Social Bookmarks: A Useful Tool You Aren’t Using

February 2, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | 3 comments

What is social bookmarking?

According to Wikipedia: a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. In other words: keeping track of stuff you find on the web, and making it easy for others to find. The key to all of this is tagging – assigning keywords to each bookmark to help keep them organized and easy to locate when you need them. Social Bookmarking hasn’t caught on like Twitter or Facebook. But it’s incredibly useful for keeping track of links, resources, blog posts and all sorts of things we come across on the web and think, “I need to remember this” or “I might want to refer to this later.”

Among the most popular sites for social bookmarking are Diigo and Delicious. Delicious allows you to save and tag bookmarks, connect with other users, and subscribe to individual users’ bookmarks with RSS. An example: Mark Greenfield’s bookmarks are an excellent resource (username markgr). Mark makes great use of tags and has more than 2500 bookmarked resources. Want to know more about Twitter? Click the twitter tag in his list and you’re set.

Diigo offers a full suite of tools to help keep tabs on your bookmarks, and share them with others – it’s ideal if you’re engaged in a research project and/or collaborating with others. You can highlight specific sections of a site’s content or leave comments for others to find. Diigo also boasts a group feature, which allows users to self identify and share links with others interested in the same subject. We’re planning to use a Diigo group as a resource for the attendees of the CASE Social Media and Community Conference (thanks to Joel Price, a member of our faculty, for setting it up).  It’s brand new, and we’ll start populating it with content in the weeks to come.

And that’s Social Bookmarking in a nutshell. Give it a shot. It will save you from many  ”now where did I read that?” moments.

A Twitter Survey: Your Input Needed

January 27, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | Leave a comment

It’s been one year since Andrew Shaindlin of Alumni Futures and I published a white paper on Twitter and Alumni Relations. What’s changed? You tell us.

Last year, we conducted a survey to find out more about those in the world of education, alumni relations and advancement: who is using Twitter, how often, and for what purpose. We’re polling folks again to see how things have changed.

Please take a moment to fill out the survey by clicking this link >>

I’ll post the new white paper, Alumni Networks and Twitter –An Update, on this blog in February.

Thanks Twitter, Facebook: How I Got News about the Eureka Earthquake

January 10, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

I’m from Eureka, a relatively rural town of about 30,000 people in Northern California. For those of you unfamiliar with the foggy, green, quiet town where I was born and raised, here’s a map.

Saturday afternoon, Eureka was hit with a 6.5 earthquake. The majority of my extended family still lives in Eureka, and I was very concerned. Not only about the potential for earthquake damage, but about the potential for a tsunami (there was one up there in the 60s, and it killed 11 people). My sister and I weren’t able to reach our Mom and Dad right away; cell signals were dead and land lines were unreliable.

So how did I get details about what happened and how the town fared? From the Internet, of course.

But not from online newspapers. No, I got my info from my Facebook network and from Twitter:

Mind you, these posts are from Facebook friends who don’t even live in Eureka any longer, but they had spoken to their respective families. This at least reassured me that Eureka wasn’t underwater, or complete rubble.

Twitter gave me some other pieces to the puzzle as well, thanks to the #Eureka hashtag (search it now for ongoing info). Even Mashable was running a story that featured user @amyeureka’s Twitter photos of the aftermath.

Thanks to all of these, I was able to at least get some idea of the current status: no reported deaths, no tsunamis, no obliterated buildings. Just a lot of broken glass, toppled bookcases and broken chimneys. I could make a somewhat reasonable assumption that at least my family was alive, though maybe missing a few picture frames and glassware. And I wouldn’t have obtained that information from broadcast news or the paper.

The good news? I was finally able to make contact with my family: thankfully, the only casualty at Mom and Dad’s was a television.

Stuff I Use: Tools for Managing Social (and other) Media

January 4, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | 2 comments

Managing and monitoring your online reputation requires keeping tabs on lots of different online spaces. Fortunately there are several free tools available on the Interwebs to help you. Here are some of my favorites:

Hootsuite: a free, web based tool for administering Twitter identities. I use it to manage several Twitter accounts at once, search specific keywords and hashtags, shrink URLs and schedule future tweets. It does all that AND supplies metrics on specific tweets (if it contains a url you shortened via Hootsuite). Overall, its a great tool. My only complaint is that in the past they’ve forced users to send a canned tweet telling everyone how great Hootsuite is. Annoying.

Google Alerts are a no brainer: a free, simple way to monitor new stuff that’s been posted to the web about a certain subject. First, customize the system to send you an email with results on a certain query (or queries – you can set up as many alerts as you want, but you’ll get an email for each one). You can search for a name, a school, a company, a product – anything. When that search term pops up in the latest relevant Google results, you’ll hear about it via email. You just decide how often you want to receive them. Google Alerts has been around for a while, but I still find it incredibly useful.

NetNewsWire. To keep up with blogs, news, and other sites via RSS you need a good feed reader (if you’re not clear on what RSS or “syndication” is, read more here). My favorite is NetNewsWire, a free client for the Mac (sorry, no PC version as of yet). By sorting everything into folders/categories I can quickly and painlessly sift through hundreds of feeds every day.

PC folks: No NetNewsWire should not mean that you give up on RSS entirely. I hear good things about Google Reader; give it a shot and let me know what you think.

And don’t forget: you can put the feed for this very blog in your reader of choice right here.

Looking Ahead to 2010

December 22, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | 1 comment

Is it “twenty ten” or “ten” or “one-oh”? Regardless of what we all decide, I’m looking forward to the new year.

I have some speaking engagements lined up, not least of which is the CASE Social Media and Community conference in Chicago in April. I’m honored to be serving as chair of the conference, and to be speaking with such amazing faculty: Leisha LeCouvie of McGill University, Joel Price of Friends’ Central School, and Michael Stoner of mStoner.

All of the details, including the program, our keynote speaker and more will be added to the CASE website in the coming weeks. But in the meantime, check out the Faculty Twitter list and follow the conference on Twitter (@casesmc). We’ll tweet insider info, updates, articles, notes and other details of interest to attendees. I hope to see you in April!

This is my last blog post for 2009; enjoy the holidays and happy new year.