I am breaking this blog
I've come to the conclusion that I can no longer afford to talk about anything and everything on a single WP instance. Things already started to break apart when I decided to blog in Spanish at Redtácora.
Now it is time to break things even more. Off topic will have its own blog. Ain't that something?
The Challenge will remain covering a broad spectrum of Social Media, web Marketing, Analytics and the like. But travel, opinion, and disgruntled rants will have to find a new place.
Enough said.
Best “sell your soul to the devil” dialog ever
Every time I install a new piece of software and click on the dreaded "Agree to the Terms and Conditions / license agreement" I can't avoid thinking "yeah, yeah, I sell my soul to the devil, whatever".
Today one installer had this dialog:
Great way to put it
'Noguh Said.
Social, baby, Social!
In case you were wondering why I have been so quiet on this blog lately, I am now entitled to disclose what I've been up to since it is all now in the public domain.
For starters Lenovo now has its first Japanese blog: Yamato Thinking. It is a actually dual language blog, both in Japanese and English.The guys at Yamato are responsible for much of the design of our computers, thus it shall prove to be an interesting read.
This is a big step for us in the right direction. Enabling a social media strategy on a more global basis is the way to go.
We have also redesigned our Lenovo social homepage. This should now prove to be a fairly useful hub for everything that goes on on the Lenovo Social Media Universe. This homepage will keep evolving and upgrading to usefully serve our visitors and customers. I have wild things in mind.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg for what's being going on.
We have also launched a new service for our customers called "Discover Social Media". The word "service" does not do justice, actually. I'll describe what the intent is and how we plan it should work.
Our aim is to build a community site where newcommers to Social Media can get up to speed with all the trends, sites and services around Social Media. Reviews and best practictices are written and revised by peers. For the time being the site works very blog-like, but that will transition to something more complex and social Networky.
Here's an excerpt from our welcome message:
When you hear about “social networking,” just know that computing is getting more personal, more about you, your success, your family, your interests and the ability to connect with people and information that can help you. Social networking is people talking… about everything under the sun and much more.
As usual the best part of this projects is the people I get to know.
Mitch Ratcliffe is in charge of much of the reviews you'll see on the site. He's done a terrific job, and, I must admit, I feared for his sanity, since he had to actually use all those services. And using them means Signing up and spending time on them. In case you don't know Mitch I strongly encourage you to subscribe to his ZD|Net blog.
On the design part we partnered with Erik Hahr. We got in touch with Erik thanks to our Forums. He is an active participant at the lenovo community and showed a lot of interest and will to collaborate with us. Our experience with him on this project is a good example of how good Social Media can work both ways, for companies and customers.
I'll probably be posting updates on how all this things evolve in the near future.
WordCamp Buenos Aires Part 3
Monetizing Blogs.
Guillermo Bracciaforte.
Guillermo Bracciaforte
Guillermo Bracciaforte from Google AdSense. There are tons of blogs with publicity.
Question: Should we even try to monetize our blogs? It depends. If the blog does not have visits it will not make money. Mariano Amartino says that with less than 10K visits per day you won't be able to make a living.
AdManager: Ad Serving. You can manage ads from various sources. With Ad Networks you allways fill all ad spaces on the blog. The Ad Server will always show the highest CPM ad.
Ad Sense. Searches for keywwords in the content and decides to display a relevant ad according to those keywords. Placement is key for the ads.
Formats also pay a big part on how much money we will get from publicity.
Understanding profits. We can see how much money each format makes and decide the best practices.
Juan Bongiovanni
Juan Bongiovanni
Juan Bongiovanni, Zed Digital. How big companies spend their online money. Creatives and media are separated in agencies. Big corporations have global accounts which centralize all ad spend.
Big Media is not growing traffic. Traffic grows on Social Media. Agencies are loosing their main ally: Media. Big companies start paying more attention to bloggers because they have good page rank and they have growing audiences.
