Entries from June 2008 ↓

Cuter than the Twitter whale?

Plurk, it’s all the buzz. What have you heard? How it’s the cool new chat tool? How it’s got a neat creature? Or how Karma rules the roost? But have you heard about the chat parser?

Parser? Yes, it’s what runs over and processes the words you type in your plurk or comment. It turns your text into rich goodness, and you didn’t even know it. Let’s look at some of the obvious ones.

**this** becomes **this**

*this* becomes *this*

__this__ becomes this

Pretty nifty huh? Well there’s a few more tricks in there. The next two are nifty and less obvious.

In the chat window to create a plurk, there are several options, such as says, and wishes. There is also freestyle. The last allows you to type any text. What happens if you type says or wishes though? You get the plurk version just as if you’d selected it.

The next one is about linking someone’s name. If you want to link tojosan for example, simply putting an @ in front does the trick.

tojosan with an @ at front becomes tojosan. The @ disappears.

Did all of that overwhelm you? Well here’s a final trick for sharing URLs without having that overly long string in there. It’s another markup trick. Here we go.

URL[space](link text)

ex http://amazon.com (Amazon - The online store) becomes Amazon - The online store

ex http://plurk.com (Plurk - your life on the line) becomes Plurk - your life on the line

The key is to type out the URL then a space, followed by a (, then the link text you want, then close with a ). Go ahead, try a few. It’s easy once you see it.

As a shortcut, this also works www.plurk.com (The Plurk) becomes The Plurk.

So there you have it, a bag of Plurk goodness to play with in your chats. Go forth and chat with gusto. Come back and share your tips and tricks with the rest of us.

Happy plurking!

Plurk.

Plurk is a made up word and a fantasy creature. Plurk is more; it’s the latest chat and conversation tool on the market, and plurky just about describes it.

Plurk takes a whole new spin on on chat though as you can see. Chat isn’t just streaming up the window as with Twitter, Pownce or IM. The flow is left to right. Like little boats of conversation floating down the river, the watchful eye of the plurk beast overseeing it.

Already you can imagine it takes a bit of getting used to, but now check out the chat popup.

Each conversation box opens up, and a complete thread can take place there. The whole of that conversation is contained inside that box. The neatest thing is it’s a live update box. As folks comment back in it, it updates while you watch.

This feature is especially interesting when the plurk message is a private one or to a clique. Then it’s not even visible except to those invited into it. The box becomes your own private chat room.

Karma! Just one of the interesting features of plurk is Karma. You, me, the guy with the rat fetish, we all earn karma. Let me just say, the karma wars are on.

Karma is earned through some obvious activities. Adding friends, inviting people, and posting messages all seem to have a positive affect on your karma. You can’t always tell though, as karma points are only updated about twice each day. The notes are fuzzy on when updates occur.

So what’s the point of karma? Well unlike regular social networks, such as Twitter, or Facebook, plurk doesn’t open all of its features to new members. As your karma increases, more features, really customizations, become available.

Customizations include changing your backgrounds, cool chat icons, including dancing bananas, picking out your version of the plurk creature, and naming your plurk page. Those are most of the things that get unlocked, and it seems obvious there are more to be found.

The whole unlocking thing, coupled with the ever moving stream of messages, give plurk a game like feel. At first this is fun and appealing to almost everyone it seems. The problem is that karma updates so slowly that for most folks, they are unable to unlock anything until their second day on plurk, and even then just one or two items.

The other downside to making it so game like is that the aggressive gaming of the system is already occurring. You’ll see folks with several hundred friends and thousands of messages sent. You’ll see threads of conversation going into the hundreds of follow on comments. People are hunting down karma like it was the next big thing. Remind you of WoW?

So the game like feel may not be for everyone, but overall plurk is an interesting take on conversation online. I find it is a lot more interactive than Twitter or Pownce, and with the built in chat features, more fun to actually use.

I’ll be putting a follow up post together just about the chat text and link features. Feel free to share your best and favorite ones here, as well as your take on using plurk. Please, jump in and share, and post your plurk me link.

Plurk me?

Models and Masterminds

Liz Strauss is up to something again. Something to get your business going. Models and Masterminds is all about leveraging the wisdom of professionals like yourself.

What is a mastermind group? A mastermind group is a team of business professionals who are committed to working on their businesses together to take advantage of their combined wisdom. They meet regularly and hold conversations in confidence.

This venture takes the mastermind concept a set further.

Models and Masterminds combines professional instructional design with the mastermind format to accelerate business growth.

Members will become part of a Models and Mastermind team.

A Models and Mastermind team is 5 professionals working together. Each team member is interviewed before registration so that team placements include members with compatible goals. I work with all teams as coach and facillitator. The team meets weekly via conference call for 3 months. (Teams can continue on after the coursework finishes.)

Learning will be a key part of being on the team, as well as sharing. What are some of those things?

• Be the first trusted source in your market
• Write irresistible offers
• Talk value and results, not price
• Negotiate from the same side of the table

Would I endorse joining such a team? Yes. Why? Because I’m already on a similar team. We formed our team within a week or so of SOBCon08. The five of us have already had our first session.

We’re conducting our meetings more frequently than once every 3 months, as time permits.

This is the type of opportunity to get real time feedback from fellow business men and women, backed up by professional course work. What are you waiting for?

Hats off to you Liz!

