‘‘Organisations will start this year to get less obsessed about what site they’re on and focus more on whether the content they’re producing or the interactivity, especially around customer service, is engaging.”

(via The Post.ie)

Provide enough information for your friends to be able to identify you — but not so much that someone could use information to steal your identity.

Consider making your profile private so people you don’t know can’t “scrape” information and images from it.

Even if your profile is private, remember that your information and photos also can be accessed by third parties through your friends — and through applications developers on such sites as Facebook and MySpace.

Don’t use the same password for social network sites that you do for online accounts that have banking and credit card information.

Check for updates on privacy policies on various sites you use.

Never assume that anything you post online is completely private. Trust your instincts.

Good tips as more and more people are starting to realize they are leaving a trail of data on the internet.

The best rule of thumb is to always assume everyone will eventually see what you post. Keep that in mind and you’ll be fine in the future.

Twitter is a cross between IM, blogging, and SMS if that makes any sense. In what would seemingly appear useless spraying of what a person is doing at any moment in time, Twitter enables groups of people to keep up with that everyone is doing (or thinking as the case may be).

Filling a role not quite satisfied by blogs and chat, Twitter can act as a true lifeblog as Steve Rubel mentioned recently. Each post on Twitter is limited to 140 characters, just enough for a few brief thoughts. These are the kind of topics that you wouldn’t actually write to a blog. These simple missives would take way too much time to blog and are more personal in nature than most people write on a blog anyway. The service functions in much the same way as adding a status away message in your IM client. Just a brief note letting your friends know what you’re up to.

There may even be some potential business use here. I’m starting to see numerous companies and news sites distribute information via Twitter. I added CNN Breaking News to my Twitter list and I like how unobtrusive the messages come through. I can see a business offer service or product development updates via Twitter as another form of communication that doesn’t require any response or work from the recipient.

And this is probably the key aspect of Twitter – no action is necessary on the reader’s part. When using IM or email, the sender expects a response. With a service like Twitter, the sender is just posting updates on what’s happening in their life. It should be quite interesting to see if it moves beyond the early adopter crowd. Additionally, I can’t wait to see how Twitter holds up at SXSW starting this weekend!

I definitely recommend checking out Twitter to see how this works for yourself. If you sign up, feel free to add me as a friend. If you’re on a Mac, I also recommend using Twitterific as a nice persistent desktop client.

UPDATE: I just saw an interesting post on “why twitter matters” via a Rubel link post.

Technorati Tags: twitter, software

First, let me show what the effect of being on Netscape’s home page actually looked like. And also let me emphasize for the record that I (a) had no idea this post would be this controversial (a bit, but not this much) and (b) I didn’t submit the story to Netscape myself.

 The effect of my day on Netscape’s home page was effectively a traffic spike of about 11x normal levels. Not too bad. On Netscape, the post received 63 votes and 77 comments, many of which were quite passionate on both sides of the issue. I particularly enjoyed the commenters who wrote a paragraph on how much they don’t care about any of this and how it’s a waste of time. And yet they just took the time to write an entire paragraph complaining about the rest of us? I had similar levels of commenting on my own blog post which received 24 comments.

There were numerous negative comments reinforcing some of my thoughts and many others stating everything was working fine. After all the commenting quieted down, I’m left with a few final thoughts.

I think Netscape was quite open after the fact and allowed the discussion to unfold properly over the course of the day. Some people thought we were making too much of the subject, but it’s important for users of a prominent community contributed service to be aware of everything going on. I appreciated the comments made by the staff, though it still makes no sense that my submission was removed as a duplicate of the story mentioned. The fact that my story was removed from the system and then replaced is being blamed on technical difficulties as opposed to a malicious effort to kill the post. I will accept that explanation though I received emails yesterday from several people complaining Netscape did much worse to them (entire account removal and banning).

The fact that the post made it to the home page, managed to stay there the whole day, and was commented on by Netscape staff shows a commitment to trying to be open about issues.

