Do you have a hard time finding great content to read? Would you like to help discover undervalued authors?

Join the team…

Darren of ProBlogger sent me a link to check out Chuck Westbrook’s call for help in finding undervalued blogs.

This is a problem we can do something about without too much trouble. Here’s what I’m thinking.

1. Gather some nice bloggers who believe in helping good content rise. The more the merrier. This becomes our group for the project.
2. A good, lesser-known blog is chosen. Everyone in the group will read that blog for two weeks.
3. At the end of the two weeks, the group moves to another blog to read.

If you are looking for great content to read, and wouldn’t mind spending a few minutes each week helping another author, stop by Chuck’s blog. Not only would you help out other authors, but you might just find some really great content to read.

Many people refer to social media sites as an echo-chamber, full of noise, and tough to find signal. Some gravitate towards extreme amounts of interaction, with thousands of subscribers. Myself, I can’t quite digest that much chatter…

With so many things grabbing at my attention, I need to cut to the chase as quickly as possible, and maximize the amount of information I consume.

FriendFeed is a wonderful mechanism to do so. As I wrote in a previous article, the introduction of lists has been one of the best ways to help me organize all of the information coming in.

With my list of subscribed friends steadily going up, even lists can only help so much. To help with this, FriendFeed offers Hide options.

The Options

FriendFeed, by default, shows you friend-of-friends’ posts. The FriendFeed crew wants to help by exposing you to other friends to which your friends are subscribed. This is the quickest way to “listen in” on the many different conversations that are going on.

In this instance, I have several options:

• I can hide all entries from a specific feed of a specific “friend of” (in this case Twitter),
• all entries from a from a specific “friend of”,
• all “friend of” entries from my friend,
• or all entries from a specific feed medium (in this case Twitter).

The Reason I Use It

I have found a little hiccup, for me, in FriendFeed: I am subscribed to both Mashable and Alan Edgett, but each is in a different list – causing one or the other to usually appear in an unintended list. If I don’t suppress “friend of” entries, the water can get a little muddy at times.

I presently have the “friend of” feature turned off (as you can see above), in favor of monitoring responses to my friends posts. Since I am interested in my friends’ posts, and read almost all of the comments, I can find interesting friends very easily – willing to expand the conversation.

My thought process has been beneficial so far, and I am not bombarded with duplicate entries. This helps me find other friends and I usually can qualify whether I would enjoy their content based upon how they interact with the community.

The Block

The Hide options can be very powerful, so I try to use it sparingly. I believe in everyone’s right to say what they want, and if I am offended I can simply unsubscribe. However, the unsubscribe option does not prevent other comments from appearing in your friends’ threads.

FriendFeed has provisioned for this with an option to hide all entries from a specific user. This course of action is somewhat drastic, but I have had to use it – only once, thank goodness.

My Take

FriendFeed has offered a wonderful set of tools to both help you aggregate your various content feeds and by allowing commenting. Additionally, by giving me options to groom how I want to view the conversation, FriendFeed has created a very interesting community. The people on FriendFeed are witty, cynical, supportive, and friendly – showing you that even cyber-space the range of human emotion can be powerful when given room to roam.

While the Hide option is powerful, it is my suggestion that you play with it to see whether it can help you find what interests you.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

The list: an age old way to manage. The list can tell whether you are part of the in-crowd or have to stand in line with the regular people, or it can help you tell what task or project requires your attention for the day. In social media circles, it can be both.

There is most certainly a plethora of social media offerings. With all of the popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, people are seeking ways to connect to other individuals or groups that share common interests. After all, The Web makes the world a lot smaller.

The problem with the abundance of all of these proverbial silos of social cliques is the extra effort to keep up with all of them. The burden of maintenance is enormous, and soon takes much of the fun and usefulness out of the equation.

A popular life-streaming site, FriendFeed, allows you to connect the dots. FriendFeed can be thought of as a way to socialize on just about any subject under the sun, and has become a publishing portal for all of your varied content - from a blog to Netflix choices, from Twitter to Flickr photo sharing.

While FriendFeed can be a lot of fun, such a site must serve a practical purpose as well. With the advent and popularization of RSS feeds and blogs, content is being created more rapidly than ever. However, trying to find useful information within the open fire hydrant of this content can be daunting.

FriendFeed, in a nutshell

FriendFeed recently launched their new version to include a group capability called lists. Basically, you can subscribe to 2 different types of content:

1. Friends: These are individual feeds of a person (or entity). A friend might aggregate many different types of content into their feed.
2. Rooms: Much like a newsgroup, Rooms are typically moderated and provide an area to post content around a particular subject (like election 2008 coverage, SharePoint, etc.).

