The first computer I ever bought with my own hard-earned cash was the original iMac. I pre-ordered it and was at the launch party on the first day at the Mac Store near Lloyd Center. They called our names during the party to come get our iMacs. I was #5.

As computers went, that first iMac wasn’t much to write home about. It was neither fast nor technologically interesting. But it was a triumph of design and focus. It worked in ways that no other computer even dreamed of. There was nothing else like it and I was thrilled to make things with it.

I’ve owned and used a lot of Apple gear since then, each so much better than the ones before it, each giving me the tools to make better and more interesting things.

Steve and his team have been delighting and inspiring me for years. He was one of my few heroes.

As Jeff Jarvis said tonight, “We have lost our Gutenberg, Edison, Picasso, Carnegie….”

However you find people tweeting about your community, the key to engaging them is conversation. If your Twitter feed is a one-way stream of self-promoting headlines and links, people are not likely to engage with it. But if you answer their questions, ask them how they know newsworthy information that they tweet, retweet their observations about community life, they will engage with you.

Excellent advice for anyone or any business on Twitter. He goes on to give tips for using several 3rd party tools and Twitter’s own Advanced Search.

In my experience working with small newsrooms the tools we provide have to be both comprehensive and easy to use. The staff at a small newspaper (or news site) are each handling multiple roles and the added role of managing social media may not be welcome.

At my job, I’ve deployed HootSuite to more than 30 newsrooms and am in the process of training the staff on how best to use it. It’s a deceptively simple tool that can grow with them as the staff learn more about how to use social media, and yet it lets them manage multiple social accounts at once.

HootSuite has a built-in Twitter search function with options for geocoding, boolean searches and keyword searches. During training, I instruct our news teams on how to create geotargeted searches for common local phrases, proper names, or topics and to save those searches as new columns (or ‘streams’ in Hootsuite-ese) to their dashboard.

A ‘nearby tweets’ column, á la nearbytweets.com, would be a great addition to HootSuite but I’ll definitely add it to my training program as a good site for them to visit.

Our teams are just getting their feet wet with the tools so it’s too early to tell how well the built-in search functions have worked for engagement or as an early warning system. I’d love to hear from someone who’s made good use of these features in HootSuite.

A Journal Register Co. editor mentioned a common challenge in a newsroom trying to master social media. How do you build an engaged audience on Twitter? My answer to the editor (expanded some as I’ve thought more about it): Engaging followers is largely a result of two factors: following people who care about your community and conversing with them. How many people follow you (and how many you follow) are not as important as identifying the peopl … Read More

via The Buttry Diary

Your Terms of Use document (terms of service, community guidelines, FAQ, rules of the road, etc.) is your social contract with your site’s users. Whether you craft it to your specific needs or use boilerplate, your Terms are the rules and a good site lives by and enforces those rules.

The rules should lay out what behavior is expected and what is unacceptable in your online community, and what happens the rules are broken. You expect your visitors to abide by the terms, and they should expect the same of you.

When users break the rules, they get demoted, blocked or banned. What happens when site owners break the rules?

Two regional news sites this week publicly disclosed the identity of a commenter, despite that penalty appearing to be outside the scope of their rules. In both cases, the commenter (the same person in both instances) gave the impression that he was a member of the community, even though he was promoting his company’s business agenda. Both sites justified their action based on the commenter’s ‘deceptive’ practice of hiding his identity.

However, neither site requires that commenters use their real identity. One set of terms says it’s unacceptable to “misrepresent your identity” or “pose as another person” but doesn’t require a real ID. In fact, that same site specifically states that “Your registration information is stored in a database. This information will not be disclosed to any third party without your consent…”

In both cases, the private email address and IP address, available to system administrators were used to identify the commenter. The person’s name was then made public – a punishment seemingly outside the scope of their rules.

I’d call that bad form.

News organizations live and die by their credibility. It seems to me that ignoring your own terms in order to get a good story is a violation of the trust the community places in a site. It’s a good way to lose community members, traffic and credibility.

HD programming packages from your local cable monopoly include both SD and HD versions of many channels. The problem is that the HD versions are located on different channel numbers. This is crazy. Most TV viewers have a set of channels that they bounce between. It becomes habit: muscle memory. Telling one of these people to use channel 107 instead of channel 7 is ridiculous. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to remind relatives to switch to the HD version to get a better picture, or to get the picture they’re paying for.

Cable companies need to re-map the HD channels to the original channel #s. There’s probably a complex, possibly even regulatory, reason they haven’t done this, but it needs to be done.

In-app advertising so far has been a mixed bag. Many apps rely on ad networks and phone-optimized ad units. Some have created custom ad units, including “sponsored by” messages on the app’s splash screen.

The Times appears to have taken a different approach: their ads make excellent use both of the iPad’s form factor and new user interface features in Apple’s iOS.