The industry has forked into 2 perceptions, CPM and CPC. Blogs should focus on building their value. Although CPM remains stable, the audiences on sites are different, but CPM does not reflect that.
Bloggers should understand where brands spend their money. Bloggers should try to avoid dealing with media agencies.
A good alternative is to aim for PR budgets instead of Maketing Budgets.
Q&A
Amartino: AdServing agencies should be 100% transparent, if they are not end relationships with them.
Traditional Media Agencies only talk to bloggers if their clients ask them to do so. They are too used to picking up the phone and just calling the newspaper to work online Ad positioning.
You have to have accountability regarding your audience because that is the only tool you have to better sell yourself.
Above and Beyond plain Text.
Alejando Ponicke and Miguel Angel Saez, Microsoft.
Alejando Ponicke and Miguel Angel Saez
Alejandro and Miguel Angel are demonstrating how easy it it to install a WordPress blog under Microsoft IIS using Microsoft Web Platform. They use the infamous Microsoft method of next -> next -> finish.
IIS 7 modified its Architecture, leaning towards modularization, thus PHP is another module within IIS.
2 installers, one for the platfomr, one for the aditional packages (WordPress amongst them).
Miguel Angel is going to demonstrate how to use Microsoft Live Writer. Live writter was born because they found out that Word wasn't all that good for Blogging.
WLR's nicest feature is that it is an extensible software. They have a plugin architecture.
Demo: they get a video from soapbox and embed it into Facebook.
SmoothHD.com. Service built around silverlight. I must admit the streaming looks very crisp. Service automatically lowers quality if it detects that the bandwith is not optimal.
This type of service will become publically available (as in giving people the ability to upload HD videos) soon. When you embed a video using WLR it creates an iFrame that points to silverlight.live.
Now they showcase photosynth.com. Service builds a 3D wireframe directly out from user-uploaded photos. The example they show is of the statue of liberty using 57 pictures. People can create their own 3D models. Output of photosynth can also be embedded into WordPress.
Ismael Briasco.
Ismael is going to present miravos.tv.
They used WordPress because it is easy and flexible. WordPress is a CMS.
How to use WordPress for a VideoBlog. Not difficult, just posts with embedded videos and a good design wrapping it all.
Why did they decide to do miravos.tv: psicofxp.com and trix started discussing about doing somethign with video on last years WordCamp. There are no well-positioned video blogging sites in Latin America.
Ismael says he could feel how different links and pingabks feeded their launch.
Juan Codagnone
Juan from Flof. Flof is a tagging platform based on wordpress. They use Google Maps and Open Street Maps. All data can be exported and reused in other sites. Juan underlines that ecverythin at flof uses open formats.
Short on Juan because I head to the stage.
WordCamp Buenos Aires Part 2
I missed the segment on analytics because I had to borrow my ThinkPad for the presentation.
Horacio Bella y Pablo Rigazzi are presenting on Design.
Pablo Rigazzi
They started by making a brief review of the history of the internet. Most people who don't use Internet have no resources to do so. Of the remaining people who don't use it most claim they don't need it or say they don't know how to use it.
Improving user experience. "Your blog is YOU".
Design should be kept simple unlike:
Horrible UI
Last.fm is a good example of simple UI design.
You should cut to the chase with what you want people to do in your blog / site / service because the attention span is too short.
Text is also interface, a good example for this is flickr, when there are no pictures there they have a bunch of text (tags, etc) that make up the design. Text is your best friend.
You should also tell a story with your design. Great WP theme: WP CODA.
On design you should try to create new paradigms. BaseCamp and gMail as examples of new ways to look at old problems.
Design should be done from the inside out. Yu should focus on what you are doing, and then the rest of the design falls into place.
Horacio Bella.
Bloggers want to generate response from their readers.
Make a list of all elements that'll compose the page. Then start laying out those elements.
Design should also take SEO into account. Use H1, H2, H3, etc.
Compress CSS and JS, cache pages, use the appropriate image formats, etc.
