Families that Network together....

It's never to early!!

Bring in your children into the social networking world - well you may have to do some of the early work - you may also have the opportunity of finding others with kids like you doing the same.

Family.com is social networking for parents (well, lets face it, predominantly moms) with a purpose, and it has all the usual grown-up social networking tools: wikis, blogging, etc. Disney's plan was to build connected experiences; as they demonstrated with Disney Fairies, kids connect thru game play, while moms connect through sharing stories and communal knowledge. They refer to visitors to their sites as "guests" which you will hear at every Disney location, from amusement parks to stores to, evidently, online properties, and for the Family.com site, they have adhered to the principle that if you can't get it at a glance, it needs to be re-thought. The effectiveness and appeal of a simple visual metaphor is the goal on all their sites, and the tag cloud of "Favorite Clicks" as well as an easy-to-spot area for upcoming topics of interest (like Mother's Day) are evidence that they nailed it.

The site features an alluring travel planner for parents, detailing the best vacations for families and giving you ideas for what to do in a specific location with age-based itineraries, videos of attractions, and reviews from other users. You can also rate attractions yourself to help other parents, as well as save items you find interesting to a customizable travel plan to plan your own itinerary using the site. Family.com has the nearly-ubiquitous wikis where you can share knowledge, answer questions, and share stories about your children, something that it seems most parents love to do. I could also plan a birthday party, plan my menus, or a host of other things. I do find it a bit ironic that under the "how to" for TV-free week they have a blurb about High School Musical 3, knowing that the first two installments were on television!

The next steps for Family.com are being designed with the intent of extending and enhancing opportunites for people to connect for a purpose. Disney is trying to make sharing fun and easy, but again, purposeful. The current site also features photo galleries, contests, creating and customizing groups focused on specific topics, and other ways to share user-generated content, as well as the ability to create a "family portrait" avatar, much like children can create their own custom fairy icon on the Fairies site. See how it all ties together?

As you move through the sites on the Disney.com online property, it's evident how much thought and planning have gone into making the sites integrate seamlessly. As a parent who has supervised my children on the Disney online sites, it's amazing how similar the navigation is for parents, and how similar some of the features are, like the avatars I mentioned above. I expected to be underwhelmed, having seen just about all, and participated in most, of the parenting sites online, but if you've spent any time with your children on the sites geared toward them, it's downright devious how easily they rope you in.

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Social Creation - Crowdsourcing

Here is something where you can build your brand - how the social media world recognizes your product of voice and at the same time use the social media to lower you cost of building that brand. Need a logo - blog template - twitter page - all of them can be built to suit your fancy. People are offering work needs from $50 to $5000. So take your work over there to see what you can get done.

clipped from webworkerdaily.com 99 Designs: Crowdsourcing that Works We’ve all heard about “crowdsourcing” - the notion that you can farm work out to a large group and cherry-pick the best results to save time and improve quality. 99Designs is one of the few sites I’ve seen that is really making this work. They’re focused on graphic design: logos, icons, and other visual work. People who need something fill out a brief about their needs, pay $39 for a listing, and specify what they’ll pay for the final product. Then designers contribute their ideas, which the potential client can rate and comment on. In the end, the deal gets done, the designer gets the money, and the client gets graphic work that strikes them as best-of-breed.

Jott™ - Jott to Self

Here is another social networking tool that works with other tools.  Once you set up contacts that you are keeping up with across twitter or other social tools - you may not be in position to type your answer.  This tool works very simply - just call 866-JOTT-123 - You respond to the voice who you want to JOTT - your response is YOURSELF - listen for the Beep - you Give the message - Jott does the rest.

There is another service that I use to blog from - UTTERZ - which operate very similar.

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GistWeb - Just givin' the gist!

I'm an offender - well not on this blog as much as in Business Reputation where I'm weaving ideas together to define larger issues.  Plus, I like writing in a philosophic style that tends to a little long winded. So I understand that not ever reader has as much fun with words as I do.

So finding a tool like "Gist It" is both a real find as a tool but it is also a for it's an honest gift to those people that would read my other blog but want to shorten the time read some of my longer post. So here it is...

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GistWeb will give the gist of any web page's actual content. It's goal is to provide a "summary" version of any page, giving you the meat and discarding the fluff. This saves loads of time when doing research online.
 
To use GistWeb (after clicking here), drag the -> Gist It! <- link to your bookmarks toolbar (Mozilla/FireFox Users). If you're using Internet Explorer, simply right-click the link and select 'Add to Favorites'.
 
