Must know how to use MySpace, Facebook, Linkedin, Blogging, Twitter, YouTube, Slide share and Podcasting, the candidate should provide examples and links to live content for each example when applying for the job.
Here is why I want those, I want to see how many friends they have, I want to see how many followers they have, and I want to be able to do a Google search LINK:DOMAIN-NAME.COM. I want to know exactly how embedded they are in the internet already, and I want to know how well they use the tools. If they have a lot of followers already, if they blog and guest blog on good high visibility sites, if they have a YouTube or other video channel they use on a regular basis, and if they podcast on a regular basis I know they know how to use the tools, I also get an idea of the quality of work. Is this the kind of quality that I want for my social media manager? It is not enough to pump out tons of content, but I also want to know how popular the person is already. Good quality content that is engaging, debate starting, insightful, and interesting, the candidate already is on their way to job employment.
2. The Candidate must be able to engage with difficult and unhappy people, while remaining respectful of all parties in the process.
This is where Facebook, Linkedin, and MySpace come into play, if they are ragging on people, companies, or otherwise being degrading in tough social situations, I’ll know about it here. Don’t bother removing anything, Google has a cache of everything, eventually I will find out. I’ll also have access to everyone in your contact list; expect me to hit them up on Linked In. If I friend you, and you don’t respond for a week, you didn’t get the job.
3. I am going to ask some very tough questions on the interview, I am going to find the most degrading damaging things that have been said on the internet, and I am going to scenario the whole thing with you. I’ll find things like the 22 confessions of a dell manager, I’ll find things like Kathy Sierra, or even just general hate rant, or I’ll pull stuff from Valleywag (now a column), and I will work out how you would handle a politically and personally tough assignment. Expect this process to last hours.
Here is why I am going to go through cases, and make a process of it. One I want to find out how well you react to people calling you bad names, but even better, I want to grind you down and make you tired, the last three of these cases are going to be the most important, because I’ll know how you will react if you get tired, cranky, and have spent the better part of a day dealing with a person trying to trip you up. If you pass this, you can be my social media manager. At the end of the day is when we make our biggest and most damaging mistakes, we are tired, and just want to go home. If you are unfailingly polite through all this, that is a good thing.
4. Throw a barrage of information at the person and have them prioritize it, see how they organize and think.
The reason for doing this, and it would probably be tied to number 3 as a scenario is to work out what is important first, and what can slide. I want the person to be able to pick out the top rated blogs, links, people and respond directly to them first, and then work their way down the list in order of importance, not leaving anyone off the list. Order of importance is tied to internet fame, if Robert Scoble, RWW, Mashible, Techcrunch, or Louis Gray says that something I did sucked, then many people are going to know about it. I’ll want to engage with them first, and work out what the issues are on their site, with them, and then accept the bad news or work out a compromise. I want to make sure my Community Manager can do the same thing.
5. Given a list of sites, prioritize in order of internet importance.
The reason for doing this is to see if they really understand the industry that I am hiring them for. If it is education, they had better be putting the Chronicle of Higher Education at the top of the list. If they are in Technology, they had better be putting RWW, Techcrunch, Robert, Louis, and everyone else at the top of the list. It is not about where these people end up on the list, it is how well they understand the industry, who the movers and shakers are, and where they are. They should recognize the URL’s, or start asking questions, or getting on the internet to determine who they are and how important they are.
You can play around with these, but hiring your social manager should not be easy, and you can take these ideas and expand on them. They are generic enough that people can go out and have a good time with them, working out exactly how they fit within the companies needs.
Honestly though, this is what I will be hiring against when it comes down to finding the community manager. Really good, socially aware and responsible people will not necessarily fly through this process, but I will be able to weed out those that don’t really know about the tools, how they work, and how they can be used.
Tags: social media, community manager, hire, interview, process, pain, Dan interview
Something cool you can do with slide share is update your slides based on comments back from people. The presentation I am giving on Tuesday afternoon got a number of edits, and what I did not want to do was go through all the editing in pieces, rather make one big change and reupload the file. I also did not want to lose all the people who embedded the original presentation. Slide Share though lets you make those incremental changes as they come through, without having to take down your old slide presentation. Even better, all those embeds and links to the slide show will still work after it has been updated.
