Tag Archives: Flickr

From The Mouth Of A Guru: What The 2010 Web Will Look Like

: Image via CrunchBase

Robert Scoble is a one of the thought leaders and innovators on the web today. He is a smart, engaging guy who gets around to listen and exchange ideas with many of the other web leaders. Scoble’s a great favorite of mine and when he speaks, I listen. And so do a lot of other people.

On his blog today ,Scobleizer — Exploring the 2010 Web Scoble talks about going back to basics and refocusing on his blog. He talks about what some have called his obsession with Twitter and Facebook, where he has, in fact, been a major player. Scoble explains this by saying “All my fun experiments were over on Twitter, Facebook, or friendfeed. You could see that. Mike Arrington even tried to do a friendfeed intervention last December.” So now, Scoble is trying to bring that sense of fun, experimentation and real time zest into his newly re-invented blog. He is also trying to show the rest of us now to do the same, in real time.

(About a week ago I posted From The Mouth of A Guru: Why You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet which has many of the same caveats about the value of focusing your work on your own blog and letting Twitter be your outpost.)

In that vein Scoble lays out what he thinks the future of the web will look like:

“1. It’s real time. Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed are all moving toward architectures and displays that refresh in real time, or let you see what’s happening right now. We are at the extreme beginnings of that trend. You really should watch the video of the panel discussion I moderated on the state of real time search to get a sense of where this is going. That panel discussion will be remembered for years as a key point. One of the panel members runs Facebook search team. Yes, Facebook is working on real time search. (That video is in two parts since the meeting ran almost two hours long. I really do recommend watching it. Part I is here. Part II is here.).
2. It’s mobile. You’ll see this more next week when the Where 2.0 conference rolls into town, but if 40,000 iPhone apps hasn’t convinced you yet, nothing will. On Monday I’m meeting with Nokia to find out the latest.
3. It’s decentralized. Look at my behaviors. I’m all over the place. Six years ago I did only one thing: blog. Now I Flickr. YouTube. Seesmic. Friendfeed. Facebook. Twitter. And many more. Go to Retaggr and see all the places I’m at.
4. Pages now built out of premade blocks. You build these pages by copying a line of Javascript code to your template. This is very simple once you see how to do it, but for someone who doesn’t know code, or where in the template to go, this is VERY daunting. Silicon Valley has NOT made it simple enough yet for the mainstream to build highly useful pages. See the friendfeed block to the right of my words? I added that by copying and pasting from the friendfeed widget page. If you know where to look a TON of cool pre-built blocks like this are available for you to put on your website or blog.
5. It’s social. This seems obvious to anyone on Twitter or Facebook, but how many businesses add their customers to their pages? Not many. Silicon Valley has done a horrible job so far of explaining why adding people to your websites matters.
6. It’s smart. We’re seeing more and more smarts added to the web every day. Tonight Wolfram’s new search engine turned on. Have you played with it? That’s the 2010 web and check out what you can do with it.
7. Hybrid infrastructure. When I visited 12seconds.tv in Santa Cruz they told me they were using a hybrid approach: they own a rack of servers but they also use Amazon’s S3 to “cloud burst” or take up the slack for files that are popular…

PR People: I even made a place you can pitch me on 2010 web ideas. It’s interesting that a bunch of people are subscribed to that room — probably lots of tech bloggers looking for ideas.”

I put in that last link so those of you who are bloggers could go fishing there for ideas.

I’m certainly going to watching the evolution of Scobles newlly updated blog and trying some of the same tools and strategies myself. Are you? If you do, please leave a comment and tell us what works for you and what doesn’t. We all in this giant web conversation together, now that Web 3.o and the interconnections of social media and dynamic linking have arrived

Picking A Visual Desktop App for Tracking Your Favorite Social Sites

: Image by luc legay via Flickr

There are all kinds of apps popping up to help you keep in touch with co-workers, friends and, of course, your favorite social sites at a glance. Niche connection sites like Yammer and Socialcast let you connect with people in your organization. Blellow is a new and promising communication and collaboration tool for communities of interest, like entrepreneurs or web developers. It’s getting plenty of buzz at the moment. Guy Kawasaki even Tweeted today about having his own Twitter at http://laconi.ca/trac/; best I could tell, kind of a bare bones, do-it-yourself Twitter. But the epicenter of connection right now is for social sites, apps enabling the second by second buzz or real time news, trendy happenings, mainly on the web, gossip and daily trivia, like, as Guy Kawasaki puts it “my cat rolled over” or, more interestingly, and conveying that you are definitely in the loop, “I’m on the plane from Barcelona.” Duct Tape Marketing, today, even explained how you could set up your own social media dashboard.

