I've recently become a fan of CommonCraft, a two-person video production team from Seattle that makes very simple videos that explain social media.  Since I think RSS technology has the power to change electronic communication from a push to a pull system, I'm especially fond of their RSS in plain English video: http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english. 

In addition to the web-based mobile version of Windows Live (ex: http://robdolin.mobile.spaces.live.com/), I'm trying-out a new program on my (Windows Mobile) Treo 700w: Windows Live for Windows Mobile.  I'm probably going to get a bunch of use of it on the bus commute this coming week, but if there are folks currently using it (or interested in trying), I'd be all ears for some tips. 

If you want to try-out Windows Live for Windows Mobile, you can download the USA version from: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/mobile/wl/download-en-us.mspx and you can find a bunch of other markets/languages at: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/mobile/wl/languages-en-us.mspx

Enjoy--
--Rob

I was IM'ing last night with the head of Live Sino (LiveSide China) and PicturePan2 mentioned that was using WL Messenger on Blackberry.  Even though I'm a Windows Mobile user, I was intrigued as I have a bunch of friends (mostly from outside the tech industry) who use Blackberries and it would be great to IM with them. 

Conveniently, LiveSino just posted screenshots of the Blackberry experience and I've included a few below.  Check out the full post for the rest.  Cheers--
--Rob

P.S. If you've used functionality like this in the USA, please let me know what you think.

P.P.S. If you're on the team that makes this application, leave a comment (or send a message) and I can try to get you the list of codes for the I'm making a difference campaign for *komen, *red+u, etc. 

I've been wondering why my 40 GB hard drive on my laptop was nearly full when I only have ~27 GB of system files, pictures, and documents. 

Then Outlook hit an issue that helped me to figure out the problem.  One of my Outlook files got corrupted and I got this message:

This led me to open the C:\Users\robdolin\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\ folder and find that I had an outlook.ost file that was nearly 10 GB.  I guest that's the 27 GB --> 37 GB difference :)

I ended-up deleting this file and in the process of re-sync'ing my email with the Exchange server, I deleted a few GB of old email. 

The laptop feels like it's running a bit faster, I've got more free room on the hard drive, and the Outlook file corruption is resolved.  I guess I'm sort of glad the file got corrupted.  :)

We both Like Dare's blog entry that "Giving Sh*t Away is not a Business Strategy."

My colleague Dare Obasanjo has an interesting post on The GOOG -> MSFT Exodus that I think uncovers some interesting issues with Google's system of tons of individual contributor developers and extremely flat organization hierarchies. 

I'm not the biggest fan of a ton of career levels (it's nine promotions from starting individual contributor (59) to partner (68) at Microsoft); but having levels and offering opportunities for advancement is nice when you're actually planning to stay at a company for more than a few years.

Earlier this evening, I got a twitter from one of the founding members of the Spaces team that George Carlin just died.  I was surprised that the MSNBC article did not link to an actual transcript of the routine and thanks to Live Search and Justin R. Erenkrantz: http://www.erenkrantz.com/Humor/SevenDirtyWords.shtml. 

Carlin, like Lenny Bruce, pushed the boundaries of comedy and free speech.  To this twentysomething, in addition to hearing and reading the "seven dirty words," my two key memories of Carlin are as Rufus in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and as the Cardinal (right) in Dogma. 

You may have heard that Facebook surpassed MySpace as the largest Social Network in the world.  If your political organization or non-profit does not have an outpost on Facebook, now is a great time to get started. 

Two of the biggest reasons to use Facebook (or other Social Networks) to promote your organization are:

• Virality features - features like the "news feed" and "status updates" provide mechanisms for passive sharing so when user A joins your group, (some of) the friends of user A get a news item
• Contacts built-in - many users already have hundreds of contacts in the social network so it's easy for them to invite those contacts to your group or event (rather than having to look-up emails or phone numbers for those contacts.)

So what should you do?  It depends on the scope of your organization or event:

A) One-time Event - If you're just doing a one-time event:
    1. Create the Event
    2. Update your Status with a link to the Event
    3. Invite Friends to the Event (see right)
    4. (Wait a few days then) Ask attendees to Invite their Friends

Note: Be sure to make your Event Global so anyone can participate.

B) Local Group (<1,000)- If you're building a local group that you expect to be less than 1,000 folks, you can use a "Group" in Facebook.  Similar to above:
    1. Create the Group
    2. Update your Status with a link to the Group
    3. Invite Friends to the Group
    4. (Wait a few days then) Ask members to Invite their Friends

If your group is likely going to have many events that you would want to invite people to, these two suggestions may be useful:
    a) Create a Friends List for your friends potentially interested in the Group for easy invites
    b) Create Events for the Group as opposed to stand-alone Events

C) Large Group - If you expect a massive group (ex: targetted Congressional race), you will likely want to use a Page instead of a Group.  Pages cannot message their members using the standard private messages, but they can push "Updates" that their members see.  Most of the same suggestions as B) apply to Pages.

I hope folks found this helpful.  Please leave a comment if you have other suggestions.  Thanks much--
--Rob

P.S. Kevin Bondelli has a great related article on how to find potential members for your Facebook Group.

Kudos to my colleague Chris who compiled this lengthy FAQ: Windows Live Spaces - Frequently Asked Questions

It looks like the first 1,000 people who post a YouTube video with Sprint's new Instinct phone will get $20 for "product placement" in their movie.  IMHO, this seems like a great long tail play by Sprint; and for $20,000 it's probably a drop in the bucket for both the movie and the phone's marketing budget.  I'd be interested to see if the marketers find this promotion to have a strong return on investment. 

