Disruptive Conversations

Do you want to learn more about social media, online content creation, marketing, PR and so much more?  Do you want to meet people who are changing the online world?

If so, registration is now open for Podcamp Boston 5 taking place at Microsoft's New England R&D Center on the weekend of September 25-26, 2010.  It's hard to believe that it's been 5 years since Chris Brogan, Christopher Penn and company kicked off the Podcamp world in "Beantown"... but it has been that long... and in looking at the list of people already registered, this year's event should be outstanding!  You can register directly at:

http://pcb5.eventbrite.com/

or learn more about what will be going on at:

http://podcampboston.org/

I've attended and spoken at Podcamp's before, and they are well worth the time!  Great people, great information... it's all good!

P.S. My own schedule won't work for me to make the drive southwest due to some family and school events, but I'm looking forward to hearing all about it and seeing the news and posts coming out of the show.

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Are any of you out there using the iPad running into problems with leaving comments on blogs using the Disqus blog comment system?

This morning I browsed to Scott Monty's blog on my iPad and went to leave a comment on his "Picture This" post. (Great post, BTW!) I typed in my reply and then pressed the "Post as..." button... and... nothing:

Now, when I press that same button on my laptop, I see this window popup on the page:

allowing me to then choose the identity that I want to use to post the comment.

This popup does NOT appear for me when I'm using the iPad's browser to view Scott's blog.  I tried another blog that also used the Disqus system and had the same result.

Looking at the HTML source of the page, I'm guessing the issue may be the JavaScript script that Disqus is using to generate the comment form... but that's just a guess at this point.  It may also not be an issue with the Disqus system, per se, but more in the specific way that Scott's blog embeds the connection to Disqus. I don't know.  All I know is that when I had a comment to leave this morning, I couldn't do so.

Anyone else seeing this kind of issue using the iPad's browser with Disqus-powered blogs?

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Do you want an application that lets your customers interact with you via Twitter - but to do so via "self-service"? i.e. without a person having to help them? What if you wanted to make it so that people could RSVP for an event via Twitter and receive an automated acknowledgement?

That's exactly the type of app a colleague of mine wrote about in this recent post: Linking to Twitter using Javascript & Tropo Scripting. He shows how you can create an app like this using the Tropo.com cloud communications service and walks you through step-by-step what you need to do.

The appropriate automation and scaling of your Twitter usage is a topic near and dear to me... I've written about it myself over on the Tropo blog with topics like "creating a 'night service' for your Twitter account." (And yes, I do want to continue the series, since it's not really a "series" if I only wrote Part 1!) It's a topic I know I'll keep returning to.

Anyway, check out Justin's article... and Tropo accounts are free, so you can try it out yourself!

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Kudos to the team who put this together!

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Do you still shop in a bookstore?  Or do you buy your books online at sites like Amazon.com? Or have you ditched print books altogether and now read "e-books" on a reader like an iPad or a Kindle?

The New York Times is out today with a piece about the changes at Barnes & Noble and also about changing consumer trends in general that is worth a read.  Interesting stats on the changes in buying habits:

In the first five months of 2009, e-books made up 2.9 percent of trade book sales. In the same period in 2010, sales of e-books, which generally cost less than hardcover books, grew to 8.5 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers, spurred by sales of the Amazon Kindle and the new Apple iPad.

As an author, but also as simply a lover of reading and of books, I do wonder about where we re going. If I look at my own behavior, we have two large bookstores here in Keene, NH. One is a Borders branch and the other is a local Toadstool Bookshop. Both are great places to browse books... Borders has a coffee shop/cafe area and WiFi. Here's the thing, though:

I almost NEVER go there!

Part of it is that I don't find I have time in my daily life to just go and browse through books. Maybe I should make that time... but I don't... and I don't see it happening soon. The other reality is that as a cheap... er.. "frugal" Yankee, I just don't want to pay the higher prices of a bookstore when I can get the exact same book for less online, particularly once you get sucked into Amazon Prime and can get a book delivered so fast.

