Category Archives: blogging

April 5, 2009 · 11:17 pm

10 Delicious links to remember on Twitter, Google and Newspapers

Google in 1998
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When I scrolled down this blog this afternoon, I noticed that my list of Delicious social bookmarks was a succinct, useful snapshot of the resources or ideas I’d found worth saving over the past week. As the platform and tools that I can use to tag, share or store information online has expanded, Delicious has remained an important tool for leaving useful digital breadcrumbs I can use to retrace my travels later on. This list struck me as particularly meaningful, both because of how useful the links are and what they reflect in the moment of my life when I saved them.

For instance, I saved the Google AdWords: Keyword Tool link after I enjoyed quick workshop with my SEO guru. I use it whenever I blog or write. The link needed to be in my bookmarks.

I’ve been exploring new ways to syndicate and share digital content for years. The Top 20 Ways to Share a Great Blog Post at Mashable put most of them in the same place. Score.

I found Classroom 2.0 looking for information about how collaborative software is being use in education. Classroom 2.0 is a social network for “those interested in Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies in education.” Perfect.

I came across an anonymous blogging guide provided by Global Voices, “Global Voices Advocacy » Anonymous Blogging with WordPress & Tor,” through an email from the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. It’s an important resource for any journalist or citizen in repressive regimes that need to get information out but can’t risk being identified. Given the enormous risks to life, liberty and family dissidents face for  in many parts of the globe, I wanted to make sure I saved it to review again later. Flash drive + Tor + WordPress = Anonyblogging. Smart.

I’d come across Tweet Congress before. It’s a visible element of an online movement to get Congress on Twitter. As the site notes, “Twitter enables real conversation between lawmakers and voters, in real time.” We’re all seeing it already, as Congressional staffs, Senators and Representatives adjust to the new dynamic. There’s no need for a TweetWhitehouse, as @BarackObama is already back in use again.

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about the future of online news, newspapers and digital journalism. One of the thinkers I read the most and certainly use as a hub for information is Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU. His list of 12 essays to read, a “Flying Seminar In The Future of News,” is a must-read on the topic.

I tagged Utimaco’s compliance and regulation portal after I attended on a seminar they hosted on the new MA data protection law. I wrote about what I learned there on SearchCompliance.com: Panels reveal risks of noncompliance with Mass. laws.

I saved Bostonist’s post @ Boston’s First Official Google Meetup because Tom Lewis recorded a short interview with me at the event. I embedded it below.

One of the starkest, clearest headlines I’ve read recently was on Washington Post.com: Daily Red Meat Raises Chances Of Dying Early. The link text really says it all.

Google Moderator rounds out this “top 10” because of its use by the WhiteHouse in soliciting questions before  the recent online town hall. I’d tweeted about the TipJar before,  where users can rate “money saving tips submitted and ranked by the Web community.” I learned at the Google Meetup in Boston that Google itself uses the moderation tool every Friday internally.

I don’t usually reblog Delicous links — this was just a helluva good week for ’em. If you use delicious, share similar interests and would like to extend your network, you can find me at delicious at http://delicious.com/alexanderbhoward.

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April 4, 2009 · 9:24 pm

#hashtags on Twitter are like channels on cable TV

Readers of ReadWriteWeb no doubt appreciated the hashtag refresher contained in Sarah Perez’ post, “What Does that Hashtag Mean? Tagalus Tells You.” As growth in Twitter has exploded, conversations, interest and confusion over #hashtags have spiked as well. How could they not?

The problem is that for all of those new users, the # signs inserted into Tweets make no sense. David Pogue helped a lot of them when he tweeted a link to hashtag.org, where hashtags are defined as “a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets.”

They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. Tagalus, the service Perez blogged about in her hashtag post, is a Web service that defines hashtags. Think of it as a hashtag dictionary.

