Holy hell, has it been a year all ready?

That’s right – Plaid, the folks behind Brandflakes for Breakfast, are starting Plaid Nation in a mere ten days!

What is Plaid Nation?

Why, an excellent question to ask – Plaid Nation is a “rolling celebration of creativity and a demonstration of social media in action.”

Or – social media in motion. We’re talking live streaming video, interviews with some of the Internet 1337 –

In their venture, they managed to interview Robert Scoble, Cathy Brooks from Seesmic and Biz Stone (of his many involvements – Twitter being the one you probably know).

Awesome People, Awesome Concept, Awesome Execution.

Cool schwag for Plaid Nation!

As last year I caught wind after the fact, this year they won’t be too far from home base – they’re hitting Chicago on July 22, and Indianapolis on July 23 – I’m debating making the road trip to catch the ride from Columbus (why aren’t they coming here?)

If you haven’t gotten your fill of Plaid yet – they’ve got some new digital freebies up for this year, complete with theme song :) and a twitter stream to help the normals check in on the fun. So Darryl, you may be getting an email from me if I can pry myself away from work for a day or two and make my own road trip (without a live stream of the trip, but I can tweet away) to see how much of the Plaid fever I can catch.

Shawn Morton may have beat me to the punch – both in writing about it – and a quick iframe demo of the Skittles idea.

The general point (in terms of Web Development) is that this is an insanely simple thing to accomplish – 15 minutes and Shawn had a working iframe demo.

I wanted to grab some of the effects and colors of the original, just to see if I could do it and “make it fancy” – I mean, there’s still a half-dozen effects that can be applied to it – fades, transitions, all those whizz-bang-pow stuff people love, but I had to pull myself back a test was important.

Skittles.com Initial Test

I decided to focus on Firefox 3 so I could use rounded corners in CSS (there’s a JS library for everyone else, sans Webkit, but hell, remember, this is a test. No one’s paying, so I’m not worried about IE.

It took me a couple hours, but here’s skittles.com, reproduced without flash.

I’m too tired to write more, so – here ya go.

I get it. You joined Twitter because it’s the new thing.

But do you really need to add 1000+ people when your first tweet is “trying out twitter?”

Twitter: The Basics

If you’re trying it out, start out small. Add the people you know. That was like ten or so people for me. Then, add the blogs you love (notice the *LOVE* – not just casually read or have in your favorite RSS reader). They may not follow you back, but people will get that, at least, when you have 30 people you’re following and only 10 follow back.e

Now, test out twitter. Tweet a bit. It doesn’t have to be relevant or interesting. Have you read my tweets? I bitch, I whine, I moan, I question, I ask, I inform. I’m all over the map. It’s a total mind dump. Why people follow me at all is a mystery – at least to me.

Twitter: Slightly more advanced.

So you’ve tweeted for a little while. You’ve picked out your favorite clients – maybe TweetDeck or its groups, or maybe Twhirl for its integration with friendfeed. That’s why I tend to use the two. My cell phone doesn’t support twitter, so I don’t bother with mobile clients (for now).

So – you’re following people. Maybe a few people (that aren’t spammers) are following you. What now? Research, baby! I suggest using Twellow aka TwellowPages to find tweeters that are interested in similar topics as yourself. Maybe using Twitter’s Search (integrated from Summize) to find key words you like. I’ve done searches on mootools, analytics, metrics, social media, and a few others as they are all topics that interest me. I haven’t ruled out others, and I usually re-run the query.

Keep an eye on your ratio of followers to following.

This makes you look like a spammer if you’re following, say, a 1,000 plus people and only a hand-full are following you back (spammers get lucky if the users are utilizing TweetLater.com – a tweet scheduler/auto follower. I use it to automatically thank followers. It’s one step less I need to do to thank people for being interested enough to follow my dumbass. It gets interesting when other peple use it so it becomes a two-step loop of “thanks for following!” “thanks for following!”

It’s possible that you really dig a thousand people on twitter – you really want to read those tweets! But it just makes you look bad. Please refrain. Slowly add a few dozen daily so people aren’t freaked out by your spam-like addiction (seriously, I’m almost to 2,500 tweets in a short time – imagine me times one thousand). Think before you act. Contribute. Response. Ask. Blog.

I know, this Twitter stuff is pretty basic.

But that’s kind of the point – twitter *is* pretty basic. Don’t make it harder or more complex than it needs to be!

So Mark @ Mashable wrote about YouTube updating their community guidelines against Hate speech.

