WPBook 2.3 is released. This uses the same Facebook SDK (3.1.1) as WPBook Lite which I just released last weekend – this will make it easier to manage both.

It will also let me start work on adding more features to the plugin- a more stable base to work from.

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Third test. Should publish just to WPBook page.
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Oops. That’s why we test. Typo in publish_to_facebook.php fixed.
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Sorry for the testing post. Just working on an update to WPBook 2.3, including an update to the Facebook SDK, and need to make sure in the process I haven’t busted anything.

This should post to personal profile and to page wall.
—-

Here’s the schedule (which they haven’t yet published except as a google doc):

My friend Dave Wieneke will be presenting Saturday am on “The 7 Deadly Sins of Business Innovation” and again Sunday afternoon on “Applying Digital Strategy Across your Business.”

As though that weren’t enough reason to attend, other speakers will include Chris Brogan and Christopher S. Penn (the original founders of Podcamp Boston) as well as a who’s who of Boston’s digerati.

Will I see you there?

B2B Buzz - New Community for Small Businesses from Hoovers Online

(Via MediaPost) Hoovers and several business cosponsors have launched a new “social community” for small business users called B2B Buzz. The site’s focus is primarily content:

The voice of the social community will guide the direction for a portal and business consortium that Hoover’s and contributors Outsell, Selling Power, and Shore Communications plan to launch Tuesday. For the first six months the group will focus on building and sharing its collective expertise on marketing and sales, along with a variety of business topics for entrepreneurs.

In essence there’s a “self-assessment” and a blog (the site is on WordPress) for each of their three primary audiences: Sales, Marketing, and Small Business. The assessments walk you through 10 questions designed to determine how effectively your business is leveraging information – and end with an “enter your email address to get your results” style capture form (which gives no indication as to what happens to the email address you provide – shouldn’t a best practices site do a better job of explaining the privacy policy at the point of email capture?).

The Assessment ends in email address capture form

The site also links to a Twitter account (@b2bbuzz) and a LinkedIn Group though these links aren’t specific to the sub-audience but cross the three user types.

So is it a community? (Nevermind a “social community” which was MediaPost’s redundant term – the site merely bills itself as “a community of business information experts”).

Users can comment on blog posts, of course, and interact with the site authors via Twitter. According to the contributors page, “Experts from across the industry are invited to join our contributor ranks,” though the site’s beginning with five (including 2 from Hoovers and 1 from co-sponsor SellingPower). There isn’t, however, anything to register for – no user profiles, discussion forums, or call for user-contributed ideas and stories. Even the comments form is a simple name, email, and (optional) website link.

Given the recent Forrester report on the “plateau” of content creation, is this a smart strategic move to focus on where the companies involved can add value, or is it just the first step in the direction of a more robust community to come? (Or, I suppose, both?). Or has “community” become the new default generic term for “site,” displacing “portal,” “destination,” and “blog” itself?

WPBook

So for a while I’ve been working on and beta testing the next version of WPBook. Tonight I’ve just tagged it for release, so it will be available for download shortly. (I’ve already been running it here for a while and testing it on a few other test blogs).

The main improvement in WPBook 1.5 is that it now knows how to use stream.publish, meaning that it will automatically post to your wall in Facebook when you publish a post in WordPress. Your friends should see that notification as well in their streams. (We’re not, however, sending application updates or tracking all users’ user id’s – instead you enter your own userid into the settings and it uses that to post to your wall). Included are attachments (first image attached to the post is used) and excerpts (if you hand craft excerpts they will be used in the wall post).

The other main improvement is that WPBook now requires PHP5, and as such can wrap Facebook calls in Try/Catch blocks. For the non-programmer, this means those awful, dramatic “fatal uncaught exception” error screens are gone. WPBook isn’t doing anything terribly meaningful with those errors yet – still working on that- but at least it traps them.

In this release:

• WPBook now requires PHP 5
• Enables user to post to stream, including to pages. (Must be pages for which you are the admin, to which you have added the app, and which have granted stream.publish permission – link provided in the admin to grant permissions.
• Catches exceptions thrown by the Facebook client. (Doesn’t yet surface those in good error messages, but at least they are caught)
• Fixed, I hope, issue with comments inside Facebook for some users
• Clean up of some admin styles (resized gravatar images as well as some basic hierarchy on options)
• Added Page Options as their own section
• Allow user to select pages to be excluded
• Added option to allow a menu of parent pages at top of the app below the title
• Fixed “Facebok” typo in line line 182 of theme/index.php
• Option to turn on and off page list under content (independent of menu)
• Option to turn on/off recent post under content
• Allow user to set the amount of recent post to show under content (default 10)
• Cleaned up custom header/footer now only one function instead of two (no reason to have two functions)
• Added %tag_links% and %category_links% to custom header footer as well as made archive pages work.
• Set smart default for when Blog Title isn’t set

Next steps?

• Better error handling code – do something with the messages Facebook returns when an exception is thrown
• User selectable theme directory – for users who’ve taken the time to customize their theme
• Threaded comments – likely means requiring WP 2.7, though for error handling (and just simplicity) I’m thinking of jumping right to WordPress 2.8
• Cross-Posting to a commenter’s wall when they comment inside Facebook. (Because it is in response to a user action, I understand they don’t even have to grant stream.publish permission).

What else would you like to see?

Update: Closing comments on this post. For troubleshooting please use the support forums instead.

The effects are similar to those you’d get by applying filters in Photoshop or Gimp, but all the processing happens on the server, requiring no software install – handy for working on a guest machine or for folks who don’t need the full power of a graphics program but want to stylize a photo.