Any time you want the gist of whatever page you're on, just click the bookmark! GistWeb also works with html files you have saved on your local hard drive. Just open the html file (File->Open) and click your GistWeb bookmark.

One last note: As a rule, GistWeb only works well on English documents. Using it on documents of any other language may produce low quality results.

GistWeb - Just givin' the gist!

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Knowledge Tool - Fun to use.

I just found this "tool" - I'm not share how it fits into building a conversation as directly as say - twitter or DimDim or some of the others, but it does lots of support for the research the backs up a good conversation. I'm intrigued by plasticity of the user interface - but that is only because bright shinny things always catch my attention.

The company describes itself this way. Silobreaker is an online search service for news and current events that delivers meaning and relevance beyond traditional search and aggregation engines. Its relational analysis and explanatory graphics provide users with unparalleled contextual insight into the news stories of the day.

More than a news aggregation, Silobreaker provides relevance by looking at the data it finds like a person does. It recognizes people, companies, topics, places and keywords; understands how they relate to each other in the news flow, and puts them in context for the user. The graphical search results enables users to quickly and easily understand connections, trends and topics or navigate deeper into the most relevant stories for them. No other news search service provides such an extensive suite of contextual tools in the industry today.

Silobreaker pulls content on global issues, science, technology and business from approximately 10,000 news, blog, research and multimedia sources. With the engine’s focus on finding and connecting related data in the information flow, Silobreaker’s user tools and visualizations are ideal for bringing meaning to content from either today’s Web or the evolving Semantic Web, or both.

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Where are You Now?

Now it's travel - any interest you have, the more reasons there are to form a social network. Just think as these special networks move to open networking all the networking profiles you build the more integration strategy you will need. But that's the subject for this blog - I do all the strategy discussions in my Business Reputation blog - so if your starting to wonder how to make all these networks work for you stop in there.

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There’s the travel social network WAYN (Where Are You Now?), with 11.4 million members but only a small crowd in the US so far. Their service resembles free social networking tools like Dopplr and Twitter but specifically targets travelers. Users keep their travel profiles updated with photos, experiences, and location so that friends at home can track their progress and so they can meet up or trade tips with fellow WAYN traveling similar routes. WAYN currently has 11 employees in London and 35 developers in Poland. It took in $11 million in funding in 2006 from investors including Brent Hoberman who is also the founder of ticket site Lastminute.com.

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What kind of social networker are you?

It's always interesting to place people into neat piles of similar styles, shapes stuff.  Some times those piles work other times - well - they come up a little short.  The first group where thought up by a serious mind social scientist with good intentions to explain the social networking user space.

If you know of a few other species - leave me your definitions.

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Alpha Socialisers

If you are an Alpha Socialiser, you are in a flirtatious minority. This group mostly consists of young males who make short but frequent forays into the world of social networking to scout for new contacts – usually of the opposite sex. If you flit between profiles looking for attractive friends of friends, you may well be an Alpha Socialiser.

Attention Seekers

Members of the attention seeking breed of social networkers apparently tend to be needy females. These individuals “crave interaction with others” and post photographs of

themselves in provocative poses, “partying, drinking and portraying glamorous lifestyles.” So the next time you find yourself Photoshopping the most flattering shot of yourself on a night out for uploading to your profile, you may need to ask: “Am I an Attention Seeker?”

Ofcom also notes that users from other groups were quite dismissive of this variety of social networker, one 16-year-old boy commenting on an attention-seeking profile, “She seems really vain; 20 pictures of herself but no pictures of her friends.”

Followers

Followers come from all walks of life, male and female, young and old. These are people who caught onto the social networking craze late, and mostly just to catch up with what their already-online friends were doing. Followers, Ofcom reports, tend to have brief, intense flings with social networking before losing their initial interest. It seems these are the people who do the bare minimum to keep their profiles up to date.

Faithful

The Faithful, as Ofcom calls them, are generally over 20 years old. They have “high self-esteem”, and are sufficiently settled down to not crave the comments and extensive friends lists of the Attention Seekers and Alpha Socialisers. For this group of networkers, finding old friends is more important than making new ones. If you mostly use your Facebook account to get in touch with old school friends, chances are you are among the nostalgic Faithful.

Functionals

A mostly male group, the Functionals are single-minded, twenty-something creatures. They eschew small talk and flirting in favor of social networking for a definite purpose: say, finding music or bands via MySpace.

