Kristin Burnham, CIO
Improving on its Twitter integration feature that it announced last November, LinkedIn has unveiled several updates that make it easier to find and keep track of your LinkedIn connections on both LinkedIn and Twitter.
This newly added feature was one of LinkedIn’s most common requests from users, says, Adam Nash, vice president of search and platform products at LinkedIn.
Here’s what you need to know about the application and how to install it.
How to Install the Tweets Application
Log into your LinkedIn account and choose “More…” from the LinkedIn navigation bar. Click “Application Directory” and search for the “Tweets” application. Click “Add application.”
For more information on LinkedIn Apps, read “5 Must-Have LinkedIn Apps: Pump Up Your Profile.”
When the application is downloaded, you’ll be brought to your Tweets Overview page. (To access this page at any other time, click “More…” from the navigation bar and choose “Tweets.”)
Maneuvering the New Tweets Application
The “Overview” tab displays tweets from the accounts you follow. You can also view a feed based on the Twitter lists you’ve compiled. You can update your Twitter status from this page, and choose to share it with your LinkedIn connections.
[Want more LinkedIn tips and tricks? Check out a collection of articles here.]
The “Connections” tab displays your LinkedIn connections who have added their Twitter user names to their profiles.
From this tab, you can sort your connections by those you’re following or by those you’re not following. You also have the option to create a new, private Twitter list exclusively for your LinkedIn connections who have added their Twitter accounts to their profiles. This list won’t be visible to anyone else.
Reviewing Your Privacy Settings
When you add the Tweets application to your LinkedIn account, be sure to review your privacy settings. The Settings tab in the Tweets application outlines your privacy settings. You can choose to display all of your tweets on your LinkedIn profile, or choose to display only the tweets that you have assigned with the #in tag.
Next, review your Twitter settings by clicking on the link at the bottom of the page. Here, you can add or remove Twitter accounts, determine whether or not you want your Twitter account displayed on your LinkedIn profile and decide if you want to share all your tweets in your LinkedIn status, or only those with the #in tag.
Staff Writer Kristin Burnham covers consumer Web and social technologies for CIO.com. She writes frequently on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. You can follow her on Twitter: @kmburnham.
Posted in Social Media Tips by .
May 10
28
Climbing the B2B Social Media Ladder
By Brian R. Hook
E-Commerce Times
05/27/10 5:00 AM PT
All businesses will eventually need some sort of social media presence to survive and thrive, said Jenny DeVaugh, director of social strategy at Bernard Hodes Group. “We measure and monitor the analytics of our efforts in order to enhance our marketing,” she said, assessing ROI by gauging awareness, engagement and conversion.
Social media strategies are not just for consumer-focused companies anymore. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and their ilk are finding their way into business-to-business firms. Solid waste service provider Waste Management, for example, has set up a Web 2.0 shop.
Interactivity is key, and social media are being used at Waste Management for educational and engagement purposes, said Lynn Brown, vice president of corporate communications.
“It is about being a part of a two-way conversation,” she told the E-Commerce Times. “People are talking about your company whether you know it or not.”
Through a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account, Waste Management is joining that conversation, Brown said. “I have found that everyone is interested in the environment, so we are growing our network.”
Building Brand Recognition
Facebook boasts more than 400 million users. Twitter claims more than 75 million users are now sending more than 50 million tweets a day. And LinkedIn reports 60 million users are networking on its platform. With these kinds of numbers, businesses are trying to find new ways to use social media to build brand recognition.
“We have found significant value in social media sites,” said Larry Caretsky, president of Commence, which provides customer 
relationship management software to small-to-medium-sized businesses. The company frequently utilizes social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to promote and present research and video focused on how customers can build business with Commence products and services.
Social media can be useful tools for lead generation and contacting executives responsible for purchasing, Caretsky told the E-Commerce Times.
“We have had inquiries and closed new business from contacts we have made on Twitter and LinkedIn,” he said, adding that it is getting harder to get in touch with key exectutives by phone and email.
E-commerce payments company eBillme uses social media tools “to engage consumers, prospects and partners, and to create brand awareness,” said Samer Forzley, vice president of marketing.
eBillme uses social media to promote deals on its website and to announce weekly prizes, for example.
“Facebook and Twitter have been integrated as part of our overall marketing strategy,” Forzley told the E-Commerce Times. “We integrate these platforms as part of our website and blog , as well as being active participants.”
