Social Media – Blum Interactive Media – Brian Blum

Facebook changes mean greater need for original content

Brian Blum — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 13:22:43 +0000

Recent changes to Facebookâ€s news feed algorithm mean that organizations and companies developing and publishing their own original content are now receiving a significant boost on the leading social media site. Two weeks ago, Varun Kacholia and Minwen Ji, engineering and software managers at Facebook, respectively, posted in the Facebook Newsroom that â€œwe are now paying closer attention to what makes for high quality contentâ€¦what this means is that you may start to notice links to articles a little more often (particularly on mobile). Why are we doing this? Our surveys show that on average people prefer links to [these kinds of] articlesâ€¦to the latest memeâ€ about dancing cats or photos marked up with funny captions (as in the example to the left).

The bottom line: â€œhigh quality articles you or others read may show up a bit more prominently in your News Feed, and meme photos may show up a bit less prominently.â€

Facebookâ€s move is not a surprise. Traffic from Facebook to news sites tripled in the past year. Facebook is being increasingly used as a news source (much as Twitter has also evolved). So why shouldnâ€t Facebookâ€s algorithm promote original news articles? Facebook hasnâ€t revealed the secret formula for how it will recognize â€œhigh quality contentâ€ but the Kacholia and Jiâ€s promise is clear: uninformative over-shared links and tired memes will be demoted.

All of this is great news for Blum Interactive Media clients that have engaged us to create original content to publish on their websites, Facebook pages, email newsletters and other social sharing services. Original content already ranked high in Googleâ€s organic listings; now Facebook is joining the party. Take a look at the home page from one of our clients, Shavei Israel: they treat their website as a mini-newspaper, publishing 2-3 original stories (which we write) every week. The result has been dramatic – on Facebook alone, Shavei Israel and its related pages now have more than 60,000 “likes” and web traffic is up as well.

Thereâ€s a sidebar take away here too: trying to create â€œviralâ€ material online just got harderâ€¦and easier. You can spend less time over-thinking and crazy planning what you hope will become the next mega-video hit. Instead, write the best quality content and the social networks will help you out on their own terms.

Facebook will also be showing â€œrelated articlesâ€ directly below the news feed post. Although you canâ€t control which articles will appear, our experience using similar products on our own websites indicates that at least some of the time, these will be articles that your organization or company has published. The more content you have out there, the more likely it will appear in this new Facebook section. See the example from Facebook on the right.

If youâ€re thinking about how to get going with your own original content strategy, keep in mind that itâ€s not a one-time thing. To stand out on Facebook, Google â€“ really, anywhere online â€“ your organization or company needs a regular stream of innovative articles and multimedia material. The aim is to turn your website and social media presence into a destination; a trusted source of compelling content that make readers want to come back â€“ to subscribe to your newsletter, to like your Facebook page, and to share and forward what they receive.

Now more than ever, you canâ€t do this with a couple of lines and a cute picture in a blog post here or a press release there. You need to publish new material on a continuing basis. As your content appears more frequently in your followersâ€ news feeds and in search engine results, your supporters will know who and what you are about, so that when itâ€s time to ask for donations, or to sell a new product, theyâ€ll already be primed.

Want a job applicantâ€™s social media password? Donâ€™t try it in Canada (or anywhere!)

Brian Blum — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:49:52 +0000

Would Mark Zuckerberg be asked for the password to his Facebook account?

Hereâ€s a trendÂ that seems outright outrageous: asking for a job applicantâ€s social media passwords.

Itâ€s been in the news for the past few years, off-and-on, especially during the past few weeks. Today,Â the Toronto Star has anÂ articleÂ about a candidate for a law enforcement job who was asked to share his Facebook password with the recruiter. He wasnâ€t just asked to â€œfriendâ€ the recruiter, and when he offered to show his profile on the laptop in the interview room, the recruiter insisted on receiving the password.

The article in the Star came in reaction to a flurry of reports in the U.S. and U.K. about the occasional useÂ of this distressing practice. Asking for an applicantâ€s password for a job with the police seems to be the most common â€“ Bloomberg BusinessWeekÂ citesÂ examples from Virginia, Montana and Maryland â€“ while The TelegraphÂ writesÂ about an online retail company employee in the U.K. who was asked to hand over his login details after his employer went trolling on Facebook and couldnâ€t find any personal details on the worker.

Facebook itself is upÂ in arms about the practice. The Telegraph received a response from Erin Egan, Facebookâ€s chief privacy officer, who wrote:

In recent months, weâ€ve seen a distressing increase in reports of employers or others seeking to gain inappropriate access to peopleâ€s Facebook profiles or private information. This practice undermines the privacy expectations and the security of both the user and the userâ€s friends. It also potentially exposes the employer who seeks this access to unanticipated legal liability.