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So, which breed of social networker are you? Think you know of a few that don’t fall into any of the above categories? If you recognize yourself immediately or refuse to be pigeonholed, let us know.

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Structuring A Conversation - Diigo Social Tool

Some of you may be aware of the conversation that I had with a blogger on the issue of Barack Obama’s character.  If you are interested in the conversation you can follow this link.  This post is not intended to rehash that conversation - so much as it is an explanation of the tools I used to deepen and expand the conversation.

The primary tool I used was Diigo.com.  Diigo is a social networking, annotation, bookmarking, sticky noting, and presentation tool.  The basic idea was for the other blogger and me was to post on each others blog responses to each other position.  That never really happen for my satisfaction, but I was very pleased with what Diigo showed me and its capability as conversation structure.

After getting use to the application by viewing several of the tutorials, I settled on a strategy for organizing the conversation. The idea was to conduct the conversation on a progressively deepening and expanding basis. The initial level was to simply follow each posting by the two bloggers.  For this level no contact with Diigo was necessary.  Thereafter for those that more and deeper engagement each post was bookmarked, organized on a group page by date and site location so that each group member could use and analyze the content.  I made it a common practice of visiting my opponent’s site to highlight those statements that I disagreed with – in some cases I would add a sticky note to explain or comment further for the members of the Diigo (Reputation) group.  The aim was to open the conversation for a wider and deeper dialogue.  There was also a facility within Group Page for forum, where other questions and issues could be raised.

The features of Diigo where available to all the members of the conversation to make their voices heard: highlighting, sticky notes, annotating, and bookmarking.

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Conversations on the Tweet

Social Networking tools are not single events. It's hard to imagine building house with just a hammer. This is especially true with social networking - more and more open source or portiblty within applications means that more and more tools are being built on top of or with other tools in mind. Flock is built to house and intergrate many other social networking tools. The following is for Twitter - with all the streams of information and such many of the tools will help listen to the tweets that are most important or the reverse make sure those you want to hear you do.

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Twitter is extensible, and many third-party developers are creating tools around the simple data being exported for a variety of unique applications.

If you’re using Twitter for personal, corporate use, or to manage the brand of a client, you’ll need the right tools to find and engage the discussions.

Here are the tools that I’m using to improve my Twitter experience, note that all of these are using my profile, but you can change to fit your needs.

1) Client: Although I mainly use the browser to see what’s going on (I click on profiles to see what people have said) Twhirl is the most popular client, using adobe air technology. Leave this on your desktop, instead of going to browser, also these clients may be more accurate in seeing who’s replying to you, unlike the browser version.

2) Search: Use Tweetscan to see who’s talking about you, your brand, or a topic you’re interested in. For example, I may not just search on “jowyang” but also on “owyang” as some don’t use the full name.

3) Conversations: Quotably is the top ‘conversation’ tracker, it threads together the discussions that members are having by looking at the replies, interesting to see how conversations spiral into different threads.

4) Aggregation: Friendfeed puts all of our RSS content onto one page, making it easy to see from one glance (rather than going to different properties) and you can even reply from friendfeed to different tools. It’s smarter to organize around people, rather than tools.

5) Tagging Content: For advanced users, you can start to use the hashag “#” to add metadata around any tweet, this becomes more important as we rate and tag content. Here’s a helpful primer. I’m not making much use of this feature –yet.

6) Location Based: If you live in a particular area, and want to parse out a specific location, this Twitterlocal filter finds tweets based upon a users profile location. If you’ve a local business, this could become useful.

7) Alerts: (update) Often, people will blog about the conversations that happen in twitter, the conversation shifts back to blogs. As a result, I setup Google Alerts for the phrase @jowyang, I see it appear 3-5 times a week on blogs. Thanks Andrew for the reminder in the comments.

Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing

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Conversation Browser - Flock - Social Networking Tool

If you haven't noticed many of the tool introductions I make are facilitated by the browser I use - Flock. It's is a spin-off of the Firefox browser described by its creators as "the social web browser". Available as a free download for Macintosh, Windows, and Linux platforms, Flock is unique among a sea of browser options, because it cleverly integrates an impressive number of social networking tools.

While it might be handy for the occasional Facebook or MySpace user, it's incredibly useful for people who use many social networking tools and web-based services. Flock gives us easy access to them all simultaneously. Sign-in to your favorite services and networks like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Picasa, Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, WordPress, Xanga, diigo, etc., and Flock will offer to remember these accounts and integrate them into the sidebar and media browser thereafter.

