My favorites, in no particular order:

• @Bryce1984 The Lambs That Wouldn’t Shut Up #unseenprequels
• @jchinchar #unseenprequels Some Like It Tepid
• @matthasarms: Apocalypse Soon. #unseenprequels
• @steviedunn: The Day the Earth Continued Spinning #unseenprequels
• @PCTim: #unseenprequels The OK, The not so OK, and the unattractive
• @blogdiva: #unseenprequels Second-Base and The City
• @Alcudiabarfly: #unseenprequels dry-spell in the city
• @stealyourself: Madamoiselle Bovary #UnseenPrequels
• @lizzwinstead: The 5k run/walk Man #unseenprequels
• @jnjoiner: Thursday #unseenprequels
• @LParry: Shaun of the feeling peaky. #unseenprequels
• @KagroX: Still Plenty of Mohicans #unseenprequels
• @drywall: A Bunch of Mohicans #unseenprequels
• @RedGray: #unseenprequels Raiders of the Misplaced Ark
• @islandis: Sex, Lies, and Kinescope. #unseenprequels
• @macphoenix: Undocumented-Immigrant Kane #unseenprequels
• @mcsweater: American History IX #unseenprequels
• @AdamSerwer: The Dark Squire #unseenprequels
• @lizzwinstead: Conception of a Nation #unseenprequels
• @lizzwinstead: Still Going Back and Forth On Some Major Points of Endearments #unseenprequels
• (my own, heh): #unseenprequels Before Harry Met Sally
• UPDATE: via many others, this one clearly wins: @KagroX: Groundhog Day #unseenprequels

UPDATE: More fun titles are posted over at Ben Byrne’s blog!

* Wondering what the deal with the # is? That’s the marker for a “hashtag” on Twitter. It’s how Twitter users easily add or denote a keyword, allowing everyone else to either find or refer to a topic easily. Search for all #unseenprequel tweets!

I griped a little yesterday about this, and Elana over at Wellstone Action asked me what advice I’d give candidates running for office. Here’s a quick, handy-dandy list of pointers for candidates, from the position of a voter:

• Talk with me, not to me. Twitter is a media platform for conversation, not broadcast. A rule of thumb that’s used for organizations also applies to candidates: only about 20-30% of your tweets should be about you. The rest should be about what your community cares about. Which leads me to…
• Find out what your community cares about. Read what your followers are tweeting and respond with helpful information. It doesn’t just have to be related to the office you’re running for, either… in fact, it’s better if you mix it up a little. For example, someone you follow tweets about heading to a restaurant you love. Respond and say you go there often, too, and be sure to try the blackened sea bass.
• Stay on top of hot topics. Look for people talking about issues you care about with Twitter search. You can either save them as saved search in your Twitter app (Tweetie, Tweetdeck, Twitterific, etc.), or as an RSS feed for your news reader (Google Reader, Netvibes, etc.) Then respond to those tweets, even if you’re not following each other.
• Give back to the community. Retweeting others’ ideas and suggestions is a great way to show appreciation, and to spead the good word.
• Use your own, authentic voice, not a press release voice. I’m a voter, a human, and I want you to be a human too. Robots don’t do so well in the voting booth.
• If you don’t have time, assign a staff person to monitor and respond to items — just make sure they’re clear that they’re your staff person, and not you. For example, NYC mayoral candidate Reverend Billy Talen has a personal account, as well as his campaign staff’s group account. If your staff person uses your account, ask them to note that they’re a staffer.

In short, act like a normal person who cares about the people around them, because we know you do!

–

Note: Bill de Blasio was the only public advocate candidate who responded to my gripe, and he gets extra Twitter points for both that and at least retweeting people once in a while. Go Bill!

Twitter reported its outage being caused by a denial-of-service attack. (Quick explanation: when skilled nerds/hackers write programs to flood a server with tasks and requests, so that the server is overloaded and taken down.) What happens when we come to rely on the social web for all kinds of things, and then those services disappear? Sure, we can all merrily hop over to the next one, but as Allyson Kapin pointed out, to a certain degree, we’d all have to start over on building our networks. Our social capital translates across platforms, sure, but the physical reconnecting of users to users is one big pain in the butt.