Tagalus aside, here’s a perspective that may bring you another step towards Twittervana:

#hashtags are the channels that you can tune to whatever signal will make Twitter useful at a given time.

hashtag_screenshotTurn on, tune in, log out, to paraphrase a certain ’60s radical. Kevin Rose’s successful launch of WeFollow.com demonstrated that people will add classify their own accounts to particular channels in folksonomies. Each wants their product, service, brand or simply themselves to show up in search for that Twitter channel.

Smart brands have long since figured that out and monitor those channels like Webby hawks, adding hashtagged keywords to seed each discussion. Every user can tune Twitter into precisely the channel he or she likes. It’s easy.

You see, on twitter.com/search, we’re all equal*. Just tune in to the channel with the right hashtag.

Skeptics have rightly pointed out that many tweets are the ultimate in routine banality, expressing nothing but the author’s narcissism. Just watch the Twouble with Twitters for effective satire on that count. And for many users, they may be correct. Public access cable has had some real doozies on there, too, but that doesn’t make the medium – and most of what happens on it – trivial or useless. When you listen to Twitter using hashtags, however, it does’t matter if you have 174,456 followers, own a cable channel or play for the Suns. (Don’t worry, Shaq. Love to see you tweeting.) If someone is’t talking about the topic you’re searching for, it won’t matter. You’ve filtered them out.

If you like the Food Network, tune in to #foodie or #cooking. Or #recipe. If you’re a sports fan from New England and watch NESN, try #RedSox. Or try #NASCAR. Plenty of fans to go around. If you follow politics, you might have found #election interesting last November. You certainly will in 2010. True conservatives on Twitter (#TCOT) isn’t exactly like watching Fox News, though it’s a fair bet that there’s some crossover. President Obama’s name itself (#Obama) is a channel these days, especially during the “non-State of the Union” (#nsotu) earlier this year.

It’s safe to say that there are as many channels on Twitter as there are on cable. Not all of them have as much content, of course, but if Twitter continues to grow, each channel will fill with conversation. Twitter allows us all to create our very own channels and then seed them with even smaller categories.

Creative and clever users — of which there are no shortage — have created Twitter #channels from the ether. Check out #HARO, #journchat, #GNO or #FollowFriday for well-known examples. Others are sure to come, whether they’re generated by natural disasters (#earthquake), terrorist attacks (#Mumbai), acts of televised heroism (#flight1549), sports events (#KentuckyDerby) or national holidays (#July4).

Twitter, for the moment, is offering the best real-time search of all of these conversations. If you want a snapshot of what the world is talking about, just check what’s trending on search.twitter.com. Or, if the noise about whatever has the world’s focus is not of interest, slice the conversation into precisely the vertical topic you care about, whether it’s #Enterprise2.0, #Olympics or #butterflies. You’ll find both signal and, most likely, a conversation with a group of people who are interested in the same subject, often bearing news about the area.

Many brands have awoken to the fact that Twitter has become a pre-eminent market for conversations about them. Some, like @ComcastCares, have forged new customer service models. Others, like #Dell or #Zappos, are even profiting from their engagement. As many online analysts have noted, however, each channel can fill up with noise, rendering the listener unable to find that useful signal.

As Stacy Higginbotham quipped at GigaOm, Twitter “jumped the shark for digerati at SXSW” because the channel for the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin (#SXSW) became jammed with banal status updates, not information. She linked to Dan Terdiman’s story at CNET, where he wrote at length about Twitter saturation at SXSW.

The challenge posed for listeners at such events will be to tune their dials more carefully, either by creating groups in Tweetdeck or by refining Twitter’s advanced search capabilities. Connie Reece demonstrates how to do the latter in Twitter lessons from Mumbai.

Google’s success has shown that an audience that is searching for information, particularly about products, services or vendors, is in the best frame of mind to be advertised to for the given search term.

That could well be the Twitter bird’s golden egg. Some observers believe “real-time search is probably one of Twitter’s most valuable features.” There was endless speculation this past week that Google would buy Twitter, creating a “Twoogle,” precisely because of this real-time search capability.

