Category: Blogging

Mar 17

One Screenshot To Show How Getty Images’ "Free" Offer FAILS – And Why I Will Not Use It

Much has been made over the past few weeks about Getty Images allowing the free embedding of over 35 million images from Getty's vast library. The Verge ran a glowing piece and Neville Hobson summarized a good bit of the early coverage. While I commend Getty Images on trying to evolve their business model in the era of the Internet, here's the reality:

I will NOT use this service - and I can't imagine why anyone else would who wants their content found via social networks.

Here is one screenshot to show why Getty Image's service fails.. I used a Getty Images embed in my last post here and this is what happened when I tried to share the link on Facebook:

Getty embed facebook 2

Here's a second screenshot of sharing the post out in Google+:

Getty embed googleplus

Do you see the problem?

WHERE IS THE IMAGE FROM GETTY IMAGES???

That's right... IT'S NOT THERE!

The image appears in the post itself, of course, but it doesn't appear when you try to share the image out in social networks.

Which is... often... THE ENTIRE POINT of why I am including an image in a blog post. I want something visual that will illustrate the points I'm making in the post - but also that will be attractive when the post is shared out on social media.

So for me this is a reason why I will pretty much never use this new offer from Getty Images.

There are host of other issues, as well, as outlined by Brian Krogsgard in a recent post, but for me the one that kills the whole deal is the lack of the ability for the image to appear in social sharing.

Again, I commend Getty Images on trying to figure out how to evolve their business in the Internet age, but this implementation needs to evolve before it will be useful for people like me.

What do you think? Are you planning to use this new service?

I recorded an audio commentary on this issue as well:

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Mar 10

Crossing 300,000 Views Of My CircleID Articles

I was pleased to note recently that the number of views to my various posts on CircleID had crossed over the 300,000 mark and that along the way I'd entered the top 20 contributors to the site in terms of viewed articles. Not that viewer metrics are anything I get very excited about... but it was just kind of cool to see that mark being passed.

As I wrote about back in November 2012 and have also spoken about on past FIR podcast episodes, CircleID is one of the sites that I watch to keep up on what is happening with the infrastructure that powers the Internet, as well as Internet policy issues and, in recent years, the evolution of the "new generic top-level domains (newgTLDs)". I enjoy reading many of the people who write there - and have learned a good bit in the process. There are a lot of contributors to the site (and anyone can sign up to contribute) and so you get to hear many different voices, including some, of course, with whom you may not agree - but that is good and helpful.

Beyond simply visiting the CircleID website, you can follow the site as @circleID on Twitter and via the CircleID Facebook page as well as good old RSS.

I'd highly recommend CircleID for people interested in the evolution of the Internet!

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Feb 24

TypePad To Start Using Akismet To Fight Blog Comment Spam

Yes! The folks at TypePad announced today they going to start using Akismet to fight blog comment spam! As a user of TypePad since 2005-ish, I've long been frustrated with how poorly TypePad's anti-comment-spam mechanisms have worked and have written about that, although granted that particular incident was now 3.5 yrs ago and things have improved a bit in that I'm not seeing quite as much spam. However, I've also turned on full moderation on the couple of remaining blogs I still have on TypePad.

All my new blogs and other sites are over on WordPress where I've been very happy with the anti-spam services that I get from Akismet. (And some day I'd like to move this blog and Disruptive Telephony over to WordPress, too - if only I can carve out the considerable time that will be involved with the move.)

I'm pleased to see TypePad moving this way. It may not be enough to get me to stop using full moderation on my articles... but hopefully it should mean fewer spam comments to look at in the admin interface.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Jan 13

Are You In The Business Of Rapid Content Creation?

Rapid content creation 2It's 2014. If you are in PR, marketing or communications - or have that as part of your role, even if you are not formally in that "department" - is part of your business the rapid creation of online content?

The Internet provides all of us with a fundamental opportunity on a scale great than we've ever had before:

We can tell our OWN story, in our OWN words, through our OWN channels.

The gatekeepers of the past to whom you had to beg permission for them to publish news about your organization are now... gone. Disrupted by the Internet.

As Tom Foremski famously wrote, "every company is a media company." (Also see these posts.)