This all points to a larger problem with how market-driven application development can be highly problematic. Yes, it creates competition, but moreso, it creates closed networks and proprietary systems. Each service — Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, etc — uses its own private structure to amass our networks for us. While messages can be passed between them, there’s no way to really share the data that accumulates over time between services.

Twitter disappears, for example, and we all go over to FriendFeed. But I have probably a fifth of the community on FriendFeed that I have elsewhere, because I haven’t spent any time cultivating it. And I can’t immediately transfer all of my Twitter community to FriendFeed. I can check my Gmail contacts and see who’s on FriendFeed, but I can’t just say, “Bring over my Twitter group to this service.” That’d be problematic for anyone trying to make money off of building these services, I guess, if we could all just drop them and run. It reminds me of the same onus that contract-cancellation fees of the mobile networks put on subscribers to stick with them.

It also frightens me, to some extent, about the future of the Web when it comes to ubiquitous-yet-proprietary services. I think about what we might be dealing with today had something like email been developed as a proprietary service. Right now, email works the way that it does because there were early, agreed-upon protocols for transporting the information. Developers implemented service improvements and new ways to interact with email over time, but the fundamental-ness of those early protocols remains true today. Anyone can email anyone else. There is no, “wait, you’re on Gmail, I’m on Hotmail, we can’t talk to each other.”

(Nerd moment: Remember when the early online services were like this, btw? When AOL wouldn’t let its users access different parts of the Internet, like Usenet? Ah, the grand old days of walled gardens. And where are they now?)

In the case of social media services that focus on rapid-fire, short status updates, there is no agreed-upon protocol. I’m the worst kind of technologist when it comes to these things, too, because I know there’s a service that’s open source and based on open principles. It’s called identi.ca. Why don’t I use it, if I’m so worried? Because hardly anyone else I know does, because it’s not very pretty, and because I still can’t search my contacts to see who else is on. I’m a sucker, like everyone else, for ease of use.

So, what do we do? My heart says: all you smart designers and coders, go work on identi.ca and get it looking and working nicer. But my head knows that’s probably not going to happen, at least not right away… so I’ll just be here, staring at the blinking cursors, waiting for Twitter to come back up.

Update, 7/13/09: Two things. There’s a post on my progress and thoughts here, and also, to reflect the offline donations I’m getting, I’m now gradually lowering the goal of the ChipIn.

–

Friends, colleagues, clients! Lend me your ears…

I’m writing you with some exciting news that makes me very happy. I just signed a contract from Berrett-Koehler publishers to write a book I’ve been imagining for a long time. But it’s going to take some very hard work on my part, and I hope you can help me succeed.

The book I’m writing is on the topic that has been all the rage in the media — social networking and all that implies with Twitter, Facebook, and much more. Here’s the purpose of the book: how do we ensure that these tools are in being used most effectively by those who have too often been on the sidelines of technology advances– women, people of color, queer folk, and more?

This is a fabulous opportunity for many social change advocates to jump into the new tech conversations and help shape the future, and I want to make sure that happens. Specific topics I want to cover about women’s experiences online include privacy and security, as well as shifting cultural values through organizing and action. I’m also going to be highlighting the voices of experts working in with social media in communities of color and more– voices you don’t hear when tech is being talked about.

Here’s my challenge and why I need your help: Berrett-Koehler is an incredible publisher — supportive, collaborative, and incredibly innovative– and I’m thrilled to be working with them. But they don’t pay advances. So, to do this book (and it is incredibly fast-tracked), I need to stop working as a consultant for the next three months and do nothing but write the book. Thus, I need investors. I need you to help me raise $15,000 to cover my expenses, travel, and research. Please toss some money into a “Feed Deanna” pot!

I’m off to a good start: the Hightower Lowdown (Jim Hightower’s monthly newsletter), where I’ve worked for 4 years, is covering my rent through the summer. And Don Hazen, editor of AlterNet.org (where I also have worked) and Doug Kreeger (AlterNet’s board chair) will put the first $2,000 in if people will match it. All donations of $250 and over can be made through the Independent Media Institute, so they’ll be tax-deductible.