Choosing Social Media Tools
All businesses could benefit from social media, said Kevin Hegebarth, vice president of marketing at GMT, which provides workforce management services. Businesses need to pick the types of social media tools used by their typical buyers, however. GMT therefore does not have a Facebook or Myspace presence.
“The buyers of our technology rarely use those channels to identify potential vendors,” Hegebarth told the E-Commerce Times. Instead, GMT uses Twitter to promote brand awareness and LinkedIn to monitor forums relevant to the markets it serves in order to identify prospective customers.
“We have been successful in securing at least one customer as a direct result of a LinkedIn introduction,” said Hegebarth.
Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter aren’t the only social media outlets that can be useful for a business, noted Shel Horowitz, co-author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, who also uses Plaxo, Ning, MySpace and Ryze.
“This expands my network a great deal when I have something to tell people,” Horowitz told the E-Commerce Times, noting that she now gets more comments on the Facebook version of her blog, which is published simultaneously with identical content.
Using LinkedIn helped Horowitz to land a spot as an international speaker after an organizer posted a call for speakers for a conference in Davos, Switzerland. Twitter, meanwhile, helped her land a spot at a marketing conference in the U.S.
Return on Investment
All businesses will eventually need some sort of social media presence to survive and thrive, said Jenny DeVaugh, director of social strategy at Bernard Hodes Group. Devaugh trains companies on how to use social media tools for recruiting employees.
“We measure and monitor the analytics of our efforts in order to enhance our marketing,” DeVaugh told the E-Commerce Times, adding there are three ways to measure social media return on investment: awareness, engagement and conversion.
Awareness is the attention that the company’s social media presence attracts, including the number of followers, fans and traffic. Engagement refers to the interactions that a firm’s brand has with its audience — such as comments, retweets and searches. And conversions are highly sought-after results, such as an employee referring a candidate.
ROI varies by client needs, expectations and business objectives, said Ana Cano, senior vice president and director of digital and social media at Euro RSCG Worldwide PR. For a company that might not have been active with social media, measurements might include website impressions or a percentage increase in Twitter followers.
“The standardization of measurement is very much a work in progress for the entire industry and one we’ll continue to watch as it develops and formalizes in the coming months — and perhaps years,” Cano told the E-Commerce Times.
It is important to improve ROI measurement, said Larry Weintraub, chief executive officer of Fanscape, a social media marketing firm.
“We can sit here and say social media is difficult to measure and shouldn’t be held to the same standards as advertising,” he told the E-Commerce Times, “but that’s not good enough. We have to get better at measuring. The tools are there, and better ones are being created every day.”
It’s not just measuring social media ROI that’s getting better — social media tools themselves are improving for businesses, Weintraub said. “The opportunities for business owners to connect with their customers and ultimately drive more sales [are] tremendous. There are new technologies being created every day that will make this easier and cheaper.”
Posted in Social Media Tips by .
By T. MICHAEL TESTI
BLOGCRITICS.ORG
The goal of Smashing WordPress: Beyond The Blog is to present the core concepts that will let you utilize the power of the WordPress platform while providing you with creative spark to help you build just about any site imaginable. This book is 322 pages divided into 15 chapters and five parts.
The WordPress Essentials
Chapter One, “Anatomy of a WordPress Install,” dives into how to properly install and set up your WordPress system. Topics cover database setup, security, backing up, and even how to switch from one host to another.
Chapter Two, “The WordPress Syntax,” examines how WordPress, written in the PHP language, is built on themes which consist of template files that contain tags. You will get very familiar with all of these concepts in this chapter.
Chapter Three, “The Loop,” is a snippet of PHP code that is at the heart of WordPress. While it may feel tricky to work with at first, if you want to become an expert WordPress developer, learning the loop will put you in control.
Designing and Developing WordPress Themes
Chapter Four, “The WordPress Theme Essentials,” begins the building process part of this book. This chapter gets you started with working with themes so that you will see how they work and learn how to alter them to fit your needs.
Chapter Five, “The Child Theme Concept,” gives you the ability to build upon a theme without actually altering the theme. These child themes contain mostly visual enhancements so that you can update the core theme without breaking anything.
Chapter Six, “Advanced Theme Usage,” shows you how to take themes to the next level. Topics in this chapter include individual styling techniques, working with hooks, using taxonomies, multiple language support, and SEO implementations
Developing WordPress Plugins
Chapter Seven, “Anatomy of a WordPress Plugin,” examines what a plugin is and how they work in WordPress. A plugin is basically a way for you to add whatever feature that you want to WordPress.
