By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)Getting started with social media, whether for personal or professional use, requires learning the basic fundamentals. Social media is more than just creating a blog or Twitter account. The tools are great and give us big advantages, but they are simply extensions of how we engage and participate in social media, they are not the answers. The social in social media is all about the human element. This post touches upon 40 key elements to aid your success.Branding, personal or professional starts with your domain:1) Register your domain name. It's also a good idea to register it for multiple years. If you have extra cash up front, spend it. There is no need to be bothered with yearly domain name renewals, and, in a worst case scenario, risk losing your domain name. It's a good idea to set your domain registration on auto-renewal if you decided to renew yearly. Stay on top of the credit card you have on file as well. Auto-renewal notices, getting marked as spam, combined with an expired credit card is bad news. This happened to a friend, just a word of advice.2) If you are an individual and your goal is personal branding, use your first and last name for the domain, and preferably a dot com extension as well. The domain spelling should be equivalent to someone typing that keyword or phrase into a search engine. It should be as short as possible and easy to spell. If you are business, be sure to register any variations and extensions of your domain name. The last thing you need to be doing is negotiating with a domain squatter, paying a premium down the road when it would have cost you next to nothing initially.3) Find a reliable Web host, and do your homework. When you are just starting out, it’s practical and economical to go with the cheap shared hosting plan, i.e. Go Daddy.4) Expect to upgrade your hosting plan at some point. When you have a steady flow of traffic and people are taking notice, sharing your content, digging it etc, be prepared to spend some extra coin for the next level of hosting. Do not be concerned with getting on the front page ofDigg in the beginning. If it happens, great, but there is no need to spend the extra cash beforehand. If things get really rocking at some point, perhaps you are making some coin off your blog or non blog website, traffic is flowing, server resources are being taxed, you are registering multiple domains, and establishing multiple websites/blogs, then you should look at a basicVPS server. The bigger you get and the faster you grow, the quicker you need to be thinking about moving away from shared web hosting.5) Familiarize yourself with the basics of web-mastering. If you have not already done so, learn how to use FTP. Learn the basics of HTML, and how to configureDNS for your domain names. Learn how to configure a POP email account, and how to take a screen shot and edit and resize images. The less you have to rely on someone for these basic tasks, the better off you will be and you might even save some out of pocket expenses.Blogging:6) There are a number of different blogging platforms available to choose from. They all pretty much do the same thing, but your first obvious choice should be Wordpress . The majority of blogs on the Internet are all powered by Wordpress, and for good reason. It's a stable, proven platform and it's highly customizable. There are also a few thousand readily available themes and plug-ins made for it. There is also a huge developer community behind it, and plenty of resource sites dedicated toWordpress users. This one is a no brainer folks.7) You should self host your blog on your own server. I would avoid using a web-based blogging platform. There are limitations to what you can and cannot do with these services. If you must use a web-based blogging service, you must be able to mask your blog to a domain name. There is a price to pay for this though, and you should ask yourself, is it really worth it? For the $10.00 priceWordpress charges, add five dollars more and you can buy a domain name and cheap self hosting. I see little value in using a web-based blogging platform, and not masking it to a domain name. Do you want people to remember mikefruchter.wordpress.com ormikefruchter .com? Brand yourself, not the blogging platform. Trust me they are making enough money, why make them richer? Most hosting companies who offer even the cheapest hosting packages offerWordpress installs for FREE. Take advantage of it. You need to be in full control of your blog, starting with owning it on your own server.8) Keep your blog simple, avoid the clutter at all costs. Clutter equals slow page load times for starters. The more third party widgets you install, the more you are pissing off your readers and potential customers. Only install widgets that instill some value to your blog. Widgets such as MyBlogLog allow for referral stats on the backend, and on the front-end allows for community building. Twitter widgets show your present status updates and or allow people to follow you. This is the value I'm referring to. Keep the junk for your personal blogs, or if you must, put it on an entirely separate page altogether.9) Find and install the necessary plugins that will benefit your blog, such as SEO plugins. Installing a caching-system plugin is also a good idea. You need to optimize not only just for search engines, but also page loading time. Find a simple theme and build around it. KISS is always a good rule of thumb. Appearance is everything, and your blog is no different. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.10) Change your blog permalink structure immediately. By default, WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them. This will severely limit the amount of traffic you will see from search engines. You need to be thinking SEO at all times, and this is the first step you should take with your blog. Your permalink structure should look something like this, http://www.myblogontechnology/this-should-be-your-permalink-structure. Do you see what we did here? We inserted the relevant keywords into the url. This is crucial in terms of optimizing for search traffic. With the practices of some additional SEO basics, there is a good chance we could achieve higher rankings for the keyword phrase of (this-should-be-your-permalink-structure.)11) Tell people what your blog is about, and most importantly what you’re about. Create an about page. When I find a blog I like, and want to know more about the author, the first thing I will look for is an about page. A big turn off for most people is finding a great blog and not knowing anything about the person behind it. This can also lead to wasted business opportunities. The about page is just another extension to sell yourself, your credentials, your affiliations, your experiences and so forth. Show your readers you are just like them. Show them your personal side. This is what social media is all about.12) Show your human side by using visuals. Add a real picture of yourself on your blog and on all of your social networking profiles. The picture should be of you and not of some silly cartoon character. As with real life, image is everything. The same rule applies to social media. A clearheadshot of yourself is all that you need. Choose one where you are feeling confident and perhaps smiling. Take it a step further if you really want a polished image, and use a picture of yourself in a business suit or some type of professional attire. If you are going to establish yourself as a leader, you need to play the part.13) Blog only when you have something to say that is of importance, and that is useful, resourceful, and relevant to others. Why blog otherwise? If you want to rant about the latest meme, or blog about what you had for dinner, do it on a personal blog or message board. This is why I don't blog everyday, or blog about regurgitated new stories. This is not my style and should not be yours. If it's going to be your style, let people know beforehand or create a separate entity for it altogether. It all comes down to quality NOT quantity.14) Your blog does many things for you, but the number one thing it does is establish authority. Establish yourself as an expert on a particular subject matter, after all this is the reason for blogging. Blog about your expertise, your passions, what you and only you do best. Your audience will find you eventually, and that is who you should be catering to. Focus and be consistent with your blogging. Don't be all across the board. You will learn in time, by trial and error, what works and what doesn't work.15) Leave the introverted mentality at the door. That's not social media, that's just media, plain old ignorance. Ask for help when needed, be verbal, speak up and ask questions. We all were newbies at some point in time. Educate yourself first and foremost, read, read and read. When blogging always link out to others, credit fact sources when applicable. Make it a practice to link out in every blog post you write, and do it positively. Bloggers succeed only with the help of other bloggers, and the relevant communities they are catering to and participating in.16) Find the top 25 blogs in your space, and subscribe to their RSS feeds in Google Reader. Consistently be on the lookout for new blogs, and the voices behind them. This also helps with the creative workflow and process. It also gives you linking out opportunities, build your brand awareness and most of all helps build authority. Don't expect recognition right away, and don't get discouraged if no one notices your efforts right away. You must first establish the foundation before you can build on it.17) Quality content speaks for itself, and is recognized. Your content defines you and the message you are trying to convey. Quality gets noticed above anything else. Let others promote your content and you should only promote your best work. It may take days, weeks or even months to establish a close network of friends. When I mean friends, ones that you have a genuine relationship with.These are not simple quick click followers who you have no intention on having any level of communication with. Your true friends will be the ones promoting your content and helping you get the word out there. The old saying is true, patience overcomes perseverance.18) The content that you create should be something that people want to share. For the most part, it should be relevant to your networks’ interests. Create newsworthy, thoughtful, intelligent content that has immediate usefulness. Don't expect a home-run all the time, and do not be disappointed if certain posts do not get enough coverage. It's the nature of the beast. It often takes time for things