Marketing
EntreCard, Technorati and RSS feeds
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/10/2008 - 19:00Pinay Mommy Online is looking to build out a 100 EntreCard drop list. It looks like an interesting project to build links back to her blog, as well as provide links to other blogs and find a set of blogs worth reading and dropping EntreCards on.
She says that what she is specifically looking for is “mommy bloggers, digital scrappers, money making blogs and blogs that talks about page rank and SEO”. While I read a fair amount of mommy blogs, I’m a daddy blogger. I do talk about page rank, SEO, and even making money from time to time, but I suspect I may not be her target demographic.
Nonetheless, I’m going to highlight her project, and if she, or any of her readers chose to read me regularly, that would be nice. Random Thoughts expands on this and talks about the three criteria to make this successful, an EntreCard account, a Technorati account and an RSS feed.
The idea is that you should drop cards on people’s EntreCard accounts, add them as a Technorati favorite and then subscribe to their RSS feed with your favorite feed reader.
So, my EntreCard account is here. If you use EntreCard, please drop a card on my widget on the right, add me to your favorites and if you’re interested, set up an advertisement. I generally approve most advertisements, but if the ad wouldn’t look good on my site, I might end up not approving it.
My Technorati account can be found here. It points to Orient Lodge, Twitter and a few other sites that I have. Adding me as a favorite on Technorati would be greatly appreciated.
For my RSS feed, the best feed to use is probably this. Adding it to any feed reader you have would also be greatly appreciated.
I will check out various blog that are participating, drop some cards, add some favorites, and perhaps even get into some interesting discussions.
I know that some people don’t like that I use Drupal here for my blog, which has a completely separate comment system from the big ones, and you have to register here. Yet, registering and adding a comment would be appreciated, or sending me a note at aldon dot hynes at orient dash lodge dot com would also nice.
Finally, if you join, add a link back to my blog, as well as to Pinay Mommy Online and Random Thoughts. I hope a bunch of EntreCarders participate.
Update:
Here is a list of participants:
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PEXLINKS TRIPLE LOVE PARTICIPANTS
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Mark Kingdon to become new Linden Lab CEO
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 04/22/2008 - 19:58At the Metanomics session Monday the 21st, Mitch Wagner of Information Week and Gartner Fellow Steve Prentice expressed concerns about the future of Second Life. As a business collaboration tool, it is loosing ground to competitors like QWAQ.
Yet the back channel seemed more concerned with whether or not Mitch at Steve were analyzing Linden Lab properly. Is Second Life an application that needs to be constrained? Is it a platform that can serve many applications? Is it a community based upon a platform? Much of this will be questions that need to be answered by the new CEO.
Today, the new CEO was announced. His name is Mark Kingdon. He has been CEO at Organic, a leading online marketing firm, since 2001. During his time there Organic doubled in size.
Everyone is pouring over comments Mark has made, blog posts, interviews, etc., to get a sense about what he will bring to Second Life. Yet the view of what Linden Lab was looking for can be found in an interview Philip Rosedale did with Reuters in March where he said they were “someone who has experience with and a passion for growing this type of company — a software platform company.”
Presently, residents of Second Life expressed cautious optimism, waiting to see what sort of changes Kingdon will bring. Some of this reflects the different views about what Second Life is all about that different residents have.
A good summary of Mark’s background, and some of his articles can be found at ClickZ
The blog post from Linden Lab about Mark can be found here.
Updates
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 04/18/2008 - 10:46As I go through my emails, there are all kinds of different things I want to highlight. I’ve attempted to sort them and put them into context.
Connecticut Political News
John Hartwell, who is running for State Senate reports that he has picked up the last few donations he needed to qualify for public financing and is now spending his time communicating with voters about the important issues facing the state. You can get more information at John Hartwell’s campaign website.
Connecticut Teach Against Genocide reports that the genocide education bill, House Bill 5595, has passed the Education and Appropriations Committees and is moving on to the full house.
Sheila at Woodbridge Dems reports having been called by Mountain West Research, a firm that has been accused in the past of doing push polling for Lieberman. I’m curious, has anyone else been recently called by Mountain West here in Connecticut?
She also mentioned a great report by the League of Women Voters about Emerging Media and Internet Issues: E-Democracy for Connecticut. It is a great report worth reading.
One Connecticut has sent out an email about a bill, 5618, in the Connecticut General Assembly regarding the Husky program. They are encouraging people to contact the Insurance and Real Estate Committee and urge them to pass it as well, and without any amendments!
Beyond Connecticut
Project Laundry List is reporting that Colorado passed a Right to Dry law. HB 1270 would prohibit Homeowners Associations from restricting energy efficiency measures. They also announce that April 19th is National Hanging Out Day.
Jubilee USA reports that the Jubilee Act, (HR 2634) has passed the House and is now headed on to the Senate. Jubilee USA is seeking third world debt cancellation.
Global Kids and the International Human Rights Law Institute are holding ICC101, Learn the Basics about the International Criminal Court on Thursday April 24, 7-9:30PM EDT. For more information, check out the Justice Center online.
Protests
On April 25th, President Bush will attend a fundraiser at Henry Kissinger’s house in Kent. CT Opposes the War is organizing a protest. 9 AM to 1 PM at 50 Henderson Road, Kent.
Dream for Darfur is organizing a Protest at Coke Headquarters on Sunday April 27th from 2:30- 3:30 pm at 711 5th Ave on the northeast corner of 55th St in New York City.
The spoke and sung word
There will be a production of Hair at the Palace Theatre in Waterbury on May 9th. Details can be found here.
I got an email that Vienna Teng will be performing at the Green Apple Festival at Central Park, Rumsey Playfield, in New York City Sunday, 20 April 2008 at 12:00 pm. I heard Vienna last year at Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. If you’re in New York, you should stop by and hear her.