The process is very simple:

1. You choose an effect (from 40 available, in 10 categories, when I tried it)
2. You upload a photo, from your desktop
3. Rollip generates a preview, in lower resolution, for you to approve
4. Rollip processes the photo

Images processed by Rollip. Top left is original, all the rest are effects the application proides. (Click on the image for full size)

Credits – which are only used in that fourth stage (processing the higher quality full resolution image) and only if the image is successully processed – can be purchased at $2.99 for 15 credits, enough to process 15 high res photos.

I played around with a number of the effects on the image to the right.

Although there are other online image editing suites (WordPress 2.9 even has some basic image editing built-in), I like Rollip’s selection of filters – not so many that it’s overwhelming, but enough to add a bit of punch to an image. (I assume back when TechCrunch wrote about Rollip there was only one filter available?) .

There are competing services and applications, of course, including Photoshop Online – but Rollip is simple, quick, and free (if you are on of the first 15 using the link above) or at least cheap. (The service is also using Google Ad Sense – maybe at some point it will become free if it gets enough traffic?).

Rollip makes no claim to copyright or license on the images you upload or the processed, completed output, and has what I found to be a refreshingly simple terms of use and privacy policy – though I recognize to some folks this reads as a lack of professionalism.

If you’re interested, also check out the Flickr Group, to which people are adding Rollip-processed photos.

What other services do you use to add interest to images?

Photo by suburbanslice

It’s a perfect example of what I’m seeing as a growing trend, in which various “social widgets” actually replace functionality which should be built into the platform hosting the site. Bundling together the ability to use your Facebook identity with the actual management of comments themselves looks like progress but I think it’s really a step backwards.

Announced on the Facebook developer blog, the Comments Box widget is embedded into your site through javascript, and basically enables Facebook-driven commenting.

Facebook users can leave comments using their Facebook identities, and when they do will also have the option to publish those comments back to their Facebook profiles. (This is already possible using the Facebook Connect APIs, but the comment box certainly simplifies the process).

Facebook Comments Box

What happens in the process, though, is that all your comments on your blog are no longer really on your blog. Those comments are actually submitted to Facebook, who stores them for you and shows them on demand when your pages containing the comment box load.

In WordPress terms, this means you’re not able to use Akismet, or Mollom, or OpenID, or ReCaptcha, or any of the other plugins you might be using on your site to manage comments. (You also won’t be able to use the WordPress iPhone app to moderate comments, since they aren’t submitted as comments to WordPress).

It also means that someday, when you decide to migrate away from the Facebook Comments Box, there’s no simple way to get all the comments out (and it isn’t clear whether the terms of service would allow you to do so even if it were simple).

The announcement is careful to note that:

The Comments Box allows non-Facebook users to make comments on your site as well.

But that feels a bit like “we’ll still allow you to use cash, even after we install the credit card machine” – it’s giving me back something I already had as though it were a bonus. It’s as though we’re at the point where “non-Facebook users” are, like “those with JavaScript disabled,” a community we magnanimously allow to continue to use the web but don’t really design for.

Like Yahoo Updates with JS-Kit, TypePad Connect, DISQUS, and IntenseDebate (though the last of these offers a comment import/export feature), this is yet another “all ur comments are belong to us” move, in which I think the hosting site loses more than it gains.

Or am I just a crusty old first-generation blogger thinking that I need to store away comments in a database I control, and I should really be more open to having my comments streams “in the cloud”?

See also:

• Facebook Launches Commenting Widget
• Facebook Connect Adds Cut-and-Paste Comments Widget
• Facebook Comment Widget: Quick Review
• Facebook invades your blog, rest of Web with new Comment Box

A few changes since 0.9.3, the last version I blogged about (the most recent version can always be found on this page or at the WordPress site):

Share Button. This version adds a Facebook style “Share this post” button next to each blog post in Facebook, which allows the user to send the posts to Facebook friends or post and individual blog entry to their profile.

Here’s what the share button looks like, in context:

Share Button for Post inside Facebook

And here’s the resulting popup, with the “post to profile” tab active:

The resulting Popup with 'Post to Profile' active

Ease of installation and Update. Earlier versions required the user to add a directory to their /wp-content/themes/ directory. In this version, and moving forward, the plugin carries the theme directory inside it. Among other things, this means that the “update automatically” function from inside the WordPress plugins page will now work with no additional effort on the user’s part.

Add to pages. The directions have been clarified with respect to profile page boxes. If you want users to be able to add your Facebook Application to Pages as well as user profiles, you will need to enter some FBML (provided by the plugin, on the settings page) in Facebook.

Facebook Settings for Pages, with Default FBML (Note: FBML here is for this blog - yours will be different)

No Conflict with other Facebook Plugins. Using multiple Facebook plugins on your WordPress blog can lead to problems, as each includes its own copy of the Facebook client libraries. This version now checks for the existence of other libraries and relies on those already present if they have been declared.

Plans for 1.0:

For the impending 1.0 release, here’s what I plan to do:

1. Make the “share” button a setting, enabling users to turn off the functionality if they choose.
2. Provide a link to the “original” version of each blog post (outside Facebook) – also optional
3. Add a small “powered by WPBook” type link to the bottom of the canvas page – with option for user to disable.

I also plan to update the page for the plugin here and at WordPress with some screenshots to accompany the documentation, but that might not happen until after the plugin is released.

Updated for 0.9.2. (Jan 7 2009)
Updated for 0.9.1 (Jan 2 2009)

I’ve been working on an update to WPBook, the WordPress to Facebook plugin I co-developed.

I haven’t yet released this version on the WordPress plugin site, but I do think it’s stable enough for use – try it out and let me know what you think.