The most alarming of these practices is the reported incidences of employers asking prospective or actual employees to reveal their passwords. If you are a Facebook user, you should never have to share your password, let anyone access your account, or do anything that might jeopardize the security of your account or violate the privacy of your friends. We have worked really hard at Facebook to give you the tools to control who sees your information. â€¦ Thatâ€s why weâ€ve made it a violation of Facebookâ€s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities to share or solicit a Facebook password.

The ACLUÂ warnsÂ that employers or recruiters asking for social media passwords are entering a legal gray area that may potentially open them up to both privacy and discrimination lawsuits.Â And if the employer is the government, â€œthey may be violating your Fourth Amendment rights,â€ Catherine Crump, staff attorney with the ACLU, told BusinessWeek.

Canadians may have it better than job seekers elsewhere. The Canadian publication TechVibesÂ quotesÂ Paul Cavaluzzo, a Toronto-based labor lawyer,Â who says that laws in Canada are more stringent than in the U.S. with regards to protecting private information. In an interview with CityTV he noted that, while there arenâ€t yet laws dealing specifically with social media, Canada has â€œalways respected privacy rights.â€

Cavaluzzo adds that â€œif an interviewer demands your password, feel free to call them out. Or just ask them for their house keys in exchange; the differences are negligible.â€

A version of this article appeared yesterday on the AIM Group blog, a publication I write for regularly.

The Next Big Thing: Indoor Navigation?

Brian Blum — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 15:56:00 +0000

Amnon Dekel

I always enjoy Jeff Pulverâ€s networking â€œbreakfastsâ€ which he holds around the world. Pulver, a VoiP superstar and lately startup angel with a passion for Israel, usually hosts his breakfast shindigs in Tel Aviv, but last week he came to Jerusalem.

I approach a networking event like a Kiddush at shul. You want to flit around as much as possible (while not being too rude with quick getaways) but if you find yourself talking to someone particularly interesting, you stay put.

That was the case when I met up with Amnon Dekel. Dekel is an old friend (he used to run the Digital Media Studies program at the IDC in Herzeliya and hired me to teach a course) and heâ€s about to turn in his doctoral dissertation to Hebrew University. The topic: â€œindoor navigation.â€

Dekel has identified a problem you probably never thought about, but thatâ€s a potential â€œnext big thing.â€ Mobile phones are great at using GPS to find their position outside. But they donâ€t work so well under a roof of, say, a library.

Dekelâ€s research specifies a methodology for locating objects such as books, and it doesnâ€t require transmitters to be installed all over the ceiling of the space. The idea is that youâ€d type in the title or author into your phone, and youâ€d receive a map telling you exactly which floor, section and even shelf you should head to.

Dekel has built a working prototype in the Harman Library on the Givat Ram campus of Hebrew University. His tests show that, using the system, it takes only half the time to find a book and people make less navigation mistakes and need less help from others to find the book.

The same technology could be used in warehouses, bookstores and manufacturing plants, Dekel says.

Thatâ€s not to say that itâ€s easy â€“ staff at the physical site need to input data, items may need to be scanned â€“ but itâ€s a fascinating start.

The system has yet to be commercialized (venture capitalists â€“ take note). But, who knows (and Dekel will scold me for writing this), you could eventually crown yourself mayor of the Dewey decimal system!

This article appeared last year on the Israelity blog.

Social Media Finds a Home in Wibiyaâ€™s New Toolbar

Brian Blum — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 16:55:50 +0000

From ‘Facebook-like’ buttons to embedded YouTube videos and interactive chat, it’s rare to find a website these days that doesn’t beckon you to share your thoughts with everyone you’re connected to.

But for website owners, adding all that social interaction takes time and, if you’re not a programmer, copying and pasting esoteric HTML and JavaScript code into your site’s header or widget boxes can be a technically daunting task.

Wibiya from Israel is a hot start-up that aims to streamline the process. The company, which raised $2 million a few months back from Primera Capital and counts as one of its seed investors the ubiquitous Israeli angel and Internet guru Yossi Vardi, has built a popular toolbar that consolidates dozens of social media functions into a single space-saving strip at the bottom of your website. Wibiya’s aim is to make adding new apps and functionality as easy as a one-click install.

Among the useful Web functions that Wibiya incorporates are the ability to instantly “like” a company’s fan page on Facebook and write on its Wall without leaving the website you’re looking at; see how many other people are online and looking at the same page you are; translate the site into one of more than 40 languages; and chat with your social media friends directly from within the Wibiya bar.

Taking a cue from Apple, Wibiya has created its own app ecosystem, allowing third party developers to add their Web products to the toolbar at no cost. This has led to an eclectic range of functionality built by enthusiastic supporters that Wibiya co-founder and CEO Dror Cedar never expected.

