social media | Ryan Morrison (Up Your Ego)

Jul
25

Just another thing to update and check

Category: Blog, Web Tags: facebook, google, social media, twitter Leave a Comment

I started using Google+ a couple of weeks ago thanks to an invite from +Robin Morley and my first reaction was “this looks like a brilliant cross between Facebook and Twitter”.

Two weeks on from that initially reaction and my feelings are still pretty much the same, however, initially where I felt it would replace Twitter and Facebook in my routine of checks, posts and promotion – the reality is that it has just become another thing to update and check.

While I do have some cross over of friends between the three main social networks, there are also some on Twitter who are not on Facebook, some on Facebook who are not on Twitter and more on Google+ who are not on either of the other two.

But it is more than just the place where my friends hangout, you treat the three networks in different ways. On Facebook it is more of a personal engagement, on Twitter, while one-to-one, it is also a mass broadcast and Google+, well it is still a bit of an unknown quantity.

But, despite not knowing exactly what niche it is going to carve out for itself, Google+ does seem to have that beautiful thing Twitter had in the early days, Geeks talking about Geeky Things.

I know that isn’t going to last, once Britney Spears, Lady GaGa and other start taking to the network the Geekness will get drowned out, except that Google makes it easier than any of the others to filter the dross (Justin Bieber).

The one thing I’m really enjoying about Google+ is the circles concept, I know a similar thing exists with Twitter in lists, but it is seamless and part of the system from the start of adding a friend in Google+.

I like the fact that I can have a ‘friends’, a ‘media’, a ‘work’ and even a ‘bbc people’ circle that lets me just engage with those groups of people if that is what I want to do.

However, it is still FAR too early for me to make a final decision over whether Google+ will replace the other networks or just be another +1.

Jul
7

By Ryan Morrison

Order out of the #tag chaos

Category: Blog, Technology Tags: apple, jersey, social media, tag, Tagging, twitter Leave a Comment

We all like a good #tag, it is a great way of following a particular topic or joining a conversation using Twitter.

The grammar of social media is a wonderful thing, Question Time became considerably more interesting when the #bbcqt meme started and Eurovision wouldn’t be Eurovision without #eurovision.

But it can be over done, recently I saw a tweet where every post had the hash symbol before it.

Which #I’m #sure #you #will #agree #is #incredibly #annoying, #especially if #followed by @something or @other.

But when used properly a tag can make gathering content on an event or topic, or by a specific group a lot easier.

The BBC for example could contribute to the wider glastonbury discussion with the aid of the #glasto tag, or they could let people find all BBC Glastonbury tweets by using the more specific #bbcglasto tag.

Personally in jersey with an election coming up later this year I expect BBC journalists tweeting from declarations will be using the #bbcjsy11 tag, or something similar.

But, and this is where multiple tags are useful, we will likely use something like #votejsy so we can join the general discussion as well, but both will be at the end of the tweet.

So our first tweet on polling day will likely be: Polls have opened in the jersey election #bbcjsy11 #votejsy.

Followed 12 hours later with: Polls close in jerseys election #votejsy #bbcjsy11

Although that one would probably include a link to our live election pages, and the first to an article on the BBC jersey website saying the same thing.

When re-tweeting we would probably not use the bbcjsy tag, just the votejsy one.

The one thing I have learnt in writing this post though, apple really need to make it easier to get to the # symbol from the iPad keyboard.

Facebook Etiquette: Photo Tagging (wordsofabrokenmirror.com)
Google+ and The Entropy of Social Media (belowthefold.typepad.com)
Where do I begin with Social Media? (biztidbitz.wordpress.com)
Don’t Tweet Your Shame (natashawritesblog.wordpress.com)

Nov
2

By Ryan Morrison

The grammar of social media

Category: Blog, Media Tags: BBC, facebook, Grammar, James May, Online Communities, social media, Social network, twitter 1 Comment

At work we have recently started engaging with social media more actively, but one thing this new task has brought up is the issue of grammar.

Social media has a grammar all of its own but the challenge was around how much you hold the hand of the average fifty something listener. Read More

Aug
26

By Ryan Morrison

Covering a music festival – socially

Category: Blog, Music Tags: "bbc internet", BBC, bbc introducing, BBC Jersey, BBC Radio Jersey, facebook, festival, flickr, Jersey Live, Music, MySpace, On the Web, social media, Social network, Tumblr, twitter Leave a Comment

A weekend for me is usually a fairly predictable affair; I wake up on a Saturday and spend the day looking after my (nearly) six year old son while my wife goes shopping with our eight year old daughter and toddler.

Then on Sunday we spend the day together as a family – go the park, sometimes to the zoo and usually have a Sunday roast at around 2pm – like I said, all pretty predictable.

But one weekend a year, the first weekend in September to be exact, I spend nearly a full 23 hours interviewing, listen to, photographing or filming bands.

