GregFalken.com

Thoughts on humanizing technology

Community Access Internet Project

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Internet Lounge
Working with a group of committed people here in Tuolumne County, I have submitted a proposal to the Knight News Challenge. Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Challenge seeks innovations that use new or available technology to distribute content in local communities. There are only three rules:

  1. Use digital, open-source technology.
  2. Distribute news in the public interest.
  3. Test your project in a local community.

A description of the project follows. Please visit the application at the Knight News Challenge and add your comments and rate the project. Changes can be made to the application until the December 15th deadline and I welcome the chance to incorporate your suggestions.

Community Access Internet Project

Describe your project (max. 1800 characters)
The Community Access Internet Project (CAIP) provides web-based news and community information to rural areas. It draws on user-generated content and provides community education in the effective use of online media. The goal is nothing less than creating a community of digitally literate consumers and producers.

Should this project be funded, it will initially serve Tuolumne Co., CA (pop. ~50,000), located in the Central Sierras, 120 miles east of San Francisco. The county’s roots are in the gold rush of the 1850s and it has a rich historical character. Economically, the region struggles, with unemployment hovering around 13%.

Like community broadcasting (radio) and public access cable (TV) before it, participation is open to the entire community. However, CAIP goes beyond simply providing media access, by actively pursuing community outreach. CAIP provides classroom instruction and guidance on effective online communication, blogging, audio and video production and legal issues.

A paid core staff manages day to day operations and curates content, such as calendars of events, local news (road closures, snow days, fire information) and news features, including podcasts and videocasts. Featured content may be produced both by the core staff and “graduates” of the instructional programs. Blog space is openly available and public blog entries may be “promoted” to featured status by the core staff.

CAIP partners with other community organizations such as schools, libraries, news organizations, local government, service organizations, chambers of commerce, non-profits, etc.These organizations enhance the capabilities and reach of the project, bringing it to the attention of a broad cross-section of the community.

How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities? (max. 750 characters)
In our community, online information is isolated on numerous sites. CAIP provides technical assistance to the operators of these sites to syndicate their public content, making it available to any web site that wishes to republish it. Syndication will be a significant source of content for CAIP, without requiring any group to give up control of their own information.

The Community Access Internet Project provides a publishing platform for individuals and groups in the community. It provides an alternative source of online news, commentary and entertainment, produced locally and addressing the needs of the community. Because the featured areas of the site are curated, it can develop a reputation as a trustworthy and reliable news source.

How is your idea innovative? (new or different from what already exists) (max. 750 characters)
There are many existing variants of the community publishing platform. We plan to build on the best of these, with an emphasis on syndication and aggregation tools. Simply aggregating existing calendars of events will be an enormous benefit to the community.

The educational and community outreach component of this project makes it especially unique. During the initial planning phase, we will engage with the community to learn what information they want to have available online, tailoring the site to meet these needs. With a successful implementation in Tuolumne County, we hope to bring this model to other small, rural communities around the country.

What experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project? (max. 1600 characters)
As the submitter of this proposal, I have over 15 years of web development experience and a strong background in both communications and technology. My company, webdancers, was established in 1995 and has assisted in the development and marketing of hundreds of web sites. This experience however, brings to the table only a subset of the skills necessary to develop the Community Access Internet Project. For the rest, I turn to our community.

Network Sierra is a grassroots organization that includes individuals representing a wide range of community interests. Created in 2006, its goal is to use technology to bring our communities closer together and to maintain our rural character in a 21st century economy. We include technologists, arts organizers, educators, writers, marketers, local government officials and retirees. Network Sierra will serve as the parent body for CAIP. In the initial stages, another non-profit agency will act as Network Sierra’s fiscal agent, however we anticipate that Network Sierra will seek non-profit corporation status.

The Community Access Internet Project will be developed in consultation with a Network Sierra advisory board, which will hire the core staff and oversee the implementation of the programs described above.

Leveraging the skills and dedication available in our community, along with emerging social technology, CAIP gives voice to the many diverse groups in our region, providing them with both the training and a forum to speak clearly to their own communities and beyond.

Photo by Tom Magliery

Heroes of American Storytelling

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This American LifeThey should give these guys an award. Oh yeah, they have: three Peabodys, the George Polk Award, the Edward R. Murrow Award, two Emmys (for their TV show) and many others. This American Life, from WBEZ Chicago, is a weekly radio show that has mastered the art of storytelling. The stories they tell are drawn from every facet of life, from the absurd to the enchanting to the terrifying. Having been at it since 1995, they are amazingly good at what they do.

So it should come as no surprise that when TAL produces shows on two of the dominant issues of our day — the economy and health care reform — listeners are able to grasp the concepts behind these difficult subjects, often for the first time. I am providing links to these shows (play them right from this page or download them for later) because I believe that if more people heard these stories, we would be having a much different conversation about these two critical issues. Also as an example of what storytellers, particularly those in new media, can aspire to.

