derek abdinor

Finally got this working. The idea is that a pre-configured blog post is set up to receive comments via email. The option to receive SMS as comments works too. Why do this if a user can just leave a comment on the blog?

Consider an important business or organisational announcement. Oftimes the audience will watch this on niche financial TV stations or hear the announcement on the radio: essentially away from the desktop. We’re hoping the audience (analysts, investors, journalists) have a mobile device, and upon hearing the contact details, can comment there and then via email or sms (phones in this sector are still vastly incapable of watching the streaming presentation). The questions are received, relayed to the presenter and asked at the venue. Moderation is encouraged.

I did investigate microblogging for this event, however ran into the following problems with existing providers

• can not moderate
• can not drastically change interface
• in corporate presentation world, names like Twitter and Jaiku are brand-detractive

You would have to roll your own, and include the phone and IM additions to be able to comment.  Next time…

 The technical details
Using WordPress’ blog to email functionality, one can just hack around the existing scripts and get the email to write a comment to a pre-configured post (eg: post ID =4). Set up (in WP) your email address, and then call your new script every now and then (cron or manual refresh). It automatically goes into the moderation queue, where you can edit and filter out all the MIME netsam (would love someone to work on this).
Voila! any user can email a comment, from webmail as well as desktop mail. You can set up SMS to send to the email address too.

I’ll get around to putting this onto Codex. Until then, ask me a question if you want to install for self. Got some ideas about SMS comments from James Saunders.

This article was first posted to BizCommunity in September 2007.

A microblog is a smaller version of a blog, usually limiting posts to 140 characters. Woo-hoo, so it’s a variation on the blogging theme, but less space to make an idiot of yourself. Why then is it one of the fastest-growing applications in the history of the Internet? Is there a place for it in your digital strategy?

A microblog is a smaller version of a blog, usually limiting posts to 140 characters. Woo-hoo, so it’s a variation on the blogging theme, but less space to make an idiot of yourself. Why then is it one of the fastest-growing applications in the history of the Internet? Is there a place for it in your digital strategy?

The size comparison is not sufficient to explain the power of having a smaller, pithy blog, so here’s the rest of the product list:

• You can view posts online, get SMS, email, RSS or Instant Message (IM) notifications of new posts
• You can SMS, email or IM posts
• You can phone in an update or leave a micro-podcast (these new developments occurred during the writing of this article)
• Many people can join a group or channel and add their updates and receive updates
• You can integrate microblog feeds into blogs, other websites or even into each other.

This looks like information if not acronym overload, but its actually information aggregation and simplification. Consider these three continuum (Continuae?)

1. Publishing: catalogues and reports >> website >> blog >> rss >> microblog
2. Written communication: letters >> memos & fax >> email >> IM >> microblog
3. Telephonic communication: telephone >> mobile >> VOIP and IPhone >> microblog

Microblogging is at the nexus of publishing and communication! A post is published, users are notified five different ways, and they respond to you in five different ways. At the same time, they are part of your social network and are subscribing for the news that you wish to send them. This is keeping US marketers up at night.

You could believe we’re in the nascent stage of aggregating our content together and tying up all the loose ends. A related application is when mobile phones serve up RSS feeds. Getting all your news headlines on your mobile phone (not Blackberry or PDA) as a feed (not SMS) has been widely available for some months now. Unlike the built-in camera, but like text messaging (SMS), RSS on your phone is the real killer app.

Technologies
The main microblog providers are Twitter (www.twitter.com), Jaiku (www.jaiku.com) and Pownce (www.pownce.com). I believe they’re currently fighting it out to be the standard and therefore are trying to be the microblog for all systems. Twitter has market share and a vocabulary (vb. to tweet), Jaiku allows users to setup and join a channel and some moderation of posts while Pownce is exclusive and about uploading music and video to your profile. Enterprises could wait for one of them to create an off-the-shelf package, or you can build your own. The technology is alarmingly simple.

Lawyer, social media consultant, blogger and The Times bloggumist Paul Jacobson uses Jaiku a lot.”The channel isn’t just a one way flow of links to posts and sites, it is also a forum for members of the channel to jump in and participate in conversations sparked by items posted to the channel or topics they may want to raise themselves. A Jaiku channel is a great way to let customers know what is going on in your space in a convenient and user friendly format.” His Jaiku channel at http://jaiku.com/channel/JacobsonLaw is such an example.

A similar paradigm is Tumblelogging, which for all intents and purposes has now become a feature of microblogging. It describes a stream of consciousness where multiple users add their one-liners (tumbling) either as posts, observations or breaking updates. Great for a teenage gang, you may snort into your Horlicks, but what about co-ordinating a team in disparate locations who are not all behind desktops? The Los Angeles Fire Department uses tumbling for their dispatchers: http://twitter.com/LAFD.

