Twitter is just stupid, pointless hype?

So many clueless people, so little time... Recently,  Patrick Kershaw wrote an article about the valuelessness of Twitter. An excerpt:

"Consider Twitter…I am unable to see the benefit on even a personal level. I am not a celebrity-watcher, nor do I care what others are doing every minute of their lives. So is any value added at all? I don't think so.…If you cannot see a benefit, don't follow the hype."

Too many journalists have been doing no research on how Twitter is actually used

While Patrick (not a journalist) also made some points about how he feels social networks can be used, many journalists don't even bother. They just direct withering criticism at people who use a communications medium to tell others what they are doing.

Never mind that Twitter can be used to communicate anything; the fact that a few people use it in ways they think they never would means it must be worthless for everyone. Never mind actually researching what you are writing about and finding out what people are actually doing; stick to simple stereotypes.

A journalist's time saver: A pre-written article about pointless fads like Twitter

So in the interest of saving everyone time, I have created a template to assist busy journalists not interested in doing their own research. Simply copy the article below and publish it as your own writing:

Dear readers,

I, an important journalist, want to tell you that Twitter is just stupid, pointless hype because I heard that someone once used it to write what they were having for breakfast. I promise I will never use Twitter.

These things are so easy to spot for someone as smart as me. In fact, yesterday, I saw someone in the grocery store talking about cereal on their mobile phone! Anything you would use to talk about cereal is just hype. No phones for me.

I really can pick 'em, can't I? Someone told me the other day my articles are now being published on the internet. Do you realize the internet is full of pages of funny cat pictures? Another pointless, flash-in-the-pan medium.

It seems like there are a lot of stupid things that will be going away soon. My friend told me people sometimes get offensive messages from people they don't know by email. Clearly only morons use email.

Here's one that made me laugh: I saw someone in the park holding a stupid picture up to their face. Another moronic trend. Attached to the back were hundreds of pages with letters printed on them—all about that dumb picture! Books are unbelievably stupid.

And I can't believe you've overlooked the dumbest fad of all: Why haven't more people noticed—as I have—that other people are always saying stupid things? People are pointless.

That's why I live in a cave.

Communicating is just stupid, pointless hype.

The article beginning "Dear readers" is offered free of copyright under an Uncreative Morons license.

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What are the most essential Twitter apps ever created?

OneForty looks like the best site yet to provide a categorized list of Twitter Apps.

While OneForty requires an invitation to join and so is not available to everyone yet, I wanted to provide what I think is one of it's most valuable features to the general user: a "best of" list of apps organized by category they call "essentials."

What do you think? Are these the  most essential Twitter apps out there? Here's their list as of late September, 2009:

Desktop

• TweetDeck

• Tweetie for Mac

• Twitterrific

• Seesmic Desktop

• DestroyTwitter

• Twhirl

Mobile

• Tweetie

• SimplyTweet

• twidroid

• UberTwitter

• TwitterFon

• Gravity

Business

• CoTweet

• HootSuite

• TweetLater

• PeopleBrowsr

• Twitter

• EasyTweets

Networking

• Mr. Tweet

• WeFollow

• Who

• Friend

• Twitter

• UnTweeps

Entertainment

• Overheard.it

• Twittervision

• Twistori

• Twitter

• CelebritiesThatTwitter

• Post Like A Pirate

Monitoring

• Objective

• TweetBeep

• PeopleBrowsr

• OneRiot

• Collecta

• Radian6

Media Sharing

• TwitPic

• Qik

• Blip.fm

• twt.fm

• Screenr

• yfrog

Link Tools

• Bit.ly

• Tweetmeme

• Eventbox

• twitterfeed

• Backtweets

• TwitThis

Analytics

• TweetStats

• Twitter

• Twitalyzer

• TweetVolume

• Tweetrush

• Follow Cost

Random

• Peekr

• Post Like A Pirate

• Flip

• Portwiture

• pici.me

• Oh My Science

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How Twitter messages work when you use @

First, imagine a fictional family where everyone follows each other on Twitter: @Mom, @Dad, @Brother and @Sister.
1. The basics

Rule #1: A person must follow you before you can DM them. If @Mom and @Dad (fictional example names) want to write completely privately so no one will see what they write but each other, they have to DM each other.

Rule #2: Anytime you put an @someone anywhere in a tweet, it will be sent to that @someone, regardless of whether they follow you or not.


Read more …

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What's the best way to give retweet attribution on Twitter?

A good Twitter blogger that we've sent (deserved) traffic to had me baffled for a bit this morning. We put out a tweet that sent them 550+ clicks but they felt the tweet was improper. I'm interested to know what people think, and how I could avoid this in the future.

You know how just by the fact of tweeting back and forth things can rapidly get confusing? That's how this conversation started to go (reproduced later in this blog post with name removed: my responses are in a couple shades of green). But first, here's a cartoon summary of how wrong things can go:

So it looked like were headed down this road and although I was still confused when he said he didn't want to talk about it anymore, I was happy it hadn't turned into something like the above. It started something like this:

"[Your] tweet isn't from @UserName it's my blog"

Well, duh, I thought. It was a retweet attribution.  I started to explain that to him kindly (me: "you probably knew that") but then I admitted I couldn't imagine he didn't already understand retweet attribution and could he enlighten me as to what he was asking about?

Next it seemed like he was saying the problem wasn't that it was his blog post, it was that he tweeted about it ("give credit to the real tweeter") and he should get the retweet attribution. Of course, I had never even seen his tweet. I get most of the link for @Twitter_Tips from feeds.

I couldn't imagine that he wanted me to both tweet his stuff and then search his tweets to see if he tweeted about it to give him retweet credit for talking about his own blog, so I asked for further clarification. Then he said he didn't want to talk about it anymore and asked me not to talk about it either.

Here's how the actual conversation went:

Confusion, for sure. I'll blog about it and you can comment to help clear it up if you feel it makes sense to.

And one more point to cleared here, lets act like gentlemen lets not discuss about it :) good day!

Our tweet sent you over 500 human clicks, but I won't do it again w/o saying @yourUserName

as I told you its not your mistake.. take it easy...btw i always credit you when i tweet/rt your links.. good day

You're very kind—it does appear to be my mistake of some kind. I'm not upset (no need to suggest I "take it easy") just trying to understand

As you can see, more along the lines of the cartoon than what I would have hoped for.