Chapter Eight, “Plugins and Functions.php,” looks at how the use of the function.php file can create situations where a plugin causes a problem if used without caution. Here you will see how best to avoid these potential problems.
Beyond the Blog
Chapter Nine, “WordPress as a CMS,” describes how to use WordPress more as a content management system than a traditional blog. While it may feel different to do this, it is a perfectly appropriate solution, and this chapter examines what you can do to make this run smoothly.
Chapter 10, “Uncommon WordPress Usage,” takes what can be done with WordPress beyond even the CMS and looks at what else it can be used for. Topics include a job board, a knowledge base, e-commerce, a portfolio site, and more.
Chapter 11, “Essential WordPress Plugins,” only covers a small amount of all of the WordPress Plugins that are available, but even this is a lot. These include Plugins for handing content, media, Administrative, comment management, social networking, search engine optimization, and more.
WordPress Toolbox
Chapter 12, “Design Trickery,” is about making your theme more interesting. In this chapter you will work with JavaScript, customizing the login form, improving the menu system, and placing ads into the loop.
Chapter 13, “Extra Functionality,” will examine some of the functionality you may consider adding to a site. These include adding tabbed boxes, displaying RSS feeds, sending email, adding a login form, and adding print capabilities.
Chapter 14, “Fun with Images,” is about showing how to display images in a WordPress site in a way that goes beyond the traditional display. This is more about galleries, image presentation, and photo-sharing in a way that makes sense.
Chapter 15, “Integrating the Social Web,” now looks at how you can display your entries to your favorite social network outlets. Here you will see how to show off your Twitter, work with Lifestream, add social web submit buttons to your site, and pimp your comments.
Smashing WordPress: Beyond The Blog is geared for the developer who has a good understanding of PHP, HTML, and CSS. There is not a lot of time introducing language elements and you pretty much hit the ground running. You should also be somewhat familiar with the fundamentals of WordPress as well. This is not an introductory book on how to use WordPress; it is a more advanced book on developing your site to be unique through creating themes and plugins for WordPress.
That said, if you want to learn to design themes and plugins, this is a phenomenal book. Smashing WordPress gets down and dirty in to the bowels of the system and shows you how everything works. It is written in an easy-to-understand, not too technical form that will allow you to absorb everything you read.
I like the fact that Smashing WordPress takes you into the core functionalities of WordPress, provides information about creating themes and plugins, and also shows what else that this framework can do beyond the blog. If you are a mid to upper level developer and you want really learn WordPress, then I very highly recommend this book.
Posted in Social Media News by .
MASHABLE
May 10, 2010 by Brian Casel
ThemeJam WordPress Themes and CasJam Media. You can follow Brian on his blog at briancasel.com or on Twitter @CasJam.
WordPress has long been known as a dedicated blogging platform, giving users the tools they need to publish their message and interact with readers. However, with the official release of version 3.0, set to drop this month, the platform will be much closer, if not well within the territory of a content management system (CMS).
The list of new features in WordPress 3.0 isn’t very long in comparison to previous releases. However, the changes that are coming will certainly have a significant impact, particularly if you use WordPress as a CMS. Here is a rundown of the most important new features arriving in version 3.0.
Let us know in the comments which features of WordPress 3.0 you are most looking forward to.
1. Custom Post Types
By default, WordPress lets you publish two types of content: “Posts” and “Pages.” In version 3.0, you can define additional content types with their own attributes. For example, if you’re running a WordPress site for a design agency, you might create a custom post type to display portfolio items, another for employee pages, and another for client testimonials. From there, you can customize your theme to better suit each individual post type.
You might even want to turn your WordPress site into something more like Tumblr. This will be easy to do in WordPress 3.0 simply by creating custom post types for Text, Photo, Quote, Link, Chat, Audio, and Video.
Thanks to custom post types, there are many new possibilities for how you use WordPress to publish any sort of content.
2. Menu Management
Menu management is one of the most exciting and talked about features in WordPress 3.0. This feature gives you full control over your site’s navigation menus. With an easy drag and drop interface, users can create menus that include any mixture of links to internal pages, external URLs, categories, you name it. Then you can embed these custom menus as a widget wherever your theme allows.
So let’s say you’re running a site which has several informational pages, plus a blog, featured video posts, and you also want to promote your social media presence. You can customize your main navigation to look something like this:
- HOME
- BLOG (links to the main blog page)
- VIDEOS (links to the video category, or post type)
- INFO PAGE
- INFO PAGE
- SUB INFO PAGE
- TWITTER (links to your Twitter profile)
- FACEBOOK (links to your Facebook Fan Page)
Changing the order, titles, and destination of these links is a piece of cake with menu management in WordPress 3.0.
