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Social Media at Sundance

Posted on January 24, 2008 by jessestay

On Friday as I attended a few talks of the University Venture Summit, during which I met quite a few people that use Twitter.Â Amazingly, I think Twitter is really starting to become the communications medium for Entrepreneurs.Â I t may be catching on a little more in the Geek and development community lately, but with as strong of a networking potential as it provides, I believe the Entrepreneurs have grasped it much faster than the rest of the world.

As I followed a few of these new visitors to Utah, I started to notice some of them were using a new term, prefacing “sundance” with #, seeming to direct their Tweets to those at Sundance.Â In IRC world (I often term Twitter as IRC 2.0), #sundance would mean the sundance channel.Â So I decided to track the term “sundance” on Twitter as the Sundance festival went on in Utah last weekend and throughout this week.Â Wow what a new view of Sundance I received!

I soon learned of a Tweetup some of those at Sundance were having.Â I decided it might be worth driving up to Park City to meet some of the non-Utah Twitters visiting town, so I drove up with Charlie Oliver (@charlieoliver on Twitter) to see what all the hype was.Â It was there that I met with Sperling Reich (@sperling on Twitter), Justin Keller (@justinkeller on Twitter), and Colleen Coplick (@colleencoplick on Twitter).Â Justin works for Cha Cha, a social search service very similar to Mahalo.Â They were handling a service as a sponsor of the Sundance Film Festival which helped visitors, tourists, and Stars figure out what’s going on, where to find things in town, and more.Â I heard someone Twitter this week that Quintin Terantino is in love with their service after this week!Â Colleen is a Social Media Consultant and PR expert, and she was doing photography and PR for the festival.Â Sperling is working on a new site (sorry Sperling – don’t remember all the details!) of some sort which tracks screenplays behind films, along with other film-type technology.

Over the weekend and during this week, through Twitter, I’ve learned that there was a Facebook Party, a MySpace party, a MySpace cafe (I heard over Twitter they give good swag!), and a few others like that.Â I heard where Seal was.Â I heard where several other stars were hanging out.Â I heard how people up in Sundance were taking the death of Heath Ledger.

I’ve never seen so much from a birds eye view of the festival!Â It’s amazing the role that Social Media is taking in these festivals and conferences.Â I must try to track the places I’m in or near from here on out on Twitter.Â I will definitely be going to the Festival and be more involved in it next year after this – the Sundance Film festival is now truly a “Social” event!Â Now, I want to know why Twitter (the company) didn’t have a presence there!Â Their users certainly were.

WordPress “Socialize Me!” Plugin Connects Your Blog

Posted on January 23, 2008 by jessestay

I’ve recently been looking for better ways to connect my blog into the social sphere.Â I feel the easier my readers can connect with me, talk with me, ask questions, etc., the more personal my blog becomes.Â You’ll notice I’ve added some pretty little icons to the right that show the networks I belong to and, if you’re on them, you can meet me there.Â I will be adding more as I create new icons.

Today I came across a nifty new WordPress plugin from the guys at blah, blah! technology called Socialize Me!.Â Socialize Me! collects your user names and profile urls from about 20 to 30 different social networks, and then detects if the users visiting your WordPress blog belong to those social networks.Â If so, with some code you insert into your WordPress template, a message appears to those users notifying them that you also belong to their social network, inviting them to come visit you.

I have thus far been unsuccessful in testing this – I can’t tell if it’s because I already belong to the social networks, or if I’ve entered in the wrong information.Â If you visit the Stay N’ Alive blog and see a message inviting you to visit me on any of my social networks, please let me know in the comments below.Â You can try the plugin yourself at:

Â http://www.blahblahtech.com/2008/01/wordpress-plugin-socialize-me.html

How I use Google Reader

Posted on January 13, 2008 by jessestay

I’ve been on the Google Reader band wagon for a long time now. I currently subscribe to about 150 feeds, and I read or skim over probably near 1,000 or more feed items a day. Reading my feeds is how I stay up on the latest and greatest, and how I am able to give the best advice to my clients. Instead of me going to news, now the news comes to me, which, despite the amount of news I read in a day, has made me actually more productive.