To change your slide show on the fly, login to slide share. The click on edit your slide show.
Then click on Replace Slideshow
Make all your edits on your master slide deck, then upload your new master slide show using the replace method.
Once it is uploaded, the original slide show will be in place until the new one has been crossed over to the slide share format. No one needs to know that this happened, but is great for sharing a slide show and making incremental updates of the master, and then reuploading it so that people still get to see it, and all the original code works, links, embed code, and other ways that people have linked to the presentation.
Neat trick with slide share, and makes this very easy to fix issues with the original slide show, without undoing all the linking that happens with slide share.
Tags: slideshare, update, presentation, on the fly, link, embed, cool, trick
Image by Sailing “Footprints: Real to Reel” (Ronn ashore) via FlickrAs I wade through a bunch of comments on a number of systems, what is coming to mind are some of the most important things I have learned about blogging. While these are in no particular order, this is not a top 10 list; they are all things I have learned because of my five-year experiences with blogging.
1. People are going to hate you – some bloggers seem to live in a love hate relationship with other bloggers sometimes. What is particularly interesting is when blogging becomes a blood sport in terms of comments, post comments, blog entries that seek out to savage each other rather than inform or form a cogent argument on why a particular viewpoint is better than another’s. Sometimes the emotional gut evisceration that some bloggers partake of can get to be a real downer. The good part of this is that you do not have to participate in those kinds of tit for tat arguments on line you can just quietly walk away, and write about something else.
2. We are stronger together rather than apart – this comes from the idea that we have formed a community. If you look at community driven systems we all choose who we want to be friends with. We can choose those people who are fun to be around rather than go digging around in the dirt and hanging out with people we would not associate with in real life. When we build a community, we build a social voice, we can effect change for the better, or we can simply do nothing and let things slide on by and not use our collective voice to address any social, political, or personal issue.
3. There are people out there who will support you – much of what I write has a relationship to what other people write about on their blogs. Sometimes I get an original idea, but more often than not, someone else’s article will inspire something on my part. Sometimes what I write inspires someone else to write something even better. We stand on the shoulders of each other, learning, and doing good things. The people who do this kind of building out the dialog are worthy of knowing. I have met many of you, and that is part of the wonderfulness of the blogosphere.
4. A blog is both tool and weapon – depending on what you use your blog for; it is either a tool to help or a weapon to hinder. At times, it is hard to tell the difference between the two. The person running the blog is coming at something from their viewpoint which may or may not contain facts, most of us are going to be looking for facts when we stop by the blog. Or we may be looking for informed opinion, we probably are not looking for an ill formed argument based on emotion. Bloggers are becoming more aware of the need for fact checking, something that journalism teaches. However, like most human controlled systems, sometimes we cannot pass up on something that will drive traffic and cause sensationalism, not worrying about the eventual personal outcome of that article. We have seen this in the past, and no doubt, that it will continue into the future. We need more tool using, more fact checking, and move past the weaponization of the blog. Sensationalism only draws traffic for a small amount of time; good factual articles live for the long tail.
5. We all struggle – all bloggers at some point want to be heard, even if it is by a small audience. We try to build out an audience, and sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail. Sometimes that failure is not pretty, yet the blogger learns and moves on, learning from the failure. It is when we link love, it is when we listen, it is when we debate that we start building out our voices, and we start building out audience share.
6. You have to build out a thick skin – when you blog you are exposing yourself to the world. People from all over the world are going to come read your blog, and some of them will never come back. Some will make it their personal mission in life to try to change your mind, or try to shut you down. If you are a person that lives on the internet as a public person, anyone can and will say anything about you. Some of it you might like because it reaffirms your ego, some of it you might not like because it hurts or causes people to doubt you. That is ok, but you cannot let it drive you into a downward depressive cycle. Many bloggers I have known have been torn apart on the internet, and rather than dusting themselves off have stopped blogging, stopped being public people. We lose a voice, we lose an opinion, and the abusive person just moves on to find someone else to hate. You need to work these kinds of issues out internally. The idea to remember here on this one is that in politics, senior business management, blogging, and even writing, someone else is always going to armchair quarterback your decisions.
7. Blogging can be very rewarding – blogging and writing can be some of the most personally rewarding things you can do for yourself and for others. If you walk away from an article thinking you did well here, then you most likely did do well. Remember those moments; they are what blogging should be all about.