Along the way he also posted a link to his followers about "Reposting others' content without attribution" being stealing.  His public post (which I won't reproduce since that would make it too easy to identify him) helped clarify where he was coming from: He wanted me to not only tweet his blog post, he wanted to see his @username in the tweet about it too.

As unreasonable as that sounded at first, I quickly figured out his concern, I think: Since I was using "via @username" at the end instead of "RT @username" at the beginning, he thought it would not be clear who wrote the blog post. He thought I was saying someone else (who doesn't actually have a dedicated blog) was the real author. Aha!

Putting the attribution at the end instead of the beginning can get people confused:

• They might overlook the attribution entirely;
• They might think the attibution is crediting the creator of what is being linked to rather than just being a retweet attribution.

ProBlogger's TwitTip Twitter blog had an article on using "via" instead of "RT" that I shared with this guy but he was obviously so concerned that someone else was being given credit for his work (even though we sent him 500+ visitors to see for themselves) that it got me thinking.

I do a lot of tweeting with the "via-style" retweet  attribution from our account @DivineLove, because quotes are often retweeted on their merits, unlike links which are too often just pimped back and forth to get blog traffic. For quality articles about Twitter I look to feeds rather than reading people's tweets (mostly).

So why not just start tweets with "RT @…"?

I don't like starting with RT because it obscures the topic of the tweet, and lots of people have chimed in that they don't like this either. People have in fact given a number of reasons for ignoring tweets that start with "RT @…" and so I've tended to favor the "via @…" at the end. Since from @Twitter_Tips I don't seek out tweets to find links, it isn't much of a problem.

What do you think?

Is retweet attribution in the form "via @userName" at the end of the tweet too confusing, and should it be avoided?

---

Postscript: Why don't I read more of people's tweets? 

Because most top people tweet their own stuff and other stuff as a "favor" to their friends. Quality has too little to do with it, as long as it meets a minimum standard. At least, that's what I think I've had trouble finding better-quality links by reading through what other people tweet/retweet and rely on popular link feeds such as ReTweetist instead.

Don't get me wrong, I've tweeted some stuff without reading it carefully that has turned out to be bad, but it's not bad because I tweeted it as a favor to someone who would then offer to do the same for me. Since I have so far hardly ever blogged about Twitter, I don't have many articles anyone could tweet anyway!

Also, I'm happy that so far, despite having over 92,000 followers and sending thousands of DMs back and forth to people, I don't know of anyone that has "gone away mad" after communicating with us on @Twitter_Tips. I'm happy to share links with and talk to people from any part of the political (or emotional!) spectrum. 

We've made mistakes and owned up to them, and where we could, fixed them. I appreciate feedback of all kinds and have made numerous changes to how and what we post on @Twitter_Tips based on comments to us from our followers.

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Won the technology (Shorty) award on Twitter, heading to NY for award ceremony

Recently won an award for creating short tech content on Twitter.com via our "channel" @Twitter_Tips—The Shorty Awards competition was covered by The New York Times, The BBC, AdAge, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, MediaBistro and many others.

Read more (This post is in the process of being moved toblog.TweetSmarter.com ... check back for an updated link—thanks!)

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Community: it's not just for politicians anymore.

So much of the “noise” about connecting with people online focuses on having too many online friends (FaceBook and Twitter in particular).  The point being missed: we are all moving into an era were each of us have a “community” to manage. 

In person, natural filtering takes place: at a high school reunion, for example, we make connections only to a small number of people at a time, few connections “pile up” and very little happens simultaneously. Online, information that inbound us has no natural limits  to it. We have to be the filter—others will not filter themselves for us.

Community is coming at us every day, in our email and phone messages. We need to change our mindset from one-to-one to community-to-one and one-to-community.

Admittedly, online tools to help us filter our communities are still in their infancy. You have to seek out filters—they don't make themselves known automatically, nor is using them always intuitive. On FaceBook you can put friends into friend list groups, select a friend list, then select “recently updated” to check in on that part of your community. In Twitter you can download and use TweetDeck in much the same way. Feed tools feed tools such as Yahoo! Pipes can be used to help you filter your community by topic as well.

If you follow many thousands on Twitter and concentrate only on your DM and @ inbound streams you are just using another kind of IM tool. But the community is still there. zeFrank recently asked his community “Where were you and what were you doing when Obama was elected president?” Managing the inbound side of a large community is always a challenge, but one worth having.


How do you interact with your community?

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Fixing YouTube videos in Firefox by reinstalling Adobe Flash Player

If you upgrade to the latest (beta 10) version of Adobe Flash player, it fixes the problem of videos occasionally not playing in Firefox.

Here's how to do it:

From this link, run the flash uninstaller, and then get version 10 here go here and download flash beta 10.

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"Youthiness" infects internet writers of all ages.

Update: When Carl Icahn got into the fight later, he used all UPPERCASE letters.



Jerry Yang sent out memos today in all lowercase letters, trying to motivate the troops. Apparently this is common for him. I don't doubt it--lots of emails from bosses look like this. Shows how busy and important they are: "I can't be bothered to capitalize my letters. I have people to do that for me!" Jerry should try to be more like Google, where even their bad jokes generate bandwidth.



When is cool not cool?



Of course, lowercase is cool, if you're 13 and texting your friends, or sending MySpace messages. So Jerry is probably also striving to affect an aura of youth and cool.



Apologies to Stephen Colbert, but this looks like another example of misplaced youthiness to me.



A lot of text communication strives for youthiness nowadays. No one wants to be caught using email when they could be texting, Twittering or DM/IM'ing. But modern text systems push us to do more and more with less and less, particularly encouraging TMA (too many acronyms).



The three T's of status on Twitter



Updates on Twitter such as "cleaning toilet naked in meeting with guy k at jfk" are another example. This is a person combining the youthiness of missing words and lowercase letters with the three T's of status on Twitter:

• I'm so cool I can share embarrassingly personal stuff;


• Proof of my high status is that I meet with people who have status;


• I'm so busy with important stuff I'm frequently tweeting from airports.