For example, there’s an app that allows website owners to pop-up targeted messages filtered to the specific person visiting. This could be based on the page a visitor is currently viewing (say, a message about the Middle East peace process) or could kick in only after a user has been on at least five pages of the site.

Another popular app automatically turns all links on a website into “affiliate ads.” If a visitor to the site buys a product via that link, the website publisher keeps 70 percent of the revenue. Amazon is one of 25,000 merchants included in the program.

Want to raise money? Wibiya has apps for that, too. One puts a link on the toolbar to your organization’s Causes page on Facebook; another allows visitors to use PayPal to make donations a snap.

Wibiya is on the verge of releasing a developer website with an open API (Application Programming Interface) to make it even easier for developers to build Wibiya-compatible apps, Cedar says.

For publishers, Wibiya provides detailed analytics showing, for example, how many clicks the toolbar is receiving or how many Twitter updates have been tweeted via the Wibiya service. The toolbar itself is tiny – only 17K. And it plays nicely with all the leading blogging platforms, including WordPress, Blogger and Ning.

Since the toolbar is free to both third party developers and publishers, how does Wibiya intend to make money? “We work with high end publishers including Philly.com, Playboy and even the (confectionery vendor) Jellybelly.com on either a revenue-share model or one that’s based on performance,” Cedar explains. “We deal with them directly to build a tailor-made solution.”

For everyone else – the so-called “long tail” of web publishers, as Cedar describes them – Wibiya will soon introduce premium paid packages with “for example, the ability to integrate your own advertisements into the toolbar.”

Cedar didn’t start out with the intention to build Wibiya. He and his co-founders Daniel Tal and Avi Smila were working on a travel-related product called Joongle. “If you wanted to search for a flight from Tel Aviv to New York, our toolbar would give you the top 10 websites, like Kayak and Priceline, with flights to that country,” Cedar says. “Then each time you clicked, it would do the search for you.”

But when the team showed the product, potential clients kept saying “wouldn’t it be great to have another button that would show my most recent posts, or one that displays photos,” Cedar recounts. Realizing that there was an even bigger market beyond travel, the company quickly switched gears. “After the 10th time, we said okay. The demand came from the publishers themselves. People really wanted it.”

One concern we had was whether creating yet another way to share information across the Web would cause alarm, much in the way that Facebook has taken a drumming recently for its fungible privacy policies. Moreover, will users be paranoid that Wibiya may follow them around, tracking what they’re doing on the Web?

Cedar assures us that Wibiya is just “an enabler. We don’t do anything automatically and we don’t save your information. We’re completely transparent.” Still, Wibiya may have to be more proactive in spelling things out to put visitors at their ease.

As for the name Wibiya, it’s a play on words – a “wib” is a widget bar. “We didn’t like ‘widget,’ ” Cedar says.”That implies a static component.”

Indeed, with Wibiya’s functionality, financing and future prospects, the company is anything but static.

This article originally appeared on the Israel21c website.

The Wedding Will Be Webcast

Brian Blum — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:16:01 +0000

The happy couple "live"

A couple of weeks ago, we attended the wedding of good friends, Sammie and Isaac. The wedding was a blast with all the usual features of Israeli nuptials: chuppah, dancing, speeches and those greasy fried â€œcigarsâ€ stuffed with minced meat (of which I always partake too heartily).

There was one element, though, that Iâ€ve never seen before (although maybe Iâ€m just not invited to the right weddings). Prior to the simcha, the couple sent out an email that announced that, for those who couldnâ€t attend, the evening would be broadcast live over the Internet.

Now, live web streaming is nothing new and there are plenty of vendors eager to upgrade you to a â€œproâ€ account â€“ Ustream and Livestream are just a couple that come to mind. I often catch up live online with TechAviv, a hi-tech group that meets monthly in the Tel Aviv area, when Iâ€m feeling too lazy to hoof it over from Jerusalem. But I havenâ€t seen the technology used for a wedding.

The way it worked was a bit funky: one of the wedding guests had set up a small laptop with a built in camera and microphone facing the chuppah. When he wanted to pan around the crowd, he picked up the whole laptop and did a 360.

Since he had plugged the laptop into a 3G wireless card (I guess the wedding hallâ€s WiFi wasnâ€t dependable), he was able to later walk around the dance floor, as well as grab shots of guests chowing down at each of the tables â€“ although with that brick of a broadcast unit, he wasnâ€t quite as nimble as a wedding photographer.

This isnâ€t state-of-the-art yet: the sound was muddled and the video not up to TV network quality (or even watered down YouTube, for that matter), but itâ€s still a great idea, not just for family that canâ€t make it from overseas but local guests for whom a time conflict may preclude in-person attendance.

