I had the oppor­tu­nity to talk with Joe Schueller of P&G sev­eral times in the past weeks, and I found the expe­ri­ence extremely reward­ing. Joe is an Inno­va­tion Man­ager in Proc­ter & Gamble’s Global Busi­ness Ser­vices organization.

We talked about the econolypse and its impact of busi­nesses like P&G. See the orig­i­nal post on the Enter­prise 2.0 blog. Joe makes some great points:

1. P&G had already been work­ing to damp the cycles of oscil­la­tion and impacts based on things like the rise in gas prices in 2008. The new down­turn has just sharp­ened focus.

2. Joe believes that P&G has grown intol­er­ant of duplica­tive work, for example.

3. He quotes the CEO of P&G, who stated recently that the com­pany has many, many net­works of smart peo­ple, and the trick is to get them to find each other and dream up new ways to deliver great products.

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Both ser­vices are ver­sa­tile, but WP has pulled ahead

Matt Mul­len­weg, CC photo by Robert Scoble

People still ask us all the time which blog­ging plat­form they should use. (Micro-answer: It depends on what’s impor­tant to you.) A few weeks back the team here stared down the issue our­selves when we made the deci­sion to switch Socialmedia.biz from Type­Pad to WordPress.

Why did we do it? Let me explain.

First, a word of praise for Type­Pad. I began blog­ging in May 2001 after inter­view­ing Dave Winer, Doc Searls and Dan Gill­mor on the sub­ject for this piece in OJR. They looked like they were not only hav­ing fun but doing some­thing that mat­tered. So I started on a Manila blog, switched to Mov­able­Type, and then became one of TypePad’s early cus­tomers when Ben and Mena Trott of Six Apart rolled out what was then the Mer­cedes Benz of blog­ging platforms.

By that time I was fairly com­fort­able with CSS and Advanced Tem­plates, so the cookie-cutter offer­ings of Blog­ger or Live­Jour­nal never appealed to me. Besides, my blog was evolv­ing from per­sonal com­men­tary about media to a busi­ness focus on social media, and I rechris­tened New Media Mus­ings as Socialmedia.biz in 2005. Type­Pad gave me the abil­ity to design a slick-looking blog with rich, archived con­tent and even some third-party doohick­eys in the sidebar.

But over at Word­Press, a rev­o­lu­tion was brew­ing — and finally reached the point where I could no longer ignore its pull. In WordPress.org, Matt Mul­len­weg (pic­tured above) offered a free, open source plat­form that thou­sands of devel­op­ers were cod­ing for. (We opted for self-hosting rather than the hosted wordpress.com ver­sion.) Some­where between 2007 and 2008, WP became not only com­pa­ra­ble to Type­Pad, but bet­ter. Not because of Matt’s cod­ing prowess, but because of the power of crowd­sourced devel­op­ment. I now find myself attend­ing Word­Press Camps, along­side Bar­Camps, Social Media Camps and other open media efforts born of my involve­ment with Ourmedia.org.

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One of the short­com­ings of Twit­ter is that it can be find to hard to find peo­ple — even peo­ple that you’re fol­low­ing — when you don’t have their Twit­ter ID right smack in front of your nose. Sure, you can go hunt­ing and peck­ing in Tweet­Deck, or do a Google or Twit­ter peo­ple search, but that’s a pain.

Some­times it can make for a guess­ing game. What’s Doc Searls’ Twit­ter han­dle again? Not www.twitter.com/docsearls (if you go there you’ll get Twitter’s “That page doesn’t exist” mes­sage, shown at top. Doc is actu­ally at @dsearls. It may not be a large num­ber, but I’d guess that at least a few peo­ple type twitter.com/docsearls into their Web browser and leave, assum­ing that Doc doesn’t Twit­ter, when his tweets are well worth following.

Sim­i­larly, you won’t find Amy Gahran at @amygahran, but at @agahran. Rebecca MacK­in­non and Hunt­ley Tar­rant, smartly, have short­ened their Twit­ter han­dles to @rmack and @huntleymt, respec­tively, though have no point­ers there.

Now, I’m no scold, but I don’t like wast­ing time, and it takes only a few sec­onds for any­one to claim their real name on Twit­ter (assum­ing no one else has grabbed it), and then point peo­ple to the Twit­ter ID that you pre­fer. And more impor­tant, by claim­ing your real name on Twit­ter, you’ll be head­ing off some pos­si­ble mis­chief down the road, as some squat­ter may swoop in, steal your iden­tity and use it for unto­ward purposes.