He points out the obvious – people on the internet are retarded and this change means they are censoring us all, and we are fucked because all censorship is evil, and they have won because they can’t say their evil words online.

Freedom of speech is absolute.

If we can’t beat them without silencing their message, we obviously
aren’t being convincing enough to those they are converting. Fight them
with our own free speech and expression.

Overall – it’s a good read. YouTube doing a political nod (gee, just like Google did for China, and then did with Law Enforcement Agencies).

My only real issue with the article is the wrap-up:

We Need to be Smart About This
As Uncle Ben used to say, with great power comes great responsibility… If we want to keep it safe from the grubby paws of governmental intervention, companies like Google must implement and enforce standards
of policing the community.  Otherwise, the government will do that for
us, and I think I speak for all of us when I say we do not want that.

Google isn’t the little shop down the street. They’re a huge-ass corporation. If MSN was doing this people would be calling for Bill Gates head. If Steve Jobs did it, people would make shiny new logos promoting how innovative and forward thinking he’s being.

Instead, YouTube (which was purchased by Google) is taking it into their own hands. This shows the error of their “Do No Evil” slogan – nothing is really black and white. They can do something that a lot of people can consider evil – collecting user data, censoring hate speech, censoring anti-hate speech.

I do not welcome our new Internet Overlords.

Benjamin Franklin once said,

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

We continue to do so, and turn a blind eye to it. We say it’s for the best. It’s better this way. Think of the children. To me, this just shows how freaking worthless our rights are becoming. Services talk about how they’re for everything, but what’s going to happen in the future? For a citizen to express their discontentment, they’ll have to make a video, encrypt it, send it to a friend over seas to upload it to a “video sharing site” hosted on a derilect oil tanker in international waters that’s under siege by the U.S. Government for posting a video of someone saying “The Bill of Rights is an illusion.”

So what – how did I get all of this off a little YouTube censorship? Because Google was supposed to be that Little Big company. They’re supposed to be those guys that got big being good, making Microsoft look foolish for ever putting DRM on your computer. Instead they’re slowly transforming into “will this be good for the company?” type double-speak they can throw around in marketing and PR to make themselves look good.

How long until Google starts telling you what to write on your blog? “You said not nice things about Google, so we’re giving you a PR of 1, unless you delete those articles. By the way, we bought the rights to your domain, so when it expires, it’s ours unless you comply.”

Those who have the power, make the rules. Those that get the information can make their power. I know, I know, a bit paranoidal-freakish, but hey, political season stupidity always riles me up.

A friend of mine recently contacted me about a little accident with filezilla and setting permissions – see where this is headed? – for whatever reasons, filezilla starts to bug out and does a chmod 774 on EVERYTHING. Site goes down, nothing works. Blank page. Foreign file system, so I couldn’t get access to the server logs. Basically, one of those – I know I can chmod this, but what are they supposed to be again?

So, I could use transmit – but screw that noise. I wasn’t in the mood for “get info” – “apply all?” and finding out I misconstrued a directory or file.

NCFTP is my backup, but I could only scrounge up the SSH command to mass fix the CHMOD.

The command that saved the day (and saved some time) was combined from two sources:

• The command.

FOR FILES:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 444

FOR DIRECTORIES:

find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 755

• The CHMOD config.

Let this be a lesson, kids – always make sure you don’t mass edit your files, and back-up, back-up, back-up!

As a web developer, I get the wonderful job of constantly improving myself and my coding. I research, I test, I experiment, and I try to come up with consistent methods that, in my opinion, are a best practice in my work, and can be shown to other people to help them improve their skills. That being said, sometimes you are so damn busy you seldom have the time you’d like to properly coach (and be coached).

Personally, I love constructive criticism.

I really, really, really, do. It’s an excellent way to accurately better yourself – someone else critiques you. It’s even better when the person is someone you admire and respect – because then you’re more likely to take it to heart.

I know I’ve written bad code in the past (haven’t we all at some point?) and I know sometimes I’ll work on a bit of code and see a way to better myself, or improve upon others work (as I often do with mootools scripts, and jquery/javascript conversions). But I don’t just lock it away. I post on forums and groups. I send out emails to friends and colleagues. I ask for feedback, and I take feedback even when I don’t ask for it.

Because I have a desire to better myself. Because I recognize I am not perfect, and I can improve.

I could get all zen on you and go into a personal rant, but that’ll have to hold off for another day.

