Paul's Web Space 2.1

Spottiswoode Makes More Enemies on NPR

I had the distinct pleasure of listening to my good friend and former band-mate Jonathan Spottiswoode on NPR's Weekend Edition this morning. It was an entertaining and thoughtful interview, conducted by Susan Stamberg, the original host of the weekend edition of the most popular show on radio. He sang and played two of his songs live in the studio, and they played cuts from the two CDs that his band Spottiswoode and his Enemies recently released as part of their 10th anniversary celebration — it was awesome exposure for Jonathan, his band, and his music. (All four songs are available on the NPR Web site.)

Jonathan is truly a gifted songwriter; he wrote all the songs on the first CD by my band, the Oxymorons ("Meet the Morons," which Jonathan also co-produced, was released in 1993). Around that time, he co-founded the Zimmermans, which shared two other members with the Oxymorons, but soon after split off in its own, more serious direction. (The first Zimmermans music video, "Portuguese Woman," also received its premiere at the "Meet the Morons" CD release party.)

The Enemies share most members with the final line-up of the Zimmermans, and have been together now for ten years. In the interview, Jonathan mentioned that he considers himself lucky to have been able to work with such good enemies over the last ten years, and to have been able to make a living writing, recording and performing his music, regardless of his spotty success with the so-called "music industry." To celebrate their ten years of existence, the Enemies recently released not one, but two new CDs: "That's What I Like" and "Salvation." Watch the video of the title track from the first CD, directed by Andrew Blackwell:



When Susan asked Jonathan how he managed to put out two CDs simultaneously – the band recorded 33 tracks in six days in the studio, of which 28 were included on the released CDs – he remarked that five CDs would be too little, were it not so difficult to press, package, and distribute the music once it was recorded. Several years ago, he remarked to me that he had five new fully-formed and sequenced CDs all worked out in his head; all he needed was the money, label, record deal, or whatever it would take to pay for it. The enemies are on a bit of a media roll these days: Paste Magazine gave them a rave review for a recent show in Atlanta as they worked their way back north from South by Southwest, and the New Yorker made their 10th Anniversary show last weekend at Joe's Pub the lead pick in last weeks listings.

Labels: music, npr, spottiswoode

   Link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89197132

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F2C: Freedom to Connect

I'm looking forward to attending F2C: Freedom to Connect 2008, next Monday and Tuesday, March 31 and April 1, 2008, at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, MD (where I just happen to live). F2C always brings together the most interesting people and projects, all with one goal in mind, making the Internet more useful and powerful for everyone, making it a tool that people can use for whatever purpose, with the maximum capability, while not being limited by business rules set by telecommunications providers nor short-sighted government regulation.

I just received the last pitch email for this conference, so I want to pass along that after tonight, registration cost goes way up. So if you want to experience this stimulating and thought-provoking event in person, sign up today. They will have major WiFi capability, and a live chat online and on screen powered by 37 Signals CamfireNow.com, as well as a webcast for those who wish to simply watch remotely. (But then you also miss out on the truly killer networking that happens there as well.)

The names of the speakers this year are as good as ever, including Susan Crawford, Brad Templeton, Micah Sifry, Tim Wu, Bruce Schneier, Danny O'Brien, Gigi Sohn, Clay Shirky, and many others. As was the case last year, Howard Levy will provide the musical background to program breaks, this year accompanied by Chris Siebold. Should be fun AND informative.

Labels: broadband policy, netneutrality, telecommunications

   Link: http://freedom-to-connect.net/

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Social Media Presentation at Digital Velocity

On March 4, 2008, in New York City, I gave a presentation at the American Business Media conference DIGITAL VELOCITY 2008: Real Experts, Real Applications, Real Time. Here is the combined PowerPoint of my entire panel – Engaging Your Community in a Web 2.0 World (warning - large PDF download).

In my talk, I described social media efforts at edweek.org, including both community features that we are adding to our site, as well as Web 2.0 features that integrate our content more completely with the Web at large. Here is my favorite slide, which attempts to depict the feedback loop created by the social media "conversation":O'Reilly to the rescue (reprise) - the O'Reilly Digital Media Center page "Mac OS X Screenshot Secrets" helped me out when I was creating this presentation on the road, and it comes in handy again helping me to grab my favorite slide from the same presentation and save it as a GIF. Thank you O'Reilly!

