Broadcasting Brain

Note:  if you’ve discovered this post at Blogtreprenoeur, you should know that they’ve scraped this post from my blog.  Please click here to read the original post at its original source.  Blogtreprenoeur is a thief and steals from several sources.  They do not deserve your support.  Thanks.

When you encounter a new blog, you might want to get some idea of what’s been written there before. That way, you have some idea of what to expect when you read the blog.

I have a popular posts page, a listing of the posts with the largest numbers of page views, but I’ve come to the conclusion that sometimes a popular post is different from the normal content in one’s blog. Sometimes posts are written specifically to get social media attention…

:: whistles and looks away, hoping no one notices him ::

Other posts, although they might not be as popular, may give a new reader a different, more representative sense of what your blog is really about.

Therefore, I’m going to include links to some of my favorite Broadcasting Brain posts which might not have been so popular. Maybe you’ll like them, too.

Can you trust the news? My thoughts on how to deal with media lies and disinformation.

You can actually hear me speak at the link in this post

I wrote this post after exchanging E-Mails with an A-list blogger, it was a pleasant surprise

 
The Power of Context, or EVERYBODY Knows John! - just some thoughts about name dropping and the use of a person’s first name or nickname

The appropriate platform is in the eye of the beholder - not the best-named post, but still, it’s a topic that I believe in quite strongly

Size does not matter (in the blogosphere) - this post is on my popular posts page, but I think it’s worth repeating

There you go, a Broadcasting Brain B-Sides post!

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Later this week you should see the Alltop badge in my sidebar. Broadcasting Brain is listed in Alltop Social Media.

Whether or not you think Alltop is a good thing, there’s really no downside for me, and most bloggers like me, to being included in Alltop’s Social Media page. If anything, I benefit from it more than Alltop does. I’m listed alongside a lot of bloggers that I read and admire. Alltop’s already thrown me a little bit of traffic.

It’s all good.

I’m of the same mind as Chris Brogan about Alltop. If Alltop opens up the blogosphere to people who don’t use RSS, other blog directories, or the like, then I think we all benefit. Let’s face it, there are far more people who don’t dabble in social media than do. Every bit of exposure helps. It’s a good way to help people find your blog.

Some people think Alltop has been overpromoted or that it’s riding on Guy Kawasaki’s reputation. I really can’t judge the former; time will tell us whether or not the latter is true.

Alltop’s method of displaying RSS feeds may be basic functionality that an idiot could use (or make), perhaps even redundant, but it sure doesn’t hurt anyone. Plus, it’s aimed square at the heart of that HUGE TAIL (not just a long tail) of potential readers.

Thanks to Alltop. I hope we all benefit! [and here's a post with some ideas on how you can use Alltop to your best advantage.]

Credit (original image): Silent Disco by Brixton

Grab a nickname, a cool outfit, and BAM! You’re a member of Twitter Club! Or, heck, come as you are and just Twitter with everyone!

You can talk all day long with your pals, share secrets and exciting things, and remind each other how great Twitter is! If everyone else just understood how cool Twitter was, they’d want to join too!

So why don’t more people join? It’s really cool… right?

The club of the 21st century

Setting (most of) my sarcasm aside for a moment, Twitter is like a lot of other clubs, such as:

• the Glee Club
• the Chess Club
• the Drama Club
• the Yearbook Committee
• the Rotary Club
• even some of the less popular sports clubs.

Granted, Twitter is a club that’s close to 1 million members strong, but I’m sure that the Mickey Mouse Club and the Merry Marvel Marching Society had some big numbers in their day, too.

It’s still a stomping ground with limited appeal; you have to like Twittering.

It’s not nuts and bolts, it’s flesh and blood. And words. Lots of words.

Lately bloggers write about the relevance of Twitter, its technical stability, and its potential to ever generate enough revenue to be a viable business. Twitter does have some useful, though limited functionality, and a devoted fan base.

However, if there’s any value to Twitter, it’s in the interactions and relationships between its users and, to a lesser extent, the information that’s stored there.