And the coolest part: the video is still online. So even guests who were there can catch a glimpse of themselves doing the chicken dance.

If you want to view some of Sammie & Isaacâ€s wedding, hereâ€s the link.

This piece appeared originally on the Israelity blog.

Multitasking in Tel Aviv

Brian Blum — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 10:31:57 +0000

From right to left: me, Benjy Lovitt, Lior Manor and his iPad

A recent episode of the NPR program Science Friday featured an interview with Clifford Nass, the author of the forthcoming book â€œThe Man Who Lied to His Laptop,â€ about whether human beings are truly able to multitask. His conclusion: not really.

Nass says that we have the illusion of multitasking, but in reality, we are switching from one task to another so quickly it seems like weâ€re doing more than one thing at once. The problem is that, every time we switch, there is a micro-millisecond delay and that teeny tiny pause causes us to be less productive even when we feel weâ€re sailing high.

I had a chance to experience the woes of obsessive multitasking first hand earlier this week when I attended the 140 Characters conference in Tel Aviv. The event, produced all over the world – including Israel – by social media and VoIP guru Jeff Pulver, is dedicated to exploring the â€œreal time webâ€ (a fancy way of referring to web and mobile services that let you follow a stream of never ending status updates as they happen).

As I sat in the lecture hall at Tel Avivâ€s Afeka College listening to the lectures (which, in true short attention span spirit, were allotted on average no more than 10-15 minutes each), I had my laptop with me open to TweetDeck, a Twitter desktop client where I could follow along as much of the room was â€œlive tweetingâ€ what was happening on stage; Gmail â€“ which I checked incessantly while simultaneously chatting with people both in and outside of the room itself; Facebook â€“ of course (just for fun); an Excel spreadsheet of all the attendees sent by Pulver – so I could scope out who to approach during the networking breaks; a live video stream of the conference itself (with a slight time delay); and Evernote â€“ a application I used to take notes on my laptop which were then automatically synched to my home computer, iPhone and (when I get one) iPad.

And if the lectures ever got boring, Iâ€d brought with me a copy of an article I was working on that needed an edit.

By the time the conference was over, I actually breathed a sigh of relief as I finally caught a break in the long drive back to Jerusalem.

Not so for Michael Matias, a 14-year-old who took the stage for his 10 minutes of fame to tell us about â€œgrowing up in real-time.â€ My multitasking experience is his daily reality. He adds to the mix doing homework while simultaneously watching TV on his laptop (42-inch flat screens are so 2006) and playing online chess and poker. He says he spends at least 5 hours a day online, not including class when he often uses the school computers. When he needs to study, itâ€s as likely to be via video conference than an in-person cram session.

Matias is a relative pauper when it comes to Facebook friends â€“ he only has 300 and says he only accepts someone heâ€s met in person. Although he does spend time with people in the so-called â€œreal world,â€ he told the audience that in some ways he actually prefers his online world. â€œIt brings me closer to them. I can hang out with more than one person at the same time.â€ No, he doesnâ€t think he spends too much time online and, when asked which of his real-time tools heâ€d give up if necessary, he quipped that he couldnâ€t. â€œIt would be like choosing between my mom and my dad.â€

The rest of the conference was interesting (if less shocking). Israeli comedian Lior Manor did â€œTwitter magicâ€ â€“ he asked the audience to tweet a number between one and 140 (get it, the 140 character maximum Twitter imposes), then he picked a number from his real-time Twitter stream and did a card trick in person â€“ no different than what magicians have been doing for years except that he used an iPad to display the input.

Yossi Taguri talked about his latest startup Fiidme which lets you â€œshare your satisfactionâ€ about food. â€œIf youâ€re in a restaurant,â€ he explained, â€œyou can ask your friends whatâ€s good on the menu and theyâ€ll tweet you their recommendations.â€ With a grin, he added that they also â€œthought it would help us get free lunches.â€ His business partner Lior commented that being in a restaurant â€œwithout wireless is very frustrating.â€ (Whatever happened to the romantic candlelit dinner?)

There was also a session on using Twitter to do good in the world: an Israeli company called JustCoz lets you â€œdonateâ€ your Twitter status to organizations to raise awareness about their causes. In just under a month online, 100 organizations have signed up for the free service, gathering 1,200 supporters which provide re-tweeting access to more than a million people.

Now thatâ€s a great idea from the real time webâ€¦if we can actually take a moment away from our incessant multitasking to participate.

Oh, and about that article I was writing? I guess I succeeded because youâ€re reading it now.

This article was originally posted at Israelity last week immediately following the 140 conference.

