Category Archives: Uncategorized

Video: Problems and Solutions in Social Media Production

I wrote about this in two other places:
SocialMediaProduction: Knowledge Sharing Through a Common Video Tag
Tuesday Night: “Problems and Solutions in Social Media Production”

That second link is to the website of Portland Social Media Club. Hopefully we’ll have live streaming video of the event discussed, so if you are elsewhere perhaps you will join us. Check out the video below for good times and a couple of stories of problems I’ve solved.

How to Create RSS Feeds for Your Organization

A wonderful friend in the nonprofit tech world emailed me this afternoon and asked how I would recommend organizations create RSS feeds for their news or news related to their topic of interest. Preferrably quick, dirty, cheap or free. Get that feed out the door. Here (after the more link) is the email I sent her, in case it’s of use to you. I wrote it very quickly, but I figure it works for now. Feel free to share your thoughts in comments.
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I’m Going to Be on Bob Parson’s Show Tonight

Life Online with Bob Parsons, the founder of Go Daddy, is a weekly live audio show on the web that’s also podcast. I’ll be the first guest tonight at 7PM PST to talk about SplashCast.

Update: Well, it ended up being prerecorded and less than fascinating. Believe it or not, sales pitches aren’t my favorite thing to do. We didn’t exactly talk about any burning issues or deeper questions. Oh well, hopefully people listen to the show and will check out SplashCast. I’m reminded again, as I was at the advertising conference I was at in SF yesterday – that engagement in social media, concerning matters of social interest or importance, is a much more fullfilling method of promoting a company than broadcasting sales messages. We’re engagers at SplashCast and I like that. Oh well!

VideoBloggingWeek2007


In case you missed it (I basically did) last week was observed as Video Blogging Week 2007.  The honorary queen of the event was the fantastic Irina Slutsky, whose newest project, the Vloggies Show, is not to be missed. VideoBlogging week has been a great way to take a look into the breadth of video blogging that’s going on around the web these days. It’s awesome!

Participants in the event could post their video blog episodes on any hosting service they chose and then tag it videobloggingweek2007 in MeFeedia.  Pretty cool stuff.  What kinds of videos were included?  Well, lest you think video blogging is a small thing – there were more than 900 videos uploaded last week!  Over at SplashCast we indexed the RSS feed from MeFeedia and created this crazy huge SplashCast show.  It’s not all 1k videos, but it does include the most recent 168 videos in the MeFeedia feed.  And, believe it or not, any new videos given the same tag will automatically appear in this show as well.  So check it out to get an idea of the breadth of the participants.  It takes a few seconds to load for the first time, but there’s a whole lot of video in there and after the first time you press play then advancing to other shows is very fast.

If someone wanted to put this live content on their own page they could do so with ease.  Pretty cool, huh?  Lots of fun video blogs here to check out.  Hover over the blue “i” in the bottom left of any video for a link to its page on MeFeedia, complete with description and website links.

This is the kind of thing I took the job at SplashCast for.  It’s just a preview of some incredible functionality the company is going to roll out next week. Three cheers for RSS feeds and online video!

Mike Arrington: Bobblehead or (3)Bubble Head?

Warning: Unusually mean stuff coming. Do you remember the ajax chat plug-in for blogs that launched a year ago February called 3Bubbles?  I didn’t think so; unless you watch every new app closely or follow the work of old school advisor types, you probably couldn’t have cared less over the last year about 3Bubbles. “3bubbles is going to be wildly popular with bloggers,” Michael Arrington wrote in his review when the company launched.  Wrong!  Though Arrington’s pied piper blog post led 40 other bloggers to link to his review, 3Bubbles today looks like a cold fish.  The company’s blog, linked to on the front page, hasn’t been updated in 9 months!  That’s slower than TechCrunch posts in the morning!  They didn’t even post about John Edwards using the service, though there’s a badge on the front page.  John Edwards uses such an excessive number of Web 2.0 apps that if yours is on the list – odds are it’s not going anywhere.

Arrington was concerned that 3Bubbles might not be able to handle the massive traffic influx headed its way.  He forgot to mention in the post that that traffic was likely to be dispersed across Mebo, Gabbly, InCircles, GeeSee and goodness knows how many other services just like this that launched in 2006!  Man oh man did that guy give me a hard time when I worked for him if I gushed about someone without mentioning any competitors! Maybe he was just got distracted by all the players and lost his head in enthusiasm!  

Why the hostility? TechCrunch is holding a contest calling people to mock the site about how how wrong it’s been about a review or market forecast.  I’m still embarrassed about falling for the April Fool’s joke – so in love and respect, I thought I’d oblige! What did 3Bubbles do to deserve this mean spirited post? Nothing, really. As someone working at a company staring into the startup abyss, I shouldn’t be so nasty. There’s just no other way to participate in the contest! What kind of blog runs a contest like that?

Baby Pictures

Sometimes you’ve got to take advantage of having a personal blog. Doing a file transfer between computers tonight and found these. The one with my dad looks so much like me! I promise to return to regularly scheduled posts about stuffy internet matters soon.