(Of course I was personally so uncool on Twitter when I started out people contacted me directly to try and educate me.)



Where will it end?



It makes me wonder where this will all end. Using acronyms for our feelings was only the beginning, I fear. Is the way people are texting and tweeting today the way our novels and press releases are going to look in the future? I wouldn't doubt it. Conversations keep "atomizing," with no end in site. Even the thought leaders of our new age can't keep things straight, or as Kevin Rose said earlier today "and by wofo I mean wifi."



One day, some corporate bigwig will be tried for insider trading, and get off by saying "I didn't actually have inside information, I misspoke: I meant to say "AFAIC, not AFAICT." And we will realize nothing really changes: ssdd.

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Message to MySpace users: Don't leave town

Long story short: woman goes missing, family distraught. Police and large, helpful internet community versed in finding missing persons have no luck, other than indications that she has left the state.

And then .. someone suggests MySpace. [Cue music.] Bingo! Information about the missing woman begins to show up right away when the family starts checking with the missing woman's MySpace network. Most of her friend connections were on MySpace, and sightings of where she was and who she was with started coming right in.

It's much easier to teach ethics (and karma!) nowadays, by simply pointing out that your actions can be recorded or commented on and saved for decades on the internet for all to see. I don't think we've seen all the kinds of stories of people's internet information and connections catching up with them yet.

For example, a friend had a relative who didn't want to be found disappear some years ago, before MySpace. This was an unstable person, who incidentally was very entrepreneurial. Got me thinking how today's shady entrepreneurs are heavily involved in social media sites like MySpace, and the old story of "take the sucker's money and leave town" isn't going to play out like it used to.

Basically, the internet (supported by security and cell phone cameras) is making people more accountable. Politicians have certainly figured this out; they have become a collection of unflattering sound bytes and mashed-up internet videos.

And since heavy internet users skew young, it's like a giant, pre-adulthood ethics and reputation experiment. A lot of kids and young adults are still experimenting with letting pictures of them doing foolish thing show up on the web (and paying consequences).

I wonder: will the first internet generation develop a new common wisdom not only to avoid letting images or information about doing foolish things get on the internet, but to avoid doing foolish things in the first place? Or will they just create and accept a world where being a fool is the accepted standard? So far, it doesn't look good, but they're still young yet.

Of course, nothing will likely get rid of criminal behavior, but you have to love the story of the woman who took pictures of the thieves who stole her notebook by using the notebook's built in camera remotely. The happy ending: Thieves go online, victim logs in and takes their picture, police recover all stolen goods.

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Keep it simple, stupid: Making friends on social sites like Digg, Twitter, Reddit and Mixx

I can't believe the number of articles that over-complicate and philosophize how to enjoy and do well on social sites. (Or you can skip to the big list of links.) Disclaimer: This isn't any kind of "always works" formula for manipulating votes. It's just a simple introduction with some common-sense tips. I'll start by talking about Digg, and then cover Twitter a bit:



Getting your item to be "made popular" on Digg.



The first stage is watching your item climb the "Hot in [subcategory]" upcoming page for your post. For example: digg.com/all/world_news/upcoming. If your post rises here, it will either disappear or make the "Top in [category]" page. Example: digg.com/world_business. Making the top of your category page will bring you TONS of traffic. If it fades, it was either surpassed by faster-rising submissions, or too much time elapsed (over 24 hours or so). But best of all is making the front page of digg overall.



When my last post made the front page of digg (a photo) it rapidly received over 140,000 views and well over 1,800 diggs. I deleted it pretty soon after, mainly because I decided it was indirectly unkind to the family involved. (But you can still see the digg submission and thumbnail here.) Now, on with the "how to:"



Make your homepage your friend's submissions



Add the user who submitted something you enjoyed to your friends. Make the feed of your friend's submissions one of the home pages in your browser. (You do have multiple home pages, right?) Press the F11 key at the top of your keyboard when you're browsing friend's submissions (press it again to return to normal mode).



The more friends you add, the more time you should spend finding and digging stories only from your friends submissions or shouts. It's amazing how much good stuff doesn't make it to the home page.



On Digg, this page is digg.com/users/[YOURUSERNAME]/friends/submissions. (The equivalent page on Reddit is reddit.com/r/friends/new.) Digg headlines and descriptions that you think look worthy and go back through your list of dugg stories to chose ones to read. Unless you have a lot of free time, you should digg things that look good and only later go back and choose which ones to read. You're watering the garden for your friends by digging their stories, as long as you digg them while they're new, or barely a few hours old. (When you have a lot of friends, you can make your homepage the feed of your friend's shouts.)



I don't advise digging someone's story, and then shouting to tell them you did and ask them to digg something back. But when someone shouts this to me I almost always take a close look at what they've got.



DO click the link at the top of Digg that says new shouts, and digg all you like. Shouting is more of an advanced topic, (here's a basic how-to shout on digg) but for sure experiment by sending a few, and reading most that come your way.



For some great Reddit-specific tips, try this article.



Note that "shout to all" only goes to your first 100 friends, so you'll have to manually shout to each 100 when you have more than 100 friends (and you should!) Also realize that Digg adjusts how features work from time to time, so references go out of date from time to time.



Link to your followers content when appropriate



On sites where users promote their own content, I'll use Twitter as an example: link to their content when appropriate in your @ comments directly to them. It lets others visit the site your are referring to, and helps promote their work. On Twitter, starting a comment with @[USERNAME] adds your post (called a "Tweet" on Twitter) to what is essentially their public inbox (twitter.com/replies).



Understanding Twitter



Prefer a simpler introduction to Twitter? Here's a great video introduction:

Always send a Tweet thanking anyone who follows you. It's the perfect way to make a connection. When Direct Messaging ("DMing") , if you're not sure if it would be perceived as spam, you can ask in the message. (Disagree?) Or don't do it. It's a great way to open a conversation, but be careful with it. You can say, for example, "[Brief message with link]. I don't/won't usually DM links, please say if this is spammy ..." Also realize that some users get their DM's on their phone.



Of course, if you really want the inside scoop on how people use Twitter, there is none better than the hilarious collection of inside jokes in the video below, "No Twitter for Hitler."