3. Custom Taxonomies
While this new feature may seem a bit complex to non-developers, it certainly brings WordPress 3.0 closer to a true CMS. Custom taxonomies allow you to create additional pieces of meta information. By default, there are “Categories” and “Tags.” Now we can add additional types, with the option of being hierarchical or not.
So what does this mean exactly? Here are some examples of what you can do with custom taxonomies:
Let’s say you’re a film fanatic and you use your WordPress blog to post reviews and rate new movies. You can create a custom taxonomy for “Rating,” then add R, PG-13, PG, G to every review.
Another example would be real estate listing websites. In addition to photos and descriptions, you might use additional taxonomies to provide a list of specs on each property such as asking price, number of bedrooms, year built, etc.
4. New Default Theme: “Twentyten”
Twentyten is the long-overdue default theme packaged with new installations of WordPress 3.0. It features a clean, yet bold design and introduces some nice functionality not found in many themes. Two features built into Twentyten are particularly useful if you’re new to WordPress and don’t have the coding skills to customize your theme. They are:
Custom Header Image
The Twentyten theme gives you the ability to easily change your site’s header image. Packaged with the theme are eight interesting banner images to choose from. You can also upload your own image. This feature isn’t limited to the Twentyten theme. It can be activated and included by theme developers as well.
Custom Background Image
Another nifty feature found in Twentyten is the ability to upload your own background image for your site. You can also set a solid background color if you want. While this is likely an easy thing to tweak even for those with only light knowledge of web development, it’s certainly useful for those who don’t want to get their hands dirty and edit CSS. Again, custom background functionality can be included in other themes as well if activated by the theme developer.
5. Multi-site
You can’t discuss WordPress 3.0 without mentioning the new multi-site capabilities. That is, you can manage several different websites (with different domains and/or sub-domains) all with a single installation of WordPress. What was previously known as WordPress MU (Multi-User) is now merged with the core WordPress system in 3.0. Enabling multi-site capabilities likely isn’t something for the average user, as it requires some tinkering with the code and configuring server settings. That said, the average user likely isn’t interested in having multi-site capabilities.
So who benefits from running a multi-site installation of WordPress? It’s perfect if you’re running a blog network, or manage a large news organization with many different departments. Perhaps your business has each employee running their own blog with a unique design or even their own domain. These are situations where multi-site functionality can be useful.
What Else?
Here are a few of the minor feature enhancements arriving in WordPress 3.0:
Get Shortlink (with your own domain)
We all know how useful URL shorteners can be, especially for tweeting links. WordPress 2.9 gave you the ability to use the wp.me URL shortener. WordPress 3.0 takes this feature a step further by allowing you to get a shortlink for your post based on your own domain name. For example: http://mashable.com/?post=7127. You don’t need to mask your URL with other services like bit.ly. Now you can keep your branding intact when you tweet your links.
Author Templates
New in 3.0 is the ability to create unique author templates. This is great if you’re running a multi-author blog and you’d like to apply unique styles or layouts to individual author pages.
Select Username and Password During Installation
Before WordPress 3.0, new installations automatically set your master account to username “admin” with an auto-generated password. Now, you can define these during installation, saving you the hassle of changing them later. It also adds a new layer of security. WordPress sites have been known to be compromised simply because they use the most common username, “admin.”
Get the entire list of new features and changes at the official WordPress Codex page for 3.0.
Posted in Social Media News by .
MASHABLE by Suaad Sait
Suaad Sait is co-founder of Workstreamer, a business listening platform that delivers actionable, real-time information to business professionals.
As businesspeople, we now have an unlimited amount of constantly updating information at our fingertips. It holds the promise of great value (and more importantly, profit), but it is also voluminous and fleeting. Powerful new search engines, newfangled social CRM systems, and a preponderance of social sites and services leave us sitting at desks, feverishly fetching news and updates throughout the day in an attempt to stay up-to-date.
The trick, of course, is making sense of all that data, and putting it in context of what companies — and who exactly at those companies — matter most. Increasingly, we have the palpable desire to turn good data into good decisions and profitable relationships. But how can you take advantage of that tsunami of information without risking death by data? How can everyday businesspeople get value out of these data-heavy services and sources?
Relationships Still Rule
The answer to these questions starts by first acknowledging that it’s the same as it ever was: Business is still all about relationships. This should be soothing to many for whom the data web is a brave new world.