The Economy

The Giant Pool of Money

A special program about the housing crisis produced in a special collaboration with NPR News. We explain it all to you. What does the housing crisis have to do with the turmoil on Wall Street? Why did banks make half-million dollar loans to people without jobs or income? And why is everyone talking so much about the 1930s? It all comes back to the Giant Pool of Money. [Aired 5/9/08]

Return to The Giant Pool of Money

In which we mark the anniversary of the economic collapse and the anniversary of Planet Money: recapping some of the original episode, The Giant Pool of Money, and finding out what’s happened to all those guys in the year since. [Aired 9/25/09]

Health Care

More Is Less

An hour explaining the American health care system, specifically, why it is that costs keep rising. One story looks at the doctors, one at the patients and one at the insurance industry. [Aired 10/9/09]

Someone Else’s Money

This week, we bring you a deeper look inside the health insurance industry. The dark side of prescription drug coupons. A story about Pet Health Insurance, which is in its infancy, and how it is changing human behaviors—for example, if you have the pet health insurance, you bring your pet to the vet more often, and the vet makes more money and…well, you can see the parallels. And insurance company jargon, frighteningly decoded. [Aired 10/16/09]

Keep the Stories Coming

If, after listening to these programs, you agree with me about the incredible informational and entertainment value of This American Life, please support them by making a donation.

Show descriptions courtesy of This American Life.

TAL_Giant_Pool_Of_Money_355.mp3

Humanizing Twitter

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Flock of twitterers

The following is cross-posted on Annie Hart’s blog, Stories Change The World, with thanks to Annie for requesting a guest post.

Twitter is pretty darned geeky. It’s full of symbols and jargon and half the time you can’t even tell if you’re being tweeted by a human or a robot. People wonder, with good reason, how they can possibly get anything useful, let alone humane, out of the untold number of tweets that pass through the system every day.

The first thing that I tell new Twitter users (after, “you won’t know if it’s a stupid idea or not until you try it”) is that they don’t have to read every tweet that comes through their account. Everything prior to a few minutes ago is water under the bridge. Unless it mentions you or is a direct message to you, in which case you need to keep track of and respond to it. Every Twitter client and the web site makes this easy to do.

Next, you need to follow a group of people who you find interesting or with whom you have common interests; people who you would like to talk to. Think of Twitter like a crowded party. The conversations flow around you and you can choose which ones to focus on and where to join in. If you’ve chosen your party (the people you’re following) well, this can be both entertaining and informative. If you’re at a party with a lot of obnoxious drunks…well, that can be less pleasant. Remember, you get to choose who you follow. If someone follows you and you don’t follow them back, it’s like they don’t exist. If you follow someone who you later decide to un-follow, they’ll get over it.

When you do decide to join a conversation, knowing some of Twitter’s somewhat quirky conventions will help you be better understood.

  • The @ symbol. Including @username anywhere in your tweet will cause it to show up in that person’s list of “mentions”. If @username is the first thing in the tweet (i.e. @ is the first character), the tweet will only be visible to the recipient and anyone who follows both of you. So, when you want your tweet to go into the general Twitter stream and be noticed by an individual, include @username somewhere after the first character of the tweet.
  • Hash tags. Hash tags were not a part of Twitter’s original release. People using the service found that they needed a way of identifying words to search on and settled on prefixing them with a hash (#) symbol. When you include a hash tag in a tweet, you are inviting people to search for that tag. For example, if I tweet about health care reform and include the hash tag #hcr, I can be sure that my tweet will show up in a lot of search results, in addition to my followers seeing it. Use the search box on Twitter.com to find commonly used hash tags. Brand names are also commonly used. If a company is paying attention, they should be monitoring for any usage of their name in a hash tag and respond to you. Sadly, this is not often the case.
  • Retweets. Another instance of the users of Twitter coming up with a convention, in this case the letters “RT” followed by the @username of the original sender (so they will know that they’ve been retweeted). You can either retweet verbatim or edit it a bit and add your own comments. I like to put comments at the end, prefixed with <–.
  • Links. If you use Twitter’s web site, URLs are automatically made clickable but they are not shortened, eating into your 140 character limit. Most of the 3rd party Twitter clients, either desktop or web-based, will shorten URLs using a service (4th party?) like bit.ly or tr.im.

Once you do start talking on Twitter, be a good conversationalist. You want people’s response to your tweets to be either, that was helpful or that was interesting or both. It’s not always easy to write stories in 140 characters or less but it can be done with practice. Here are some good examples:

Rain in DC this morning is mean to all who pass. The bones in my feet will be cold all day.
@jdickerson

Fish communicate through farts http://bit.ly/2ybLKD
@slate

Didn’t realize I flew in on the same flight as @tmonhollon from Oklahoma. Okies represent! #bwe09
@BeckyMcCray

Breaking: Tipped off by Stockholm that he was about to be branded euro-wimp peacenik, Obama ordered NASA to bomb moon.
@Roland_Hedley

Be nice, give credit where credit is due and remember, more than 20 tweets a day and people will think you have way to much time on your hands.

