There have been two huge enablers in my online publishing habits. FriendFeed and my BlackJack 2.

I’ve always had a variety of desktop *publishing tools* but my BlackJack has enabled me to create content on the go, and FriendFeed pulls all that content together. While Louis Gray is the real maven on FriendFeed and all things aggregated I wanted to share with you how I’ve gone from being an avid blogger to being a Constant Content Creator.

• I’ve written about how Google Reader Notes is a huge benefit to FriendFeed.
• How a camera phone has enabled a whole new world of armature content publishing.
• I’ve blogged way too much about Twitter.
• I’ve written about the ScribeFire blog editor as well as other blog publishing tools.
• And how non bloggers can aggregate all of their content into FriendFeed.

I’ve also recently added to my online publishing arsenal: Jing and BrightKite.

Jing is a free service I’ve been using from TechSmith. You can use it for screen grabs (pic and vid). You can even set it up to publish your content online instantly. I’ve set up Jing to publish my screen grabs to my Flickr account.

BrightKite is still in closed beta but I got an invite from Justin Foster. BrightKite lets you send status updates from where you are. You send in text messages with as much location information as you can and it uses Google Maps to locate you (not GPS).

If Twitter is “What am I doing?” BrightKite is “Where I am?”

So I’m sorry to give you all that back history and flurry of links but I thought it was important to set the stage first. If you look at my FriendFeed you’ll notice I currently use 17 of their over 40+ services. The real power isn’t just the aggregation of content but the aggregation of the conversation.

If you notice this picture on my FriendFeed account, I took the photo with my phone, sent it via MMS to my flickr account with a descriptive title of what I was doing, “taking a lunch break away from the pc” not some artsy title like “Tranquility Among the Corporate Chaos“.

FriendFeed’s real time aggregation of content has turned everything into communication about what I’m experiencing.

You’ll also notice that there is a place for people to comment on the photo if they want (as a surprise Easter egg, I’ve left a comment over there for you). I then took a screen grab of my flickr picture on FriendFeed using Jing, which then sent the photo to my flickr account with the title “flickr on friendfeed via mobile”, which has commenting enabled on flickr (is your head spinning yet?).

But it doesn’t stop there.

Here you’ll see my travels to a meeting with Jessica Flynn at RedSky PR’s new offices. Remember these post in reverse chronological order.

By themselves Twitter, BrightKite and flickr give you pieces of what I’m doing but combined they provide a much more rich experience. Now if I had just videoed some of our conversation and sent it to YouTube you’d have a true multimedia experience.

If I used Pandora on my mobile device and bookmarked the songs I was listening to on my way over you’d also have the soundtrack of my travels.

And it turns out that Marco, who has a great (and much shorter rant) about FriendFeed and early adopters, shares my taste in music.

FriendFeed is the Meta Social Network

Ever since MySpace went mainstream and everyone else decided they wanted to be the next MySpace people have talked about a social network that could overlay all the social networks and allow communication between them. While this will never happen completely FriendFeed gets us as close as I think we’ll ever get.

No longer does it matter if I still use Twitter and other people are moving to Plurk we’ll still see eachothers updates.

It won’t matter that I use Diigo and Mike Manuel use Ma.gnolia, we’ll still see eachother’s bookmarks.

And as new services get added to FriendFeed they’ll continue together more of the conversation. FriendFeed has already won.

When I hear people ask if this is all necessary or if it’s just a fad (they asked the same thing about blogs) I keep going back to my new favorite quote which I first mentioned in regards to wiki’s and the military:

the side that learns faster and adapts more rapidly – the side with the better learning organization – usually wins

I know that this seems like a lot, and I’m not suggesting that everyone jump into the deep end of the pool but things aren’t going to slow down. Most of you don’t see the business value in this yet (honestly most of us early adopters don’t see the full value yet either).

My suggestion: Start small. With 40+ services and growing there is probably some content you are creating that FriendFeed can aggregate. From there it grows organically. You’ll only use the services you see value in (I promise there is value).

Technorati Tags: FriendFeed, Twitter, flickr, mobile, Pandora, conversation, content, publishing, video,

If you want you can even see this post on FriendFeed and see the comments there.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I hope you guys are finding this series of Tuesday posts helpful. Today’s post is for all you corporate types (although this works for agency types working on client accounts).

