Jennifer - Jan 0, 2008
Yup, I agree - this is a good way of using links. :) That’s how I try to do it too - give the gist of the information and then link-back to the original content. It’s like giving people just a taste to whet their appetites. They can be satisfied with that nibble, or they can click to get more. It’s their choice.
I’ve seen a lot of people create link posts where there’s no comment just links and these are not effective. They’re not effective because they require the audience to click through and read the entire post to see what you thought was of interest. Instead I’m going to choose key paragraphs and link to the article. If you like the paragraph then simply click on the link and you’ll get the full article within it’s context. The user-generated video content tsunami has clearly changed the shape of the online environment we live in today. In fact, the growth of UG video so far is turning the Internet into a non-interactive medium. It’s created the quagmire we’re in today because the industry is treating all online video the same — meshing UG video with professionally produced brand videos. Even if consumers want to sit back and watch a monkey juggling video online, that doesn’t mean they don’t want to lean forward when they visit Web sites to get information about that car or house they’re thinking about buying. Source  I believe it’s not about gazing into a crystal ball to predict what ad format will produce the greatest CPMs. In an industry as exciting, creative and fast-moving as ours, it seems we are all becoming as distracted as the consumers we are trying to attract. But we need to remember the basic premise that advertising is communication of valuable information. And for it to be effective, we need to communicate the message multiple times in multiple ways; we especially need to recognize that every time the message needs to be a fresh exciting experience that engages and resonates with target customers, motivating them to take action. David Ogilvy once said, “What really convinces consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.†Source Instead, go to work tomorrow worrying about something even more important. Rather than how many see your commercials, worry about how much time they spend with them. Source Let me know whether you like this style of posting. Now to go on with traditional feedreading.
Rox - Jan 5, 2008
Update - comments as homage to twitter I’ve been using it for an hour and no crashes with the most recent update. Carry on.
I was so going to love twhirl, but it is crashing on me in Leopard. What platform are you running it on?
OTOH, I like to colors of the interface. :-)
For those of you familiar with twitter there are a number of ways of keeping up with information and my current favourite is Twhirl. What I love about using Twhirl is how well it works. At first it feels clunky. You’ve got to download adobe air, then you’ve got to download twhirl and once this is done you’ve got to get used to the user interface. I went from twitterific to here and the transition was relatively painless. I missed one or two of the keyboard shortcuts. Since then I’ve grown to enjoy using it for three key reasons. The first of these is that you don’t need to restart it as there are no caching issues. For someone who tweets as much as I do and follows as many a lot of time would be sent reseting twitterific. Not with Twhirl. It’s got over 5500 tweets right now and no sign of slowing down. The second feature i love is how you can choose whether to @, DM, Favourite or re-tweet. Anyone using twitter is familiar with the first three. The re-tweet feature is fun. It allows you to retweet verbatim quite easily. I don’t see it used often luckily but it’s a nice gimmik. The third feature that I enjoy are the shortcut keys specific to this program. R for replies, F for friends, D for direct messages and then there are two or three other such short cuts that could be of interest. As an aside you’ve got the filter option although having not used it I can’t comment. It’s a nice package and anyone using Aero should give it a try.
