SlyDial Would Be Cool if it Actually Worked

When I first read about SlyDial, I was really excited. Just between you and I — and now the rest of the world — I’ve never been a big fan of talking on the phone, with the exception of a few people.

So the prospect of being able to route myself directly to someone’s voicemail and leaving a message without having to actually talk to them sounded wonderful. Too bad that when I tested SlyDial by dialing my cell phone from my home phone, it not only rang my cell, but showed my number on the caller ID.

SUCH a tease!

Changes to the Home Page

If you monitor TeresaCentric via RSS, it might be time to click on through and check out our homepage.

We’ve moved a few things around to display the conversation happening among our wonderful commenters much more prominently. Lower down on the lefthand side, you’ll find a widget from lifestreaming site FriendFeed that aggregates my activities from a dozen different social tools, including Twitter and Google Reader.

Below that, you’ll find Andy’s very own Twitter. That’s right. Andy has a Twitter account, but he needs to step it up.

Feedback is always welcome below.

Obama and McCain on Tech

Obama says he’ll appoint a White House CTO. McCain’s got Carly Fiorina stumping for him as the best candidate for the tech industry. Obama has a Facebook co-founder working on his campaign. McCain’s…well, Carly Fiorina swears he’s a good tech candidate. Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen was impressed with Obama’s breadth of knowledge and intellectual curiosity on the emergence of the social Web. McCain doesn’t actually know how to use a computer.

Why are we even talking about who’s the better tech candidate?

MTV Street Team ‘08 Does a Piece on TeresaCentric!

Many thanks to Washington State Street Team reporter Cory Midgarten for covering TeresaCentric.

Kid Rock Says “Steal Everything”

SCAM ALERT

I just received a phone call from 503-403-2674. As soon as I picked up the phone, it hung up. Apparently, this part of a scam. If you call the number back, you get this recording:

“Welcome to Wells Fargo, to get started please say or key in your card number.”

This number is most definitely NOT Wells Fargo. They just want you to give them all your information so that they can take all your money. Hopefully the Feds will shut them down quickly. In the meantime, block any calls from the following numbers:

1-503-403-2674
1-503-403-2660
1-503-403-2665

Popping Popcorn with a Cell Phone?

Bluetooth headset look better to you now?

Via Matt Mullenweg.

Your Revolution: Voter Registration Straight from Facebook

The revolution is officially here. This evening, I got a Facebook message from Brett Horvath — a political genius I worked with on Deb Eddy’s campaign for the state legislature. Brett and his friends have built a super-sweet application that allows you to register to vote right from Facebook and then see which of your friends aren’t registered and sign them up.

The application is called Your Revolution, and you can find out more about it here. Here’s a bit about the group behind it:

Your Revolution is an independent, non-partisan group of students across five states. We’re a people-powered movement that brings students together for a common goal; making it as easy as possible to participate in democracy. We run entirely on donations, and we could really use your support. If students across the country could register to vote instantly, and invite their unregistered friends using social networks, that’s a game changer. Not for one party over another, but to enable the student movement in way that hasn’t happened in a long time.

MySpace Hates Snurl

I sent a MySpace message to my friend Jill last week. Jill’s a yoga person and I thought she’d enjoy the post I wrote about Jill Bolte Taylor and how her stroke allowed her to get to that elusive state of mind that yogis strive for.

Since MySpace messaging sometimes does funky things with long URLs, I decided to shorten the URL at Snurl.com. It seems that Jill was able to click through and view my blog post, because she responded to tell me that it was cool. I read her response, and then decided to click through to my own blog.

That’s when I saw this:

Since my blog post is clearly not spam, a phishing scam, or a virus, it can only be deduced that MySpace hates and disables ALL snurl links in messages. That is ridiculously lame.

Video from the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives

Here’s the video from the panel I participated in at the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives social networking conference last month:

The rest of the videos can be found here.

Some Neat TeresaCentric Stats

This caught my attention in my WordPress dashboard just now.

Way cool!

Tools For Evaluating the Credibility of Online Rumors

I’ll be the first to attest to the revolutionary power of the Web. Those who know me well have heard me speak effusively about the power of social media to revolutionize everything and save the word from evildoers. But much like Al Quaeda with a nuclear device, evildoers and crazy people can leverage revolutionary technologies to do incredible harm.

This has been the case with a number of stories leveled at the Obama campaign in the past few days. And even though a number of the rumors in question have been widely discredited, they continue to circulate online.

Misinformation and innuendo are tactics that should have no place in our democracy. But since they have become a part of the standard repertoire for anyone who wants to discredit a political candidate, it’s important to evaluate information that comes our way critically. Below is some advice for those of you who have heard a rumor online and want to determine its veracity.

First, look at the source. Is the video or article hosted on a mainstream news site? A blog with a reputation for good reporting? On the website of an organization that pushes a specific political agenda? Does the article in question have a byline? Is it an actual name or a Web handle like “randomguy789?”

One way to do this easily is to look at the root URL. This is everything that comes before the “dot com” (or “dot net” or “dog org”) in a web address. So if the URL of this post is www.teresacentric.com/2008/03/tools-for-evaluating-the-credibility-of-online-rumors, then the root URL is www.teresacentric.com.