Twitter and the Tube: Social Media Meets Interactive TV

Brian Blum — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:46:27 +0000

Interactive video has been one of my passions since I worked as a â€œmultimedia producerâ€ in the early 1990s creating CD-ROM titles in edutainment and healthcare. In 1994, I led a team that produced â€œHow Multimedia Computers Work,â€ an immersive interactive environment that plunged viewers into a virtual 3D computer. We followed that up with â€œHow Your Body Works.â€ Both were co-published in a book-CD package by Ziff-Davis Press.

In recent years, interactive video has been used very effectively for advertising and marketing. Carnival Cruise Lines employed it to help bring a cruise ship alive for would-be (and high-paying) passengers. Mars created an entire mini-commercial called â€œGet the Girlâ€¦An Interactive Love Story (Sort Of)â€ for its Twix brand where the viewer gets to choose what happens next. Even The New York Times got into the act with an interactive David Pogue sharing insights on consumer electronics.

But the Holy Grail for we interactive pioneers was always marrying it with broadcast television. It was the late 1980s, though, and technology never kept up with our creativity. Now, though, with the advent of social media, that day may have arrived. But with what consequences?

I wrote in my earlier post about Jeff Pulverâ€s â€œ140 Characters Conferenceâ€ which paraded a veritable cavalcade of social media luminaries on stage to talk about all things Twitter and Facebook. One of the panels at the event was on â€œsocial TV.â€

Veteran Israeli media consultant Dror Gill described how TV and Twitter are already mashing up. A growing community of users are tweeting while they watch the tube, he explained, sending their comments, theories and criticisms into the social ether for others who are following the same program at the same time to reply to or re-tweet.

Gill called this phenomena 2-screen interactive TV (there are cable operators that have already integrated similar social media tricks into a single screen).

The experience, Gill explained, in some ways recreates a bit of what was for me an integral part of my childhood: sitting together as a family, laughing at dead parrots and silly walks, or cringing at another one of Mary Tyler Mooreâ€s insecure faux-pasâ€s.

These days, itâ€s rare for members of a family to even find time to eat dinner as a cohesive unit. Twittering together, apparently, is the next best thingâ€¦even if your fellow schmoozers are on opposite coasts (or even different continents).

Conference host Pulver related his own social TV experience. A big fan of the NBC show Heroes, one evening, Pulver found himself away from the TV trolling the aisles for canned corn or some other delicacy in his local supermarket.

Distraught over missing his favorite guilty pleasure, he pulled out his cell phone and was able to follow the show by scrolling through the real-time tweets that neatly summarized the main plot turns.

How Pulver got his shopping done I donâ€t knowâ€¦I also have to wonder why the one time founder of VoIP giant Vonage didnâ€t just TiVo the show, or at least watch it later on Hulu. But that wouldnâ€t have made for such an illustrative story.

Despite the fact that a number of the participants at the conference praised social media for making the post-modern world a little less lonely, the entire experience seems to me to be exactly the opposite. Where once we gathered in a shared space, we now sit alone opposite our 42-inch plasma screens tapping away to strangers thousands of miles away.

But for advertisers, this real time web can perhaps be seen as a hopeful trend. Broadcast television has been inching inexorably towards time shifting. The number of viewers watching a show at the hour itâ€s actually aired has been steadily declining in an online world where you can instantly stream that same program on any number of sites or â€“ heaven forbid â€“ download it for free.

The social media interactive experience, by contrast, requires participants to watch live. Tape delay ruins the whole thing. Moreover, not only canâ€t live viewers fast forward through the commercials, TV Twitterers may be less likely to jump up at a commercial at all. With all the real time excitement, a social media conversation may actually evolve about the ad itself. That puts the onus on the advertiser to make sure that what theyâ€ve created can withstand the withering comments of a live Twitterverse.

The game for advertisers, as a result, gets even more complicated than it already is in a globally connected world. Companies must make sure they have assigned a staff person to monitor Twitter and other social media channels whenever their ads play in primetime. Because, when the masses wonâ€t put down their keyboards even during the once sacred passive TV experience, the necessity to remain vigilant, to jump to attention and enact damage control if the need arises, becomes an integral part of the job.

Itâ€s been said before by techno-luminaries far more prolific than me, but social media can no longer be seen as a â€œnice to have.â€ This makes it at once both terrifying and a terrific opportunity. But itâ€s one that must not be ignored.

Writing and the Future of the Book

Brian Blum — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:32:26 +0000

Iâ€ve written before about how I believe the physical nature of books will changeâ€¦much sooner than most of us can imagine. Within 10 years, 20 years tops, there will be virtually no print books being published â€“ weâ€ll be consuming content exclusively on portable reading devices. Newspapers will fall even sooner.

Todayâ€s text readers include the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Nobleâ€s Nook, The Plastic Logic Que and, of course, the iPhone and its various cell phone based derivatives. Future products â€“ perhaps even the long rumored Apple â€œiPadâ€ – will undoubtedly be much easier on the eyes and intuitive to use than whatâ€s currently available.