     Nope, I’m not talking about knitting!  Twine is a new social aggregation site and now there’s a twine for St. Louis.

     So what’s a twine exactly?  A twine is a collection of items about something.  Vague? Yeah. Once a twine is started on a subject, say St. Louis, Twine users can add things such as bookmarks, documents, notes, images and video under it.  As time goes, the collection will grow.

     Users become members of individual twines.  Members can add more items to that subject’s twine as well as commenting on already added content.  Members can also share items, such as bookmarks, with their contacts, or other twines.

     Diversity in what can be shared on a subject sets this apart from a wiki.  Instead of just links, actual descriptions and previews of those links are available, as well as member comments about those links.  And it’s not just links. The ability to add documents and video contributes to that diversity.

     Beyond diversity though is the ease of contribution.  Members can contribute by adding a Twine bookmarklet, posting on the twine page, or sending an email in.

     Twine content is enjoys another benefit.  It’s able to be searched for the instant it’s entered. That’d be pretty interesting on its own, but Twine take it up a notch.  They find key words in the content.

     A great example is on the St. Louis Twine page.  I added the Missouri Botanical Garden website to the twine.  It not only picked up the tags from the entry, but also recognized that Henry Shaw is a relevant person.  The Botanical Garden was actually founded by Henry Shaw. Amazing.

     Will people really find this useful? I’m imagining that the more people have access and get involved, the better a twine will be.  There are already twines with hundreds of members and even more links and items.

     So now you’re ready to get involved but you need an invite.  I can help you there.  Just drop me line with your email address and mention Twine and I’ll send you one.  Once you’re in, invite your friends.  You receive plenty of invites to pass on.

     See you on Twine!

The MidWest Media Conference was a success. What was it you ask?

IF YOU TWITTER, POWNCE, BLOG, SEESMIC OR UTTERZ - THIS IS THE CONFERENCE FOR MEDIA RELATED ISSUES.
HOSTED BY WORKING PROFESSIONALS, IT’S DIRECTED TO EVERYONE INTERESTED IN IMPROVING ONLINE MEDIA PRODUCTION.

The conference was the brainchild of Duane Myers, aka PreppyDude. Seeing the strong interest in St. Louis and having connections, he went forward with his plan. He brought together a diverse set of panelists to help out.

Byron Sletten of Mindactive, headed up the technical side of the conference. His company provided the site, as well as the equipment to live broadcast the conference. Byron himself bookended the row of panelists. He provided valuable insight about site design and purpose for businesses and artists.

Steph Stockman, geologist and science educator, brought her expertise as a developer/implementer of education and outreach programs for NASA to the panel. Not content with mere drawings and a few pictures, Steph has strived to use online media in her education efforts. She’s now quite familiar with online networking and media, for both professional and personal use.

Dana Loesch, professional blogger and talk radio host, has been online and sharing writing and media for decades. An experienced hand at online media from blogs to broadcasting, she shared her experience in getting it right online.

Bill Streeter, a video blogger, blogger and more, is the man behind LO-FI Saint Louis. He brought a strong background in online media publishing as well as production to the table. A good portion of his work has been with local St. Louis musicians and artists.

Frank Ireton, Ph. D., a retired educator and public outreach professional, turned those years of experience to becoming a social media and virtual world expert. He’s created numerous things for clients and private projects in Second Life, including a representation of Belfast Ireland, including a pub that streams live music from Belfast.

Michelle Havens, professional photographer and stylist, worked on both the panel and as technical support for the evening. Her expertise in creating and publishing digital works was a welcome addition to the group.

David Myers, radio host and voice over talent, came with 14 years of radio industry experience. He’s now acting as Operations Coordinator for CBS Radio’s Kidstream Internet station. David played cohost and spurred on the panel.

These people came together to share their expertise and experiences in putting media online and making it work. They handled questions from privacy to investment to get something online.

One of those most interesting things to surface was the panels agreement that up and coming artists, especially musicians, should get their art online and put up an interactive site at the earliest opportunity. Also, the panel made clear that interactive doesn’t mean just a few news updates now and then, but a two way communication, between artists and fans.

Cost to get involved was a big topic. The answer? It’s cheap, just do it. They key is to focus on the quality of the content in general, and not on the gear. There’s no need to invest in $1000 plus camera or recording gear to get started. The panel talked about even using a cell phone to get initial things online.

Though the panel had limited time for questions but also managed to talk about privacy concerns, some pet projects, and what other first steps an artist should take.

The turn out was small for this initial conference but the attendees and panel enjoyed themselves. After the conference proper broke up, the entire group of folks retired to another section of the Roadhouse for dinner and drinks.

Lessons learned:
1. You can put a conference on with no in person meetings.
2. You can put a conference on without tens of people.
3. You can put a conference on in just about any place, even a noisy restaurant.
4. You can put a conference on and have a good time.

5. Noisy restaurants aren’t the best venue.
6. Get their early to set up.
7. Have questions prepared for the panel.
8. Advertise the hell out of it; you’ll get more attendees online and in person.

The biggest success about this conference was that it happened. It’s hopefully a gateway event for St. Louis and a sign of more to come. It’s also a great lead in for the upcoming St. Louis Interactive Festival.

I’m already excited about the next event. What’s great is that you don’t have to be an expert to get involved, just have the urge and energy. Do you have an idea for a one evening conference? One afternoon? Target audience 20 folks or less? Let’s make it happen!