User-Generated Content

The other day, my brother asked for help printing out a paper for his Physics class (ran out of ink, as usual). When I opened the documents he emailed, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at what I saw. Of course, the paper was all about Physics–sort of a brief overview of significant events in the field for the past few centuries. But he presented what was supposedly a timeline of historic events in an unusual fashion: as lifestreams. He used Plurk, to be more specific.

I had a blast reading about Archimedes taking a bath and then exclaiming Eureka! and how Einstein purportedly plurks that relativity is how spending an hour with a pretty girl seems like a minute (how time flies, huh?).

If I wasn’t such a Physics geek back in High School I probably won’t find any of these interesting. But then what I find intriguing is the possibility of future generations looking back our present time through our lifestreams. Face it: our blog posts, tweets, plurks, and social network testimonials are part of history.

One of my history professors taught me how history is recorded through a collective of streams of information from personal observations and other data. And so, indeed, tweets, plurks, microblogs and even other longer mediums, are part of history.

But how sticky are these tidbits of personal and social history? Web applications and online media are eletronic and can be considered ephemeral in nature. Blogs come and go. And even blogging, lifestreaming services and social bookmarkers can close shop. Can we, therefore, rely on these as a good way to preserve our lines of thought for future generations? Can we trust our history to web apps?

The British Library is concerned with preserving digital media as reliably as manuscripts and books, and they want to archive digital media (on various other mediums) for future reference. True enough, it’s not too difficult to archive paper. Take for instance notes and letters sent between historical figures or heads of state, perhaps like communication between America’s founding fathers stored in national or state archives. Or how about something personal like love letters exchanged between sweethearts kept precious inside tin boxes? But email correspondences might slip away if not saved and archived properly. Consider this: how sure are you that Gmail will still be around 50 years from now?

This notwithstanding, lifestreaming services do afford us a good overview of what’s happening around the world, right now. Live blogging has become popular at trade events and conventions. Lifestreaming services make it even easier and more convenient, particularly if users can access through mobile devices.

In fact, some major world events have been liveblogged and “lifestreamed” so to speak. Take for instance CERN’s tests of its Large Hadron Collider late last year. Updates were posted on Twitter. Yes, that and a handful of doomsday predictions! But when the dust has settled–and when we’re sure we’re still alive and not sucked by some black hole from Europe–would people still consider this relevant at all?

The civilizations of old left us their structures and artifacts as pieces of the puzzle that is their history. To some extent, I still wonder at awe at how people lived back then. Ages from now, would people look back at the 21st Century through our “structures” and “artifacts” that is what we call new media? Would lifestreams and blogs be part of history? Would there be a reliable archive of this electronic data that would last through the rigors of time?

Or is all this just a fleeting moment, bound to pass at the blink of an eye?

Many people are already aware of creating news alerts for keywords as they are indexed on Google. But what if you could extend the usefulness of those alerts to videos that are uploaded onto YouTube? That is what a new service called Video-Alerts enables you to do. Video-Alerts is a site that enables registered users to track up to 10 keywords on YouTube.com. These subscriptions are updated once a day and the results are then sent to your inbox.

After activating and then logging into your account, you’ll have to create your first alert. The alert creation process is pretty straightforward.

Text To Search: This is the text that you want the alert to search for.

Category: The category drop down list matches exactly with the one on YouTube.com.

Search Type: Video-Alerts offers two different search types. Keyword searches for video descriptions, user search will find all new videos uploaded by that username.

Frequency: Choose between Once per week, once per two days or once a day.

Max Videos: Choose between a maximum of 50 or 100 videos to be described in each alert. Any videos that go over this limit will be ignored.

Once you finish creating your new alert, you can either create a new one or just wait for that email that contains all of the videos that were found. One cool thing about Video-Alerts is that after the alert is created, you can go back and edit it to change certain parameters or delete the alert entirely.

Conclusion:

To this day, YouTube still doesn’t support the ability to subscribe to videos or a particular user by way of RSS. If you’re scratching your head wondering why, don’t worry as I am to. However, if you prefer to subscribe to specific YouTube videos by way of RSS via keywords such as Tags, type the following into your browsers address bar:

To subscribe by tag, simply key in this URL to your RSS reader: http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/[insert tag here].rss e.g. http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/wordpress.rss will subsribe you to videos that contain WordPress as one of the tags. You can also apply more than one tag by using the plus sign as a separator. WordPress+2.7 would subscribe you to videos that contain both WordPress and 2.7 as tags.

There is a great thread in the Performancing Hive Forums which is asking members to write 2-3 paragraphs, sharing one professional tip they have learned over the last 6 months. I participated in the thread which is ongoing and filled with a bunch of great tips but I thought I’d share my response with you through the blog.

I never concentrated on getting social traffic through the likes of SU, Digg etc. I simply hunkered down, wrote in depth reviews of sites and services and people took notice without me telling them. My biggest success on my personal blog was reviewing a site before it really launched and the guy who owned the service place a banner and a link to my review from the front page of the site. I can’t even begin to tell you how much traffic I received from that. As a bonus, I read a PC magazine and they took a screenshot of the front page of that website and because the site had an image of my site banner on the front page, in a weird kind of way, I made it into a print magazine

The bottom line is, I didn’t work on getting people to my site. I simply created content that was good enough to be shared whether it was by word of mouth or some other means. Back in the day, I considered a piece of content I wrote that was submitted to SU by a visitor to be an article that was apparently worthy of the submission. These days, I see people ask for others to stumble an article and I’ve realized its just that easy to get a good influx of traffic from the service.