The business world still runs on relationships, and data is as much at home at a cocktail hour or on a conference call as it is in a slide deck. The game has not changed much at all. The difference is that today’s business data has put everything in stark relief, at very high resolution. Opportunities and risks have been amplified.
For example, if I notice a partner’s company’s stock surge at the opening of the market and tie it to a news item on quarterly earnings, I can now send a timely congratulatory note and schedule a follow-up meeting to discuss leveraging that momentum for a proposed joint venture.
Or, say I am alerted to an old college friend changing his contact info on a social network, and as a result, track down a few details on his role at a new company. I might subsequently notice via a status update that he is departing for my home city in a few days, and now I can initiate a reconnection and invite him to participate on a panel I’m organizing.
Today’s most actionable business data comes from living and very human sources like social networks, wikis, microblogs, crowdsourced contact directories, collaboratively filtered finance communities, real-time search engines, hyperlocal news sites and more. Managing that data can involve a lot of mixing and matching, comparing and contrasting.
Posted in Social Media Tips by .
May 10
25
Twitter To Ban Outside Advertising
Twitter announced Monday it is banning outside advertising in message streams on the popular micro-blogging service.
“Promoted Tweets” advertising will still remain in place, allowing companies and others to place up to 140-character messages known as “tweets” at the top of a page of search results.
“Aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API,” Dick Costolo, chief operating officer at Twitter, said in a blog post.
“As our primary concern is the long-term health and value of the network, we have and will continue to forgo near-term revenue opportunities in the service of carefully metering the impact of Promoted Tweets on the user experience,” Costolo said.
Costolo said the main reason of the ban is to prevent ads from defacing the “unique user experience” on Twitter of real-time streaming comments.
“A third party ad network may seek to maximize ad impressions and click through rates even if it leads to a net decrease in Twitter use due to user dissatisfaction,” he added.
Since its launch four years ago, Twitter has grown exponentially. The company unveiled its Promoted Tweet plan in April to use advertising to turn the huge popularity of the site into a profit.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said at the time: “Promoted Tweets are ordinary tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.”
Twitter knew that the ban on outside advertisers would be damaging to some software makers behind applications made to work with the service.
“We understand that for a few of these companies, the new Terms of Service prohibit activities in which they’ve invested time and money,” Costolo said.
“We will continue to move as quickly as we can to deliver the Annotations capability to the market so that developers everywhere can create innovative new business solutions on the growing Twitter platform,” he said.
The new plan will not prevent celebrities or others from getting paid to make endorsements or other promotional commentary in their tweets.
Posted in Social Media News by .
May 10
19
21 Rules for Social Media Engagement
MASHABLE by Brian Solis
Brian Solis is the author of Engage and a leading authority in digital branding and marketing. Connect with him on Twitter or Facebook. What follows is a modified excerpt from Engage, the complete guide for businesses to build, cultivate, and measure success in the new web.
Social media is reinventing marketing, communications, and the dissemination of information. While businesses now have access to these rich channels, the true promise of social media lies in the direct connections between people who represent companies and the people who define markets of interest.
Today, many businesses approach this with the establishment of social media guidelines and policies. This is indeed an important step, and not one worth economizing. But it’s also not enough. I highly recommend establishing official procedures that remind representatives of the importance and privilege of engagement.
The openness of popular networks is trivial. Any business can join and create a profile. It’s the devices we employ, the intentions that motivate engagement, and the value we offer that dictate the significance of the brand-specific social graphs we weave. It’s a simple investment in either visibility or presence. In social media, just like in the real world, presence is felt.
Rules of Engagement
As social media continues to evolve, defining the “rules of engagement” will encourage thoughtful interaction that benefits the business, brand, customer, peers, and prospects at every touchpoint. In the end, we earn the attention, relationships and business we deserve.
The following is an outline of best practices to help you craft a practical set of rules to guide representatives as they engage.
1. Discover all relevant communities of interest and observe the choices, challenges, impressions, and wants of the people within each network.
2. Don’t just participate solely in your own domains (Facebook (
) Fan Page, Twitter (
) conversations related to your brand, etc.). Participate where your presence is advantageous and mandatory.
3. Determine the identity, character, and personality of the brand and match it to the persona of the individuals representing it online.
4. Establish a point of contact who is ultimately responsible for identifying, trafficking, or responding to all things that can affect brand perception.
5. As in customer service, representatives require training to learn how to proactively and reactively respond across multiple scenarios. Don’t just put the person familiar with social networking in front of the brand.