Google Reader has recently added a friends feature. Now, all those on your GMail or Google Talk contact lists that use Google Reader will appear in a Friends list to the left of Google Reader. You can choose to turn your friends’ feeds on or off in the settings (upper-right of Reader), and even invite more friends to begin using Google Reader. As your friends “share” the feed items that they like, you also get to see what they are sharing. This feature in effect has actually started bringing me even more news. It will be interesting to see the SEO effects of this as people no longer subscribe to blogs, but rather rely on their friends sharing their favorite blogs with you. Personally, I think it will improve the odds, as now more people will see your blog due to the viral nature of this system, and more people in result will be persuaded to subscribe to your blog – this time through Google, improving the SEO chances of you appearing in Google personalized results for that individual.

Here’s how I use Google Reader. Bloggers may want to take note, as this could provide some tips as to how to further improve your posts to fit with the power Feed readers out there.:

Skim, Skim, Skim! – There’s no way I would get through all 1,000+ of my feed items if I read every single one of them. I skim over the headlines, and sometimes the content, then move onto the next item. Only if the article is important to me do I read the article in detail.

Learn the Shortcuts – There are 3 or 4 shortcut keys that are essential for me. I use the ‘j’ key to open the next item and mark it as read. I use the ‘k’ key to move back to the previous item. I use the ‘shift-s’ key combination to share the item I’m reading if I think those that are friends with me might be interested. I use the ‘s’ key to start items I want to “bookmark” for later – this is Google Reader’s equivalent to del.icio.us. I then use the ‘r’ key to refresh the list I’m on – I like to click on the link “x new items” and read through those. Then, when I hit ‘r’ to refresh, it only shows me the new items I haven’t read yet.

Add as many friends as you can – The more friends you have, the more information you receive. If a friend isn’t providing productive feeds, then perhaps you can take them off, but besides that, information is good!

Stay on top of your feeds – if you don’t check them several times throughout the day, they will build up, and you’ll be stuck spending an hour or two in the middle of the night catching up. I like to use my cell phone when I’m away from my computer to go through my feeds. Google has excellent mobile tools, and Reader is no exception.

Don’t use iGoogle – I was using this for awhile, and realized a) I couldn’t use the shortcuts, and b) I couldn’t utilize the sharing or starring features. Perhaps if they improve it I’ll go back.

Those are the strategies I use to read through my feeds in Google Reader. What strategies do you use? Please add me as a friend – you can either add me as a contact in Google Talk, or shoot me an e-mail and you’ll automatically be added to my Google Reader Friends. jessestay at gmail dot com

Jesse Stay is Now a Bebo Developer and Consultant!

Posted on January 12, 2008 by jessestay

That’s right – you may now add Bebo to my list of expertise. You may notice there’s a new category to the right – “Bebo”. The popular website Bebo.com, that I guess one could compare much closer to MySpace than Facebook announced late yesterday night that they were opening up their platform to developers. Before this, the platform was open to a small number of developers developing in a private beta of their application space.

I have started delving into their API, and I have to admit – I’m impressed! Their system is much more responsive than Facebooks (Facebook was recently rated as one of the slowest Social Networking sites), and in setting up a basic app, I have to admit it is a little more user-friendly than on Facebook. While it is much more user-friendly, Bebo has striven to maintain compatibility with Facebook. Almost every aspect of their API, from the API itself, to its FBML derivative called SNML is near duplicate. Bebo denies being the first to use the 3rd party partner-licensed platform Facebook is soon to release, but I have to admit, Bebo has done an excellent job at replicating what Facebook has done. If only Google could do the same with Open Social. Could this bring the developer community over to Bebo from Facebook?

Stay tuned – on SocialOptimize.com we’ll be posting some white papers on statistics surrounding Bebo, demographics, traffic, users, etc. as we find them. My partner, Allan Young is hard at work putting those numbers together. In addition to that, I’m working on migrating the WWW::Faceboook::API Perl libraries over to Bebo.

On a side note – one ironic thing I found about Bebo is that somehow, my 84 year old Grandmother is on Bebo. She has been sick lately, so I can’t imagine how old that account is. How many people can say their Grandmother is their friend on a social network??? 🙂