planet sab

Not everybody's friend: contact policy

Two things made me write this post, first the amount of friends request and the type which consume a lot of time lately, and recent great posts and videos by Mr. Gray, Mrs. Barone and KommonKraft:

Here is how I decide whether to be your friend on any platform (except Twitter, I'll get to that in a sec).
If I don't know you, I won't be your friend. Yes, even on Facebook. It doesn't matter if we have 137 friends in common, if I have never heard of you, I'll ignore you. Why? Just because. I actually like to use the service, not just boast my numbers.

On Twitter, I am a bit more flexible. If you have no URL and no bio your out, but otherwise I'll check your blog and read some tweets. If I like it, you're in, at least until the monthly follower management session ;-) And to be honest, my current follower/follwing ratio will only increase.
But don't be heartbroken, plenty of other people are eager to read you increase their numbers by following you.

Awesome video about the future of interactive by Microsoft

(via Werbeblogger)

Authority on Twitter: Based on what?

The topic of the weekend is Loic LeMeur's call for "search by authority" which people like or dislike. Arrington today put this down as a simple feature request, namely being able to sort twitter search-results by number of followers/following/# of tweets. I think most people have no trouble with the latter, but are hung up on calling this "authority".

I agree for once with Robert Scoble that the metric is highly game-able. However, even if not, I wouldn't all a mix of "followers/following/# of tweets" authority: The beauty of twitter is that there is a bunch of data out there, but the usage you derive from it is completely up to your behaviour.

Whom you follow, what do you track, how do you tweet. Not without thinking people have decided to have groups with tweets by @arrington, @jowyang, @scobleizer and @stevegillmor in one subset, another with @wayne_gretzky, @eklund and @thehockeycardshow. A CEO might have a lot to say, but only choose to follow @dbfarber, @rands, @cc_chapman and @stevepavlina. Where does that put his authority? In my view this contradicts the notion that it is not important how many readers a blog has, but who reads it.

Sure, a search results page with the "followers/following/# of tweets" would help you get a first impression. But does that help you? Lately, many people have added me who have loads of followers. But I have never heard of them. That is not a bad thing, but there is no trust based on numbers, and to me, authority has something to do with trust!

twitter, authority

How reporting is changing

I am loving it, and I bet John Buccigross too. With the adventthepresence of video content, reporting can evolve and is evolving. In a recent column on ESPN.com, one of my favorite NHL writers, John Buccigross, gave a detailed account of how Phil Kessel scored a goal, and how he (Bucci) thought that was an outstanding moment of that game.

With the Bruins on the power play in the second period, winger/menace Milan Lucic
won a race for the puck along the boards and made a nice little
backhand pass to a trailing Kessel, who suddenly was like a solitary
man on a frozen Wisconsin lake. Kessel is a human monorail. When he is
low to the ice with his back bent and his skates far apart, it's as if
he is straddling and avoiding a sidewalk filled with thumbtacks.

Kessel
took the pass with his momentum surging forward. After he took the
pass, his head immediately came up to search for some twine behind
Miller. Kessel never took his eyes off the net as he braced all of his
195 pounds on his right skate and his blade glided over the paint of
the faceoff circle. Kessel gave a little pump with his airborne left
leg and wired in what had to be an 80 miles per hour wrist shot. (J. Buccigross, October 11, 2008)

The thing that stood out in contrast to reporting from two years ago though, was a link to a video, enabling the reader to watch the moment and then read on. Sounds like not a big deal, but it is. As much trouble as "old media" outlets have adapting to the current era of information flow, one should sit back, relax and enjoy, when they mix the new with the old, empowering well-written texts with loads of resources and experience - and in this case video.

nhl, espn, journalism, buccigross

Follow-up on revver

The other day I wrote about my revver issues. Somebody was kind enough to respond, but after my follow-up comment all I am getting is silence. Instead something has happened on the technical side of the game. Feed-burner tells me I am still having over 7k downloads per day, however, stats for the latest episode on the revver site show merely 137 views.
And I checked, in the meantime there has been no message on either payment info or change of statistical analysis.
After reading Kent Nichols account of how the Ninja left revver (Thanks Tim), I am thinking (more like a communcations consultant) that one might just have to track not only clients and topics/companies related to them, but also services one likes to use. What do you think?