Like channels on a television, lists enable you to program the types of feeds to which you watch, and a simple way to filter information into manageable chunks to increase the likelihood you will find useful information.

How I use lists:

I have created several different lists to help me find useful information or information that is enjoyable for me to consume. Here’s a breakout of where I am seeing some productive use:

• Home Feed: Everyone I subscribe to is part of my Home Feed. This is much like ground zero for me when I want to see unfiltered traffic of those to which I subscribe.
• A-Listers: This list obviously contains some of the notables on FriendFeed like Louis Gray, Mona N., and Scobleizer. However, I also use this list to monitor conversations from friends that quite often have a lot of conversations.
• Business: These are people I currently work with in some capacity or interact with in my local business community that happen to frequent FriendFeed. Sadly, there are only a few.
• Front Page: This is the list I will hit first if I am limited on time. I move those I am most interested in, I interact with most, or who interact with me most to this list. This list is comprised of both friends and rooms.
• SharePoint: I have created a list just to monitor activity on SharePoint as this is a very interesting subject to me presently. This list is solely comprised of rooms.
• Watched: This is a temporary list I use to watch content until I can determine how to classify it. This helps me ensure I spend time focusing on subscribers that may not post a lot or might post material I find questionable.

The Black-Hole List:

One way many individuals judge success in social media circles is simply by the number of subscribers. One use of lists, if you are devious, is to encourage someone to subscribe to you and tuck them away in a list you never frequent. While it may be tempting to some, many I spoke with seemed indignant at the thought of anyone using a black-hole list. I, myself, found it more ethical to simply unsubscribe if I was uninterested in the publisher’s content.

The Take-Away:

I have been spending a great deal more time on FriendFeed, since I discovered lists. In fact, this simple feature supplanted both Twitter and Plurk, in my opinion.

While I enjoy the conversations quite a bit, I am still seeking a balance between time spent and useful information I am gathering. More than not, I find that I will subscribe directly to a publisher’s blog content, and have been using FriendFeed more to interact with the publishers.

This use has given me a greater sense of true conversation as opposed to random comments left on a blog that may or may not be answered. Overall, FriendFeed has offered me a wonderful mechanism by which I can aggregate much of my different online content-types, and keep an index of information to which I might later refer.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

First, just what is social media? That’s a pretty broad term. In general, it has come to signify a collective offering of Web 2.0 companies like Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, and Facebook which allow groups of like-minded individuals to form loose-knit communities for the purpose of broadcasting information to large groups of people who comprise a well-targeted demographic.

Business translation? You get your intended message out to a well-tuned market who will listen your message.

Most traditional businesses aren’t even aware these services exist, well with the exception of sites like Facebook or MySpace. But aren’t those for my teenager?

The Chicken or the Egg?

Ah, now you’ve asked an interesting question. This actually shows you are not dumb at all - I’m proud of you for thinking like that. You at least know they exist.

Here’s a quick fact for all of you, Facebook recently reached 100,000,000 subscribers. A free service dedicated to helping people connect with one another now has more competitive information housed within its database than your CRM/SFA application.

Do you think you might be able to do just a little research on a prospect before heading over if they were subscribed to a service like Facebook, or LinkedIn (a popular professional network)?

You may ask, “My prospect couldn’t be using any of that stuff - could they?”

The Tipping Point is Now

Social media is at a tipping point, some might argue it is well past - but I would contend only now are avant garde companies utilizing social media outlets to capitalize on untapped markets and interact with their customers. The mainstream businesses are still grappling with search engine marketing, and the Web has been around for almost two decades, while social media is really only in its infancy.

Companies like Comcast and Dell are putting their proverbial ear to the ground in order to help foresee potential press before it hits the mainstream media outlets like MSNBC or CNN. While these examples are technology companies, it is important to note this is both an intelligence and social tool; these two companies are opting to lead the pack to both “listen to the chatter on the wire” as well as connect with their customers in a meaningful way.

Be Authentic

While you would love to have access to this wealth of raw marketing data, there is a cost. It does not necessarily come in subscription fees or maintenance agreements. There have been no proven “get rich quick schemes” here.

It takes authenticity and empathy; a genuine interest and interaction in the communities you traffic. In this manner are you given the keys to the kingdom.

Sound familiar? Isn’t it very much like how we say we sell - by building relationships? The payoff is measured in meaningful gains - at first not quantitative, but qualitative. Then, as your sphere of influence grows so to does your return: You find increased responsiveness to your brand, increased goodwill, and increased customer retention.