Follow your friends around the web



Comment on their blog posts, join their network on LinkedIn (why?) or elsewhere--at least read their profile!



Find people you respect, or have something in common with, and give them some attention. Set aside some time to read what they've written and when you find something you like, say something thoughtful about it in a comment or message to them. And avoid folks that seem like a poor fit for you, just because you're supposed to "network." Look for people you can help, like minds, and people willing to help you, in that order. I can't tell you how many times I've done a Google search for something of interest to a new contact and found something that helped them. Really. Othertimes it just helps me learn a little more about them.



Tools: Once you get better at this stuff ..



.. grab some tools to make it even easier:

• DoshDosh has a great list of Tools for Active Digg users.


• Here's a list of tool lists from stejules;


• Add Reddit Comments To Digg;


• Twitter autocomplete;


• Cool social site tools for FireFox.

Oh .. and use FireFox; it has hundreds of incredibly useful add-ins and extensions that you can't use without FireFox.



Also, read a few articles, get a few tools, and put your own wisdom down in writing (everyone else does). But if you're really geeky, this Forrester research post is worth a look. Any sites you would recommend? Also check the big list of articles at the end of this post.



Creating content that becomes popular on social sites



Not going to reinvent the wheel: here is an excellent article on creating good viral content, or, if you need to hear from the "experts," try this article. Recent research indicates that to give articles the best chance to go viral (such as reaching the front page on Digg), you should submit them after (or before) dinner (C.S.T.) Tue-Thu. Results go down if you submit earlier in the day or earlier in the week. The best days in order, best to worst, are: Thursday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Friday, Monday, Saturday or Sunday. If you're seeking to expand on Twitter, this looks like a collection of interesting tools.



There's a lot more that could be said, but somehow these basic ideas seem to be overlooked a lot, so I've kept this short and simple.



Comments?



Big list of Social Media articles by Chris Brogan



These appear with permission of Chris Brogan. Click the headline above for links to the articles:



Community Development

• Understanding Community Development Strategies


• Ways to Disrupt a Community


• Why Do Community Development


• Should Your Small Business Use Community Tools


• The Long Tail of Community


• If Communitites Are Just Marketing Pools


• The Magic of Including People


• Meeting People at Events


• The Community Play


• The Community Ecosystem


• How Blogs Improve Customer Service and Product Development

Social Networks

• Three Things LinkedIN Does Better than Facebook


• How I Use Facebook


• Things To Do on Facebook


• Facebook - Let Me See My Friends


• Fix Your Facebook Profile Now


• Facebook and the Social Graph - Who Benefits


• Five Things to Do on LinkedIN


• Considering Social Etiquette


• Social Networks are Your Local Pub


• Why Join Another Social Network


• Marketers in a Social Network World


• Real Live Human Social Networking


• Social in Real Space vs. Social Networking


• Making Social Networks Work


• Improve Your Social Network


• The Importance of a Human Social Network


• Three Untapped Values of Social Networks


• Five Things to Do at a Social Networking Meetup

Social Media

• Social Media Starter Pack


• A Basic Social Media Strategy


• My Social Media Toolkit


• A Sample Social Media Toolkit


• Participation- The Key to Social Media


• Social Media - Talk is Cheap for Businesses


• How Big Companies could Use Social Media


• Social Media Inside the Firewall


• Social Media Power Secret - Listening


• Small Businesses And Social Media


• Social Media is a Set Not a Part


• Social Media for Your Career


• Help Someone Understand Social Media


• Social Media as Personal Power


• Snake Oil in Social Media


• Using Social Media to Meet People


• Social Media Starter Moves for Entertainers


• Social Media Starter Moves for Real Estate


• Social Media Starter Moves for Freelancers

Twitter

• How I Use Twitter


• Deeper Twitter - Tuning Twitter for Value


• Newbies Guide to Twitter


• Twitter as Directors Commentary


• Twitter as an Advisory Board

Personal Branding

• The Power of Personal Leadership


• Slicing Time in a Face to Face Environment


• Brand Stories


• Some Quick Branding Tips for Individuals


• The foundations of Your Power


• Personal Scalability


• Personal Branding and Social Media


• Passion Drives Personal Brand


• Elements of a Personal Brand


• Challenges of Social Media Types in the Workplace


• The Value of Networks


• Scaling Yourself

Making Media

• Why Create Personal Media


• Whats Your Social Media Strategy


• Media Makers Next Steps


• Blogging Advice for the Next Level


• Expand Your Audience


• The Future of Microcontent and Hperlocal Media


• Why Bother Blogging Podcasting and Using Social Networks


• Consider Your Media-as-Business Strategy


• Marketing Media Means Moments That Matter


• Using Social Sharing to Extend Your Message


• Performance and Your Audience - Blogging Tips


• Advice for Traditional and Local News Media


• Tagging and Metadata and Why Bother


• A Sunday Newspaper Strategy for Traditional Companies


• Promoting Your Media


• The Power of Links


• 20 Blogging Projects for You


• Succeeding in Independent Online Media


• Seven Blog Improvements You Can Make Today


• Keeping the Blogging Fires Burning


• 100 Blog topics I hope YOU Write


• 100 PodCamp Topics for You to Cover

Read more!

What motivates people? Harry Beckwith knows: The Beckwith 40

When I wrote about prof. Clay Shirky and giving people the chance to achieve higher needs, I was thinking about some of Harry Beckwith's genius.

We're not talking brainwashing here, this is common-sense human nature from a brilliant observer of it. One of my favorites from Harry is: The ultimate test of a communication: Does it make people stop what they are doing? That gem of advice is #40 on the list he calls the Beckwith 40.

So, for an introduction to Harry, here's a baker's dozen from the Beckwith 40: (The subheads are my addition. For the full list, Rajesh Setty has published it with Harry's permission.)

First, Understand How They Think

1. Your biggest competitor is not a competitor; it’s your prospect’s indifference.
2. Your second-biggest competitor is not a competitor; it’s your prospect’s distrust.
3. Your biggest obstacle is whatever stereotype your prospect has formed about you and your industry.
4. Prospects decide in the first five seconds.
5. Prospects don’t try to make the best choice. They try to make the most comfortable choice.
6. At heart, every prospect is risk-averse, and risks are always more vivid than rewards.

