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Have you checked your privacy settings lately?

That was one of the questions we batted around during last Saturday's SMMOC meetup when we were discussing Facebook's new bid to "rule the web" as it gets even more social.  

The gist of the discussion was around Facebook's recent announcement at its F8 developer conference about a protocol to let content publishers tag their content while also adding one of Facebook's "Like" buttons to the site. The idea being that as you, my Facebook friend, goes about your merry day surfing different web sites, will have the ability to push the "Like" button on articles, products, restaurants, etc. that you happen across on the web. In the meantime, your friends may also be doing the same thing.

Well, Facebook's goal is to store this information and allow content partners to use it in a way that allows them to tailor a more "personalized online experience" for you, me and our other Facebook friends.

What do you think about that? Creepy? A good thing? Good for business?

Our discussion at my meetup last Saturday was mixed. There was general agreement that privacy issues are (once again) a concern. I mean, imagine you stumbling across a site --purely by accident, I'm sure-- that sells black leather, uh, paraphernalia. Only to then find dialog at the bottom clearly stating that, "Mel 'Likes' this". (??!) Hmm...maybe not something I would've wanted my friends to necessarily know.

I realize one rebuttal could be to say, well, "Mel, you fool, knowing how the 'Like' button works, why would you press it on such a site?" But, therein lies my point. WILL everyone know how the wizard behind the veil of the "Like" button actually works? Will most people understand that they have to pro-actively tweak their privacy settings on Facebook? Do you understand that a "default" standard is being set that requires us to take action to opt-out of such publicity, rather than taking action to opt-in. It's like this, unless you take action, your preferences will likely be public. (This is in contrast to specifically choosing to make your preferences public. There's a difference. Opt-in vs. opt-out.)

Now, all that said, I actually come down on the side of the fence that sees it as a generally favorable trend. But, then again, I'm a content publisher.

What do you think? More to the point, have you checked your privacy settings lately? 

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(Photo courtesy: jepoirrier Flickr Creative Commons)

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How to create a custom email signature in Mac Mail

I'm writing this post to answer a question my friend, Jennifer, asked about how I formatted a custom signature on my Mac (via Mac's native email client called Mail). And to be able to do it in such a way that doesn't distort or otherwise get discombobulated on the receiving end.  The snapshot below is what we're shooting for.

 

The snapshot below is what we hope to mitigate as much as possible on the receiving end of your email.

Rather than keeping the process a secret between Jennifer and me, I figured some of you might have the same question.  So, I thought I'd share it with the rest of ya'll, as well. To make it easy, I included both a video (below) and then also summarized the steps in a procedure list (further below).  By the way, you can also watch the video in HD directly on the YouTube server.  (Just double-click the video.)  That'll give you a bigger video to see all the details.  Let me know if you find it helpful.

First things first.

The steps to follow presupposes the following:

A. You have access to a web or FTP site to which you can upload your images and reference them over the web.

B. You have the basic skills to create a simple html page. (Or, at the very least, you have access to such knowledge via the skills of a friend.) It will help to have a software package like Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage.

C. You are trying to create your custom signature for Mac Mail.

D. You have the Safari web browser installed on your Mac.

(Double-click it to watch it in HD.)

Steps to follow.

Assuming you have the above three conditions locked, here are the steps I follow to create a signature like the one at the top of this post such that it shows up in your Mac/Mail email signature:

The Preamble. (Do this in your html software package.)

1. Take all the graphics you intend to use in your signature and ftp them to a folder on your website.

2. Use an html software package like Dreamweaver or MS Frontpage to create the look and feel of the email signature you want to have. Use the software's features to display the email graphics via "IMG" references to the file on your web host.

3. Save your email signature design as an html file. (For purposes of this exercise, I've given my signature design the name "myemailsig.html"

The Crux of the Matter. (Do this in the Safari web browser.)

4. Now launch the Safari web browser. From Safari, select File/Open File from the menu bar.

5. Navigate to the location on your computer where you saved the html file for your email signature. Select the Open button. Your email signature will appear as a web page in your Safari browser.

6. Now, save your email signature as a webarchive file. To do this, select File/Save As... on the menu bar of your Safari web browser. Make sure to select "Web Archive" in the Format picklist of the Save As... window. (For my example, I've assigned the name "myemailsig.webarchive")

Make a "placeholder" email signature in Mac Mail.

