AMY GAHRAN: The Right Conversation

Accounting for Community: Thoughts for the BlogHer Business Summit

                                               

Stig Nygaard, via Flickr (CC license)

"Toto, I don't think we're in Boulder anymore..."

I'm in New York right now, and on Friday afternoon I'll be on a panel at the BlogHer Business Summit that I'm really looking forward to. Here's the official blurb from the conference program:

An RFP for the Measurement Industry

Where is the blog measurement tool that could measure more than "eyeballs," more than "authority" via inbound links, and could begin to approach measuring influence and relevance? [The panelists will] scope out what is, is not and ought to be available.

The panel will also include Edelman PR's Elizabeth Lee and LiveWorld's Jenna Woodul. Jory Des Jardins, one of the BlogHer founders and a gifted blogger in her own right will be moderating.

Gee... No pressure...

Frankly, I've been stressing a bit about this session. For a long time I've felt I was missing something very obvious about this topic. I've been worrying that I'm going to get up in front of an audience of people I respect and look like an idiot. Perhaps I'm about to do just that.

Regardless, something just occurred to me. I'd like to hear what you think about it...

Getting LinkedIn: Growing Your Network

After much nudging from various colleagues, I've finally begun to use the professional networking service LinkedIn. (See my profile.)

I thought now would be a good time to get more connected with this service. One of my New Year's resolutions is to be more focused and systematic about how I build my conversational media consulting business. I like the LinkedIn model because it focuses on personal connections -- which is also the foundation of conversational media. Seemed like a natural place for me to start.

Here's what I've been doing so far, including six tips for building your LinkedIn network...

Running a Group Conference Blog: What I'm Learning

This Tuesday I'm flying to Burlington, VT for my annual brain food festival -- the conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ). I've been working with this group since 1990, and I have a lot of friends there, so this event is always a blast.

This year, I set up an unofficial SEJ2006 group weblog. It's "unofficial" because it's a strictly volunteer, independent effort by people who are either SEJ members, attending the conference (speakers, exhibitors, others, etc.) or who are working on the conference (staff, etc.). I did this mainly because it was more efficient to just set it up by myself, on my own, than to have to deal with any organization to get it done.

To be quite honest, this blog has been consuming much of my time this week. More than I'd intended -- but this is an experimental project, and experiments always entail unforeseen resource demands as well as results. It's OK, I've been learning a ton of useful stuff from this effort.

So if you're considering setting up a blog in support of your conference, benefit from my experience. Here's what I've learned, so far...

Help Request: My Gmail May Have Been Hacked

This morning, my e-mail (which I access via Google's Gmail service) got weird on me. About 90 minutes ago I started receiving a ton of bounces for messages I never sent.

I figured that maybe some spammer spoofed my e-mail address in the Reply-To field -- that happens to nearly everyone sometime, and there's not much you can do to prevent that. (If you got spam with my name or address on it, rest assured it wasn't from me.)

But then I looked in Gmail and realized that some messages I'd sent and received this morning were missing. I've never had missing mail in Gmail, and I'm 100% certain I did not delete these messages. They're gone, they're not even in the trash.

I'm thinking maybe someone hacked into my Gmail account, sent spam, and then deleted the spam from my sent mail and from the trash.

I immediately switched to another strong password, but I'm still concerned: If the person who hacked my account remained logged in while I changed my password, I'd think they could then switch my password -- locking me out of my own account. They also could delete more of my mail, or send more fraudulent messages.

I tried to contact Google to ask them how I could avoid this problem. To my amazement and dismay, the only help Google offers for Gmail (as far as I could find) was login assistance. That page says, "The Gmail Team will not respond to inquiries submitted through this form that are unrelated to login problems."

Wow, that's real nice. I'd think "Don't be negligent" would be part of "Don't be evil," but I guess not...