Content is king, don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise. Without the good content, YOU HAVE NOTHING.

Here at Performancing, we’ve highlighted various forum software to use in conjunction with your blog. Ahmed Bilal also published an article back in 2007 which explained how to launch a forum on your blog. Once you have the blog up and running, it’s time to manage it. Thats where the expertise of Patrick O’ Keefe comes into play, author of the book Managing Online Forums. The book covers all aspects of managing an online forum but it doesn’t stop at forums. Many of the topics discussed within this book could be used in managing online communities in general.

In Part 1 of this interview, I tap into Patrick’s knowledge regarding what to do before the first forum post is published and developing your community. Part 2 will be published tomorrow.

Jeff – What are some things that should be done prior to the first forum post being published?

Patrick – It’s important to be ready to accept people, in all facets. If you ran a brick and mortar restaurant, would you open with the store clean, but with you in your underwear? The same goes for your community. From your look to your functionality. Don’t launch with things coming soon. Launch with things that are ready to go that people can use now. You should have your infrastructure set up, both publicly and privately. So, that means your public forums, but also your private forums for discussion amongst staff and the proper documentation of guideline violations.

Speaking of guideline violations, it’s important that you have your user guidelines written and online. It’s always best to start with guidelines to ensure that everyone is on the same page from the start. It’s always harder to add guidelines later than it is to start with them because, even if you are still managing the community the same, it will be treated as a new thing and a change when people may feel that they are already used to a certain way. So, have guidelines and enforce them from the start.

Guidelines are also a sort of vision statement for your community. They really show people who you are and who you want to be. Have a set idea in mind for your forums. It doesn’t have to be too specific or difficult. At KarateForums.com, we want to have a community where the martial arts can be discussed in a respectful manner that is both family and work friendly as much as possible. Everything that we do works to accomplish that. I’m a big believer in having goals, having an aim and sticking to it.

Suffice to say, before launch, all details should be taken care of. Don’t launch until you are ready.

Jeff – Once the forum has launched, what are some steps one can take to grow and nurture their community?

Patrick – So, from a promotional standpoint, with forums, a lot can be tied to activity. If you’re hyper about marketing and hyper into aggressive growth, you want to have some activity going because activity itself directly affects the success of any marketing campaign that you undertake.

As an example, let’s say you use Google AdWords to promote your forums. If you send people to a community that hasn’t had any posts in a few days, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice and not realizing the full potential of your money because people are less likely to join a community that doesn’t already have something happening. Even if it’s just you, your brother and a few friends (or something like that), activity is activity. Try to keep some going.

Most people don’t have an ad budget. I’m the same. For those people, it’s important to have that activity and then to make sure that people can find you through search engines. So, using a search engine optimization hack for your software can help, to ensure that search engines are able to spider your content. Forums can be big time content generators, from the general to the very, very specific, and making sure that search engines can find that content can make your life a lot easier.

As far as nurturing goes, I believe that nurturing comes from you, and your staff (if you have anyone), spending time on your site and ensuring that it’s taken care of. This can take shape in the form of fairly, but firmly enforcing your guidelines, welcoming people to your forums and contributing yourself. Being a part of the community allows your users to regard you as a real person, rather than a machine or just an authority figure. This can lead to the community being a more encouraging and comfortable place for people to be.

Fake stories are gaining popularity because a nice chunk of bloggers tend to skip the tiny details and believe everything they read. Throw social networks like Digg into the mix, and you have trouble on the horizon. I am not one of those people, and I do scrutinize (maybe even too much) nearly every story I read on a daily basis. This is why I am asking that the blogging community take a step back and realize that this is only the beginning of a big problem. People are going to try to hurt the image of the blogosphere.

I, unfortunately, have lost some faith in the blogosphere over the past few months with regards to credibility. Bloggers are beginning to prove why journalists still have jobs. Scammers are beginning to realize that the blogosphere is the perfect opportunity to run their fake stories and lies to gain popularity and fame. It is likely that the same people that have provided us the need for spam inboxes will now give us the need for more scrutiny within the blogosphere.

We might be entering a time where we have to question everything we read from some of the A-list bloggers amongst us. It is so easy for someone to write something that is a complete lie—in a matter of days, the whole internet will think it is the truth. Blame should be passed on to the blogger(s) that publish these stories (as well as the person that lied) without knowing the truth.

I fully realize that everything I have said here applies to news organizations as well. However, news organizations are, in the public eye, thought of as responsible and trustworthy resources which will try their best to find the truth. Bloggers seem to get away with horrible mistakes and worse, but as the amount of news generated increased, it might get frustrating for readers and bloggers alike.

Now, many of you might have read my recent post about some problems with the blogosphere—namely the fact that this GPS drawing story had been in my feed an absurd amount of times. The story was taken way out of proportion, and I criticized its popularity. Well, now we all should feel cheated and embarrassed that it was a fake all along. I am not the least bit shocked either.

Those blogs that represent themselves as credible resources should learn from this. I trust the bloggers I subscribe too now, but nothing is certain. Services, like NewsCred, are already starting to gain popularity, and bloggers will need to start owning up to knowing the truth before publishing stories.

[Image Credit: Don’t Give Me A Fake Smile—Jen SFO-BCN | CC]