Category: Social Media

YouTube Deep-Linking Example

In yesterday’s highlights I called attention to a new feature from YouTube that allows deep-linking to a specific point within a video.

I decided to try it, because I wanted to show some key parts of a couple of videos during a presentation for which I had a limited time. The total time for the two videos is about eight minutes. I encourage you to watch the entire videos, but by deep linking to four separate spots I could show some highlights within the presentation.

This video is from an interview I did with Rhonda King, in which she explains how she used an online support group to gather information about her son Trevor’s condition. She later explained the decision she and her husband made to seek a second opinion for Trevor, and what happened when she sent an email to Michael Ackerman, M.D., Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic cardiologist who specializes in diagnosing and treating Long QT syndrome and other heart rhythm abnormalities. She also describes her experience in getting Trevor examined by specialists at Mayo for his other medical conditions.

Social Media 111: Customizing Your iGoogle Page

In Social Media 102 we introduced you to RSS, which is a powerful way for you to keep tabs on what’s new in dozens (if not 100 or more) of Web sites and blogs that provide RSS feeds. Instead of having to go to the sites, you can use Newsgator or NetNewswire or Google Reader, and have the updates sent to you.

iGoogle is an alternative that enables you to embed what Google calls “gadgets” featuring the latest content from your favorite sites, all on a single page. It lets you, in effect, create a simple, free blog monitoring dashboard.

I recently heard that Yahoo! said as many as half of all MyYahoo! users never customize it from the default settings. I expect that may also be true of iGoogle. That’s why I made this video screencast, to show just how easy it is to customize iGoogle, to have the latest posts from the key blogs you’re monitoring available to you with a single click.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B7u49Ky_oo]

Homework Assignment:

  1. Sign into your gmail account (or get one if you haven’t yet)
  2. Go to iGoogle.
  3. Click the “Add Stuff” link (on the right side), and then the “Add feed or gadget” link in the left column.
  4. When the box pops up, paste in a URL from any blog post. If you like, for example, you could use this one: https://www.social-media-university-global.org/2008/10/27/smug-reading-list-102708/ then hit the “Add” button.
  5. When you get the confirmation that the feed has been added, click the “Back to iGoogle Home” link, and you will see that the gadget containing this RSS feed has been placed in the upper left corner of your page.
  6. Repeat the steps for each blog you want added to your monitoring dashboard.

Please note that while iGoogle lets you just enter the URL from a single blog post, and figures out the related RSS feed you want to monitor, you also can paste in the URL from an RSS feed in step 4. So, for example, I did a Blogpulse search for posts mentioning “Mayo Clinic” and got this URL:

http://blogpulse.com/rss?query=%22Mayo+Clinic%22&sort=date&operator=

Which I pasted into a gadget and now it sits on the front page of my iGoogle.

Please note also that you can edit the number of feeds that go into your gadget, increasing to up to 9:

This will be most helpful for those feeds (like Blogpulse or Technorati searches on keywords) for which you expect more frequent updates.

Alltop has several pre-configured pages like this, as described in this post. But you can’t tailor those. You can configure iGoogle to exactly meet your needs, though, and as our SMUG motto says:

It’s Not That Hard!

Alltop: RSS without the RSS

I’ve been getting @GuyKawasaki ‘s Tweets about Alltop, but until today I hadn’t clicked through to find out what it was all about.

In essence, Alltop is a pre-loaded set of RSS feeds by subject, in which Guy and his fellow curators have sought some of the top sites and aggregated them into one page.

I was pleased to see that MayoClinic.com was in the top left corner of the health.alltop.com page.

There’s a PR page, as well as others on homeschooling, Cancer, Lifehacks, Christianity, DIY, Science, WordPress, Blogging, College Basketball and many others. More are being added at least every week.

What’s great about Alltop is you can just use it, and you don’t have to waste time customizing. In fact, you can’t customize it, except that you can hide particular feeds you don’t want to see.

As you use a page, when you mouse over a link you see a brief excerpt from the feed, and then you can decide whether to click through to read the whole thing.

And when you use Alltop, it keeps track of which pages you’ve visited, so you have a built-in dashboard of your feeds.

If you’re already using a feed reader, you may not like Alltop because you’ve chosen your feeds. But if you haven’t really figured out RSS, Alltop is a great way to start. And if you want to help other people get the functionality of RSS without having to learn the lingo, point them to Alltop.

So I guess that for about 90 percent of the Web user world, Alltop provides a tremendous service.

Check out Alltop today!

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Blogwell Next Week in San Jose

Through my role at Mayo Clinic, I am a member of the Blog Council, and next week we’re hosting an event called BlogWell. The senior execs in charge of social media from these companies are scheduled to speak:

  • Cisco Systems
  • Graco
  • The Home Depot
  • Intel
  • Kaiser Permanente
  • UPS
  • Walmart
  • Wells Fargo

They are going to be presenting case studies on how they do corporate social media, and talking about these topics:

  • Social media ROI
  • Obtaining management buy-in
  • Monitoring the conversation
  • Disclosure
  • Legal issues
  • Video blogging
  • Internal blogging
  • Branding
  • Creating great content
  • Participating in the conversation
  • Blogging in regulated industries
  • Engaging detractors
  • Dealing with negative word of mouth
  • BtoB blogging

The cost of the event is $200. I’m bummed that I won’t be able to attend myself because of a previous family commitment, but one of my Mayo colleagues will be joining the fun. If you’re based near San Jose or can get there on the 28th, I think you’d find this event well worth it.

Here is where you register.

Talking Social Media and Health Care at MSP

I have a three-hour layover at MSP, so I’m taking advantage of the time to have a chat with Albert Maruggi for a talk he’s giving to the Mississippi Hospital Association in a month or so.

He’s going to be shooting some video; hopefully he will upload it to YouTube so I can embed it here.

It’s a good thing we’re both in our 40s, which explains why we would both have time to talk about this kind of stuff on a Friday night.