Disruptive Conversations

From Chris Brogan today, I learned of this video which I very much enjoyed:

Per adfreak, the video was a "Gold" winner at the Cannes Lions event.

The question is - how many of you had absolutely no idea why I would reference this video until the very end?  At which point you then went back and watched it again?  :-)

It was a bit surprising to be flipping through our local paper, the Burlington Free Press, this morning and stumble upon an article about SecondLife called "Vermont eyes virtual world".  Not entirely sure why, to be honest, except that perhaps a Free Press writer just thought it was cool to write about... and given that IBM is a large employer in these parts, things that IBM is interested in are potentially interesting to area residents.

As noted, the Vermont tourism department doesn't have it in their plans yet, but is interested.  The article quotes Vermont's deputy commissioner of tourism and marketing, Steve Cook, and says this:

Cook envisions a virtual Vermont that includes rolling green hills, meandering wildlife, a portion of the Long Trail, the gold-domed capitol, the Bennington battle monument and aspects of downtown Burlington and the city's waterfront. An address in Second Life would give the state an opportunity to lure tourists by creating a spot for avatars from around the world to gather, socialize and experience virtually what Vermont has to offer.

If he's going to go that far, he should probably include a virtual ski mountain, too, since that is so much of what we have here most years.  They should also have a sugar shack... maybe you could help tap some maple trees and then connect the pieces to get syrup processing going. I do like the idea of "meandering wildlife"... if it were to actually be done it could be quite entertaining.

We've also got the "V" thing going... I mean... "Virtual Vermont" or "Virtual Vermont Valleys"... :-)

It would be interesting to see if the other places that already have a virtual presence to encourage tourism are actually seeing any positive results they can measure.  Are people visiting their area/region as a result of having seen it in Second Life?  (Not sure exactly how you track that unless you provided some way in-world to sign up for travel or had a code to use with agencies.)  Some day in all my copious free time (!) perhaps I'll investigate...

You have to know that the "Facebook Platform" is being successful when there turns out to be an entire web site dedicated to reviews of Facebook applications!  Yes, indeed, courtesy of the previously mentioned Reuters article, I learned today about FaceReviews.com run by a gent named Rodney Rumford.  (Yes, okay, so I missed it when it appeared on Digg back in mid-June. Hey, I was on vacation!) In looking through the site, I learned of a number of apps I hadn't yet seen (like this one remarkably from LinkedIn or this one from c|net).  I do like the way he is providing a "rating" of apps - if you are going to do reviews, a rating is a good thing to have in my opinion.

In any event, it's good to see a site like this and I'll be adding it to the list of "social media apps" sites I watch.

Reuters today came out with a lengthy article, "PluggedIn: Facebook lets friends share private view of Web", that will undoubtedly only continue to fan the flames of Facebook growth.  That growth, in fact, was apparently 1 million new Facebook users in the last week and 5 million in the last 6 weeks.  All in all, not a bad growth curve!  The article starts with the requisite quotes that people need a "Facebook strategy" and other such statements typical of recent Facebook articles.  It also weighs in on the privacy issue:

"Facebook is inherently not open the way the Web is open. Users share all kinds of information on the site they would never share on the Web," (Facebook CTO Adam) D'Angelo, 22, says. "We get users to divulge more information because we protect users' privacy."

Let's just pause there and take a look at that first sentence again:

Facebook is inherently not open the way the Web is open.

Therein lies my fundamental problem.  Don't get me wrong: I am a Facebook user.  I am logged into the site pretty much every day.  I'm also a huge privacy advocate who wants control over what information I expose to whom.  So on one level, I do applaud what they are doing.  I'm also a huge fan of open APIs and platforms... so I like what they've been doing with their "Platform".  But I still go back to my feeling that, as I wrote about previously, we're returning into a world of walled gardens.  To read messages, I have to be logged in to Facebook.  To use the apps, I have to be logged into Facebook.  Facebook has to really be my "portal" to the Internet.  Now, obviously that is good for Facebook... but it worries me to have one site become the lens through which so many people view the Internet.  (Obviously, similar statements though could be said about MySpace or even iGoogle or Yahoo...)