The point is – especially as a web developer in this new media age - you need to get criticism, give criticism, and improve your coding abilities. You can specialize – front-end, back-end, ATG, CSS, XHTML, WTF-Kung-Fu-BBQ, RoR, etc. etc. and so on and so on… but…

…unless you work on improving yourself you’ll always end up at the bottom rung.

So a big hub-bub ’round these parts of Columbus was Nationwide hiring Shawn Morton to do social media strategy.

(Disclaimer: I used to work at Nationwide, I still have friends there, and I’m writing this because I want to!)

Social Media for an Insurance/Finances company?

Damn straight. I loved the idea. It’s forcing a big company to become more involved with its people. It’s bringing the corporate in touch with the civilians. It means instead of commercials of cheesy actors saying how “I got a great rate from Nationwide” it’s the twittersphere all-a-twittering about “I got some great info from Nationwide.com” or maybe “check out Nationwide’s hilarious new commercial.”

But all these little things aren’t what I want to focus on.

Corporate Responsibility and Transparency

Certainly you always stumble on advertising articles talking about the new campaigns – but usually it seems that’s where it stops. Company A has started a microsite, check it out at… or Company B is giving away X if you do Y, pass it on.

But sometimes, just sometimes, the company wants people to talk about it. And as David Griner points out, sometimes companies fuck up so utterly and completely what could’ve been a good review of their product.

David writes:

Over on the J-Walk Blog, John Walkenbach seemed plenty happy to have received a free bottle of a liquor called VeeV — “the world’s first Acai spirit.” Before even trying it, John wrote about the product, ran a picture of the bottle and promised to do some “live VeeV blogging” (ie, blogging under the influence).

Home run for the VeeV marketing folks, right?

Hey VeeV, I’m available for test marketing! Send free shit my way!

How’d they screw up? How COULD you screw up? I mean, maybe they’re worried they’ll be portrayed as the drink of alcoholics if someone “live blogs” drunk.

Apparently, John blogging drunk about VeeV, but the marketing agency of VeeV – Maverick Digital – put a little comment (as Bob no less) talking about about how awesome it is in pure marketing speak – which rather pissed John off.

Right, that’s what Griner said.

Right – people hate it when you try to act like you’re some random schmo (in this case, Bob) with a genuine opinion. Which brings me back to Nationwide…

Sanjaya-ize yo’self, fool!

That’s right. Sanjaya-ize Yourself – in the spirit of Elf Yourself you can upload a shot of yourself and make yourself like Sanjaya of American Idol fame. Haven’t you heard of it yet? It’s being shown in targeted markets – smart move! They identified a certain niche and targeted them with a celebrity that appeals to them.

And my point is?

Vader Sanjaya-ized. I totally stole this from Shawn.

This simple entry on the fan board for Sanjaya:

Just wanted to let everyone know that Sanjaya will be premiering his new TV commercial for Nationwide Insurance at Branch (226 E 54th St) in Manhattan on Wednesday, August 20th at 6PM.

The event is closed to the public; however, you still may be able to catch a glimpse of Sanjaya.

If you’re outside the NYC area, you can check out the new commercial on Nationwide.com (http://nationwide.com/about-us/featured-ads.jsp) and on our YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/NWInsurance) starting on Wednesday evening.

And for those who want to try on Sanjaya’s own unique style, you can check out our Sanjaya-ize Yourself widget starting Wednesday evening as well.

http://www.sanjaya-ize.com

BTW, I am part of the team at Nationwide that is putting together the event and the Sanjaya-ize Yourself widget, so please let me know if you have any questions or comments. We look forward to hearing what you all think.

See that last part? Here, in case you missed it, I added some bold to it for you:

BTW, I am part of the team at Nationwide that is putting together the event and the Sanjaya-ize Yourself widget, so please let me know if you have any questions or comments. We look forward to hearing what you all think.

See what Shawn aka sMoRTy71 did differently? FULL DISCLOSURE OF HIS INVOLVEMENT. No bullshit, no clever white lies. He appealed to their fans, made sure they knew who he was and that he was totally pimping out his product.

That , my friends, is how you do social media right.

Just my piece in politics. I’ve talked to him, and he’s very genuine – a rare trait I’ve ever gotten from talking to anyone involved in politics.

Robert Owens on youTube?

That is correct, friend!