I’m using it here: http://apps.facebook.com/openparenthesis/.

This version allows an “add to profile” button inside the app, which presents the five most recent posts in a profile box – can be on the user’s main profile or inside the “boxes” tab.

It also enables – if the “application settings” inside Facebook are set – for the blog app to be added to FaceBook “pages.”

Download: WPBook 0.9.3

What remains to be done is testing – especially testing with multiple user accounts when you publish new blog posts – does the new blog post show up in other people’s “recent posts” profile box?

I’m also working on cleaning up some of the admin UI – right now there’s a complicated set of steps one has to go through in order to get an “infinite session key” which basically lets WordPress update the list of recent posts whenever they change, regardless of whether any specific user is logged in to Facebook – I think I ought to be able to make that a “get infinite session key” button, which handles the whole thing in a jQuery modal popup or some such.

Anyway, try it out and see what you think – hopefully I can finalize a release shortly.

(Note: There’s an excellent tutorial here on how-to forge which greatly helped in getting this working – worth a look, though it is for a different kind of application).

Update: Looks like Facebook has deprecated infinite session keys, but they key Fbml.refreshRefURl method I need no longer requires a session key. Trying this path now. Yeah – it works.

You get some spiffy features, including the ability of other bloggers to leave comments (which appear to be) on your site using OpenID, with threading, and with avatars; but in the process you put all your comments (and your relationship with your blog readers) in someone else’s hands.

It also seems like the real benefits of using TypePad Connect come from network effects – once everyone has a TypePad Profile and every blog uses it for comments, the benefits will be great. But what about when only some of your users have TypePad profiles, or want TypePad profiles? What about letting people comment with identities they already have rather than creating yet another profile / lifestream?

Ok, so maybe the title’s a bit strongly worded, and if you’re already using a hosted blog, or using TypePad for blogging, maybe it doesn’t where your comments actually live. But I don’t think it will work for me.

What is TypePad Connect? It’s basically a drop in replacement for however your blog current handles comments – you swap out how you currently handle comments and use TypePad Connect instead.

Why would you do so?

TypePad Connect Benefits for Bloggers:

• Enables you to accept comments from users with OpenIDs or TypePad Connect Accounts, whether your blogging platform accepts OpenID or not
• Provides threaded comments, with avatars (for users who have TypePad Connect accounts)
• Links comments to profiles of the people leaving them (for users who have TypePad Connect accounts)
• Enables you to moderate and reply to comments via email
• Enables you to manage comments from multiple blogs in one place

What about blog readers? (Forgetting for the moment that many blog readers are also blog authors)

Benefits for users:

• OpenID. If you don’t have an OpenID, you can sign up for a TypePad Connect account and oyu will get one, though then you will likely use your TypePad Connect account to leave blog comments rather than your OpenID.
• A TypePad Connect profile – lifestream, avatar, etc.
• A comment feed – where you can track comments on posts you’ve also commented on, replies o your comments, etc. Provided, of course, the blogs you commented on use TypePad Connect (? I think).

So what do I see as the issues? Primarily they all follow from the idea that using TypePad Connect means replacing your blogging platforms built-in comment handling.

This means that:

• Comment-related plugins, search (of comments), moderation, anti-spam, and other features of your own blogging platform are disabled.
• Change your mind down the road, and decide you’d like to move to another platform? Can you get your comments back, or bring them with you? What if you move to a platform TypePad Connect doesn’t support?

Am I being too hard on SixApart? After all, they’re providing OpenIDs for all TypePad Connect profiles, enabling people to comment via OpenID. The profiles are also marked up with “rel=me” microformats, enabling the social graph style APIs to read them semantically.

Ultimately my concern isn’t with the TypePad Connect profile itself – if you don’t already have an existing lifestream and OpenID provider (Chi.mp, for example, or self-hosted like johneckman.com) it seems like a nice way to get one – but with the notion of replacing your blog’s comment moderation and management engine with an outsourced offering.

It seems too much like a shift towards a kind of walled-garden (to be fair, though, the content is open and available to all) of blog comments, in which users without TypePad Connect Profiles get a secondary experience.

It feels like a step backwards to ask users to create an account (albeit one which can be used on other sites too) just to be able to comment – but then nothing prevents users who have an existing OpenID, and a profile at that OpenID url, from using their existing “bring your own” style profile.

What do you think? Is TypePad Connect yet another step toward the open social web, or a step backwards in terms of openness?

For more on TypePad Connect, see the ReadWrite Web review, or the TypePad Connect page at SixApart.

As I tweeted at the time, the timing could not have been worse, as I was already feeling bad about not having been as productive a blogger as I’d like to be over the last month or two (I’ll spare you the obligatory “blogging is important to me but I’ve been really busy and I feel bad about it and I promise to be better” post), so hearing that blogging was at best futile (since spammers and professional authors have taken over the blogosphere) or, worse, was a marker of just how “out of it” I am.

Boutin writes:

The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

Or, in his later psuedo twitter speak:

@WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won’t find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook?

So I was overjoyed this morning to find Doc Searls coming to the defense of blogging, and not just to refute the argument that it is out of fashion but more importantly to reassert its centrality.

Doc’s argument has three key bits, all of which resonated with me, the last most of all:

First, Doc points out that the goal should not be to simply chase the latest buzz – the goal for most authentic bloggers is not just to turn up high in search results, but to say something meaningful. Doc writes:

First, why give a damn about buzz? Here are the main things it’s good for: 1) popularity, by itself; 2) driving eyeballs past advertising. Nothing wrong with either, as long as substance is involved. Even if all you want is ad bux, it helps to remember that there isn’t a 1:1 ratio between traffic and click-throughs. Quality still matters, and buzz isn’t its only driver.