The most obvious ads are the banners at the bottom of the category index screens. While nice and unobtrusive, what makes them shine is how well they handle rotation. Every ad requires two creatives: one for each orientation. The result is a great presentation of the ad content. So far, the ads themselves have been well-produced. Tapping on the “Conviction” ad opens a Fox Searchlight page that is nicely compatible with Mobile Safari, including the movie’s trailer.

The in-story ads resemble IAB-standard 300×600 ad units and appear on every other screen of a multi-screen story. The number of screens grows dynamically as the user changes the text size to suit their reading style.

Perhaps the best example of the Times’ advertising prowess is the ad in each story’s sharing panel. The Times has, for many years, excelled at offering sponsorships to various tools and features on nytimes.com. It appears that this concept is being applied in-app as well. Tap on the sharing panel within any story and you’ll see the various sharing options (e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, Copy Link) as well as an ad. I’d love to see some numbers for how often that sharing panel is opened. My guess is that it is impressively high. Good for advertisers, and good for the Times.

I’ll be on a panel that night at Varsity Grill in Tacoma discussing those very things. The panel is organized by Social Media Club Tacoma and Tacoma’s own Mark Briggs will moderate. I’ll be joined Doug Conarroe, AME for Online at The News Tribune, and Brent Champaco, editor of Washington’s first Patch.com site in University Place.

Thanks to Walter Neary, my former editor, for putting this together.

RSVP

I was pleasantly surprised, then, to learn that Mail in iOS 4 would include both threading (a longtime staple of Gmail) and a ‘Swipe to Archive’ feature just for Gmail users to replace Mail’s standard ‘swipe to delete.’ These, plus the ability to use multiple Exchange ActiveSync accounts and the addition of notes syncing, had me all geared up for today’s iOS 4 launch.

The new Mail is better, for sure – but the Gmail features are flawed. Google provides real-time sync to Gmail, Google Calendar, and your address book via their own Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) system. It works great with iOS devices but suffers under some of the limits of previous versions of iOS (lack of threading and Archive, no notes sync). Google also provides IMAP and POP access to Gmail accounts. iPhone owners who use the Gmail button to configure their mail on the phone get an IMAP account configuration, which lacks real-time updates.

Under iOS 4, if you use the EAS method for syncing to your Google account, you will gain threading and keep real-time updates, but you do not gain notes sync or Swipe to Archive. Users who simply use the Gmail account type get the same old IMAP mail but now see calendar and notes sync – and get Swipe to Archive – but lose the contact sync that EAS uses get.

This odd mix of features is unfortunate. Why doesn’t the Gmail account button use EAS for mail? Why does it lack contact sync? Why does the EAS option lack notes sync and Swipe to Archive?

The downsides, though, are worth examining. Limited access to your visitors’ contact information means that converting visitors into repeat customers is not necessarily easy. Not all of your visitors use Facebook, and might want to connect profiles from other social networks or public profiles. Further, with Facebook positioned in the center of the exchange, what happens if Facebook suffers access problems? Facebook could become one of the largest single points of failure on the internet.

While their offering from this week’s F8 event are compelling – and I’ll likely add some of their tools to my sites – I want something else. A set of easily plugged-in tools not tied to any particular social net, but which can access any or all social nets – not unlike the OpenLike project, but bigger.

For example, Facebook’s social plugins allow my site’s visitors to see what their FB friends are doing on my site and discover more of my content which might be relevant to them, based on their social graph. Let’s consider what would happen if the plugin was network-neutral, though.

Visitor arrives for the first time and has the option of selecting one or more social profiles to connect with my site. The visitor is in charge here – they can decide how much of their personal life (which networks) to share with my site based on their own privacy concerns and on how much value they want to get from my site. This is a win for the visitor, who gets to add value to their experience on my site without compromising privacy or having to sign up for yet another account, and the publisher, who gets more engagement on her site and access to a diverse range of social networks on which to distribute her content.

Once the visitor selects one or more profiles, the plugins go to work aggregating information from the selected nets using their APIs. It would be preferable if the nets agreed on a standard, open set of APIs for social graph access.

One piece of this semi-federated system is that the publisher needs to be able to store some of the visitor’s information. Again, this would have to respect their privacy settings, but publishers need the ability to convert visitors into customers and for most of us, that means email. If a visitor agrees to share their email address with my site when they connect their profile, I should be able to retain that information and offer them subscriptions to my email services (as a start).

Jeff Jarvis takes a slightly different direction, from the POV of the visitor/user, in his discussion of the Bizarro Facebook. In Jeff’s idea, visitors can tell the social nets where to go to learn about Jeff.

It’s entirely possible that what I’ve described already exists. RPX seems to have an API capable of doing more than just allowing logins to a site from a diverse group of social nets. Also, what about OpenSocial? Wasn’t it supposed to offer much of this?

The bottom line is that publishers probably aren’t going to get a great deal from Facebook and aren’t going to be thrilled in handing over so much of the customer relationship to Facebook. Many (most?) will sign on and use the new Like button, but how many will opt for deeper functionality? And how many would if it meant they weren’t locked in to a single social net partner?