Anyway, if you know anything about the inner workings of Gmail, I'd like to know:

• How can I tell whether anyone else is logged in to my account when I'm logged in? I'd like to know when it's really safe to change my password.

   

• Is there any way for me or Google to recover e-mail deleted from my account today? I'd assume they have master backups.

   

• Is there any way to get support from Google on this matter?

   

• Has this happened to anyone else?

Thanks a bunch. If you have answers, please comment below or e-mail me.

Net News Wire: What I Like, What I Don't

On Sept. 11, I wrote about how I have have a new favorite feed reader: Net News Wire (for Mac).

Here's a quick followup on how that tool is working out for me...

Distributing News by Feed: Simpler, not Lazier

On Sept. 19, I wrote this posting for the Poynter Institute's group weblog E-Media Tidbits (which is read mainly by mainstream media pros) that caused a little stir in the PR field.

See, part of what I do is journalism, so consequently a lot of PR folks unthinkingly add me to their press release e-mail lists. I really, really don't like that. In fact, I routinely flag any unsolicited press release as spam. I strongly prefer to get news by feed, and I subscribe to lots of feeds on the beats I cover.

It's not that I'm closed to new sources. In fact, PR reps for prospective sources can always e-mail me to request permission to send me releases. If I think they're relevant enough, I'll first ask for their feed URL. If they don't offer a feed, then I'll let them send me e-mail only if I think their content truly is on-topic for me.

Not surprisingly, several PR pros were alarmed that I'd flag their precious releases as spam. Tough! It's my inbox, and have no trouble finding good leads from diverse sources.

On Saturday, PR blogger Barbara Iverson picked up on my theme and encouraged PR pros to offer feeds. I appreciate her support in that community. In the comments to her post, I asked Iverson whether she thinks most PR folks know how to set up a feed, or know enough to ask their tech people to set it up for them. From her reply, I gather that most PR pros probably don't even know what feeds are, let alone how to set them up.

Then she responded with a good question of her own: "Do you think most reporters know about feeds or how to ask for them?"

READ MORE: I answered Iverson's question over at my client's blog Capture the Conversation -- plus I listed more reasons why organizations should publish their news via feed...

Capturing Conferences: Expanding on Beth Kanter's Thoughts

Beth Kanter, one of the many great minds I encountered at BlogHer 2006.

Ever since the BlogHer conference in late July, I've been thinking about live blogging and other ways to capture the energy and creativity that often arises at conferences and other gatherings.

Well, as often happens when I don't get around to writing something down, some smart blogger beats me to it. That's just what Beth Kanter did. See her Aug. 25 post, Collaborative Models for Capturing and Sharing Conference Notes at Nonprofit Gatherings.

As a matter of fact, go read her post first. What I'm about to say will make more sense after you read her excellent overview of tools and techniques.

(Really, go read it. I'll wait. It's cool.)

...OK, now that you've read Beth's overview of collaboration tools and strategies that can help capture the value of conferences (and hopefully followed her links to some examples), here's my bigger-picture thought for today:

Conference planners should consider how to capture and extend the value of the conference during the planning process. Because for many people and organizations, what gets captured from a conference is more valuable than the event itself.

READ MORE: Over at my client's blog, Capture the Conversation, I've published a quick checklist of what I think conference planners should start taking into account...

Why I Ditched Most of My Feeds, and Changed to NetNewsWire

Just part of my old feed list. What was I thinking?

I was just overwhelmed. My "system" felt organized at first, but it got to be chaos. So this weekend I made some radical changes in how I use feeds.

For a long time, I'd kept over 400 feeds organized into about 20 topic areas (environment, energy, science, women, law, etc.) bundled into my former favorite feed reader, Sage (a Firefox plugin). I figured since they were bundled neatly into folders and alphabetized within, I could find what I wanted easily.

But gradually I realized that I almost never looked at most of the feeds my topic folders. The only ones I scanned regularly were task-related -- mostly search feeds based on specific topics I'm currently following, and I change these a lot.

