
As some of you already know, I love running. I may be a slow runner but I’m quick to see the value of social media for my chosen sport.
[FULL STORY continued below]
educational web strategy + consulting

As some of you already know, I love running. I may be a slow runner but I’m quick to see the value of social media for my chosen sport.
[FULL STORY continued below]
What are the most essential user controls for social media?
NOTE: When I created this little poll it was my first time using poll daddy. I configured it to allow people to choose more than one option. I’m not sure the results say as much as I’d like them to. Thanks to all who participated in the experiment. Next one will be better.
What is your ideal vision of a social media network? Think about what’s presently available and consider how you might change it to better suit your own needs. Drop your ideas into a comment below. I will aggregate your responses into a single post and twitter, delicious and RSS the results.
A couple of months ago I started experimenting with the use of Twitter and other social media in my wired college classrooms. Meanwhile, out in California, Howard Rheingold was exploring the question of wired attention spans with his UC Berkeley social media class. Rheingold turned these explorations into a series of compelling vlog posts called “Training Attention.”
All of this got me thinking about the nature of engagement in a wired world. It struck me that we’re in need of some form of scaffolding for particpatory and social media use. Specifically, the creation of some sort of attention scaffolding that transports the user beyond a state of random gratification and sensory overload.
These thoughts led to an inspiring conversation with fellow educator and webby Rabble.ca columnist Wayne Macphail. Macphail turned this dialogue into a Rabble column he called “May I halve your attention please?”
Continue reading ‘Attention rabble-rousing with Wayne Macphail’
Has anybody else had a tough time explaining the value and purpose of Twitter to your non-Twittering friends, clients or colleagues?
After writing several lengthy emails, I threw all my best examples and links into a single message. My “Twitter explained” boilerplate is the result.
Continue reading ‘Client hacks: Twitter explained [boilerplate]‘
Despite the popularity and widespread adoption of social tools, there’s little agreement when it comes to matters of our individual terms of use. Without a collective social contract for social media, many of us are left wondering: How do I define my own social policy? Until now, corporate social media developers are defining those policies for us. Some of us feel it’s time we defined social media according to our our own terms.
In 2007, Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington created A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web. Their bill was intended to “spur conversation and debate” around the need for users to be more proactive about the ownership and use of their personal social media content. For example, the right to:
“Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats.”
I was inspired to extend this idea to speak to the more elusive question of social granularity. For example, to define my own policies around connecting, professionalism and signal to noise. The need to define these things along more personal terms was the basis for developing my own policy for social networking and media.
The following is a template based on my own personal Social Media Policy (SMP) for you to hack and remix. As ever, the content, tone and format is entirely up to you.
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