Hi I am Joe Hackman, welcome to my personal blog. I am an Entrepreneur, IT Consultant, and Blog Talk Radio host. I also work with social media professionally as both a consultant, and by developing Wordpress based blogs/Websites.
Recently I noticed I was featured in a paper.li daily by @morgaine. I went and checked it out, thought it was a pretty interesting site. Being the web 2.0/Social Media tinkerer that I am I could not help myself so I created an account and started playing around with my own dailies. I found some extremely beneficial aspects to the service but I am going to focus on 2 of them for now:
Helping Friends
Building Influence
Helping Friends
Since your paper.li papers can be about lists, people or hashtags – there is great opportunity to help people. How is that you ask? Well if I make a Joe Hackman daily, it will feature my tweets and the tweets of my followers to generate the article content, videos, etc for the feature. Being mentioned in a daily, or anything, is almost always good for a Twitter user (unless someone is complaining about you!). The other thing it does is build back-links to your sources articles and blogs. We all want to be found, being linked to will benefit your sources SEO. When you start to think through the list feature, hashtags, etc, you start to understand how there are many ways to help your friends achieve the mentions and back-links for better SEO.
Building Influence
This point is fairly simple, people like to be featured in your paper for the reasons above and for another important reason. It is great to have your content recognized and shared. In this case you will receive recognition for following others. How? By following anyone on Twitter they have a chance to be featured on your paper, if they are feature and they actually are paying attention they are likely to appreciate it. This means that if you produce a paper.li your sources on Twitter are more likely to be recognized and recognize you. That is influence. Of course you could also record a cool video and write about it in your blog then direct people to read about it. I think that might add a bit of influence as well.
Be sure to watch the video for additional tips and subscribe to my Youtube Channel if you enjoyed this post. I’d also love to hear your tips about how to utilize paper.li.
Ok there is quite a bit of buzz over the infamous Chatroulette, a site where random people are placed in a video chat session together. I personally don’t have the stomach to even try it since I’ve heard “found mostly depressed looking guys and naked men (about 1 in 5 shuffles was a guy’s bits)” source: Chris Brogan. Not my idea of a fun or practical application. Nurph on the other hand is exceptionally cool for several reasons:
It’s easy to setup
It works with most websites
Easy authentication
Realtime text chat, no video or audio
Easy Setup
The setup is very simple, you go to Nurph’s website and type in the url you wish to add a chat to. You can then use that URL in the future to access chat at that site or you can even create a link on the website to that url. For example if you click this link, you should be connected to the chat on this blog. If you see me online be sure to say hello.
Compatibility
I tested Nurph with Chrome, Mozilla and Internet Explorer. The only issue I had was a flash component (my cumulus tag cloud) overlaid the chat window. I was able to resolve that by enlarging the browser window. There may even be a setting to change the “always on top” aspect of Flash components. Please comment on this post if you are familiar with a way to do that. Websites that require authentication such as Facebook do not currently work with Nurph. No doubt that will improve with time as the product matures.
Authentication In the battle for authentication dominance, I always find Twitter to be the most comfortable. Fortunately while Nurph is in beta you can only use Twitter to access it unless you are part of the beta program. Just use the connect with Twitter button, but make sure you are logged in to Twitter first.
Text Chat
My comments about Chatroulette were largely in jest, but plain old text chat is a good handshake medium. Rather than investing in voice or video chat via the anonymous web you have a simple medium by which to say hello and assess your new contacts before taking that step. For that reason Nurph is a great way to “shake hands” without committing too much. Since it is multiple user you can also see how the participants behave with groups.
Video
I am a screen-cast addict, if I need to explain how to do something a lot of times I just record a quick screen-cast and send that. Here is a Youtube video I created where I talk about Nurph and demonstrate how simple it is to use.
Today while exchanging some tweets with @simbeckhampson I recognized that my social media and web footprint has evolved over time and in the process different tools have been useful for different things:
Facebook is where most of my real life friends are. I also find it more personal interaction wise.
I get news from Twitter, share news and interesting info. More informal interaction wise.
Blogtalkradio has opened up a nice niche for conversations with interesting people.
Cinchcast – I love to call in and get ideas out while driving then I share it later.
Youtube – I am big on screencasts and moving towards more personal messages (videos of me mixed in)
Amplify – I am making new friends, sharing more what I am reading more and selectively share to FB, Twitter, etc.