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I’ve been argu­ing for some time that jour­nal­ists need to embrace the best ele­ments of social media — going beyond the new media and mul­ti­me­dia ele­ments of the craft devel­oped over the past 15 years to develop a true con­ver­sa­tion about the news with mem­bers of their communities.

In the past few weeks I’ve begun ply­ing the waters to see who’s begun to take advan­tage of the new social tools now avail­able to all of us, in prepa­ra­tion for an online course I’ll be giv­ing, along with Paul Gillin and Michele McLel­lan, at the Poyn­ter Institute’s News U. start­ing next month about how news orga­ni­za­tions can incor­po­rate social media in their news offer­ings. (The lessons are equally applic­a­ble to cor­po­ra­tions, gov­ern­ment agen­cies, non­prof­its and other institutions.)

Here’s the first of four seg­ments in the series: a 23-minute audio pod­cast with Chicago Tri­bune gen­eral assign­ment reporter James Janega about his use of social media tools, par­tic­u­larly Twit­ter, in his report­ing for the paper.

Stream or down­load the inter­view (time: 23:28):

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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At South By South­west Inter­ac­tive in Austin Texas, two weeks ago — inside the blog­gers lounge — I ran into Julia Kagan­skiy, the social media and com­mu­nity man­ager for Unigo.com.

If you haven’t heard of Unigo, you will. It’s a crowd­sourced col­lege guide that offers hon­est appraisals of life at hun­dreds of U.S. col­leges, includ­ing the abil­ity to find out what it’s like to major in a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject on a col­lege campus.

Crowd­sourc­ing doesn’t always work, but when users know their sub­ject — and col­lege stu­dents know their cam­puses — it can pro­duce a more use­ful, authen­tic and accu­rate pic­ture than that pro­duced by tra­di­tional infor­ma­tion sources. Julia says putting an edi­to­r­ial fil­ter on crowd­sourced con­tent “sets it apart” and increases the sig­nal level, and I think a lot of sites are find­ing the same thing.

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Stowe Boyd, a long­time fix­ture in the tech and social media worlds, is join­ing Socialmedia.biz as a con­trib­u­tor and col­lab­o­rat­ing strate­gist. The fol­low­ing orig­i­nally appeared in his blog /Message.

Geolo­ca­tion tools fall into two broad categories:

• Pre­dic­tive loca­tion, gen­er­ally ori­ented toward arrang­ing to meet with other peo­ple when trav­el­ing to other places (like Dopplr and TripIt), or in your own town (like Mixin)
• Loca­tion stream­ing, gen­er­ally ori­ented to keep­ing oth­ers informed of loca­tion (like Google Lat­i­tude, Dodge­Ball, Plazes, or Brightkite), either for arrang­ing meet­ings, or to main­tain a geolo­ca­tional lifestream.

I have used tools in both cat­e­gories, and writ­ten about my expe­ri­ences with them.

Most recently, I have been using Dopplr for pre­dic­tive pur­poses, and Brightkite for loca­tion stream­ing. But in recent weeks, I have found that Brightkite is too rich an expe­ri­ence, over­lap­ping too much with what I am doing with other tools, par­tic­u­larly Twit­ter as my pri­mary lifestream, and the var­i­ous blogs I main­tain on Tum­blr. Per­haps it is also that I don’t have a deep sense of com­mu­nity on Brightkite.

One thing in par­tic­u­lar annoys me about Brightkite, and that is the Twit­ter inte­gra­tion. While they have pro­vided a sophis­ti­cated template-based approach to post­ing tweets based on Brightkite loca­tion updates, the tool to sup­port updat­ing Twit­ter loca­tion in the user pro­file is just bro­ken. When I post ‘542 Bran­nan St, San Fran­cisco CA 94107′ the Twit­ter loca­tion gets set to ‘542 Bran­nan St’ drop­ping the city, state, and zip code.

I was quite happy to stum­ble upon a small but beau­ti­ful loca­tion stream­ing tool the other day, called Twiphlo. It seems like the main win­dow is designed for a mobile inter­face use, like iPhone. The basic idea is that you can post some­thing, while at the same time updat­ing your Twit­ter pro­file location.

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The Face­book pho­tos appli­ca­tion has been by far Facebook’s biggest suc­cess: The easy to use inter­face for upload­ing pics from your com­puter and then bril­liant point-and-click tag­ging of friends has proved intensely viral. There are now more than 15 bil­lion pho­tos on Face­book, mak­ing it the largest col­lec­tion of pic­tures in human his­tory. More than 850 mil­lion new pho­tos are uploaded a month with no signs of slow­ing down, and Facebook’s servers dis­play 20 bil­lion pho­tos every month.

