Archive for January 2010

Soren Gordhamer, organizer of the Wisdom 2.0 Conference, blogs for Mashable about 7 Lessons for Better Networking with Social Media. This quick article outlines some key lessons for improving your social networking skills.

• Find a Person’s Preferred Communication Channel
• Say Just Enough
• Don’t Expect a Response
• Clarify Early
• What You Want is Not the Point
• Be Open Without Needing
• Give Space

If you’re using Google’s Chrome browser, you’ll want to check out this Lifehacker list of 13 Excellent Extensions. Each entry includes a description and screenshot illustrating its usefulness.

The annual Horizon Report has been published by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and the New Media Consortium (NMC). It profiles six new and emerging technologies which will impact education over the coming years. Here’s a brief recap of their findings:

Time to adoption: One Year or Less

• Mobile Computing
• Open Content

Time to adoption: Two to Three Years

• Electronic Books
• Simple Augmented Reality

Time to adoption: Four to Five Years

• Gesture-based Computing
• Visual Data Analysis

John Soat at InformationWeek discusses 7 Questions Key To Social Networking Success. Each question is important for organizations to consider in order to effectively leverage the power of social networks:

1. Are my competitors continuing to invest in social networking?
2. Where’s the ROI?
3. Which way works best?
4. How deep within my organization should social networking be allowed to penetrate?
5. Is it necessary to have a corporate policy around social networking?
6. What can social media teach me about internal collaboration?
7. What’s next?

Samuel Axon at Mashable has put together a quick tutorial for How To: Add Captions To Your YouTube Videos. If you want to learn how to add captions for the hard of hearing or subtitles for non-native speakers, you’ll want to check out this guide.

Cory Bohon at Mac|Life discusses 20 Real-World Uses for Google Wave. Each recommended task includes an illustrative screenshot and instructions. Here are his top five suggestions for making the most of Google Wave:

1. Keep in touch with friends
2. Share your photos
3. Share files
4. Collaboratively Drafting Documents
5. Trip Planning

Matt Silverman at Mashable has published an excellent tutorial detailing How-To Create Custom Backgrounds for Twitter, YouTube, & MySpace. This quick article provides a walk-through for how to create your own branded backgrounds on these popular networks, including exact column dimensions, file sizes, and layout information.

Slideshare.net has published a helpful post about 5 Social Media Secrets for 2010. Organizations who are actively using social media applications will want to check out these quick tips:

1. Pay Attention to the Metrics
2. Scale Good Habits
3. Have Rules, But Trust People
4. Creativity & Personality Trump Big Budget
5. Listen Listen Listen

Cameron Chapman at Noupe has created a quick and comprehensive guide to Getting the Most Out of Twitter. If you want a quick primer for using the popular microblogging app, you’ll want to check out this article. Here are just some of the topics discussed:

• Twitter Basics
• Terminology
• Etiquette
• Twitter Tools
• Twitter Clients
• Twitter Services
• Finding People to Follow
• Using Lists
• Twitter for Communication
• Twitter for Promotion
• Twitter on Your Blog
• Other Twitter Uses
• Further Resources

The folks at Common Craft have produced a new video titled Protecting Reputations Online in Plain English, which discusses “the long term risks of sharing inappropriate information online.”

Blake Carver at LIS News has published the annual list of new must-read LIS blogs. Check out this year’s list of 10 Librarian Blogs To Read in 2010 for professional inspiration. Here are the top five:

1. Academic Librarian
2. Awful Library Books
3. The Best Of PubLib
4. Disruptive Library Technology Jester
5. Everybody’s Libraries

Doriano “Paisano” Carta at Web Worker Daily writes about 3 Ways to Create a Lifestream For Your Brand. If you’d like to aggregate all of your organization’s social media content from accross the Web and display it in one place via what’s now called a lifestream, be sure and check out this article.

William Deresiewicz writes for the Chronicle Review about social networks and act of “friending” in Faux Friendship.

“We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all. Already the characteristically modern relationship, it has in recent decades become the universal one: the form of connection in terms of which all others are understood, against which they are all measured, into which they have all dissolved. Romantic partners refer to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. Spouses boast that they are each other’s best friends. Parents urge their young children and beg their teenage ones to think of them as friends. Adult siblings, released from competition for parental resources that in traditional society made them anything but friends (think of Jacob and Esau), now treat one another in exactly those terms. Teachers, clergymen, and even bosses seek to mitigate and legitimate their authority by asking those they oversee to regard them as friends. We’re all on a first-name basis, and when we vote for president, we ask ourselves whom we’d rather have a beer with. As the anthropologist Robert Brain has put it, we’re friends with everyone now.”

Ann Smarty at Search Engine Journal has posted a guide to How to Promote Your Facebook Fan Page & Get Lots of Fans. She includes five easy steps to follow along with screenshots and instructions for creating a popular Facebook Page. Here are her recommendations:

1. Round 1: Create fresh content for people to want to join
2. Round 2: Invite your friends to join
3. Round 3: Try social ads
4. Round 4: Promote on Twitter
5. Round 5: Leverage your email contacts

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch makes some predictions about 10 Technologies That Will Rock 2010. The post details his list of tech which will have the largest impact in the coming year. Here are his top five:

1. The Tablet
2. Geo
3. Realtime Search
4. Chrome OS
5. HTML5
6. Mobile Video