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Archive for the ‘social.networks’ Category

WordPress offers a fascinatingly wide range of options: thanks to the power and the creativity of the open source community, the world’s most popular CMS has developed from a “blog-only” product into a multifaceted platform. Hundreds of plugins are waiting to cater almost every web publisher’s needs. These days, two new plugins take WordPress to the next level by integrated elaborate social network features. BuddyPress is now available at version 1.2 which plays along well with standard WP-installations; the previous version required WP multiuser edition. And then there’s Mingle, a new brilliant extension by Blair Williams, author of the (genius!) PrettyLink plugin.

Even though both plugins offer similar functionalities, they take a completely different approach at turning WordPress into a social network. While BuddyPress aims at running a stand-alone social network site, Mingle extends the community capabilities of nay existing blog. I installed it here on datadirt yesterday. Curious for a test-drive? Just click the new link Profile in the main menu! In the following posting I’ll explain why extending a blog with social network features is generally a smart idea. Read the rest of this entry »

I got 30 more invites left. Just drop me a note and I’ll send one to the e-mail address you provided. But please don’t ask what to use your newly-won realtime comfort for. Frankly speaking, I have got no idea yet. But I said the same thing about Twitter when I registered my account there, so I’ll keep waiting for the wave frenzy to happen. What’s your opinion? Are you already surfing the wave?

I admit: this equation does indeed have more than one solution – the result could just as well have been formsquare.com. But it wasn’t. And that’s why the maximum mash-up for all geeks trying hard to keep up with the latest hype(s) enters the stage with a noisy, frightening BANG. There are many old sayings perfectly describing this delicate situation: An RSS feed in the aggregator is worth two in a web / A site and its RSS feed are soon parted & Better a big aggregator on a little domain than a little content on many sites. Can you smell where I’m getting at? Indeed: datadirt proudly presents: fourspring.me! Read the rest of this entry »

Foursquare.com is getting gold: hype-searching geeks are moving on, and these days their favorite URL is formspring.me: it’s a really simple q-and-a platform – kind of like Twitter, but without the 140 character limit. The service lacks a lot features, it’s still in a pretty early stage, which didn’t keep me from registering though: formspring.me/datadirt.

The setup just takes a minute: like on Twitter, there’s the avatar pic, the homepage URL, a short description and that’s it. When it comes to eye candy, formspring.me offers a couple of templates, but the more brand-aware user can also upload their own background pic – now in 2 minutes, because I’ve compiled a Photoshop-template that speeds up the process of creating a custom formspring template a lot. Read the rest of this entry »

Journalism students from the Dutsch university of applied sciences in Utrecht are currently conducting a survey about the popularity of social media – if you run a popular blog, the questionnaire probably already arrived in your inbox. All interviews with social media experts will be published on the crossmedialab homepage – good questions, I’m really curious about the results of the study and my colleagues’ answers, just mailed mine to Wolfgang.

How long have you been working with online social media and what was your reason to get into this topic?

The question is: which online services do qualify as “social media”? I’ve started using the internet in 1994 – out of mere curiosity. A couple of years later I started working as a web designer for APA (Austria Press Agency). At the same time, 3 fellow students from the department of science of communication and me launched the platform medianexus.net – a community site for publishing “grey” student literature about media-related topics. The project doesn’t exist anymore, the site is archived in the Austrian National Library though. The comment function was one our most important features back than – and even though services like Facebook and Twitter were lurking in the far future, we used e-mail and mailing lists for discussion and organisation purposes.
To me, there is no clear-cut between “Web 1.0” and “Web 2.0” – technologies have evolved, dynamic web applications did replaced static content. So the new tools fuel the use of social media, but the basic principle of enabling dialogue and connecting people has been one of the main strengths of the internet from the beginning. Read the rest of this entry »

The World Blogging Forum 2009 has started today. In the morning, Mr. Traian Basescu, former mayor of Bucharest and now president of Romania, greeted us with a warm welcome; I actually expected him to just drop by for a couple of encouraging words, but Mr. Basescu obviously is a quite avid followers of the blogosphere and even pointed out that he prefers political blogs over traditional media as they are a lot less biassed.

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Earlier today, I asked on Twitter if anyone of my followers wanted a Google Wave invitation. The number of responses was overwhelming, the 14 invitations I gave away were gone within 5 minutes. I’m not an evangelist of Google’s latest collaboration service, as it’s still lacking too many features. But the huge demand amazed me, so I’m giving away three more invitations each here and on my German blog datenschmutz. All you have to do is leave a comment until tomorrow, 12:00pm CET. Read the rest of this entry »

“Welcome to the world of tomorrow!” No, that’s not right. Let me try again: “Welcome to the world of the last seven days!” That sounds better! There’s a lot to show-and-tell, so without any further ado, let’s jump straight into last week’s social media news. Read the rest of this entry »

But if you actually want to secure your unique name, you gotta be quick, because:

Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13, you’ll be able to choose a username on a first-come, first-serve basis for your profile and the Facebook Pages that you administer by visiting www.facebook.com/username/. You’ll also see a notice on your home page with instructions for obtaining your username at that time.

That’s what the official blog says – and what’s even more important: once you chose your unique username, it’s here to stay – no change of mind later on. And it’s first come, first serve – so be quick! Read the rest of this entry »

This weekly round-up comes with a built-in 24 hours of delay, as the author was extremely busy during the last weekend launching the Austrian Internet Council [site in German]. This was an amazing proof of the power of social media: within the short time span of 5 days we our project was the cover story on ORF FutureZone, Austria’s biggest Tech News site. Crowdsourcing is great, but it can be quite time-consuming, especially when there’s a lot of interest and involvement. So, without any further ado, let’s jump right into this week’s hot social media topics! Read the rest of this entry »

I recorded this 1-minute introduction video for all my fellow tweet-geeks: micro blogging is great, and it’s even more fun if you can put a face to the name. So this is how datadirt (that would be me) rolls:

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