6. Embody the attributes you wish to portray and instill. Operate by a code of conduct.
7. Observe the behavioral cultures within each network and adjust your outreach accordingly.
8. Assess pain points, frustrations, and also those of contentment in order to establish meaningful connections.
9. Become a true participant in each community you wish to activate. Move beyond marketing and sales.
10. Don’t speak at audiences through canned messages. Introduce value, insight and direction with each engagement.
11. Empower your representatives to offer rewards and resolutions in times of need.
12. Don’t just listen and placate — act. Do something.
13. Ensure that any external activities are supported by a comprehensive infrastructure to address situations and adapt to market conditions and demands.
14. Learn from each engagement and provide a path within the company to adapt and improve products and services.
15. Consistently create, contribute, and reinforce service and value.
16. Earn connections through collaboration and empower advocacy.
17. Don’t get lost in translation. Ensure your communication and intent is clear and that your involvement maps to objectives created for the social web.
18. Establish and nurture beneficial relationships online and in the real world as long as doing so is important to your business.
19. “Un-campaign” and create ongoing programs that keep you connected to day-to-day engagement.
20. “Un-market” by becoming a resource to your communities.
21. Give back, reciprocate, and recognize notable contributions from participants in your communities.
MASHABLE by Samuel Axon
Few industries are experiencing greater upheaval at the hands of technological progress than the news media. New ideas are popping up every day, so we’ve collected five of the most interesting ones for your consideration.
The previous generation of sites that redefined the news birthed several household names — Twitter (
), YouTube () and Digg (
), to name a few.
It’s no secret that newspapers have struggled as blogs and social networking sites have grown in prominence, but in the rapidly changing worlds of mobile and web technology, the distribution methods for news information are once again shifting. It’s difficult to predict whether or not these newly noticed innovators will become as popular as their predecessors, but they are introducing new approaches to the consumption of information that few have tried or thought of before.
1. WikiLeaks
Internet (
) advocates love to say that information likes to be free. There are few greater examples of this than WikiLeaks, which has played an important role in several political scandals and controversies. Allegedly founded by a Chinese dissident and several volunteer associates, the site accepts submissions of confidential political documents, reviews them to verify accuracy and pertinence, then publishes them to the masses.
WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to protect its sources and data, using military-level encryption and setting up backup servers all around the world. The primary servers are hosted by Swedish host PRQ, which keeps few records of its clients. The host is also known for its association with the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay.
WikiLeaks’ big breaks include hacked e-mails sent by 2008 U.S. Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, extensive documents from the upper ranks of Scientology, details on the United States’ Guantánamo Bay procedures, inappropriate disposal of toxic materials in Africa, and most recently, video of U.S. soldiers performing an airstrike that killed Reuters news staff.
Despite its funding problems, harassment by authorities and legal pressures, WikiLeaks is a demonstration of the power the Internet has to ensure that secrets are nearly impossible to keep.
2. ChicagoNow
Owned and operated by the “old media” outlet The Chicago Tribune, ChicagoNow drops traditional journalists and news reporting in favor of a large network of volunteer bloggers, all writing about the community, culture, politics, and everything else in the city of Chicago.
Investigate the network and you’ll find evidence of the leading trend in the new web and mobile-based news networks: Local. The network cranks out 100 posts per day and thrives on comments and feedback from readers. Bloggers arrange in-person meet-ups at Windy City watering holes to further develop the community.
Since urbanites like to get their news on the go, ChicagoNow has a fully-functional mobile website. Bloggers for the network range from political muckrakers to film critics to sex and relationship advice columnists, but they all put a local spin on their coverage. The news is built by the community, and the community is built by the news.
3. EveryBlock
Another Chicago-based venture (though it serves many other cities), EveryBlock is one of the flagship products of the “hyperlocal ()” movement. It delivers news and information tailored to where you are — exactly where you are, within a few hundred feet.
The past decade hosted an explosion of sites that track local businesses and events, and we’ve seen community blogs for cities, towns and neighborhoods pop up in abundance. That useful information used to be fragmented between different sites: Gothamist, Yelp (), Craigslist () and so on. EveryBlock and its competitors aggregate that data and filter it by your location.
You can access EveryBlock on the web, but it’s arguably most impressive as an iPhone () app, using the handset’s GPS to locate you and serve up a feed of nearby news. The items covered include Yelp business reviews, crime reports, real estate listings, street closures, and blog and news reports containing references to nearby addresses or venues.
