Inspired by Garrick Van Buren, I have decided to brainstorm and document some presentations I would like to give in the future. Here they are:

PRESENTATIONS I WOULD LIKE TO GIVE:

• Blogging for Beginners (I am scheduled to give this one in April!)
• Making Wordpress Work for You
• Building Your First Wordpress Theme
• Advanced Wordpress Themes
• Harnessing the Power of Online Social Media; or How I Became Friends with Maria Shriver
• Computers In the Classroom: The Medium is Still the Message

PRESENTATIONS I HAVE GIVEN:

• Wordpress for Beginners (at Minnebar 2008)
• Manipulating Classroom Space to Suit Pedagogical Ends
• Using Wordpress as a Content Management System (at Unsummit 2009)

Things we need to figure out:

• Who will write?
• How often will people write?
• What will the content be?
• Terms & Expectations

Who will write?
EVERY employee shall be required to post one blog every two weeks.

How often will the blog be updated?
Twice per day.  We need to keep to that schedule.  If 30 people are blogging once every two weeks, that’s 60 blog entries per month.  Shouldn’t be too tough, right?

What will the content be?
Every employee will be required to share expertise on a topic of interest to her.  This could be an exploration of a topic or more of a teach-in-style blog entry.  Any blog entries, so long as it is at least tangentially-related to the business will be accepted.

Terms & Expectations
The blog will share the same expectations as other company-branded communication.  That is, all blog entries shall be respectful of differences as well as support the mission of  the company.  Basically, that means that the blog will receive the same treatment as face-to-face, email, and phone conversations with colleagues and clients.

Summary
Obviously, I have a lot more hashing out to do in terms of this blog strategy.  I am sure that I left out all sorts of important things. Please feel free to offer tips and suggestions via comment below as we move forward with this project.  In turn, I will keep you updated!

Thanks!

I have used an iPhone for a couple of weeks now, using it mostly as an online social media device, and pausing sporadically to make a phone call on it. Generally speaking, it is a good device for connecting with friends on the major online social media networks. Of course there are some pitfalls, too.

The good:
Facebook
MySpace
LinkedIn
Pandora

The bad:
YouTube
Last.fm
Flickr

The ugly:
Twitter
Blogging

First, let’s talk about the Good. The free proprietary applications for Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn are all fantastic. All three provide an easy way to quickly update your status, check and send email, and connect with friends. Facebook even provides a way to chat.

Pandora’s app is simple, intuitive, and offers all the functionality of the Pandora website. One bad thing about this app is that the application closes and the music stops playing when you press the home button. I’m not sure if this is a limitation of the iPhone operating system, itself, or if this is a programming issue. But the iPod app continues playing until I manually close it or press “pause”. It would be nice for Pandora to have that functionality as well.

Now, for the Bad. The biggest disappointment, by far, is the YouTube application that comes pre-installed on the iPhone. It sucks. It is fine for playing videos, but it lacks all of the features that make YouTube a great online social media environment. You can’t view user profiles, post comments, make friends, send email, or really do anything at all, except watch videos.

Flickr does not have an official iPhone app. This is a bit of a black eye for this giant of the online social media world. True, you can still post photos to your Flickr account by taking advantage of Flickr’s “post by email” capabilities, but without the ability to comment on others’ photos and check my Flickr email, and see what my friends are saying about my newly-posted photos, what is the point?

Last.fm’s iphone app doesn’t do anything except stream music, making it a clone of Pandora’s app. Without the ability to check your neighborhood, your recommendations, etc., Last.fm is merely another online radio station.

Finally, we reach the Ugly. The iPhone app store is saturated with Twitter clients of varying abilities. I have only used two free ones – Twitfire and Twitteriffic. As I have said before, Twitfire is great if you just want to send a quick Tweet with a combination of text, location, and photo. But it does not have the capability of viewing other’s tweets. Twitteriffic provides a fantastic interface for viewing tweets en-masse and for sending tweets. Unfortunately, it does not provide a way to track specific friends in the timeline. Also, there is no way to find specific friends via a search. So, these applications are good at what they do, but have significant room for improvement.

Blogging on the iPhone is mainly limited by the keypad. The iPhone is great for short text messages and tweets, but it’s keypad makes it too cumbersome to write anything more than a sentence or two. There are probably kids who can type 60 words per minute on the iPhone, but I am not one of them. In fact, I am lucky if I get 20 words written in a minute. That said, the Wordpress application is a gem! From time-to-time, I post short blogs with photos, which works exceptionally well. Also, the next iteration of the Wordpress app will include a landscape (horizontal) typing feature, which might increase typing efficiency.

So, that is my experience with online social media and the iPhone so far. Please comment if you have anything to add!