T-W-I-T-T-E R-C-L-U-B: Twitter Club!

Twitter’s really a big social club.

Picture a gigantic club house, not unlike a gigantic dance club and bar, where you can:

• drown in 500,000 simultaneous conversations
• listen to smaller groups in the “room” or network that you happen to be in
• sneak off into the corner with one friend and whisper short nothings (not necessarily sweet ones) into each other’s ears

Now, add into the mix a series of:

• actors
• salesmen
• fanatics
• politicians
• random buffoons…

 and the picture’s complete. It’s Twitter Club!

Not to say that Twitter Club isn’t cool or fun. It’s just that Twitter Club is also like a trendy nightclub where you can sit around and chat, in a limited sense, for free. You can pick up your mobile phone and call someone on the other side of this huge club and chat if you want.

There’s no bar, no real music, and there’s very little room to dance.

People love to hang out there anyway.

Yelling sweet nothings in a noisy room

That’s not to say that you can’t have some meaningful interaction at Twitter Club. It’s just that the odds are stacked against you if you try, much like trying to debate economic theory or existential philosophy in a disco when the mirror ball’s lit up and the music’s pumping away, while hordes of sweaty people try to shake their bodies to a beat.

In the end, a club will make it or close down if the economics aren’t there. However, if people still want to hang out together, twitch to some music, or just soak in the rare kind of vibe, they’ll go to a new club. This is probably what will happen if Twitter Club is forced to close, as long as people still like to hang out in similar clubs.

But why don’t more people come to Twitter Club?

The problem is that not everyone likes the same kind of clubs, the same social situations, and the same diversions. This, in my opinion, is why Twitter might not make it into the mainstream.

Not everyone wants to join a huge club like this.

Twitter Club can be fun, exciting, and rewarding, like many other clubs. However, the value that you extract from Twitter Club is related to the energy you put into Twitter Club.

A lot of people probably won’t like Twitter Club: they aren’t geared towards these kinds of club interactions.  It took me awhile to get into it and I’m less fanatical than a lot of members.

But we really want more people to join! How?

On the other hand… maybe it just takes some encouragement and a few friendly faces to get the party started. And isn’t that really what keeps clubs going? Not the locale or the architecture: it’s the people.

Maybe Twitter Club will stay intact and get a killer make-over. Who knows?

But… if your friends go somewhere else, chances are you will, too. It’s all about having fun… with them.

Wherever.

Once again, ReadWriteWeb provides a few new nuggets of insight for social media practitioners. Marshall Kirkpatrick provides information about the best and worst times to submit news stories or blog posts to social news and social bookmarking sites.  Read his article to get a better understanding of Jake Luciani’s study (or, for that matter, read Jake’s own post about the study.)

In short:

• Thursdays are the best days, Tuesdays aren’t far off (in my opinion)
• Saturday, Sunday, Monday are the worst days
• Wednesday and Friday are somewhere in the middle

In terms of time of day (all times in GMT):

• Midnight to 2 AM and 4 PM to 10 PM are the best times to submit to social media
• Between 10 PM and midnight is the worst time slot for submitting to social media; 8 AM to 2 PM look fairly weak as well
• Every other time is average

This information might be useful to anyone who wants to become a Top Digger (I’m still at 711 in the top 1000 list) or other social media maven - every little bit helps.  However, as with any of these studies, the information should be used as just another piece of data in your social media strategy and you shouldn’t rely too heavily on timing.

I know that in my own experience, I used to submit Digg stories early in the morning (my time) and I seemed to have better success when I submitted stories at different times of day.

Marshall’s article also made me wonder about the timing of blog posting. Are some days better than others?  Are some times better than other times?  In the RSS world it shouldn’t really make any difference because the posts are always there in your reader, waiting for you, right?  Or does timing matter?  I tend to check more than once per day, although I reserve noon hour my time to review a certain collection of social media blogs.

And so, on this Monday, the beginning of my week (possibly yours as well), I’d like to hear what you think.  Do you read blogs on some days or than others?  Certain times of day more than others?