Once you’ve gone to the root URL by deleting everything after the “dot com” from your browser bar. Look around for an about section or anything else that tells you about who owns the site and what their political agenda is. If the site in question is hosted at its own domain — as opposed to, say wordpress.com or blogger.com — you can do a WHOIS search by entering the root URL into a WHOIS search engine.

As a general rule, you should be very skeptical of any site or blogger that does not make his or her identity and intentions clear.

Next, investigate further and see what the most credible sources say about the individual or group making the claims. Cast a wide net. Look at mainstream news sites and blogs with a high Google Pagerank. Pagerank can be determined by pasting the root URL into this Pagerank checker.

While sites with a lower pagerank can be credible sources, it’s rare that a site with a pagerank of 6 or above is going to contain a lot of misinformation. This is because sites with higher pagerank have more inbound links or “votes” from other credible sites. Keep in mind that pagerank is not a be-all end-all metric for determining credibility. Many sites with high pagerank are sketchy. But it can be a useful tool in evaluating credibility when weighed along with other factors. For your information, at the time of this posting, TeresaCentric.com had a pagerank of 5.

If most of the evidence surrounding an online rumor comes from sources with sketchy credentials and low pagerank, proceed with caution. The story may be entirely true, but until more credible sources check the facts and talk to the major players involved, the information should be viewed as potentially false. Try to reserve judgment, even if the claims seem compelling.

Finally, ask yourself, “is this logical?” Does the accuser offer any evidence to support his claims? Are there witnesses? Do the claims rely on half-truths, or are they fully fleshed out arguments? Ask yourself if the person making the claims is appealing to the reader’s emotions, prejudices, fears, or is otherwise attempting to get in the way of logical thought.

I know that it’s easy to be confused by the Web with its plethora of content and perspectives. But if you think critically and reserve your judgment until the facts are in, you can avoid the worst of online rumors and get to the truth.

A Vertitable Online Community Smörgåsbord

Anyone who remembers the wonderful 1973 animated adaptation of E.B. White’s immortal Charlotte’s Web remembers the hilarious musical number in which Templeton the rat eats up every last delicious morsel once the county fair has shut down for the night.

I felt a bit like Templeton last night at the Online Community Round Table organized by Bill Johnston of Forum One Network. There was almost too much good information to consume.

I Twittered the heck out of the event, which apparently added value for a lot of my followers. I got a lot of encouragement to write a blog post out of all my notes.

Before I get into the stream-of-consciousness, I’d like to wrap up a few main takeaways from the event:

1. Online community starts with the people in the community, not the technology. Know their needs and habits intimately and build your feature set accordingly.
2. Communities with robust existing user bases often police themselves more effectively than administrators can.
3. Communities have active and passive contributors. Lurking is a contribution, too.

Below is a list of my tweets in a reasonable approximation of chronological order with annotations where necessary:

• @choconancy is talking about knowledge sharing. Sometimes technology supports people, sometimes it’s the starting point. Contradicts POST. [Nancy was talking about starting knowledge sharing databases for within companies or professional associations. The POST I was referring to here is the POST method advocated by Forrester.]
• Sometimes new leadership and culture shift can kill internal community initiatives,, sometimes they are so bottom-up that it doesn’t matter.
• ppl sometimes don’t appreciate online community resources until it adds direct value in their personal experiences [In other words, sometimes some people within an organization are not supportive of spending time and resources to build online knowledge bases until those information repositories help them directly.]
  
• Sometimes the “not invented here” mentality really gets in the way of organizational mandate
• @nancywhite is her username, not @choconancy whoops!
• Kim malek is talking about the tensions between creating an invitation only community while working to grow membership virally.
• Invitation only as an acquisition tactic, like how bleeding edge online tools raise hype
• Discussion about core groups policing the group with regard to invitation-only vs. open
• An audience member observes that effective online groups usually represent a diversity of perspectives grouping around a common experience.
• Talking with these online community geeks is reinforcing my takeaway sentiment from SXSW: geeks can save the world
• Some people huddle together for warmth, others are there for content
• Peer review becomes seriously important the more bottom-up the content becomes
• Community managers should ask 1) should we try to scale ip size of community? And 2) why do we want to grow? and 3) will growth benefit us? [The third question was originally supposed to read "will growth kill the community?" but I ran out of characters.]
• TED conference is trying to scale while remaining meaningful [A presenter was showing how the TED conference was using online community building as a way to maintain the personal connections built at its conference while growing the audience.]
• We’re getting a demo of the TED online community
• TED profiles are content rich and very specific. You have big buckets for privacy. Users can tag themselves. Looks a lot like facebook.
• There’s no social graph representations that we can find. Wish they were doing that.
• Online overlays help conferences to flesh themselves out. [We talked a lot about how the online overlays of Twitter, Facebook and Meebo were integral to the SXSW experience this year and last year. I referenced Jeremiah Owyang's post on how online backchannels were the source of groundswells during the conference.]
• Discussing conferences that use compulsory registration vs. optional off-site resources.
  