A social service
Will microblogging take off? Well, if you’ve heard of MXiT you either come to know it through your kid’s school principal threatening to ban it or your occupational therapist trying to wean you off it. Your FaceBook status that you update six times a day: you are “lifestreaming”, or communicating brief asides that sum up your feeling, outlook, personality and location in around 10 words or less. On the other hand, our mobile phones have prepped us into this “always on” culture where we can describe complex concepts using just a few glyphs.

Microblogging for the enterprise

The instant information retrieval nature of microblogs mean that companies can bypass traditional wire services. As Dominic Jones recently blogged:

In essence, [microblogs] can be a notification system and an editorial system. It can tell someone news is available and provide a link to it. For example: “Sun reports Results for Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2007 http://tinyurl.com/2h5osq”

It can also be an information system by delivering the news in a concise format: “Sun Beats Profit Target Q4 Revenues $3.835 billion, EPS $0.09 vs consensus $0.05 http://tinyurl.com/2h5osq”

Sun’s recent decision to bypass PR wire services for its earnings releases is but a baby step in what is coming.

Imagine a presentation where you release run a microblog and make this available. Users can post to it through all the media mentioned above; they can even link to video feeds, picture slideshows and pull other content into the feed.

A global distribution concern, based in South Africa, had the problem of sharing information amongst its executives who were scattered over multiple continents. They hit on the idea of each member logging into a secure site, submitting business intelligence or a link to a related article. SMS notifications were the next step. This successful application was produced by us in 2006 when microblogging wasn’t even a Wikipedia entry.

Keeping touch

Some of the US presidential candidates have microblogs. I subscribed to Barack Obama’s as a follower of his posts, and get woken up at 2am to read this on my mobile phone: “BarackObama: In New York – heading to the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Be sure to watch it tonight.”

You get the point? If I needed to follow breaking information, I can have it delivered to phone, IM, email, RSS or go to the website. If I need to post breaking information, I do exactly the same. There is clearly application for intranets, collaborative groups, rapid dissemination of information. If email was instant, then microblogging is inst.

Like it or not, we (ourselves, groups and organisations) are being coached by our technologies into having a “persistent presence” online; a form of branding ourselves through all channels available. Maybe instead of the 15 minutes of fame we were promised in the TV era we’ll only be allocated 140 words and a thumbnail on our microblogs.

Go ahead, tweet yourself.

“The blogosphere has hit the mainstream, according to a new survey, which reveals that 80% of Americans know what a blog is, 50% regularly visit blogs, and 8% publish their own blog. The survey also reveals that more women than men are bloggers, with 20% of American women who have visited blogs having their own versus 14% of men.”

This via Slashdot. Some more stats I found regarding metrics of Wikipedia.

• In July of 2007 over 41 million people visited Wikipedia
• That represents  1 in 4 people online in the US (although Wikipedia is international)
• Wikipedia is now the 12th most visited website overall

I love the fact that MySpace has introduced millions to blogging.
I love even more that FaceBook has introduced millions to microblogging.

Spacers blog and respond by commenting all the time: isn’t that brilliant? Facers microblog all the time. Its the status update, right under your pic. They can also edit status by mobile, and you can subscribe to notifications by RSS feed: that’s microblogging! Love or hate the two platforms, they are unconsciously bringing radically new concepts to massive audiences. When I need to explain microblogging, this is the way I do it. If I have to still explain FaceBook: oi.

The word microblogging should probably fall by the wayside in time: too cumbersome. High environmental impact.

The last few days have been a flurry of buzz around microblogging in general and twitter in particular (Note: I started jaiku before twitter but prefer the latter). First, Dominic Jones wrote a visceral article about the potential use for it to disperse investor info (this days after SUN Microsystems released their results online ). Dominic’s article led me to some others, notably: Get ready for the ‘Twitterization’ of mainstream media by David Berlind (ZDNET) and Five Quick Suggestions to Improve Twitter by Allen Stern.

my thoughts,

I see twitter as the bridge on these two continuum:
1. old media, website, blog, rss, twitter
2. letters, memos, email, IM, twitter

I’d like to see Twitter have a better admin interface, and the opportunity to easily edit your posts (if you’re all nerves and thumbs, it could be disastrous)

and

I want to use a microblog in the enterprise (2.0) field. Currently none of them are there. Your suggestions are all valid, and one of these would do well todetach itself from the ubiquitous-use market and go for a solid business platform. I would pay good (or bad) money for a business twitter. However, I think you realise too that they are all within sight of the big cheese and would it make sense to settle for second best?

Also, many ridicule Twitter for the fact that one can record one’s most inane moments and send them on. There is a service and a sale around that, and like it or not, its brilliant. Didn’t we all love 24 hour reality TV a few years back? Will we be able to pry microblogging out of the hands of an “always-on” culture?

spoiler: Seth Godin comes first, 349 follow. A South African appears at #106. A lot of PR blogs in there as well but no IR.