Flock photo by: Eileen Maher

Better Blog Editing with ScribeFire

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ScribeFireWordPress is a great publishing platform but I find its editor to be rather cramped and not very conducive to actually writing. The editing window is only 10 lines high by default and there are lots of other panels, checkboxes and drop-down menus competing for your attention while you write. I wanted an editor that presented more of a blank page.

There are approximately a gazillion external editors available that will post to a WordPress blog but a couple of factors narrowed my search. First, I didn’t really want to install yet another application on my computer. Second, and this really narrowed the field, I wanted to post my writings to WordPress as a draft, so that I can make final changes within WordPress itself. I’m compulsive enough that I always want to tinker with my posts, previewing them many times, before hitting the “publish” button. Also, WordPress changes quickly enough that it’s unrealistic to expect a 3rd party tool to stay in sync with its features. I wanted to decouple the two.

The writing tool that I settled on is ScribeFire, a plugin for the Firefox browser. Since it’s a plugin, it didn’t require installing any new software and it will publish in draft mode. ScribeFire works with several different blogging platforms, however I have only used it with this WordPress blog.

Installation is the same as with all Firefox plugins: click the “install” button, wait for the download to complete and restart Firefox. Once that’s done, you’ll have an additional icon in the Firefox tool tray and another entry for ScribeFire in the Tools menu. Selecting either of these opens the ScribeFire editor on a new Firefox tab.

Here’s a screencast of ScribeFire in action (for best viewing, use full screen mode):

Does Social Media ROI Matter?

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ROI Doodle [Note for the acronym challenged: ROI = return on investment.]

Last week I attended a small business seminar hosted by the Tuolumne County Chamber of Commerce, Sonora Chamber of Commerce, and the Tuolumne County Economic Development Authority, on the subject of online and offline marketing. The offline portion, presented by Bruce Tepper, of SCORE was good, basic advice on marketing and PR for small businesses. Lots of head nodding in the audience accompanied his talk. The online segment, presented by Michelle Shelton, of Luminosity Tech Training and Consulting, raised a lot more questions than it answered.

I should point out that Tuolumne County is not (how shall I put this?) a hotbed of technology. The concepts behind many online strategies, including social media, are new to most business owners. The questions in the room indicate to me that there is a huge educational effort that needs to take place if social media is going to become widespread and effectively used in Tuolumne County.

My friend and colleague Bob Gelman, of BGA Media is more skeptical than I am about the value proposition of social media in general and for small business in particular. He writes in his blog:

After all this, in all my experience, I’m afraid that the Social Media Emperor has no clothes!  That’s because I’ve seen no reason to believe that it will actually be worth the effort that it takes to do this stuff properly.

You would expect me to be an evangelist of this work. I’ve not only worked in this field since 1992, I’ve built several social networks (with my team).  But no, I’m not an evangelist, I’m a skeptic. Having seen the bubble of Internet vapor burst in early 2001, I feel strongly this may be happening again, only this time, the losers could be struggling small businesses who invest their time and energy unwisely.

What a small business needs from its efforts, be they online or off, is ROI. If you have 12 hours in a day to run your business, you probably do not have time to setup Facebook fan pages, write blog articles, tweet on Twitter, and still sell. manufacture, ship, and keep the books as most small businesses do.  So before you tell me to go Yelp, or contribute to the public works Wiki, or check my comments and trackbacks, you’d better be prepared to tell me what it will be worth to me in additional sales and more importantly: profit!

Being the Kumbaya Blogger that I am, I believe that the point of social media is to improve your connection with your market. I suspect that trying to measure the ROI of this is difficult at best and is more than likely an exercise in futility. Everyone acknowledges that word of mouth is an excellent way to build business, yet I don’t know how you would measure its ROI. Social media is word of mouth on steroids.

A few basic concepts that I would like to introduce to our business community:

  • Social media should be used for listening, as well as talking.
  • Social media is a great tool for offering help and service. Not so good for selling stuff.
  • Social media should be part of an overall marketing strategy, which includes goals.
  • Many existing forms of advertising are dying. Social media may be what replaces some of them.
  • Markets are conversations.

We need to lay some groundwork before jumping in to the mechanics of setting up a Facebook fan page or a Twitter client. That’s what I’d like to see brought to the businesses of Tuolumne County. The folks who run these businesses already know the value of connecting with their customers. Many of them don’t have the disadvantage of being under layers of bureaucracy or having to get approval from a home office before trying something new.

Yes, social media takes time and effort; something that small business owners have in short supply. But it’s also nearly free to try it out. Rural communities like ours need to learn about conducting business online and they need to do it now! It’s really just a matter of applying business concepts that they already know (treat your customers right, give them more service than they expect, talk to them like intelligent human beings) to a new form of communication. The act of learning how to use these new tools will have no measurable ROI but I believe that it will pay long term dividends.

ROI doodle by Russell Davies