So, here I am, hat in hand for a good cause. I’ll make you proud. You can donate via PayPal at http://www.deannazandt.com/chipin or send a check to me (address below).

I know it is a tough time to be asking for money with many people out of work and struggling. I hope you’ll forgive my chutzpah. Yet I want this all to happen so badly I can taste it; it’s more than anything I’ve wanted in a very long time. It’s a dream come true in many ways, and I hope even if you can’t give at this time, you’ll join me in celebrating the moment.

much love,
deanna

P.S. — For anyone who donates $100 or more, I will give you a copy of the book with an inscription of my heartfelt thanks. One more time, that donation link is:

http://www.deannazandt.com/chipin

P.P.S. — Thanks in advance for anything and everything that you can do to support this wildly excited, somewhat humbled first-time author. Here’s more info about the book: http://www.deannazandt.com/bookannounce , and I’ll be blogging as much of the book’s content as possible at http://www.deannazandt.com/ throughout the summer.

–

For donations over $250, checks can be made payable to:

Independent Media Institute
77 Federal St
San Francisco, CA 94107

Memo: Deanna Zandt Project

Deanna Zandt on WRHU: Iranian elections, social media and more

First, from an American media perspective, here was another great moment for folks to demand what they wanted to see covered on national news media. What a moment of media dissonance: As protests erupted — and in some cases, turned violent –  in the streets of Tehran and elsewhere in Iran, major broadcast media in the US had little to no news on the events at all. By using the hashtag¹ #CNNfail to collect all of the dissatisfaction on Twitter, Americans were able to shift the focus of the conversation and eventually influence CNN’s decision makers to start covering stories by Sunday.

It’s reminiscent of #AmazonFAIL (when Amazon accidentally delisted 58,000 books, fueling a social media revolt), in the sense that within a pretty short timeframe (less than 24 hours), major news organizations simply could not ignore the story unfolding — via reportage and commentary — on social media. I remind folks to think about how this sort of situation would have unfolded even five years ago: Bloggers would blog, perhaps media watchdog organizations would get a grassroots campaign together, and maybe within a week, if we were lucky, we’d see some influence. Now, with so many people participating in the conversation, we have immense power to quickly shift both focus and perception.

This is why, when it comes to politics and advocacy work, it’s important to look at a bigger picture beyond just who’s using Facebook to get votes, or which representatives of governments tweet with pizazz. It’s less about celebrity and more about connection, humanity and the ability to inject our values into the wider culture in a fundamentally populist way.

Another fascinating angle of this story is the bootstrapping of access to technology after the Iranian government began blocking access. Facebook was blocked in late May, when reformist candidate Moussavi had around 5,200 supporters. Not long into the protests this weekend, access to major portions of the Internet (including Twitter), as well as SMS texting, were blocked. Not to be stopped, protesters within Iran are receiving information about accessing proxy servers from folks setting them up outside of the country, and stories continue to flood out.

Honestly, there is just no blocking The Internet, y’all. What the Iranian government is trying to do is, in effect, akin to trying to stop water or electricity from flowing. There is so much infrastructure in place at this point, they’d basically have to blow up most of it to stop people from accessing the outside world. Of course, I wouldn’t put it past Ahmadinejad, now that I think about it…

–

¹ What’s a hashtag? It’s a keyword that people add to their tweets, so that conversations around a particular topic can be easily tracked.

Here’s some links to the presentations and workshops that I led and co-led all week; thanks to the participants who took killer notes. There’s tons of incredible info on, and being added to, this wiki, so check back often:

• Inspiration: Social Networks (midway down the page). Day one was all about showing our participants the myriad of tools at their disposal and some successes that others have had. [PowerPoint preso here]
• Measure THIS! Social Media ROI. How to think about metrics for social media work. [No session notes yet, but PowerPoint preso here.]
• Engaging business leaders and decision-makers through social media, led with Eric Squair.
• Twitter for Individuals and Organizations. (shocker, right?)

I talked in pretty simple terms about some different approaches in “The non-fanatical beginner’s guide to Twitter.” With this post, I’m going to flesh out some of the nitty gritty and help to answer some of the tougher questions.