The ques­tion is: How many of those pic­tures are of you? Well, you know how many of them you’ve been tagged in but how many pho­tos are out there that you have no idea about? A new appli­ca­tion launched today aims to answer that question.

Photo Finder will go through all the albums in Face­book that your account has access to — their fast, pow­er­ful and accu­rate facial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­ogy will scan Face­book to find untagged pho­tos and let you browse through the results. There’s no need to train Photo Finder, it does it all auto­mat­i­cally. Photo Finder shows you all of the results sorted by accu­racy or date, let­ting you review its find­ings so that future searches become more accu­rate. With Photo Finder you also get noti­fied when­ever a photo of you gets posted, even if no one tagged it. Photo Finder lets you know first and gives you the chance to hide poten­tially embar­rass­ing pho­tos from other Photo Finder users.

Photo Finder also has the abil­ity to push infor­ma­tion on newly dis­cov­ered pho­tos to your FB news feed, giv­ing this app a real chance to go viral as more and more peo­ple dis­cover pics they never knew about.

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We’re con­tin­u­ing to exper­i­ment with offer­ing the lat­est, most use­ful set of tools and resources around social media while mak­ing robust use of Word­Press plug-ins. So you’ll see addi­tional changes here in the com­ing days and months.

One wid­get we like is from Slideshare.net, which can be con­fig­ured as a ver­ti­cal or hor­i­zon­tal wid­get. (A wid­get is sim­ply a piece of soft­ware code that runs inde­pen­dently and does some­thing use­ful, like bring you the lat­est news headlines.)

Today, Slideshare.net hosted Pre­sen­ta­tion Camp, the first of a series of Bar­camps on the sub­ject of online slideshows (motto: “no more death by Pow­er­Point”). I had hoped to attend the event, held at Slideshare’s head­quar­ters in San Fran­cisco, but am too far behind on a num­ber of project dead­lines. But you can fol­low the tweets from those in atten­dance at Twit­ter Search.

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I just returned from a week of con­fer­ences. I started up at Search­Fest in Port­land, OR (put on by the dom­i­na­tors of search—SEMpdx) and ended in Austin, TX where I par­took in both the Pub­Con and SXSW fes­tiv­i­ties. Let me just say…I am tired. What is it about us geeky types? Put all of us in the same city, with our iPhones, tweet­streams, free cock­tails, and we are a happy, chatty group of brain­storm­ing power, but I digress …

The point is after a week of trav­el­ing and smooz­ing with the big­wigs of social media, one word lingers…sexy. Never have I been so engulfed by one phrase, “social media is sexy.” The ques­tion that pref­aced the response never mat­tered. The word sexy was like an excla­ma­tion point to every panel dis­cus­sion, every Q & A, every hand­shake I encountered.

So what does that mean? I have been an advo­cate of social media for quite some time, always push­ing past the buzz-worthy stereo­types and the crit­i­cisms that it is just a fad. I’ve pushed for mov­ing beyond the ini­tial excite­ment into a world of social media stan­dards, social media ana­lyt­ics and into an aware­ness that our efforts in this new mar­ket­ing realm will be fueled with a finite pur­pose lead­ing to a bottom-dollar gain.

How­ever, we seem to be stuck as to how best to cat­e­go­rize the pow­er­ful tool that lay before us. If social media is most accu­rately described as sexy then we are in fact say­ing it is “inter­est­ing, excit­ing, trendy.” While I agree with the first two adjec­tives, I also believe our depen­dency on this overused phrase unin­ten­tion­ally con­firms that social media is sim­ply a pass­ing thrill. Clearly we all know this isn’t the case. So I threw it out to the twit­ter stream in a truly sexy fash­ion, ask­ing, “What does it mean when some­one calls social media “sexy”? Here are the responses:

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Here’s a recent inter­view I did with Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini in the company’s San Fran­cisco offices. Wid­gets (lit­tle pieces of code that bring in real-time data) are becom­ing increas­ingly impor­tant in the Web 2.0 world — to indi­vid­u­als, com­pa­nies and orga­ni­za­tions — and Netvibes has been an early pio­neer in the field.

Netvibes pro­vides wid­gets and per­son­al­ized start pages to 2.5 mil­lion active users. You can access 146,970 dif­fer­ent wid­gets — all free — in the Netvibes Ecosys­tem sec­tion. Many wid­gets have only a small, tightly focused read­er­ship, but oth­ers have broader appeal. For exam­ple, the Tech­nol­ogy Review wid­get, fea­tur­ing head­lines and images that accom­pany recent arti­cles, has had 657,077 installs. (If you’re logged into Netvibes, you can install it here.)

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