Summary: In the next steps, we're going to use Mac Mail to create a new "placeholder" for your email signature within the Mac Mail file structure. We'll then copy the system-generated filename for this placeholder and then use it to rename the webarchive file you created in Step 6 above. As a final step, we'll copy the renamed webarchive and replace the system-generated signature file in Mac Mail. (Got it?)

7. Open Mac Mail.

8. Create a new "placeholder" signature. To do this, select Mail/Preferences... from the Mac Mail menu bar. The Preferences window will appear.

9. In the Preferences window, select Signatures from the list of menu icons. The Signatures list window will appear.

10. From the Signatures list column, select the email for which you want to create a new signature.

11. Beneath the second column, select the "+" button to add a new signature. Enter a name where prompted.

12. Now close the Signatures (Preferences) window and Quit out of the Mail program. (Mac Mail needs to restart as you complete the final steps.)

The End Game. (Do this in Finder.)

13. Using the Finder (file browser) application, navigate to the following folder: /Library/Mail/Signatures

14. Inspect the "Date Created" column for the files in the Signatures folder. (Notice these signature files are webarchive files!)

15. Find the webarchive (signature file) with the most recent date under "Date Created". (This will be the signature file you created as a placeholder in Step 11 above.)

16. Select the webarchive file with the most recent creation date and then copy the filename. (Note: This step requires you to copy the name of the file; not the file itself.)

17. Now, find the signature file you created earlier in Step 6. (i.e., myemailsig.webarchive) and replace its filename with the filename copied from Step 16.

18. As a final step, copy the file from Step 17 and replace the "placeholder" file in the folder under /Library/Mail/Signatures.

Your custom email signature will appear as a selectable item the next time you try creating an email message.

I hope this and the video helps!

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If this was helpful, then you'll also like all this content on MelAclaro.com:

• The Poor Man's Wireless (walkaround) microphone
• 5 Great Ideas for Using QR Codes
• Social Media Marketing Essentials for Small Businesses (free mini-course)

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Speech recognition recommendations for blogging

I came across Jon Morrow's guest post on ProBlogger last night and it rung a bell with me because it relates to the use of speech recognition software. In my web video training productions I've occasionally resorted to the benefit of speech recognition software to create transcripts from the talent in our productions. In the video below, Jon gives a great primer about his recommendations, as well as a demo on the use of Dragon Naturally Speaking (version 10) to write his blog posts.

The technology has continued to improve over the years. And, since my purchase of Dragon Naturally Speaking (version 9) last year, I believe Jon when he says that Dragon Naturally Speaking version 10 is easily twice as good.

The video below is well worth taking some time to view. But, for some of you "bottom line" types ;) I took the liberty of including a timecode index so you can fast forward to key sections.

Speech Recognition for Bloggers -- The Ultimate Guide from Jon Morrow on Vimeo.

~3:00 Hardware is key to optimizing efficiency with speech recognition software.
~4:40 Today you can buy everything you need for less than $100.
~6:00 Recommended hardware... especially USB sound pods vs. just a sound card. It makes a huge difference in accuracy.
~7:30 KnowBrainer.com as an online resource for recommendations. But, check out also eMicrophones.com for price comparisons.
~9:05 Speed and power of your computer can make a difference.
~10:20 About choosing speech recognition software.
~11:00 Windows: Dragon Naturally Speaking (v10 is MUCH better over v9). Macintosh: Mac Speech Dictate.
~14:15 Demo on what it's like to write a blog post using Dragon Naturally Speaking.

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Free Social Media Listening Tools You Should Use. Part 1 - RSS

 
 http://www.flickr.com/photos/cindy47452/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In my post a few days ago about Monitoring the Conversation, I mentioned the importance of Listening and promised my ASTD-OC friends that I'd post an article about some of the free automation tools I use to help me listen to online conversations. And it's here in the automation discussion that a related question sometimes comes up about whether or not it's ever a good idea to use bots or automation engines when engaging others in the social web. In a nutshell, yes. I said as much in an article I wrote this summer, Automating Social Media - Good or Bad?

The gist is this: leveraging automation, bots, engines, and so on, to alert you to topics, keywords, phrases and conversations that are of interest to you = good idea. But, when you respond in places where those conversations are happening, don't automate that part. That's the personal part that should come from YOU, not an assistant nor a 'bot. Easy enough?

With that said, here's the first of several tools/techniques you can easily start NOW to get a leg up on who's saying what.

o RSS. This is also known as a news feed reader. RSS means "Really Simple Syndication." But that's not important. What is important, is that it's a tool that allows you to "subscribe" to your favorite blogs, news sites and even search results from some popular search engines. The cool factor is in the one-stop-shop setup it affords you for getting updates from all those places.