It used to be said with one of the very first popular online social tools — email — that you shouldn’t write anything in a message that you wouldn’t want to appear in the New York Times. Few people ever followed that rule, thank goodness. How boring would our lives be if we all subjected ourselves to Grey Lady standards of information sharing?

Nowadays, new tools make it easier to share as much of ourselves as we want, and especially if you’re just getting going, it can be difficult to know what’s okay to post and what isn’t. A flat-out easy beginner’s guidepost comes from the illustrious Susan Mernit, who told participants in a workshop we led: “If you’re wondering whether you should post something or not, you probably shouldn’t.”

The genesis of this proverb comes from a key principle of social media: Authenticity is king. That word is being thrown around quite a bit these days (“authenticity,” not “king,” heh).  Social media “gurus” and “mavens” often slip “authenticity” into smarmy marketing posts. Ignore them. They are not the guides you are looking for. But authenticity is.

First of all, let’s make it clear that despite technology’s best efforts, we still have multiple authentic selves. We are the same person, for sure, at work and at home, but the mix of personality components we use is at least a little bit different in each setting. Social media makes the mix slightly more transparent, thus we have to think more about which parts we present, as well as when and how. But just like our personalities in the offline world, it’s those different parts that make us unique — and our perspective and experiences interesting.

One of my cousins, who’s a therapist in D.C., told me recently about a model of thinking about intimacy in relationships as a stereo equalizer, where things like reliability, trust, availability, etc., are the main components. Skew one of those bands outta whack, and the whole mix is off.

Social media authenticity works much the same way. It’s a mix of personal insights, professional announcements, expertise (whether it’s a job or a hobby), general passion, lots of opinion, and often humor. (Question to advanced users: What other bands would you add to the equalizer?) It takes some experimentation to figure out what mix sounds right to you. This is why Susan’s advice is so dead-on: What you perceive to be good, what you feel comfortable with, that’s what people will pick up on as they share in your experiences. For people who are largely private folks who don’t want to tell the world about the silly stuff their kid just did, that’s fine. Share more about what you thought when you read an article related to your work. It also doesn’t have to be your most familiar voice, either, if that doesn’t make you feel comfortable. You can maintain a fairly professional tone in social media (though do try not to be emotionless) and still provide value.

It’s all about the mix that’s going to make your voice sound good — to you and others.

For some people, it’s easy to share personal news and events. Me, I have no bones about tweeting funny things my mom says, details of a party I’m at, or (loads of) pictures of my dog. It’s a way for me to keep a running log of things that are important to me. That said, my guidepost is to not share things that would make me feel vulnerable, like details of my dating life. I share things once in a while about my health, either to reach out for help or to show solidarity with others, but I consciously keep it to a minimum … simply because that’s what feels right to me.

The experimentation can be uncomfortable to start with, but know that it’s okay to make mistakes here and there; social media is quite a bit more forgiving than more traditional forms of media (and I would say, also more forgiving than blogging). Worried about it all being Out There? Jaclyn Friedman made a great point recently in a workshop I was leading about how our perception of social media is rapidly changing, similar to how our perception of tattoos has changed in the last 50 years. Think about the attitudes toward a person who got a tattoo in 1959, versus attitudes now. It’s the same with social media. Ten years ago, someone getting a swig of TMI via Google might have had an adverse reaction, versus today, when seeing something a little off-topic in a Twitter stream is no big whoop.

That said, I do want to mention that there are some folks in jobs where more attention needs to be paid to privacy and security (you know who you are). There are different parameters to work with when establishing your mix, but you shouldn’t keep yourself out of social media altogether. Almost all of us are, in some way, already represented online. Social media sites generally appear within the top 10 search results; you should do your best to influence how you appear, even if it’s to show that you’re largely a very private person.

In a really big picture sense, I see all of our social media voices combining into this huge, glorious mix that has a real chance to change our cultural perceptions and values. (Note: this is the premise of the book I’m writing this summer for Berrett-Koehler.) All of this social technology has a humanizing effect on our digital interactions. Much like everyone getting tattoos, if we’re all presenting our authentic selves and experiences — versus relying on gatekeepers to tell our stories — we stand a chance to cause a tidal wave of change and inject our values, finally, into a culture that has long ignored too many of our experiences.