These aren’t all the tools I use, for me the key is really the data that comes in via Email. I need to re-evaluate my use of Google Reader and RSS also for incoming information. Here is the podcast that was inspired by my conversations with Paul:
This is an instructional video on how to create a large or customized tag cloud on an individual page on a WordPress based website. The concept is relatively simple:
WP-Cumulus is a Plugin/Widget, install the plug-in first.
Customize WP-Cumulus on the Widget Page any size/colors.
Viewing the source of your page you will grab the code to.
Create a new page and use the source code from step 3.
This morning I woke up and while scanning Twitter for news I noticed @Mashable has an article about a Facebook re-tweet feature. This is kind of a big deal for Facebook users but many Facebook users aren’t also Twitter users so I knew it would be useful to do a screencast to demonstrate the feature and talk about the benefits. The two reasons you should use it:
To provide the person who original shared the content credit for their efforts.
To encourage your friends to become fans of similar content that interests you.
Here is a screen cast demonstration of how to use the feature:
I love opening up the Android Marketplace on my Droid Phone and checking out the latest apps. This is a video of the Radar Now application for the Android Phone Operating system. I am using and demonstrating this app on my Verizon Droid Phone. It is a very useful app particularly if you are travelling and need access to some recent weather radar coverage. I wish I had this years ago when I did a lot of camping
I’ve had a number of conversations with friends who are facing job transitions, most of them unemployed. Through this process I’ve compiled 3 things that I have done and received extremely good feedback from my friends. The purpose of this article is simple, to share a formula that you can use to help friends (or yourself!) if a jobless situation occurs. If you’d rather just listen, I have a podcast at the bottom of this post.
Step #1 Information Gathering
I ask my friends about their situation, specifically:
What kind of work do they do.
What kind of work would they like to do.
Where would they like to work.
I then use that information to make constructive suggestions based on my own personal experience and the activity within my network. I also make sure that I am very supportive of them to try to embolden them to drive hard to the finish line (find a job that they will love!).
Step #2 I know this person that….
I then look at my network and think about who I know that might be able to help them. I make virtual introductions usually via Email and offer to help facilitate a connection. I’ll follow that up with another communication in a week or two and ask if they were able to connect and if that person was able to help them. The top person on my list that I refer people to is my neighbor and friend JP McDermott. JP has done a lot of outreach with people that are in these transitional situations. JP has a career coaching column at examiner.com.
Step #3 Support
Being jobless during a bad economic time with high unemployment is not a happy place to be. Step 3 for me is simple, I do everything I can to be supportive of my friend who is searching. I write encouraging comments on blog or social media posts they make, I re-tweet some of their key tweets, or I just send little follow up messages to encourage them. Mind you this is emerging opportunity, I don’t setup a schedule and I don’t do this equally with all of my friends.
You can do this, anyone can do this. I know there are jobs out there sometimes it’s just about getting the right people together. The sooner these jobs are filled with the right candidate the more quickly that company and the employee can start building an economically viable relationship. The net result is we all win. I hope you find this useful, please share your stories and tips.
In my day to day travels both personally and professionally I am often encouraging people to check out and use certain social media sites and blogs. When I mention RSS it seems like a lot of my audience drops off comprehension wise. In response to this I’ve come up with a video that your parents could use to understand and use RSS and more specifically Google Reader. The video will get into detail but it will be useful for people who:
Might want to get updated content from certain web and blog sites.
Like to organize all of their media content in one place when possible.
Don’t know what RSS is but would like to be able to explain it to others.
Want to learn more about blogging and how the content gets delivered.
Have an interest in Feedburner for promoting their blog and RSS feed.
I became a member of a Toastmaster club around 2003. Toastmasters is really an incredible opportunity for persons from any walk of life to gain confidence, leadership and public speaking skills. I was fortunate to have two very important people in my original club, the woman that would one day become my wife and the mother of my first and only child and Art Breslow a wise old Toastmaster of 50+ years! To say Toastmasters changed my life would be an understatement but you really need to be ready for change to happen, that was up to me. One of the most valuable lessons I learned that I’ve seen the majority of speakers I’ve watched error on is in the naming of podium and lectern. Most speakers call the stand that they put their notes on a podium but it is a lectern. A podium is an elevated area where a speaker gives his or her presentation. I’ve watched many accomplished speakers make this mistake so I am hoping this helps them become even that much more accurate of a speaker. I have to confess, the lesson learned was thanks to Mr. Art Breslow. Mr. Breslow was keen at keeping certain inaccuracies from perpetuating in his presence often in a very spirited way. I can still here him piping up when people used certain jargon, his memories haunt me in a good way. Thank you Mr. Breslow.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=4ceb7c21-32ac-468b-a8cb-cf74221bd9a8)