Second, Doc points out that blogging provides a mechanism that is not equaled by twitter (or other microblog applications), Flickr, YouTube, or Facebook. All are wonderful services and well used by most bloggers, including Doc (and me):

As personal journals on the Web go, blogs have no substitute. Twitter is fine for 140-character micro-postings, and for the ecosystem surrounding it. But micro-posts are not journals. Flickr is great for posting, tagging, organizing and annotating photographs, and for allied services such as creating groups and the rest of it, but it ain’t blogging. Facebook has some blogging features, but at the cost of forcing the blogger to operate in a vast hive of non-journalistic activity — and flat-out noise.

Third, and most importantly, the blogosphere is a fundamentally open ecosystem, whereas many of the cloud based services are less so. While Flickr and Twitter are reasonably friendly to openness, and allow you to expose content via various APIs, blogs are at their heart about sharing discussion openly:

To the credit of Flickr and Twitter, they are mostly friendly to the open Web, and not roach motels tricked out as friendly walled gardens. No ‘fence, but that’s what Facebook looks like to me. (Argue that if you like, but you still have to admit that it’s a private space rather than a public one.)

Meanwhile, blogging is free-as-in-freedom at its core. It’s something you do as an independent human being.

Although most blogs run on hosted services, those blogs are still ours. Do it right, and the constraints are minimal. http://doc.searls.com is a WordPress blog on a Harvard server, but if I want to move it elsewhere, I can do that. I have data portability, and service substitutability.

Freedom matters. Independence matters. Not being utterly dependent on any single service provider not only matters, but is an essential virtue too rarely visited and too lightly respected. What Richard Stallman said about clouds (that they’re “a marketing hype campaign” and “You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software”) has more than the ring of truth to it. His is a warning as righteous as those made by responsible forecasters of the financial meltdown.

Blogging at its best is free speech working in open spaces. That virtue persists, no matter how many slums get built in blogging’s hosted services, and no matter how passé it seems at the moment.

Can I get an amen!? Data portability and service substitutability – that’s the core of what made the web and it will continue to be.

Key question: What do you, dear reader, think about cross-posting to multiple blogs as a solution to the challenge of maintaining both a personal and a corporate presence?

Chris’s post focuses on “trust agents” who have a personal presence in a given community but also represent a company, and raises the issue of what happens when they move on to another company. Some folks blog on the corporate site, with the company for which they work providing the platform. His own situation?:

My own blog has been mine since day one. When I worked with Jeff Pulver, it was still my blog. With CrossTech Media, this is my blog. They might ask me to be mindful of our company and occasionally post information germane to my business, but that’s expected. I’m their guy. Why wouldn’t they want that of me? And I love writing about the work we’re doing, like the New Marketing Summit (plug plug).

But the blog is mine. It’s my shingle. It’s where I conduct my business. Most of this business is on behalf of my organization. I’m grateful to have a company to work with, and both CrossTech Media now and Pulvermedia before supported this stance.

At Optaros, we’ve always tried to encourage consultants to maintain a presence in various communities on their own, independent of the corporate platform. We’ve never wanted to project a kind of “corporate voice” that is impersonal and anonymous, and having people speak in their own voices on their own platforms helps project a more authentic, created-by-real-people-working set of voices in the communities with which we interact.

In addition to encouraging external blogs, we also started supporting blogging on the corporate site when it relaunched in early 2008 and on the Enterprise Open Source Directory, which Optaros sponsors.

It’s an extension of the same logic – kill the bland, anonymous corporate voice in favor of real personalities who write in their own voice about subjects with which they have deep experience – with a minor change in that we’re using the corporate platform. Optaros’ VP of Marketing Marc Osofsky describes the approach in a blog post: What is a Web 2.0 Corporate Website?.

(We did consider simply aggregating content from the external blogs of Optaros employees, but providing our own platform creates new opportunities for employees who don’t maintain external blogs, and creating quality content directly seemed a better long term strategy than simple aggregation).

I’m a big believer and supporter of both these positions: supporting employees who have an interest in maintaining an external blog as well as allowing employees blogging on the corporate site. But what happens when you’re writing a blog post that really applies in both places?

Do you:

1. Post it (exactly the same content) in both places, maybe even using an XML-RPC client to automate that process.
2. Post it to your personal blog, and refer to it from the corporate blog?
3. Post it to the corporate blog, and refer to it from the personal blog?

Sometimes I’ve posted the same content to both places – most recently my review of Groundswell – and I’ve done the “post once and reference elsewhere” approach as well.

In an ideal world I’d have time enough to craft (frequently) meaningful personalized messages for each appropriate channel – valuable content for each audience, uniquely tailored to that audience – but I’m not sure that’s ever going to be realistic. It also gets complicated by the additional presence of the Enterprise Open Source directory blogs – which means some posts I write (focused on open source software platforms, frameworks, and projects) could have three “venues” in which they make sense.

(I also bring all three together by reference at JohnEckman.com which is an aggregated lifestream – but that’s likely too much me for anyone to really subscribe to).

The easiest solution is to just cross-post, but somehow, honestly, that just feels not-quite-right to me, at least as a constant stream. Not everything I write on Open Parenthesis makes sense on Optaros.com, and vice-versa. Maybe the only real solution is to continue to muddle along, choosing each time based on what I’m writing about whether it belongs on my Optaros.com blog, here on Open Parenthesis, and/or on the Enterprise Open Source Directory blog, and whether full copies or references make sense.