Second, Understand How You Need To Think

7. Beware of what you think you know or have experienced; memories fail people constantly.
8. For the same reason, beware of what others say they know or have experienced.
9. Certainty is a trick your mind plays on you; keep yours open.
10. If everyone likes your idea, it’s not an idea. Good ideas always make enemies.
11. Don’t create something that everyone likes; create something that many people love.
12. Research never shows anything; it only suggests.

Value, Communication, Action, Understanding

13. Never take seriously what people say they think, because people are never sure. Trust only action.
14.-40. Full list

Read more!

There is time enough to create 10,000 new web sites that engage and empower us

NYU professor Clay Shirky points out the the Internet population watches 5 trillion hours of TV, roughly equivalent to 10,000 Wikipedia projects worth of time. His point is that what he calls our "cognitive surplus" is huge, and there is room for a whole lot of new and engaging stuff on the web. His talk at the at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008 is loaded with useful insights. (Transcript and video below.)

I wish he'd talked more about self-actualization. Self-actualization is sometimes described as an instinctual need (in humans) to make the most of our abilities; to strive to fulfill our potential and be all that we are capable of. It includes creativity and problem solving. And self-actualization opportunities sometimes need to be made more visible before people will take them up.

Whether you agree with Maslow's heirarchy of needs from "A Theory of Human Motivation," it seems common sense that self-actualization is a higher kind of human striving.

Shirky points out, explaining social sites, that if you offer people the opportunity to produce and share media (beyond just consuming it) people take it up, but it didn't feel like he delved into the real reasons why, IMHO. I predict sites that seek to provide a high level of self-actualization opportunities become more the norm, but they need to signal that they offer a higher level of opportunity.

But it's nonetheless a great talk! Some very useful insights. You can read this lightly edited transcript of his talk, or watch it below. Shirky also has a great book about net-enabled social tools are transforming us, Here Comes Everybody, The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.


His talk begins:
"I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

"The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

"And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today.

Read the whole transcript here.

Read more!

Puns from Digg.com

Members on Digg often compete to contribute the best puns and jokes. Here are some highlights from a recent post on puns. The Diggers contributions are ALL better than those in the actual article, in my opinion.

I've put the longer ones at the bottom, and edited out any I didn't think were that good. I've also included a selection of my favorite spoonerisms from the fun with words site (at the end of this post).

Top short puns:

• Feminine hygiene jokes are the lowest form of humor. Period.
• I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.
• Radio Shack is giving away dead batteries. Free of charge.
• Q: What do you call a psychic fugitive midget? A: A small medium at large.
• A termite walks into a bar and says "Where's the bar tender?"
• Did you hear about the guy whose whole left side was cut off? He's all right now.
• I couldn't quite remember how to throw a boomerang, but eventually it came back to me.
• A three-legged dog walks into a saloon and says: "I'm here to find the man that shot my paw" This one also made it as a poster:
  

A nurse is making her rounds at the hospital, she goes to make a notation on a patient's chart and pulls a thermometer from behind her ear. Looking at the thermometer she exclaims "Some asshole has my pen!"

Longer jokes:

A bayman was walking home after collecting seagull eggs to throw at mating dolphins near his home. He sees a sleeping lion on the path and slowly steps over it. He is immediately arrested. "What's the charge?" The man asks. "You were transporting young gulls over a sedate lion for immoral porpoises!"

A cowboy walks into a bar and orders a whiskey. As the bartender pours it for him he sees the place is empty. He says to the bartender "I know I'm new in town, but this place seems dead."
The bartender says "I reckon everyone is up at the hanging."
Cowboy asks "Who are they hanging?"
Bartender responds "The law finally caught up with ol' Brown Paper Pete."
Cowboy: "Brown Paper Pete? What kind of a name is that?"
Bartender: "You've never heard of him? He's notorious around these parts! Wears brown paper pants, brown paper shirt, brown paper vest, he's even got a brown paper hat."
Cowboy: "Now ain't that a caution. What are they hangin' him for?"
Bartender: "Rustlin'."

There's this guy looking for a job. By the way, this guy has no arms. So, he's looking through the wanted ads and sees that someone is needed to ring the bell in the church. So he's like, "I can ring the bell in the church!" So he runs over to the church and asks this priest if he can have the job. But the priest is like, "You have no arms! How can you ring the bell?" So the armless man runs up a dizzying six flights of stairs. Then he backs up, concentrates, and runs headfirst into the bell and rings it with his face. So now the priest is stunned and says, "Well, I guess since you rang the bell, you can have the job..."
Three months has gone by and twelve times a day this guy has to run up six flights of stairs and smash his face into this bell. The guy looks like a pancake.... So like he normally does, the pancake man goes up the stairs and runs at the bell BUT--he misses. He runs straight past the bell and goes flying over the side of the bell tower; splattered all over the sidewalk. So this big crowd of people comes around and they're all shouting, "OH MY GOSH, WHO FELL FROM THE BELL TOWER?!" So this guy bends down and looks at his demented head and says, "I don't know his name, but his face rings a bell!"

Soon after another armless man inquires if he can fill the now vacant role of bell ringer. The priest asks why yet another limbless man wants to be climb all those stairs and smash his face into the bell. The man replies that the original bell-ringer was his brother and he continue his brother's work. The priest grudgingly accepts. As before, the man runs up the six flights of stairs and smashes his face into the bell. All is well until the new man also misses the bell and tumbles to his death.

Aghast, the townsfolk ask the priest for the identity of the mysterious deceased stranger. "I don't know," replies the priest, "but he's a dead ringer for his brother."

Spoonerisms overheard (from Fun With Words):

• Cat flap (Flat cap)
• Bad salad (Sad ballad)
• Soap in your hole (Hope in your soul)
• Mean as custard (Keen as mustard)
• Plaster man (Master plan)
• Pleating and humming (Heating and plumbing)
• Trim your snow tail (Trim your toe nails)
• Birthington's washday (Washington's Birthday)
• Trail snacks (Snail tracks)
• Bottle in front of me (Frontal Lobotomy)
• Sale of two titties (Tale of two cities)
• Rental Deceptionist (Dental Receptionist)
• Flock of bats (Block of flats)
• Chewing the doors (Doing the chores)

And ... a great collection of humorous sayings.

