Conversational Media Marketing

I had the privilege of sitting in on a two-hour webinar led by , the CEO of WordFrame, where he demoed the enterprise level social networking/online community platform. And, two hours wasn't long enough!

I was amazed, not only by the extensive number of components that make up the platform (with more to come), but its ease-of-use. I've had experience with a number of both open-source and .NET social networking platforms and found none of them as simple to use as this. The logic, the workflow...everything made sense.

I'm not the only one who thinks highly of the product either. Just announced, one of the WordFrame sites, IT Counts, won the "Best New Web 2.0 Initiative" at the Web 2.0 Strategies 2008 conference held in the UK. How's that for industry credibility!

Not only is WordFrame a platform for the future, George is a genuinely nice guy who thoroughly believes in his product. You can tell he's proud to show it off.  And I was proud to be in attendance.

Data portability... MySpace announced Thursday they're doing it... Facebook and Google made similar announcements on Friday.

The issue has been gaining ground for a number of months, especially since the unintended (It was unintended wasn't it?) Scoble Facebook/Plaxo mishap shed more intense light on the need for netizens to be able to control, move and share their data across a network of trusted sites.  Now, it appears another step is being taken in the direction of a more Pangaea-like web.

A data portability or semantic web expert I'm not, but anything that's going to make the job of registering for yet another social network easier suits me just fine. And, Google's announcement comes with an added bonus, especially where small business is concerned.

Popular veteran business bloggers, Andy Beal, founder of Marketing Pilgrim, and Stowe Boyd, author of /Message,  recently became technology tool vendors (independently of each other), creating the apps  Trackur and WorkStreamr, respectively.

Trackur is a low-cost, easy to use application that enables anyone to monitor their online reputation. This is in keeping with Andy's shift in focus toward Online Reputation Management. He co-authored a newly released book on the topic, Radically Transparent, and offers his services as reputation management consultant.

Stowe, along with two others, just launched WorkStreamr, a "social tool for work management that gets out of the way, and lets people interact to get work done." The application is still in private beta. Those interested are welcome to register, according to Stowe. The email I received upon registering indicated new people would be allowed in starting sometime in June.

Congrats to Beal and Boyd. I look forward to making use of both these tools.

Recently, AdAge editor, Jonah Bloom, sent a note to AdAge Power 150 members asking us to share our ideas about what we think would be the "single technology, site or application" most deserving of marketers’ attention in 2008 and why.

Never one to pass up an opportunity to get my name in print (:->), I submitted a comment, which was posted. However, part of it was left off. Just for the record, here's the full comment as it was sent:

Online video/TV is THE technology to watch in 08. There seems to be a seismic shift toward digital distribution of video content, more and more video sites are being created, and there is a small camera revolution going on (which includes webcams) that portends a continued rise in user-generated video content.

YouTube was just the beginning. Now, there’s ooVoo, seesmic, revver, Jumpcut… the list goes on and on. Oh, and FastCompany.TV that Scoble just inaugurated. Add to that the fact that people are scurrying to their computers in droves to watch television programs which, themselves, are being equipped to serve as television monitors. More than any other technology, including social networks, online video is it.

Note the sentence which says, "Add to that the fact that people are scurrying to their computers in droves to watch television programs which, themselves, are being equipped to serve as television monitors." Some bad sentence structure there... should have read something like, "Add to that the fact that people are scurrying to their computers to watch television programs on sites like Hulu, Netflix or DailyMotion." Anyway, you get the point.

• Yahoo Search Casts Lots with Semantic Web Technology - MarketingVox
• Yes, You Too Can YouTube - Forbes
• Is AOL after widget-maker KickApps? - MediaPost
• The Future Belongs to Widgets - MediaWeek
• Top Tools - The Daily Fix

Ever attempted to live blog an event using any of the popular blog platforms? Pain in the rumpus, isn't it. The platform just isn't suited to that purpose. That's all changed now, thanks to an application designed specifically for live blogging called, Cover It Live.

