Archive for the 'Social Media' Category
March 10, 2010 @ 8:30 am | Filed under: Social Media
Since I seem to be writing a lot about iPod Touch apps and social media lately, here’s a roundup page for easy reference.
A day in the life of my iPod Touch (my favorite apps)
Streamlining the way I use social media
Social networks for book lovers
Facebook—why I love it; how I keep it streamlined
Tips for using Twitter (these last four are part of a series at Faith & Family Live; that last one is coming tomorrow)
And lest you think I spend all my time online (what mom of six could?)—I’ve written a few posts about books in my time, too. 
Who can stay online when there are cheeks like this to smooch?
facebook, iPod Touch, Social Media, Twitter
March 8, 2010 @ 7:17 am | Filed under: Social Media
Hey, I’m a social media maven—who knew?
Danielle Bean asked me to spend the week guest-blogging at Faith & Family Live, talking about my favorite social networks and how I use them without letting them drive me crazy.
First up: How to streamline your Facebook experience. Tomorrow: Facebook’s privacy settings. Later in the week I’ll tackle Twitter and other social networks.
February 11, 2010 @ 8:39 am | Filed under: Social Media
Like everyone else, I’m still trying to figure out the ins and outs of Buzz, but I made one discovery I wanted to tell other parents about ASAP—if your kid comments on one of your buzz posts, all your followers (as far as I can tell) can see that comment, even if they aren’t following your kid themselves. And it looks like you can only comment on buzz if you have made your Google profile public, so that means any other followers can click through to your child’s profile.
(Obviously this applies to any Buzz user, but I thought parents might be particularly concerned about their kids’ email privacy.)
If I’m understanding things correctly, you can follow people on Buzz (in Buzz? do we have grammar for this yet?) without making your Google Profile public. But in order to comment on (public) Buzz or write public Buzz yourself, you must make your Google Profile public. You may have done this automatically when you first clicked the Buzz link yesterday.
If I’ve got this wrong, please let me know and I’ll correct it. I tested it with Scott’s account—his Google Profile is private, and when I tried to comment on my account’s buzz from his account (you following this, LOL?), I got a pop-up saying he had to make his profile public in order to comment.
(Now, that was a PUBLIC buzz. Do you have to have a public profile to comment on a PRIVATE buzz?)
So okay, you know I love me my social media, but I love my kids’ email privacy even more. If your kids want to be able to Buzz, it might be a good idea to encourage minimalist profiles for them. Especially since, as I understand it, Buzz is going to be searchable via Google.
Oh, and in case you don’t know, you can turn Buzz off (and back on) by clicking a tiny link at the bottom of your gmail screen.
More to come as we continue to figure Buzz out. I do like the threaded conversations, but my first response to Buzz is that it’s too pushy. I love Twitter and Facebook, as you know, but I like having to make the extra effort to click there. My gmail inbox is already an overwhelming presence—I don’t know that I want MORE stuff in it. However, buzz can be filtered into folders like other gmail, so that can help cut down on inbox clutter at least.
UPDATED: In addition to having your kids keep their profiles either private (but then they can’t post or comment on public buzz) or very bare bones, with no personal info, you might also want to take a look at your own Google profile. The default setting publicly displays lists of everyone you follow, and everyone who follows you. And when you first activate buzz, these follower/followee lists are made up of 1) the people you follow/are followed by in Google Reader and 2) the email contacts you write most often. (!) So if you don’t want your Aunt Effie to know you’re g-chatting daily with her arch-enemy, your Aunt Prunella, you might want to uncheck those boxes.
(Or you could just ditch Buzz altogether. There is that.)
Buzz, Google Buzz, Social Media, social networks
January 21, 2010 @ 7:07 pm | Filed under: Books, Social Media
The other day I mentioned two book-related social media platforms I use: GoodReads (faithfully) for logging the books I’ve read, and LibraryThing (sporadically) for cataloging the books we own.
I’ve experimented with several other platforms—
• BookGlutton is growing on me. It’s an ebook reader for your browser, with some nifty features built in. You can write notes in the margins, and other people can see these notes and comment back—so just imagine, we could all read a book together and discuss it page by page if we wanted.