One of the biggest complaints I get from clients and friends who join a new social network (besides the pain of setting up the profile) is the feeling of info overload. I’ve talked about how the paradigm of email has set us all up for disaster in this department, and I always come back to that Clay Shirky quote: “There is no such thing as information overload, there's only filter failure.”

In the past, we left the responsibility to others to filter our information for us in a number of ways, mostly because there wasn’t any other way to get the goods. Media organizations, through their hierarchies of gatekeepers, have determined for ages what the important stories are. Businesses have decided what demands needed to be met with the products they produced. Whenever we did get information via social means,  we could manage the incoming info because there wasn’t that much of it to handle — our networks were considerably more closed and less overlapping.

Now, with social media, we have the ability to connect with a previously unimaginable amount of stuff coming at us, often from multiple directions. And people are thus crying out for help in managing the flood. Top complaint of the day is email — if only people knew how to use filters and rules in their email programs better, heh. Facebook  gave us the ability to make lists of people and then filter the news feed based on those lists. Tweetdeck is one of the most popular Twitter apps primarly because it allows you to create groups of people to follow.

Still, there’s a mental hurdle for many of us to get over– just the mere fact that it’s now in our hands to filter everything that comes at us. We’re so used to waiting for things to be dished or pitched to us that we’re not quite sure how to make the decisions on what to filter out and what to keep in. Figuring out what works is going to be very individually based and experimental, and that’s often a painful process.

It makes me, as an info junkie and organizational nerd, exponentially more anxious to see how filters develop in the coming months and years. The semantic web is going to be particular intriguing here — when the machines learn our language, learn better how we think… are they going to be able to help us?

What do I want to do, I hear you asking yourself? In short — I do want you to buy the book, after all — I’m going to be describing the social media moment as a huge opportunity for social change and action. If you’ve read some of what I’ve written about Twitter and other services, and my ideas about the giant gene pool and the desperate need for diversity, you have an idea of where the book will go. Plus, it’ll be stunningly entertaining to boot!

It was interesting to go from “I don’t think I ever want to write a book” at the end of February to looking at what I’ve got to sign for the deal in the middle of May. I wanted to share this part of the story as both a testament to Johanna’s powerful skillz of persuasion, as well as a revelatory moment about how these things can work– especially for women who think they have to know every detail of everything before they set off on sharing their expertise. Not that I know anything about that.

In the beginning, I couldn’t identify what topic (of the myriad of things I’m interested in) I’d have enough passion, expertise and attention span to write an entire book about. Johanna asked me to complete an exercise as homework after our first official call, where I was to answer three questions:

• What community do I identify with, am affiliated with or otherwise care about?
• What is that community’s point of pain? What’s preventing them from getting to the next level?
• What book could I write to address that point of pain?

Well, jeez, that was easy. My community, through my work in feminism over the years, is women; their point of pain is an intimidation and/or distrust of new technologies, and yeah, I’m pretty sure I could write a book helping them get over that hump. As Johanna and I fleshed out my ideas, we both realized that what I’m talking about is larger than just women needing to take advantage of this moment. I’m going to be talking about and bringing in experts from the fields of racial justice, LGBTQQI organizing, the front lines of the class warfare… yeah. It’s going to be one big party in my book.

So, there you have it. We’re attempting to do this on a strikingly fast timetable, and I’m going to be looking to my community for help in a few areas. One of them is fundraising, but that’s a separate story that I’ll blog later this week. For now, I’ll be over here just bouncin’ off the walls.

PS– A big, big, big shoutout to Christine Cupaiuolo, the most fabulous editor ever, without whose help I seriously would not have been able to put together a proposal that knocked it out of the park as hard as it did. Can’t wait to move on to the book work with you, CMC!

But hey, I’m a magpie and I like shiny new things, so I decided to give Tweetie a whirl. Both apps cost something, by the way: Blogo is $25 after a full-featured 21-day trial period (but it includes a robust blog editor); Tweetie for Mac is $14.95 till early May, then will be $19.95, with an ad-supported free option.