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Build community around topics of importance with Drupal

This is about creating a site that lets people submit news and links and let visitors vote on which should gain the most visibility. It's a way of building a community around a topic of significance.

Many hosts will set this up for you in literally seconds (free: it's open source) with a one-click install (typically of Pligg). You can use a site like this as a step beyond blogging, where you submit synopses on topics of interest, and link to sites with news or information.

Recommendation on how to start:

Install Pligg, then upgrade to Drupal with Drigg if you get popular. Drigg (in early 2008) will import your Pligg data.

If you're more savvy, start with Drigg running on Drupal. Here's an excellent site built with Drigg running on Drupal. I could provide a lot of the competing recommendations on this, but I decided instead to cut to the chase. I did several hours of research. Your main choices appear to be:

• Pligg;
• Drupal with Drupaligg;
• Drupal with Drigg;
• Drupal with a mixture of modules;

There are lots of other choices as well, these are the main ones. Summary: Pligg is buggy but widely available as a one-click install, Joomla not enough useful modules for this purpose and more challenging to customize compared to Drupal (though Joomla is a little easier "out of the box").

Why use Drupal?

Drupal is also one of the best documented open-source projects out there, won an award for Overall 2007 best Open Source CMS, was overall winner of the Webware 100 Awards, etc. Also, Drupal is an old-timer; Drupal began just as the internet was heating up. Drupal is more secure than WordPress (for comparison).

Okay, who am I kidding? Wordpress is hacked and hacked. Because it's too popular, and follows what is essentially an insecure upgrade process. Automatic (the name of the group that provided Wordpress developers) don't provide bug and security patches for previous releases --Drupal does. Upgrades often break or change things, and need to be tested first (and users need training on changes), so security patches need to be provided for previous versions. Updates affecting users need to be in addition to security patches that let technicians secure the software without affecting users or plug-ins. Wordpress needs to leave the Update or Die philosophy. You can harden Wordpress against attack, but it's a lot of work.

Plus, who wants to fail when they become a success? Drupal can handle your site and community becoming as successful as you can imagine. (If you start small, never grow and then give up--it really doesn't matter where you start.) Drupal powers major sites such as:

• United Nations
• Warner Bros
• Discovery Channel
• AOL
• Sony
• NATO
• MTV UK
• BBC
• the Onion
• NASA
• Greenpeace UK
• New York Observer

There are books written about using Drupal too. You can read excerpts from books about Drupal at Google Book Search. Here are many examples of sites using Drupal, an even larger list of sites, and information about using Drupal in academia.

Comparing Drupal to Joomla

Here's two detailed comparisons of Joomla vs. Drupal from late 2007 (here's the second Joomla-Drupal comparison). Here are some quotes I found around the web:

"Drupal, [is for] web sites that are "highly dynamic" in nature, "community-driven," with lots of interaction. Whereas Joomla is for what he calls "brochure web sites", that are more static in nature (less dynamic)."

"Joomla provides a good first impression, which tends to wane as you dig deeper into the program. Drupal is just the oppsite. It provides a poor first impression ("initially left a bad taste in my mouth"), yet becomes more appealing the deeper you dig."

"1. Drupal is a 'developer's' CMS. You'll find that the Drupal community is packed full of php geeks, but you'll rarely find good designers. That's because Drupal offers incredible possibilities in terms of what you can do with modifying the code. Less designers involved means less beautiful themes...and as a designer, myself, I too find this frustrating. My solution has always been: just build your own themes.

2. Joomla is easier to use, involves less coding, and is more popular than Drupal. This means that coders don't flock to it...but designers do. This fact yields more beautiful stock themes because there's more designers working on the project, and it's a bigger market for them to work in. "

Comparing Drupal to Pligg

Here are few quotes from around the web that I found useful:

August 12th, 2007

Drupal has already modules to set up a social news /bookmarking plattform and it is great! We tested pligg but it was too buggy. No problems with Drupal.

April 18th, 2007

You can install Drupal (as a designer or non-programmer) and have a feature rich site in under an hour. Developing for Drupal takes me less time than fixing the issues in Pligg that managed to escape testing. I’ve been working with Drupal long enough now to jump into developing my own modules and features quickly.

The downside? Drupal requires learning, experience and clean PHP development. You don’t just install Drupal and start coding.

April 20th, 2007

Unfortunately, we soon found out how beta Pliggs code truly was and ended up having to almost completely rebuild the way pligg handled voting, searching, tag handling, URLs, live viewing, tag clouds, multimedia and stories. Some of these issues revolved around Pliggs inability to support usernames with spaces, something VBulletin allows. Our implementation authenticates using the VBulletin system so many functions that display the username had to be tweaked in order to allow for spaces.

It is of no fault of Pliggs and we would still recommend the software to anyone that simply wants to clone diggs features. In fact the crew over at pligg.com are constantly adding new feature sets and fixing bugs so I’m sure it is only a matter of time before they release a truly stable and semantic version.

Our biggest struggle was with Pligg and its instability. Running a few releases of the Pligg beta proved to be a large amount of work when it came time to update to a later revision. All of our code had to be migrated (in some cases line-by-line) because of the dramatic changes. In the end, old bugs were fixed but new bugs arrived that we had to handle.

What else can you do with Drupal?

At last count, there were almost 3,500 modules in over 30 categories.
One of my favorite modules is CiviMail, which provides advanced mailing list management. This is an example of how there is powerful free software you can only use when operating on a CRM platform such as Drupal--you can buy standalone software to do this, but there is nothing else as powerful that is free without using Drupal.

Beyond modules in categories you'd expect to find (at bottom) there are categories such as:

• Organic Groups
  
• Evaluation/rating
• Event
• Location
• Commerce / advertising
• Mail
• Media
• Syndication
• Community

.. and expected categories such as Developer, Import/export, Javascript Utilities, Paging, Administration, CCK, Content, Content display, Filters/editors, Multilingual, 3rd party integration, RDF, Search, Security, Taxonomy, Theme related, User access/authentication, User management, Utility, Views, e-Commerce, and File management.

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What is LinkedIn REALLY about?

