Starting this afternoon, you can watch the keynotes of Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco via LiveStream (above). I'll be attending today's sessions but will miss the late afternoon keynotes because I'm giving a presentation on social media at the Commonwealth Club.

The live stream above should start at 3:45 pm Pacific time (6:45 pm EDT).

Here's the full Web 2.0 Expo agenda. Today's keynotes include:

• 3:45 pm PDT: Welcome
• 3:50 pm Kevin Kelly, author
• 4:10 pm Hal Varian, Google, on the Economic Impact of Google
• 4:25 pm Mari Baker, Moving Into Mobile and Social
• 4:35 pm Jessica Mah, Making Money with Metrics
• 4:45 pm Christian Crumlish & Erin Malone, Start Using UX as a Weapon
• 5:00 pm Dan Schulman, American Express
• 5:10 pm Rosalind W. Picard, New Technologies for Measuring Emotions
• 5:20 pm Ann Winblad and Robert Scoble

On Wednesday, starting at 4 pm PDT, speakers include Jennifer Aaker ("The Dragonfly Effect) and Red Hoffman of LinkedIn. Thursday's speakers are here, starting at 9 am PDT.

Web 2.0 Expo's hashtag is #w2e. Follow them on Twitter at @w2e.

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Want to be popular on Twitter? Here's how.

Is there a formula to be a trending topic on Twitter? After some successful experiences with some clients plus some very public data on trending topics, I've put together a ten-step guide on how to create a trending topic on Twitter. I think you'll be surprised by the techniques. Most of the advice is focused around energizing people during events.

Above is my appearance today on 7 Live, an interactive live Bay Area show that hits a lot of pop culture and technology issues. I mention three of the techniques.

To get the guide with all ten techniques, subscribe to my newsletter Spark Notes* (see the latest issue) and you'll receive your copy of "How to #Trend on Twitter" for free. Simply enter your email address below, then reply to the confirmation email, and I'll send you this valuable article for free.

The article is free and you can unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time.

Enjoy, and please let me know if you have any alternative suggestions.

Two new books chronicle a new era of participation

Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators
By Steve Rosenbaum
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
$17.90, hardcover
Buy it at Amazon.com

What's this? Even in an age of democratized media, where the barbarians have not only stormed the gates but made a nice bouillabaisse out of the media guardians formerly known as The Gatekeepers, there's a need for curators?

Well, yes. In fact, curators are needed now more than ever, Steve Rosenbaum argues in his fun, insightful, passionate and satisfying new book Curation Nation.

Curators, you might say, are the distant cousins of gatekeepers. Where gatekeepers once decided what news to dispense to a pliable, passive audience of mass media consumers -- and, just as important, what news not to dispense -- curators serve a different purpose. In this age of information overload, we need curators to find, organize, contextualize and repackage data to make it accessible to us. We're moving from an age of making stuff to one where we organize, filter and reconceptualize information.

Rosenbaum recounts a dinner conversation Esther Dyson had with Bill Gates, quoting Dyson:

Bill Gates uttered one of the smartest things he has ever said: "The future of search is verbs." To me, the meaning was clear: when people search, they aren't just looking for nouns or information; they are looking for action. They want to book a flight, reserve a table, buy a product, cure a hangover, take a class, fix a leak, resolve an argument, or occasionally find a person, for which Facebook is very handy. They mostly want to find something in order to do something. A lot of the social web is or will be directed towards helping people select stuff for other people, because the automated things get the topic, but not the meaning.

Enter the curators. "Curation, whether accidental or intentional, is rapidly becoming the future of media, commerce, and community," the author writes.