Lauren Doninger wrote about The Moth, a not-for-profit storytelling organization. I pointed out LibriVox as well. Both are great sites for picking up stories to listen to.
Digital Social Media
digitialmediawire has two interesting articles up right now about YouTube. The first is that YouTube Says User Partners Have So Far Earned $1 Million. Then, there is the article that Egal, the company that created Lonelygirl15, has raised $5 million in its first round of financing. I’ve been a fan of Lonelygirl15 for quite a while, and I’m pleased to see them get funding.
Shelly Palmer at JackMyers.com has another interesting article up. This time she’s writing about why she doesn’t think it’s
an even remotely credible prediction that you could have 345 million digital television ready (able to interpret and receive signals from local broadcast television signals) handsets in the market by 2012. As a person that shoots video with my cellphone and sends them to friends and to the web, I think she’s on the right track, even though I would have liked to hear her talk more about the disruptive nature of people shooting their own videos and sharing them online.
and finally
Leslie Weinberg writes about the Hope in Motion, Walk, Run, & Ride 2008 fundraiser for Stamford Hospital’s Bennet Cancer Center. The event will take place on June 1st. Contribute if you can.
Serious about Games
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/28/2008 - 21:13Today, I attended Metanomics session with David Wortley of the Serious Games Institute. Wortley spoke a bit about the Serious Games Institute(SGI). I was busy with a bunch of other things at the same time and didn’t give it as much attention as I would have liked. The one thing that jumped out at me was their use of SGI’s use of Forterra. They like Forterra because of its integration with other tools. Hopefully, Linden Lab and/or OpenSim will come up with tools to facilitate creating better objects in the Second Life/OpenSim space.
This was followed by the discussion about Rights and Responsibilities in Virtual Worlds with Jonathan F. Fanton, President of the MacArthur Foundation, Robin Harper, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development from Linden Lab, and Jack Balkin, professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School.
The time was too short and the discussion was too broad to be very interesting. If anything, all that it did was reinforce my opinion about the Lindens being out of touch with the community they created. Robin Linden seemed especially concerned with the privacy. She used it as an excuse for why Linden Lab was not making their jurisprudence more transparent. She also expressed concern about people gathering information about who is visiting their site in SL, and didn’t address the question about how it compared to web sites where even more information could be gathered.
Then, out of the blue on a completely different list, I received an email about Lufthansa’s effort to get people to think about all the European cities they fly to. It is a great little game where you can see how well you know your European geography and improve a little on it.
Here are my initial results:
It seems like a great illustration of a brand using a game to give something back to people interested in the brand.
Attention Data
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 01/25/2008 - 16:03718 unread emails. Following 183 people on Twitter. 467 friends in Facebook. 102 of them have recently updated their profiles. 145 unread messages in Facebook. 567 unprocessed updates and requests. 298 RSS feeds in Bloglines. 128 friends in Second life. 58 friends and 179 admirers in MyBlogLog. 70 friends and 40 communities in BlogCatalog. Spock, Wink, Plaxo, Pandora. The list seems endless.
I remember years ago teachers asking for my complete undivided attention. Now, everyone wants my constant partial attention. It seems unmanageable. Beyond that, I want to get as much constant partial attention from others as possible as well.
To get other people’s attention, I make sure that when I do something, it gets out to various places. I send text messages from my cellphone to Facebook and Twitter. Facebook also feeds twitter, in the event that I put something on Facebook directly. Both of them feed jaiku. Twitter feeds MyBlogLog, Spock and Plaxo. When I put up a post on Orient Lodge it feeds Facebook, in a couple different ways, as well as Twitter and Jaiku. When I take a picture with my cellphone, it goes to Facebook and Flickr. From Flickr I can send it to Orient Lodge. When I shoot video from cellphone, it goes to Facebook, Youtube and blip.tv. Blip can send it on to Flickr and to Orient Lodge.
There are probably a lot of other connections I’ve established that I’m overlooking right now. Confusing? You bet it is. It makes it even harder to track what is where.
So, what gets my attention? Well, this shifts frequently. I’m doing a lot in Second Life right now. I have TwitterBox running so I stay on top of my incoming Tweats and Second Life IMs. I’ve been playing a bit with Spock recently. Mostly I see tweats there that I’m already seeing in Second Life. However, I do see people’s updates in Spock. My experiences with Plaxo Pulse are fairly similar.
Right now, the feed that probably gets the most data is my Plaxo feed. However, since it is listening to a bunch of different feeds, it gets redundant data. So, as an example, 18 hours ago, I put up my post about Clinton, Edwards and the FISA legislation. 17 hours ago, Twitter picked it up. Then Plaxo Pulse picked up on both the link on the blog, as well as the link in Twitter. Four hours ago Jaiku picked up the feed from Twitter and then three hours ago, it picked it up from my blog directly. So, the same key piece of information shows up in my Plaxo Pulse four times.
This illustrates a few different things. One is the latency that it takes for information to get out through the network. It illustrates the duplication of messages. Yet not all the messages are duplicates. In some cases I post a quick message in Twitter without posting a message on my blog.
So, how do we aggregate, sort, filter, and make meaningful all this information without introducing more latency? How do we add something new so that, for example, if I find a new friend, I can get him added in all my social networks, get his statuses on Twitter, Facebook, track his RSS feed and so on? And for that matter, how do we plug it into other systems, like Pandora so that if my friends twitter or write blog posts about music, I can hear related music? I don’t know, but it does look like as the data that comes at us starts coming more quickly, we need to come up with better ways of processing attention data. Perhaps most importantly, how do we do it in a way so that people don’t simply turn off their computers and communication devices and walk away?
