Avenue Design Studios has recently begun consulting with Discovery Christian Church on a social media outreach program. Two Sundays ago, I sat in the contemporary worship service thinking of ways that the church could communicate beyond the pulpit. As a congregant, my favorite use of social media for church would be to use social media in church — I frequently write down meaningful verses or quotes on the back of the Sunday program which would be perfect to share online.
But is it okay to tweet in church? Churchgoers are more likely to tweet a message live, but how do pastors feel about their congregants using cell phones during the sermon? I looked for a precedent online, and read Anthony Coppedge’s e-book The Reason Your Church Must Twitter, but the book didn’t deal with the issue.
So I proposed the idea to Ryan Phipps, the campus pastor, and found that it wasn’t an issue. I wrote a statement that I suggested including in the Sunday program, and today Ryan surprised me by tweeting a pic of the printed statement — preceded by a headline that clearly answers my question:
When I first heard that a meet-up for web geeks was happening in Bloomfield, you can imagine my emotional response: I was pissed. I was disappointed that I hadn’t heard of the event until that day, and I already had plans. Luckily, that was just Build Guild Pittsburgh’s first monthly event, so don’t get pissed at me because you didn’t hear about today’s meet-up until just now.
What is Build Guild?
According to their website, “Build Guild is a monthly event (Occurs the 2nd Wednesday of every month) where folks in the web industry—designers, coders, project managers, hobbyists, etc.—can get together to talk web, debate industry topics, share ideas, make professional connections, land gigs, and discuss the real reasons why mustaches need to make a comeback.”
The meet-ups happen at Silky’s Pub in Bloomfield, and are very informal. If you’re familiar with the like-minded group Refresh Pittsburgh, the crowd is very similar, and you’ll probably see a few of the same folks. However, unlike Refresh, which has scheduled speakers, the only speakers you’ll be listening to at the Guild are you and whomever you’re talking to — think Geek Night or OpenCoffee Club without recruiters or venture capitalists.
And it’s in Bloomfield, which is pretty cool, or at least geeky enough.
I realize now why this didn’t entirely make sense at the time, but I did point Rob to a Discussion post on the Flickr: Bloomfield group where I encourage people to license their photos. Much like Creative Commons itself, I don’t think many people on Flickr use or even know about the Discussion feature, so I’m going to repost it here:
By default, photos added to Flickr are “All rights reserved”, which means that nobody can do anything with your work. Flickr encourages people to choose a Creative Commons license as an alternative to full copyright, which will still retain your rights to the work but allow others to use it if they give you proper credit. There are several different licenses to choose from, including some that don’t allow commercial uses of your work, and Flickr gives a good explanation of them all here.
The reason we encourage you to use Creative Commons is so that we (Bloomfield Development Corporation, a community nonprofit) can use your photos in the pages and blog posts on the Bloomfield Now website, and credit you when we do. Of course, this may help your work get published in other sources as well — my brother has had his Flickr photos published in Gothamist and Wikipedia.
FYI, I license all of my photos under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which means that anyone can use my photos for noncommercial purposes, including creating derivative works/remixes, as long as they give me credit.
If you want us to know that you have licensed your photos so we can use them on the site, just email me or respond to this topic.
Rob responded with some points of his own, so I know that at least one person read my post:
If only the general public could really get to understand the impacts of this sort of thing.
By loosening stranglehold on your content that “all rights reserved” implies, you allow for innovation. With photography for any sort of intellectual property, the moment you create it, under US law, it is by default copywritten by you. No paperwork needs to be filed, no words need to be said, its just an automatic license. Its great if whatever you’ve created you’d like no one else to do anything but look at. If, however, you’d like for your content to be shared with other folks who might like it, promoted, even remixed to create new things, if you don’t specify something other than copyright, all of the above acts are illegal.
So you can use creative commons, which as this point is serving up billions of licenses worldwide and has taken several precedents in court, to specify exactly who and how your content can be used.
I, much like Carman, use Attrib-NonCom-SA, so folks can share my work with whomever they want, as long as they dont sell it, and anything they make with it must be shared as well.
Just as much as Flickr was a remix of the idea of a photo sharing community, your ideas too can be used to create great new things, as long as you allow it to happen.
I mean this to be an informative post, but if any of my readers don’t use Creative Commons, I’d like to read why. Is it because you didn’t know about it, or is it because you’re a terrible person who never learned to share? Perhaps you’re a terribleperson who shares too much, or perhaps you do respect Creative Commons and like to blog about social media assholes who don’t. Discuss.