I broke down and bought the iPhone a week ago for a number of reasons, but the main reason was for its online social media capabilities.  The tools that I use regularly include Twitter, Wordpress, Facebook, and MySpace.  For the last few weeks, I have also been text-messaging (SMS) quite a bit.  Here are the free online social media-related iPhone applications that I use:

• Twitfire
• Twitteriffic (free version)
• Wordpress for iPhone
• Facebook for iPhone
• MySpace for iPhone

Twitfire (a Twitter application): Of all my online social media-related iPhone applications, I use Twitfire the most.  I tried out Twitterific before I tried Twitfire, and based on my experience, Twitfire is much more stable.  Using Twitfire, I am able to quickly send tweets containing my current location, post photos (either from library or taken at time of posting), and do “@” replies.  Utilizing all of these features is quite intuitive, though the usability is a bit clunky. For example, the posting of photos takes a few minutes, and the “@” address book doesn’t have all of my contacts listed.  Twitfire has a built-in web browser that converts links into shortened links and allows me to easily place them into tweets.  One HUGE downside to Twitfire is that you cannot read others’ tweets.  To phrase that last sentence differently, Twitfire is used ONLY for posting tweets and NEVER for reading tweets. (Video review)

Twitteriffic is much more robust than Twitfire, but it hasn’t been very reliable, in my experience.  That is, it doesn’t load up half the time when I open it.  This is frustrating.  That said, when it does work, Twitteriffic is a fantastic product that does everything Twitfire does and MORE!  In addition to being able to post photos, geolocation, and tweets, Twitteriffic has a great interface for viewing and replying to tweets.  To summarize, if you can get Twitteriffic to work consistently, it is a much better product than Twitfire.

Wordpress for iPhone is simply fantastic.  If you use either self-hosted Wordpress or Wordpress.com software for your blog or website, then you will love this application.  The current version allows you to manage and publish posts with photos and hyperlinks.  The next version has promised expanded functionality including horizontal keyboard, posting in the future, managing comments, and managing pages.  Unfortunately, the nature of the keyboard makes it difficult to type as quick as I am used to on my home keyboard, which makes posting long posts such as this one difficult to stomach.

Facebook for iPhone is FANtastic!  From the iPhone home screen, this application’s button has a slick, little icon that tells me how many new messages are in my Facebook in-box in much the same way that my “Mail” button does.  The application has interfaces for my “News Feed”, “Notifications”, “Requests”, “Friends”, “Chat”, and “Inbox”.  I am able to view photos and respond to comments and status updates.  I am also able to write and post photos on friends’ walls.

MySpace for iPhone allows me to manage my status, view and comment on friends’ pages, view and post photos, check and send email, and view friend requests.

Some other tools that I use regularly are the Twitter SMS functionality and Flickr email functionality.  Both of these tools allow me to send photos to Twitter and Flickr, respectively, from the photo management interface on the iPhone.

I spent 6 hours at the BIG Mall yesterday trying every cell phone and PDA in the place.  I tried the iPhone, G1, and all sorts of other smartphones and PDAs from Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T.  None of them do what I need them to do.  Here’s what I need my cell phone to do:

• Text messaging
• Twitter
• Photo capture
• Ability to email photos
• Video capture
• Ability to upload video to Youtube
• Wordpress image upload
• Wordpress video embed (Youtube)
• Skype
• mp3 player

The main area where ALL the phones fail is in video capturing and uploading.  My 3-year-old Motorola cell phone has video, photo, and audio capture features.  The iPhone and G1 can only capture photos out of the box.  Why these two phones do not have video capture capabilities is beyond me.  The video image is already streaming digitally through the phone when you use the photo capture feature, why not capture 15-30 frames per second of video and encode it to MPEG?  Is it that tough?  How can my crappy 3-year-old cell phone out-perform both of these fancy, new devices?

The iPhone and the G1 operating systems are WAY more intuitive than the others.  Windows, Palm, and Blackberry operating systems were confusing and seemed chintzy, cheap, and slow.  The Windows OS, in particular, was particularly confusing. Both the iPhone and G1 provide simple touch-screen interfaces where you just touch the icon for “web browser” to search the web.  With the other operating systems, you need a working knowledge of all the buttons as well as some training to figure it out.  Even after being showed how to access the web on non-iPhone and G1 phones by the salesman at both the Verizon and T-Mobile stores, I was confused about how to access the web!  Some could blame me for a lack of knowledge or understanding of the respective operating systems, but I call it bad design.

The iPhone is nicer than all of the other phones I tried.  It feels solid and sturdy compared to the G1, which has a cheap plastic feel to it.  It also is the simplest phone, with only one tactile button.

The G1 tops the iPhone with its tactile keypad.  It is quite difficult and time consuming to type a message free of spelling errors on the iPhone, as my big fingers always press the wrong letters on the screen.  I end up having to use the delete key a lot.  The G1’s keypad is awesome.  Writing text messages and blog entries will be significantly easier with the G1.

On price, the G1 wins, hands-down.  At $70 per month, the iPhone rivals data/voice plans provided by Verizon and AT&T.  But T-Mobile’s offers sufficient voice and unlimited 3G data access for only $50 per month!  That’s a $240 savings every year (almost $500 over the course of your 2-year contract).

Here’s where I stand at present.  I have had a voice-only plan for the last 7 years with Verizon.  I have been happy with their voice coverage.  The only reason I am looking to upgrade my phone and plan is that I have become very interested in text messaging, live-blogging, and Twittering in real-time.  I am still debating whether or not it’s worth the $30-60 more per month to get this functionality in a phone. Any guidance or experience that you can provide with either of these two phones would be much appreciated!

Here’s a video showcasing and critiquing the features of the G1:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here’s a Youtube video showcasing the differences between the iPhone and the new Blackberry:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here’s a video showcasing the new features of the Wordpress iPhone App (version 1.2):