Aggregation as media's new business model

At turns serious and lighthearted, "Curation Nation" has a good deal of fun with the subject matter. In the chapter "Are Content Aggregators Vampires?," Rosenbaum lays out the varying contenders: Mark Cuban arguing that aggregators suck your blood and offer nothing of value, Seth Godin defending the value of aggregation and blogger Robert Scoble observing that the New York Times aggregates the work of its 1,100 staffers. (I don't agree: These folks are on the payroll. That's not aggregation as we understand the term in the digital age, and the Times pays for pretty much all of the content in its pages, unlike aggregation sites like the Huffington Post. But I agree with Robert's overall point. New media has wrought a new age -- so get used to it.)

Scoble offers solid advice to folks just getting into the game: "Pick some niche that you're passionate about that you can totally own. If somebody says something about that niche, you should be able to see it in real time and be able to explain it to other people. If you do that and do that well, then you're going to be able to build up for that."

In the end, Rosenbaum offers readers a roadmap for how to win at the curation game. He turns to various experts, like Chris Brogan, About.com founder Scott Kurnit and Twitter conference organizer Jeff Pulver, who offers this pithy gem: "Curate yourself."

Rosenbaum overstates the case on occasion, as when he declares (drumroll please): "Search is over. Curation has begun." In truth, traditional search will be wedded to social search -- what your friends recommend and, yes, what your network curates for you -- for years to come.

Mediactive
By Dan Gillmor
Publisher: Lulu
$14, paperback
Buy it at Lulu

'Mediactive" might well have been called "New Media Literacy 101," but I like the term that Dan Gillmor has coined to describe the new responsibilities thrust on us as both creators and active users of news and information in our hyperconnected age.

Besides, it's a sexier title.

Gillmor -- whose previous book, We the Media, chronicled the rise of citizen media -- here takes us on a tour of the churning, still-evolving media landscape, where blogs and independent websites figure prominently in the discussion alongside the usual traditional media giants of print, broadcast, cable, radio and the Web. It's an age not just of "radically democratized and decentralized creation and distribution" but also an era of "information confusion."

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An early screenshot from Ourmedia.org.
 

How an era was born: Ourmedia, YouTube & grassroots media

It's hard to fathom now, but six years ago YouTube, free video hosting and democratic video sharing didn't exist. Then, six years ago today, Ourmedia.org burst onto the scene and helped launch a video revolution.

The "media" part of social media has become so engrained in our culture in such a short time that it's worth looking back at how quickly things have changed -- and why it matters. (Given that the early history of the Internet is withering away, I'll try to be as detailed as possible.)

At the Supernova conference in June 2004, Marc Canter, one of the pioneers of Internet media and a true character in the startup world, and I had a long talk about the need for a free online service to host video and rich media, which we saw as the next stage of the Internet’s evolution. I was spending time among creatives like digital storytellers and video producers who had created amazing stories that were locked away in people’s computers with no way to share them. Marc had already carved out a reputation as the go-to geek for creating online communities with open standards.

And so we envisioned a site that would host thousands, and eventually millions, of amateur works: grassroots videos, podcasts (just invented), independent films, photo and art galleries, Flash animations, video diaries, documentary journalism, home-brew political ads, music videos, children's tales, student films, multimedia presentations and more. The site would have to be free. And the works would be stored online -- forever.

It was, of course, a preposterous idea. Other video hosting sites had sprung up, but none offered free hosting and free bandwidth -- something that was still awfully expensive.

Birth of a genius idea: Free video hosting & bandwidth

Dave Toole, JD Lasica, Brewster Kahle, Doug Kaye and Morty Wiggins at lunch in the Presidio.

We went to work to make it happen. This would be a public commons of shared creativity, not a closed system operated for profit. So instead of trekking to Sandhill Road for VC funding, we sat down with Brewster Kahle, the quixotic genius behind the nonprofit Internet Archive, who took the millions he made selling Alexa Internet to Amazon.com and poured it into an effort to archive the entirety of the World Wide Web on servers in San Francisco, the Netherlands and Alexandria, Egypt. (Think your website from the mid-‘90s is gone? Check out the Archive’s Wayback Machine.)