Finally, in the Winter/Spring of endless conferences, I just returned from the NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans, and next week I attend David Isenberg's Freedom to Connect a mile from my house at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring MD. Look for blog posts covering each of these as soon as I can get them together.

Labels: b2b, media, socialmedia

   Link: http://www.americanbusinessmedia.com/assnfe/ev.asp?ID=122&SNID=1304268107

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Colbert Report on Protect America Act

Stephen Colbert once again hits the nail on the head regarding the power of telecommunications companies. This time, he skewers their request for retroactive immunity from prosecution for illegally wiretapping an unknown number of Americans in the aftermath of 9/11.

The House Democratic leadership must stand firm on their commitment to leave this clause out of the renewal of the Protect America Act. This would set a bad precedent, by essentially letting the administration and telcos off the hook for widespread disregard of privacy rights. If we give up our rights in the name of security, we've lost the war on terror.

It looks like they are holding fast for now. Read more on FISA.

Labels: aclu, amnesty, fisa, privacy, telco

   Link: http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=163287&is_large=true

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SEO Resources, Events, Consultants, Blogs, Etc.

At edweek.org, we're fixin' to crank up our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts, a roughly biennial effort, but always worthwhile, because best practices are always improving, and the search engines we're targeting also continually tweak their algorithms to prevent gaming and other distortions.

There are many blogs and other information resources available, often totally free (sometimes with a pay "premium" level of service as well). Anybody who understands the basics behind search engines, as well as concepts such as information architecture, taxonomy, and maybe a little semantic web, can get a good head start simply by consulting free resources and applying a handful of best practices to their site. One principle to keep in mind, though, is that applying SEO to a web site should not distort the presentation of information to make it less understandable by humans in the service of search engines — rather, you should only make changes that enable readers to understand and find information more easily as well.

A. Information Resources — the best news, tools, and information services, some free, some paid, and sometimes with consulting services also offered:

1. In 1996, Danny Sullivan founded the granddaddy of information services that track search engines, SearchEngineWatch.com. He sold it in 1997, but remained associated with it and the related conference series Search Engine Strategies, until 2006, through a couple more mergers and sales that left him with less of a stake in its success. It is still a major resource in the space, along with the affiliated interactive marketing service ClickZ.

2. Danny Sullivan has since started a new company, Third Door Media, which I believe has quickly become the premier resource, and certainly contains the most vibrant communities, in this space.

• First there is the blog and information service Search Engine Land.
• Then there is the growing series of SMX — Search Marketing Expo conferences.
• It offers Search Marketing Now, a series of free webcasts and webinars.
• And finally it operates Sphinn.com, a social news/discussion site for search engine marketers.

3. SEOmoz.org, founded by Rand Fishkin in 1994, provides many free and paid services. They have a daily blog and member blog; and publish more detailed articles (both free and paid/PRO), and provide an extensive set tools for free. Their PRO Membership includes more tools and more features in free tools, a dashboard, premium guides and paid articles. They also provide high-end consulting services.

4. Search Engine Roundtable is a group blog featuring forum leaders from many leading SEM forums around the web, a search engine that searches these selected forums in the aggregate, as well as its own Search Engine Roundtable Forums where anyone can contribute. The primary editors are Barry Schwartz and Tamar Weinberg of RustyBrick, a web design and SEO consultancy based in NYC. Their blog posts are very informative, but the forums covered seem slightly dated (Danny Sullivan is still listed with SearchEngineWatch, and his newer Sphinn forums are nowhere to be found.)

5. Check out this list of seven SEO News Aggregators from TopRank Online Marketing, who also maintain the much larger BIGLIST of SEM and SEO blogs

6. Then there's the mostly-paid SearchEngineNews.com service from Planet Ocean. The few select articles available for free are presented mostly to pitch the paid subscription service; I don't know what's behind the paid curtain, but other people at edweek.org have obtained useful information from this service.