to get picked up.19) Leave thoughtful and constructive comments on other blogs. This promotes good practices in social media. It also gives you an opportunity for more exposure and additional places for people and fellow bloggers to discover your blog. This can lead into new networking opportunities, and potential new friendships and networking opportunities. The best way to reward a fellow blogger for their hard work is by leaving comments. This will also get you on their radar screen a lot faster. There are no negatives to this, only positives.20) Never fly blind. You must know where your traffic is coming from. Install analytic software, such as Google Analytics. It’s a good idea to have at least two stats packages installed and running. All analytic software is not created equal. They all have the same purpose, but vary in their reporting and tracking methods. Results will vary to an extent, and comparison of multiple data sources is vital.21) You have linked out to many bloggers, some are noticing and linking back. But how do you know? The answer is simple, set up Google Alerts to track mentions of your blog. This is a requirement not an option. Blogging software such as Wordpress will track inbound links, but it's not always accurate and lots of inbound links are missed. In addition to alerts, you need to be doing Google Blog searches and Twitter searches. These are the first tools you should be using, but there are plenty more listed here, and they are all free. Wouldn't you hate to miss a moment of recognition? Put yourself in the other blogger shoes. They might get the wrong impression with no acknowledgement back, these things need to be avoided at all costs. You can't please everyone all the time, but at least make the effort to no matter how big or small.22) Promote others, even more than you promote yourself. Retweet good content, Stumble it, Digg it, share it and so forth. The "others" first and foremost should be your network's content. Everyone else comes after that, plain and simple. Your online network is family and need to be treated as such. Sharing, self promotion is always a two-way street.23) I'm going against the grain on this one, but it's something I still practice to this day. Ask for link exchanges, the worst that will happen is that you will get declined or you wont get an answer at all. I'm not saying to stick links on your site to every blog out there. Look for quality link exchanges from blogs that focus on your subject matter. The real benefit from this is purely from a search engine perspective. A link from a blog with a higher pagerank could be very beneficial to you, in turn boosting your pagerank in the process. It's also a nice way of showing support and appreciation for a blogger as well.24) Interaction with your readers is crucial for long term success. Encouraging commenting is very important if you are seeking sustained long term repeat traffic. Ask questions in your post. Ask the readers for additional tips or thoughts on the story subject. Do not require registration. Make commenting easy and not a chore. Make time to reply to comments that require an answer. It's not feasible to reply back to every single comment, but at least put forth the effort.25) There are two types of bloggers. One way bloggers and two-way bloggers. You need to strive, and pride yourself on becoming a two-way blogger.26) Establish a Feedburner account. Provide easy visibility for new RSS subscribers, use text links in addition to graphics to promote your RSS feed You can also add an email subscription form on your site for people who do not use RSS. You should also give people the tools to promote your content. Add to your blog and postings promotional tools such as social sharing and bookmark services. Addthis.com is a good starting point. It's a few simple lines of code and your done. You should also take full advantage of Feedburners Feedflare.Twitter:27) Establish a Twitter account and learn how to make it beneficial not only for you, but for others. There is no right or wrong way to use Twitter. There is one wrong way, which I will highlight next. Twitter is a powerful tool for listening and more importantly broadcasting. You may not spend countless hours on it, but the time you do spend on it, use it effectively.28) Do not use Twitter for spamming. This is a perfect example of how NOT to use Twitter. If your intent is to spam and add no value whatsoever, consider going back to the basics, email-spam. Don't waste your time and others with this crap.29) If you are going to use auto-replies for new followers, do NOT include any self-promotional text and or affiliate marketing links. You wouldn't do this in real life with people you first meet, the same rule applies here. It's a waste of time, it does not work, and it pisses people off. If you are going to use auto-replies, there is nothing wrong with sending a friendly thank you for following note.30) There is nothing wrong with announcing a new Blog post on Twitter. Do it in a tasteful and respectful manner. If this is all you are going to be using Twitter for, you won't see much results. Contribute to Twitter first before you use it solely for self promotion. A good way of adding value and contributing is re-tweeting your followers tweets. When you come across quality content, promote it to others by broadcasting a link to it on Twitter. You should also practice being resourceful and helpful as much as possible on Twitter.31) Take full advantage of Summize, Twitters built in search function. This is a great resource for research, and keeping track of who mentions your content. This is the perfect tool for performing blogger ego searches.You need to be where it counts. Establish and build power passports, profiles.32) Passports are the social profiles that we create on other social networking sites and platforms. You need to have Omnipresence in social media. Your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google profile are all passports. More importantly, they are all sources that generate search engine traffic. It's very important that you maintain a recognizable, uniform presence across all social networks, professional and personal.33) Consistency needs to be practiced and applied to every area of your involvement in social media. All of your online profiles should share the same information. Make sure to use the same user names. If possible, use the same profile pictures (if applicable), logos and contact info.33) Be consistent with blog posts. Try to establish and maintain a schedule for posts and stick with it. Be consistent with tagging your images, bookmarks and blog postings. Be consistent with commenting on other blogs, as well as with comments left on your own blog.34) Stay consistent with the latest trends and technologies. Think about how they can impact or improve your successes online. Things are quickly changing on the Internet. Failure to adapt with the times has consequences.35) Experiment with new mediums. Try your hand at creating videos, of course this depends on what your objectives are. People love visual aids. if you are selling a product, create a short video about it. Video tutorials, screen casts and so forth are priceless. You could also ask your users for video testimonials. Bandwidth is not an issue for most people nowadays, take full advantage of it when and where you can. Here is an idea, create a short video for your about page on your blog. When you find good videos that are relevant to your subject matter, embed them on your blog posts.Friends, followers and family, without them you are a rowboat without a paddle.36) Hopefully friends to you are people you have some level of engagement and conversation with. Friends in social media or for that matter in social networking are not equal to what we classify as friends in real life. Friends in social media are followers who take the next step, which then evolves into some level of general interaction. Friends in time will morph into members of your core network. Choose your friends wisely, this is the army you will need for the battle you are about to embark on. While you have the option to friend people back, it's all about your objectives using social media. If you want a mass audience, then friend everyone who friends you back, but if you have no intention of ever having any level or engagement, then you are just fooling yourself, and all your doing it list building. You need to be receptive with friends who are trying to engage you positively. It's impossible to interact with hundreds or even thousands of friends, but the ones who reach out to you, by commenting on your blog posts, sharing your content, tweeting your content and so forth, you can not neglect.37) Followers are your audience, always remember that. Without them you are a rowboat without a paddle. Never lose sight of this. As I mentioned before, followers evolve into friends, be cognizant of that fact. Never take them for granted.38) Family is your core network. Your core network is your power, your network is connections. These are the people that will be there time and time again. They are your support through good and bad times. These are relationships that are built up over time. These are genuine relationships. Never lose sight of this, and do what you can for them at all times when applicable. This goes beyond just sharing or promoting their content. You are only as good as the network you align yourself with, make sense?39) Always give the little guy a platform and a chance to shine. Your followers, and friends may also run blogs. When the chance presents itself, offer guest postings on your site. Link out to them when possible. You can also leave them recommendations on LinkedIn if you know them well or can vouch for their work ethics. Look for opportunities to expose others in a positive light, no matter how big or small.40) Whether your goals and objectives in using social media are for professional or personal reasons, the outcome will still be the same. The outcome depends on what you put into it. Be prepared to commit a lot of time, devotion, patience, and understanding. You must crawl before you can walk, it's that simple. Be passionate about your initiatives. Have fun and always show your human side. Contribute and give more than you ask for in return, at least in the very beginning. Do onto others as they do onto you. These best practices will reflect on you, and in the long term will come back tenfold. This is what social media is about, now roll up your sleeves and start laying the foundation.Image by Ricardo under Creative Commons License.Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.More: louisgray.com | RSS | FriendFeed | E-mail | Cell: 408 646.2759