In any event, the Reuters article will no doubt expose even more people to Facebook and generate more interest.  I did enjoy page 3 where they talked about the sudden success application developers have had.  It will indeed be interesting to see where Facebook evolves.

I just have to post my congratulations to Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson for landing a sponsorship of FIR by Lawrence Ragan Communications!  As noted in their blog post and also in their social media news release, this is a long-term relationship that will both promote Ragan to FIR listeners and also promote FIR to the many Ragan customers.  (Shel and Neville also discuss this in today's FIR #255.)  As a weekly correspondent into FIR, I'm excited for Shel and Neville that they have both the financial backing and also the wider exposure within the communications industry.  I think it will only be a positive thing for the show and its listeners!  Congrats, Shel and Neville!

Twitter has been labeled many things... but I don't know that I've yet seen anyone talking about it as an outlet for fiction.  However, Scott Sigler is now experimenting with it as exactly that.  This came about because last Friday (iPhone Day, in case you have somehow forgotten), Scott started a series of tweets (first one here) that escalated into what was called the "iPhone War".  In a series of what looked like posts from an embedded war reporter (albeit one in a dumpster), he rapidly had Canada, Mexico and Russia invading the US to get all of our iPhones, the USA being wiped out and the ultimate collapse of civilization.   (Unfortunately with Twitter in order to see them you'll need to go back in Scott's Twitter page to see the posts - you also can get a taste by clicking the graphic on the right to see a larger version and some of the text.)  It was an entertaining diversion to read. (Hat tip to the tweet from C.C. Chapman that clued me in to it.)

C.C. implied that the "iPhone War" storyline was picked up by other Twitterers, i.e. they joined in, but I didn't see those tweets and unfortunately I don't know of an easy way to pull that all together.

Scott Sigler is now continuing his experiment with another short story that he put up back on July 2nd.  Not quite as personally compelling to me as the "iPhone War", but an interesting experiment nonetheless.   Fun to see people trying to use new tools in old ways (telling stories).

Right at the end of May, Microsoft released a Beta 2 of Windows Live Writer and ever since then it's been in my queue to write about, given that it is now the offline editor I use for almost all my blogging. However, I think I'll give up on writing the massive comprehensive review I was intending to do and instead write a series of smaller posts about various aspects of the program.

So first up, I thought I'd mention the new capability to easily link to previous posts.  When you choose "Insert-> Hyperlink..." (or simply "Ctrl+K", which brings back old WordStar memories) you get the dialog box shown on the left (click for larger image) that allows you to enter the URL to link to and potentially edit the link text.  The cool part, though, is the "Link to" dropdown button which has as one of the two choices "Previous Posts".  If you choose that, you then see the dialog box shown on the right (click for larger image).

In this window you see the recent posts you have made across all the blogs for which you use Windows Live Writer.  You can simply click on one of them and the link is automagically inserted for you.  Alternatively you can click on a blog title to see the posts to that specific blog. (The posts are retrieved from the blog itself so it does not matter whether they were written using WLW or through your blog web interface.)  If you want to go back in time, you don't have an option to go back to a specific date (which my previous editor, Semagic, did) but you can see the last n posts, where n is 10, 15, 20, 25, 50, 100 or 500 and so you can scroll back that way.

All in all it's pretty slick and has saved me already a great amount of time in linking to previous entries.  Given that I blog across multiple weblogs, the ability to link to entries in other blogs is definitely a great timesaver.  (Note that you need to have setup all the weblogs within WLW, which I have done for mine.)

If you haven't checked it out (and are on Windows), do go to the Windows Live Writer Zone and download a copy. I think you might be impressed as to how well it can help you blog faster.

Question for you all - what do you use to incorporate screen captures into your blog entries?

For a variety of reason, I like to incorporate images into my posts.  Sometimes it is just the logo of the company/product/service that I am discussing[1].  Sometimes it is a part of a web page or program screen (here's an example).  In any event, my highly unsophisticated process of getting those graphics right now on my Windows XP PC is to do the following:

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+PrntScrn to copy the current open window to the Clipboard.
2. Switch to Windows Paint and paste the image into the window.
3. Click on one of the other tools (like the eraser) so that I de-select the entire area and then click on the selection box again.
4. Select the region I want to copy and then do the standard copy to Clipboard.
5. Switch to Windows Live Writer (my current blogging editor of choice) and paste the graphic into my blog entry.

