The life of DJ Ksar

In today’s odd social networking news Comcast is going to acquire Plaxo! At first glance, you think - Comcast is going to put Plaxo on my TV — uhh…that doesn’t make sense. After further research it does in a big way cause Comcast has been creating community features on it’s comcast.net and other interactive properties since December 2005.  Taking a glance at their pre-release site - http://labs.comcast.net/ - they are working hard at community features within their product. Cause as everybody knows when I watch my Comcast box I usually have my computer with me or very close by.  

My ultimate TV-related community site is this:  

• A site where I can view the show(s) online
• Post messages and get my questions answers about the show and actor gossip
• Tell my friends about a new show by clicking on a button and it creates an email, blog post, or content worthy of sharing on my other social networks where my friends reside
• Find new shows and schedule recordings directly from the web or my mobile phone

On Comcast’s labs site they do have a product called Fans 4.0 that allows you to watch on-demand shows.

Is this where Plaxo can add community features and really nail the user-experience for Comcast customers?  Time will tell.  Tell me your thoughts on this acquisition by adding your comments below. 

I’m loving Utterz’s promotion to engage users to show who they support in this year’s “crazy” Presidential campaign. All you do is go to http://www.utterz.com/vote08.php, select the candidate that you like to support, call a # to leave a vmail or record directly via their web site. It showcases their content submission flow beautifully and spreads their brand via the widget that users can post on their blog and/or web site. Try it out by showing who you support this year! Is it Obama or Hillary? or Maybe you wish Nader was still in the running.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Randy Ksar
rksar at yahoo dot com

I’ve been testing out a brand new service from Ribbit called Ribbit for Salesforce that has awesome voice to text features, click to call via their web-based phone, and all using my existing AT&T Nokia n95.  Here are the cool features that I think you would enjoy:

• Receive a text transcription of the vmail message that was left by my co-worker Don (especially helpful when I ignore his call and I can multi-task within my meeting)
• If I am on a business trip and still want to take phone calls from my 408 number I just need to load up salesforce.com and take the calls via the Ribbit for Salesforce web phone. My mom doesn’t need to remember the country code to call me in Italy just my regular phone number. 
• To keep track of all the voice mails from my client “A” in salesforce.com, I can just drill-down into that lead detail page and listen to the vmails and view the text transcription for the past few months — very useful!!
• Say I’m at my house (which has notoriously bad cell phone signal) I can login to salesforce.com and take the phone call via the Ribbit for Salesforce web-phone 

Randy Ksar

rksar at yahoo dot com
 

I was at MakerFaire 2008 in San Mateo, California and I meet CEO Stephen Frick showcasing his new social bartering application called Trade a Favor exclusively on Facebook.  Here is the video interview recorded using my Nokia n95 streaming live to the web on qik.com and later posted to YouTube. The audio isn’t the greatest but this is just the first of many tests using a 3G mobile phone and AT&T network to do mobile video streaming. 

Randy Ksar

rksar at yahoo dot com

I’ve been researching how to make video content that is engaging and ran across this video on blip.tv. It is an interview with Larry Kramer, Marketwatch.com founder and he gives some insightful tips on what makes video journalism in it’s rawest format work for viewers. 

 
Randy Ksar
rksar at yahoo dot com

In launching a new product at a company in today’s web 2.0 world you need to update all your company’s presence on each social network.  Here a sample scenario that the person in charge of social media needs to do when a product launches:

• Update corporate blog with post and tag. 
• Make sure Technorati profile is setup, blog is claimed and pinged
• Update Facebook fan page with photos, videos, and message to fans
• Update MySpace page with post and message to “friends”
• Update your statuses on Facebook (your personal account if you promote yourself as the company evangelist), Twitter (your corporate account), Tumblr, and Pownce
• Post, create sets, and tag photos to Flickr (if time join groups related to company and add photos to group)