Time will reveal how — or if — Twitter find a way to monetize those conversations. In the meantime, I need to go. There’s a good NCAA college basketball tournament game to tune in shortly at “UConn OR Michigan State.”

*Over the years, that’s proven not to be true: Twitter has an internal weighting system for users and tweets. Popular users and tweets show up at the top of search.

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April 1, 2009 · 4:24 pm

Happy April Fools Day online! #AprilFools is fun in 2009.

Organic Air!

Organic Air!

I had a fun time last night watching websites roll out April Fools jokes.

This morning, I saw many more go live. Fun stuff, for the most part. You can see the hoaxes, pranks and faux sites go up , more or less in real-time, by watching the AprilFools hashtag on Twitter. Here’s what I found:

I stopped tracking once I arrived in the office. I didn’t need to: @TechCrunch posted an EPIC list of 2009 #AprilFools hoaxes: http://is.gd/q24M | Stellar work, Michael.

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March 4, 2009 · 6:46 pm

How do you measure social media ROI on Twitter? A ReTweetability Index?

A carpenters' ruler with centimetre divisions
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I was asked a “quick question” about my Twitter use yesterday:

How many user responses do you get from your tweets?

It’s a fair question. As soon as I started thinking about how to answer it, I realized how many dimensions a proper answer should measure and compute that number.

What constitutes  a user response?

A @reply?

A RT?

A FWD using a (via)?

A HT (hat tip)?

A @mention?

There’s “influencer marketing ” metrics to be considered in there too, like whether users can be driven to comment or watch something elsewhere.

If you accounted for each metric on a given tweet, what measurements for the ROI of Twitter use could you generate?

If you’re measuring click traffic, you can see the traffic for @digiphile at bit.ly. That includes links that have been shared on three different Twitter accounts: @digipile, @epicureanist & @ITCompliance. The reach of the first account is dramatically greater, so results vary widely.

In aggregate, my qualitative answer to the original questions has to be:

“It depends.”

There are so many other variables: when I tweet, what I tweet, whether there is a link, if it’s directed to another user or if it includes an identifying source for a link.

Dan Zarrella, a social media and marketing scientist, has been at the forefront of retweet research focused on offering other quantitative models for measuring ROI.

His newly published Retweetability Index ranks Twitterers by his own formula:

[ Retweets Per Day / In(Tweets Per Day) ] / In(Followers)

I’m ranked at 1919 today with an index in the 7000s. I think that means I get a modest amount of user response. For more information, check out what Jennifer Grove ‘s post on Zarrella’s  ReTweetability Index at Mashable.

I’ll ask “How do you measure social media ROI on Twitter?” today and see what other people think.

In the future, I hope Dan and other researchers will create and share formulas or indices that include @replies, FWD, (via),  HTs, @mentions & influencer variables.

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February 26, 2009 · 3:11 am

Science Fiction Writers on Twitter

alien_fish_memorial_day_2008Since I had an epic geek FAIL earlier today, thinking I’d found Orson Scott Card on Twitter*, I felt like I needed to make up for my mistake in some small way.

The best approach to that sort of thing, in my experience, is to try harder. Do better due diligence. Look deeper. Have some fun — after all, this is science fiction, where space opera, phasers, nanites and scantily-clad aliens that somehow manage to show up in luscious female humanoid form are the norm.

(Yes, I know that’s precisely the sort of thing that make high-minded literary critics dismiss the genre. As serious fans know, however, there’s much more to be found than the cliched pulp covers might imply.)

If anyone finds more, please do add them in the comments. I’m absolutely certain I missed many wonderful authors and will add more as we go.

Cory Doctorow (@Doctorow) may be the most public science fiction writer on Twitter, given that he’s part of BoingBoing. Cory has earned a well-deserved reputation for his science fiction which you can find and often download from Craphound.com.