What you put in is what you get out, and that’s why you would use social media for your business. Not because it is a scheme, but because it is another way to build relationships with your community of customers.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

What do you think of when you think of the term ‘currency’ ? Dictionary.com offers these definitions of currency:

cur·ren·cy [kur-uhn-see, kuhr-] –noun, plural -cies.

1.	something that is used as a medium of exchange; money.

2.	general acceptance; prevalence; vogue.

3.	a time or period during which something is widely accepted and circulated.

4.	the fact or quality of being widely accepted and circulated from person to person.

It is interesting to notice that while money is certainly mentioned, first and foremost, currency is a medium of exchange, indicating value does not lie within the value of the coin or dollar intrinsically. So then, who decides what manner of exchange is to be employed and what value is to be placed upon the denominations used?

As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

In social media terms, Twitter has followers, FriendFeed has subscribers, and Plurk has Karma… they are all status symbols signifying importance or authority… Who places value on them? The participants of those communities, of course. If you are not fond of social media, or have not been exposed to it, then you might ask why such trivial things matter?

Let’s broaden our analogy: For those in web-based marketing, often termed search engine optimization (SEO), maybe it’s unique visitors (uniques) or conversation rates. For those in brick-and-mortar businesses maybe it’s customer retention rates, revenue per employee, or sales per square foot.

All in all, we all seek to assign value to our transactions and why? Quite simply, to survive.

We live in a world where everything has a price, and in assigning value to your product or service you attempt to broadcast your worth to your clients, to the world, and most importantly - to you, yourself.

Ah, now there is the rub. Up until this point, this is all basic economics, right? Well, have you ever considered the reason you are so caught up in trying to inflate your value is to take a place of superiority for yourself - above others?

Let me give you a more personal example:

I started this blog several months ago for a reason, I would even call it a cause. My goal was two-fold:

1. I wanted people to know who I was.
2. I wanted to share my thoughts with others, and encourage debate and discussion.

I dug in, and learned more and more about blogging tools, tricks, and sought any advice I could get. I worked long hours building this site, and had quite a few frustrations. Then somewhere along the way, I discovered I was spending more time pumping my blog - pumping myself up - and less time creating content. I found I was spending less time enjoying myself.

My currency had become me… pushing me, pumping me up, talking about me… Does that sound as self-centered as it looks while I’m writing this?

Now here is my adjusted goal:

1. I wanted people to know who I was.
2. I want to share my thoughts with others, and encourage debate and discussion.

Now that I am focused on connecting with people, I am much more focused on creating content and having fun. I have rediscovered the joy of interacting with others simply for that - not with ulterior motive in mind. Where the currency I had traded in used to be a currency of “me”, I have learned that trading in a currency of “you” actually betters my experience, and comes back to me ten fold.

So as you travel through your life, ask yourself, “What currency do I trade in?” If it is a currency of “me”, you may find that you are feeding your ego and starving your soul.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

As a citizen of the blogosphere, and being technology-minded, I enjoy trying new things. Plurk was one of those new things.

While some may argue it was too weird, some may maintain it was a Twitter knock-off, and some may just not like it - Plurk has a very interesting interface and an even better community.

I first gave Plurk whirl back in early June, and even wrote a little piece comparing its features against that of Twitter, called Twitter = Ego; Plurk = Fun.

So why say goodbye? Well, there are a few reasons.

1. Noise:

I am attempting to cut through the noise, and social outlets like Plurk and Twitter generate an awful lot of that, in my humble opinion. With the amount of information coming at me, I need a very succinct way of pairing back what I don’t need - almost an RSS reader for social media - if you will.

2. Connect:

I am attempting to connect to others, in a meaningful way. While the community in Plurk is wonderful, I would liken it to happy hour at a bar. If you want to unwind and have some interesting conversations - with LOTS of tangents - then Plurk is definitely the place for you.

3. Time:

I want to learn things from others, and I get this when reading others blogs or parsing through my subscriptions in FriendFeed. Plurk was very good at this, as long as I was willing to put in a copious amount of time.

This was not productive for me. I need to invest my time wisely with all of the various priorities in my life. I’m sure each of you, my readers, can relate to this - and make these decisions more and more now as well.

In general, this was not a hard decision to make when I stepped back and analyzed my goals relative to where I am spending my time. There is only a finite amount of time and energy I have, and while each and every community out there is wonderful in its own right, I can only be part of so many.

To the A-Team at Plurk, my hats off for creating something very interesting - but it’s time I said, “good night.”

Watch-out Twitter - you may have to be next…

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

For those of you fanboys (and fangirls) of FireFox 3, this post is for you:

As many of my valued readers might know, I have been following various social media outlets for a few months, with some mixed results.