The videos on CIL's Web site explain how the platform works much better than I, so let me encourage you to view them. However, I will hit some of the highlights.

You set up a live blogging session via CIL's admin console and are given a snippet of code to embed in your blog's posting interface. (CIL uses iframes to push its content into your blog and AJAX technology to make it all work.)

Updates made via an entry field in CIL's console  are added in chronological order. Site visitors can not only follow updates, but leave moderated comments,  which, once approved, are added to the stream as well. The blogger can add panelists who provide additional commentary and producers who manage the whole affair. That way, the blogger can focus on providing commentary without the distraction of approving comments, inserting images or video clips, etc.

Images and video can be added to a library and used as needed during the live blogging session. And, there is an interactive polling feature which can be set up in advance or created on the fly. CIL's platform requires no manual refresh either (no need to use the F5 key).

Cover It Live takes live-blogging to an entirely new level and  opens the door to blogging press conferences, political or sporting events, television shows, conferences, or breaking news in real-time. I can't wait to use it and am looking for any excuse to do so. 

I had the chance to attend barcamp Austin III over the weekend and want to share some videos I took with my RCA Small Wonder camcorder. (Beats the Flip hands down imo, except that the version I have doesn't upload directly to YouTube, which, admittedly, is a negative. Newer models do though.) I've put tall the videos in the extended post section.

I must mention the fact that barcamp, while I enjoyed it, was a little too much of a "geekfest" for my tastes. The main reason I went was to meet with a couple of guys, Rick Calvert of Blog World Expo and Jim Turner of One-by-One Media. We talked for about four hours about some ideas we have. (More news about that later.) Otherwise, I used the opportunity to connect with some old friends as well as meet some new ones.

Anyway, videos follow. Get a soft drink and some popcorn, sit back and enjoy. (Well, tolerate at least... I'm no videographer, that's for certain!)

I've been futzing over whether to attend barcamp Austin for quite a number of days. Circumstances wouldn't allow attendance at SXSWi, so I pretty much blew the whole thing off. But, I decided to bite the bullet and at least attend this event, which will be my first.

I hope to see some old blogging buddies there and maybe learn a thing or two as well. 

After spending a good deal of time on Steve Rubel's blog I got to noticing that he had a bunch of cool social media stuff in the footer of each post... Technorati links, Digg, delicious, etc.

Using Typepad for my blog, as does Steve, of course I wanted to have all that as well. So, I searched under the hood of his blog to view the source code and found that he was using Feedburner's FeedFlare component to add the functionality.

If you're using Typepad and would like to do the same, it's really very easy.  Just follow the steps outlined in the two following videos:

Video #1: Setting up FeedFlare in Feedburner (4 MB; 3:13)

Video #2: Activating FeedFlare in Typepad (1 MB; 47 sec)

Disregarding the fact that I need to polish up my video presentation/narration skills, I hope you found this helpful. In all honesty, I'd like to do more of this sort of thing to add some instructional value. I've been reluctant to do so in the past because I'm not a technical writer and doing "how-to" posts has never been my strong suit. But, with video screen capture (I'm using Jing btw), it's much easier.

Me and the Internet go way back, at least to 1995, and probably before. I can't exactly remember. What I do recall though is that the browser I used to surf the net via my 1200 baud modem (or whatever speed it was) was Netscape Navigator. That's why I'm a bit sad to learn that AOL is about to kill the browser once and for all.

On Saturday, March 1st, AOL will pull the plug on any support related to Netscape. It's already dead for all intents and purposes. What happens March 1st will be the final nail in the coffin.

Despite this move, considering Firefox and Flock are built on the same codebase as the original, Netscape does live on in a sense.

So, why don't we all take a moment to fondly remember the old browser.  Rest in peace Netscape. I knew thee well.

Just for grins, I downloaded Netscape 9. Though I have no plans to actually use it, I thought once more just for old time sake wouldn't hurt.