I've also bought more e-books this year than ever before, largely because I now own an iPad. I had purchased a few before for my iPhone or desktop, but the reading form factor wasn't that great. The iPad is great for reading... and again there's a price factor. I bought a bunch of O'Reilly books I'd wanted not too long ago when the ebook versions were only $5.

An interesting aspect of e-books (or are they "ebooks" or "eBooks"?) is the ease of receiving updates. Just today I received an email from O'Reilly that there is an updated version of one of the books I bought that has a number of corrections and fixes. Pretty much impossible to do with a printed book, particularly because they wouldn't know I had bought it. (More anonymity with print books... a subject for another blog post.)

Now, there are a host of reasons why I personally still like print books... "tree-ware"... I'm not yet cool with the idea of "cuddling up in bed" at the end of the night with my e-reader. And I just like the feel of a book in my hands. But I can see the day coming...

How about you? Do you go to bookstores anymore? Do you still buy books? Or have you shifted to e-books?

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When uploading a video today to Voxeo's YouTube channel, I noticed that videos can now be up to 15 minutes in length:

When did this happen?  You used to be limited to 10 minutes. Not that I'm complaining, mind you.  With my Emerging Tech Talk video podcast, I try to keep each episode to down around 5-7 minutes, but sometimes I've been in a really good interview and it's felt rushed at the end to keep it down under the 10-minute mark.

Also, with longer presentations from conferences and events, I've considered posting those to YouTube as segments, but with an hour-long talk that would have meant 6 ten-minute segments, which seemed too much for me. As a result, I've been posting those long videos to our voxeo.blip.tv channel. With a 15-minute limit, I could break those hour-long sessions into only 4 segments, which is much better to me.

Regardless of when that limit was changed, I'm just very happy that it was changed!

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As I got ready for my travel down to New York City this week for the SpeechTEK conference where I spoke and also helped staff Voxeo's booth, I reflected as I packed on all the extra steps I wind up going through when planning to be a "content creator" at the show.  I'm not there only to talk and show our new services... I'm also there to write blog posts, take and upload photos, record video interviews (and maybe audio interviews), to post tweets and respond to tweets, etc., etc.  For multimedia content creation, there's a bit of extra work and gear.

THE GEAR

My travel pack of choice these days is a Lowepro Fastpack 250. It fits the gear I need, but also has this great feature where you can unzip the side pocket and pull your DSLR out very quickly.  As you can see by the picture, I travel these days with a Nikon D90 for photos and a small JVC Everio MG-330 hard drive video recorder.  In truth, the D90 can also do video... but it's harder to hold for video than the JVC unit is.  Perhaps I'll eventually do more with it... but for the moment I carry both.  Both have power cords (or battery chargers), naturally.

I also carry a Blue Eyeball (which I reviewed) in case I want to do two-shot video recordings (using my MacBook Pro's camera and the Blue) for an interview.

Add to this, of course, the laptop, and these days the iPad as well... and it's a heavy pack.  I also naturally have my iPhone for photos and quick status updates and such as well.

THE ADDED STEPS

There are also a series of steps that all this gear adds to travel preparations:

1. Import and delete all the photos off the DSLR memory card (which in my case means importing them all into iPhoto on my Mac).

2. Import and delete all the movies off the video camera (import into iMovie for me).

3. Make sure the battery is fully charged on the DSLR.

4. Make sure the battery is fully charged on the video camera.

5. Make sure that I have all relevant cables needed to copy content off of the cameras and onto my laptop.

It's not a huge number of steps, but it does add up, particularly if I have a lot of photos or movies on the cameras.  Yes, with memory cards being so cheap I certainly could leave the photos on the DSLR, but I'm also paranoid about losing photos... so I want to make sure they are off the camera before I go traveling.

If you are a "content creator" for your organization, what do you bring when you travel?  What steps do you wind up adding to your travel preparations?

