Inside View from Ireland

Febooary Social Audio

PROOF THAT SOCIAL AUDIO is alive and well during a month rechristened as "Febooary" by avid users of the Audioboo service. Every day has a unique topic, such as today's about "favourite smell and why?"

We like croissants, the bread in the crosshairs of the Irish government's increased tax plans. Unhealthy white pan bread escapes an increase in tax while croissants are blasted with an additional two percent of tax. Some merchants have increased the cost of their croissants by 10 cents, thinking we're expecting to pay more and won't gripe about it.

The audio clip below is a non-whinging report of our favourite smells and scents.

Febooaary Scents and Smells

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Listen on Audioboo to Febooary Scents and Smells

Febooary Week Two Topics on the Audioboo Blog.

Bonus Audio: 

Whitney Houston Filtered Acapello

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Shared Circles and a Confession

I HAVE A CONFESSION to make: my most retweeted items come from Google Plus Shared Circles. And now since my G+ activity is much higher than what I do on Twitter, I'm sharing the inside story.

Image compliments of Kexino.com

It's a story of how to find like-minded, engaging people on Google+ by tapping into a list of 139,000 names and over 900 circles on the Google+ Shared Circles Database. If you like eclectic, this is your honeypot.

The Shared Circles Database gets regular updates from the Google+ community. If you're a regular reader of my blog and someone has shared a circle with you that is worth recording, please take a moment to add it to the Google+ Shared Circles Database at goo.gl/PrcGo #SharedCircles

Here are the instructions http://goo.gl/Ktn6R and the current categories are below the break.

Twitter Subordinating Censorship to Business

TWITTER IS TAKING STEPS to selectively censor messages country-by-country when it receives "a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity." I wonder what that means to free range tweeting but I imagine how some commentary from ground zero of protests will be muted.

Twitter already deletes content (tweets, images and links) when presented with DMCA requests. " I'm listening to what Christian Payne makes of the Twitter policy in the audio clip below. I'd expect Twitter would seriously consider requests to scrub certain hashtags from its timelines in the county of origin. Marshall Kirkpatrick wonders, "If told to do so by a government massacring its citizens in the streets, will Twitter render all people in that country unable to see messages of protest on its network? Will shouting into such an eerie silence change the way such Tweeting campaigns also engage with the outside world?"

This kind of thing is bound to happen before the end of 2012. I think it's the cost of doing business.

Documentally on Twitter and Censorship

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Always a Good Whinge

ADRIAN WECKLER writes about the group whinge factor on Twitter in his Sunday Business Post column today. And he concludes with the same thought as my unwired in-laws.

In his Reality Bytes column, Adrian dives deep into Irish people whinging about the Late Late show on RTE television. He could have cited a number of events, brands or personalities for similar treatment. That's because Twitter has evolved into the superhuman public channel for people to vent. I follow a lot of people who feel it is perfectly natural to open a Twitterstream with a litany of complaints about anonymous faces on emails, bad meals, slow trains or poor service. Sometimes I wonder if it might be faster to just pick up a phone to escalate a complaint through customer service channels instead of stirring up a gripe session online. But then I realise that a whole new service sector of social media experts has emerged alongside the popular adoption of Twitter and that those experts can advise clients on message tonality, brand recognition and conversations that engage. Twitter's ecosystem needs the whingers if there's to be any hope of sustaining the experts in social networking who live under the banner of "effective communication". Whinging, that is.

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Sent mail2blog from my Nokia phone in County Kilkenny after reading the Business Post.

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Managing with One View of Simple Tiles

I'M PLAYING WITH A Nokia Lumia 800 and it has elegantly changed the way I see messages.

I can see conversations as they bleed across different networks. So a comment arising in Facebook can morph into a direct SMS message and then become a longer email. All of that message continuity stays clustered together when viewed on the Lumia 800. This makes easy work of going from an emotive comment to a request like, "Send it to me as an email, okay?" And for me, the e-mail laggard, the Lumia 800 saves me from getting into more trouble.

I start a lot of classroom collaboration via email that accompanies a Google Document. Students will engage in that Google Doc directly, then often share thoughts in a Facebook group. What often happens is the answer to an academic question percolates up in Facebook. The Nokia Lumia 800 is set up to see a discussion evolve in the different communications media.