Much of this data originates from databases and submissions from users to various sites on the web, bypassing traditional media. EveryBlock isn’t about editorializing and interpreting events as much as it’s about providing raw information. Some of the more savvy folks on the block prefer it that way.
4. Fwix
We noted this when we first covered Fwix: The spate of dying local newspapers has left a void that needs to be filled. Fwix takes an approach slightly different from those of ChicagoNow or EveryBlock, but it’s just as relevant and useful.
Whereas EveryBlock automatically aggregates a wide range of raw data based on location and ChicagoNow produces original content about its host city, Fwix aggregates blog posts from local blogs and the mainstream news publications that still exist — and yes, ChicagoNow is among the sites represented there.
While the ability to search curated aggregation of news based on location is useful on its own, Fwix is also notable for its integration with social media. Each time you click through to another site to read a news story, a Fwix toolbar lingers over the article. It includes buttons for commenting, liking, and sharing.
Clicking “Like” likes the article in Facebook ()’s Open Graph platform. “Share” sends the article to friends within the Fwix network (you can find them by searching your Gmail (), Yahoo Mail, Facebook or Twitter contacts), and “Comment” drops you into the comment thread for the article hosted by Fwix — not the one on the source website.
Those features make Fwix a social news site that builds a virtual community around the happenings in the physical community. Yes, it’s similar to ChicagoNow in some ways, but its social features put it more in sync with current web trends.
5. Spot.Us
Spot.Us uses individuals in the community too, but it does so in a very different way. The site currently serves the San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle communities, but expansion to more cities is coming.
When a citizen is curious about something in his or her community, that person can use Spot.us to commission a journalist to investigate and write a story about it. Suspicious that the cops in your precinct are abusing their power? These guys will look into it for you.
The community provides the funding; once a story has been pitched, Spot.Us’ journalists determine how much it will cost to investigate. Microdonations are made by individuals or organizations until the costs are met, then the investigation begins. The story that results is published under the Creative Commons license so anyone can use it. However, a news outlet may have the option to claim ownership of the material on a temporary basis if it contributes more than half of the cost of the investigation.
This model is audaciously nontraditional, but it’s easy to picture the ways it could be a boon for communities where important stories are underreported.
The Take Away
If you take away one insight from this list, make it this one: The citizens in the community are the backbone of each site’s strategy. They each aim to make journalism a community project.
Also note that all of these sites except WikiLeaks have some local or mobile component. The previous generation of news startups focused on national or even global news, but the web is now changing the stream of information and education in local communities, thanks in large part to mobile devices like cell phones.
These services might not become the norm overnight, though. We checked in with journalist Paul Bradshaw, noted for his work at the Online Journalism Blog, about these trends. Few sites or apps stand out to him right now, so he had this to say: “The nature of most news is unlikely to change while most big publishers are still milking their old cash cows into shriveling hulks. Only when the majority of money moves online do I think we’ll see genuinely social news, viral news and news as a platform that people can use to hold power to account.”
It’s a fair point; two of the sites on our list are non-profits, one is an arm of a larger and more traditional news organization, and the other two are startups that have yet to prove their long-term viability. The money is still in old media, but that will change.
“As more people get their news from specific apps I think we’ll see expectations rise,” Bradshaw said. “People will expect things to be faster, to know where they are, to let them share things, and to let them interact.”
Enterprising communities, a DIY culture, mobile devices, and better ways to sort through the flood of information (like semantic web) will be essential to the new ways in which we’ll stay informed each day.
MASHABLE
No matter where you sit in the HTML5/Flash debate, the fact is, more and more mobile or low-powered devices are being shipped either without or with very minimal support for Flash video. Web developers who design sites that utilize video need to be cognizant of this reality and design and build their sites accordingly.
While it’s great that video hosting services like Vimeo () and YouTube () support HTML5 and that solutions for larger sites are available from places like Encoding.com and Brightcove, that still leaves users who want to host their own video content — but don’t necessarily use a platform like Brightcove — in a bit of a predicament. After all, in a perfect world, everyone who visits a website should be able to view video, whether they are on a desktop or on an iPhone.
Fortunately, there are a number of great free tools available that will let you serve video via HTML5 and also support Flash, in the event that a visitor’s browser doesn’t support HTML5 (or in some cases, the video codec being used with your HTML5 code).
Here are a few of the solutions currently available that we particularly like:
1. JW Player for HTML5
LongTail Video recently released a beta release for the JW Player for HTML5. The JW Player is currently one of the most popular open source video solutions on the web and the new version offers seamless fallback support for JW Player for Flash.