Let me be frank when I say that I think there is a log of egotistical stuff going on in the world of social media, but I have met some really nice people through channels like Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk, and so on.

Twitter, in specific, is rather interesting in that I typically post little observations or aggravations about the world at large. For those of you that don’t know what Twitter is, it is what is termed as a micro-blogging site; more to the point, it is a way for you to post little tidbits in 140 words or less.

So it was that I found myself aggravated with some goings on of FF3. It would at some points sieze up, or not allow CAPTCHA’s to be displayed properly on some blogs… This was rather frustrating.

So I blabbed about it on Twitter - and Firefox Answered.

At first firefox_answers gave me what I thought was a mundane answer, uninstall your plug-ins…

“Gee, really? What fantastic advice,” I said… and got a response back. In fact, I got several responses back, much quicker than any of the other twitterers (yes that is what they are called).

… and I ended up enjoying some crow to go with my serving of humble pie - because even though the plugin was only meant to help render FriendFeed a little more cleanly - it stepped on some other pages toes.

Here are the take-aways:

1. Those companies in Tech using social media to talk with their customers are very savvy.
2. Social media used in this fashion creates a very warm customer experience.
3. I should quit thinking I know everything about technology just because I’m in technology - and be a little more humble when instructed to do something by the official semi-official Mozilla FireFox Twitter Technical Support Account.

… it was a plug-in … come on cut me some slack!

So I’m changing my default browser back to FF3 to look for some more flaws… I know, great attitude right? Well, now I have @firefox_answers.

Why do I … ?

That is an interesting question I ponder often. Certain things strike my fancy or I wonder why things work a certain way, or why they don’t work a certain way?

So why do I write? Why do I blog specifically?

Much like you, my readers, I suppose there are many differing reasons. Perhaps I like to rattle off opinions, perhaps I use this medium as journal of sorts to record my thoughts, or perhaps I want to spark a small conversation in a small community.

All of these do revolve around the core of why I blog, but perhaps an even better way in which to discover why I write might be to ask what is it that I like most about writing - about blogging?

I think perhaps at the core of my being is an insatiable thirst for knowledge. I think what I have found I most enjoy about writing is that it flips a switch in my mind; it keeps me observant - always prodding me to ask why, even more than I already might otherwise.

As I’m washing dishes, or going to the park with my daughter, or working through a complex issue within my business I’m always tilting my head to the side - challenging myself to try and look at the situation a smidge differently.

It is not without its complications. There are times when asking why has caused me more grief than not knowing. However, I have to remind myself that no one said knowledge would be without pain or insult. I asked for the blinders to be removed. How else can I be prepared for the inevitable, the always onward-marching, change?

So it is, that I sit here before a monitor, with the click, clack, click of the keyboard keeping beat with my thoughts that I challenge myself to another discovery - however small - each day; I enter a contest, of sorts, to see how many times I can discover a new truth, a new reason, a new dance of cause and effect.

What is it that tugs at you to keep you writing?

Image courtesy of  creator of circumstance

Reminiscent of a Dr. Seuss meets Tim Burton interface, Plurk gets a big plug from some A-listers and takes off with fans and foes alike.

For those of you that have been watching the web for the past few days, a new social site has gained in popularity thanks to Leo and Scoble called Plurk. Plurk has seemingly begun to step in where Twitter has begun to falter under scalability issues. While it is not without its problems, it seems to offer a richer user interface (UI) along with some nice hooks, like Karma (discussed a little later).

Where did the name Plurk come from you ask? Well, akan from the Plurk Blog had this to say:

Plurk. Yuck. Sounds so muck like pork. or bork. We understand there’s sort of a love-hate thing going on with our name. It’s understandable but we’d like to give you some colour on what’s behind the name so you are not as quick to brush it off.

• Plurk as stalkerati central: People + Lurk= Plurk
• Plurk as an amalgam of Play + Work: Play-Work. Plurk is what scientists do. It is the enthusiastic, energetic application of oneself to the task at hand as a child excitedly plays; it is the intense arduous, meticulous work of an artist on their life-long masterpiece; it is joyful work. (credit)
• Plurk as acronym: Peace, Love, Unity, Respect, Karma
• Verb potential: “Oh I googled this –> Oh I plurked it” Easy enough to wrap around in any form. Plurked, plurking, plurkers, plurks. Little p, big P, it’s catchy, snippy and sweet.

So next time you say Plurk, don’t say ewww, but chew on it for a little longer and have a happy day (at work, plurking the day away!).