B. Consulting Firms — firms that provide consulting, perhaps conferences, and some free information mostly to support their services business:

1. BusinessOnLine specializes in SEO, usability, and web strategy. Managing Partner Aaron Kahlow also chairs the Online Marketing Summit — I've seen him speak several times, and worked with him on social networks devoted to online marketing. I also attended a class on SEO taught by Ray "Catfish" Comstock, their Search Engine Optimization Manager — his fascinating lecture at a VisualSciences conference drove many of the changes we have made over the past couple years, giving us a great start that we're now looking to build upon.

2. Enquiro, founded by Gord Hotchikiss, specializes in B2B SEM/SEO, as well as testing/usability. They are located in British Columbia, and are said to be remarkably smart, easy to work with, passionate, and reasonably priced; they also publish articles, blogs, and case studies.

3. I've also seen Gary Angel, President and CTO of SEMPhonic, speak at a VisualSciences conference, and was suitably impressed. SEMPhonic offers various services related to Web analytics and SEM, and publish articles and blogs demonstrating their expertise, and describing their methodology known as Functionalism. They also sell a product to automate SEM tracking, and host conferences on analytics.

As with lists like this that attempt to be comprehensive, I will likely update this post from time to time; I will either repost it, or post an update notice with a link. I hope you find this helpful.

Labels: edweek, marketing, seo

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We Media Miami

Two weeks ago I attended a pretty cool conference, We Media Miami, with Craig Stone, a colleague from work. There were plenty of interesting sessions, including preplanned large and small breakout sessions, and a closing unconference, but most importantly, there were also many good opportunities for networking. This meeting serves a relatively small group, maybe a couple hundred, but included senior executives from almost every major news media outlet in the US, as well as interesting thinkers in the fields of web technology, social media, social entrepreneurship, the future of media, and future in general.

At the final plenary session, they demonstrated a cool new technology (embedded below) which enables very interactive slide shows that appear like panoramas, courtesy of VUVOX - check their site for more examples. See this and more on the main We Media Miami page a smörgåsbord of event coverage via a dizzying array of social media windows and widgets, such as live on-site blogging and twitter hash tags I tweeted with.



The conference agenda included several panel sessions which were quite interesting, as well as an incomprehensible sidetrack into the area of medical informatics taking up a large chunk in the middle of day one. Highlights among the programmed presentations included: The Power to Change the World, and break-outs Search World, Nonprofit World and News World — I'm sure I missed as many good presentations as I caught.

Following the pre-set agenda was a self-organizing unconference, during which I attended two very interesting sessions - a presentation on the social cloud and OpenSocial by Google Developer Advocate Kevin Marks. The slides are great, but it's a big download; email me if you want the link. That was followed by NewsTrust salon, in which they first described the system (which is like a social bookmarking/tagging site with a serious news criticism component). We then spent several minutes dissecting and reviewing one article as a team on their site.

Finally, the networking opportunities were brilliant as usual, as I was able to connect with folks I was looking to meet, who were looking to meet me, or who just turned out to be cool people. The first night, Craig and I met Mark Blafkin from the Association for Competitive Technology, who travels in some of the same policy circles I do. Then as the conference progressed, I ran into David Cohn, whom I had known through NewAssignment.net; only later did I realize he also worked for NewsTrust. I later met Susan Mernit – recently of Yahoo! Personals, Blogher blogger, and connection via various social networks – who had pinged me on Facebook to meet. Finally, for lunch on the last day, I met Carlen Lea Lesser — who had connected with me via the conference social network. She was looking for insights and information about the education marketplace (arguably my domain, coming from Edweek), and could offer some expertise in social media metrics and ROI - my current obsession. A win-win.

Labels: facebook, media, socialmedia, twitter, wemedia08

   Link: http://www.ifocos.org/we-media-miami-2008

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Nonprofit Technology Conference
April 19-21, 2008, New Orleans, LA

Check out the new widget for the Nonprofit Technology Network's annual Nonprofit Technology Conference, in less than two weeks, in New Orleans! I'm helping out with social events, and may help out on a panel too. You should go!
Recently I've also been to We Media Miami and American Business Media's Digital Velocity in New York, where I presented on social media at edweek.org Hopefully, I'll blog about all of these soon.

Labels: 08ntc, nonprofit, nptech, nten

   Link: http://www.nten.org/ntc

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