But have YOU embraced that?

Are you thinking like a "media company"? Are you thinking about how you can best tell your story online? Are you thinking about how you enable many people within your organization to tell your story?

I'm not just talking about social media and encouraging employees to share or retweet corporate tweets or posts on Facebook or Google+.

Are you enabling people within your organization to rapidly create online content related to their roles?

Can they easily post blog posts? Can they post videos to YouTube? Can they create an audio podcast episode? Can they post photos to Instagram or Pinterest or Flickr?

Or does everything have to go through YOU in the PR or Marketing department? Are YOU the only one who can post information about the company online?

And if so, can you/your department scale to truly represent your company online when thinking like a media company?

Unless you've got a large staff and budget, I think the answer for most people is that to truly embrace the "media company" thinking, you have to look at how you enable more people within your organization to rapidly post content about their aspects of the company. Your role can then evolve to be in helping with the overall strategy and with enabling the individual groups within the company to rapidly create online content - and also to post

If you are embracing the "every company is a media company" opportunity that is out there (and guess what, if you aren't your competitors either already are or will be soon), then you need to start asking yourself some questions:

Authority

Do people within your organization have the authority to create online content related to their part of the organization? Can they do so rapidly? Or does everything have to go through 15 layers of approvals before it can go out?

Do you trust certain people within your organization to communicate online on behalf of your organization?

Tools

On a purely practical level, CAN they rapidly create content? Does your website or blog system allow them to rapidly create content? Do they have the tools - and training on the tools - to be able to create content?

Have you reduced the "latency" in your processes? Is the user experience as fast as it can be?

If someone wants to post something online, particularly someone who might only be doing this as a small part of their larger work, can they get into your system, enter in their content fast, and publish it quickly?

Or is your system slow, with many different screens and fields that just don't make sense?

If you have a non-tech-savvy person who just wants to post an article with maybe a photo, can they do that fast?

Skills

To that point, do the people in your organization have the skills to rapidly create content? Do you have people who can write well who are tasked with communicating for their group? Do you have people knowledgable in how to create videos or well-done photographs? Do you have people who understand the nuances of using different types of social media services?

Think about this - have you ever considered "embedding reporters" into the different groups and teams within your organization? Hiring people with communications skills who don't work directly for, say, the PR department, but instead are working within the actual product teams or other divisions within your company?

Could you do something like that with those embedded communications people having some connection to your central team? (And some companies are doing exactly this by hiring some of the journalists who have been laid off from the true "media companies" (ex. newspapers) who have been disrupted.)

Can you help people within your organization to gain the skills to help tell their part of your larger story?

The Internet has fundamentally disrupted the traditional view of PR, marketing and communications. The opportunity is there for people who can embrace the new world to truly rise above the others out there and tell their story in their own words.

Are you embracing that change?

Are you enabling the people in your organization to rapidly create their own content?

Are you thinking like a "media company"?

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Dec 12

Awesomeness! Jetpack 2.7 Lets WordPress Users Auto-Post Content To Google+

JetpackNow here is an awesome gift for the holidays! Any self-hosted WordPress users who use the JetPack plugin can now automatically publicize their posts out to a Google+ account... including to a Google+ page. This is all courtesy of the new Jetpack 2.7 release that happened yesterday.

For quite some time, users of Jetpack (and other similar WordPress plugins) have been able to auto-post out to Twitter and Facebook using the "Publicize" component of Jetpack, but posting to a Google+ page always required you to manually go to G+ to post the link. As a result, it was just yet-another-step that sometimes didn't happen. This was particularly true for scheduled posts that you might arrange to go out at particular times when staff were not available to post the link into Google+. (I've scheduled posts like this any number of times when I'm going to be spending a day traveling on planes.)

This changes with Jetpack 2.7 and puts Google+ on equal footing with other services. Now when you configure "Publicize" within Jetpack you see this screen (shown on my Monadnock Curling Club web site):

Publicize settings 2

You then are asked how you want to connect to Google+ for this WordPress site. You can either connect to your own G+ account or to any of the Google+ Pages for which you are a manager:

Google Accounts

You next must approve the permissions and indicate who you want to see your posts:

Gplus permissions 2

One final step is to approve whether you want all users of the blog to be able to publicize the post through this Google+ connection:

Sharing Settings Monadnock Curling Club WordPress 3

That's it!