Private Messages in Google Plus

I'VE STARTED GETTING private messages through Google Plus on both my Android and iOS handsets.

If you want to reach me via G+ messaging, you need to be part of my extended circles. That is, we need to be connected on G+ by no more than one degree of separation. I need to be able to see your G+ stuff and my flow must be visible to you if you want to use private messaging in Google Plus. I turned on the private messaging feature by editing my G+ profile after going to http://gplus.to/topgold and clicking "Edit Profile" on the screen. That exposed an area just under my G+ Profile Image (in the screenshot) and I changed the message settings there. Those settings let me see messages only from selected people or from specific circles.

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Location Corner Chat

NOKIA WORLD BRINGS together handsets, location-aware search results, and service providers. I listened to five clever speakers talking about what lies ahead in the world of location-based services.

Ford wants to use its vehicles as platforms and through that platform allow drivers to operate safer and with elegant background syncing. I hear Leo Laporte talking about Ford Sync and I like the idea of thinking of my car as a wheeled device connected to the cloud.

Lots of Time for Audioboo

I HAVE TIME AND RESPECT for Audioboo because its reliability and ease of use make social audio as simple as reaching into your pocket.

Today my iPod Touch told me James Corbett was stepping up to the Audioboo app by using a new Android phone to make the process easier. He explains in the short audio clip below. The operative word is "easier" because in the realm of Personal On-Demand audio (the original meaning of Pod as in Podcasting), the easier you make personal recording, the greater the prospect of that process becoming a social one. Twitter is social because it's very close to texting--it's short and sweet to tweet. Audioboo is as easy as picking up your phone to answer a call. And a major benefit is you can delete what you've said with Audioboo. Try that trick with a normal voice call. I expect to be able to share more personal on demand social audio through a group of students in LIT-Clonmel and I believe the creative results will hang as a channel on Audioboo. I've lots of time for that.

Eirepreneur's First Samsung Galaxy S2 Boo

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I am topgold on Audioboo. I listen to truly social audio about newborns.

More about Audioboo on InsideView.ie.

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Before the Paintingtour

I SPENT AN HOUR with @eolai talking about his thirty-two county painting tour and the way that he plans to leverage social media during his ambitious cycling journey.

Talking to @eolai

 

I'm loaning him my O2 Mifi access point because it serves me well when uploading video, audio and still images. He's using a Sony Ericsson Xperia X8 to snap shots and to record Audioboo clips. All these pieces of media gain machine intelligence when uploaded and shared online. It should be possible to construct maps that show the Painting Tour as it runs around Ireland. The idea is straightforward: you pay for a painting and Liam stops to complete the commissioned work. He wants to reserve five hours each day for his art work and be on the bike to log up to 50 miles for each cycling segment. This is an ambitious undertaking, one I'll follow online by rreading, viewing and listening.

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Sent mail2blog using O2IRL Typepad service in Liffey Valley from my Nokia E7.

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Where Social Networking's Potential Lies Untapped

AFTER DISCUSSING PRELIMINARY research from a survey of third level educators, I can see how several innovative uses of social networking remain untapped in Irish universities. I've formed my conclusion by listening to colleagues in social settings, by attending presentations at Irish education events, and by scanning the initiatives that have come from action groups connected to the Croke Park Agreement. It's easier finding a senior lecturer with a feature phone than it is to find academic staff using the three big socnets of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. It's often an issue of productivity and personal financial outlays. In many parts of academia, people want to maintain a rigid work-life balance. Once you get attached to social networking, the lines of demarcation between work conversations and home life get compromised. Hence, there's no real incentive to leverage the power of social networking to help students who want to learn through multiple touchpoints. I'm discussing this idea during the 2011 e-learning week in the Dublin Institute of Technology next week. I expect to further confirm my initial observations.

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Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet Project, Kristen Purcell, Associate Director, Research Pew Internet Project, Lauren Sessions Goulet, University of Pennsylvania, and Keith N. Hampton, University of Pennsylvania -- Social Networking Sites and Our Lives, Pew Internet Research, June 16, 2011.

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