In other words, instead of having to alternately go to each of 10 sites (or 50 sites or 100 sites) whose content you regularly follow (or would like to if it didn't take so long to navigate to each of those sites!), you can instead subscribe to their "RSS feeds" (I'll show you below) and view updates on one web site containing all those subscriptions. Wala: One-stop-shopping (well, reading, you get my drift).

First things first: Sign Up for An RSS Feed Reader

1. If you don't have a favored RSS feed reader at the moment, you might just as well go to www.google.com/reader and start a Google account, if you don't already have one. Otherwise, sign in.

2. Open a new window or a new tab in your web browser and navigate to one of your favorite blog sites and look for a little "RSS button." It looks like this: . Right-click it and select "Copy Link." (Hint, and, shameless plug: There's a similar button in the right sidebar of my blog. Feel free to start with that one.

3. Now, go back to Google Reader and click the "Add Subscription" button. It looks like this:  

4. In the field that appears, Paste the link you copied from Step 2 above.  

5. Click the Add button.

6. Wash, rinse, repeat for each blog you typically follow.

Henceforth and forever after, all you have to do is go to your Google Reader site to read any new updates on each of your subscribed blogs. (Unread articles will be highlighted in a slightly different color or typeface until you've read it or marked it as having been read. In this way, you can easily scan what's new and what's not.)

I hope that helps! In my next post, I'll tell you how to add keyword search results to your RSS feed reader.

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Monitoring the Conversation

Yesterday, I summarized the Hubs-and-Spokes framework from Chapter 3 of The Social Media Report. Hubs-and-Spokes is a metaphor I used in our book to help think about the way we can share our values, interests, expertise and passions with those we establish relationships in other social networks. Part of that model showed blue bubbles as placeholders for activities related to listening.

In Chapter 4, I talked about the importance of Monitoring the Conversation. As your relationships continue to grow, and the information you share through your blog resonates with more people--positively or negatively--it'll be increasingly likely that others will link to your articles, piggy-back their thoughts about your opinions in their own blog posts, share links to your posts, discuss or mention them in forums, twitter, and so on. It's important to know when these events happen so you can respond, comment, or further the dialog. It's one of the ways in which conversations happen on the web today.

Listening Posts

In Chapter 4 we talked about Listening Posts as events, supported by automation, that trigger alerts for you when keywords and phrases you're interested in are created somewhere on the web. Some of these tools can be as simple as the use of search engines and keyword alerts, while others may be as sophisticated as customized third-party "dashboards" and analytics for which it may make sense to pay a nominal fee as your business grows.

Listening posts differ from the traditional feedback tools like focus groups, interviews, surveys and polls. They're different in the sense that Listening Posts give us clues about the online conversations happening around us now. To help you here, you'll want to get technology working for you to trigger alerts or filter information based on keywords or phrases that give clues to industry trends, customer perceptions, competitor behavior, technologies, politics, and so on.

Now, I'm totally in love with some of the dashboard analytics of providers like Radian6, Compete.com, Hubspot, Sysomos, and others. But, these are paid services and, for many of you who've been gracious to put up with my rants and raves on this blog, it's probably worth first looking into some of the free services.

In my next posts on this series that highlights key points in the Social Media Report 2010, I'll share some of the free tools I use to monitor the conversation in the social sphere. 

But, because I know some of you will be wondering what an analytics dashboard from one of the paid services can offer, I thought I'd share this demo Matt Dickman was kind enough to put together about Radian6. It's a good overview that'll show you what's possible beyond the simplicity of the free tools I'll be talking about in the next post.

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A peek into the world of video editing for live broadcast.

Those of you who cut and produce video content, whether you do it as a hobby, for training, eLearning or broadcast productions, then you know how involved the workflow can be.

What from ingesting video, loading it up in the timeline, editing, splicing related media, color-correcting, audio overlays and especially, especially rendering out the final production. It can be quite involved. Depending on your efficiency and technology, it can also be quite time intensive.

I think I work pretty fast when I cut video. (My preferred non-linear editor? Final Cut Pro.) But, I've always been amazed at the guys and gals who do this stuff for live broadcast TV.

Quite often, they're putting clips in the timeline for editing even as the video streams in via a satellite feed. I understand it's not uncommon for these pros to begin working on the feed at 5 p.m. for a playout at 6 p.m. That's nuts! Also, very impressive.