Who would you hold up as successful examples of blogging on and off the corporate domain?

The main updates were in the 0.8 release yesterday (0.8.1 is just a bug fix to that release). In 0.8, you have the option to enable an “Invite Friends” link. See this section of the admin panel:

If that’s enabled, you’ll see something like this inside your facebook app:

People can use this to invite their friends to your facebook app. (Of course you can also use it to invite your friends to your own app – 15 per day).

Grab the updated version from the WordPress Plugin Directory or directly from here.

If you’re interested in getting involved in development / support of this plugin and others (especially related to educational use of WordPress), check out Scholarpress.

WPBook, the WordPress for Facebook plugin which Dave Lester and others at Scholarpress originally created and which I’ve contributed some to, has been updated again.

Version 0.7.4, which I just tagged in subversion (so it should be showing up in the WordPress plugins directory by the time I post this) includes the following:

• Works with WordPress installs in subdirectories, using ABSPATH to ensure the right includes get called
• Fixed for the “new Facebook” javascript but remains compatible with “old Facebook” javascript as well (as described here)
• Removed hard coded reference to MyAvatarsNew(); and downgraded to WordPress standard avatars
• Fixed the (previously hard coded) offset for permalinks to be dynamic based on blog’s home url

All in all, this should be a much more stable version for most folks.

Note: If you use the “upgrade automatically” feature in WordPress, you must remember to copy the wp-facebook folder from /wp-content/plugins/wpbook/ to /wp-content/themes/ – it must reside at /wp-content/themes/wp-facebook in order for the plugin to work correctly.

You can get the new version from my plugin page or from the WordPress plugin directory.

First, the WP-OpenID plugin for one specific version (2.2.0) had a bug which ate comments containing double quotes, which means all comments with links in them. 2.2.1 fixes the problem.

Then, Luis Villa told me in email that the Captcha on my site was unusable. So I tried it, and he’s right.

A while back I installed a plugin for Mollom, which catches comments which are thought to be suspicious in one way or another, and then asks users to solve a captcha. Problem is that they were all unsolvable.

Or, rather, they were perfectly solvable, and I solved them – as I’m sure Luis had. But Mollom refuses to recognize my solutions. Maybe I really am a computer, and thus fail the Captcha.

Anyway, the point is, I’m not trying to make it difficult to comment on this blog, just trying to deal with spam. I’ve turned Mollom off again, and won’t re-enable it until I try it myself and see that it works.

One of the famous cartoons of the first internet craze was this one from the New Yorker:

On the Internet Nobody Knows You're a Dog

The reality is, however, that increasingly people’s online identity can be mapped to their offline identity. (Check out Who Controls the Internet? for a well informed and very smart extended exploration on what this means from a legal perspective, and this reality checkfrom UNC).

Earlier this week, I wrote a blog post about TripIt and Dopplr, two major companies in the social travel market, which people use to share information about various trips they are taking or planning. It was a perfectly innocuous post, describing some of Dopplr’s new features which make it more like TripIt, and presumably more competitive with TripIt as a result.

That post recieved the following comment, from someone identifying himself as Thomas, with an email address at Yahoo! mail, and no url:

Well, in regards to Dopplr’s generic email import approach, I’ve tried forwarding several different emails I have from my company, travel agent, and from major airlines such as American Airlines, but they don’t work one bit. For example, Dopplr thinks I’m going to different places in Europe when I send in my opentable reservation.

In contrast, most of these work “out of the box” with TripIt. And when I complained about my travel agent not being supported, they added it within a day.

What’s more, is that I don’t really want to “discover” people I do not know on a trip. All I’ve been wanting to do is to manage my business travels better and inform my family. TripIt fits that bill perfectly.

So, I don’t really find Dopplr very useful. My two cents.

Thanks for the nice write-up though.

Best,
Thomas

Not itself a controversial comment, and I almost approved it without a second thought. But then I noticed that the IP address from which the comment was posted (69.12.150.246) is mapped to a machine called wall.tripitinc.com:

jeckman$ nslookup 69.12.150.246

Non-authoritative answer:
246.150.12.69.in-addr.arpa name = wall.tripitinc.com.

(I would likely not have even noticed, but either WordPress itself or one of my plugins actually adds that info to the email it sends me letting me know that a comment has been recieved and is awaiting moderation).

So I emailed “Thomas” – using the yahoo.com address he provided – and suggested he disclose that in his comment.

I never heard back – perhaps the email wasn’t valid to begin with. So, I decided to post the comment, but also note what I had determined about its origin.

Lesson learned? It’s easier than you think to determine who you are when you do various things on the net. If you’re going to post comments on blogs that discussion your product(s), disclose your relationships. Nothing wrong with posting – I’ve had many comments from folks whose products/services I discuss in blog posts – but posting a comment like the above without disclosure is basically astroturfing, and it never works.

Mollom will ask “suspicious” commenters to solve a CAPTCHA before allowing their comments to post.

If this proves too onerous I will go back to just using Askimet but I wanted to try it out.

Thanks to Dries, Benjamin, et al for running Mollom and to Matthias Vandermaesen for maintaining the WP-Mollom plugin.

I’ve spent some time over the past few nights revising the wp-book plugin, which lets you bring your WordPress (self-hosted) blog into Facebook as an application, and I’ve published a new 0.7 version.

You still have to add the Facebook developer application, accept their terms of service, and get an API key to be able to deploy your blog-inside-facebok, but the plugin no longer requires creation of an extra page nor editing of your existing themes.

Instead, inspired by Alex King’s excellent “wordpress mobile” plugin, wpbook now asks you to install an additional theme, wp-facebook, into your theme directory, and then uses that theme when it senses it has been called from inside facebook.