0. Sign-in :)
1. Go to your mobile space (ex: http://robdolin.mobile.spaces.live.com/)
2. You can see the "Delete comment " link below every comment
3. Click "Delete comment" for comments you want to delete

BetaNews reported that the Associated Press is going to start attempting to charge bloggers for excerpting their articles.  IMHO, this move exposes either massive ignorance about both Search engines (particularly page rank algorithms) or a business model inconsistent with their website (www.ap.org.)

Page Rank and similar algorithms are used by search engines to determine relevance of a particular web page by looking at the inbound hyperlinks to that page.  Thus, if a web page representing a news story gets a bunch of inbound links (like from bloggers) then the story will rank higher in search engines like Google as well as in news and blog search engines like Technorati. 

If the AP wants their content to be the content that is as the top of the list when a major story breaks, the should let bloggers excerpt quotes (and link to it.)

Alternatively, maybe the AP sees itself as a news sharing network for traditional media outlets.  If so, that's totally cool; but then they should not be posting content on their websites as it under-cuts their news agency customers.

If the AP is a news source catering to newspapers, TV networks, and other mainstream media, then they should not post their content on their own site so that the primary content source (and link destination) is the websites of their customers. 

I hope someone at the Associated Press wakes-up and smells the web 2.0 before they alienate either their likely most avid readers (bloggers) or their customers in the media industry.

Thanks to one of my co-workers for sharing this video.  I enjoy the personifications of the Social Networking services. 

You've of course seen viral video like the diet Coke and mentos or Vote Different.  Yesterday afternoon, I participated in a both real-world and online scavenger hunt to get people to make a vote pledge for the 2008 election. 

There was a face-to-face component of teams with clipboards walking around downtown Nashville, but there was also an online component where people were Emailing, TXT'ing, Facebook Messaging, and Twittering their friends to complete an online version of the vote pledge form.  I was really impressed that the organizing group had implemented the complimentary online component to the offline; but it makes sense that both virtual and real-world components are important for organizing young people (whether it's politics and activism or advertising and consumerism.)

The question that this raised in my mind was what would be necessary to push something like this to go viral.  More specifically, what additional tweaks would be needed on the vote pledge system to get the cycle to self-perpetuate.  I've got a few thoughts, but I'd love to hear what other folks think too.  Please leave a comment with your ideas or suggestions.

Thanks--
--Rob

Technorati Tags: Politics,YDA,YDANashville,Social Networking

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As a way to break the week and recharge, I try not to do any work for my day job on Saturdays; but I really like technology so I find myself playing around with "weekend projects."  Two things I've been messing-with today:

Twitter for Politics

My friend Kevin has been talking a bunch about twitter for youth organizing.  I'm curious if Twitter (and opt-in SMS blast services in general) will be useful for political organizing.  I've created a Twitter account for the 43rd District Democrats in urban Seattle: http://twitter.com/43rdDems and cross-posted about it to the 43rd LD Dems (Windows Live powered) blog and Facebook group.   If you're curious to see how this is working-out,
send a TXT message of "follow 43rdDems" to 40404. 

SiteMap improvements on TestMash.com

Given the number of people who use keyword search as one of their primary web navigation mechanisms, I've been interested in the area of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or how to optimize content for crawl by search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live Search, etc. as well as how to increase page rank and improve display of content on search results.

Over the past few days, I've re-written the SiteMap (and SiteMapIndex) generation code on my experimental site: http://www.TestMash.com/ with a goal of improving coverage of some new view "item" pages that I've created like:

• http://www.testmash.com/person/viewitem.aspx?ItemID=167753
• http://www.testmash.com/person/viewitem.aspx?ItemID=538706 
• http://www.testmash.com/person/viewitem.aspx?ItemID=825997

I've put some special MetaKeywords on these pages and I'm looking forward to seeing the impact.  Cheers--
--Rob

• http://www.testmash.com/celebrities/results.aspx?q=Lindsay%20Lohan shows content from the queries:
  • http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=Lindsay%2bLohan+site%3Aspaces.live.com%20meta%3Asearch.pt%28people%29
  • http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=Lindsay+Lohan+meta%3Asearch.pt%28blogs%29
• And http://www.testmash.com/music/results.aspx?q=madonna shows content from the queries:
  • http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=madonna+site%3Aspaces.live.com%20meta%3Asearch.pt%28people%29
  • http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=madonna+site%3Aspaces.live.com/music%20-%22there%20are%20no%22
  • http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=madonna+meta%3Asearch.pt%28blogs%29

So as you probably noticed, the site is a pretty rough prototype, but if you think the idea is cool (or is lame), please leave a comment.  Thanks--
--Rob

Back in 2000, I was a student rep. for Microsoft at the University of Illinois and they wanted to make sure students had access to the latest dev tools so they shipped me something like ten cartons of Visual Studio to distribute to folks in computer science and computer engineering.

At the time, it was probably a reasonably efficient system, but it was a bit awkward.  Not only was having thousands of dollars of software stashed on the loft in my room in the fraternity house a bit awkward, but moving these over to the CS building for distribution at events like the WinDevils (Windows Developer ACM SIG) meeting was a bit of a logistical pain. 

It's nearly eight years later and things have indeed improved; and not just the software; but the distribution mechanisms.  The folks at Channel 8 from MSDN are offering FREE DOWNLOADS of:

• Visual Studio 2008
• Expression Studio
• Windows Server 2003
• XNA Game Studio

All of this is at: https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/

To whoever the folks are running the student outreach programs, kudos on a much improved software distribution system.  Cheers--
--Rob