An Overview:

Plurk is organized in a timeline format and threaded comments, or Plurks. Twitter, however is organized in a sequential format and only provides a first-in-first-out (FIFO) format for messages. The “river” allows you to scroll through a time line of conversations and expand each thread to view other “plurkers” comments.

What is interesting about the posts is that they are comprised of several key components:

1. Avatar - A picture to add some flavor and a nice way to filter only your posts in the timeline.
2. Handle - A link to your bio
3. Action Verb - A verb that allows you to express a little more emotion (e.g. Changeforge “is”, “thinks”, “loves”).
4. Message - The message in 140 characters or less
5. Number of responses - indicates you have responses - or people replurking to your plurk.
6. Lastly, you get friendly reminders about updates and the ability to filter on all plurks or just responses, or just your plurks.

The Stats & Karma:

There are the normal stats like number of plurks, responses, and join date. However, the creators of Plurk are definitely geared towards spreading the word as indicated by some other stats like friends invited and profile views.

Also the makers of Plurk have added a fun game outside of the normal accumulation of friends, called Karma. Karma is achieved through various acts like number of referrals and overall activity. The exact calculation hasn’t been cracked just yet, which is probably best.

However, you can even subscribe to a robot that tracks your Karma and ranks you against other Plurkers. Beware, you can actually loose Karma as well, adding an element of slight risk to the mix.

Is Plurk a Twitter knock-off?

Well, let’s see, there is the fact that you can’t type in more than 140 characters, and an input screen that is very similar in nature. You have friends that you follow and that can follow you.

You will have to be the judge. Many Twitter fans accuse Plurk of being a knock-off of Twitter geared towards 14-year old Neopets. This might very well be true. Some feel the interface is great, and some feel it gets in the way.

Integration:

Plurker currently offers IM integration with a few clients like Yahoo! and Google Talk, and has a mobile version that seems to be a bit spotty at times. However, the real power for Plurker will come in its integrations. If it cannot cross the chasm to offer users more ways to interact with the community and find information in the fashion they choose, it will quickly loose steam and/or never reach the critical mass that now seems to plague Twitter.

Summary:

What I can say is there is a great amount of potential. With the influx of traffic, the Plurker team had a tough time with scaling, but made some quick adjustments and seemed to get back on track.

But what I think I like most about Plurker so far is the simple and raw fact that the community is so much nicer. Twitter seems to be plagued with A-listing egos and has meandered into a bloggers billboard for their latest blog. I use it for that too, don’t get me wrong, but there doesn’t seem to be the inquisitive substance I had hoped for many months ago when I started.

With Plurker, people seem to be genuinely interested in discovering each other and about each other some some degree. It has not become the stomping ground for the “ego’s” afoot to discuss why they like FriendFeed or Twitter - ad nauseum. It is a place to ask simple questions and get fun answers.

Plainly put - Plurk is not Twitter. Plurk is not revolutionary. Plurk is fun.

Where does this road lead?

If you liked this post, you might also want to read how my adventure in Plurk turned out.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

So what’s so great about all of these social media platforms like FriendFeed, Twitter, etc.? Back at the beginning of April, I signed up for a FriendFeed account (ChangeForge). I decided to join the experiment first hand to see what’s it’s all about.

Well, to be truthful, it seems like I’ve been subscribed much longer than just 2 months.

Scoble wrote a post about news v. noise (link). The premise was a simple question of whether you enjoy information from 1 of 2 sources: 

1) news, an organized stream of information from “reputable sources”, or

2) noise, the chatter in the blogosphere.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I enjoy the former more than the latter, BUT I have come to learn that social media sites and meta-aggregators are wonderful ways to find new content that I would never have found otherwise.

Think of it… you are 1 person trying to find things interesting through traditional media outlets, various e-mails, or you might even be using some sights like MySpace or FaceBook already.

So what would something like FriendFeed or Twitter bring to the table?

Think of this… you now have dozens or hundreds of individuals combing the Internet for things you enjoy and posting links back to their source. This is the beautiful thing I have come to love about FriendFeed or Twitter.

These sites do not give you that 1-on-1 feel like an Instant Messaging client might, but you can gain some wonderful links to new information, and that branch can take you to many other sources of information. It’s almost as if you are becoming part of the root system of a large tree seeking more and more sources of minerals and water.

Social Media is not without its issues; it does tend to be a little “high school” in that users tend to become incensed at the drop of the hat, it seems. It is also my opinion you need a program like AlertThingy, TWhirl, or Feedalizer to keep a little more interactive feel.

Nonetheless, it is a bold new frontier I have not regretted becoming part of. I am still refining who I follow, but this practice is, and should be, part of any evolution. Give it a try, and dive in.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.