This is important for developers or designers who want to make sure that no matter what browser is being used (even IE6), video will be watchable.
JW Player for HTML5 uses jQuery and supports playback of H.264, Theora and FLV video. It also supports existing JW Player and PNG skins.
JW Player for HTML5 is just entering beta but we expect that it will soon be integrated into a number of different platforms (like WordPress ()) and that it will continue to evolve quickly.
2. Kaltura HTML5 Video Solution
Kaltura is another open source video solution with an HTML5 player and library. Already in use by Wikimedia (the Wikipedia () people), the JavaScript library is built on jQuery and jQuery UI which means that the look and feel will be very easy to customize.
Kaltura supports OGG, H.264, FLV and MOV formats and is designed to work across browsers and fallback to Flash if necessary.
3. Video for Everybody
Kroc Camen’s Video for Everybody was one of the first cross-browser HTML5 video solutions on the web. Although more players have entered the ring, it remains a great contribution and is extremely useful.
One of the unique aspects of Video () for Everybody is that it does not use JavaScript. This is important for accessibility standards or for playback in applications, like RSS readers, that might not support JavaScript.
The code is pretty simple — if a browser supports HTML5, that’s what is played. If a browser doesn’t support HTML5, Adobe Flash is used. You can locally host the Flash file or embed an existing file, like a YouTube clip, for instance. There is a deprecated version that can also try to fallback to QuickTime before playing Flash.
Worst case scenario, a placeholder image and a video download link is shown.
WordPress users can use the External Video for Everybody plugin by Kevin Wiliarty for easy integration with their WordPress blogs.
4. Open Standard Media Player
The Open Standard Media Player (OSM) bills itself as an all-in-one media player for the web. It’s licensed under the GPL v3 and is written in jQuery to support HTML5 as well as Flash and Flash-based sites like YouTube and Vimeo.
It can be used to playback OGG or H.264 files or to pull video from other video service streams. It’s customizable using jQuery UI’s ThemeRoller.
5. Degradable HTML5 Audio and Video for WordPress
This WordPress plugin is similar to the Video for Everybody plugin but there are a few differences. While Video for Everybody encourages encoding video in both Theora and H.264 (as Firefox () only supports Theora video via HTML5), if you just want to use one H.264 file, this plugin will force Firefox to fallback on Flash and play the H.264 video that way.
Depending on how much video you use, it may not be worth trying to support multiple formats if the Flash player fallback is acceptable.
BONUS: Sublime Video (Coming Soon)
Another solution that is in the works is Sublime Video from Jilion. This is another JavaScript based option (although it uses its own standalone library) and offers full-screen playback, iPhone and iPad support, and fallback to a Flash player () in unsupported browsers.
I’m really excited about this option because it just looks so stunning. Obviously, we’ll need to wait for it to come out to compare performance and options agains the other solutions currently available, but this is still one solution to keep an eye out for.
Posted in Social Media Tips by .
May 10
19
Yahoo Acquires Associated Content
MASHABLE by Jolie O’Dell
Yahoo has just closed a deal to buy Associated Content — a huge web farm for text, image and video media that is created by low-cost freelancers — for slightly more than $100 million
.
Yahoo bought the company to bolster its content offerings, according to a statement from Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz. “Combining our world-class editorial team with Associated Content’s makes this a game-changer,” she said. “Together, we’ll create more content around what we know our users care about, and open up new and creative avenues for advertisers to engage with consumers across our network.”
In the past, Yahoo’s content strategy has been focused on creating high-quality, more expensive content, such as original online video programming from former NBC president Ben Silverman and news coverage from the Associated Press. While the user-generated media on Associated Content represents a marked step down from these other sources, it also represents a long-term strategy that will pump Yahoo’s network full of more content at much lower costs.
Associated Content was founded in 2004 and generates around 50,000 unique pieces of media each month. The company has received a lifetime total of around $21 million in funding, including a $6 million Series C round just one year ago. Here’s CEO Patrick Keane talking about the company’s metrics back in February:
Posted in Social Media News by .
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Alan Brooks brings more than 19 years of experience in marketing, business development and product management in the high-tech and legal industries to his role of vice president of marketing at Sfile Technology Corporation, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider.
Alan Brooks
Vice President, Marketing
Sfile Technology Corporation
3040 Post Oak Blvd., Suite 1440
Houston, TX 77056
O: 713.228.3184 x203
M: 315.566.9330
abrooks@sfile.com
www.sfile.com