That means you can follow your Twitter updates and Facebook friends right in the sidebar--no need to visit those sites to get the latest information and media. You can view media streams from Facebook, Picasa, Flickr and YouTube, compose new Gmail or blog posts, and follow RSS feeds from virtually any source all while using other websites in the main browser.

As you can see in the screen capture above, I'm using Flock's blog editor now to compose this post, and it works great! I just dragged in the picture from my Photobucket media browser. As I write this, I see there are some updates in my Tweeter feed and new Facebook activity displaced in the sidebar. Everything seems to work well and feels much more responsive than using Blogger's editor. I think this is going to be habit forming.

If you haven't tried it yet, I encourage you to download Flock or at least read more about its features. Version 1.1. is already very impressive and way ahead of other browsers in terms of networking and media features. That being said, I hope they'll soon add even more integration features with other services I use, including Ning, Picnik, and Google Docs or Zoho.

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Conversations In The Class - Social Networking For Education

This presentation was by a consummate educator. What he does is give a complete overview of some of the tools and tactics that anyone could use to build a conversation - he just happens to be focused on teaching and students.

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Book Making for Groups - WeBook

The conversation is taking on ever more shapes and twists. One of the more intriguing is WeBook. Think Wiki but more!

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Where is WEbook?

Right here. You made it. WEbook is a virtual theme park for writers to take a stab at the book they've been thinking about in the shower for years. But you don't need to have a book in mind. Jump in and add a sentence or two as feedback, or write a quick article for one of our collections. Grab your friends or - if you don't have any - find new ones right here who are willing and able to help refine your work. Read, review, rant, and rate other books.Now that you've found your way here, we invite you to be a part of the online publishing revolution. Stop Waiting. Start Writing. At WEbook, Writing loves Company.

WEbook.com - Publishing Company - Online Publishing Group - Internet Companies - WEbook

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How to: Research An Unknown Online Retailer

Building a social networking conversation as important as it is does have some risk. In an earlier post I made the point that using some tools turns out to be a two edged sword.  Some of the tools have additional risk - some may actually boogus - this post will give you some of place to check out if you suspect something does not look or feel right.

The following are for any situation where you want to purchase something online, use some tool found online or you simply want to check out some offer.

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All these steps add up to a matrix that can either reassure you or make you want to run the other way.

• Do they have a toll free customer service number and published hours of operation?
• Do they take credit cards? It is no guarantee of quality if they do, but it is one step up. I think you should generally avoid any place that only takes Western Union money transfers.
• Do they have a security/hacker prevention or testing certificate?
• Does the checkout process use an encrypted HTTPS page?
• Are the company Privacy and About pages blank, or do they look like they are from a default template for an online shopping cart that was just set up the day before?
• Search Google for the store name and words like "scam" and "customer service." It is not a good thing if all the entries are for people asking if a site is a scam in Yahoo Answers.
• [www.google.com]
  [answers.yahoo.com]
  [wiki.answers.com]
• Check the Whois to see what the website registration looks like. It is not a good sign if it was just registered last week. It should not look like someone is trying to hide the fact that they are running a business out of their parents basement.
• [www.geektools.com]
• Check the Traceroute to see what network it is running on. It should match the WhoIs info to some extent.
• [www.opus1.com]
• Check if the company has a yellow pages listing and street address. If you have a phone number, a company with a street address is a lot more reassuring. Check the address on Google Maps to see if it is a vacant lot or an address in a housing tract.
• [www.411.com]
• See if the site has a warning listed on McAfee SiteAdvisor.
• [www.siteadvisor.com]
• Check fraud and scam report sites. Some of them also list sites that have allegedly scammed other people.
• [edsbandwagon.com]
  [www.fraudbureau.com]
  [www.ripoffreport.com]
  [www.scambusters.com]
  [www.scamclub.com]
  [www.cybercrime.gov]
  [www.fraud.org]
• Beware of "Online Review" sites. Some are little more than a site for scammers to post fake positive reviews, and the owners to make money on banner ads. Here are some you can trust:
• [www.epinions.com]
  [reviews.pricegrabber.com]
  [www.bizrate.com]
  [www.resellerratings.com]
• BBB online. Lots of places do not have entries because they are small and treat their customers well enough to not get a complaint.
• [search.bbb.org]

  What techniques do you use to see if a site is legit? Share your thoughts in the comments.

How To: How To Research An Unknown Online Retailer

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