If you’re coming to PodCamp Pittsburgh this weekend, you probably either have a BlackBerry, an iPhone, or you’re an android. If you have a BlackBerry I still want to do a bump with you, but if you have an iPhone I suggest you download the free Bump app. We can still swap business cards, but how cool is this:
Bump makes it so easy to share contact information (or a photo of my cat) that even Justin Kownacki may want to meet you. So download the free app, update your contact information (I just added my AIM/Twitter user name) and get ready to fist bump like a Nobel Prize winner.
One week ago, we launched JohnCSimpson.com as the home base for the beauty industry icon for whom the domain was named. We had previously redirected the domain to John’s MySpace page, where he still connects with clients, colleagues and fans, but he was fast outgrowing that outpost. John’s new site brings together his blog, press mentions, a budding FAQ of beauty tips called “What Would John Simpson Do”, and his photos.
It is photos that I am going to focus on here. Not the photos themselves, nor the two ways we integrated John’s Flickr stream with his site, but the pic posting workflow: the laborious and unglamorous task of getting your photos online. This should prove useful to anyone who posts to both Flickr & Facebook.
In John’s case, we need to cross-post his pics to Flickr, Facebook and MySpace. You could do this by using a Flickr badge or any number of plugins instead of actually posting to Facebook Photos or MySpace Pics, and in the case of MySpace, this may not be a bad idea. But IMO, one of the best features of Facebook is the ability to tag photos.
When you “tag” someone in a Facebook photo, that friend gets an email alert, and who doesn’t know the thrill of getting the “[Your Friend] tagged a photo of you on Facebook” email? Most people are going to click that link to see what they look like in your photo, and there’s a good chance they’ll stick around to look at your other photos. This is social media.
Flickr2Facebook: Unofficial Flickr to Facebook Uploader
So we need to post the same photos to Flickr and Facebook, right? Sort of. Flickr is where you store your photos, but not necessarily where you showcase them. Some people move their pics directly from digital camera to Flickr, and you can choose to show only a subset of your photostream on your other sites. Also, a Flickr pro account lets you store your original photo, which is often too large for viewing on-screen. This would be overkill for Facebook, so you really only need to upload the medium size that Flickr shows by default.
We’ll semi-automate this process using Flickr2Facebook, a bookmarklet that you add to your browser. When you’re on the Flickr page of an image you want to upload to Facebook, you click the bookmarklet and then click this logo that appears over the image:
You may have to click “Login”, and then you can give the image a caption and add it to one of your Facebook albums. You can’t create an album here, so you’ll want to create it first in Facebook. By default, Flickr2Facebook uses your title as the caption, so you may not have to change a thing — I prefer to use my Flickr description for this, as it usually works better as a caption, so I just copy & paste it beforehand.
Once you click an album, you are taken there to approve the photo. If you’re uploading multiple photos, just go back to Flickr and repeat until all your photos have been uploaded, then approve them all at once. Now go tag your photos.
Any other recommendations you want to add to the process? Any questions?
G is having Rituxan (Rituximab) treatments as a preventative measure, which we are hopeful will prevent him from needing plasmapheresis. His first treatment was last Monday, and it went as smoothly as we could have hoped for. Smooth enough that despite, or perhaps because of the cocktail of drugs he gets during treatments, G decided to walk home. Thankfully, Scott & I were able to pull a U-ey on Liberty Avenue and pick him up across from West Penn at the gas station convenience store, a place where choosing chips while really really high goes largely unnoticed.
He reacts to Rituxan during treatment like many patients, and the other drugs are to treat those reactions. This is followed by soreness, especially in the joints, which will last at least a few days. After a few days of recovery he is able to move around normally, but every once in a while he’ll start to feel worse toward the end of the week, just before the next treatment: pain accompanied by a fever.
Unfortunately, with treatments early in the week, this has traditionally left us checking into the hospital during the weekends, which is usually when the regular doctors are off. The weekend doctors are usually replicants, and treat your symptoms without a proper understanding of the human condition. Some nurses are replicants, and you can tell because they won’t laugh at “I got a fever, and the only prescription…is more call bell”.
X-ray Courtesy of Emergency Radiology
I gave G acetaminophen for his headache, which is what they give him in the hospital, but since he hates pills and went against my advice to get a prescription, he had nothing stronger for the pain. The nausea was something new, and quite frankly I didn’t appreciate him launching a new symptom during a new episode of Mad Men, but he has never been a fan of the show. At 102° F, his vomitous defiling of the trash can had muffled enough dialogue that we had to go to the ER, where they have two televisions and they will leave you alone for hours.