Another decent Sigur Ros track that popped up on my iPod today

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)Getting started with social media, whether for personal or professional use, requires learning the basic fundamentals. Social media is more than just creating a blog or Twitter account. The tools are great and give us big advantages, but they are simply extensions of how we engage and participate in social media, they are not the answers. The social in social media is all about the human element. This post touches upon 40 key elements to aid your success.Branding, personal or professional starts with your domain:1) Register your domain name. It's also a good idea to register it for multiple years. If you have extra cash up front, spend it. There is no need to be bothered with yearly domain name renewals, and, in a worst case scenario, risk losing your domain name. It's a good idea to set your domain registration on auto-renewal if you decided to renew yearly. Stay on top of the credit card you have on file as well. Auto-renewal notices, getting marked as spam, combined with an expired credit card is bad news. This happened to a friend, just a word of advice.2) If you are an individual and your goal is personal branding, use your first and last name for the domain, and preferably a dot com extension as well. The domain spelling should be equivalent to someone typing that keyword or phrase into a search engine. It should be as short as possible and easy to spell. If you are business, be sure to register any variations and extensions of your domain name. The last thing you need to be doing is negotiating with a domain squatter, paying a premium down the road when it would have cost you next to nothing initially.3) Find a reliable Web host, and do your homework. When you are just starting out, it’s practical and economical to go with the cheap shared hosting plan, i.e. Go Daddy.4) Expect to upgrade your hosting plan at some point. When you have a steady flow of traffic and people are taking notice, sharing your content, digging it etc, be prepared to spend some extra coin for the next level of hosting. Do not be concerned with getting on the front page ofDigg in the beginning. If it happens, great, but there is no need to spend the extra cash beforehand. If things get really rocking at some point, perhaps you are making some coin off your blog or non blog website, traffic is flowing, server resources are being taxed, you are registering multiple domains, and establishing multiple websites/blogs, then you should look at a basicVPS server. The bigger you get and the faster you grow, the quicker you need to be thinking about moving away from shared web hosting.5) Familiarize yourself with the basics of web-mastering. If you have not already done so, learn how to use FTP. Learn the basics of HTML, and how to configureDNS for your domain names. Learn how to configure a POP email account, and how to take a screen shot and edit and resize images. The less you have to rely on someone for these basic tasks, the better off you will be and you might even save some out of pocket expenses.Blogging:6) There are a number of different blogging platforms available to choose from. They all pretty much do the same thing, but your first obvious choice should be Wordpress . The majority of blogs on the Internet are all powered by Wordpress, and for good reason. It's a stable, proven platform and it's highly customizable. There are also a few thousand readily available themes and plug-ins made for it. There is also a huge developer community behind it, and plenty of resource sites dedicated toWordpress users. This one is a no brainer folks.7) You should self host your blog on your own server. I would avoid using a web-based blogging platform. There are limitations to what you can and cannot do with these services. If you must use a web-based blogging service, you must be able to mask your blog to a domain name. There is a price to pay for this though, and you should ask yourself, is it really worth it? For the $10.00 priceWordpress charges, add five dollars more and you can buy a domain name and cheap self hosting. I see little value in using a web-based blogging platform, and not masking it to a domain name. Do you want people to remember mikefruchter.wordpress.com ormikefruchter .com? Brand yourself, not the blogging platform. Trust me they are making enough money, why make them richer? Most hosting companies who offer even the cheapest hosting packages offerWordpress installs for FREE. Take advantage of it. You need to be in full control of your blog, starting with owning it on your own server.8) Keep your blog simple, avoid the clutter at all costs. Clutter equals slow page load times for starters. The more third party widgets you install, the more you are pissing off your readers and potential customers. Only install widgets that instill some value to your blog. Widgets such as MyBlogLog allow for referral stats on the backend, and on the front-end allows for community building. Twitter widgets show your present status updates and or allow people to follow you. This is the value I'm referring to. Keep the junk for your personal blogs, or if you must, put it on an entirely separate page altogether.9) Find and install the necessary plugins that will benefit your blog, such as SEO plugins. Installing a caching-system plugin is also a good idea. You need to optimize not only just for search engines, but also page loading time. Find a simple theme and build around it. KISS is always a good rule of thumb. Appearance is everything, and your blog is no different. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.10) Change your blog permalink structure immediately. By default, WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them. This will severely limit the amount of traffic you will see from search engines. You need to be thinking SEO at all times, and this is the first step you should take with your blog. Your permalink structure should look something like this, http://www.myblogontechnology/this-should-be-your-permalink-structure. Do you see what we did here? We inserted the relevant keywords into the url. This is crucial in terms of optimizing for search traffic. With the practices of some additional SEO basics, there is a good chance we could achieve higher rankings for the keyword phrase of (this-should-be-your-permalink-structure.)11) Tell people what your blog is about, and most importantly what you’re about. Create an about page. When I find a blog I like, and want to know more about the author, the first thing I will look for is an about page. A big turn off for most people is finding a great blog and not knowing anything about the person behind it. This can also lead to wasted business opportunities. The about page is just another extension to sell yourself, your credentials, your affiliations, your experiences and so forth. Show your readers you are just like them. Show them your personal side. This is what social media is all about.12) Show your human side by using visuals. Add a real picture of yourself on your blog and on all of your social networking profiles. The picture should be of you and not of some silly cartoon character. As with real life, image is everything. The same rule applies to social media. A clearheadshot of yourself is all that you need. Choose one where you are feeling confident and perhaps smiling. Take it a step further if you really want a polished image, and use a picture of yourself in a business suit or some type of professional attire. If you are going to establish yourself as a leader, you need to play the part.13) Blog only when you have something to say that is of importance, and that is useful, resourceful, and relevant to others. Why blog otherwise? If you want to rant about the latest meme, or blog about what you had for dinner, do it on a personal blog or message board. This is why I don't blog everyday, or blog about regurgitated new stories. This is not my style and should not be yours. If it's going to be your style, let people know beforehand or create a separate entity for it altogether. It all comes down to quality NOT quantity.14) Your blog does many things for you, but the number one thing it does is establish authority. Establish yourself as an expert on a particular subject matter, after all this is the reason for blogging. Blog about your expertise, your passions, what you and only you do best. Your audience will find you eventually, and that is who you should be catering to. Focus and be consistent with your blogging. Don't be all across the board. You will learn in time, by trial and error, what works and what doesn't work.15) Leave the introverted mentality at the door. That's not social media, that's just media, plain old ignorance. Ask for help when needed, be verbal, speak up and ask questions. We all were newbies at some point in time. Educate yourself first and foremost, read, read and read. When blogging always link out to others, credit fact sources when applicable. Make it a practice to link out in every blog post you write, and do it positively. Bloggers succeed only with the help of other bloggers, and the relevant communities they are catering to and participating in.16) Find the top 25 blogs in your space, and subscribe to their RSS feeds in Google Reader. Consistently be on the lookout for new blogs, and the voices behind them. This also helps with the creative workflow and process. It also gives you linking out opportunities, build your brand awareness and most of all helps build authority. Don't expect recognition right away, and don't get discouraged if no one notices your efforts right away. You must first establish the foundation before you can build on it.17) Quality content speaks for itself, and is recognized. Your content defines you and the message you are trying to convey. Quality gets noticed above anything else. Let others promote your content and you should only promote your best work. It may take days, weeks or even months to establish a close network of friends. When I mean friends, ones that you have a genuine relationship with.These are not simple quick click followers who you have no intention on having any level of communication with. Your true friends will be the ones promoting your content and helping you get the word out there. The old saying is true, patience overcomes perseverance.18) The content that you create should be something that people want to share. For the most part, it should be relevant to your networks’ interests. Create newsworthy, thoughtful, intelligent content that has immediate usefulness. Don't expect a home-run all the time, and do not be disappointed if certain posts do not get enough coverage. It's the nature of the beast. It