For example, if you click on that widget it’ll open to the first page of the book, and there’s a chat window (the TALK button on the left) and a place to write margin notes (the MARK button on the right). Has possibilities, no?
(I’m curious—did the widget add to this page’s download time?)
• BookBalloon—a forum for discussion about books and the arts. Every time I visit I wish I had more time to participate there. Very high caliber of conversation. There’s a monthly book club, author interviews, all sorts of good stuff.
• Readernaut—same concept as GoodReads, I think?
• Reading Trails—a place to create lists of related books, in that rabbit-traily way that appeals to so many of us.
And a few I’ve not yet explored:
• aNobii
• Shelfari (I see the Shelfari widget all over the place; it’s the one that looks like a real bookshelf.)
What have you tried? What’s your favorite way to talk about books online?
book lovers, ebooks, Social Media
January 16, 2010 @ 7:45 am | Filed under: Computer stuff, Social Media
I’ve long been aware that I am somewhat sloppy in my approach to link-saving and -sharing. I “like,” I share, I tweet, I deem certain items Delicious, I upload to Flickr, I send to Facebook. I seldom Stumble, but recently I began to Tumbl. I log the books I’ve read at GoodReads and am slowly cataloging the books I own at LibraryThing. And those are just the social media I use regularly. The number of things I’ve tried out—well, a free Evernote account would scarcely accommodate the list.
It may be a bit of overkill, but the thing is, I really do use all these media in different ways. Lately I’ve been trying to streamline and simplify how I use them, and I feel like things are starting to run pretty efficiently.
• Delicious. In the past I’ve used this social bookmarking site sporadically to share links here on the blog. The Postalicious plug-in makes it super easy to autopost links. As of this week, I am keeping my ongoing books-I’d-like-to-read list at Delicious as well. When I read a post about an intriguing book, I save it to Delicious with a TBR tag. I should have started this practice a long time ago.
• Tumblr. While I use Delicious for links I want to share with other people (and the TBR list), my newish Tumblr account is a catch-all just for me. After that frustrating lapse the other week when I couldn’t remember where I read an article I very much wanted to refer to again, I decided I needed a journal for my online reading. I keep my book log so faithfully, but what about the zillions of posts and articles I read on the web? Enter Tumblr. I’m trying to be good about tagging so I can find things again, and I’m trying to cultivate a habit of Tumbling everything of substance I read online. Everything! It’s a tall order.
(And why not just bookmark posts via my browser or Google toolbar? Because the bookmark lists quickly become too long and unwieldy. Tumblr, with tags, is faster.)
So, in a nutshell:
Delicious for links I want to share on the blog, and for the TBR list.
Tumblr for a record of my online reading.
GoodReads for a record of the books I’ve read.
LibraryThing to catalog the books I own. (But really, I haven’t taken a whack at this giant task in months. It’s not a priority.)
Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family. Say what you will, I love Facebook. Today, out of the blue, I heard from a high-school friend I lost touch with after graduation, but whom I’ve never forgotten. She played Sally in a school production of Snoopy, the Musical. Whenever my kids play that soundtrack—which is often—I think of Lisa. Amazing singer. What a delight it was to find a note from her on my Facebook page today. Facebook, I heart you.
Twitter for quick recording of funny kid moments, quick info-searching (as when I had a question about garam masala powder last night and within seconds of tweeting the question, found myself in conversation with a very friendly author of Indian cookbooks), and participating in dynamic conversations among the various communities I belong to: writers, homeschoolers, booklovers, etc.
Flickr for the easiest way to share photos with family and friends.
Google Reader Shared Items for blog posts I want to bring to other people’s attention—this autoposts to my sidebar.
Related post: A Day in the Life of My iPod Touch
December 12, 2009 @ 9:14 pm | Filed under: Books, Fun Learning Stuff, Social Media
I sleep with my iPod under my pillow. No, not because I love it so much that I can’t stand to be parted from it even while sleeping, but because I am nursing my 11-month-old, and the Touch lets me read in the dark, with one hand, without disturbing the baby or my slumbering husband.