This means you not only get a few recent posts, but in theory all your posts, available inside Facebok. Once I know this release is stable, I should be able to start rolling out additional features like archive links for years, months, categories, etc.

As before, you can see it action with this blog’s content on facebook: Open Parenthesis.

You can download it from here, it should also get populated into the WordPress plugin directory soon.

My favorite blog spam comment of the day (with no link so as to not encourage them, and therefore no credit):

Candy cheap folklore urged birth heroic, carpet stain removal?!

Maybe it’s the faux sentimentality of the “birth heroic” smashed up against the prosaic “carpet stain removal,” but I like this particular piece of candy cheap folklore.

Candy cheap is like really really cheap – one step below bottom-shelf-liquor-cheap.

Panelists:

• Bruce Leichtman, Leichtman Research Group
• Stacey Lynn Schulman, Turner Broadcasting
• Maury Giles, GSD&M Idea City
• Jim Nail, Cymfony

Description:

As media companies have come to recognize the value of participatory audiences, they have searched for matrixes by which to measure engagement with their properties. A model based on impressions is giving way to new models which seek to account for the range of different ways consumers engage with entertainment content. But nobody is quite clear how you can “count” engaged consumers or how you can account for various forms and qualities of engagement. Over the past several years, a range of different companies have proposed alternative systems for measuring engagement. What are the strengths and limits of these competing models? What aspects of audience activity do they account for? What value do they place on different forms of engagement?

—
Notes:

Jim Nail – Cymfony is a brand monitoring company – tell enterprises what users are saying about them.

Maury Giles – GSD&M Idea City – ad agency / interactive agency in Austin. Background in political campaigns, where measurement is paramount.

Stacey Lynn Schulman – new to Turner. Previously at Interpublic group – consumer experience practice. Measurement in the old media are well understood and stable. Walks through history of shifts in measurement – movement into multi-network world (cable), move to “people meters” in households, etc.

Bruce Leichtman – based in Duram NH. Boutique analyst firm focused on future of entertainment. To understand the future we need to begin with the present. Talked about needing to avoid the sample of one problem. We don’t represent the masses – need to focus on quantitative research across broad audiences.

—

SF – Place to start. The Writers’ Strike.

BL – The writer’s strike over the 4.6 billion in revenue that could occur – but the hockey stick curves aren’t real yet.

SLS – We don’t know how big the pie will be – but that doesn’t mean that writers should have a piece of the pie. We have difficulty really quantifying this stuff – especially when it comes to fusing samples across media. People starting online then watching tv, rewatching things they downloaded, etc – we don’t have any way to capture this information reliably across channels.

MG – For me it comes down to how you measure success. Are we going to stick with eyeballs, audience size, etc., or can we adjust to a different way of measuring to understand the control users have. The old paradigm, based on eyeballs, is falling apart – rather than tracking the diffusion of media throughout channels, we focus on what is enabled by all these niche audiences. If we focus on the impact of content on niche audiences rather than mass media – it’s not about how many people we reach as opposed to our impact on niche markets.

JN – the challenge is that those hockey stick graphs are just opinions expressed in numeric form – the real discussion should be not about the size of the chart, but about what assumptions are made to generate them and what direction they indicate things are changing. But we cannot forget about the consumer and how rapidly they change, which is a slowing effect on change, no matter how much the technology changes. This has to come down to the number of times something is viewed, downloaded, etc – not a flat fee since we don’t know how much revenue this will generate.

—

SF – Is it someone’s fault that their isn’t a viable revenue stream?

JN – The networks have been in control for 50+ years. As their control and revenue stream erodes, they are struggling. It isn’t anyone’s fault it is just a fact of life.

BL – 6 minutes of video/day is the mean number in terms of what users are viewing. People talk alot about the YouTube phenomenon, but not much about “Don’t Forget The Lyrics” – but that is still something which got more eyeball time than YouTube did. It’s more about evolution than revolution.

SLS – When I was on the agency side, clients just wanted to be on the next big shiny object.

JN – I call that the GMOOT – get me one of those.

SLS – What happens is that the industry gets this sense that everybody is in these spaces and that they have to be in these spaces. But that’s because 80% of their mindshare is on that big shiny object. But the reality is that 80% of their dollars are in that traditional media, because thats where the audience is. They want to see these new bright shiny objects expressed in terms they understand – which means they want the market numbers they get for traditional media.

JN – During the bust, people were pointing at companies which spent money online going out of business failing and saying see – online advertising doesn’t work. At the same time, however, the % of time people spend online keeps increasing – the percentage of consumers media consumption online outpaces the marketing spend.

SLS – the flipside of the bright shiny objects crowd is the lean back arms crossed posture – the marketing folks who don’t even believe anything new is important or signficant. Yeah, but everytime I put that commercial in old media I sell X amount of Y.

BL – but as we see these things evolving, old media is not dead. We just saw the largest cable event ever in history – high school musical 2. Audience segmentation is important, and we can’t think that we are the audience.

JN – Appointment TV isn’t dead – it is just that the user is setting the appointment.

–

SF – Jericho / CBS. Fans rallying for a show. But also fans saying we’re watching, how come our eyeballs don’t count?

SLS – Engagement is the beginning of that. Trying to determine how much people like a show based on how much they talk about it. When Lost first was being talked about, everyone thought it wasn’t going to work – but our analysis of buzz said that it was going to work. In that case it turned out to be right. But there are also small, highly engaged audiences in some cases – Veronica Mars, The Office, Friday Night Lights – these are shows which ranked very high in buzz, but small in audience. The small engaged fan cultures are something we should be looking at. We also can’t forget that consumers are themselves channels – they are distributing content as well.