I’m really digging how politicians are starting to utilize new media methods to get their message out. Most recently, we’ve heard of Ron Paul’s online money raising that really helped point out the power of the people online. Then we see Obama has emulated the online presence – and they use their staff at hand to help tailor the experience to the potential voter. The undecided voters get one message, the supported get a different set – maybe facebook reminders, tweets, IMs, etc.

Very cool – I’m looking forward to the 2012 elections just to see how much the Internet is involved – maybe they’ll have mobile voting figured out by then, or maybe even electronic voting machines secured!

No, I don’t mean the fashion statement – I mean the company! (har har, I know, bad keif)

The thing is – they did a tour, “Plaid Nation 2008″ and trekked across state lines from Washington to Nevada,  and for little over a week, they twittered, they blogged, they filmed (they had a live van feed!). An ecstasy of social media and tech geek-ness. This is the first modern road trip I’ve heard of doing this approach, a kind of modern day Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters albeit perhaps minus the psychdelics. It just reeked of an awesome, modern day traveling social media party. Geeks on wheels. Nerds on boad. The kind of thing that makes me constantly ask “why haven’t I moved to the west coast yet?”

Ken Kesey and The Merry Prankster

In their venture, they managed to interview Robert Scoble (you know who he is, right?), Cathy Brooks from Seesmic and Biz Stone (of his many involvements -  Twitter, Xanga, Blogger, Odeo, and Obvious) – a little wet dream of the kind of people that brand makers and shakers would love to be involved with (or pick their brain for a moment – which Plaid did, and shared).

Is this the first event of its kind? Well, not exactly. We’ve had these kind of “live road shows” (*cough*merrypranksters*cough*) but also a lot of faux reality shows try to mimic this kind of unscripted approach to topics and interviews, but this is a pure, online approach that I really want to catch from the beginning next year (they have a countdown timer on the home page! Keep your eye on next year’s tour).

One thing I definitely dig – they have online freebies – wallpapers, buddy icons and even the 2008 theme song up for download! It’s this little cool features that most campaigns miss out on (I don’t know why, maybe because they’re simple, quick and easy?).

So do yourself a favor – grab a cup of coffee and scan through the video interviews for a slew of cool ideas and information – and keep your eye open for Plaid Nation ‘09 – maybe I’ll be lucky enough to head out to the coast and catch one of the tweetups!

Over the next few weeks (or less, or more) I plan on doing some research into Social Media. Now the irony here, is that traditional research would require book research, texts, etc. to get the information.

Social Media – it’s the new Internets!

Since Social Media is an online phenomenon, I’ll be doing most of my research here – the various sites, clouds, tubes, et. al. to get a “definitive” answer on Social Media. I’ve all ready stumbled on some early marketing materials, and a couple educational publications doting on Social Media’s rich history (since 1996!)

This will be the first in a small series, and it’ll continue for as long as I can dig up the short lived history of social media.

Social Media Quick Facts:

1. The first social media site is generaly considered to be “SixDegrees.com”
   • Please note – I’m talking about Social Media sites. I may delve into the history a little further, but that may be overkill and bore us all to tears.
2. The Six Degrees site was based off of the idea of “small world phenomenon” most frequently cited as “any person is no more than six degrees away from knowing everyone,” which also became attributed to Kevin Bacon being the center of the Hollywood Universe (which, itself is constantly shifting).
3. Kevin Bacon set up http://www.sixdegrees.org as a charity, and has parodied his “game” numerous times.

Next up – a little more into the history of Social Media and its backstory!

I’ve got to be honest – I’ve been really hard on anyone that introduces themselves as a “Social Media Expert.” I’m a little prejudiced, because I’m very familiar with Social Media and the social networking movement – I signed up for sixdegrees.com back in the day, I sought out the old school “party-lines” thanks to a phreak I knew.

That, to me, was the beginning of social networking. BBS were the original message boards. Hackers and computer nerds pioneered these ideas of getting people together across the country (and even the world) for the pursuit of knowledge.

Today we have Social Media Experts.

What are Social Media Experts?

Why, they’re experts in social media! To me, I always related Social Media as a skillset – they are part of a bigger role – much like how we don’t have HTML experts – they are part of a bigger role. They have the knowledge of the tool sets. They have a proven track record of showing how they apply their knowledge to various business functions, which creates value.

To be an expert – you must have experience, a track record! Now take a minute and visit that link. Read through The Personal Branding Blog – and if you have twitter I suggest you add @danschawbel as well (and add me too!). You can start to see his understanding the Social Media Experts of today will not exist in the short future.