As some of you know, I use Twitter quite frequently as MarkDykeman.  I developed a decently-sized following on Twitter through my Twitter experiment.  Between reading Tweets and making them I probably spend 1 - 2 hours per day on the service.  However, I do all of my Twitter activities via the Web, either through the Twitter homepage or using Twhirl.  This leads me to an interesting thought.

If you read through the Twitter website and various accompanying literature it seems pretty clear that Twitter was intended to be used via SMS messaging from mobile phones or other portable communication devices.  The Web functionality almost seems like an afterthought in its original design.  I’m probably wrong about that, but there certainly seems to be an emphasis on SMS capabilities.

I took a quick poll about a week ago and of the dozen people that responded, virtually none of them used the SMS functions and did all of their Tweeting via their PC or laptop.

I find this interesting given the frequent issues with Twitter’s performance.  It makes me wonder if the problems with Twitter aren’t just an issue with the number of users, but because more and more traffic isn’t SMS. 

So, the question I have for today is:  how many people are using SMS to interact with Twitter?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Catch the Brainwaves is our ongoing series of interviews with a variety of folks participating in blogging and social media. I ask them ten questions and they respond with their brilliant answers and insights! Today we are featuring Patricia Mayo of Comhacker.org and Nowsourcing.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin!

1. When you read, do you prefer paper or are you an on-line, electronic reader?

I prefer the best of both worlds - PDF downloaded to my Blackberry. That way I’m not chained to my desk and I’m not contributing to paper waste

2. “Live free or die” – does that motto resonate with you?

Absolutely, otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed in New Hampshire for 6 years, joined the Free State Project, and associate with mostly Libertarians. I have a great big button on my purse - I mean huge 5″ diameter - with the famous Benjamin Franklin quote “Those willing to forfeit liberty for security will have neither.”

Although, it goes much deeper than that. My father, who passed in 2003, spent the large majority of his teens and early twenties in and out of jail for charges like “threatening the life of the President,” “vandalizing government property,” and other similarly patriotic acts The apple did not fall far from the tree. Daddy was my favorite, after all.

Nowadays I toil away at exposing media lies and working for media reform. This June, in fact, I’m going to the Free Press conference on media reform. It’s much better to bark up one tree and figure out how to fix that one, than to just bark up them all.

3. Are we getting to the point where words alone are not enough? Put differently, have we become dependant upon images to complement our words, especially online?

If you are targeting the general public, absolutely yes. The attention span of the casual Internet user is too short to be captivated by any kind of even truly useful headline. You have to give the general public something cutesy to focus on and draw them in - and unfortunately, that will only get worse as more websites are created and thusly demand our limited time.

However, if you are targeting academics, scientists or other technical groups, pretty pictures actually get in the way more often than not. The fundamental difference between these two groups is they inherently want information, they want to learn, and will spend days on end hunting for the right thing. The general public, on the other hand, is mostly just seeking entertainment or “something” useful.

4. Ever think about writing a book? If so, what would be the topic?

I am actually writing a free ebook right now on getting the most with virtual assistants through effective communication. This will eventually be turned into a full-on series about specific areas of effective communication - such as in management, marketing, relationships, etc. There’s a mailing list for anyone wishing to keep up to date and ask any specific questions they need answered - the signup form is on every page of ComHacker.

As far as actual physical in-print books with an ISBN and PITA distribution agreements, I have quite a few in mind. One is on my existential philosophies (like Uniform Social Standards), another on my discoveries within cognitive psychology and mass media, and I’ve been thinking about a remix of swarm theory.

Gosh, put that way I sound like such a stuffed shirt. Then again, anyone who knows me through Twitter or even in person would probably think of all that as being out of left field. Which brings me to the idea of writing my memoirs. I have been through quite an interesting life, and some of the lessons I have learned - such as keeping to myself the fact I analyze every single word anyone ever utters or scribbles - would be best if put to use by others too.

5. Let’s talk about social media for a moment. Do you think that large organizations are starting to understand the potential value of social media (blogs and more)? Or does social media really have an impact on a large corporation?