often takes time for things to get picked up.19) Leave thoughtful and constructive comments on other blogs. This promotes good practices in social media. It also gives you an opportunity for more exposure and additional places for people and fellow bloggers to discover your blog. This can lead into new networking opportunities, and potential new friendships and networking opportunities. The best way to reward a fellow blogger for their hard work is by leaving comments. This will also get you on their radar screen a lot faster. There are no negatives to this, only positives.20) Never fly blind. You must know where your traffic is coming from. Install analytic software, such as Google Analytics. It’s a good idea to have at least two stats packages installed and running. All analytic software is not created equal. They all have the same purpose, but vary in their reporting and tracking methods. Results will vary to an extent, and comparison of multiple data sources is vital.21) You have linked out to many bloggers, some are noticing and linking back. But how do you know? The answer is simple, set up Google Alerts to track mentions of your blog. This is a requirement not an option. Blogging software such as Wordpress will track inbound links, but it's not always accurate and lots of inbound links are missed. In addition to alerts, you need to be doing Google Blog searches and Twitter searches. These are the first tools you should be using, but there are plenty more listed here, and they are all free. Wouldn't you hate to miss a moment of recognition? Put yourself in the other blogger shoes. They might get the wrong impression with no acknowledgement back, these things need to be avoided at all costs. You can't please everyone all the time, but at least make the effort to no matter how big or small.22) Promote others, even more than you promote yourself. Retweet good content, Stumble it, Digg it, share it and so forth. The "others" first and foremost should be your network's content. Everyone else comes after that, plain and simple. Your online network is family and need to be treated as such. Sharing, self promotion is always a two-way street.23) I'm going against the grain on this one, but it's something I still practice to this day. Ask for link exchanges, the worst that will happen is that you will get declined or you wont get an answer at all. I'm not saying to stick links on your site to every blog out there. Look for quality link exchanges from blogs that focus on your subject matter. The real benefit from this is purely from a search engine perspective. A link from a blog with a higher pagerank could be very beneficial to you, in turn boosting your pagerank in the process. It's also a nice way of showing support and appreciation for a blogger as well.24) Interaction with your readers is crucial for long term success. Encouraging commenting is very important if you are seeking sustained long term repeat traffic. Ask questions in your post. Ask the readers for additional tips or thoughts on the story subject. Do not require registration. Make commenting easy and not a chore. Make time to reply to comments that require an answer. It's not feasible to reply back to every single comment, but at least put forth the effort.25) There are two types of bloggers. One way bloggers and two-way bloggers. You need to strive, and pride yourself on becoming a two-way blogger.26) Establish a Feedburner account. Provide easy visibility for new RSS subscribers, use text links in addition to graphics to promote your RSS feed You can also add an email subscription form on your site for people who do not use RSS. You should also give people the tools to promote your content. Add to your blog and postings promotional tools such as social sharing and bookmark services. Addthis.com is a good starting point. It's a few simple lines of code and your done. You should also take full advantage of Feedburners Feedflare.Twitter:27) Establish a Twitter account and learn how to make it beneficial not only for you, but for others. There is no right or wrong way to use Twitter. There is one wrong way, which I will highlight next. Twitter is a powerful tool for listening and more importantly broadcasting. You may not spend countless hours on it, but the time you do spend on it, use it effectively.28) Do not use Twitter for spamming. This is a perfect example of how NOT to use Twitter. If your intent is to spam and add no value whatsoever, consider going back to the basics, email-spam. Don't waste your time and others with this crap.29) If you are going to use auto-replies for new followers, do NOT include any self-promotional text and or affiliate marketing links. You wouldn't do this in real life with people you first meet, the same rule applies here. It's a waste of time, it does not work, and it pisses people off. If you are going to use auto-replies, there is nothing wrong with sending a friendly thank you for following note.30) There is nothing wrong with announcing a new Blog post on Twitter. Do it in a tasteful and respectful manner. If this is all you are going to be using Twitter for, you won't see much results. Contribute to Twitter first before you use it solely for self promotion. A good way of adding value and contributing is re-tweeting your followers tweets. When you come across quality content, promote it to others by broadcasting a link to it on Twitter. You should also practice being resourceful and helpful as much as possible on Twitter.31) Take full advantage of Summize, Twitters built in search function. This is a great resource for research, and keeping track of who mentions your content. This is the perfect tool for performing blogger ego searches.You need to be where it counts. Establish and build power passports, profiles.32) Passports are the social profiles that we create on other social networking sites and platforms. You need to have Omnipresence in social media. Your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google profile are all passports. More importantly, they are all sources that generate search engine traffic. It's very important that you maintain a recognizable, uniform presence across all social networks, professional and personal.33) Consistency needs to be practiced and applied to every area of your involvement in social media. All of your online profiles should share the same information. Make sure to use the same user names. If possible, use the same profile pictures (if applicable), logos and contact info.33) Be consistent with blog posts. Try to establish and maintain a schedule for posts and stick with it. Be consistent with tagging your images, bookmarks and blog postings. Be consistent with commenting on other blogs, as well as with comments left on your own blog.34) Stay consistent with the latest trends and technologies. Think about how they can impact or improve your successes online. Things are quickly changing on the Internet. Failure to adapt with the times has consequences.35) Experiment with new mediums. Try your hand at creating videos, of course this depends on what your objectives are. People love visual aids. if you are selling a product, create a short video about it. Video tutorials, screen casts and so forth are priceless. You could also ask your users for video testimonials. Bandwidth is not an issue for most people nowadays, take full advantage of it when and where you can. Here is an idea, create a short video for your about page on your blog. When you find good videos that are relevant to your subject matter, embed them on your blog posts.Friends, followers and family, without them you are a rowboat without a paddle.36) Hopefully friends to you are people you have some level of engagement and conversation with. Friends in social media or for that matter in social networking are not equal to what we classify as friends in real life. Friends in social media are followers who take the next step, which then evolves into some level of general interaction. Friends in time will morph into members of your core network. Choose your friends wisely, this is the army you will need for the battle you are about to embark on. While you have the option to friend people back, it's all about your objectives using social media. If you want a mass audience, then friend everyone who friends you back, but if you have no intention of ever having any level or engagement, then you are just fooling yourself, and all your doing it list building. You need to be receptive with friends who are trying to engage you positively. It's impossible to interact with hundreds or even thousands of friends, but the ones who reach out to you, by commenting on your blog posts, sharing your content, tweeting your content and so forth, you can not neglect.37) Followers are your audience, always remember that. Without them you are a rowboat without a paddle. Never lose sight of this. As I mentioned before, followers evolve into friends, be cognizant of that fact. Never take them for granted.38) Family is your core network. Your core network is your power, your network is connections. These are the people that will be there time and time again. They are your support through good and bad times. These are relationships that are built up over time. These are genuine relationships. Never lose sight of this, and do what you can for them at all times when applicable. This goes beyond just sharing or promoting their content. You are only as good as the network you align yourself with, make sense?39) Always give the little guy a platform and a chance to shine. Your followers, and friends may also run blogs. When the chance presents itself, offer guest postings on your site. Link out to them when possible. You can also leave them recommendations on LinkedIn if you know them well or can vouch for their work ethics. Look for opportunities to expose others in a positive light, no matter how big or small.40) Whether your goals and objectives in using social media are for professional or personal reasons, the outcome will still be the same. The outcome depends on what you put into it. Be prepared to commit a lot of time, devotion, patience, and understanding. You must crawl before you can walk, it's that simple. Be passionate about your initiatives. Have fun and always show your human side. Contribute and give more than you ask for in return, at least in the very beginning. Do onto others as they do onto you. These best practices will reflect on you, and in the long term will come back tenfold. This is what social media is about, now roll up your sleeves and start laying the foundation.Image by Ricardo under Creative Commons License.Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.More: louisgray.com | RSS | FriendFeed | E-mail | Cell: 408 646.2759