• build vs join issue: engagement metrics are challenging when you use someone else’s tools.
• Gates foundation education practice is trying to increase HS graduation rates, working to connect principals and teachers for information
• How do you build online communities for non tech-savvy people? How do you determine what people will do?
• I get a massive high from these networking/discussion events. I really need to do this more often.
• People often don’t know what will make them happy. [This was in reference to an audience member's comment that the idea that people can tell you what features on an online community site will make them happy is a faulty premise. I agree.]
• Don’t chase too many features. Non tech communities are by definition not early adopters.
• “cool shiny factor” vs. Bare bones and iterate [This reminded me a lot of the logic that goes into developing successful Facebook applications. The best developers are the ones that repeatedly throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. This is also remeniscent of the Chorus methodology now in use at Eli Lilly to determine the best compounds for late-term efficacy studies.]
• The major theme of this conversation appears to be that knowing your niche audience and how they function is essential.
• I have a lot of new empathy for teams like facebook and myspace thst are trying to serve hugely diverse groups.
• Reading and absorbing content is a seriously underrated “passive contribution” to a community.
• how do we incent passive contribution? Show what someone is listening to. [One audience member brought up Last.fm's Facebook application which shows what channel users are listening to. The idea behind this is that it incentivizes reading and making passive contributions by adding content consumed to an aggregate of someone's expertise as it's represented online. Some audience members point out how easy it would be to game a system like this.]
• That would add massive value to my practice of following individual attention streams as a way to monitor relevant online conversations. [I advocated this methodology in a PRWebinar I gave about a month ago and elaborated on it here.]
  
• This does raise some concerns with regard to privacy, people really sometimes do just want to lurk.
• This is what mybloglog is for.

If you found this information just the tiniest bit useful, then you really need to be engaged with the Online Community Round Table group on Facebook and keep apprised of when they’ll be holding an event in your area.

Update: This post was originally supposed to go up over at Web Community Forum, but due to jetlag, my exhausted brain made me post it here instead. Now that you’re done reading, head on over there for more great online community resources.

zOMG!!!! We’re Above the Freakin’ Fold on AllTop! Also, Guy Kawasaki is Cool!

I was at the airport getting ready to board a plane back to Seattle when I got this text message from my roommate:

Did you know your blog is listed alongside scoble, guy Kawasaki, fake Steve jobs, arrington on alltop.com. This is awesome !! Alltop is guy Kawasaki’s latest venture !!!

Needless to say, I got online immediately and was absolutely astounded to see that TeresaCentric is listed (very!) prominently in the egos section of the site.

After the initial headiness wore off, I realized that the fact that only my name was listed and not that of my brilliant co-blogger Andy was a problem — a problem that Guy Kawasaki quickly and kindly fixed when I pinged him about it. (Thanks, Guy!)

I poked around the site a bit more and found it to be a really cool compendium of voices from around the Web covering hot topics. I’m not sure how I feel about the hovering orange bar at the bottom of the page, but the rest of the user interface is very straightforward. I can see some less tech-oriented people regularly logging onto this site instead of using an RSS reader to keep up with the buzz in a particular area of interest.

Also, despite the fact that Andy and I have egos big enough to be listed in the egos section, I can’t imagine what amazing thing we did in some alternate universe to be listed ahead of so many people we absolutely idolize. In any case, and in all seriousness, we’re seriously honored to be included. We’ll let all you guys know when we float back down to Earth, k?

On Leaving SXSW

We build a future on the shoulders of giants
by building a platform for the giants to come.

We sell an idea written in logic:
the whole of human meaning wrapped in code.

It was once said that the pen is mighty.
We say: the text editor is mightier still.

In the past few days, I have been uniquely privileged to meet some of the best and brightest minds in technology. As I sit at the Austin airport waiting to board my flight, I am overwhelmed by the promise I have encountered.

We live in a frightening world, but I’m starting to believe that the geeks can save it.

So much love to all of you!

Fox Starts To Get With The Program

Fox has started broadcasting some of its top shows (Family Guy, The Simpsons, House) on fox.com. While I still think that they are idiots for not broadcasting EVERY episode that they have rights to, at least it’s a start. In the meantime, however, if I want to watch an old episode of Arrested Development or Futurama, I have use SurfTheChannel.com, tv-links.cc, or google video.

Google video, by the way, is amazing. I still don’t fully understand why it is that movie and tv studios want me to have to go all the way to a theatre or blockbuster to watch a movie that I really want to see, as opposed to paying a fee and watching it off their website. I’ll still go out and see movies socially (saw The Other Boelyn Girl last night), but if it’s a Sunday night and I want to watch Walk Hard, I have to watch the crappy version shot with a video in the theatre off of Google video.

P.S. Walk Hard was terrible. If I had actually had to put on pants, drive to a theatre, and pay ten bucks, I would have been really pissed off.

Hillary Clinton Tries Desperately to be Cool

Methinks that Senator Clinton doesn’t understand that her “youth problem” doesn’t stem from lack of coolness. It stems from a lack of genuineness. I don’t think this video helps much, but it’s a clever approach. I definitely laughed a little bit:

What do you guys think? Good attempt at viral video or stupid campaign stunt?

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