I like the social media and I spend a lot of time with them. Occasionally i meet the people involved in real life and so the social media are no longer quite as interesting, although of course I still have fun with them. One of the things I’ve been thinking is the term social media girlfriend. What would require for a person to be a social media girlfriend? What does it require in the physical world? Conversation for a start. It would entail many conversations and discusssions, so far Twitter and seesmic both provide that. I wake up in the morning, hardly able to open my eyes yet I open up the laptop and type “good morning world” to which i get a good morning back. There are currently two social media girls that wish me a good morning. Melissah in Australia is one of them. Maggieconv in the US is the second. The three of us are in different timezones but we wish each other good meals, nice evenings, good mornings and sweet dreams. We’re friends in the same sense that flat mates may be but with one big difference. We are not within the same physical space. We’re separated by distance, over a thousand kilometers when we’re lucky, over 20,000 when we’re not. That’s unimportant. It’s the idea that we share our daily lives through text messaging, data access on phones, websites, blogs and even facebook. To some people this is an abstract idea. Why would you want to meet people online in such a way. Well in fact chatrooms were like this a decade ago. IRC is like that today. There’s one major difference. We’re not anonymous. We know how the people look, we know how they sound. We know when they’re happy and we know when things are going well. We also know when they’re going badly. If both physical and virtual friends are both inhabiting the same spaces nowadays then what discounts those whom we don’t know from another context? If I meet you at the cinema and we become friends then everyone would accept that. Online though people wouldn’t. Of course that is changing. For me the distinction is fading since I have met so many of these people in real life, occasionally quite a few at once. Anyway part of the reason for this post is that I was called a flirt online, told that half my seesmic videos answering one girl’s posts were flirts. It kicked off a conversation about flirting and that’s fun. we’re using the social media and we’re flirting. That’s a great idea. The idea that we’re flirting with people across a new medium. That’s where the idea of a social media girlfriend came into place. I saw two friends flirting across both seesmic and Twitter and I thought that this was the perfect opportunity to come out with the idea. Anyway to cut a long story short I was meaning to type @melissah but started to write @maggieconv instead. Would she be more likely to be a social media girlfriend? We added each other on Facebook so there’s a chance she c0uld be a social media girlfriend.
This weekend I went on a social media binge. A social media binge is the moment when you forfeit sleep and the rest of reality for a few hours as part of the social media. For the purpose of this particular challenge I set myself two pass times. The first of these was to twitter and the second was to seesmic. If you read previous posts you’ll find out what twitter. As to seesmic that’s another story. It’s close to being instant messaging with videos. Normal video chats are live. I talk and as I talk you can respond and interrupt me. In seesmic you talk, type a title and share the video. After that another person speaks, presses stop and posts. Over the period of a few hours many more posts appear and as they do so the conversation evolves exponentially. All of these videos is available to every over member so there is a great degree of overheard conversation. This overheard conversation is where the fun begins. I’ve seen girls dancing, guys act like zombies, discussions about literature and social media. I’ve seen so many things that it feels like the social media equivalent of a music festival. Watch seesmix clips on youtube to get a better idea.
Today I went over to try the ASUS EEE and it’s too small. Its got the feel of a child’s toy more than anything else. I’m a touch typist, I don’t look at the keyboard when I’m typing, I appreciate feminine beauty as it walks past me in the computer room. I look around and the content keeps appearing on the screen. What this means is that getting used to such a small keyboard would take quite a bit of time. I prefer a thumb typing device. That doesn’t mean I don’t like the idea. I love small devices that I can take with me. That’s why my coat weighs so much.
Jennifer - Nov 5, 2007
Hmm yes. Very true. The TWiT family has done this to me many a Saturday, also!
Podcrastinating, when you put off doing something because you prefer listening to a podcast instead. It’s when you know that you should be doing a number of things but because you want to listen to conversations you listen to podcasts instead. Those guilty for taking a lot of my time would be From our own Foreign correspondent, quite a few of the TWIT podcasts and many more. It’s not that you’re not learning because you are. The problem is when you spend ten-twelve hours listening to podcasts rather than getting on with the tasks at hand.
Today I really wish i could vote for whether I like or hate the adverts that facebook are displaying in my news feed. The reason for this is simple. Whilst everyone else is complaining about how advertisers are destroying their privacy with targeted advertising I find the opposite is true. I’m really angry with Facebook advertising The Sun in my newsfeed, especially since there is no evidence of me enjoying tabloid crap anywhere on the worldwide web. I’m angry for two reasons. The first one is that they dare to put such a crappy newspaper in my feed. The second one is how they advertise it. If they advertised quality news articles then I could forgive them but to advertise how they intend to invade the privacy of the stars is plain wrong and stupid. For this reason I was thinking of using just the portable version of facebook but to no avail. You can’t accept event invites so within two hours of deciding to ignore the full version I was back. I want to be able to accept events via mobile devices. I also want to be able to say that I hate certain adverts. If I can say I hate news from certain friends then why can’t I say I hate the adverts. I want to let them know that their adverts are crap and that I dislike their products. Facebook If you’re reading this let me show which adverts i hate. It’d be worth your while.