In the United States, definitely yes. The fact that Wal-Mat, Sony, and Microsoft have all had their fair share of fake blogger and social media bribery scandals stands as testament to both accounts.

Remember the Kryptonite bicycle locks? The company that made those was literally brought to its knees by one person posting one YouTube video on breaking into their locks with a ballpoint pen. And let’s not forget the special number sequence for hacking the HD DVD encryption key. Someone thought it important enough to write a cease and desist letter - social media therefore must have an impact on companies that can afford to lose a few hundred thousand dollars without even so much as a flinch.

However, remember that I specified the U.S.A. (we’re not the world, we just haven’t realized it yet). South Africa is actually fairly closed to the idea of using or even watching their reputation on social media. And who can blame them, really? The vast majority of Internet users are in developed countries - but it would be wise of them to at least tap into this market and encourage importing their goods.

6. Where do you think ideas come from? Pete Townshend (the Who) used to think that his song ideas were a divine gift or otherwise were created by a higher power. Others think otherwise. How about you?

Oh dear. Now you’ve just gone and set me up to be contradictory.

As much as I admire and appreciate Pete Townshend, Van Morrison, and The Grateful Dead, I have to say ideas come from subliminal connections. Taking drugs (as just about every musician does, famous or otherwise) often helps subliminal thought processes to move more into the cognitive realm, and thus new ideas can happen more rapidly - but there are less risky ways to encourage subliminal and cognitive mergers.

One of the most recognized and common ways is meditation. I use that in combination with sleep deprivation and polyphasic sleep to feed my idea machine as well as boost productivity, metabolism, memory, and lucid thought.

But to elaborate on the “subliminal connections” I mentioned before - absolutely everything within the range of your five senses, whether you consciously register it or not, is remembered. In the case of whatever you are doing at any particular point in time, everything within the range of your five senses at that moment is linked together into one cohesive bubble in your subliminal and cognitive mind-spaces.

Later on you can recall that entire bubble if the most unique input is re-triggered. That “input” could have been stored in your subliminal or cognitive mind-space, doesn’t matter - so long as it was the first of its kind.

Take for instance scents trigger the most vivid memories because our sense of smell becomes tolerant so quickly - eventually, you just don’t smell your perfume or cologne, so you don’t realize you’ve bathed in it. Unlike any of the other senses, not only are you not cognitively registering that scent, you’re not subliminally registering it either. Therefore, scents are most commonly the most unique input and thus trigger more vivid memories than any other sensory inputs - because only one thing smells like bacon, and that’s bacon.

Back to my point - obviously, not a whole lot is unique. If a memory doesn’t have a unique sensory marker, it just gets jumbled into a larger bubble with a few loose links to some cognitive thoughts - think of it as a tag cloud, except every bit of information is a tag. When you think or see something that contains some of the same information from that tag cloud, you mind kinda “clicks” on that tag, quickly digests the information to see if it’s relevant, and just might give you a subliminal connection - an idea.

How quickly you can come up with ideas is entirely reliant on how much you use your brain and how much you encourage your brain to “index” subliminal information through drug use, meditation, and sleep techniques.

Simple, isn’t it?

7. Can you list five things that you couldn’t live without?

Can I? Almost certainly. Will I? No.

…

…ok, you win.

1. The bare essentials for survival - food, water, air. Didn’t want to be a smart alec and use up three for something so obvious and trivial.
2. Humor - because I’m not good at being dull. That would mean I’d have to be perfect too, because without humor, nobody could laugh at me either… and being perfect is just way too much work.
3. Access to more information than I could ever digest in an entire lifetime. If there’s nothing left to learn, what’s the point? I don’t care if I don’t have Internet access - so long as I can travel, new experiences count as information too.
4. Some way of expressing myself and sharing information. I don’t care if I have to stand on a soap box in the middle of Timbuktu and holler my message while the Pamplona bull run is in town… so long as they can listen and run.
5. And last but not least - Liberty.

If you’re wondering why all of the above are more like concepts rather than things - I’m against materialism and senseless consumerism.