Will I use Netscape in the future? Maybe. Am I still upset over how everything was handled before I wrote the post and aired my complaints? Yes. But I’m open minded and as I watched the story and comments grow on Netscape I found it to work pretty well, technically speaking. I’m not a big user of Digg or Reddit either, so I can’t comment on how they handle many of the issues that were discussed. I’m optimistic an open discussion like the one that occurred around the post on Netscape will move the service forward and hopefully encourage them to make their practices and polices more transparent. There is obviously enough room for them in the space. People vote with their clicks and Netscape’s traffic is a big indicator that they’re not going away.

After seeing the traffic showing up in my analytics software, I checked out Netscape to see how things were all shaking out (and yes, I was hoping to see massive amounts of votes). I logged into Netscape and started poking around in the account section. But I see nothing. Nada. Zippo. Now how can that be? I know with 100% certainty that traffic was being referred to my post by Netscape, yet there is no record whatsoever that my submission even existed. It’s simply gone from Netscape. So, after a resounding WTF!, I send an email to Netscape asking what the hell happened.

I hear nothing back from them and simply decide to boycott Netscape. Yes, I know a boycott of one person will hardly hurt them, but it’s the principle here. I basically forgot about what happened and figured Netscape just decided to ignore me (they wouldn’t be the first on that account). Recently I happened to go to Netscape and took a peek inside my account to see if they ever managed to respond. To my amazement, I found two things – my submission was listed again and there was a Netscape Anchor Commentary stating:

We’re closing this post, as it’s a dupe of this story.

Hmm, my blog post was a duplicate of an AP story published by the Northwest Florida Daily News. Are you kidding me? So I responded with:

How could it be a duplicate of that story when it was the personal observations of a resident living in Blacksburg that morning? So, by removing this story, is Netscape saying there is only one possible perspective?

And finally, the response:

The post you submitted was reported by a couple of users as a duplicate of another story, which was our main motivation for closing it. Looking at the link you submitted now, though it does come from a personal blog, it doesn’t substantially add information or analysis to the original story. This is not a case of there being, as you suggested in your original message, “only one possible perspective” allowed at Netscape; rather, our users identified your submission as a duplicate, we took a look at it and concluded that the information at the link you submitted was indeed very close to the information that had already been submitted, and closed the story. Hope this helps to clear up any confusion. thanks, Karina

I completely disagree with this logic. If you read my post, the content links to a few different sources with the standard information of the shooting. But the post not only gives a recap of the situation, it also provides a commentary on the event as well as perspective from someone actually there. Yes, if you skim the first paragraph it would appear to be a duplicate. When the whole post is taken into consideration, with comments from others, a different picture emerges.

The whole point of a social networking site is to let the users contribute and regulate the content. Competitors of Netscape do a much better job in this aspect. If a story is a duplicate or of poor quality, its gets voted down. In this situation, the post wasn’t voted down it was actually removed until I sent an email complaining after the fact. Voting down and removal are two very different things to me. Even if some Netscape users marked the post as a duplicate, the amount of traffic my site received from the time it was up would indicate that many found it useful.

From this exchange with Netscape, I’m still forced to conclude the following:

1. Netscape is heavily censoring everything that gets submitted by these anchors
2. Netscape only allows one perspective of a story to be on its web site
3. Netscape places higher weight on “mainstream” media than bloggers
4. The Netscape anchors have too much editorial control
5. Why even bother submitting anything to Netscape?

It all seems very heavy handed to me. Netscape’s FAQ says the site is

programmed by you–the audience! All of the stories on Netscape are submitted and voted on by users.

That sounds good, but what about these anchors? Their FAQ also restates the argument made to me. From the FAQ,

In order to ensure that there are not multiple duplicates of the same story, it is important that Netscape community members always link to the original source of a story. Whenever the Netscape Anchor team spots a story that is not linked to the original source, we will change the link and leave a note in Anchor Commentary noting the change.