Announcing Twadio - The silent radio station that plays in your head Twadio is another in my series of micro-startup web ideas with Andrew Dubber and is a cute little idea: you follow a user on Twitter (the tweejay) and every few minutes you get a music track title and artist name in your twitter stream. Sounds simple, but the cute thing is that you will definitely already know that nearly every track that the station ‘plays’ and just from the title you should be able to get that song stuck in your head, at least until the next song plays. Hence - ’silent’ radio. You can listen to Twadio in places where you can’t normally listen to music even or use it to shake that awful Spice Girls track out of your brain that you heard in the taxi - at least that’s the idea. And if you don’t know a track or you suddenly realise you have to have it in your collection, you can get a thirty second sample of it on the site under “how does it go again?” and then buy it from Amazon on MP3 (and hopefully iTunes soon). We get a tiny percentage of any sale - that’s how it pays for itself. So far we’ve had some great comments back from our ‘alpha testers’ (thanks all!), the best of which was “this is somewhere between genius and WTF” from spookydirt - thanks! This was something of an experiment. On Saturday morning at 6am (don’t ask) I sat with Dubber’s list of tunes that he had hand-picked for the task, decided to teach myself as much Python as I needed to do my first Google App Engine application and set to work. I had it all online by about 11am, and then spent a few hours that evening and Sunday morning tweaking the graphics and trying to get the domain name to work. Seriously - that was more complicated than the whole app - registering domain names on Google and getting them to point to your Google App Engine site is feindishly complicated and requires having at least twenty tabs open in your web browser. Then, a morning of testing with our generous twitter alpha testers, and we released it at 4pm. So a total of 34 hours start to finish, with a trip to the ever excellent Ikon Gallery all saturday afternoon, lots of playing with my toddler, doing a few bits and bobs around the house and some sleep of course. So let’s say fifteen hours work? Anyway - just shows what you can do with freely available tools and friends who have crazy ideas. What’s your web idea that you shelved in 2008 because it sounded too hard?

Related posts:Ten4 Magazine Feature - The Sound of Selling Ten4 Magazine have uploaded a selection of features for...Introducing Odadeo - a new site for dads For Fathers’ Day 2008 I have launched the ‘private...Create something day 4: A Certain Ambiguity Ah, well it was bound to happen. I got... Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Under the headline 'Absentee fathers must be sent their children's school reports', the Independent has reported that Ministers will be revising school record regulations to underline the importance of keeping "everybody with parental responsibility" aware of pupils' progress at school, saying it can lift youngsters to know that both parents are supporting them in their schooling. Sadly, the article's headline ignores mothers who are not the main day-to-day carer and continues to refer to fathers who are not the main day-to-day carer as being 'absentee'...

     Bookmark this on Delicious
    - Saved by CentreforSeparatedFamilies
                to
                                                    - More about this bookmark

Trydan is an informal get together for anyone interested in Social Media in Cardiff. First meeting: 23rd Jan 2009

Those of us striving to integrate participatory media literacy practices into our classes often face resistance.  Other faculty might argue that we are turning away from the foundations of print literacy, or worse, pandering to our tech-obsessed students.  Meanwhile, students might resist too, wondering why they have to learn to use a wiki in an anthropology class.   The surprising-to-most-people-fact is that students would prefer less technology in the classroom (especially participatory technologies that force them to do something other than sit back and memorize material for a regurgitation exercise).  We use social media in the classroom not because our students use it, but because we are afraid that social media might be using them - that they are using social media blindly, without recognition of the new challenges and opportunities they might create. I was reminded of this while reading Howard Rheingold’s great little article, Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies, where he writes: If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty first century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates). For this reason, participatory media literacy is not another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers. In all of Howard’s work is an understanding that a new technology may have good or bad consequences, determined largely by how people use it and how well they understand the broader implications of these uses.  In Smart Mobs, he warned that new forms of participatory media could be great “cooperation amplifiers” but without sufficient literacy on the part of the public could also become an “always-on panopticon” invoking Bentham’s haunting design for a prison in which a centralized entity could see everthing all the prisoners do, “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” Like Howard, I employ social media in the classroom with a sense of urgency. Like the early days of print, radio, and television, the present structure of the participatory media regime - the political, economic, social and cultural institutions that constrain and empower the way the new medium can be used, and which impose structures on flows of information and capital - is still unsettled. As legislative and regulatory battles, business competition, and social institutions vie to control the new regime, a potentially decisive and presently unknown variable is the degree and kind of public participation. Because the unique power of the new media regime is precisely its participatory potential, the number of people who participate in using it during its formative years, and the skill with which they attempt to take advantage of this potential, is particularly salient. Ultimately, participatory media literacy is as much about a literacy of participation as it is a literacy of media.  For, as Howard says, “a participatory culture in which most of the population see themselves as creators as well as consumers of culture is far more likely to generate freedom and wealth for more people than one in which a small portion of the population produces culture that the majority passively consume.”

We had a traditional Christmas this year, though since the kids are now sixteen and seventeen their sleep patterns were not disturbed by an anxious wait to see what Santa would provide in return for their good behaviour during the year. After a lazy morning, a protracted lunch and a game of Scrabble we settled down to watch Doctor Who and the latest Wallace and Gromit, assembled on the sofa in a perfect twenty-first century family scene. However in a slight break with tradition our shining faces were illuminated not just by the glare of the television but also by two laptops and my iPod Touch as we used Microsoft Messenger, Facebook and Twitter to keep in contact with our friends around the world.

In the quiet bits of the programmes, and between them, we were letting friends and family know what was going on, chatting to those we like to share our experiences with and staying connected to the wider social networks that are such an important part of all our lives, without losing the intimacy of a quiet Christmas Day at home. We had it easy, of course, since we’re a wired household and the technology is not seen as intrusive or unwelcome. That patter is still relatively unusual as one of my online friends, Christian Payne, found out. In a comment on Twitter he summed up the difficulty of spending Christmas Eve in a non-wired household: It’s hard hanging round the non-geek. i have to keep a low profile. laptops are associated with work and not necessarily communication. He’s absolutely right, but I think that he will find life less difficult next year, because the big change we are going to see through 2009 will be the breakdown of the association between the network and work even for those who would never describe themselves as geeks. We can see the pattern shifting already. Over the last week the number of work-related emails I’ve received has dropped to a trickle, and my spam filters are good enough that I rarely see any of the invitations to invest in dodgy companies, buy herbal versions of drugs that will enhance my sexual prowess or cash in on fake lotteries. But I’ve been receiving a constant stream of Friendfeed updates, Dopplr notices, BrightKite checkins, Last.fm recommendations and Facebook notifications since the many and various social network sites I am a member of have remained just as active in the holiday season. My friends, relations and contacts are all online and they are using the social network services as heavily as ever, even though most of them aren’t in their offices or working on projects. Some, especially freelances like me who have to work or we don’t get to eat, are still in the midst of it all – as you can see from this column, written when most people are enjoying the extended Christmas-new year break. But those who can get away from their job are not using the time to get away from the network, because the network has become embedded in the pattern of their lives in the way that the mobile phone managed five years ago. For a growing number of people, and I include myself and my children, being offline over the holiday would be as strange as cutting off the telephone and not calling relatives on Christmas morning. Laptops and mobiles are not a burden but a tool that gives us contact, and we would not give this up. The problem, of course, is how to balance work and life, how to ensure that the screen that gives direct contact with friends, offers invitations to parties and gigs and an insight into the lives of those we like and care for is not also a way for employers and editors to monitor and control us. We need to ensure that the means of online communication serve and do not oppress. I’m more optimistic about this than some. Twenty-five years ago the IBM Personal Computer managed to undermine the corporate mainframe because it was affordable by middle managers in large companies, who could buy one to do their accounts and learned that it was also capable of much more. Something similar is happening today with home internet connections, laptops and of course mobile phones. The technologies that companies insist on foisting on their employees to keep them tethered to the office can also keep them connected to their personal networks, using tools and services that are far more effective and compelling than email ever was. And the end result might be to undermine the work ethos that sees the office Blackberry as a way for management to keep staff connected to the office, and see it instead as a tool for maintaining an extended online friendship network that can also be used to manage work tasks. This is possible because the space occupied by computers and the network has changed radically in the last year, and the way that network tools like Twitter and Facebook have become part of the general reporting of news events, celebrity gossip and even political developments reflects the broader trend. These online services have superseded instant messaging for many of the more technologically astute partly because they offer a sense of participation in a public space, validating our social connections by making them semi-public in the same way as going on a date with a desirable partner can enhance one’s self-esteem. So when we spend our Christmas holidays online it is not because my children have become sad geeks, mirroring their father’s dependence on technology, but because our friendship networks now have such a significant online component that to ignore it and go offline over the holiday would be an unfriendly thing to do. And while I didn’tl bother fighting the network congestion to send many text messages at midnight on New Year’s Eve this year, there were a whole load of tweets and the odd Facebook status update. Bill’s Links Jemima Kiss interviews Christian Payne History of Personal Computer:

The US Air Force has a nice military flow chart for making decisions about how to respond to blogs. Anyone managing a brand's reputation online would find this useful.

UK Culture minister, Andy Burnham launched an idea into the debate on the protection of children on the web during the Christmas holidays by suggesting that film style age ratings be applied to websites.

As a father of three young children, Mr Burnham was reflecting the genuine concerns that parents have about the exposure of young people to harmful material on the web. Sadly, his idea for classifying websites is unworkable, would be useless at protecting children and could potentially waste a huge amount of our money.

Stef Lewandowski has already set out some of the practical impossibilities of the scheme. The number of web pages is technically infinite (many web pages are generated on the fly and don't even exist until requested from a user). Web pages are not final published items - they change and evolve, so anyone checking a site on a Monday will fail to see what's been uploaded on a Tuesday.

Obviously, manual checking of web content is practically impossible, but automated filtering is also hugely problematic - as the Australian government is currently discovering. Filter out the word 'sex' and bingo, no more content offering good education and advice on sex for young people.

Mr Burnham even suggested that he saw great opportunities with the incoming Obama US administration for co-operation on controlling content on the English speaking web. I'd suggest he take another look at President-elect Obama's views on support for net neutrality and revisit that assumption.

And then there's the thorny question of WHO, exactly, would be in charge of classifying or filtering the web. Like many others, I'm concerned that anyone should set themselves up as an arbiter of culture in this way - the very notion seems ripe for abuse.

For example, Facebook (well known for policing content on their site) is currently taking down photos of breastfeeding - it's fair enough for a company to do what they want on their own website, if annoying when they so obviously get things wrong, but if it's a government agency, which cultural values drive the decision making and how can they be accountable?

Old media solutions won't work on the web

There's another reason why this notion of classification of websites is useless. It builds on an old media model from an age where access to media was limited and depended on an identifiable gate-keeper who could be held to account for their control of access to children.

Film classification works because you have to buy a cinema ticket or DVD from a real human being who can be trained to refuse access to anyone underage. In an age with limited access to media through movie theatres or shops, classification works because it can be enforced.

There is no such control of access on the web - click or don't click - ultimately it's the user is the one who decides whether to access a website, and there is no intermediary available for preventing someone aged 15 from clicking on a site with a 16 rating.

Indeed, I'd suggest that putting a 16 rating on a website would pretty much guarantee it would become a big hit for the under 16s! Ban something and you make it way, way more interesting.

The big question I have is this: How does a big sign on a website saying 'adults only' protect a child from accessing it if the only thing the child has to do is click a button saying 'enter'?

The UK government, if it runs with this idea, could waste a huge amount of taxpayers money and years of the opportunity cost of not pursuing more effective policies, and still leave children as unprotected as ever.

It strikes me as a naive hope for an easy solution to an incredibly complex problem, and yet again demonstrates the profound levels of ignorance about the internet that so often pops up within government.

The Byron Report

Mr Burnham attempts to build on the excellent work of Dr Tanya Byron's review for the DCSF in which she carefully examined child safety online. In a thoughtful review, Dr Byron called for a wide ranging set of initiatives to help protect children online, but classifying websites wasn't one of them.

She did talk about strengthening the classification of computer games, but with real world intermediaries to control access (the shops and people who sell games), the use of classification is a viable option.

But sadly, classifying websites would be an enormous and expensive undertaking that would ultimately have no impact on the protection of children from harmful material.

Far more useful would be to look at Dr Byron's actual suggestions, which included:

• reducing the availability of harmful material on the most popular areas of the internet. This means working with (and resourcing) popular sites like YouTube to ensure they have the capacity to remove damaging content quickly and effectively. She acknowledged that it was impossible to 'police the long tail'


• helping parents to understand the web and how to protect their children online. There is an accelerating generational digital divide and as parents are the key gatekeepers to childrens' online access, it is with them that we should focus our efforts


• building childrens' resiliance to the online environment and its content

Dads, mums and carers are the key

It's on this second point that the most potential exists. Parents can and do gate-keep their childrens' access to the web, but there is a huge amount of work to do to help them do this.

Here are some basic tips for protecting your kids online:

• Never allow your children to access the web in a private space. If you have a desktop, put it in a communal room like the living room, where anyone can wander past and see what they're up to. If you're using a laptop, try positioning your wifi router so that there's no signal in their bedroom, and therefore no private access to the internet


• Set up separate accounts for all family members on your computer. Make yourself the only administrator and password protect your account. You can configure parental controls in both Windows and Max OS


• Try installing Netnanny or another parental control software on your computer


• Try using Glubble - an internet browser which pre-approves websites for children under 12 - and make this the only browser available on your children's computer accounts

The FBI has some good pointers on indications that suggest your child may be at risk in it's Parents' Guide to Safety Online .

Ultimate, the internets will not be controlled by the governments - it's core architecture means that attempts to control internet content by apply the same thinking as was applied in the old media age can never really work.

In the old media age, content was created and distributed by a small number manageable and regulate-able actors and access was controlled by gate-keepers who could be made accountable to a law based on classification and control.

In the new media age, content can be created and distributed by anyone, anywhere at any time. Billions of items are uploaded every day and it cannot possibly be policed, nor, arguably, should we want it to be.

The real solutions are to invest in the skills, knowledge and understanding of children and especially parents. It's a messier, more organic solution and certainly no low-hanging-fruit for a government minister looking for an easy win, but in the long term, it's the only way.

UPDATE: Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson MP has opened a debate on the issue on his blog. So far, every one of the 160+ comments is against the idea. Let's see if Andy Burnham listens.

One of my new years' resolutions is to really get going with my blog, so I thought I'd kick off with a brief review of my working year.

The years started off very focused on building Dad Info. The project came out of a long held concern at the Fatherhood Institute and among fatherhood and health workers that the absence of good information for new fathers helped the general sense of distance us men often feel from parenting.

So our aim was to get a card into the hands of every expectant dad in the UK with core information they need and directing them to a website where they could find the information they're after.

Over years, we've developed relationships with midwives to work on tackling this problem. They meet more new dads than any other professional - around 95% of new dads turn up at their maternity units.

And 2008 was the year that the Dad Card was launched - it's a great achievement that midwives have embraced it and are handing them out at 300 of the UK's 330 maternity services.

We've listened to their feedback about the card and yesterday, I received my first copy of the new version we've just printed. You can download a PDF of the card here. It has much more information than the original including a unique set of graphics showing how dads can help their partners during pregnancy.

The company is just becoming independent of the Fatherhood Institute and we're thinking about the future. In 2009 I'd like to set up a multi-author blog on the site with some of the best writers on fatherhood in the UK.