Disclaimer: Other than being a user of LinkedIn's free services, I have no connection to LinkedIn. Update: The New York Times has a good article on the benefits of using networking sites.

Short answer: It's an online contact management address book, people finder and expert advice site designed to help you network to find work, clients or assistance. It's the biggest of its kind—over 18 million people use it. It’s very useful in the free version (which I use), but a large percentage of users also pay to extend the features from time to time.

Common Uses

LinkedIn is sometimes perceived as insurance against future job changes. It’s an aid to getting a new job quickly, or finding a new one while still at your present job. Stats show getting connected on LinkedIn (at least 21 connections) makes you over thirty-four times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity (than people with four or less LinkedIn connections). So a list of uses might include:

• Asking questions of experts (one of the best sites anywhere for this);
• Find old friends;
• Find jobs/give yourself insurance against future job changes;
• Get recommendations about you and your work;
• Get new clients;
• Check references, find people to hire or help out your contacts by recommending them.

There are many fun “small world” things that happen. For example, I forgot about a guy who highly recommended my work years ago. I found him again because his wife was one of my wife's dance students!

More places to learn about how to use LinkedIn:

• I'm on LinkedIn: Now what?
  
• Guy Kawasaki's 10 13 reasons to use LinkedIn.
• 20 Ways to Use LinkedIn Productively for Web Workers
  
• How to get most out of LinkedIn
  
• LinkedIn Intelligence
  

Protecting Your Privacy

LinkedIn gives you a lot of control. You can hide information about yourself, or only publish information you want friends of your friends to see. People who don’t know you through either a past job or a friend are prohibited from seeing your details unless they have searched for you specifically, and you have made your details publicly available. You can also choose whether to let Google show your LinkedIn page or not. And even if you make your profile more visible, you can always hide parts of it.

Even if someone wants to contact you, they would have to find you, request permission (from me or anyone you connect to), and in some cases pay a substantial fee (too high in the past to make sense for spammers) if they were outside your immediate network. You can let LinkedIn contact you with occasional reminders, or you can opt-out.

Even if you leave yourself logged into LinkedIn on a public computer somewhere, no one can access features that involve private information, because you have to login each time you access those features. (I wish other sites where that way!) Of course, on my home computer I let the browser automatically fill in my info to speed things up.

Ways to Take LinkedIn Further

• Join the LinkedIn Power Forum at Yahoo groups;
• Read and contribute at LinkedIn Answers;
• Stay up to date on strategies at LinkedIn Intelligence;
• Add the LinkedIn Outlook Toolbar (for users of Microsoft versions Outlook/Windows XP/2002 or higher);
• Read this LinkedIn article for tips.
  

Sample Advice for a NonProfit Seeking Funding

Someone asked how to use LinkedIn if you are a not-for-profit seeking funding.
There were tons of people who had contributed to topics in the Charity and Non-Profit section of LinkedIn answers. I learned, for example:

Osocio.org has with a good track record providing information and resources on promoting your non-profit on the web. A great boost to a giving campaign.

Givestream provides free online fundraising and community-building tools that help nonprofits create their own branded easy giving center. Calculate how much they can help you raise.

Doing some brief research on LinkedIn answers turned up some of the following tips:

• View the list of helpful LinkedIn Experts in this category;
  
• List people you are working with currently, and all email addresses you have for them. Search LinkedIn for them, and ask them to join your LinkedIn network using the links provided on their LinkedIn profile page.
• List people you would like to reach, search LinkedIn for them, and ask your connections to introduce you to them.
• Write up a question for your project and post it to LinkedIn
• Search for people who's current job description includes the word "Fundraising" and ask them for advice on using LinkedIn in your effort
• Create a membership dues program;
• Contact corporations about a matching donations program before seeking donations from individuals;
• Create teams of people to go out and visit your major donors and ask for multiple-year pledges;
• For whatever someone gives by mail, multiply by ten and that's the gift they're capable of, as a rough estimate, if you visit them. A $500 donor can give $5,000, $1,000 can give $10,000. You'll have to teach yourselves how to ask for larger gifts: I recommend a video from Board Source called, "Speaking of Money" as a way to start your training.

While this advice might not be specific to what you wish to use LinkedIn for, this should give you some idea. There were literally hundreds of answers that I didn't even look at relevant to this topic. LinkedIn is a terrific resource!

Read more!

Are you some kind of Twit(ter)? Who types what they're doing throughout the day?!

People are starting to have a lot of conversations on Twitter.  Of course, Twitter is like an insane asylum sometimes .. people call out, you answer, and then they disappear, babble randomly, or answer days later. You could call it it real-time microblogging.

The big question: Why? (Or, "Are you nuts?!")
Here's how Todd Mintz describes Twitter: to some friends at a large group event:

“Look around the room. We’re having a conversation…one of about 50 going on at this event.”

“Now imagine you had the ability to listen in on all 50 conversations simultaneously. Furthermore, you have the ability to participate in any of the 50 conversations that you find interesting. Beyond that, you have the ability to engage any person in the room in a new conversation about any topic you wish.”
“That is what Twitter is about. Twitter is conversation participation omniscience…it is taking the power of what I just described and doing it on a global scale. On Twitter, there are an infinite number of conversations going on that you can participate in. On Twitter, there are an infinite number of interesting people that you can engage in conversation. From Twitter, there are an infinite number of possibilities arising from these conversations.” 

And it's a way for anyone to talk to anyone. The internet is often viewed as breaking down the barriers between people, but Twitter achieves that in way well beyond what most other internet-enabled technologies have done.

And it takes only a really small amount of time: Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters each! Do yourself a favor and do a Google search on Twitter to read all the reasons different bloggers have for Twittering.

Read more!

Social bookmarking and personalized news are trying to create the future of the internet.

Update: This is pretty out of date in 2008! More of a historical look at some of the sites at this point.

When it's easy, and it works, users love it. We all follow, save and sometimes share links from around the web to interesting news, videos and other websites. If someone could find everything we want without our having to search for it, and put it on one page, we'd use that page.

This is what the social bookmarking and personalized news sites are trying to do for us. Does it work? It depends on how hard you work at it.