William Gibson (@GreatDismal) joined Twitter after I posted this, on April 1st. No matter — and no April Fools! Given that he’s one of my favorite science fiction writers, I went ahead and added him to the top of the list. He defines cybernoir. (A fan has reserved @WilliamGibson for him but he hasn’t moved there). You can read what he thinks of twittering at his blog on WilliamGibsonBooks.com.

Bruce Sterling (@bruces) alas, protects his tweets. You can read him at Wired at his Beyond the Beyond blog, where he keeps an eye on the spread of spime. That’s much better than spam, if you’re wondering. It’s an “imaginary object that is still speculative.” [Watch spime on Twitter]

Neal Stephenson (Neal Stephenson), author of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, Anathem, REAMDE and more. He didn’t tweet much for the first three years on Twitter but has sped up in recent months.

Greg Bear (@Greg_Bear) has written over 30 books, including Darwin’s Radio and Forge of God, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Neil Gaiman (@NeilHimself) has won oodles of awards and written many wonderful books, including The Sandman comic series, Stardust, American Gods and Coraline. Gaiman is currently enjoying well-deserved attention as the film-adaptation of Coraline spins 3D marvels on the silver screen.

CJ Cherryh (@CJCherryh) has written more than 60 books since the mid-1970s, including two Hugo Award-winning novels.

David Brin (@DavidBrin1) has picked up nearly every honor a scifi author can be awarded and turned out some marvelous fiction in the process. The Uplift trilogy is excellent but Earth and Kiln People may be my favorite novels by Brin. (Sadly, The Postman did not convert well to film.)

Neal Stephenson (@NealStephenson) is one of my favorite authors, period. As I update this post, I’m downloading Reamde. While I didn’t find the mammoth Baroque Cycle to be Stephenson at his best, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon and Anathem stand as some of my favorite books of the past decade. Stephenson’s account (which appears to be managed by a third party) hasn’t tweeted since January 2011. “Don’t worry… I won’t actually be using this, except possibly to make the occasional announcement” was his first tweet.

Margaret Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) is the author of The Handmaiden’s Tale,  Oryx and Crake and many other works of poetry and prose that extend well beyond the science fiction genre.

Charles Stross (@cstross) is the author of several of my favorite science fiction books ever, including Halting State, Glasshouse and Accelerando, along with the excellent Merchant Princes series. He joined Twitter in September of 2011.

Elizabeth Moon (@emoontx) is the Nebula Award-winning author of The Speed of Dark and and many other excellent space-based sagas.

John Scalzi (@Scalzi) may get the nod, after Cory, for most prolific blogger. (I’m happy to be proven wrong — Stross is after him. See below). Scalzi has written Old Man’s War, Agent to the Stars, The Ghost Brigade, The Android’s Dream, The Last Colony, and Zoe’s Tale.

Jonathan Carroll (@JSCarroll) has veered into fantasy, horror and even romance but I think he belongs here. Editorial discretion.

J. G. Ballard wrote Crash, Empire of the Sun & The Atrocity Exhibition. Given that more tweets came from @JG_Ballard after he passed away in April 2009, however, it’s probably safe to assume it wasn’t really him. The account has been closed but you can still find traces of users referring to him and his work with a search for @JG_Ballard on Twitter.

Scott Edelman (@ScottEdeleman) is a Stoker Award-nominated writer and Hugo Award-nominated editor of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

Mike Resnick (@resnickmike) — Via commenter Catherine Jefferson: Resnick is “the author of “Santiago”, “Paradise”, and a bunch of space-based shoot-em-ups and some amazingly lovely stories set in alternate Africas. Also the editor of a number of excellent anthologies.”

Alexander Irvine ( @AlexIrvine) has written Buyout, The Narrows, The Life of Riley, One King, One Soldier, A Scattering of Jade, along with many other shorter works.

Steven Gould (@steviechuckles) wrote Jumper, Wildside, Greenwar (with Laura J. Mixon), Helm, Blind Waves, Reflex, and Jumper: Griffin’s Story, which are all evidently much better than the recent film turned out to be.