6:20 a.m. It’s still dark when I wake. In a few minutes I will try to slip out of bed without rousing the baby—Scott is already up with Wonderboy, our earlybird—but right now, in this peaceful hush before the rest of the gang arises, I stretch my legs against the cool sheets and reach for the iPod. I wage a brief war against the temptation to check my email first, and thumb iBreviary, a 99 cent app containing the Divine Office, the daily prayers of the Catholic Church. I try to pray the Invitatory and the Office of Readings first thing in the morning.
Then a quick email check. I loathe typing on the iPod’s touch screen, so I tend to read a lot more mail than I answer. Guilt!
6:45 a.m. Time to get up. But first, a 30-second dip into the SignSmith app, where I’m trying to learn at least one new ASL sign a day. Today’s word: exaggerate. And finally, a quick visit to the Louvre via the museum’s free app. Free! How terrific is that? Today I land on Vermeer’s The Lacemaker. The image is zoomed in close on the woman’s face and hands. I admire her careful concentration, her butter-colored gown. My baby is stirring. I’m up, I’m up.
10 a.m. The morning bustle is behind us and my older kids and I have taken to our books. We are reading The Odyssey aloud together: I from the battered paperback I brought home from college, and Beanie from the Classics app on my Touch. They are different translations; my hard copy is Albert Cook’s verse translation, and Beanie’s is a prose version. Sometimes we’ll read a passage twice, hers and mine, to hear the contrast. It’s working really well for us; I’m enjoying the girls’ enthusiasm for Homer. Not everything I attempt with the kids runs smoothly, but The Odyssey is a big hit.
10:45 a.m. Bean and Rose take turns playing with the MathTables app, which is basically math facts drill turned into a game. I noticed that even Scott got sucked into that one the other day. Then Beanie wants to explore some of the very cool mental-arithmetic tricks in the Mathemagics app I bought for Jane.
11:15 a.m. I’m nursing the baby and there’s a bit of a lull. From my rocking chair, I use the iPod’s Remote app to access iTunes on my laptop, which is sitting on a counter across the room. I scroll through the possibilities…a little Mahalia perhaps? Once the music is playing, I check my email again and then I have time to squeeze in a two-minute game of Scramble, which is sort of like Boggle. Wonderboy asks if he can play a game. He’s fond of DoodleJump, and much better at it than I am. But his favorite app is Scribble Lite, a free drawing/painting program; it has entertained him in many a hospital exam room.
4:09 p.m. I’m at the YMCA. Rose is downstairs in her gymnastics class, and I’ve dropped at my three youngest kids at the playroom. I dig out my earphones and decide what to listen to while I’m on the exercise bike. The latest News from Lake Wobegon podcast? This American Life? Or maybe an audiobook? Ooh, I just remembered that free download of Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe; that’s what I’ll try today.
4:42. The bike wore me out and now I’m sitting in the hall with the other gymnastics parents. I am momentarily irritated to realize I left my book at home. I’ll catch up on my article-reading instead; before I left home I downloaded a number of posts and articles to read offline via the Instapaper app, which is a favorite utility of mine. The iPod Touch requires a WiFi connection for internet access (unlike the iPhone), and there’s no WiFi at our YMCA. It’s the Y, not the Wi. The Instapaper app lets me save any web page or post I come across for downloading onto the iPod. I have an Instapaper button in my laptop’s Firefox toolbar, and when Mental Multivitamin links to a promising piece, or when I want to save a nice long Betty Duffy post for later reading, I click the Insta-button and am assured the post has been Saved. All I have to do is remember to open the app on my iPod before I leave home and click the refresh button. That downloads the latest string of articles to the iPod, and now I can read them anytime, without need of a WiFi connection.
11:06 p.m. Bedtime. Scott is closing up the house and I’m snuggled in the dark next to the baby, who is making creaking sounds like a rocking chair. I click on my Lexulous app to see if my friend Anne Marie, who lives in Virginia, has played her next move in our ongoing Scrabble game. She is beating me, as usual. I’m a decent Scrabble player, but Anne Marie is killer. Then it’s back to iBreviary for Night Prayer. And then, if I’m still awake, I open my beloved Stanza app, my favorite of the e-readers I’ve tried. Right now I’m reading The Cricket on the Hearth, because I always crave a little Dickens in December. I really do. I’m not sure I’ve ever finished a Dickens book in December—who has time?—but I figure Cricket is short enough I might actually pull it off. And it cracks me up when Mrs. Peerybingle doesn’t lose her temper—she only mislays it for a while. Ha. Yes. I can relate.