Soon after we launched Dad Info I came across another brand new site for dads - Odadeo. Built by web entrepreneur Stef Lewandowski, it's a social web app to help dads answer the question "How am I going to be a better dad?". I was so impressed by the early work, I contacted Stef and suggested we work together. I'm now working with him on user experience, marketing and community building.

Odadeo is a very clever social web app and it's great to have the talents of someone like Stef focusing on fathers. It uses a system of collaborative pledges - for example "I am going to read more stories". If you're pledging that, you can ask and answer questions, offer tips and links for the pledge and when you make some progress, you 'pip' the pledge. Odadeo builds a DADSDAQ graph. You can check the DADSDAQ for each pledge, for your progress as a dad as a whole, your friends and the whole Odadeo community.

For the past few months, Stef and I have been building the community at Odadeo, thinking through how the site should develop and creating ways for blogging dads to find a community and platform for their content. We've been building connections with dads on the web and he's also released couple of extra apps like Goingtobeadad.com and Tweetlet, which sends private twitter messages through pregnancy with little messages like "Hey - I've just opened my eyes for the first time!".

This was also the year I went freelance. After eight years working for the Fatherhood Institute and Dad Info full time I'm looking to spread my wings a bit.

Since going freelance in September, I've focused on a few projects. The first thing to do was to set up a site for myself, and I settled on Sweetcron - a lifestreaming app that pulls data feeds in from social media sites around the web and displays them on your own server. Sweetcron's an interesting system, I've done quite a bit of work customising it and I feel a blog post about using it brewing!

Across the week I'm working for two days on Dad Info and a day for Odadeo. I've also been setting up a few sites for friends and charities and developing a new partnership with Carl Morris.

In it's very early stages, Native is a new company - a vehicle for the work that Carl and I are doing together. We're both into Social media, web hackery and staying ahead of the curve, so we're offering our time and brainpower to clients looking to grown online.

A big part of this year has been learning about all the latest trends, tools and developments online.

Web 2.0, Social Media or whatever you want to call it has been the key trend on the web for the past few years, and it has the potential to be as revolutionising a force as the initial development of the web in the early nineties. Tools like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter are transforming human relationships, culture and markets. Personally, 2008 was the year of Twitter for me - it's certainly where the most exciting action is.

As for the tools, I've been learning CSS and PHP, and having seen what Stef can do with Odadeo, I'm starting now to look at Ruby on Rails. Setting aside time for learning while getting the projects and income in is going to be an important balance in 2009.

So it's been a busy and interesting year, and it looks set to continue in 2009!

Here’s an article I wrote for the Birmingham Post, published on page 5 today: How would you feel if everything you tried to access on the internet were filtered for “unacceptable content” by government censors? That’s a possibility Andy Burnham, secretary of state for culture has proposed this week. He’s concerned about the fact that he can’t leave his kids for two hours alone on the home computer without fear that they will be exposed to inappropriate content. The problem is that the internet doesn’t take into account the user’s age when they access it and doesn’t have a 9pm watershed. How can a dad trust that if he lets his ten-year-old daughter use the internet for a while unsupervised that she won’t accidentally click on something that’s not meant for her, be exposed to something frightening, violent or sexually explicit and suffer nightmares for weeks afterwards? Or even, how can he trust that if he gives his 14-year-old son a free email account that he won’t be inundated with sexually explicit spam email? The answer is that parents and guardians of kids just can’t. There is no internet-wide, internationally agreed method for parents to filter out what is, and isn’t, appropriate (in their view) for their kids. So Mr Burnham commissioned an excellent report into these issues by clinical psychologist Dr Tanya Byron who neatly summarises the problem: “Many parents seem to believe that when their child is online it is similar to them watching television … in fact it is more like opening the front door and letting your child go outside to play, unsupervised.” So what’s to be done? Mr Burnham is currently considering a couple of options that have set bloggers raging: How about websites having cinema-style age ratings like they do for films? Or how about forcing the internet service providers, like BT and Virgin Media, to filter out sites that host ‘inappropriate’ content? Neither of these ideas will work, and here’s why: There are currently one trillion web addresses in Google’s index of the web. But some estimate that the size of the ‘invisible web’ – the password protected pages, the things that aren’t linked to anywhere – is about ten times that size, so let’s estimate that there are 100 trillion web addresses out there (strictly, it’s infinite but that’s another story). If you or I were to attempt to go through each of these sites by hand and decide whether they are appropriate or inappropriate for our kids, one page every second, it would take over 30 million years! Or put another way, you could have 30 million people employed to do the job. That’s just the web. People often conflate the words ‘web’ and ‘internet’, but there are a huge number of services that use the internet that don’t appear as ‘web sites’. A big one, that’s hugely popular with kids is MSN – it’s like text messaging on your phone, but quicker, more fun and free. Are we going to have some kind of system monitoring every message that gets sent for ‘inappropriate content’ too? Obviously this is an impossible task to be done by hand, so the government would need some sophisticated software to do it. The trouble is that computers find it very difficult to analyse a piece of text or an image and decide if it’s ‘bad’ or ‘good’ depending on some criteria. The web is very different to the world of film (or games). Once you’ve released your film, that’s it – it’s done and can be quite easily given an age rating. But websites change from day to day or are even so dynamic that pages don’t exist until requested. One minute a site could just have pictures of kittens on it, the next someone could upload some legal, but adult content. How would you rate a photo-sharing site like Flickr where around 5million images are uploaded every day, a handful of which might be ‘inappropriate’? Over 18 only? That would make hundreds of thousands of blog posts suddenly image-free for the filtered user because bloggers tend to use Flickr images to illustrate their points. And how are we to legislate for websites that are produced or hosted outside the UK? And furthermore, who decides what content should or should not be permissible to be viewed? Earlier this year Birmingham City Council’s internet filter ‘Bluecoat’ amusingly barred employees from accessing prominent atheist Richard Dawkins’s blog because it contained “occult practices, atheistic views, voodoo rituals or any other form of mysticism” [since writing this it's been brought to my attention that this is not actually the case, although plenty of websites were filtered], and in fact my own blog was blocked to council employees for some reason too. [this is definitely the case, but my blog is no longer blocked] If we were to roll out something along the lines of what the Australian government is attempting this year, where every internet connection in the country is filtered with a system like this, we would see more of these kinds of ‘false positives’ occurring. And a flurry of lawsuits from legitimate but banned website owners would follow. But surely it is ultimately the responsibility of the parent to help their kids navigate the dangers of the online world? The government putting out the message that they’ve got the kids protected with an electronic system will just mean more kids will be left in front of computers for hours at a time, and if you’ve ever done any work with young people you know just how easy they find it to get around any filtering system. What alarmed me the most, though is this comment from the interview with Mr Burnham in one newspaper: “There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical.” I disagree entirely. Once something is on the internet it is potentially always accessible, because it can be copied by anyone. Wish-thinking that this is not the case does not help. If you take some content down from one site, it will just reappear elsewhere. Put simply, rating websites and filtering internet connections are unworkable ideas, and the Byron review draws the same conclusions, so it is confusing to see them even being discussed. Here’s an alternative suggestion. One of Mr Burnham’s predecessors made free museum access for all a reality. So how about something of similar ambition for the web? This year, the UK e-commerce market grew a whopping 28 per cent and is set to continue growing in 2009. The digital media industry could prove to be a big success story in a time of recession. How about free WI-FI access in every UK city? Or upgrading our national broadband network to the level that Korea enjoys? Either of these ideas would be by far a more constructive project and lead to marked benefits to the UK digital economy and are precisely the kind of ambitious projects that only Mr Burnham is positioned to undertake. In the mean-time the solution to the problem of kids and the internet is simple. Parents need to get familiar with the technology themselves so they can help their kids navigate the digital world. That’s where the government can help – by educating parents and breaking down the generational digital divide. But some quick advice to parents. You should make sure the computer is in the living room so you can see the screen (not in the child’s room) and you should not leave your kids browsing the web unsupervised. You could also install something like NetNanny for younger kids, try out KidZui for kid-friendly content and install the Glubble kid-safe browser. None of which requires any government spending.