These are probably the most important things I have learned, and that makes a difference in why I blog, and what I blog about. While we all have a voice, and we all have an opinion, overall my experience with the blogosphere has been a rewarding and positive experience. I have met and continue to meet some of the most interesting people I could have hoped to meet. I have also met some dirt balls along the way, but that is ok too. The important part to remember is that the blogosphere is a macrocosm of everyone on the planet, some opinionated, others not so opinionated. The key to blogging is to understand that you are a public person, and in a global internet environment, not everyone is going to agree with you.
Tags: blogging, lessons, learned, people, global, voice, village, support, fun
Image via CrunchBaseMore like there are also tons of other stuff to talk about, and while Techcrunch is great, the technical blogosphere in total they are not. Amit Agarwal over at Labnol asks why everyone did not just jump on the Techcrunch bandwagon and cover Dave Sifry’s new web site, Offbeat Guides. The cool part is that there were tons of other things going on today other than the launch of Dave Sifry’s new web site. Not that people do not care, it would have been cool to cover the launch. The reality though is that Techcrunch does not make the only source of things to blog about.
Even techmeme is in flat line, it does not meant that what they cover is not great, not news worthy, but heck there were many other things going on today to. People might have been talking about the Android Jail Break, or the Russian list of very cool Google hacking commands, many of which were brand new to many people on the internet. Then Robert Scoble got featured on CNN, that was tons more fun news to write about, we might have been hunting the internet for Roberts video.
Then Louis Gray posted a file on non-blog commenting and the death of comments in blogs, that was something interesting to read as well. Then Aaron Brazell told us he was in Alexandria VA at the Union Street Public House having a beer, and a beer with Aaron is not something to pass up. Michael Tsai posted more favorite Flickr pictures, meaning folks would need to go through the whole flickr stream for the person to get a context of the whole photo shoot, that wastes time, but still fun to do.
Chris Brogan posted a cool note on why you should not help your customer or should you, then there was Cisco news, continuation of PDC 2008, should GM go bankrupt or not, the resurgence of internet taxes, and Chris Pirillo posted about a color-changing mug.
Dave probably just did not hit the numbers in the same way as all the other crazy zany things. Nothing against Techcrunch, but today was a busy news day, and while we have gotten used to the general enthusiasm for new technology that we all have, some days, only Techcrunch will keep on top of the news, and remain deeply tied to Techmeme.
One of the things that are annoying me about Google Adsense is the high number of drug ads that show up on the site. Frankly, drug ads have very little to do with Web 2.0, technology, or education. Moreover, I do not want to shill for drugs, not on this site or any other site that I run, so this a quick guide on how you can turn them off.
First go to your Adsense account and log in, then go to Adsense setup, then click on the competitive ad filter as shown below.
You do not know where those ads go to and you cannot click on your own ads to work out how they work, or anything else about the destination of those ads, but there are some tricks here that will work depending on the browser you are using. You can go to the Adsense preview tool if you are using Internet Explorer. If you are not using the preview tool, or use Firefox, here is one handy trick you can use.
Hover over the ad, right above the keyword, and Firefox will show you the destination URL. The URL in the ad might not be the destination URL, so you can’t really trust what you are seeing in the Advertising URL, advertisers sometimes build out specific landing pages for their ads to gather information about who is clicking on them.
This is the URL you want to block in your Adsense screen.
Enter all the URL’s you want to block as they show up, you want to make sure you enter the WWW version and the short version (without WWW) as shown below.
Once you have all that done, then you click on save changes, and you will get a completely new bit of annoying annoying non-context sensitive ads to block. This is going to be a long drawn out process, but advertising has to make sense for the web site that you are running them on. If you want to make money from advertising, then you are going to have to do this if you want to even attempt at getting anything relevant to your small web site.
Overall, with the quality of advertising on Adsense lately, and if some of these ads are really beginning to annoy you, there is always the final option, dumping Adsense altogether until their context sensitive advertising gets better. However, for many web sites that is not a viable thing to do, face it, advertising helps pays the bills on many sites. The goal is to get the right advertising so that you are flogging things that you know your customers will actually want to click on, helping you make money.
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