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For those of us working in social media circles, the name of Frank Eliason is certainly one we've heard. He's been the person behind @ComcastCares and has not only helped put Comcast on the map with using social media for customer service, but also clearly shown to larger businesses how social media can help.  These days he's got a whole team of people working there at Comcast and a sophisticated system in place tracking/monitoring and helping Comcast respond.  As a former Comcast subscriber when I lived up in Burlington, VT, a few years back, I can attest to the speed at which Comcast responded on Twitter.  I also met Frank at an Enterprise 2.0 conference a year or two back in Boston, and appreciated the thoughtfulness with which he spoke about what they've done there at Comcast.

Now, in a post two weeks ago on the Comcastvoices blog titled simply "Goodbye", Frank writes about the successes there at Comcast and how he is moving on. Subsequent articles as well as Frank's own tweets identified his destination as landing at financial services firm Citi to head up their social media efforts.

Yes, it's a loss for Comcast, but in his time there Frank has built up a great team and I'm sure they will only continue to grow and expand their efforts.  Now it will be interesting to see what Frank does over at Citi!

Congrats and best wishes, Frank!

P.S. Jason Falls had an interesting post "A New Chapter in Personal Brands" about Frank's move...

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I'll find out myself on Saturday evening. You see, I'm traveling back down to southern Connecticut where I grew up to attend my 25th high school reunion - and Facebook has added a fascinating dimension to the gathering.

RE-CONNECTING

A year or two back (it may even be more now), some people from my hometown created a Facebook Group for people who "grew up in the 70s and 80s" in our town. I joined that group and through that reconnected with a good number of folks that I literally hadn't communicated with in most of 2 decades. (Hmm... using "decades" makes me feel old!) Over time that communication has led to multiple phone calls, great email/message exchanges and even a couple of face-to-face meetings in different parts of the world.

Then maybe a year or so ago as the excellent organizer started planning this Saturday's reunion event, she set up a Facebook event, sent out Facebook messages and otherwise integrated Facebook into the outreach she was doing to find and alert class members. There were something like 300 people in my high school graduating class and obviously over 25 years we've drifted around the world.

The result has been that I've reconnected on Facebook with a good number of people who I can truly call "friends". I grew up from birth in the same town as did many of them... and we shared the same classes, teachers and community activities in our town of then around 25,000 people. We liked each other and hated each other and liked each other again... and all the other dynamics that happen in longstanding communities.

THE EFFECT

The fascinating part, to me, about the reconnection on Facebook is that - for the people on Facebook - I now go into the reunion already knowing many of the small details that you typically start out with... "what have you been doing for the past 25 years?"... is already partly or mostly answered. In many cases, I already know:

• where they are living now
• what people look like now (though not all have posted recent photos ;-)
• who is married, divorced, remarried, single, etc.
• who has kids and who doesn't
• if they have kids, how old the kids are, what they look like, what activities they are into
• what people do for a living now, and potentially what kind of career they have had
• what special highlights people have experienced (ex. books written, awards received...)
• what people like to do in their spare time
• who likes to place games on Facebook
• who has an active social life
• what music they like
• in some cases, their political or religious views

The interesting part is that this knowledge has come to me NOT from me going out and reading their individual profiles or anything focused like that... but rather just from the "ambient intimacy" of having their updates appear in my Facebook NewsFeed over the past year or two.

They, of course, also probably know way more than they ever needed or wanted to know about me, given my prolific online content creation, be it writing, video, audio, etc.

THE IMPACT?

Will this make the reunion better? worse? the same? I don't know... in some cases I know we'll be able to start out at a deeper level. In at least one case, I know now to avoid political discussions. :-) It will be interesting to see.

Another note is that a good number of people are not on Facebook and so, with them, the conversation does start back at that question: "so, what have you been doing for the past 25 years?" Does that create a disparity between the "strongly connected" set of people and those who are more weakly connected?