Related posts:Change your wireless router password right now Yesterday I was honoured to attend my first School...Making animals with kids I’m a big fan of making and doing with...Portable Film Festival - an interview While I was at SXSW I had the opportunity... Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Just after the UK's culture minister, Andy Burnham, announced that he thinks all websites can and should be rated, comes a story that highlights what a ridiculous suggestion it is to say that you can simply classify all websites. Facebook is facing a bit of a backlash after the company started banning some photos of women breast-feeding as being inappropriate. Basically, Facebook has been making its own judgment on which of those photos are "obscene" and which are fine -- and it's pissing off a bunch of moms whose photos have been deleted. And, of course, this is just one simple example. Thinking that there's some sort of single objective measure by which all sites (or content) can be rated is so wrong it's hard to believe that someone thinking such a thing was possible could hold down a serious job, let alone elected office.Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Kiss a frog and it will turn into a handsome prince. At least that is how the story use to go...

2008 has been a wild ride of a year, hasn't it?  Social media has really started coming into its own, and everyone wanted to create something "viral" (including those of us in online marketing).  So, as 2008 comes to a close, I'd like to reflect back on some of the viral videos that caught my attention in the marketing and social media sphere.

10: 8 Bad Words Which Cause Sales SuicideI came across this video from copywriter extraordinaire Trevor Crook back in July.  It's really informative, and has served as a go-to resource for my own copy writing.  A great example of how video can be an effective medium for disseminating valuable information.#9: Email Standards Project - Gmail GrimacesWhat's great about this video is that it shows something that we as marketers and web designers can (possibly) relate to - the agony of designing an email for Gmail.  Even though I'm not a designer, I've experienced this together with a designer I worked with.  It sends a powerful message while keeping things lighthearted at the same time.#8: Facebook In RealityAs we all ponder what the future of social media will be like, it helps to take a look at it from a different standpoint to get ourselves grounded in offline real-life.  This hilarious video did that for me.#7: Link Building 101 RapI love this video.  Like the Gmail Grimaces video, it takes a subject we all know and love and frames it in a humorous, fun way.#6: Ben Stiller's Viral VideoLeave it to Ben Stiller to parody the phenomenon of viral videos - by creating a viral video about the making of a viral video for his summer blockbuster, Tropic Thunder.  To me, this is pure genius and one of the funniest videos I've seen this year.#5: The Downfall - The Age of ConversationSpeaking of movies, the German film Downfall (about the downfall of the Third Reich) has been used many times this year as the backdrop of several parodies - especially since it's entirely in German and any subtitles can be inserted.  This is exactly what was done to promote the book The Age of Conversation and get across the idea of using social media to engage in customer conversation - and quite cleverly, I might add.#4: Social Media & Ice CreamAdd Today's Best Tools to your pageThis is yet another great example of a video that puts a topic (like social media) into a context that everyone can understand - ice cream.  If more brick & mortar businesses could watch this and understand how social media can be used to their advantage, they could be generating more offline sales through online marketing.#3: Chris Brogan - Open Invitation for All of YouI've never met Chris in person, but after watching this video, I really want to.  See, this goes to show how video can add personality and transparency to your business, and allow your customers to get to know the person behind the logo - and there's nothing wrong with that.#2: You Oughta Know Inbound MarketingThis video from HubSpot works just like the Link Building 101 Rap in that it conveys valuable information in a lighthearted, relatable way - Alanis Morissette's You Oughta Know.  I guarantee you won't be able to get that song out of your head for days.#1: AC/DC Rock N Roll Train VideoHow do you get your music video through corporate firewalls and onto the computer screens of your office-bound fans?  By embedding it into an Excel spreadsheet, of course!  This is an absolutely brilliant viral campaign, not just for the video itself, but because of the innovative and clever method by which is was distributed.

tombeardshaw

Uploaded with AirMe

Uploaded with AirMe

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)Lifestreaming was a big thing for social media in 2008, and surely will be even bigger in 2009. Thanks to sites like FriendFeed, Lifestream.fm and others, we can easily aggregate our social activities into one central place. As with all of these services, we must log into the service's Web site to see and stream our activity. That is fine for the majority of us, but what about self-hosted lifestreaming? Solutions include Sweetcron and a ton of advanced PHP scripts that can be found at the lifestreamblog.The problem, however, is that a lot of these scripts are complicated, and if you do not have basic PHP coding skills, you are pretty much out of luck. This is where Kakuteru comes into play. Kakuteru is an open source lifestreaming application built on Ruby On Rails, with the key difference being that it uses your your FriendFeed.com stream as the core lifestream backend. It falls into the self-hosted lifestreaming category because you have the ability to mask your Kakuteru service URL to a domain name, as I did for testing purposes. It's completely customizable as well.Wait a second. This looks a lot like Sweetcron!Dominiek ter Heide, the creator of Kakuteru, got his inspiration and design from sweetcron, but that's where the similarities end. Sweetcron is completely self hosted, being you must install and upload the files to your Web server. Sweetcron also runs on PHP, and gives you the ability to import any type of activity stream via an RSS feed. Lastly, Sweetcron stores all of your content on your server.Kakuteru, on the other hand, is Web-based, and only aggregates your FriendFeed activity for your lifestream backend. In other words, you need a FriendFeed account for this to work properly. You have the ability to strictly post HTML content, if you decided not to aggregate any of your FriendFeed services. You also have the ability to toggle on and off the FriendFeed services you want to lifestream, so if you wanted your Kakuteru lifestream to strictly display Google Reader shares and Youtube videos, you would be able to do so.Okay, so what's so special about this?The ability to import your FriendFeed stream to a custom domain name with full customizationSemantic features such as autotagging of tweets and articles using Zemanta.comRelated articles & tweets are shown for each entry.Blog posts can be written and posted using textile, markdown or HTML.Kakuteru uses Disqus.com to support comments on articles & stream updates, and published articles have the ability to display Tweet-this, Digg and also Addthis.com, if you choose to enable these social components. "Me on other sites" are automatically gathered from your Friendfeed account.Oh, and did I mention it's open source?Out of the box:It's very vanilla out of the box, as you can see in the screenshot above, or by going to mikefruchter.com. Give your stream a custom feel and fit by customizing your CSS, headers and about page. Select the services you want to display, by default it will stream all of your FriendFeed services. Be sure to add your domain name and follow the instructions for pointing your dns to your Kakuteru account.Extra integration:Kakuteru allows you to seeminglessly incorporate Web 2.0 features and functions, such as your own custom Disqus forum, Feedburner feed, Dopplr schedule and social bookmarking services. No editing of code is necessary, it's a simple plug and play process.Activity stats:One of the features I particularly like is the activity stats. Kakuteru gives you two sets of stats. Daily activity, services used and hoURLy activity. Who doesn't love colorful bar graphs?Final verdict:I'm particularly not too big on self-hosted lifestreams, as I prefer the real deal with the community interaction behind it, i.e. FriendFeed. If I was looking for a custom solution, I would use this, but it's currently limited to only your FriendFeed data. If you are not on FriendFeed, this application will be of little use to you other than creating a bare-bones HTML blog post. I do like that it is semantically-driven and offers a ton of bells and whistles, and like Sweetcron, it's open source. This application showcases a lot of what Sweetcron is currently lacking, the creator has put some thought and time into it and it's obvious by looking at the feature set. Since the creator of this app took his que from Sweetcron, I would like to see this application be able to save your lifestreaming data to your server. Offer that, and you have a real winner on your hands.Kakuteru is currently in closed Beta, so be sure to register as a second round of invites will be going out soon.Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.More: louisgray.com | RSS | FriendFeed | E-mail | Cell: 408 646.2759