The Archive was then a prim, buttoned-down place for storing vetted digital collections – sort of an online version of the Library of Congress. It was, in short, a place for historians, scholars, librarians and researchers – not a place for the unwashed democratic masses.

We persuaded Brewster to open up the Archive for a six-month experiment. We would create a new site, Ourmedia.org, with a team of programmers from India and Canada. All the posts, comments and the front-end UI would take place on Ourmedia, while all the media files would live on the Archive’s servers. Ross Mayfield, meanwhile, donated a free wiki from Socialtext for about 200 volunteers from a dozen countries around the world to collaborate on the site’s front end. It was all built on Drupal, the open source publishing platform.

Yes, we came before YouTube was born

It proved to be unwieldy, chaotic, maddening – and a thing of beauty. The world’s first free media hosting site, open to anyone in any country. (While it was free to small Web publishers, we placed restrictions on large commercial operations. They already had places to serve their media; this project was intended for our media.)

Let the record show: We launched on March 21, 2005 – a month before a newcomer called YouTube opened its beta doors and two months before Blip.tv was born.

As I wrote at the time:

"Marc and I believe that real change in the mediasphere will only come about when millions of us pick up the tools of digital creativity. The tools are now at hand. Let’s go."

A simple Slashdot post of two sentences on the day of our launch generated 327 comments – and knocked out our servers for half a day.

By launch, we had assembled a world-class Advisory Board: Lawrence Lessig, Doc Searls, Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold, the Harvard Berkman Center’s Charles Nesson, author David Bollier and Steve Rosenbaum, Leslie Rule and other luminaries.

Journalism.co.uk covered our launch, noting that we got 20,000 visitors in our first 24 hours. "The site is free to use and is likely to have particular appeal for video bloggers and podcasters: popular files usually mean costly data bills but Ourmedia will host files for free," they reported. "The founders hope that the site will become a rich repository of shareable digital media including documentaries, student films, grassroots political adverts and artwork."

Andy Carvin at Digital Divide Network (and now NPR's social media wiz) spotted its significance right away:

Today is the official launch of Ourmedia.org, which I checked out over the weekend prior to the official launch. I can’t remember the last time a new website launch has had me so excited. The idea behind Ourmedia is really simple: it’s a community where anyone who creates online media – video blogs, podcasts, photos, you name it – can have a place where they can publish it and share it with others.

This may not seem like a big deal, but it really is an important step forward in the world of online citizen journalism. Now, you don’t need your own Web host to store that killer 50 meg video file you’ve just produced. Just become a member of Ourmedia, use their upload tool, and presto …

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Social Marketing to the Business Customer
by Paul Gillin and Eric Schwartzman
Wiley, 250 pages, hardcover, $16.09 on Amazon

Istill run into executives and top-tier managers who think of social networking as an employee productivity drain. For anyone who shares a similar point of view, run to your nearest bookstore and pick up a copy of "Social Marketing to the Business Customer" by Paul Gillin and Eric Schwartzman (disclosure: I'm friends with both authors).

The book is chock full of meaty, real-world examples of how to grow your business using B2B and B2C strategies and tactics. The authors show how companies can use social media to forge deep, productive relationships with customers and lure new customers into the fold.

To take a few examples: The authors explain how a Midwestern distributor of solar panels could use Twitter's advanced search feature to scout out anyone discussing the term "solar panels" within a 100-mile radius of Chicago.

Channeling Shel Israel in "Twitterville," they cite a Dell senior manager Richard Binhammer's admonition: "Don't waste your time trying to convert atheists. Work on the agnostics in the room -- doubters who might be turned into believers through conversation."

The authors devote a chapter to search, revealing some of the tactics that social marketers (including our merry crew here at Socialmedia.biz) use to suss out keywords that customers are using to discuss your business -- and where they're discussing it. Sometimes it calls for a shift in the language you use on your own website or blog. "If you're blogging about 'solar cells' but your customers are searching for 'solar power,' you're speaking two different languages," they write.