8. Do you feel that you are accomplishing the things that you want to have accomplished at this phase in your life? Do you have a schedule, conscious or unconscious, that you are following?

If you had asked me that when I was 12, doing graphic design for anyone that didn’t mind my age (or didn’t ask) - I would have told you “hell no, it’s moving way too slow.”

If you had asked me that when I was 14, the general manager of a cybercafe and computer build and repair shop who single handedly took the company out of the red and positioned it to sell for a few million dollars, only to get booted by the new owners because I was too young - I would have told you “hell no, it’s moving way too slow.”

If you had asked me that when I was 16, married and technically a legal adult but nobody believed me - I would have told you “hell no, it’s moving way too slow.”

If you had asked me that when I was 18, stupidly trying to start my own magazine (I had no clue what I was doing!) - I would have told you “ack! I can’t keep up!”

If you had asked me that when I was 20, deer-in-headlights lost, following anything with some kind of promise, desperate and hopelessly flip flopping from job to job - I would have told you “F off, I gave up.”

If you had asked me that when I was 22, finally having found my spot in the world working my way up the copywriting ladder from the bottom up - I would have told you “I think I can make it. This isn’t a pipe dream anymore.”

And now that you’re asking me just 1 month before my 24th birthday, I can safely say I’m doing better than I thought I would be by now (once I got my head screwed on straight). I would have been content making maybe $1,000 a month for the next year, but the fact I’m doing more than double that and hardly breaking a sweat has actually caught me by surprise.

9. Pretend the Internet is destroyed overnight. What do you do the next morning?

Celebrate and focus on direct mail and “old fashioned” B2B networking for my clients, and get out more often ;D

10. What one piece of knowledge, advice, or wisdom do you have to share with our readers?

Don’t just drink one person’s kool-aid. Always always research and find out more before you buy something (especially anything to do with making money online), hire someone, start a business, or accept some bite of information into your psyche - opinion, fact, or otherwise. In simpler terms - don’t accept anything at face value.

After all, the face is merely a cover around a very interesting book.

Thanks to Patricia Mayo for sharing her brainwaves!

Once again it pays to read Men With Pens first thing in the morning - today’s post tells me that today is RSS Awareness Day!  In addition to their own bits of wisdom on the topic, James and Harry have pointed out a site created by the folks at Daily Blog Tips called RSSDay.org.  It includes a good little tutorial on Really Simple Syndication (the RSS acronym “exploded”).

For my part, I’m going to include excerpts from a newspaper article that I wrote a few months ago about RSS.  I use RSS quite a bit, but there’s a lot more that I could do with it.  Anywhere you see the orange RSS symbol, you can subscribe.  It’s not just for blogs!

Here’s the article.  Feel free to pass it along to anyone that you think might benefit from this extremely useful technology!

#     #     #

Would you like to have your favorite websites send all of their new stories to you instead of you having to check each website separately? Did you know that there are subscription services available on the Internet, just like newspaper and magazine subscriptions, which will send you their latest news? Read on for the details!

News aggregators, or news readers, are websites that you can use to view articles and news stories in a single location. Instead of having to visit 50 websites each day, you can read their articles and stories within a single website. It’s just like signing up for a subscription to your favorite newspapers and magazines and then having them delivered directly to you! Talk about convenience!

The underlying technology that enables this subscription service is called syndication. Syndication has existed in news media for many years as a means to distribute content. Famous writers and columnists like Dave Barry, Garrison Keillor, Dear Abby, and Ann Landers don’t write for a single newspaper. They write their columns, submit them to a syndicated news organization (or syndicate), and then their columns are published by many newspapers who purchase their columns from the syndication company.

Web syndication is similar in concept to news syndication in that websites can format or transmit their articles so they can be distributed to thousands or millions of readers. These articles are automatically published in a format that other websites can read and publish for them. The most popular form of Web syndication uses a technology called Really Simple Syndication (RSS). News readers are designed to allow you to track these RSS feeds within a single website. All you have to do is copy and paste the links to these websites into your news reader and presto, you’ll start getting their stories.