But how about the creation of books? Bob Stein of the Institute of the Future of the Book suggests that the same phenomena of â€œcrowdsourcingâ€ that forms the backbone of content creation on social media â€“ from blogs to Facebook â€“ and that has made Wikipedia the worldâ€s largest and most popular reference source, will be applied next to novels, biographies and all sorts of non-fiction.

The initial reaction of traditional authors â€“ myself included â€“ has been a quick harrumph. You canâ€t displace a well-trained and experienced writer with the power of isolated individuals across the Internet.

Or can you?

Stein gives the example of a well-known biographer who receives a $2 million advance, goes off for 10 years to research and write, and returns with his latest best-seller. Crowdsource me? says the writer. Not going to happen.

But at the same time, there is undoubtedly a newly minted PhD in Creative Writing who grew up on Facebook who has no problem writing in public and letting her thousands of friends and followers contribute. It may seem improbable today, but then so does the total demise of a hard cover book you can hold in your hand.

You can already see companies exploring this space. WeBook is probably the best known. Founded by Israeli serial entrepreneur Itai Kohavi and backed by some of the biggest names in venture capital, the site allows anyone to start a book topic and solicit submissions from other WeBook members who can also collaboratively edit the book in real time for all the world to see. WeBook runs periodic votes where members determine which books WeBook should actually publish (gasp) in print.

The startup Vook is more traditional in that most of what this company publishes is written by a single author, but it breaks the traditional mold by including video as an integral part of the storytelling process. â€œVooks,â€ of course, are digital only.

Group written books are actually not that new. Take a look at the Talmud, the massive work of Jewish law, folklore and history. The original source material for the Talmud was oral, written by multiple authors and handed down from generation to generation until it was finally written down.

Legally, publishing crowdsourced books can be pretty tricky. The Internet culture of free sharing makes it tough to solicit help on a book and then charge for it. For example, I have a personal crowdsourcing project called SiddurWiki and Iâ€m still trying to figure out the lawyerly language so that content on the site can be widely distributed electronically at no cost, while at the same time, be set up so that I can also sell it and make a profit.

So what does an established, traditional author (or an electronic publisher of any type, for that matter) do in such turbulent times? I think that individual authors have to begin thinking of themselves as hybrid writers and managers. Itâ€s not enough to lock yourself in a room with just a typewriter (boy, that really dates me!) Rather you have to view your work as a â€œproductâ€ that needs leadership.

Writers of the future will be need to be cheerleaders, evangelists and social media experts, as well as dedicated craftsmen.

Ultimately, writers wonâ€t go the way of the dinosaur. Indeed theyâ€ll be as valuable as ever: a single person will still need to put it all together. But the process that leads up to that is about to change forever.

140 Characters Comes to Tel Aviv

Brian Blum — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:49:14 +0000

Jeff Pulver in Tel Aviv

Jeff Pulver is a galavanting kind of guy. The one time founder of voice-over-IP telephony company Vonage, Pulver has in recent years traveled the globe hosting hi-tech networking â€œbreakfastsâ€ that attract hundreds of attendees

On Sunday, Pulver was back in town with a combined breakfast and conference focused on â€œthe state of now.â€

Dubbed the â€œ140 Characters Conferenceâ€ (thatâ€s the number of characters youâ€re allowed to type into the Twitter â€œWhatâ€s happening?â€ box), some 250 social media â€œcharactersâ€ gathered at Tel Avivâ€s Afeka College of Engineering to listen attentively to a whopping four dozen presenters who spoke either in panel discussions or alone in 10 minute incrementsÂ (a large clock counted down the minutes and, other than a few misbehavers, the time was scrupulously observed).

Among the presenters were Alon Nir, the entrepreneur behind â€œTweetYourPrayersâ€ which allows petitioners to tweet notes that Nir physically places in the cracks of the Western Wall. Nir started the project as a hobby. By the summer, he had thousands of notes and had to enlist an army of volunteers (recruited via Twitter of course) to roll the print outs and cart them to Jerusalem. Find him on Twitter at @thekotel.

A highlight for Israeli music fans was the appearance on stage of rockers Yoni Bloch and Ivri Lider who talked about how they use Twitter to get closer to their fans. Bloch, a self-confessed nerd, initially found fame by posting his songs to an Israeli MySpace-clone and was flabbergasted when, several years ago â€“ long before the advent of Twitter â€“ he sold out a live show just by announcing it online.

Comedians Charley Warady and Benji Lovitt talked about how they use social media to try out punch lines for their jokes (â€œcan you be funny in 140 characters?â€ asked one audience member).