Bearing that in mind, this weekend I ditched all  my general topic folders from my feed list -- about 80% of my subscriptions. But now, since my feeds are more focused on exceedingly timely and personally relevant sources, I think they'll help me participate in online conversations -- public and private.

Here's more about the changes I made...

Katie Couric, via search feeds

Yesterday, my editor at Poynter Online, Bill Mitchell, asked me for ideas for covering how Katie Couric's debut last night as the new CBS Evening News anchor is playing online.

Well, I honestly didn't watch her show last night. I was really tired and went to bed early. I almost never watch TV news anyway. However, the net is indeed abuzz with commentary and more about Katie Couric this morning.

When I'm trying to follow buzz or monitor conversations or topics online, one of my primary tools is to set up a group of search feeds.

Many online services allow you to save a search as a feed (what the geeks call "RSS"). This is helpful because then you'll receive in one place (your feed reader) a fairly organized, chronological list of the latest content that matches your query terms. In other words, you don't have to keep looking for new results -- they keep coming to you. At the Society of Professional Journalists conference a couple of weeks ago, I listed search feeds as an indispensable tool to help reporters cover a beat or a specific story.

If you haven't ever used a search feed, the current Katie Couric buzz provides a great example. Since she's famous, her name shows up in all sorts of places. However, this is also a not-so-great example, because searches for her name turn up so many hits that it takes considerable sifting and fine-tuning to make a meaningful assessment of what people are thinking or saying about her.

This morning I assembled a collection of search feeds for the query "Couric" drawn from nearly a dozen online sources. Only one of these directly represents mainstream media (sort of, it's from the CBS Couric & Co. blog). The rest are mostly from sites that aggregate mostly non-MSM content, such as blogs.

Search feeds are a great way to follow the "live web." First-generation search engines such as Google and Yahoo crawl the web, index much of its contents, and deliver results based mainly on relevance. Often, older content makes the top of the list. In contrast, web 2.0-focused services such as Technorati quickly index new content that gets delivered to them by feed, so their results tend to be more up-to-the-minute than Google (although often more varied in relevance).

So if you want to find out what people are saying about something right now, look to Technorati or any of the other sources I've used below -- not Google or Yahoo.

Here's my collection of Katie Couric search feeds, and a sample of current results from each...

Conversational Media Tools at Capture the Conversation

I've recently started blogging for one of my  clients, Room 214. They're an internet marketing firm that offers an intriguing service, Capture the Conversation. This service gets to the heart of why conversational media is so valuable and important. I think the Room 214 people and I can learn a lot from each other.

The Capture the Conversation blog is a good resource for marketing/PR pros and others who want to learn how to make the most of conversational media. My "beat" there will mainly be the tools of conversational media. So when I have tool-focused topics to discuss, I'll post over there. (I'll mention it here, though, with a link). I'll continue to post my think pieces and open questions to this blog. I believe that's a complementary content strategy -- we'll see how it works out.

Over at the Capture the Conversation blog, I just launched into what will be a multi-part discussion of the tools of comment tracking. Today's post is very introductory, but watch for followups. See: Tracking Blog Comments: The Challenge...

BlogHer catchup: Notes on notes

I'm at the San Jose airport, and I have a couple of hours before my post-BlogHer flight back home to Denver. I've been lucky enough to commandeer a rare airport electrical outlet, so I'm going to try to catch up on my BlogHer blogging and updating the converence coverage wiki I created yesterday. (Feel free to add to that if you were at BlogHer in person or virtually and wrote some coverage, or have found coverage like that which isn't already on the wiki.)

I took copious notes and photos yesterday, but didn't post to this blog after the morning session because the wireless network was operating at a crawl when I could get on it at all. I did manage a brief posting to Contentious (my other weblog) with a link to support a comment I made in the Next Level Naked session.

Speaking of notes...