All interesting points to ponder as we consider the continued blurring of our lives and how Facebook and other online tools/services continue to change how we connect and communicate.

I'm pretty sure, though, that I won't be pondering any of that Saturday night... I'm just looking forward to an evening getting together with some old friends... :-)

What about you? Have you attended a reunion for a high school or college (or other group) after connecting on Facebook? How did it change (or not) the event for you?

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Lately I've been a wee bit frustrated by not writing as much as I have wanted to. As a writer, there's a bit of twisted dynamic that goes on inside your brain... it's almost like you MUST WRITE... or else you just feel, well... blah. I've been feeling that way a bit lately. With all the other responsibilities of life/work/etc, I haven't made enough time to write.

So as I went for my morning walk this morning I said to myself... "you know what, I'm going to write a post in ALL of my current blogs today." And then... so that I wouldn't back down, I posted that statement to my Facebook account. :-)

I knew it was going to be a crazy, busy work day as we're in the midst of preparing for a impending trade show, product launches, publicity campaigns, and everything else... but I said, "Perhaps I can squeeze some posts off during various moments of the day."

Turns out I was able to do it! Sure, not all of them were big or important posts... a few were longer and detailed... others were short posts or update - but hey, they were posts!

I also discovered in the process that what I think of as my "current" blogs consists of some 14 blogs (2 of which are actually podcasts). I hadn't actually counted for a while... so it was a useful exercise for that purpose. There's actually a few others where I could write, but I don't any more. In any event, it's actually quite a lot of area across which to spread my writing.

I'll have to do this again sometime... it was actually kind of fun.

To prove my statement, here's the list:

Personal Blogs

Disruptive Telephony (link)

• LifeHacker: How to Downgrade Your iPhone 3G From iOS 4.0 to iOS 3.1.3
• Joining the Voxeo presence at SpeechTEK in NYC, August 2-4

Disruptive Conversations (link)

• One Day of Content Creation... 16 posts across 13 blogs (this post)
• Frustations with TypePad: Hideous trackback URLs - and inability to easily link between sites
• The Skype/Fring dustup and the importance of quick blog - and comment - response

DanYork.com (link)

• Speaking on UC Security at SpeechTEK in NYC, Aug 2-4

Seven Deadliest Unified Communications Attacks (link)

• Another great Amazon review of 7 Deadliest UC Attacks...

Advogato (link)

• Entry for July 15 (about Tropo)

Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast (link)

• Dan's new book: Seven Deadliest Unified Communications Attacks

Voxeo Blogs

Voxeo Talks (link)

• Slides: Voxeo's Unique Business Culture

Speaking of Standards (link)

• Two new SIP-related IETF Working Groups: LSD and SALUD

Voxeo Developers Corner (link)

• Want to learn VoiceXML? Visit www.vxml.org

Unified Self-Service (link)

• Free Webinar coming up July 22: Providing Self-Service Through SMS Applications

The Tropo Blog (link)

• Are you on Facebook? If so, you can join the Tropo conversation there...

Behind The Blog (link)

• Suggestion for a WordPress plugin to publish posts to a Facebook Page?

VOIPSA Blog

Voice of VoIPSA

• Unified Communications Security Presentation at SpeechTEK NY, Aug 2nd

Current blogs I did NOT update

Emerging Tech Talk

Wellllll, this is actually a video podcast, so maybe I can escape on a technicality... but the truth is that I have the next episode queued up to be released with an impending announcement - and I have to wait for that. Putting up a show today would have meant either: 1) posting a show with an out-of-order sequence number; or 2) posting a show with the next number and then pulling down the queued show and re-rendering and re-uploading with a new show number. The amount of work with #2 didn't seem worth it and #1 is too strange for me.

dyork.livejournal.com

As of today I am going to stop thinking of this as a "current blog". The reality is that I don't write there any more and I want to leave the current post there at the top so that people who do find the site know how to get to where I am currently writing.

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