The video link below of Apple's interview with Peter Wiggins is worth a look.  Peter is a Pro video editor who has worked in live broadcast environments for the Tour de France, among other gigs.

For those of you who use Final Cut Pro, or cut video, you'll find some nice little tips and tricks.

Where to get pre keyed (green screen) video footage for your web video or online project.

For some of my web video productions, I've occasionally had the need to include images or videos from third parties. If you're in marketing, web design, graphic design or any of the other creative occupations, you know what I mean. Heck, even instructional designers--especially those who develop eLearning courses--have had need for downloadable, royalty free images and video.

Certainly, web sites offering downloadable images isn't a new concept. Fotolia, istockphoto, gettyimages and a bunch more others have received their share of revenue from me. Many of these guys have also extended their services to include video. For example, istockphoto/video, Fotolia videos, artbeats.com, and so on.

But, when you get to pre-keyed video footage (think: green screen/alpha effects that allow weather reporters to project a map behind them on the nightly news, star wars effects, and so on), there have been a lot less options for service providers offering affordable footage (at least for the common folk like me) AND having large libraries. Pond5 comes to mind with about 700 pre keyed videos. But now, with the introduction of Crowd Control (All Bets Are Off Productions), the landscape just got a lot bigger with a library boasting 45,000 live action clips.

I especially like the crowd control search engine, which allows you to filter for various attributes like the angle of your subject in the frame, whether he/she is walking towards you or away, come to think of it... even the fact about whether or not the subject is a he or a she, the type of action they're taking, and so on.

I know this new provider fills a need for my production efforts. If you're an online designer of any discipline, I think Crowd Control is worth a looksee.

If you have other favorite sites for pre keyed video footage, please share in the comments below.  I'd love to know about them so I can add them to my list of resources.

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Automating Social Media - Good or Bad?

I've been tweaking a presentation for a training session I'm facilitating this week on the topic of (what else?) social media. I'm jazzed about it.

No, not just because I'll be playing a role in helping a great group of folks understand the topic a little better (at least, I hope!), but also because it sounds like they, too, are excited about the topic. I've been informed that some folks are skipping other modules to attend my module on social media. (My piece is only one portion of a four-part marketing series.)

For my part, in addition to the little "how tos" and "where fors," there are a couple of high-level concepts I find myself revisiting. One of these is the concept that social networking is a lot of work. The other, which I've written about in a previous post, social networking isn't a point-solution. I'll revisit that second one in a follow-up post.

But, for this post...

Social networking is a lot of work.

Based on feedback and discussions with colleagues, I've found this is definitely one of the underlying messages that needs to be communicated. The lamentations of one of my colleagues comes to mind--an executive with a small business I consult with--"So, Mel, I set up that Twitter account... but nothing happened..." (Ho ho ho. Silly rabbit, Tweeps are for kids... who work at it!)

On another occasion, I was asked by another executive about how he could maximize his time getting 1,000 followers over an upcoming weekend. (Whooaah... easy boy.)

'Turns out, it appears their thought process was that, social networking, being technology-based, should "make it easy" to connect with a lot of people at once. So, why wasn't this happening?

Well, as it turns out, it's not the case that you should just set up a LinkedIn account, or just a Twitter account, or just a Facebook account and then "things" will happen. The fact is, the word "networking" is an operative word. At the end of the day, online social networking isn't really too far removed from live networking in a brick-and-mortar setting.

Similar common sense manners are in play:

• Don't lead with a sales pitch (though an "elevator pitch" may still be appropriate with proper context),
• Don't come with the sole intent of seeing how many business cards you can pass,
• Be interested in others,
• Be engaging without making it all about you,
• See who else you can connect with those you meet,
• Find opportunities to help someone.

The list above works just as well for online social networking as it does in a brick-and-mortar social networking venue. And, while I think most of us understand this, many of us run into trouble when we try to automate the points above because, let's face it, there are a helluva lot of social networks to have to engage folks in.

So, we tend to lose the bubble when we allow auto DMs, auto-follows, and LinkedIn Inmail-blasts to supplant the relationship building process.

Ahh, well, hence the header... social networking is a lot of work. And it is a process.   

So, Automating Social Media is Bad, Right?

... Well, no. But, if you're going to lean towards automating anything in your online networking activities, don't delegate your relationship-building and conversation-engaging activities to a 'bot. Rather, use technology to automate some of the listening processes.

Google alerts, boardreader, blogsearch, tweetscan and twittersearch are just a few free tools that can get you started. (Exception: tweetscan has a nominal charge after an initial free trial period.)