Like I said... not very sophisticated, but it works well.  However, I'd like to simplify it a bit - ideally drop it down to simply my steps #4 and #5, i.e. select a region of the screen and then paste it into WLW. 

Unfortunately, there doesn't yet seem to be a WLW plugin that does what I want, although this plugin seems quite close if I feel like dropping $39 for TechSmith's SnagIt program (and perhaps I will).  It sounds like Vista has a built-in utility for doing this, but I don't have Vista and don't foresee getting it for some time.

What do you all use?  How do you bring in screen captures?  logos?  etc.?  [2]

Thanks in advance.

[1] And sometimes a logo can be brought in by simply right-clicking it in Firefox, choosing "Copy Image" and pasting it into my blog editor.  But sometimes the colors don't work and sometimes a site doesn't make a logo easy to get this way - the logo is part of a much larger image or embedded in Flash... so you need to capture that part of the screen to get the logo.

[2] And Mac users, please don't bother telling me that this is: a) trivial and built-in on the Mac; or b) I should get a Mac and run Parallels to use Windows and again would be able to do it.  I get it, okay... I understand the belief that Macs are superior for graphics.  But that doesn't help change the fact that my corporate laptop is a Windows XP box!

I've decided to reverse my earlier decision and turn OFF comment moderation on this blog.  Today I suddenly realized that I shouldn't have been ignoring those TypePad emails and I in fact had 4 unpublished comments in the queue.  Oops.    Sorry about that, folks.  I am going to try returning to using CAPTCHAs... it's working fine on my other blogs so I'm not sure why it wasn't working here.  Anyway, comments are now NOT moderated - please do email me if you experience any problems leaving comments.  And yes, eventually I will get rid of the problem where the preview and CAPTCHA appear in a small middle column - I just need to find the time to move to the native 3-column layout of TypePad and then do my further customizations on top of that.... some day...

It would seem that those of us who use Feedburner are seeing an early payoff of the acquisition by Google - per the Feedburner blog announcement today:

Beginning today, two of FeedBurner's previously for-pay services, TotalStats and MyBrand, will be free. Not in the sense of soaring high above the clouds or recently sprung from the hoosegow, but free like you'll no longer gladly be billed on Tuesday for a burned feed today.

Very cool to see!  I've already activated what is now called "Feedburner Stats PRO" on my main feeds and am looking forward to seeing what other stats I wind up getting.

I'm also VERY pleased to see the "MyBrand" service being made free.  One of my biggest concerns about using Feedburner all along is that people subscribe to the RSS feed at Feedburner's site.  They are essentially all now Feedburner's customers (well, now Google's!).  If for some reasone I ever want to move my feed to some other site, or to host it myself, I basically lose all those folks who have subscribed to the feed via Feedburner.  I have to somehow get them to re-subscribe to my new RSS feed.  The beauty of "MyBrand" is that instead of having an RSS feed set up as:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DisruptiveConversations

I can instead have the feed appear off of my own domain name like this:

http://feeds.disruptiveconversations.com/DisruptiveConversations

While this URL does look a bit repetitive, the point is that should I need to move the RSS feed elsewhere - or should Google someday shut down Feedburner (which I can't see happening) - the feed URL is under MY control!  I might need to do a web redirect to point "/DisruptiveConversations" to some file like "/rss.xml" but that is something that I can do on my server or service provider.  I'm no longer locked into Feedburner's service and systems.

Now, I have no reason whatsoever to leave Feedburner.  I'm a very happy user who is not paying a dime and enjoying the stats and all the other many capabilities that Feedburner offers.  But that's today... and who is to say that sometime in the future I might want to move my feed to somewhere else?  The MyBrand service gives me this flexibility and "insurance".  Sometime in the next few weeks I'll make the time to make this transition for all of my feeds.

Thanks, Feedburner team, for making both of these services available to all of your users!