Tag, You're It! BlogHer Notes

So I'm at my final Blogher session today: Tagging, Tracking...and what's this structured blogging? The session leaders are Marnie Webb of TechSoup and Charlene Li from Forrester Research.

We're all debating the difference between keywords and tags. I must confess, I find this distinction very confusing.  Marc Canter expressed the difference this way: "Keywords are outdated. Tagging is what's happening today." Which I don't doubt is true, but that didn't clarify the issue for me.

Marnie Webb just clarified this for me. Keywords and tags are basically the same thing, but this difference is in how they're used: "The context of tagging is frequently social. The context of keywords tends to be in isolation (internal use)."

Marnie also mentioned a cool service that allows you to search the tags of many different social bookmarking/Web 2.0 services: TagFetch. Way cool! I've been wanting something like this forever. I'll have to play with it to see how well I like it.

And Marc Canter mentioned "All software can -- and should -- use tags." Amen, brother!

More highlights from this session...   

Corante's Comment Spam Problem

I often read the weblogs offered by Corante, because they mostly choose excellent, thoughtful writers representing a broad range of expertise. They're rather nicely designed blogs too, with decent usability and readabilty. Obviously some people over at Corante know a few things about doing blogs well.

Why, then, is comment spam such a pervasive problem on Corante blogs? That's like making a nice dinner and then just dumping it directly on the table in front of your guests, without a plate -- an unnecessary and disturbing mess.

Here's what I mean...

Trackbacks, comments, and conversations

Ah, I love conversational media...  My earlier post on strategic commenting has generated an intriguing multi-threaded discussion. In one comment to that article, Uri Baruchin asked:

"Amy, could you share your opinion regarding the use of trackbacks vs. comments?"

Trackbacks are ubiquitous among weblogs, and often misunderstood. This theme also arose in the comments to Guy Kawasaki's posting which recommended my strategic commenting article. Here's how I responded the trackback v. comments issue there...

CoComment Firefox Extension: Way Cool!

(UPDATE MAY 10: This article was originally posted on April 30. Sadly, since then I've had to uninstall my CoComment extension. Here's why.)

I've written before about how I wish blog comments were easier to follow. Also, in February, I mentioned a promising comment-tracking tool called CoComment -- which I thought was cool, but at the time not sufficient for my needs.

Since then, CoComment has continued forging ahead. Recently they made a key improvement which may represent a "tipping point" in comment tracking -- well, at least for me, anyway. This is the just-release CoComment Firefox extension.

I've just installed it, and am starting to experiment with it. See my Contentious posting for more on that.

...Stay tuned, more on this later.

(Thanks to Easton Ellsworth for the tip on this new tool.)

CoComment: Neat Idea, Nearly There

Comments are a big reason why blogs can be used as conversational media. However, as I've noted before, conversations that occur via blog comments can be difficult to follow.

One important aspect of tracking blog-based conversations is keeping track of the conversations that you've joined...

JournURL Combines Blogging and Forums

In a comment to my posting "I Wish Blog comments Were Easier to Follow," fellow blogger Amy Bellinger mentioned a free blog-hosting service, JournURL, which offers some pretty cool options that provide rich support for online conversations.

They do this by combining features of blogging tools and online forums. Back in August, JournURL creator Roger Benningfield explained some of how this works. Here's what he said...

I Now Have a Working Comment Feed

Well, after hunting around for options, I finally found a way to successfully generate a feed of the comments to this blog in a way that is apparently valid and accessible to any feed reader.

CHECK IT OUT!

Why does this matter? Well, a comment feed is a crucial conversational-media tool, since it makes the content of your weblog comments as easily findable as your blog posts. This is because you can submit your comment feed to popular feed aggregation services like Technorati or IceRocket. When you do that, your blog comments will appear in their search results.

It's just one more way to clue people in to the entirety of conversations that happen on your blog. The easier it is to discover those conversations, the more likely it becomes that more people will join in.

Here's what I did....