Criteria #1: Google PageRank (0 to 10): Google PageRank is a link-analysis algorithm that interprets web links and assigns a numerical weighting (0 to 10) to each site. High-quality sites receive a higher PageRank. The actual PageRank number was used in the Power 150 ranking algorithm.

Criteria #2: Bloglines Subscribers (1 to 20): Bloglines displays the number of feed subscribers. Subscriber ranges were determined (i.e., more than 20, more than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 20) that was used in the Power 150 algorithm.

Criteria #3: Technorati Ranking (1 to 30): Technorati ranking analyzes the number of sites pointing to a particular blog. The more link sources referencing your blog, the higher the Technorati ranking. Similar to the Bloglines Subscribers value, Technorati ranking ranges were determined (i.e., top 9,000, top 10,000, top 20,000, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 30) that was used in the Power 150 algorithm.

One has to stop blogging as a method of storing info. Readers are not working for me, and I never get round to del.icio.us. I need my own intranet.

Since I found out about micro-blogging, I’ve been trying to think of ways to utilise this tool in the enterprise. I’m not convinced by certain things I’ve seen, while other bits have impressed. Here are some of the rationales:

• always letting people know: what are you doing? (they can check your blog or subscribe mobile to updates).
  This works for Barack Obama, and mall rats, and once or twice for me. Not convinced.
• Getting latest updates via a channel.
  This can get so irritating, I subscribed to Muti’s updates on Jaiku and went crazy every 2 minutes, so I unsubscribed. The new Nokias do a great job of subscribing to RSS feeds. I’m convinced that along with the camera and text absorption into the phone, RSS feeds delivered to phone is a killer app. Killer! Therefore the channels may be a bit out of time. Boo.
• As a sideblog. Sometimes a blog is too formal for a one-liner. Just like a printed letter is too slow for email, and email has become too formal when you can send an IM, a sideblog is, well, an aside. Its something you feel ought to be published, but does not warrant too much http to process. It’s like in a newspaper, page 2, “the world in brief”, those snippets. Brilliant.

In the meantime, “sideblog”needs to enter the Public Knowledge Repository.

Updates: Dominic Jones on Twitter for IR wires, and IMHO a “tipping point” article from  ZDNet

A historic event occurred a few days ago with the release of SUN Microsystems’ fourth quarter and full fiscal year results, for the year ended June 30, 2007.
They issued the release to the market/public in the following sequence:

1. on the SUN website
2. via RSS feeds
3. through traditional paid subscriber channels
4. Form 8-K (US mandatory filing)

CEO of Sun, Jonathan Schwartz, is the poster boy for CEOs who blog. He’s just made my job a lot easier, and therefore I dedicate the next block ‘o pixels to his release:

“It may not seem like it, but this is a sea change in how Sun communicates with the world – and sets a path for other public companies seeking to drive greater transparency. I wonder how far off we are from ceasing to issue traditional press releases altogether… after all, no news agency could possibly suggest they reach a greater portion of the planet than the internet.”

The internet is about dissemination and distribution, at a fraction of the cost. By publishing online you won’t accidentally flip a Springfield-Nuclear-Reactor switch which will send out all your clients’ credit card details to adolescent hackers in the Ukraine.

Thanks Jonathan, well done. If everyone was content with “wait and see” then we deserve to be dominated by our technology, viz: fossil fuels, copyright, Office…

TechPresident is an online aggregating service about all the US Presidential candidates’ use of online social media. You get to measure their effectiveness, or newsworthiness, on Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and Technorati.

Votojournalism
The excellent portmanteau of Voter and Photojournalism, for voter-generated content where users post pictures of the candidates on the campaign trail, online. I think the term will be hijacked to come to mean the use of social media by voters, or by candidates (see below) to run an effective campaign.

Microblogging
I was suprised to find that Barack Obama microblogs (blogs constantly from a computer of mobile device, usually one-liners of his movements) on Twitter, and does a really handy job. In fact, he has raised over 40% of his funding online! Funding is key to success in US politics, and Barack’s online strategists have been on the money.

I feel this would have an impact on business, after the elections. You could never bring microblogging to business, but it would be excellent for wannabe celebrities to grow an active stalking community.

Update: this was fleshed out into an article for BizCommunity. Read/Write Web has some interesting stuff on this, although they seem to be looking at the metrics of voting at first blush:  a lot of users in the world deperately want/need the US to change its policies and are following the campaigns, or lending their online presences to candidates they hope will bring about meaningful change.

Microsoft has managed to persuade influential bloggers (in the US) to say favourable things about their catch-phrase “people ready“. For payola, of course. (I can’t bring myself to link to any of the sites in this post).

Related thoughts in time and out of season:

• There I was thinking citizen journalism was impervious to the pitfalls of old media
• Very sad to see Read/Write web there too
• Great marketing strategy, but only as a one-off. Like the papparazzi, you have to be first to market and deflect the heat until 2nd2market catches up