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Category: Web 2.0

A New Forum User Experience?

A New Forum User Experience?

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I’ve been a huge fan of vBulletin forum software since I first installed it on Reel-Time.com in 2001.  In the intervening years, I’ve seen software come and software go, but vBulletin continues to chug along. Over the past 10 months, I’ve spent a lot of time working on a massive vBulletin site, http://www.splitcoaststampers.com and I’ve got to admit, I’m finding the vBulletin experience somewhat lacking.  Perhaps it’s just that so many of the same old foibles remain in the core…

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The Advent of the Micro-Celebrity

The Advent of the Micro-Celebrity

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Welcome to our brave new world…it is a place in which style triumphs substance, and appearance supercedes truth.  A place where the personal myths we create become truth, and are rechristened as “personal branding.” We are in the age of the micro-celebrity. The era in which we don’t need to be fully rounded individuals, where simply being the “thought leader”, guru or expert in a certain online niche is enough.  Warhol was right, we indeed will all have our 15…

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News Has Always Been Free…

News Has Always Been Free…

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I read an interesting post this morning by Michael Hickins on The Faster Times that posit that “Internet Isn’t Killing Papers, We Are“.  His basic premise: that the tech industry, and the web in particular with with the dotbomb era and sky high salaries and insane stock packages, inflated journalist salaries well beyond their regular levels. Why? Because salaries had to be adjusted for the stock options that artificially inflated the potential compensation packages offered by the dot-com start-ups. How…

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5 Lessons from a Social Media Campaign Gone Horribly Wrong

5 Lessons from a Social Media Campaign Gone Horribly Wrong

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Jim Louderback of Revision3.com has a great article up at JackMyers.com entitled “Murphy-Goode Wines Social Media Campaign Goes Horribly Wrong” about the companies recent trip to the Internet woodshed over their handling of I-celeb Martin Sargent during a recent online spokesperson ballot. While the specifics are generally quite funny…Jim gives us an excellent list of 5 takeaways that any of us who might consider a Social Media campaign ought to commit to heart: Respect the Wisdom of the Crowds: If…

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Social Networking for Tween Girls

Social Networking for Tween Girls

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It was utterly inevitable…via CruchGear and Matt Brodeur: So this seems like a good enough idea. It’s called MySecretCircle and it’s basically it’s a closed social network for girls. You and your buds buy a USB key that acts as your login. It autoruns under Windows and OS X and brings up a photo and journal sharing system that only allows certain people access to your daughter’s personal info. In theory and in practice this is great. It ensures your tween…

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Social Media Community Building 101 – The Right Domain Name

Social Media Community Building 101 – The Right Domain Name

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<This is part 3 in my series on Social Media Community Building.  You will find all of my pieces on this subject by checking out this tag: Social Media 101. Disclosure: this post is about selecting and buying domain names.  I work for a company that owns the largest aftermarket domain name listing service in the world, Namemedia, although that is not what I do for them. > One of the key points you need to consider when you are…

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Does Twitter Dilute Media Brands?

Does Twitter Dilute Media Brands?

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For the past couple weeks I’ve been tweeting for the Reel-Time.com site under the Twitter handle “Reel_Time” and I’ve found some very interesting trends.  Most disturbing is that Twitter doesn’t really appear to be an extension of the conversations that start on my site, it appears to be something wholly different.  Similar conversations in a place where I don’t get any ad revenue. As of yet, I’m not seeing this as increasing the value of the Reel-time.com brand.  Of course,…

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The Rules for Twitter

The Rules for Twitter

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Rules to be obeyed: Twitter Rule #1 No Hawaiian Shirt avatars until after Memorial Day. Twitter Rule #2 – Only religion, social media marketing, politics or other mundane topics allowed. Twitter Rule #3 – Mandatory lunch tweets – eating a cheese sandwich? We MUST be told. Twitter Rule #4 – When in doubt, Retweet. The truth is overrated… Twitter Rule #5 – Retweet your own blog posts at least every hour. Someone somewhere might have missed it. Twitter Rule #6 – NO…

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Twitter, Hashtags, Baseball and a Dose of Spam

Twitter, Hashtags, Baseball and a Dose of Spam

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For about a year, I’ve been using twitter and hashtags to tweet with fellow Red Sox fans about our favorite topic, the Red Sox.  Over that time, I’ve seen a big change how it works. First, a definition from Twitter Wiki: Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. When…

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Reel-Time.com Updated

Reel-Time.com Updated

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Over the past couple months, I’ve been working nights and weekends to get Reel-time.com updated and running on WordPress.  The project, while far from complete, reached critical mass this week and I was able to go live Tuesday night. This site has been around since 1995, and frankly, if you knew where to look, it was showing it’s age.  The homepage was left justified, which is something designers haven’t been doing since around 2001. There were a lot of challenges. …

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