Monitoring your brand online is critical for two reasons:

• It helps prevent an online crisis from building up before you are aware of it and can respond
• It helps you stay connected to how your brand is perceived by the public

The very first thing you should do is set up a Google Alert and/or a Technorati Watchlist for your company. I’ve found Technorati to be quicker but Google to be more comprehensive.

Some of the less common brand monitoring searches include searching on Flickr and YouTube for your brand. This can be a little bit harder because depending on how the person tagged their photos or videos could make it difficult to find relevant content.

Looking through bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, Diigo and Ma.gnolia can also turn up some invaluable results. I’ve often found stuff here the Google Alerts didn’t even turn up.

Following Twitter through services like Tweet Scan can give you a real-time view of what’s happening to your brand. This is where companies can really shine by being on top of customer service issues.

Finally (this one is really for larger companies) something I’ve started doing is searching LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for company employees that are using these services. This isn’t so much of a monitoring activity as it is a way to stay connected to what’s happening in my organization.

If I am going to propose an idea that involves buy in or involvement from a separate organization it sure makes it a lot easier if I know an insider that “gets it”. If I’ve already connected to that person they become an invaluable source of information. They can help me talk to the right people and save me weeks of emailing random people or following dead end leads.

Is there anything I missed? Do you have any tips for monitoring your companies brand?

Technorati Tags: Brand monitoring,search,Twitter,Technorati,del.icio.us,diigo,ma.gnolia,LinkedIn,Facebook,Google Alerts,Flickr,YouTube,Tweet Scan

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Now that I have a 3G camera phone I feel this overwhelming urge to do more with pictures and video. As I’ve stated before I personally still prefer text over video for business applications. But there is no denying that video can really enhance certain types of content.

Pictures are an obvious fit in online content. They provide color, context and good visual elements that enhance a readers experience. That is, if it’s shot by someone with any talent at all. That’s not me.

Here’s a photo I took at the opening of the downtown Boise incubator I helped launch. That’s my wife Jen in the bottom left, she’ll be so happy I used this pic

But my phone and I don’t stop at ruining good photo ops, we also take on video.

This is a group of us waiting for last weeks Boise Twitter lunch. (We would have Twittered from the event, but Twitter was down.)

This is the very first video I successfully shot and loaded up to YouTube with my camera phone. It’s absolutely horrible. I’m actually impressed the audio came out as well as it did. Being a test video and my first one, I can only get better (I hope).

I am not alone in my new visual capabilities. There are hundreds, if not thousands of people a day gaining this new capability via shinny new cell phones. I wonder what will happen as the Web is flooded with this content?

I imagine we’ll see very similar trends that we saw when blogging took online publishing mainstream. Millions of people will upload content daily. The popular stuff will rise to the top, the niche content will find it’s place and the rest will be relegated to being enjoyed by a handful of friends and family members.

If you’re interested my Flickr Stream can be found here and my brand new YouTube channel can be found here.

What do you see happening with the rise of online pictures and videos?

Technorati Tags: photo, video, mobile, 3G, Flickr, YouTube,

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I have noticed a trend on the Web lately: Non-blogging content creators.

This may seem obvious but most of the people I knew who used “Web 2.0″ services had blogs. But as more and more Web 2.0 tools go mainstream, they are being used by people who don’t blog. Thousands of people creating and sharing their thoughts and ideas without centralizing all of their contrabutions. Bloggers tend to aggregate most of that content into their blog somehow.

Some of these services seem obvious: I’m sure del.icio.us and Flickr have more non-blogging users than blogging users. Sites like StumbleUpon and Twitter, which are a little more geeky, are also seeing a rise in non-blogging users.

So today’s homework assignment is dedicated to the non-blogger out there. (Note: bloggers can use this just as much as non-blogger.)

The goal of today’s homework is to help you maximize and aggregate your online content creation.

Social Bookmarking

For those of you using services del.icio.us or Diigo I’ve posted before about how to get the most out of your bookmarking but also how to make your bookmarking more social.