Now being the weekend, I expected the ER doctors to be replicants, but everyone was very cool. Dr. Martin and nurse David who is fine with being called Dave had some of the best bedside manners I’ve seen. By the time we got there, the Tylenol had taken care of his fever, but he was extremely dehydrated due to not being able to drink water without interrupting Mad Men. The doctor understood this and gave G narcotics, nausea medication and saline so that he would finally let me watch the new episode, which AMC repeats at 1 AM. A few hours later, to play it safe, the doctors decided to admit G.
The problem came around 8 AM when G called me to tell me that he was on floor E8, and wasn’t getting his medications. Apparently his nurse was supposed to bring them and never returned, and was not responding to the call bell despite him being able to hear her talking loudly outside his room. If this sounds like a horror movie, you’re having the same reaction I did, except you’re probably awake. The best course of action I could determine was to be really rich and call my many powerful lawyers and private doctors. Plan B was to tell G to call his doctor, but when he called me back to tell me they were closed for Labor Day, I wasn’t awake enough to tell him to stay on the phone to reach the attending on call.
G also told me he was going to check out, and I appreciated the advance notice, because in the past he hasn’t let me in on his plans to escape. This was my cue to head back to the hospital, so I got up and called his doctor while picking out a nice pair of socks. I dressed business casual because replicants will treat you with more respect if you look good, and G looked pretty bad.
Shift change happens at 7 AM, so neither Dr. Martin nor Dave were still in the ER. By the time I got to his room, the new nurse and a doctor were there giving him drugs. Of course, the doctor asked him the same questions every other doctor had already asked him, which I’m pretty sure is their way of proving that we aren’t replicants. I assumed it was my phone call that got G his meds, because they were already there before anyone noticed my shoes.
I spoke to G a few hours ago, and he actually did get to speak with his doctor, Dr. K, whom we love. She explained that there were no available beds on the usual floor, which is why she had to put him on the “snail floor”. I felt better knowing that they were slow with everyone and weren’t treating him worse because he was wearing pajama bottoms, and even better that Dr. K was able to light a fire under the snails. Which were now escargot.
Dr. K also thinks G’s soreness is caused by the steroid they usually give him during Rituxan treatment. She had ordered them not to do so this time, so somebody got yelled at. I’m anxious to see what happens tomorrow without the steroid, and hopeful that G can come home on Wednesday, because I really hate cooking for myself.
I’m heading back to the hospital soon. I’ll probably dress casual for Labor Day.
I’m not sure how many people ever really thought that I might be PittGirl. Considering that I don’t follow professional sports, rarely watch the legitimate news, almost never blog and haven’t been to church in ages, I’m going to guess only one. Now that Ginny has outed herself and only the most paranoid person would still think I might be her, here’s the story of why one person thought I was a drag blogger:
Dawn was taking acetaminophen and hydrocodone for her hypochondria, and shortly after popping a prescribed pill, convinced herself that I was PittGirl.
I recently bought an iPhone because it turns out that my BlackBerry was not waterproof — it is a long story and does not make me look good. I’ve only downloaded one app so far (TweetDeck), since my main use of this particular rounded box of Apple is as a phone. I haven’t even chosen desktop wallpaper, because I have no problem with Earth, but I could not live with the default ringtone.
Rather than offing myself, I decided to change the ringtone. I was surprised to discover that although Apple has pre-loaded the iPhone with no less than twenty-five ringtones, not one of them defines me as a person. Apparently, there are no less than twenty-six types of people.
Ringtones represent a small revenue stream for Apple, since you can convert songs purchased through the iTunes store into ringtones for 99¢ per track — if the track has the bell symbol. I cannot afford $.99 because I just bought an expensive phone, so I decided to utilize one of Apple’s free features and make the damn thing myself using iTunes 8.
This process only works with DRM-free songs, so I chose an album I had purchased from Amazon.com: Has Been by William Shatner. “Common People” is actually my favorite track on that album, and one of my favorite songs of all time, but I’ve always felt that Henry Rollins would make a good ringtone. I’ve shared the “I Can’t Get Behind That” ringtone with a few good people on Twitter.
If you’re wondering what I’ve been up to lately, Pop City ran an article today that sums it up nicely:
Six new startups have joined AlphaLab, a software incubator on the South Side that fosters the growth of software, Internet and entertainment technology companies in the region.
Created by Innovation Works, the most active investor in seed-stage companies in Pittsburgh, AlphaLab companies participate in an intensive, 20-week program and receive a $25,000 investment, office space and business mentoring from a team of industry experts.
Scott Connelly and I have founded AJAX Street, Inc. as one of those companies. We’re currently developing web-based software that saves time, money and aggravation for organizations with print communication needs. You can read our description in the article, and I’d love to tell you more about it in person.