MG – The content seller has a need to validate the value of the content. What we’re trying to do is measure engagement in a context – what role that engagement has in the decision cycle of the consumer. Is it having an impact on how they purchase?

BL – if it doesn’t sell, today, tomorrow, or at some later point, it isn’t worth it for the agency.

JN – but branding does work. People deny it, but we’ve seen it time and time again – they may see an ad on toilet paper, and then later they pick that brand in the store – without even knowing it.

—

JN – people don’t like to talk about advertising. But they do talk about what is important to them, and how they talk about what’s important to them, it helps you figure out how to engage with them and how to position your products and where to position your products. Criticism is a useful metric because users who are critical of your product they tell you that because they want you to get better. Engagement is about also listening – you have to let go of that total control and develop a relationship with consumers where they help create.

SLS – We need to question this notion that as a marketer you have a portfolio of brands. What if we thought instead about having sets of consumers whose needs were meeting. What we have, what our asset is, is the consumers we are serving, not this portfolio of products we’re trying to sell.

JN – the control marketers or advertisers ever had was always a myth. We never had the control we classically thought we did. Now we can see that co-creation of meaning happening in much clearer ways. You cannot just surround people with integrated marketing messages and think that we control the conversation.

BL – Between DVR and On-Demand, about 5% is when the user wants it – the other 95% is viewed on the schedule created by the networks. Even that push is due to it being pushed by providers (cable box integration, dish integration) not end consumer demand (stand alone TiVo box). Even as the number of DVR’s grow, the % of viewing which is time shifted, it will still be only 15% of all viewing time even when we have 50 million DVRs in households.

—

Audience questions:

Q: When you make predictions about audiences over time, how do you account for the aging of the audience over time as well?

BL – My forecasts are based on demand and supply – in a 3-5 year time frame those issues don’t impact as much.

SLS – But it isn’t always about studying a single generation across time – the millenials have an impact across time, but when you project their teenage behavior over time, don’t assume they don’t change.

JN – it’s valuable for how to connect to them now, not what they will be like in 30 years or even 10.

—-

Q: What about the kids market? What kind of research are you doing in terms of how to reach that audience?

SLS – More difficult because there are restrictions and regulations about doing research with children, especially in the context of trying to sell them stuff.

—

Q: What about users recommending things to each other and how you can track that?

SLS – recommending products is something being enabled in facebook. It isn’t about the reach of one distribution mechanism but the reaggregation of all the various sums.

JN – 80% of word of mouth is still offline, so even measuring online word of mouth is only a proxy for the recommendations people make. If you think about the never ending friending report about MySpace, the revelation in that report to me was the importance of the widgets and portability – people putting that widget in their profile is so much more important than having your own brand page or banner ads.

MY – You also have to be very careful about that “facilitate” role – if you’re actually creating it and pretending people popularly / virally created it you’ve got a problem. I love the Nike/Apple iPod integration example – if we can provide a real service that happens to also be branded that is the loyalty solution. Facilitating the experience in order to drive to real results. The goal of the campaign is to have a specific impact on consumer behavior and that behavior might include telling friends about something, subscribing to a feed, etc.

SLS – Mass media isn’t going anywhere, even as we hear alot about fragmentation.

BL – We hear about how cable is beating broadcast – well, there are 4 broadcast networks and 100 cable channels – shouldn’t cable beat broadcast? Those 4 channels are still very dominant and that reflects something about human nature and centrality of shared experiences.

—

Q: Other than word of mouth, what other engagement metrics do you see.

MG – Some of the softer, traditional metrics from branding and advertising – it’s about what makes people think, feel, and act – and thinking and feeling are hard to measure, especially when the “act” comes much later.

JN – It’s about return on marketing objective. The right measurements are different in different places – growing awareness, repositioning a product when it relaunches, etc – those are valid metrics in different cases. It isn’t alwyas about specific ROI – there are things you do in marketing which lead to future sales, which you should do, and you have to do them whether they can be directly tied to sales or not.

MG – The thing that fascinates me currently is using complex scientific approaches to create virtual environments and test in them based on metrics tracked over time – you create virtual agents and introduce different stimulous and then see what emerges. Basically become predictive, rather than reactive – it isn’t just about measureing how effective this last campaign was, but predicting how effective the next one will be.

—

Q: What about an open, transparent approach to measurement? It is frustrating that we (users) have no access to how things are measured?

Great idea, but unlikely to happen – lots and lots of money in this space and lots of investment in how it is done today.

–

Q: Consumers as a channel for us to think about – what about Bebo Channels? Couldn’t the revenue in that space be shared with the writers? (Back to the WGA strike).

SLS – In terms of the writers strike, it is very layered here. It is just more complicated than simply saying because ads are there it is therefore profitable. It’s all too all over the place at this point to know what we can and can’t support from a cost/revenue perspective. Even the sites the networks are building have a hard time competing with bittorrent, file sharing, and other mechanisms out there which provide more control – so they are having a hard enough time creating the ability to actually get online distribution they control rather than the distribution users control, let alone worrying about paying more to be able to do it.

BL – but it also isn’t necessarily all incremental revenue – is this in place of other syndication later? Does the value of the show in broadcast, in rerun, in syndication, diminish as it is spread more broadly online?

—

Q: Are there any specific metrics you’ve seen advertisers believe which demonstrates people paying attention to ads?

SLS – IAG and the rewards tv model – there is a measurement here in which the user needs to recall copy points, but is the expectation it is setting real? This is an example of a metric the industry has accepted largely accepted because there is nothing better.