As you can see it is quite a bit of work, time consuming and repetitive in some cases. Can a company create a tool that can manage my social media outreach to each of my networks? Blogging company Typepad created a Facebook application called Blog It that can update my statuses and blogs all within one site. I can link up my social network profiles, enter in one status and/or blog, and it gets sent to the respective sites. Pretty cool and time saving!  Blog It is tied into the following social networks as of this posting (5:32 PM 4/19/2008):

• TypePad
• Blogger
• LiveJournal
• Movable Type
• Pownce
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Vox
• WordPress.com
• WordPress.org Site

Unfortunately, it’s not tied into all the social networks that I need to update and their blog editor is just a simple text box. This is just version 0.1 of the software and it is fairly simple to connect to another network via APIs so great start by Typepad! I look forward to the next release and maybe other competitive products because there is a real need out there for us folks managing social media outreach for companies. 

Here is snapshot of the page on Blog It that ties all my social networks together:

Here is snapshot of the Blog It page to update my status on Facebook, Twitter, and Pownce:

Here is a snapshot of the post to blog page with the very simple text box:

Add your comment below on your experience with Blog It and/or other tools you’ve used at your company. Thanks and talk to you all soon,

DJ Ksar
rksar at yahoo dot com

YouTube revised there sharing to be more focused on sharing off-network (off the YouTube site) verse sharing among YouTube users. The top social networks they have listed are MySpace and Facebook which I assume they took a look at their embed code referrers to see where the majority of users were sharing the videos.  

Before:

After:
 

 
DJ Ksar

Flickr has finally added video! Hip hip hooray! Everybody pop the champagne bottles! Seriously this has taken so long that other video upload services have come out with tagging and community features so Flickr is already behind the times. Congrats to the team! However, you have some work to do on version 2.0.

Here are some issues/complaints/recommendations:

• The embed code takes you to a whole new page to download it. Why can’t they design and code in a nifty ajax drop-down div with the code? Is really necessary to take me away from my video detail page?
• Ability to post on other social networks? It has become standard now to have the share button that can post to your profile on any top social networks. Yes you can attach your blog to your Flickr account but that is so limiting. 
• Why the limitation of 90 seconds and 150 MB?  Sometimes that can’t tell the whole story.  I really wanted to upload all my videos on Flickr but not going to happen now. 
   

Unfortunately, I can’t use the Flickr embed code on a wordpress.com hosted blog - doh!  I know..I know move my blog to a self-hosted solution and it will work.  Here is the link to my Flickr page with the video: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rksar/2399423001/

Comment below on your experience with Flickr and video. 

DJ Ksar

My contact over at eBay GivingWorks pinged me this recently launched blog and social network called whatgives?!

Each blog entry is tied into an eBay GivingWorks (non-profit division of eBay to support non-profits raise funds on eBay) auction with the accompanying badge code, send to a friend functionality and the “add to” Delicious (a Yahoo! company), StumbleUpon (an eBay company), Digg, Reddit, Furl, Yahoo! and Facebook links. The site encourages members to comment on each entry and allows you to create a profile that showcases which non-profits you believe in. The profile can also include 5 photos of themselves, a short bio, and links to blogs and other public profiles on the web.

One huge set-back to this site is the ability to connect with other members with similar charity interests. How am I suppose to find other members who support the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society or Boys and Girls Club? The “socialize” page (shown below) was an attempt by eBay but the only thing you can do there is search by name and location. Once you get the results the three columns of content displayed are name, location, and # of comments. Not a useful feature and really not too much thought put into the social aspect of the site. It’s a shame that eBay put all this effort into helping non-profits and executed poorly

Try the site out and let me know your thoughts by adding a comment below.

Thanks.

DJ Ksar

Here is a video by Robert Sandieman, President and co-founder of Viddler.com (video sharing web site) that loves his product just a little too much since he did the video at 2am! Nonetheless, a president that shows that he actually uses his product instead of just talking about it plus having fun with it is great evangelism and adds to the personality of the Viddler brand. Enjoy the below video and add your comments  .

-DJ Ksar