For example, if you have posted an AOL UnCut Video, YouTube or Google Video video to your personal blog and you wish to submit the story to Netscape, unless your blog post presents substantial analysis or discussion of the video, you should link directly to the source video.

This same rule should apply to any stories—regardless of whether they are audio, video, pictures, or text—that you submit to Netscape. We want to avoid cluttering the system with rehashed stories, and we appreciate your help in this matter.

So, once again, they explicitly state that the only thing they want on Netscape is one article from the “original” source. What is that? The first one posted to Netscape? Whatever strikes the fancy of one of these anchors? What do you think? Maybe it’s my fault for not reading their FAQ in the first place.

Now honestly, my post was no great feat of journalism, but there was some perspective and commentary on how the situation was handled. This was not really discussed elsewhere at the time. Netscape did post other sites (including blogs) throughout the day in their Anchor Commentary box, but they managed to delete mine. I really don’t see how my post was so much of a duplicate that it deserved to be removed and not just voted down (or something similar).

First paying top Digg users to switch over to their site and now this. What kind of community and service are they trying to create? My recommendation – stick with Digg and Reddit.

For those not too familiar with del.icio.us, Jeremy Zawodny points to a great article entitled: What’s so cool about del.icio.us?

Also, I often stumble upon links that are interesting and I want to share on my blog, but not necessarily write any comments on them. I’ve found some plugins for WordPress that I’m going to try out in order to post these links to my blog. We’ll see how it works.

Update: Jeff Clavier of Software Only has a detailed post on Rojo’s new product.

If you also get the service up and running, please share your thoughts on Yahoo 360 as a comment as well.

My review of the service is cross-posted on my Yahoo 360 blog and this blog.

I can’t say that I’m terribly impressed with Yahoo 360 and I will not be using it anytime soon for blogging. Everyone is comparing it to other blogging tools, but I’m not sure if that is an appropriate way to review the service. It looks like Yahoo 360 would be most useful for those already fully integrated into using Yahoo’s other services like Mail, Photos, My Yahoo, and Groups. Yahoo 360 pulls all these together into one nice interface. So, as a “social networking” tool, I think the service will do well. In addition to having your email, groups, photos, etc. accessed in one place, the user will also have the ability to perform basic blogging.

There are some nice features of Yahoo 360 with respect to blogging, but there are also some severe drawbacks that will prevent almost any serious blogger from using the service on a regular basis.

Pros:
- built in blogroll lists
- moblogging
- free
- links seamlessly to Yahoo “friends”
- automatic RSS 2.0
- basic WYSIWYG post editor works well
- built in upload for images (JPEG only)

Cons:
- no trackbacks and no pings
- could be considered “too” integrated with Yahoo
- very limited blog customizations (almost none as bloggers know it)
- blog description limited to 100 characters (why?)
- couldn’t change timezone settings for posts (hey, I don’t live on the West coast)
- no Atom, RDF, or older RSS versions
- blog url is structured as a subfolder instead of a subdomain like Blogger (http://360.yahoo.com/tmarkie)
- sometimes the pages just go blank while editing (not sure why this is happening)
- you must be a Yahoo member to see the public blog site (at least in most of my tests this was the case)

Numerous other blogs have some good additional reviews of the service (Software Only, Dave Winer, Steve Rubel)

Overall, I’d say Yahoo 360 is a decent service as long as its put into the proper context when comparing it to other services. If someone is looking for a free, hosted service just for blogging though, I’d shy away from Yahoo and stick with Blogger or something similar.

UPDATE (4/9/05): Even though I’m not a big user of everything Yahoo, I do use My Yahoo regularly for their finance and portfolio tracking features. One oddity of Yahoo 360 is that even when I’m logged into My Yahoo, I have to re-enter the same login info for Yahoo 360. When I do that, it must delete the cookie for My Yahoo because when I go back after closing my browser to My Yahoo, I have to login again. Yahoo needs to coordinate My Yahoo and Yahoo 360 here. Single sign-on folks. Please.