Now all your future posts will be publicized through Google+! I'd note that you do have the option to control on a per-post basis what services your content is auto-posted to. When you are in a post you can see right in the "Publish" box an area for "Publicize" and by clicking on an "Edit" link you can have control over what services get the post automatically and what the message will be:

Add New Post Monadnock Curling Club WordPress

In a very nice feature I found that you can click "Add New" and go through the process again to connect additional Google+ pages or accounts. Here I've configured posts to this blog to go not only to the Monadnock Curling Club page but also to my personal Google+ account:

Sharing Settings Monadnock Curling Club WordPress 6

All in all a very cool addition to Jetpack! Well worth the upgrade to 2.7 (or the installation of Jetpack if you're not using it yet). Looking forward to now being able to more regularly get my content into Google+.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Dec 02

Releasing a New WordPress Theme Through Github

Deploy360 frontpageAs part of my work with the Internet Society on the Deploy360 Programme, I've wound up spending a good chunk of time learning the inner workings of WordPress due to the fact that WordPress powers our Deploy360 site. Given that the main Internet Society site uses Drupal, we wanted our site to look as close as possible to the main site. The Internet Society also has 100 local chapters scattered around the world who also maintain their own websites - and some of them use WordPress as well. The result is that I've spent a good bit of time working on a custom WordPress theme that is available through Github for chapters to use:
https://github.com/internetsociety/isoc-wp
It's been an interesting experience using Github for a WordPress theme. Given my love of the git version control system, Github was a fairly obvious choice for public collaboration, given that I'd been using Github for long before joining the Internet Society (ISOC) in 2011. Perhaps the single biggest advantage of using Github beyond the ease of collaboration has been the issue tracking. We can maintain a list of "issues", be they bugs, enhancements or otherwise, and collaboratively work through those issues. Github does a great job of tying in code commits to issues and lets you easily associate them with milestones. Today's experiment for me was to learn more about Github's "releases" feature and to make the theme available as a formal "release". I documented this in (of course!) an issue for the theme after Github removed the "Downloads" functionality very early this year. My main issue was that for ease of documentation and support I wanted people to install the theme into a folder called isoc-wp on their WordPress server. If they did so they would be able to use some of the examples in the documentation without any modification. The problem is that if you just download the code from Github using the standard download buttons, you get a ZIP file with a directory name with a version number on it, such as isoc-wp-v1.2.0 or isoc-wp-master. This does actually work perfectly fine when uploaded to a WordPress server... but the documentation examples don't work verbatim and need to be modified with the directory name. With the "Releases" functionality, what I can do is separately create a ZIP file that has isoc-wp as the directory name and then upload that ZIP file to Github as part of the release. I've documented my release packaging instructions in the Github wiki for the theme. All in all it's a rather nice way to maintain a WordPress theme and I'm pleased with how it is all working so far!
P.S. If any of you out there want to help work on this WordPress theme, perhaps as a way of learning more about themes - or about working with Github, you're welcome to join us on Github, even if you have no connection to the Internet Society or an ISOC chapter... best place to start may be to look at the list of open issues and see if there are any you can comment on or contribute to. (You'll need a Github account but those are free.)

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Aug 16

Video: Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word 2013

If you are fan of WordPress... if you use WordPress or maintain a WordPress site... and haven't yet watched Matt Mullenweg's "State of the Word 2013" talk from WordCamp San Francisco in July, I'd strongly encourage you to sit down for a bit and watch:

It's a great view into where the WordPress ecosystem is today - and where it is going in the future. Incredible stats, such as 46 million downloads in just the past 12 months! 336 new themes added in the past 12 months. 6,758 plugins added in the last year... and so much more.

A huge number is that 18.9% of web sites on the Internet now run WordPress!

Intriguing info about WordPress as an app platform... and where it is all going...

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Jun 10

Boom! Apple Disrupts Media Coverage of WWDC 2013 By Streaming The Keynote Live

Wwdc2013 live 300This morning I imagine there must have been a round of collective shock going through the tech media community as word spread that... GASP! ... Apple is going to stream the WWDC Keynote today at 10am US Pacific LIVE on the Internet?