My take is that this is the future of of how a lot of people get their content, but it needs to be made simpler, while providing useful results sooner. See also:
The Social Bookmarking Faceoff
Social Bookmarking Showdown
Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking Resources

There are a lot of sites, and it seems more every month. Here's what I've found so far. While I welcome additions, I can't promise I can keep this up to date on a daily basis. Here's nearly 200 I've found so far:

180n
30daytags
Ambedo			Bookmark and tagging and search
ArticalTag			Social bookmarking service.
Ask Jeeves
Backflip			Bookmarking organized by folder system
BandBuzzer
Blabb.com			Bookmarketing and recomendation function.
Blinkbits
BlinkBits			Social bookmark and tagging site.
Blinklist			social bookmarking
BlinkList			Bookmarking; good import features.
Blodex
Blog Top Sites
Blogdigger
Bloghop
BlogLot
Blogmarks			Thumbshot bookmarketing service.
BlogMemes			Social bookmark and tagging site
BlogPulse
Blogs of the Day
Blogsearch.com			Sharing and syndicating bookmarks
Bloogz
Blue.us			Bookmark and tagging site.
BlueDot			social bookmarking
BlueOrganizer
Blummy			multiple bookmarklet tool
Bmaccess			Social bookmark and tagging site.
BookKit			Bookmark and tagging site.
Bookmarket.it			Social bookmark and tagging site.
Browsr			Social bookmark and tagging site.
Buddymarks			Bookmarking in directory format
ButterFly			Bookmarking with editing and annotation.
Buzznet
Chaamp			Social bookmark and tagging site.
CiteUlike			Bookmarking service for academics
ClipClip			Content clipping using tags.
Clipmarks			Bookmarking/web clipping with community.
Cloudalicious			del.icio.us cloud tag history for links/sites
cluebacca			social text clips sharing
Co.mments
CodeCubed
Common Times			social bookmarking for news
Complore			Bookmarking with blogging
Connectedy			Bookmarking with batch editing
Connotea			social bookmarking for researchers and clinicians
Daypop
de.lirio.us
del.icio.us			social bookmarking pioneer
digg
Diigo			social bookmarking with annotation
Dogear			Social bookmark and tagging site.
eSnips			Social bookmark and tagging site.
FaceBook			Share Bookmarklets now available
FanPop			Social bookmark and tagging site.
fantacular
Fark
FatRedFish
FeedButler			web-based feed reader; bookmarking
FeedMarker			rss aggregator and bookmarks manager
FeedMeLinks
Feedster
Filangy
Findory
Flickr			Online photo sharing and bookmarking
Flock			Social Web browser
Frassle
Fungow
Furl			social bookmarking
Gada
Gada.be			Social bookmark and tagging site.
Gataga
Gibeo.net
Give a Link
Goesby			Social bookmarking with RSS.
GoKoDo
GoobToob			Social bookmark and tagging site.
Google Notebook
goowy			Social bookmark and tagging, web-based mail, contacts, calendar, games etc
Gravee
GUIcookies			Drag and drop bookmark service.
Hanzo			social bookmarking and archiving
Hyperlinkomatic			Social bookmark and tagging site.
i89			Social bookmarking with RSS and tabbed interface.
Ice Rocket
Icio			Social bookmark and tagging site.
igooi			Bookmarklet service with RSS
iKeepBookmarks			Bookmarks with task bar.
IndiaGram			Social bookmarking service.
Indiahappening.com
IndiaMarks			Bookmarking with tag cloud.
Indiza
InspiredRepublic			Social bookmarking service.
Jeteye			social info sharing
Jots			Bookmark with ignore features.
Kaboodle			social info sharing
KB Cafe Tag Search
kinja
KopiKol			Social bookmarking service.
LifeSlot			Social bookmarking service.
Lilisto			Social bookmark and tagging site
Linkagogo
LinkaGoGo			Social bookmarking service.
LinkArena			Social bookmarks with folder system.
Linkatopia.com			Bookmarking with friend features.
linkfilter.net
LinkLog			Social bookmark and tagging site.
Linkroll
Listible			Bookmark site.
ListMixer			bookmarking that automatically expires in 30 days
LiveMarks			live del.icio.us additions
looklater			private bookmarking and archiving
Lookmarks			Bookmarks with podcast support.
LookThisUp			Bookmarks with gallery.
Magnolia			Bookmarks with discussion enabled
maple
Markboo
Memeorandum
Meme-Stream
MesFavs
MyHQ
MyLinkVault					social bookmarking
Mystickies					add sticky informational notes on web pages
MyVmarks
Netscape
netvouz
Network Menus
NewHots			chinese portal for rss, bookmarks
Newsvine
Newzingo
Nextaris			social bookmarking, networking, blogging
NowPublic
Oishii
OnlineFavorites			Social bookmarking service.
OnlyWire			simultaneous bookmarking tool
OpenBM
Philoi			Social bookmark and tagging site.
Pixat			Photo sharing and bookmarking.
PopUrls			Manage multiple social bookmark links.
PopDex
Portachi			Social bookmark and tagging site.
Quimble
Raw Sugar			Clustered bookmarking and search engine.
RecommendIt			social bookmarks recommendations
reddit			Social bookmark and tagging site
Riffs
RocketNews
Rojo
Rollyo
Scoopt
Scuttle			Social bookmarking service; open source
SearchFox
Segnalo			social bookmarking (italian)
Shadows			social bookmarking
Simpy			social bookmarking
Sitetagger
Slashdot
Smarking
Sphere
Spurl			social bookmarking with a meter
Squidoo
StumbleUpon			social bookmarking / web discovery tool
Taggle			German social bookmarking site.
Tagground			Social bookmark and tagging site.
TagHop			Social bookmark and tagging site.
Tagsy			social bookmarking (feed management to be added)
TagTooga			Social bookmark and tagging site.
Tailrank
TallStreet			Financial bookmarking site.
Target Your News
Technorati
thumblicio.us			screenshots of the most popular del.icio.us sites
Ticklr
ToRead			Email centered bookmark service.
Twitter
Unalog			Social bookmarking service
Webride
Wink
wists			social bookmarking; shopping
Yahoo! My Web 2.0			Social bookmarking service.
Yoono			social bookmarking software
Yummy.printfu
zurpy			Social bookmarking service

Read more!