Blogging 115: The Blogroll

A blog’s Blogroll plays two main roles. When you add a link to your blogroll you are typically either saying:

  1. “I have found this site helpful, and I would like to share it with you” or
  2. “Here is a blog that covers some of the same subject matter as mine, and if you like my blog you might also enjoy this one.”

So politically oriented blogs tend to include like-minded others in their blogroll, for example. And blogs that are about social media often have blogroll links to others that have a similar focus.

The SMUG blogroll has been rather spartan because I haven’t updated it for about 18 months. Here’s how it looked before I began this post:

So I’m taking the opportunity of this course to both demonstrate blogroll management and to bring the SMUG blogroll up-to-date. Or actually, it’s what it looked like immediately after I did this first addition.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRvd4jJhQr0]

Here are some more blogs that fit both of the above criteria, and which I’m therefore adding to my blogroll:

These are only a Baker’s Dozen of the 230 or so feeds in my NetNewswire feed aggregator, but they’re the ones I think will be most interesting for the SMUG student body. I also added links to some of our Mayo Clinic social media sites (on Facebook, YouTube, our News Blog and our Podcast Blog.)

Also, this course is the first one for which I’m using a YouTube screencast instead of a Slideshare.net narrated slidecast. I’ll post about how I did it in a future course. I obviously have some things to learn to improve the quality of the screencast (and make it a snappier presentation), but I think having the ability to show exactly how to do things instead of narrating still frames will be really helpful in the show-and-tell courses.

Assignments:

  1. Go to the sites linked above and subscribe to their feeds. See Social Media 102 on RSS feeds if you need a refresher.
  2. If you have a blog, create or update your blogroll. You get extra credit points for adding Social Media University, Global.

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Tax Time and Weekend SMUG Class Readings

One of the nice simplifying factors about running a tuition-free online university is that you don’t need to fill out a request for 501(c)(3) status or other federal tax-related forms. With no revenue, the Internal Revenue Service isn’t interested in us. We can focus on our non-profit educational mission.

Alas, the IRS has not shown the same disinterest in my personal life, so in addition to attending some of my daughter’s basketball and volleyball games this weekend, I’ll also be doing this:

So while I’m meeting my obligations to the U.S. Treasury and the State of Minnesota, it’s a good opportunity for you to catch up on some SMUG homework and extra-credit readings:

First, here are the most recent SMUG class offerings, in the Podcasting track

During the past week your Chancellor was continuing his education (and hopefully helped some others with theirs) at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit 2008 in San Francisco. Here are some of those highlights, and while they don’t involve direct homework assignments, you will find them helpful for your capstone project:

I’ll also maybe let you know how long TurboTax took. Of course no self-respecting do-it-yourself on-line Chancellor would do anything but electronic filing. I’ve used TurboTax before (though usually not this close to the deadline), and I like how it carries forward my information from year to year. Hopefully its servers won’t be slammed by fellow procrastinators.

Scoble Media Relations 2008 Keynote

I’m blogging from the front row of Bulldog Reporter’s Media Relations 2008 Summit, as Robert Scoble begins his keynote. I like how Robert starts his presentations by gauging the experience of the audience, so he can speak at a level that will be meaningful to them.

Robert says Web 3.0 is “the death of the page.” An example is Twittervision. He’s giving the group (more than half of whom haven’t been in Twitter) a tour of his life. Most of them haven’t seen FriendFeed either. Robert is on 20 different services in what he calls “the social media starfish” and Friendfeed brings them together. Here is his FriendFeed and here is mine.

Robert is using Sliderocket for his presentation, which is an online version of Powerpoint. It allows collaborative editing. It’s like a wiki for presentations.

Scoble uses Google Reader for reading his RSS feeds to create “a river of news.” Techmeme tells him the big stories. The thing that just changed in Google Reader a few months ago is the addition of friends, which lets people share news.

He talked about “the friend divide” which means that people who are new to a service aren’t going to get as much value out of it because they don’t have a lot of friends yet. The solution: Get friends.

Upcoming.org is another site for seeing what is…you guessed it…upcoming.

Robert closed with a demonstration of Qik, which live streams video from his cell phone. It’s a TV station in your pocket. The minute he turns off his cell phone it becomes a recorded archive on the Qik site. It only works with Nokia phones right now, I think.

Robert’s take-away: The word-of-mouth network is hyper-efficient. Even in the 1980s when he worked at a camera store, 80 percent of his sales came from word-of-mouth. With the web today, it’s a world-wide network for word-of-mouth. That’s what I’ll be talking about at my presentation.

Go to the Bulldog Media Relations group to see more of the pictures from Robert’s presentation.

Media Relations 2008

I’m heading back to San Francisco tomorrow, for the second time this year. I’ll be attending Bulldog Reporter’s Media Relations 2008 conference. Here’s the schedule, which looks really interesting. I’m part of a panel on Tuesday called “Getting Personal:Telling your Story in Social Media: Facebook, LinkedIn and More.”

Seems kind of weird to have two colons in a program title. Is that even allowable in English?

I hope to be liveblogging many of the sessions, wireless access permitting. I’m particularly looking forward to:

  • Keynotes by Robert Scoble, Charlie Rose and Duncan Wardle (from Disney theme parks)
  • Katie Paine’s session on measuring online media impact
  • Other technology, new media, social media sessions
  • Mike Moran from IBM’s address called “Doing it wrong quickly: What corporations need from PR in Today’s Transforming Marketplace” also looks provocative.

I’ll be sharing highlights here.

Being a Facebook Celebrity

Can you be a celebrity without having any fans?

In Facebook, I guess you can.

leecelebrity2.jpg

(Click the thumbnail to see the full-size screen shot, or better yet, click here to see my Celebrity/Public Figure page, in the Writer category.)

I had originally tried a workaround for the personal/professional Facebook separation by creating a group called Lee Aase’s Professional Contacts. Establishing a brand page for your professional persona looks like it might be a better way. People can become “fans” without being “friends.” You don’t have to approve it. You can put your email address on your Celebrity page.

So if you want to put forth a professional representation of yourself, you can. You can upload videos and photos. You can post links to some of your most significant news coverage or blog posts. And you don’t have to worry about the various applications you’ve installed on your personal profile cluttering your celebrity page.

Seeing that Scoble and Jeremiah have fan/brand pages in the Critic and Writer categories, I decided to give it a shot. I looked at the Facebook Terms of Service and didn’t see any requirement for a certain level of notoriety before someone could be a celebrity. So if two of my Facebook friends, Jeremiah and Scoble, can have both user accounts and celebrity pages, hopefully I won’t run afoul of the TOS with my celebrity page.

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