Apple?

Streaming a WWDC keynote... LIVE???

HUH?

Given Apple's intense focus on secrecy, and the fact that the WWDC keynotes have NOT been streamed live in the past, an entire mini-industry has grown up around supplying "live" feeds out of the WWDC keynote. Sites like Engadget, Gizmodo, 9to5Mac, MacWorld and a zillion others have maintained "live blogs" posting the latest updates out of WWDC. These sites have been populated by reporters actually in the WWDC room using smartphones, laptops or whatever other tools they can. Photos were posted from phone cameras. Updates went out to social media.

In fact, past WWDC keynotes have been proving grounds for various forms of "live blogging" software and platforms - as many have collapsed under the crushing load of massive numbers of viewers wanting the latest news out of Apple. It's also been interesting in the past to watch the different outlets and their strategies... having one person typing updates while another posts photos, for instance, while yet another is tweeting or updating other social media channels.

The scarcity of information led to truly creating a "spectacle", as Apple is so good at doing. You had to visit these sites and watch the social media streams if you wanted to know in the moment what Apple was announcing.

It's the way we've become used to monitoring WWDC keynotes within the tech community. We expected today's speech to be more of the same. Each tech news site has been focused on providing the best and most comprehensive coverage of WWDC, knowing that doing so would garner them a large number of new visitors and potential subscribers. They were all gearing up for covering today's event.

And then this morning... BOOM! ... Apple just deflated and disrupted an entire way of covering the event.

Watch wwdc liveFirst word started circulating that Apple had rolled out an "Apple Events" icon on Apple TV allowing Apple TV owners to watch the stream live. Then a link appeared on Apple's website where you can watch the WWDC lifestream. And then Apple actually issued a press release stating that they would be live streaming the event.

With one action, Apple just removed the primary need for all of those live blogs by all the major tech sites, as well as the need to follow streams on Twitter and other social networks. Sure, you can still follow them to get analysis or snarky commentary but there is no longer the need to follow them.

One site, 9to5Mac, has already stated they will be adjusting their coverage:

Update: Since Apple will be live streaming the event on the Web, iOS and AppleTV, we will be doing real-time updates only on our Twitter account and posting stories as they become available.

I expect some of the others will do so as well.

Now... will this actually lead to better coverage of the event for us as readers? In the past, these tech media sites have been competing with each other to churn out the live updates as fast as possible. But with the live stream available directly from Apple, will these news sites instead be able to focus on assembling articles about the announcements? (And will there then be even more articles churned out by the sites?)

It will be interesting to see... we'll find out in about two hours... :-)

P.S. This morning I published an audio commentary on this topic at:

I'll note that at the time I recorded this podcast it was not yet known that Apple would be streaming the keynote live on their website.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Mar 06

Every Minute You Spend Consuming Content Is A Minute You Are Not Creating Content

WatchThink about it... right now, while you are reading this, you could be writing an article for your blog or website. You could be recording a video for YouTube or an audio segment for SoundCloud. You could be working on a new application if you are a developer. You could be writing a guest blog post to appear on some site somewhere. You could be writing up future posts so that they will appear at some later date and keep new content appearing on your site.

Or you could be reading this article... or liking posts on Facebook... or interacting with people on Twitter or Google+... or watching the latest video on YouTube that-you-absolutely-MUST-see-because-it's-so-amazing... or watching that series everyone is talking about on Netflix or commercial TV...

In every moment, you have a choice:

Every minute you spend consuming content is a minute you are not creating content.

Do you read this article? Or do you create a new article that feeds your sites and social networks?

Do you spend time interacting with content other people create on social networks? Or do you create new content that you share out onto social networks?

Obviously, the key is... balance.

We all like - and need - to consume content. We learn by reading, hearing and viewing the articles, podcasts and videos that are out there. We are inspired and amused and delighted and saddened and angered... and every other emotion. We deepen our friendships (and meet new people) by interacting with content created by others.

In fact, sometimes we may need to consume content, in order to create new content of our own. We may need to read articles to research a topic we want to write about - or we may want to read other points of view to bring depth to our own article. Or our own new content may be a "curation" of other content with perhaps added commentary for context - and so we need to be a consumer of content in order to create the new content.