Jay Lake (@Jay_Lake) has written four novels, including Mainspring, Green, Madness of Flowers and Death of a Starship and 240 short stories.

Gregory Frost (@gregory_frost) recently published Shadowbridge. He’s also written Fitcher’s Brides and Attack of the Jazz Giants.

Eileen Gunn (@eileen_gunn) writes terrific scifi for Eclipse One, Wired, Hayakawa’s Sf Magazine, Nature, Asimov’s Magazine and is the publisher and editor of The Infinite Matrix.

I found Tim Pratt (@TimPratt) was new to me but his work shows he’s bonafide. Check out Tropism, his online journal, or the rest of his bibliography.

Joe Hill (@Joe_Hill) updates from somewhere around New England. He’s the author of Heart-Shaped Box, 20th Century Ghosts, and Locke & Key

David Marusek ( @DavidMarusek) recently published his second scifi book, Mind Over Ship, the sequel to Counting Heads.

William Shunn (@shunn) has published a series of novellas, novelettes and short stories.

Michael Marshall Smith (@ememess) is the author of The Straw Men, Only Forward, Spares, The Servants, The Intruders and Bad Things.

Paul Cornell (@Paul_Cornell) wrote Something More and British Summertime but is far and away best known for his work on Doctor Who fiction and as the creator of Bernice Summerfield.

Paulo Bacigalupi (@PaoloPacigalupi) wrote The Drowned Cities, Shipbreaker and an excellent novel entitled “The Windup Girl.”

Who’s (still) on my wish list?

Stephen King. Terry Pratchett, though his Alzheimer’s might preclude it. George R.R. Martin – it would be glorious to watch him interact with the 59,000+ @GameOfThrones fans who have already started following @GeorgeRRMartin on Twitter.

Of course, if they join Twitter and find it alluring, they might end up writing less. Wishing they join may be a dangerous whimsy. Even so, here’s hoping.

*Postscript:: Orson Scott Card,the author of Ender’s Game and dozens of other novels, did eventually join Twitter at @OrsonScottCard, although only tweets signed -OSC come from the author himself.

Disclaimer: I didn’t try to list any of the Twitter serials that have been going online of late. I aimed for authors who have published work that Isaac Asimov would reasonably recognize as science fiction writer in something resembling a book or journal. Quaint and terribly retro, but there it is. We’ll never be able to follow Heinlein, Asimov, and Verne on Twitter, sadly.

Disclaimer 2: I didn’t realize that the talented and lovely Felicia Day (@FeliciaDay) had gathered and posted a list of Twitter authors until I was finishing my final edit to this post. On the one hand, I’m smiling that someone else saw a need to list something other than tech, marketing, government or PR accounts. On the other, she did an excellent job finding people. Fortunately, I had only missed one on her SF list (@matociquala) so I imagine this is still worth publishing. I noticed she’s been reading Tim Pratt’s work. Cool.

Disclaimer 3: This was a fun project that distracted me from being rather ill. If I’d noticed that Thaumatrope had created a dandy Web-based form that authors or editors of science fiction, fantasy or horror could add themselves to at Greentacles.com, perhaps I wouldn’t have created this page. But then, of course, I might not have enjoyed finding and  the tweets of all of the fine authors listed above — and that would be a shame. If you are such an author, please do go add yourself to the Greententacles list.

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February 7, 2009 · 7:29 pm

On WBUR, social media and tweetups

I’ve now been to two tweetups at WBUR, my local NPR news station. I’ve enjoyed each immensely, meeting new people, enjoying deep discussions about the place of social media in public radio and how the delivering the news is changing.

I’d meant to write both experiences up but had necessarily pushed that effort down the list of priorities. Earlier today, I noticed that Chris Brogan had posted about the WBUR tweetup on his blog and had mentioned me. Once I was at the post, I found myself writing a long comment. Chris decided to make the comment its own post, Alex Howard on Public Radio, and published it.