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Will we see .news, .nonprofit, .health, .sports any time soon?

Today through Friday, ICANN -- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -- meets in San Francisco for one of the three meetings it will hold in different regions of the globe this year.

Among the items on the agenda: the next generation of top-level Internet domain names.

In this seven-minute video interview that I recorded last year, Elliot Noss, CEO of Tucows, talks about the next generation of Internet domain names. Elliot previews some of the revolutionary changes that may soon be coming down the pike.

In addition to the common top-level domains like .com, .org, .net and .biz, the urls you may be clicking on include domains like .solar, .health, .water, .search, .nonprofit, .news, .sports, .ibm -- a new breed of domain extensions to the right of the dot.

"Social cause centered organizations shouldn't miss out on what's happening here," Elliot points out. These new flavors of domains shouldn't be seen strictly as a business opportunity but as a new way to communicate and reach new constituencies.

We could see potentially hundreds of new top-level domains and dozens of narrowcast corporate domains like .ibm, .dell or .intel. It won't come cheap. Under one scenario, an initial application could cost $55,000 -- but that's only a deposit toward a fee of $185,000 for a full application. If there's contention -- say, Google and Microsoft duking it out over owning the .search top-level domain -- then it'll result in an auction process.

Watch, download or embed the video on Vimeo

Liberalization of domains inches closer this week

Will ICANN settle this during the next five days? "Thousands of pages have been written. It's still in process," ICANN chief executive Rod Beckstrom told me.

This morning should provide a good overview of the global issues involved, he added. The opening session from 9 to 11 am showcases such speakers as Vint Cerf, Ira Magaziner, former White House Deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin and Beckstrom.

This afternoon in the main ballroom the discussion will also focus on top-level domains. Elliot says whimsically, "This is reaching its bloody climax and you will see all the long knives out. The supporters will be shutting up and letting staff and board get to the finish line and the opponents will bring out the longest of their knives." Thursday promises a robust public forum on Internet governance.

The public is invited to the ICANN sessions, which are generally open. See the plans for ICANN's meetings at the Westin St. Francis on Union Square in San Francisco as well as the full schedule. (The Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) and GNSO are key committees on this issue.) Elliot will be there.

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Creating a plan from scratch? These 7 tips will get you going

'We need a social media strategy." I hear this all the time. And companies have meetings upon meetings to discuss this. I've been a part of many of those meetings and it can be tiring to go through endless internal discussions as to what your social media strategy should be. You know what doesn't work for a social media strategy? Not being social.

People just want to start.

Social media works when you become public about your discussion. So my recommendation is to fast track your social media strategy with the following recommendation.

While everybody's situation is different, I find myself recommending the following basic model for most of my clients. Some of these recommendations are echoed in an article I recently wrote for Mashable titled, How to Jump-Start Your Career by Becoming an Online Influencer.

There are plenty of variations, but if you don't know where to start, this model will work well for you.

Set up your own media outlet

Step 1You need an outlet to publish your thoughts. You need a place where you can invite influencers and customers to be interviewed. You can't become an online influencer if you don't create content.

Repeating my mantra, "Content is the currency of social media and search."

If you want to be traded and visible in social media and search, then you must create content - ideally good content.

There are many ways to do this, but if you want to save yourself a ton of headaches, complications, and cost simply set up a WordPress blog with a theme that's optimized for social media and search, such as the Thesis theme. This blog uses WordPress and Thesis.

Create social identities

Step 2For most users and brands, you'll want to have accounts and identities with the major sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Try to stay consistent and use the same username for all identities so as not to confuse yourself or your audience. KnowEm is a great service that will check across endless social services as to which names are and aren't available.

Create a proactive editorial plan

Step 3Create thought pieces, how-to's, explanations, videos, podcasts, or anything else that demonstrates your thought leadership in your space. This is where you form viewpoints that you hope to become leading opinions.