Consuming content may in fact be an important part of the creative process.

BUT... if consuming is all we do... then we are not adding to our own online presence. We are not building our own online reputation through the material we create. We are not providing our own content that others can share. We are not out there telling our own stories and sharing our own information. We are not helping people learn and grow from our experience and knowledge.

Are you just a consumer? Or are you a creator?

Consume? Create?

In every moment, you have a choice... choose wisely.

P.S. A month or so ago, I recorded an audio commentary on a similar topic that you may also enjoy:

UPDATE: After a comment by Alan Percy on Facebook related to this post, I added the paragraph "In fact, sometimes..." and the following one-line paragraph to clarify that consumption may very well be part of the creative process... but again, it is finding the balance.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Nov 28

Can A Blog Post Be A "Work In Progress"?

Are we stuck with the mental model of blog posts as pieces of content that are just published and then not touched again?

Or can we treat a blog post as a "work in progress" that will continue to evolve and expand over time?

I have been asking myself this question in relation to my quest to tear down some of my own barriers to doing more blogging. The model that we have had since the early days of blogging has been one more similar to traditional news media - you write an article, you publish it, you move on to your next article.

You "fire and forget."

Sure, you might go back and update the article if something was wrong or if later information changed the story a bit, but even in the latter case it is often more common to write a new story with the updated facts and then link to the new story from the old one.

But what if we just posted a blog post as a first draft knowing that it would change and evolve over time?

Almost something more like a wiki. ... perhaps a "blicki" :-)

Where you post knowing full well that you will be editing... and then you do so.

Interestingly, I have been seeing news sites doing this. In the rush to be the first one out with a story to get the tweets and retweets and links, they will publish a stub story with "more details to come" - and then they will in those details in the subsequent minutes and hours.

Can we do that as individual writers though? Can we give ourselves permission to post a partially done piece? And can we have the discipline to go back and update it?

An Implied Contract?

To expand on this a bit (and practice this kind of editing myself), I wonder:

Do we have an implied "contract" with our readers?

Do they expect that the content will not change from when they first read it?  Or at least not change dramatically?

Many of us, myself included, seem to feel there is this implied contract and so when we do go back and update a post, we'll often put those updates at the top or bottom of the article with some kind of marker like "UPDATE:" to clearly show what was been updated.  Or we will use strikethrough to indicate that text is removed.

But what if we just wove all the updates in together to make a cohesive article?

Would readers find that troublesome?

What if the initial content is only a few paragraphs... and then over time it evolves into a lengthy document going on for several pages?

What about the "integrity" of a piece?  If someone else quotes an article or references an article as containing a specific quote or bit of information... but then the article gets modified so that that quote or content is no longer there... what does that mean for the original reference?

For these reasons we tend to think of writing that gets posted online as "fixed"...  but what if we move away from that and let posts evolve over time?

What About The Aggregators?

In the comments to this post, Michael Richardson asks "what will my aggregator think?" And indeed that is a good question. Many people read blog posts in aggregators / news readers / other clients that often pull copies of the articles down onto the local system for the user to read. However, once the article is retrieved, the aggregator may or may not go back and retrieve the article again. And so the user may be sitting there reading an article that is now outdated.

Even with my own aggregation site, danyork.me, where I aggregate pointers to all of my writing, I have it set to pull in the RSS feeds from all my sites and store the contents in that WordPress site. (The site is not indexed by search engines to avoid "duplicate content" issues.) Now, in the particular syndication plugin I use, I have set it to merge in and overwrite any changes that come in from the RSS feeds. So as I update this post, the changes should be reflected over on that site. But I don't believe that was the default setting. I think the default was to ignore any changes in the RSS feeds... so the aggregation site would be out-of-sync with the real content.

For all these reasons, it's not clear to me that we should move away from the way we work today. But could we?

I don't know... it's a shift in thinking.

What do you think?

P.S. You may also be interested in reading "Subcompact Publishing" by Craig Mod. It's a long piece that is exploring a different question, that of our mental model of a "magazine" online, but a similar kind of thought experiment...