Whenever possible avoid leaving the notes section blank. The notes section is not only a huge benefit to your network and the larger community, it’s also a huge benefit to yourself. If you’re not going to use the notes why not just use your browsers bookmarks?

The same is true for people who use StumbleUpon or share something with Google Reader Notes. I talked in more detail about how to get the most out of Google Reader Notes using FriendFeed.

Flickr, YouTube and your cell phone

I’ve become a total addict to using my camera phone and Flickr. You can set up your Flickr account to receive MMS pictures via your camera phone. And while I haven’t tried it out yet you can also send video from your camera phone to YouTube.

Bringing it all together with FriendFeed

There’s a lot of buzz around FriendFeed but what the non-bloggers need to be concerned about is it becomes a great way to aggregate all of your online activity into one feed (you can also use Tumblr but it limits the amount of feeds you can add and doesn’t have the commenting feature FriendFeed has). Flickr, del.ico.us, YouTube, Google Reader, StumbleUpon as well as Twitter and blog feeds (for those of who blog).

What some people may not be aware of is that it also aggregates your LinkedIn and Facebook updates, Amazon wish list and Netflix queue. There are currently 35 services that FriendFeed pulls. Plus anything with an RSS feed you can pull in. (You can see my FriendFeed here.)

What about all that other content?

What about that Wikipedia page you decided to create or the blog comment you left? Bookmark them. Using your bookmarking service of choice tag it and it will get picked up in your FriendFeed.

I’ve been very curious about non-blogging content creators, I actually think it’s kind of cool. You’re out there in stealth mode and most people don’t realize it yet.

If you have any tips I left out feel free to share them in the comments.

If you’re a non-blogging content creator I’d love to hear your thoughts on how many services you use and if you see any value in a service like FriendFeed or not.

Technorati Tags: Flickr, FriendFeed, del.icio.us, Diigo, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, StumbleUpon,

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

So back in 2003 I heard about this brand new site; MySpace. At the time I owned a skate shop in Las Vegas and all the lurkers we’re obsessing over this MySpace.com. As they explained how it was soooo much better than Friendster, I decided to give it a try.

One of the things that struck me right away was this sense of belonging to something. There was this basic carnal need to be on the “inside” when everyone else was on the outside. The best part was watching people who swore they would never join MySpace get hooked and start acting like junkies. It was an obsession to see who had left you a message, who added you as a friend or if anyone had commented on your pictures.

Things feel remarkably similar to the ongoing Twitter craze. There is this sense of belonging, of connecting to people that you don’t know. Communicating instantaneously with hundreds of people is amazing. According to compete.com, Twitter has grown almost 108% in one month to 35k people. And according to Blogpulse Twitter went from being mentioned in 1% of blogs back in mid February to 10% of blogs by mid March.

It is impossible to compare the growth of MySpace or YouTube to Twitter; two are platforms and one’s a channel. Here lies the real power of Twitter: Who has more power: a site that millions of people visit each day and stay on average of 20-30 minutes? Or a utility that is always with you via web, SMS and IM?

You have the capability to use Twitter like a hybrid IM/blog right from your Twitter page. I rarely use this page. I run Twitter from my Google Talk, which is run through on my Blackberry. This allows me to have Twitter on my phone without having to give out my cell phone # or have to pay for all the additional text message charges.

The challenges that are ahead for Twitter are that of scale. Can they continue to handle the load? MySpace crashed a lot back in the day, but something about the service kept people coming back.

Twitter has been having similar problems; so far people are sticking with it.

Twitter already has bands jumping on board. Can Twitter ad features like MySpace has? We have yet to see anything new from Twitter (I bet they’re just trying to hang on right now), but the users are taking care of that; there are plugins for WordPress, there are Twitter specific search engines plus Twitter mashups are popping up all over the place. Some bloggers have abondoned their blogs in favor of Twittering.

Many people are already predicting the demise of Twitter. I think they’ll pull through just fine. Twitterers seem pretty willing to live with the glitches caused by the sudden increase in users. I think Twitter is one of the newest ways to stay connected and will change the face of social networking. You think MySpace is looking at a way to copy Twitter? I do. And if they don’t someone else will.

Recomended blogs on this topic:
Micro Persuasion
Tac’s Twitter Page

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!