By placing keywords and phrases into these tools on topics, themes and trends that interest you--or that relate to you or your business--you'll be informed about conversations as they happen now and have an opportunity to reserve the core of your efforts to engagement and conversation with actual people.

Rather than re-hash a list of listening tools in this post, let me offer these excellent articles from which I, myself, have learned much:

• John Bell's Links for Listening,
• Chris Brogan's, Five Tools I Use for Listening,
• Mike Fruchter's 10 tools for listening in social media.
• Kyle Lacy's 5 Quick Tools for Listening in on Social Media.

Later this week, I'll hit another point I'll be touching on during the training sessions: Social networking isn't a point solution.

Until then, I wish you success and hope to hear from you.

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Got a Decision To Make? The Old Magic Eight Ball Just Got Social.

courtesy: greeblie's photostream, FlickR
creative commons

FlickR co-founder, Caterina Fake recently rolled out Hunch, an online decision-making tool. It's sort of like the old "Magic Eight Ball", but now with collective intelligence to optimize a sort of decision making wizard.

But wait, there's more. In addition to user-generated question refinements (question/response "training"), it also uses statistical inferences associated with the discipline of machine learning.

It's all The math is beyond me, but key highlights from Hunch's "How Hunch Works" page makes for an interesting read:

• In choosing what to ask you, Hunch's question selection algorithm tries to do two things. First, it tries to find a question which will discriminate well among the remaining possible decision outcomes for you - thus filtering the remaining choices from "many" to "fewer". Second, the algorithm looks for a question which can help optimize and rank the remaining decision results to present you with the ones you'll like the most.

• As you answer questions, Hunch can narrow down your possible decision outcomes because each outcome can be "trained" to correspond with each question's answers.

• Any logged in user can set initial training or correct existing training, in addition to proposing new topics, questions to ask, and decision outcomes.

• When a user clicks "Yes" or "No" to indicate whether or not they like a decision result, Hunch incrementally strengthens or weakens the mathematical correlation between that result and any 'Teach Hunch About You' questions that have been answered so far.

Google Wave's Rosie-new possibilities for online collaboration across languages.

The presentation above is from Day 2 of the recent Google I/O Conference; it previews Google Wave, due out sometime later this year.

In a nut, I was pretty impressed with the scope of channels Google Wave expands for real time communications. I won't rehash a summary of the features. For that, PCMag has posted a pretty good summary here.

Suffice to say, I'm looking forward to it. I've signed up to be informed about the rollout and am already thinking about some of the possibilities for online learning support and how I might be able to integrate Wave down the road with MindBridj. (MindBridj is a new venture I recently started and haven't really said much about yet. More later. (??))

So, rather than rehash all the features of Google Wave in this post, I simply want to highlight the one feature that impressed me even more than the others. It's called Rosie.

What I Love About Rosie

The reason Rosie impresses me is because it addresses one of the pain points I see with social media at the moment. That is, how do I connect with someone on, say,Twitter or Facebook who speaks only French? Or only Spanish? While I speak primarily English?

Wouldn't you agree there's a language barrier today (time zone differences aside) that prevents many of us from communicating globally in real time?

Rosie may change that.

Who Is Rosie?

Rosie is a "bot."

What it (she?) does is translate.

Rosie speaks about 40 different languages. Her main role in Google Wave is to translate discussions between participants who speak different languages.

In the demo above, Lars Rasmussen (Google Maps-guy) and his team showed a chat feature in which one participant, chatting in English, had the text of his message showing up, as French, in another user's window. And vice versa. All this in real time.

Now, I have no illusions that some words won't (yet) translate 100%. But, my philosophy is, if you don't start, we ain't never gonna arrive. This is a great step in the right direction and builds upon the milestones already previously established by other translator services, such as Google's existing Translate service.

See Rosie In Action

If you want to see the demo without sitting through the entire 80 minutes of video, then scrub forward to about time code 1:13:00. (Maybe a little before that.) It's toward the end. Not surprisingly, they chose to close their demo with Rosie.

And, if that piques your curiosity, here are some other timecodes I also found interesting:

• 0:08:40 to 0:10:15 - demo of new functionality in email-type threaded conversations.
• 0:20:45 to 0:23:00 - demo that shows possibilities for live blogging interactivity.
• 0:57:35 - "twave". (What else? No app is complete these days without a Twitter API.)
• 1:12:55 - the Rosie demo.

If you check it out, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'd especially enjoy hearing from some of you who are in any way involved with training, coaching or learning.

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