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New WordPress plugin: Twitter Tools – StatusNet

Posted on by John

When Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin was in its 1.x days, I published some directions on how to change the API endpoints to point to Identi.ca.

Now that Twitter Tools is at 2.x, Alex has provided an API for enabling additional posting.

So I wrote a plugin for his plugin: Twitter Tools – StatusNet.

It leverages the API he provided to post your tweets (on new blog post creation or via the sidebar form) to a StatusNet instance (default is Identi.ca but it can be easily changed to another). (In case you missed the announcement, the software formerly known as Laconica, which powers Identi.ca but also other sites, is now known as StatusNet).

Given that many StatusNet instances also already cross-post to Twitter, my plugin enables you to suppress the actual posting to Twitter that Twitter Tools does. (You can have notices posted to both Twitter and your StatusNet instance, or just your StatusNet instance without Twitter).

What it doesn’t do is provide all the functionality Twitter Tools provides – digests of your notices, a sidebar widget containing latest notices. If you cross-post to twitter you can use all that functionality from Twitter Tools natively.

If you’d like to replace Twitter throughout Twitter Tools with your favorite StatusNet instance, you can hack away at Alex’s plugin directly – the same basic concepts I outlined before would still apply.

media

Being Interesting is Not Enough: Be Useful

Posted on by John
How to Be Useful (Photo by Robert Banh, cc-by license)
How to Be Useful (Photo by Robert Banh, cc-by license)

I used to be fond of saying that the best advice for content-centric businesses on the web was a simple commandment:

Above all, be interesting – everything else will follow from that

Being interesting is still necessary, of course – if you’re trying to create a content-centric business and your content isn’t interesting, you’re in big trouble.

But is being interesting sufficient? In an attention economy, where interesting content is ubiquitous, and what’s truly rare is the users’ attention? In an era where every company is a media company?

In the era of the Assembled Web, where consumers expect to find content, community, and commerce pervasively and persistently throughout their online experience, is it enough to just be interesting?
Continue reading →

media

Social Media Engagement, Ice Cream, and Murder

Posted on by John

Earlier this summer, the Altimeter Group and WetPaint collaborated to produce the ENGAGEMENTdb site and related ENGAGEMENTdb Report ( a free download).

It’s truly a must-read if you’re interested in how large brands are engaging their customers through social media. In the Introduction, Ben Elowitz (of WetPaint) and Charlene Li (of Altimeter) claim:

While much has been written questioning the value of social media, this landmark study has found that the most valuable brands in the world are experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement. The relationship is apparent and significant: socially engaged companies are in fact more financially successful.

So now we know it pays to be social, but it is important to note that by “social,” we’re talking about deep engagement, not merely having a presence.

But there’s an interesting rhetorical slip there – in the space between “a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement” and “it pays to be social” we’ve crossed the gap between correlation and causation.
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SlideShare is now social (it has spam)

Posted on by John

One of my favorite definitions of “social computing” is Clay Shirky’s quip:

Social software is stuff that gets spammed

Well if that’s the case, now even share-my-powerpoints site SlideShare (follow me there) is officially social.

Here’s an email I got yesterday via SlideShare:

Hi jeckman,

jane209 sent you a private message on SlideShare.

******
hi I am jane,single girl looking for honest and nice person, whom I can partner with.I don’t care about your color or ethnicity.I’m sending you this beautiful mail,with a wish for much happiness. I am looking forward to hear from you. Write me on (janegab42@yahoo.com)God bless. thanks jane
******

You can reply to jane209’s message by clicking here.

Now, as much as I like the sentiment that Jane209 is looking for someone with whom she can “partner,” that she doesn’t care about my color or ethnicity, and that she wishes me much happiness, I’m going to have to go with the “report as spam” link on that one.