Tonight, @chrisbrogan asked for a *really* simple stumbleupon plugin instead of addthis/sharethis. I had been meaning to write a review of social bookmarking plugins, but what interested me more was his reference to research that says the “paradox of choice” actually cuts down on people using those bookmarking tools.
I haven’t seen the research, but I was discussing this same theory with Justin Kownacki at a recent Refresh Pittsburgh meeting. In my own blog reading, I find that I’m more likely to click on a bookmarking link if I’m given only one or two options than if I’m faced with an overwhelming choice of bookmarking sites.
If you’re wondering what I mean by “paradox of choice”, you can read The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, or scan the reviews. If you’re wondering what I mean by social bookmarking plugins, I’m talking about those image or text links at the end of a blog post to add/share/bookmark that post on social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and many others:
The Criteria
Link Options
In Chris’s case, he only wants a link to StumbleUpon, which gives him the most traffic. Since he knows where people are finding his content, he wants to support them there. And since readers are more likely to click one link than two, he wants to drive his traffic to the best service rather than split it between several, or lose them to overwhelming choice.
“More” Link
However, some readers may have a preferred bookmarking site that differs from the author’s, so my criteria for a social bookmarking plugin is going to include the option to add to other services — a “more” link.
Customization
As a designer, a second criterion of mine is customization — whether through the plugin’s settings or my theme’s CSS and PHP code — since I don’t want the plugin to look the same on all of my site designs. In Chris’s case, he wants a big fat simple button. Since most social bookmarking plugins use small icons, this will probably need to be a custom graphic.
News Feed
Another consideration may be whether the plugin adds links to the blog’s feed or just to the site. I know that FeedBurner’s FeedFlare™ is added to both, but its text images are not customizable, nor aesthetically pleasing IMO.
The Plugins
To find the best social bookmarking plugin based on these criteria, I used Mashable’s “30+ Plugins to Make Your WordPress Blog More Social” as a guide. I chose nine plugins based on that list, and review them here in alphabetical order:
Bookmark Me includes an impressive list of international sites, but does not have a “more” option, nor does it add links to RSS feeds.
I Love Social Bookmarking displays links in a drop down menu to save on load time. The settings provide good customization from within the admin panel, but to remove the plugin’s logo from your site, you will need to edit the image or your CSS. No RSS or “more” options.
obsocialbookmarker was annoying just to install, and wasn’t any easier to set up. The filter which displays services by country seemed nifty, but only gave me three choices for USA. The International option let me choose “Stumble it”, but the rest of the customization options left much to be desired. No RSS or “more” options.
Sociable allows ordering of site links, something I hadn’t yet considered, but no “more” link.
Social Bookmarking RELOADED was a little difficult to customize, partly because I had to manually un-click each site link that I did not want. No “more” link or RSS feed options made me UNLOAD this one.
Social Bookmarks is the plugin that Social Bookmarking RELOADED was based off of, but with different icons. I prefer RELOADED, but would not choose either plugin.
SociBook was confusing to set up, and only partly because of the broken English. Customization through the administration panel is limited, but it does provide an easy way to use custom icons. There are no RSS or “more” options, and I couldn’t get the plugin to work on my test site (WordPress version 2.6.2).
SocioFluid has a cool factor because it keeps the icons small until the reader mouses over them, similar to the Mac taskbar. A decent amount of customization can be done in the settings page, but no RSS or “more” options, and the plugin didn’t work correctly on my test site.
So which plugin is best?
Unsurprisingly, I found Bookmarkify best met my criteria. It has an excellent selection of links, including the requisite “more” link, and also a link to share the post by email. Most of the plugins I tested include the most popular social bookmarking sites, but if you need a less common site, you may need to find a specific plugin that includes it.
By default, Bookmarkify’s code is included in the RSS, but you can check a box to exclude it from the feed. As far as customization, Bookmarkify’s settings page provides the choice of placement at either the top or bottom of posts, or a custom option which requires template modification. The settings also list all of the relevant style classes to customize with CSS — these do not include the More Box, but by viewing the site code you can find out these classes easily. And since the images are all hosted in the blog’s plugins folder, they can be customized.
The only feature that this plugin lacks is the ability to chose where to display its code within the blog, such as single posts, single pages, home page, excerpts, archives etc. The settings page does offer the PHP code to call the plugin, so presumably this can be achieved by editing the theme’s template pages.
I’ve activated Bookmarkify on this blog, as seen below.
![[Digg]](http://www.carmanavenue.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.carmanavenue.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Email]](http://www.carmanavenue.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
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