Needless to say, I was surprised and deeply complimented. I’d been thinking about how social media and public radio might relate since the last tweetup; this response reflected many of those musings. Thanks for giving those thoughts a platform, Chris.

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February 7, 2009 · 5:33 pm

What’s the value of Stumbleupon?

stumbleupon2A new online friend, Dave Atkins, asked recently what the value of Stumblupon was. “Who has time to randomly browse web for interesting things?” I’ve been thinking of that too. After all, there are dozens of social bookmarks or social news submission networks around the Web. You can see the best — or at least the most popular — over at popurls.com. Digg, delicious, Reddit, Yahoo! Buzz, Truemors, Newsvine, Metafilter, Slashdot — all the usual suspects plus many of the world’s top blogs and newspapers.

When I saw what Marshall Kirkpatrick had written StumbleUpon Hits 7 Million Users, Quietly 50% Bigger Than Twitter” at ReadWriteWeb, however, clarity of utility of the service came quickly. Here’s how he put it:

What’s got a button to push, knows how to make money while changing the world and is read all over? StumbleUpon! The social discovery network [is] like Pandora for webpages and videos.”

Needless to say, that got my attention. Twitter’s business model is one of the great speculative exercises of our time — well, at least in the hothouse garden of the social media world. Mark D. Drapeau‘s thoughts on Twitter’s vision offer considerable insight concerning the possibilities for the popular microblogging service. As Marshall notes, however, Stumbleupon has several things going for it that Twitter does not quite enjoy, at least to date.

  1. Stumbleupon has its own Firefox plugin and Toolbar. While there are many addons that allow you to add a Twitter bookmarklet to your browser, to date Twitter does not provide one itself. Small potatoes compared to the next three.
  2. Stumble upon is a social discovery service. As Marshall wrote, it’s ‘like Pandora for websites and videos.” This resonates with me on a fundamental level. I’ve chosen who I follow on Twitter carefully; my network brings me news I care about constantly, especially when I ask questions about specific subjects. Stumbleupon, however, adds an algorithm and 7 million other clickers to the challenge of finding more content for me. That’s incredibly powerful. I adore Pandora — and my stations continue to get better at tuning music to my interests. So if the parallel holds true, there’s every reason to keep “stumbling” while I “tweet” away.
  3. Stumbleupon is profitable. According to Marshall, “Advertisers pay a few pennies to have their pages inserted into the Stumble streams of relevant users and those ads are silently voted on just like any other page. Silicon Alley Insider estimates the company was making $10 million each year as of this Fall.” If Twitter monetizes the realtime search at search.twitter.com, maybe they’ll get there too.
  4. Stumbleupon delivers massive amounts of traffic. I can vouch for that. When tweeted about my last post, Online J.R.R.Tolkien Translators and Font Converters, I earned a few dozen clicks and a retweet or two from friends like Shava. When one of those people Stumbled the post, however, I immediately began receiving a river of visitors to the blog (relative to normal traffic, anyway).

In sum, that’s all powerful. And it’s all occurred without much notice. So here’s my answer to Dave’s question: Stumbleupon has some power when one person uses it to bookmark sites and explore the Web that way. Like delicious or Twitter, however, the service shines when all of those clicks are analyzed and used to rate content on the Web. We’re all deluged with increasing amounts of information online; the websites that matter to me are the ones that help me make sense of it all. I haven’t been using Stumbleupon at all in 2009. I suspect Marshall’s post may change that. Who knows? Maybe I’ll stumble across you. You can find digiphile on Stumbleupon here.

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January 22, 2009 · 3:45 am

Talking about e-health under a new administration

I recorded a new podcast about e-health and IT compliance earlier this month that just went live this week over at the IT Compliance Advisor blog: Dr. William Yasnoff on e-health and compliance in healthcare IT infrastructure.

I’m proud of the work and grateful to the good doctor for taking some time to talk with me about compliance in healthcare IT, e-health, Dossia and what changes we might expect to IT healthcare policy under Obama.

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