RSS works for many different kinds of websites. In addition to every major newspaper or magazine in the world, you can also subscribe directly to blogs. Most blogging systems will automatically take these blog articles, or posts, and create RSS feeds for them. You can “subscribe” to dozens, hundreds, even thousands of these websites using your news reader.

If you’d like to read a more detailed subscription of how to use RSS, you can check out this article.

I’ve used three different Web-based news readers and they all work well. You can check them out at the following websites:

Google Reader

Bloglines

Netvibes

You can now simplify your web browsing by limiting the number of websites that you have to visit. This can save you time and effort when you want to stay up to date on news and current events.

Many different kinds of websites can be viewed using your news reader. Check for the terms “RSS” or “subscribe” on a website to see if it’s available for subscription. You might be surprised at the amount of information that can be sent to your preferred news reader!

Next time you run across a blog or website that you really enjoy, check for the RSS button and subscribe; both you and the author will benefit!

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Maki does it again over at Dosh Dosh with his latest post: Rethinking Blog Comments. I highly recommend his blog if you are interested in social media, Internet marketing, or blogging in general.

In summary, Maki advises his readers to think long term when commenting on blogs. You can use blog comments as a way to interact with a blogger and build a connection between the two of you.

I know from my own experience that I love it when people comment on Broadcasting Brain posts. Blog comments have allowed me to connect with other bloggers.

The downside of blog comments, especially if you’re an established blogger, is that your comment section will mutate into a gigantic bulletin board where any greedy soul will post just to get their name noticed, plus the backlink that comes from a Do Follow blog comment section. Maki describes one scenario where an internet marketer mass-posted the same comment at multiple blogs as a means to promote himself.

I’ll be honest: I’ve posted comments on some of the A List blogs as a means to get some exposure. Caroline Middlebrook and Darren Rowse have both written useful posts about ways to use blog comments to make contact with other bloggers. I figured, “Hey, if they recommend it…”

However, on the other side of good taste, there is the obvious link spammer, not unlike the gentleman that Maki describes in his post.

I’m sure that it’s a bit discouraging to know that some people are commenting on your blog just to get some attention for themselves.

However, if they are contributing to the conversation in some way, then I think it’s perfectly fine to give your commenter a chance to be contacted by other like-minded individuals.  Most blogs were designed to allow the commenter to be contacted, after all. 

Yes, it’s an opening that some people will try to take advantage of, but when you’re a beginning blogger, every little bit helps.

Maki wrote a great post, as usual, so please check it out, won’t you?

(And why not leave a comment here while you’re at it?)

(For that matter, why not subscribe…  you never know what kinds of goodies I’ll be presenting here… 

I’ve just posted my first poll here at Broadcasting Brain.

I’d really appreciate it if you take a moment to vote.

Thanks!

What do you do when you feel like you need to say something but you just can’t find the right words to communicate it?

Telepathy would be so much easier, wouldn’t it? Gone would be the guessing games, the frustration, the hurt feelings and time lost due to misunderstanding. The perfect words wouldn’t have to be so perfect anymore when direct mind-to-mind communication, free of filters and barriers, could transmit any thought, feeling, or concepts between two or more people.

Credit: Writers block 3 by Jonno Witts

Alas, telepathy is currently impossible. We must rely on our five senses (smell, taste, and touch don’t tend to be used very often: at least not intentionally) to tell the story.

Given these constraints, it’s easy to understand that we can struggle with the right way to communicate something. We use different languages with hundreds of thousands of characters, symbols, and groupings to move information between minds. Sometimes we get the message across, sometimes we don’t.

But what do you really want to say?

What’s worse, sometimes we can’t even figure out what we want to say, even if the thoughts feel maddeningly close to the surface, just like we could snatch them up and start using them. Sometimes these words and thoughts will dive deep, scamper away, or otherwise evade our grasp. Instead of transmitting a meaningful message, we broadcast gobbledygook that even we, the author, don’t understand.

How do we get the right words out?

Read the rest of this entry »