On a more serious note, David Saranga discussed how the Israeli consulate in New York took to Twitter to counter negative reports coming out of Gaza during Januaryâ€s Operation Cast Lead. He also pointed out one of the more effective campaigns to reposition Israel in the mind of the world: the 2007 infamous â€œGirls of the IDFâ€ bikini photo spread in Maxim magazine.

The strangest use of Twitter discussed? Simultaneous tweeting while watching TV. While I find it hard to understand how one can actually enjoy a program while tapping away on a Blackberry or iPhone keyboard, veteran media consultant Dror Gill suggested that interactive media can actually restore some of the social cohesion thatâ€s been lost in the modern world where families rarely sit down together to watch the contemporary equivalent of All in the Family.

Twittering away, he said, is akin to kibbutzing together in the family roomâ€¦even if your fellow schmoozers are thousands of miles away.

To back up that point of global interconnectedness, host Pulver announced at the dayâ€s conclusion that 6,464 people from around the world had tuned in to watch the conference live via the Internet and that for much of the day, this intimate little get together, tucked away in an off the beaten track corner of Tel Aviv, had been ranked in Twitterâ€s Top 10 â€œtrending topics.â€

See for yourself. Search for #140conf on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on the Israelity blog.

The Serendipity Effect in Social Media

Brian Blum — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:53:00 +0000

Image from Mary Lindsay's blog

When the web first started becoming paramount in how people consumed news, there was a lot written about the dangers of information â€œnarrowcastingâ€ and how it would result in a populace that knew little about what happening outside their own limited sphere of interest. Traditional print newspapers and magazines were lauded because by their very nature they enable readers to serendipitously stumble across news they might not have searched for on Google.

An interesting interview on a recent episode of NPRâ€s On the Media with Ethan Zuckerman of Harvardâ€s Berkman Center, and Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired and The New York Times Magazine, suggested that â€“ surprisingly – social media could be an answer.

Thompson cited the research presented in Malcolm Gladwellâ€s â€œThe Tipping Pointâ€ about how many people someone can actually have as friends or colleagues. The number, says Gladwell, is 150; human beings canâ€t really keep track of more than that. But on social media, that number jumps to the hundreds (and in some cases, particularly on Twitter, the thousands).

I have over 600 Facebook â€œfriends.â€ Do I know all of them well? Certainly not. But something interesting happens when it comes to learning about news. The more â€œfriendsâ€ we have, the more likely it is weâ€ll learn something about a topic we didnâ€t expect to and likely wouldnâ€t have searched for either.

And if enough of our friends share or re-tweet on a particular subject, we will come to think this is â€œimportantâ€ (even if itâ€s really about some ludicrous boy in a balloon). More seriously, the tweets emanating from Iran during the recent mini-revolution definitely opened many new eyes.

Admittedly, most of our friends are â€œlike usâ€ in terms of educational backgrounds and socio-economic standards. But some of those friends may have a wider circle that includes one or two more exotic colleagues. And I have not been terribly discriminating about who I â€œfriendâ€ â€“ when I have a question that I need answering, I then have a wider circle to whom I can publish.

The issue of serendipity in social media has come up recently with one of my clients. The client has a particular organizational focus, and most of what we post relates to that topic. But sometimes we also publish links to articles off-topic which we feel will be interesting to our readers. Itâ€s a way of keeping the site timely and relevant. But it also has the effect of populating our fansâ€ activity streams with news they might not have seen otherwise.

So, if part of the product management services you provide your clients includes preparing and executing on a social media â€œcontent plan,â€ keep in mind the serendipity effect. It can help establish you more as a destination site within the social media universeâ€¦and itâ€s good for the world too.

Addicted to Email (and Why That’s Important for Marketers)

Brian Blum — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:04:40 +0000

We all feel like weâ€re addicted to email sometimes. Now along comes someone to tell us why.

New York Times reporter Matt Richtel, interviewed on the NPR program On The Media, explained that in psychological terms, there is something called “intermittent reinforcement” â€“ “thatâ€s this idea that if you put a rat in a device where a food pellet only comes out of a hole periodically, the ratâ€s going to be checking that hold all the time because it never knows when that food is available.â€

The same thing happens with email, Richtel said. â€œMost of the stuff we get is plainly unimportant. But occasionally, something really important comes along. So what does that do? It randomly reinforces us to be checking all the time.â€

In other words, we are not that much more evolved than the common rodentâ€¦at least when it comes to checking our iPhones ten times an hour. And itâ€s not just email â€“ Facebook status updates, SMS, chats â€“ theyâ€re all part of an addiction that, apparently, gets physical as well.

Richtel again: â€œwhen you check your device, you basically get the equivalent of a dopamine squirt. Well, if you get that little candy when you check your email and you check your phone, in its absence you start to feel bored.â€

And when you feel bored, you want a new squirt. So what do you do? You send out a text or an email or a Tweet, or you initiate a Facebook chat, all in the hope that youâ€ll get a response. It becomes an endless loop.