WordCamp Buenos Aires part 1
Alejandro Piscitelli
Alejandro Piscitelli opens the day.
Participation Culture. Blogging comes to age, Internet is the 21st century printing press. Before Gutenberg only 1000 books were created per year in Europe.
Web 2.0 is participation architecture. Alejandro is sharing Technorati's "state of the bloggosphere". Blogs have a short lifespan.
Personal blogging came first. Only then did Corporations grasp it.
Alejandro is sharing hhis blogs / sites: InterLink Headline News, Filosofitis, and some internal education blogs he uses to give class.
He shares the October number of Esquire.
Crowdsourcing as a knowledge strategy, MATLAB, Innocentive and the power of difference. Jeff Howe wrote most of the starting knowledge on crowdsourcing.
Detractors of crowdsourcing: Nicholas Karr, Mark Bauerline, state that we are dumber due to computers and the internet.
Generation differences between Baby Boomers, Generation X and "Generation Einstein", (those under 20).
Cultural convergence. Henry Jenkins focuses on Fans and participation clutlure. Barriers have fallen for creativity and civic commitment.
Kids today have to learn "Digital Competencies". Thys turns them into natural multi-taskers. They can switch focus rapidly.
The internet created a Virtual Crowd (Jeff Howe).
Innocentive is a site were people can "sell" problems, so the community can solve it.
Ned Gulley: Addictive Collaboration. On MatLab they find code solutions 1000 times faster than on any company.
Matt Mullenweg
Matt has already learnt to say "Buenos Dias". Last year's wordcamp was the first international one, now they are all over the world. His favourite WordCamp was in Philippines. There was a pool between the stage and the public, bats flew all the place, the Mic was a Karaoke machine.
Don't believe what wired says, blogging is not dead.
History of WordPress.
He started on movable type and then moved to b2. It was all great untill the main coder disappeared. His first opensource contribution was made for b2.
After Matt wished that there was a better blogging / publishing platform, a comment by "Mike" invited him to do a fork of b2. That is how wordpress was born.
He then was offered a job at cNet, staying there for about a year. He learnt he was a bad employee. Automattic's first project was Akismet. He created it because his mom wanted a blog, and "spam was not appropiate for a Texas Catholic Woman".
WordPress.com gets 2 terabytes of uploadsper month, 1 billion dynamic pages. 14.2 billion requests (7,300 per second). 7.1 million wordpress.org blogs.
WordPress 2.7. Live Demo!
They used laser eye tracking to test the new dashboard for 2.7 The dashboard is completely customizable. As a matter of fact everything is highly customizable (for example comment views).
Threaded comments and comment pagination are other innovations in 2.7.
Future.
WordPress is going to go mobile. iPhone WordPress app is massive in the US. You should be able to check your stats on your mobile.
There is a long tail of plugins. Popular plugins: Akismet, SEO stuff. Average WP blog has 4.9 plugins. This makes every WordPress different. "WordPress by itself is pretty boring".
They Created a directory because some people were taking advantage of the users, embedding virus in themes.
They created an internal Twitter called Prologue.
WordPress showcase: they feature the best wordpress instances
buddypress: they want to make it easy to create social networks.
Q&A.
BBPress: they don't promote it because they don't want to break backwords compatibility. Once 1.0 is out they'll also work in integrating it to WordPress.
WordPress MU: it trails Main WordPress by 2 to 3 weeks. They are also redesigning WordPress MU backend.
Plugins: they are working on algorithms to predict what plugins will become popular. Not every plugin will make its way into the WordPress Code. It would make the system slower, and it is not convenient.
Prospected Social Network system: WordPressers should come together and connect. No hosted Buddy Press in the foreseable future. "Facebook does an amazing job at what they do". "For the 95% of what we do we have no idea how or if we will make money out of it, we're a bit like google in that, and we're just lucky that that 5% pays for everything else."
DiSo (Distributed social networks) is the "glue" for social networks.