Lez Get It Poppin’ at POPSignal
I’ll be at the POPSignal Party tonight at Tequila Rain in Boston with a few hundred tech rock stars. Let it be noted that I may or may not have a Flip and I may or may not get you on video. Looks like there’ll be a huge turn out, so here’s to a great night. See you there, Boston!
Buzzing Bees, Events, Tech | Comment (0)If You Can Make It There… PodCamp NYC 2.0
Sup friends? I’ll be at PodCamp NYC 2.0 on Saturday at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. I will probably want to capture you in some way. No, not in a trap, silly! But I’m gonna get you in a photo, video or Utter while we’re having fun at camp. Deal?
I’m looking forward to seeing a bunch of good friends and to turning some pre-lationships into REALationships this weekend. If you see me around, please say hello. See you there!
Social Aggregators: FriendFeed vs. Socialthing!
When I explain FriendFeed and Socialthing! to my non-social media friends, they think the general idea is pretty cool. A place where you can aggregate the updates from your favorite social communities? Very nice. Borat style.
I recently got a Socialthing! invite from modern journalist and friend Brad King and signed up for FriendFeed at the same time. I’ve been using these two services side by side to see what I think and get a flavor for what the buzz is about. Although the case can be made that each service is bringing users a unique solution, so far I’ve been using them the same way.
Initial feelings: I like the Socialthing! UI much better than the look and feel of FriendFeed. The Lifestream thing is working for me. However, I have a lot more social networks aggregating in FriendFeed, making it much fuller as a one-stop shop for checking in on what my friends are up to. I don’t think I’d choose one over the other at this point. The thing is, I’m not sure that I even like mixing up all my networks in one place, even though social aggregators are so hot right now.
There’s something familiar and comfortable about going to each distinct site to find that separate content. I know what to expect from each different network and they’ve all become like favorite hangout spots for me. These social communities are not just about contributing and absorbing the content my friends are creating, but about the experience of going to a comfy, cozy place I’ve come to enjoy.
Do you find tools like FriendFeed and Socialthing! to be useful for you? How do you use these services?
Apps, Social Networks, Tech | Comments (4)PicLens is Enhancing My Photo Viewing Experience
Social media evangelist and friend Bryan Person (formerly known as Bryper) recently turned me on to the Web browser add-on PicLens. I’m generally a fan of toolbars, buttons and widgets that make things flashier and/or easier to use, so I checked it out. As someone who takes a lot of pictures and finds herself turning up in a lot of pictures on the Web, I was curious to see what this app could do. And I agree with earlier reviews–it’s pretty special.
PicLens puts a little “play” button on images you find within certain Web sites, like Google Images, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, etc. When you click the little button, it transports your browser to this alternate universe where photos are much more amazing than they are with the average, everyday browser. Note: if a photo is small (think thumbnail size), the button will take up most of the picture. If you don’t want to PicLens it, make sure you click on the corner or edge of the photo so it doesn’t enable the PicLens app.
So, say you clicked on a friend’s profile photo within Facebook. PicLens now takes you to what they call a “3D Wall” of photos related to the one you clicked–in this case, your friend’s other photos in the album. From there, you can zip around, look at things up close, play a slideshow, search for keywords and generally have a very rich photo viewing experience.
Now excuse me while I go PicLens it up with the 1,336 photos currently filling the BS08 Flickr group.
Apps, Honey, Tech | Comments (3)Boston Tweetups + Security Conferences = Fun
Last night I had the pleasure of attending another Tweetup here in Beantown. Ah, I love me a good Tweetup. The night, which started at Fajitas & Ritas and led us to FELT and Good Life’s Vodka Bar, was full of great conversation, new friends and footage captured on Alexa Scordato‘s MacBook Pro (coming soon).
There’s something about the people who use Twitter that inspires a fun, electric energy at meetup events. It seems there’s never a dull moment, and I always end up learning new things. At this particular Tweetup, I met Jennifer Leggio (@mediaphyter), Raffael Marty (@zrlram), Dmitri Gunn (@dmitrigunn), Adam and Sophy O’Donnell, Kee Hinckley and a bunch of other movers and shakers in the security industry who were in town for the SOURCE Boston conference.
Topics of conversation ranged from security compliance standards (how cool is it that I got to bring up SOX and PCI outside of work?!), to what, if anything, can or should be done to correct malicious online behavior among teens and college students, to glitter MySpace layouts, to Danny, the door guy at Good Life, being a seriously cool dude.
Thank you to Bryan Person and Joe C for being cool cats and making the night awesome.
Buzzing Bees, Events, Social Networks, Tech, Twitter | Comments (5)Tool I Love: HubSpot’s Website Grader
(Disclosure: HubSpot is a SHIFT client.)
As an entry level PR professional, I spend a lot of time in the trenches scanning, tracking, compiling, reporting, monitoring… You get the picture. I’m sure the other newbies out there know what I’m talking about, w00t. It’s part of the job, and even though it’s sometimes tedious and time consuming, this stuff is important to our clients and supportive for our account teams.
A tool I’ve been using in my scanning and monitoring work is Hubspot‘s Website Grader. Since Technorati isn’t all that comprehensive or reliable on its own when it comes to ranking and scoring blogs, I love that I have this tool to help me give meaning to the content I track. Why does this service rock? From the Website Grader home page:
Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.
I like that the grading doesn’t just give you a number or a score, but that it shows you how the tool derives that number (AND how to better optimize your content if you want to improve your score). Website Grader pulls from different resources like Technorati, Google Page Rank, del.icio.us and Alexa (not to be confused with this Alexa), and gives you a table-view snapshot of your results. So simple. It helps people like me to explain the authority of certain blogs as opposed to others with easy-to-understand evidence supporting my recommendations. I love this tool.
If you have been tasked with scoring blogs, have you used Website Grader? What do you think?
PR Pros, Public Relations, Social Media, Tech | Comments (7)Slowly Figuring Out My MBP
Wanted to share my first, feeble attempt at using iMovie. I get geekier by the day. Le sigh…
Music: “Let the Drummer Kick” by Citizen Cope Amanda, Tech, Video | Comments (6)