I am asleep. The iPod is back under my pillow.
This post probably makes it sound like I am glued to the thing all day long. I’m not! Many hours pass between bursts of iPod activity. Also, I deliberately picked a YMCA day because that’s the only time I use the Touch to listen to things on audio. I don’t think I have ever used my earphones outside the gym!
People often ask how I manage to read so much (and I know I don’t read nearly as much as a lot of folks, but I suppose I do pretty well for a mom of six), and the convenience of the iPod Touch is a big part of how I’m able to squeeze literature, art, music, nonfiction, and other pursuits into the corners of my busy day. For me, it works a treat.
Related post: Two More Nifty Apps
app reviews, iPhone apps, iPod Touch, Social Media
October 25, 2007 @ 12:52 am | Filed under: Social Media
I confess that when I first heard about Twitter, I rolled my eyes. The concept seemed to me the ultimate in navel-gazing. Sharing our thoughts via blogs and feeds isn’t enough? We need little widgets for zapping out little thought-bulletins so that no writer need wait for the 20-minute chunk of time it takes to write a blog post? Do we really need more undeveloped, spontaneous fragments of one another’s thoughts flitting across our screens?
Then came the wildfires, and I became a Twitter convert, just like that. All week, the KPBS Twitter feed has provided the fastest updates on fire and evacuation news. Whoever is manning that feed is doing the work I don’t have time to do: listening to scanners, sifting through the TV and government-agency reports, compiling all the bits and pieces of information so crucial during an event like this—and getting that info out to the public as fast as it comes in.
This is practical information, not commentary or reflection. It’s topical, timely, a sort of 21st-century twist on the old phone tree."
Tower 23 in Pacific Beach is offering 12 hotel rooms to evacuees for the next 2 nights- call now 858-270-2323," twitters KPBS. If I were looking for a place to stay, this would be just the kind of pertinent, just-the-facts-ma’am information I would need.
Jonathon Mulholland ponders our changing news needs:
We really are approaching a turning point in news dissemination. We
want information quicker than traditional media sources can deliver, we
want it pushed to us at point of the event, and we want to be able to
engage with it as it happens.I was shocked to realise yesterday that I now consider even
traditional web news outlets to be ‘old’ and slow. I was frustrated
that I was getting quicker/better updates on the fires from Twitter
than from bbc.co.uk/news – and I’m of the generation that would rather
look up the news on BBC or CNN than wait till the evening bulletin!Surely traditional news outlets, and official news suppliers such as
government agencies, fire departments etc will start using new/social
media services as channels for disseminating official information. A
FEMA Twitter account, properly managed, would be a valuable service.
Easy for affected citizens to opt in or out of, and a quick fire method
for sending advice, updates and warnings.
This week’s fire news-watch has me reconsidering my initial dismissal of Twitter’s usefulness. I’m still not interested in the kind of breezy, trivial "right now I’m sitting in a Starbuck’s about to renew my library books online" kind of Twittering I saw when I first visited the home page. (The text-entry box at Twitter invites you to share with the world "what you are doing" right now.) I mean, enjoy your latte, but honestly I could put the three seconds it took to read that to much better use.
But event- or crisis-Twittering, there’s an idea with potential. You can set up your Twitter feed to be public or selected-viewers-only. That means that if there were a family crisis, you could get information out to your loved ones (and only your loved ones) rapidly, easily, instantly.
I’m thinking about other ways this technology could be useful. The "Blogging for a Cure" event, for example. Many of us across the kidlitosphere are posting regular updates with links to each day’s Robert’s Snow posts, and some bloggers have even set up post-schedules in their sidebar. It’s been great, having so much access to the information—but it does mean a lot of us have been duplicating efforts. (And I for one have dropped the ball on many a day.) Is there a way to use Twitter to update with links to each post as it airs? I don’t know; I’m just thinking out loud here.
In any case, Twitter is definitely an application with possibilities for good. The KPBS feed has made that quite clear.