A simple way to produce a proactive editorial calendar is to simply ask your sales staff and sales partners, "Why are we losing sales?" You'll get answers such as "We're not even a consideration," "They don't know how we're different than competitor X," and "They didn't think we had a solution for problem Z."

Take all the answers, rank them 1-10 in terms of importance, and start creating content (e.g., articles, screencasts, how-to's, case studies, video interviews) that answer those issues. Next time your sales staff are out in the field and they get hammered with one of these top ten questions, they'll have your content as support and they'll be able to close the sale.

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Report offers insights into the state of customer relationships

Customer relationship management, or CRM, has become a misused term of art by those who focus too much on software tools and lose sight of the internal business processes where customers are lost or gained.

A new 24-page ebook, New Trends in CRM, has just been released by The Customer Collective -- a community of sales and marketing professionals -- as a free download.

I contributed one chapter, "Four Experts on How to Turn Social Media into Sales," with insights from Becky Brown, Director of Social Media Strategy, Intel; Rob Fuggetta, CEO, Zuberance; Michael Brito, Vice President of Social Media, Edelman Digital and Tony Lee, Vice President of Marketing, TiVo. I quoted Becky Brown in the report:

“Be resourced,” Becky said. “Use employees and advocates and agencies.” She said it was important to use listening tools “to find people who are not your brand advocates, who are negative advocates.” And take it on yourself. You cannot ask an agency to read all your posts for you. You cannot get college grads to handle your Twitter account. These are real customers talking about your brand, so engage with them directly.

From the report's preface:

CRM software (and its trendy offspring, social CRM) can't substitute for clear, effective strategic thinking. Before they can leverage the power of CRM, in other words, businesses must first identify business priorities, define departmental roles, drive performance and create value for customers.

To clarify these issues and help you map out a strategy that works for your business, we gathered perspectives from smart folks in the sales, marketing and CRM industries. We hope this e-book will help you make informed choices on selecting and leveraging a CRM solution that boosts your company's bottom line.

Other contributors include David Brock, Charles H. Green, Cheryl Hanna, Esteban Kolsky, Ben Bradley and David Tyner. Download "New Trends in CRM" after filling out a 15-second registration form.

Since I began blogging back in May 2001, I've let readers access content on my sites in any manner they chose, including full-length posts in RSS feeds and automated email updates. I was an early user of Feedburner, now owned by Google, and while there are other services out there that probably do a better job of delivering updates to subscribers, I have stuck with the tried and true.

Today 7,115 people subscribe to updates on Socialmedia.biz through the free Feedburner email service, which goes out late at night whenever we have a new blog post. Another 4,433 people get email updates for new posts on Socialbrite, and 2,629 for new posts on Time for Nurses, a site we launched for a client in the fall.

What I didn't know, until subscriber Sandra Sims alerted me to the fact, was that Feedburner allows you to tailor the subject line of your outbound emails. For years, recipients saw emails with the subject line that simply said "Social Media" or "Socialbrite." But Sandra pointed me to the impossible-to-find, needle-in-a-haystack link where you can customize the subject line to use the headline of your most recent post. This will be old news to some, but it was news to me, so I thought I'd share it here.

If you'd like to customize the subject line of your Feedburner emails, follow these steps:

1. Log into your Feedburner account
2. Select the feed you want to customize
3. Click on the "Publicize" tab"
4. Click on "Email Subscriptions" in the left sidebar (you'll need to click the "Activate" button if you're just launching your email service)
5. Now you'll see an "Email Branding" submenu in the left sidebar. Click it.
6. Change the "Email Subject/Title" to this, believe it or not: ${latestItemTitle}
7. Click "Save"

There you go! Let me know if that works for you, and please share any other Feedburner, RSS or automated email delivery tricks you'd like to pass along in the comments below.