The One Page Social Media Dashboard

I looked at it, and, although doable it seemed like a bit of a project. I’m leaning more towards Jennifer Van Grove‘s preferred screen Skimmer: Visual Desktop App for Tracking Your Favorite Social Sites. Here’s how she sees it:

“You’ve got Facebook friends, Twitter followers, Flickr Flickr reviews photos, and probably plenty of other social sites that you keep your eye on. So how do you keep up and engage with all the new content that’s constantly being added by friends?

You could try social aggregators and lifestreaming options like FriendFeed FriendFeed reviews or Strands, but if those are just too much, but interacting with Facebook and Twitter updates isn’t quite enough, you can find a happy medium in Skimmer — an Adobe AIR desktop client for Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and Blogger.

Skimmer, which launches in beta today, is equal parts content aggregator, lifestream, and status updater with a penchant for visual stimuli. The site aims to strip away some of the bloated feature sets of other desktop apps, enhance your overall viewing experience, and keep the content dynamic but limited to five of the most popular social sites.

Once you download and install the application, you can connect your Twitter Twitter reviews, Facebook Facebook reviews, Flickr, YouTube YouTube reviews, and Blogger accounts to start getting a stream-like view of your contacts’ updates. You can even view TwitPics in-line, filter your feed by keyword, service, or contact groups, and cross-post status updates to Facebook and Twitter. Skimmer also offers a few viewing and customization options, so you can alter the size and color scheme of the app to make it fit your personal preferences.

Where Skimmer really shines is via the Flickr and YouTube photo and video viewing experiences. Not only is the application’s design sleek, but it provides a superb, freshly-windexed window into content from both sites.

With Flickr, you can view you or your friends’ photos (quickly skim through sets or the entire photostream), view counts, and comments, as well as watch slideshows, with an experience is arguably more visually impressive than Flickr itself. With YouTube, users can view videos, comments, tags, views, and ideally do the same for videos from friends.

Skimmer is very obviously a beta service, and even though some of the bugs diminish from the overall experience, it’s still an interesting and entertaining desktop application that doesn’t try to do too much.”

Let me know if you set this up, and how you like it. I’m off now, I wish to Barcelona, but, more likely, to watch my cat roll over. ( But, come May, to D.C. for web business building, and possibly in June to Barcelona.)

How Do I Do This Faster & Easier? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies

Image via CrunchBase

If you’re a “newbie” just wanting to “dip your toe” into the swirling waters of the blogosphere, presumably you’ve already read How do I Do This? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies which attempts to set out the very basics of how to get started. If you’ve gotten that far along and have a WordPress account and have your site installed and set up, I’m going to tell you an easy way to start writing your blog.

Writing your content on WordPress. Once you’ve gotten your feet wet and are comfortable with the program – perhaps a month of two from when you begin – you should probably try to put in greater originality and more of your own thoughts and stories. But to begin, I would suggest the following 3 support steps for you:

Set Up A Reader to scour the Net for material that interests you and about which you have some comment, thought or opinion to make.

Blogging takes time. And keeping up with news and other blogs so you have something to blog about takes time. So it’s highly recommended you set up a Google reader, or any other kind of reader to bring blogs or your favorite kind of information and news to you, instead of you going out and searching the Net to track it down. (This will also allow you to get more familiar with the blogosphere: the most popular blogs and bloggers, the most popular topics, the different styles which bloggers use.)

Just go to Google and create an account, or log in if you already have one and get the free reader. Go to your favorite sites and look for an orange button indicating a feed. Then you put the RSS feeds of your favorite sites into the Google Reader. Sometimes this process is automated so you will be asked how you want the feed delivered and in this instance you would select Google Reader. This will save an enormous amount of time for you. And I’m told successful bloggers peruse a huge number of sites daily. ( I could give you some numbers but it can get kind of scary how much the top bloggers read and how hard they work.)

Shortcut – Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web

A Press This bookmark you can add to your toolbar provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog as you’re surfing the web:

The Press This bookmarklet is found at the right bottom of the Write Posts panel. Drag and drop it onto your Favorites, Bookmarks, or Links list or toolbar. To activate, simply click on the “Press It” bookmarklet link. A window will open with the URI of the current site displayed, and the site’s title as your post title. Here’s what it looks like:

For example, if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it’ll magically extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post. Not to mention using it with regular text posts where you just copy and paste the portions you want to comment on, write your own thoughts in and Voila! You’re done.

Well, not exactly, if you really want to take your blog to another level, make it more useful and have it stand out, consider using the Zemanta plug in, which I believe is an almost brand new release:

Zemanta enables you to blog smarter with instant smart links, pictures, tags and more. The ability to automatically add a relevant graphic to the top of your blog adds interest for your users. Also, as Zementa puts it:

Save Time…with relevant content from all over the web delivered instantly as you blog.
Build Traffic…with immediate tagged links created between your posts and others sharing related conversations.

These features bring increased value to your blog. Plus using these fast and easy techniques will build up your confidence and get you moving in the right direction…..towards a higher level level of blogging

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Tag Archives: Flickr

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