What does all this mean for Internet advertisers and publishers? Perhaps this: If you want to get your message out, steer clear of banner ads and choose more interruptive media. Build up your social media fans and followers. And keep them guessing as to when the next big announcement will arrive in their inboxes.

————

The interview, by the way, was part of a larger discussion on â€œdistracted drivingâ€ amid new laws forbidding texting while behind the wheel – see Matt’s articles here. The implications for advertisers when it comes to potentially fatal social media behavior are far more ominous.

Casinos, Behavioral Tracking and You

Brian Blum — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:27:12 +0000

I was listening to an old episode of one of my favorite NPR shows and podcasts, Radio Lab. The topic was how we choose and it featured a fascinating and highly disturbing story that has relevance to anyone involved in the Internet today.

It turns out that in the world of gambling, the casino chain Harrahâ€s is the undisputed leader. The reason? All visitors must first join a â€œloyaltyâ€ program. Since signing up grants the gambler a nice credit of a few bucks, no one says no. Once you get your card, you have to insert it in the slot machine whenever you want to play.

What happens next is that Harrahâ€s tracks everything you do at the slots – how long you stay, what machines you play, how much you spend. By crunching the numbers, Harrahâ€s knows your specific pain threshold and at what point youâ€ll have lost enough to quit.

Harrahâ€s staff in the back room tracks everything and when the computer flags someone coming close to their limit, a member of Harrahâ€s floor staff approaches the soon-to-give-up gambler and intervenes, offering a free steak dinner, or another $15 credit or even tickets to a show that evening. The result: the gambler keeps gambling.

When I first heard this, I was appalled. How could a casino be so manipulative? (Well, theyâ€re already manipulative, but this seemed over the top.) And how could gamblers be so gullible as to give the casino access to their personal behaviors.

But then I realized that what Harrahâ€s is doing is really no different than whatâ€s happening online today. Advertisers using behavioral targeting are tracking your every move on the web â€“ which sites you linger on, how long you stay in one place, what links you click on. The advertiser then knows to serve up the right ad at the right time and place.

Letâ€s say you just left Cars.com and are now at The New York Times. If the two companies both use the same tracking service, itâ€s easy for The Times to serve up an auto ad even though youâ€ve long since left Cars.com.

And how about mobile GPS services? We give up our privacy so that we can receive customized ads and coupons for restaurants in the vicinity of where weâ€re walking or driving. We see that as valuable â€“ hey, I just got 10% off â€“ but arenâ€t you being manipulated in exactly the same way as at the casino? Minority Report isnâ€t so far away.

Iâ€m not saying that we should turn off our cookies â€“ often times those ads can be valuable â€“ and in any case, itâ€s largely impractical given the way the Internet operates. But we should be aware of whatâ€s happening around us and make sure that we know when weâ€ve given our permission to be manipulated.

A Social Media Proposal

Brian Blum — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 19:04:26 +0000

This is what social media is all about…a wedding proposal via YouTube and posted to Facebook. It’s in Hebrew, but you get the idea.

Move over Twitter, Here Comes Flutter

Brian Blum — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 08:21:01 +0000

There have been some very funny social media parodies that have swept the web. CollegeHumor’s Web Site Story and the BBC’s What if Facebook Were Real?

The latest to come across my desk is this take on a new nano-blogging service with a maximum of 26 character updates: Flutter. Enjoy!

Tweets Come to the Western Wall

Brian Blum — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:12:21 +0000

Have you ever wanted to place a note in the Western Wall but couldnâ€t afford the ticket to Jerusalem? Now you can tweet it.

Itâ€s traditional to place short notes in the cracks of the Western Wall stones asking for health, livelihood and other personal requests. Now, a new Israeli Web site launched two weeks allows petitioners to submit their prayers or wishes via Twitter. The notes are then printed out and regularly taken to Jerusalemâ€s Old City.

Twitter is ideal for such a service: the 140-character limitation forces the religiously-minded to keep their requests short. It also allows site founder, Alon Nir of Tel Aviv, to consolidate a number of messages onto a single sheet of paper.

Nir doesnâ€t see the project more as cultural than religious. â€œI thought of it after understanding Twitter’s power and wondered what I could do with it,â€ he said. â€œSo I linked the Western Wall to the millions using Twitter.”

One drawback: since the service uses Twitter, the notes are all public. Didn’t we all learning that telling someone what you wish for means it won’t come true?

The site is at http://www.tweetyourprayers.info/. You can follow the service at http://twitter.com/TheKotel (Kotel is the Hebrew for Western Wall). The site already has 546 followers.

For more articles on newspapers and classified advertising, visit the industry experts: AIMGroup.com.