MG – What we’re trying to do is connect to the metric which really matters – incremental improvement in revenue. Skin in the game, tying marketing/advertising to how the company actually does – if we fail to have a positive impact on your revenue that puts us in a different position to worry about these other intermediate metrics which ultimately connect to improved company performance.

—

Q: What about online versus offline: we tend to think of offline as about brand awareness and online about direct action – but online can also be used to build brand awareness, can’t it?

MG – the interactivity of being online can still be a brand building experience – so the actions users take (click here, send this to a friend, whatever behaviors you offer) *are* part of building awareness and brand recall.

JN – TV is still very influential. What online can ad is reach to the lite tv viewer once you pass the point of inefficiency in tv.

SLS – Although TV is seen as the reach medium, remember that things are changing. In an on demand environment more options are available – TV may be growing into a medium which offers more interactivity . . .

JN . . . and those studies were all done on banner ads – as we get more online video, so both are evolving toward each other in terms of capabilities.

–

Q: Any case studies which surprised you about the impact of various kinds of media? Times where what happened was unexpected?

BL – High School Musical. The mass still does exist. How Disney was able to move that across media – an album, a show, a skating tour, etc.

JN – I’ll give you three: MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook. All of these really took the world of tracking influence by storm as places for people to express how they feel about various products and ads. A fourth is the people talking about their ads in advance of the superbowl – the tradition was to keep things quiet and try to make this big surprise. Instead, as folks were sharing info about their ads in advance of the big show – but we found that they still had the same influence.

BL – AppleTV as a great case study. 2 million by the end of the year? Now they won’t talk about it. Now it is Steve Jobs hobby – the case study was already written – people don’t want a standalone box.

—

Q: Any other outside examples in terms of measuring engagement, which didn’t originate in media but come from other fields?

SLS – check out a company called Neuro focus. Measureing brain waves to measure engagement.

MG – swarm theory, chaos theory – these worlds are increasingly relevant. Studies of complex biological systems and how they evolve – marketing is increasing like an organic system.

—

Q: Problem established. Tell us how you are addressing it

BL – not my problem. I’m trying to help understand the consumer and clearly define where we actually are not just where we are going.

SLS – our biggest challenge is trying to figure out how to keep commercial minutes relavant to content minutes. (New ways to get advertisers involved in the content, new ways to keep consumers engaged and get them to see messages from advertisers without interrupting your primary reason to be there).

MG – we’re focused on studying how the consumer engages with the product. Dynamics, triggers, stages of decision making – looking in depth at what “reachable moments” exist to influence that behavior.

JN – one of my notes from this panel has been SLS on the reaggregation of meaningful sums. In the future it isnt going to be who is the audience of this tv show – at the end of the day it is about reach and impact, regardless of the channel or mechanism. Advertisers want to reach a certain number of certain kinds of people in a certain timeframe with a message – they don’t care what *channel* is used – so maybe again it is aggregation from a lot of smaller more passionate audiences.

• Convergence Culture Consortium Blog
  • FoE2 Opening Remarks
  • FoE2: Mobile Media
  • FoE2: Metrics and Measurement
  • FoE2: Fan Labor
  • FoE Day 2 Opening Comments
  • FoE2: Advertising and Convergence Culture
  • FoE2: Cult Media
• License to Roam
  • Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green Opening Remarks
  • Mobile Media
• Isabel Walcott Hilborn on Day One
• Ad Pulp
  • Brand Narratives Will Benefit from Transmedia Storytelling
  • Really Smart People at MIT Actually Study Advertising
  • Content for and from Portable Multi-Platform Network Devices
  • Reporting Live from MIT’s Media Lab
• Talent Imitates, Genius Steals
• Fallon Planning
• Raph’s Website
  • Futures of Entertainment 2: Fan Labor
  • Futures of Entertainment 2: Mobile Media
• Media Maven
  • Cult Media Panel
  • Fan Labor Panel
  • Fan Labor Part 1
  • Beginnings of FoE2
• Media Is Culture and It’s Converging

I’ll add others as I find them – or leave a comment. I’m using the tag foe2 for what it’s worth.

Changed the permalink structure (options->permalink) to custom so that permalinks are of the form:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%

Rather than using the “date and name” option which looks much the same but has the trailing slash.

This also strips the trailing slash from the tags link. I’ll try this for a while and see how it works – WordPress accepts the requests and drops the slash if requested. Hopefully technorati will re-index the posts and pick up the tags.

/Update

For the last few days I’ve been attending the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago, and blogging a fair amount about what I saw there. While doing so, I religiously tagged my posts with fcf07, as recommended by Jeremiah.

Yet my posts were not getting indexed, or aggregated, or even found as part of the technorati tag fcf07.

Why not?

I think there is a conflict between WordPress 2.3′s tagging feature and Technorati‘s expectations for tags.

On Technorati’s Tagging with Links page, they explain:

1. The tag link must occur within the boundaries of a weblog post to be included in Technorati’s index.
2. The constructed link must define a link relationship of “tag” by adding rel=”tag” to each post link you would like Technorati to include in its tag index.
3. The referenced URL must have content after the final forward-slash (“/”).

It’s that third one I’m wondering about. On my blog, the tags WordPress generates have links which end with a trailing slash. For example, the tag for fcf07 appears in those posts like this:

<a href="http://www.openparenthesis.org/tag/fcf07/" rel="tag">fcf07</a>

Note that trailing slash after fcf07. I think this trailing slash prevents Technorati, which does index my posts, from seeing these as valid tags.

Anyone else seeing similar behavior with WordPress 2.3 and posts getting indexed by technorati but the tags being ignored?