Podcasting: the whole 9 yards is actually much longer

You can write and read as many "25 tips on improving your podcast"-guides as you want, even act upon the tips – the learning curve just never ends. This week alone, fueled by input from Gary Vaynerchuk, C.C. Chapman and the guys from Marketing over Coffee, I felt like a pre-schooler yet again. And believe me, looking at the numbers, the Speaking English Podcast is about to enter his Sophomore year in High-School pretty soon.
The lesson here though is, that the work is never done. There is always room to improve. Every day. Work on the info text of each show. Add a new distribution channel. Find new ways to measure. Connect more to your audience.
Every day.

Open letter to revver.com

Dear people at revver (yes, that includes "the guy who can't read a calender),

for more than two years I have given you my content from www.speakingenglishpodcast.com for free and used your player, promoting your brand. Even more so, I allowed you to monetize my content in your name.

In return I received some money, but let's be honest, almost 500k views this year alone did not even translate into a three-figure sum for me. It might have, but you are late with payments. Almost four months late. And the money you promised to send out on September 11th which would have been enough to buy my wife a decent dinner, did not reach me yet. And I just double-checked my PayPal account.
What the hell is going on?

I can tell you what the hell is going on. You are ruining the one USP you had. There are so many video platforms out there (which, btw, I am all feeding through Tubemogul.com), easy monetization was your one advantage. The only one.

Since that seems broken I see no reason why not to talk more with sandieman at viddler, I really like what he did with Gary Vaynerchuk. Ask a Ninja switched, the mentos guys put there latest video on vimeo, it seems as always I am the latest to realize the ship is doomed, but I will move on.

Just give me the money you owe me. Or I'll send the Ninja!

Podcasters: enhance your ID_3 tag for iPhone and iPod Touch users

I saw it first on Jaffe Juice, then on The Hollywood Podcast:



One touch on the podcast's cover and not only the time listened/remaining appeared, but also some text. I wondered how they had done that and tried it myself.



The trick is in the ID_3 tag in the lyrics section, a region I had previously thought was the most useless feature. Not so. From The Hollywood Podcast's example you can guess, that it is also scrollable, really cool. You can't click the links it seems, but apart from that a great way to enhance your podcast. You can put the entire show notes into the lyrics section and iPhone and iPod Touch users can follow them while listening.

Tracking, Discoverability and the Future

Since what seems like forever Steve Gillmor has been lobbying to get the TRACK function back into Twitter. And apart from the Newsgang-crowd he seems to be alone doing that. At least here in Germany nobody seems to bother all that much. When IM and TRACK did work I had Twitter in a GTalk sidebar working nicely, showing me updates from followees and soon to be followees, i.e. people who share the same interests as I do. Gillmor put it into plain Engish again last week. TRACK is a discoverability-tool, expanding your network based not on people you know or live near-by, but based on shared topics.

Identi.ca, a much talked about microblogging tool and Twitter-challenger does not offer the TRACK-functionality but does not limit a "Spy"-bot "drinking from the firehouse", to use Gillmor's metaphor. With this bot I can TRACK some of my interests such as podcast, NHL, shanahan, extreme, kanal 14, planetsab and others. And the spy-bot delivers:

As you can see, all of a sudden, news are not only coming in through people I want to know about but also through topics I want to know about. The thing is, I did not realise how important this feature is, until it was reinstated through identica. Though identica has a much smaller user base than Twitter at the moment, the results coming in through TRACK have proven to be very helpful.

Mix this with the highly useful zaptxt via IM, and you have all the live input you need to put you either ahead or make you nuts.

Twitter-spam getting out of hand

Mandy711, Brandy454, Lucy196, the line goes on and on. And since I maintain about 7 twitter accounts it is mulitplied. Forget about Twitter being down and the Friendfeed vs. Twitter discussion - if I continue to get more spam subscribers than real "friend" requests, Twitter gets kind of, well not useless, but a pain in the bum.