Here are my pros (+) and cons (-) for each app:

Tweetie
+ Better multiple account integration: the timelines of each identity are kept separate (- after you get over a weird bug)
+ A menubar icon turns blue when someone replies to you
- If you tell it to autoscroll to the top when new tweets arrive, you have to manually scroll down then up to make the “new tweets” blue dot notification disappear
- There’s no easy way to go to a friend’s timeline if they’re not in your current tweets
+ Continuing to scroll through a list of tweets automatically retrieves more
+ Love the fade ins and fade outs, it’s very Quicksilver-like
+ Shows user info within the app; also tells you if selected person is following you
- Can’t reply to multiple people

Blogo
+ There’s a dropdown menu that allows you to view mentions, friends, all followers
+ There’s a separate another dropdown to show individual friends’ timelines
+ Shows the number of API requests for that hour and what time it will reset
+ Puts retweet info up front (this is my style — I do “RT @username: their tweet”
- Only shows 20 tweets at a time; have to go to Twitter website for more
- Have to go to the site to see user info, too
+ Shows current trending topics in initial search screen

Neither app does groups, and both have seriously slick Mac interfaces. I’m going to keep doubling up for another week, but so far, Blogo still has my heart.

Amazon is blaming their PR nightmare on their French brethren. While this still sounds sort of suspicious to me — it reeks of, “I totally have a girlfriend; you just haven’t met her because she lives in FRANCE” — I’ll run with it for the sake of the teaching moment that we have. Let me sooth my own inner conspirist, though, by saying that I find it extremely bizarre that this swath of books were all taken down together, at the same time.

So, you’re a global corporate giant, and you’ve got a PR nightmare on your hands. You learn quickly that the storming of your castle is happening on social networks and media like Twitter and Facebook. If you’re looking to make the situation exponentially worse, here’s what you should do:

• Stay silent. You know that you have a corporate blog, and a Twitter feed, and pages on Facebook, but you should ignore them. People aren’t there to talk to you, they’re there to wait patiently for your pearls of wisdom when you deem it time to do so. Preferably wait at least 36 hours before making any kind of statement.
• Go old-school. When you’ve finally got something to say, choose old PR strategies and apply them to new media. Get your entire communications team to talk to “authoritative” voices that the masses will clearly listen to, and be quieted by.
• Make it up. Don’t know have any control over your inner situation, or have any idea what’s happening? Come up with a really flimsy excuse, like, I don’t know, a “glitch.” Your consumer base, especially the sector that’s raving luny, is clearly not savvy enough to understand the complicated nature of your big business. Don’t admit, ever, that you are not 100% in control of the situation.

There ya have it. And for you folks working the #sorryamazon hashtag? Please. Don’t let those jokers off the hook so easily. This is a  giant FAIL on the part of Amazon– everyone makes mistakes (though again, mistakes that affect LGBT, feminist and disability-themed books? I don’t know), but there are a myriad of things Amazon could have done to remedy the ripple effect.

Over the holiday weekend, a firestorm let loose on the Internet: For no apparent reason, books on Amazon.com with feminist, LGBT and sexual-empowerment themes were removed from the sales rankings, numbers that show how well a product is performing on the website.

Angry authors and readers responded by launching a full-on social media assault, using blogs, Facebook and Twitter to raise awareness and to collect signatures on a petition.

Rapid response campaigns not affiliated with any one organization are increasingly becoming the norm in the age of free communication tools.  The Amazon incident (dubbed "AmazonFAIL," drawing on usage of "fail" as an indicator of strong disapproval in online cultures) is a fascinating example in part because of the cultural motivation behind and the mechanics of the removal and the implications for sales of "banned" books.

Read the full article here.

We try to keep it light, informal, and funny — providing helpful resources and interesting links, and being responsive to our followers, while also using it as a way to crowdsource and get buy-in and guidance on new projects.  We want to have a mix of self-promotional content and links to things happening in the progressive movement that our audience should know about, but might not necessarily read about from any traditional or even new media sources.

Read the full interview here!