What Social Media Is

Social Media is an extension of Public Relations, communications, customer service, business development… it’s a tool to be used, to be taught. You use your expertise to assist your clients – not to milk them for eyars, but to show them how to be capable themselves. You need to be an expert so you can teach them your skill set (and if you’re truly indispensable, they know you’ve got an eye for “the next big thing” so I’m sure you can inherit a new Web 3.0 title when those start coming around).

What Social Media Isn’t

Social Media isn’t all about networking – but it is one aspect. It’s about OPENness. It’s about communication. It’s not about hording information, or acting like you hold some secret. You don’t – and the more you horde your information, try and make yourself “indispensable” by creating vague propositions hiding behind a mask of “social media.” You’ll be out of a job if you don’t start expanding your knowledge and understanding, and become a teacher.

The secret is OUT!

Social Media Experts are all ready on their way out – we know it’s a matter of time as the “skill set” propagates out – but the true value you have to add right now – appying your knowledge and experience with social toolsets and networking – proving that you have more to add than just one area of “expertise” – that will show your true colors – your mixing of your expertise in multiple aspects will outshine this “web 2.0 title” and propogate to show that you’re on top of what’s buzzing in Web 2.0 and you’ll be buzzing when Web 3.0 rolls around.

So – all you Social Media Experts – shine on and show the world your not just a buzz word!

First, let me say, I do not watch project runway. However, after perusing some of Columbus’ many blogs (like the270.com) I found out one of Columbus’ one is on the show!

From Bravo!’s description of Kelli:

Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, Kelli turned to retail at the age of 15 as a form of escapism and to create a unique look all her own. She fought her way through adversity receiving a full scholarship from Bob Mackie at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandise in Los Angeles. Once there, she was accepted into the Advanced Design Program where she was able to design and show a small collection in 2006. Kelly went on to design a guitar for Kevan Hall during Los Angeles Fashion Week and just recently started her own empire, Black Market — a cutting edge boutique in her hometown.

Freaking awesome! I wish Kelli the best of luck, and be sure to check out Black Market in Clintonville!

A coworker and I were discussing whether or not dashes are applicable in domain names – from earlier research, it seems Google has some specific issues when it comes to dashes “-” and underscores “_”.

ikeif_blog is the same as ikeifblog (note the _underscore_!)

That’s not going to do me any SEO favors. The fix is easy enough, fortunately, and luckily WordPress does this by default!

ikeif-blog is read as ikeif blog! (note the -dashes-!)

This includes your file names, image file names, page names, etc.

Why the _underscore_?

Our friend the _underscore_ is left over from earlier coding days and *nix systems. From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s not a space is because of programming functions like mysql_affected_rows in PHP, and many older C functions, pre Hungarian notation.

It just translated to the web as an extension of such. That and it kind of makes sense – keith_baker is more like keith baker visually, and keith-baker is like keithbaker. Got that? Google decided that -dashes- were more SEO friendly, and because Google is “the big one” we’re stuck following their obscure rules, and I’m forced (forced!) to research them ;). Is there a grammar lesson in there? May be!

What about periods?

Now we’re down to talking about keywords, and this could be beneficial to stores – yoga-pants.myyogastore.com is better than myyogastore.com – but the debate is open if yogastore.com/yoga-pants is a better alternative still!

The only danger in this,is you don’t want a convuluted or crowded domain name – then it starts to look spammy. Imagine if my domain was ikeif-blog-seo-mootools-jquery-nigerian-scams.com? We also start to make it a difficult site to remember! However, if you like owning domains, it might be possible to benefit from the keyword rich domain and include a 301-redirect to your actual site (if you have more detail, pass it on!)

I’m working on some new mootools functionality, and trying to be SEO friendly, so over the next several days the site may look a little wonky.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog!

This is something I have twitter to thank for – I stumbled on it from some random tweet, watched out of sheer morbid curiosity (it starts out like a vlog… Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible reading his email).

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

It was once the singing kicked in that I loved it. It’s like “The Tick” from the villain’s point of view – just trying to be recognized as a villain, and have a personal life. I can’t say too much, but if this is where the future of generated online series goes – I’m loving it.

Part tragedy, part musical – it comes together in just under 40 minutes. Great performances, great music – and the idea behind the series was that:

The idea was to create something small and inexpensive, yet professionally done, in a way that would circumvent the issues that were being protested during the strike.

They succeeded, and I can’t wait for part two (or the DVD to come out so I can actually purchase it :D