The first weekend of September is when the Jersey Live music festival happens at the RJA&HS Showground in Trinity, Jersey.

This is the sixth year of the event and the sixth year I’ve covered it for the BBC in Jersey.

For the first four years I spent the weekend gathering content and then pulled it all together for the BBC Jersey website, BBC Radio Jersey and a bit for BBC Channel Island News (then BBC Spotlight Channel Islands) on the following Monday.

Then last year I tried an experiment – instead of holding all the content and publishing it on Monday – I’d publish as I went along – socially.

Actually the original idea was to publish it all to the BBC Jersey website – updating a series of features and galleries as the weekend went on.

But it didn’t really work out that way due to an error with 1) logging into the BBC FTP server and 2) intermittent WiFi in the press tent.

So our coverage sort of went social by accident and by that I mean photos on Flickr and updates on Twitter – with slightly longer reviews posted to our MySpace blog.

This year we have a whole new look BBC Jersey site, a new publishing system and no way to update the site remotely on a non-BBC laptop.

So I’m planning to go social from the start and will be tying the whole thing into the various social media pages for my show – BBC Jersey Introducing.

As with last year I’ll be posting photos to Flickr as I come out from the front of the stage, or as I get back from wandering the festival site taking photos of people.

Then I’ll write 140 character reviews of the bands on the various stages I visit (as will the other two people covering the festival with me) on Twitter as well as using our Twitter stream @jsyintroducing to write any interesting festival facts or stories.

I’ve also set up an Audioboo account for BBC Jersey Introducing where I’ll have the phone next to me when I interview bands – so you’ll be able to hear (albeit slightly lower quality) interviews as I do them.

I’ll then be pulling the mass of content together using Tumblr so it can be found in one place and having that re-post the mass of content to the BBC Jersey Introducing fan page on Facebook.

I’ll then be able to use all of the above to help me write the various reviews, articles and create the galleries that will make up the bbc.co.uk/jersey coverage of the festival.

It will also help me piece together my first ‘post festival’ show on the following Saturday as the highlights will be on Twitter and Facebook.

And obviously I’ll be trying my best to respond to any comments or feedback on any of the various social sites while running around the Showground in Trinity.

So if you’re not going to Jersey Live but want regular updates on what’s happening just follow @jsyintroducing on twitter, become a fan on Facebook at jerseyintroducing, follow my boos or keep track of the whole thing on Tumblr.

Or you can still do all of the above from a half decent mobile if you’re AT the festival – you might even hear about a cool band just starting you might not have gone to otherwise.

Then again you could just enjoy the event and catch up with our coverage on the BBC Jersey site on Monday – they’ll even be video.

Posterous autopost strongly recommended by moi (zorgbeheer.blogspot.com)
Social Media Pillows Are All Kinds of Awesome (mashable.com)
Posterous’ new iPhone app could make citizen journalism and lifestreaming the norm (thenextweb.com)
Postling.com – Post All Over The Social Web Easily (killerstartups.com)
Getting Yourself Organized in 20 Minutes (blisstree.com)

Jan
3

By Ryan Morrison

A new Ego writer

Category: Blog Tags: 21st Century, blog, education, family, FAQs Help and Tutorials, Parenting, Ryan Morrison, social media, Web, Weblogs Leave a Comment

Actually that isn’t really true – Up Your Ego hasn’t instantly become a blog network – its just that there is now a second blog hosted here.

The first is the one you’re reading – mine – the one written by Ryan Morrison – the second is my wifes.

When I first started Up Your Ego the goal was to create a blog all about life in the 21st Century – a guide to getting through the day to day in an overly technical and digitally social society.

From at least one perspective I think I’ve managed to achieve that – when I’ve got time I regularly write about the world of new media, media and society – but UYE does lack something of a female perspective.

Well now I’ve managed to convince my wife to write the odd post for the site – it will be under the Sammy Speaks section and usually come forth in the form of parenting tips, recipe ideas and rants about the world as a whole.

Also – it will help me keep up with at least every other day postings – something I’ve been struggling with lately – especially since discovering the world of alternative history fiction.

If anyone else feels like contributing the odd blog post feel free to send me an e-mail (ryan@upyourego.com).

Sep
30

By Ryan Morrison

They’re changing Gear

Category: Blog Tags: BBC, blog, James May, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, social media, Television, The Stig, top gear, topgear.com, UK, Web, wordpress Leave a Comment

Actually that should be that they’re changing Top Gear – but the headline didn’t really work if I added the word Top before the Gear.

Basically the point of the post is that there will very soon be a new look TopGear.com – not sure if the public service site will be getting a make-over but the commercial one certainly is.

It looks pretty good – from the looks of the beta we’re in for wood panelling backgrounds, glassy effects and very web 2.0ey fonts and colours.

See another picture of the homepage at the bottom of this post v

They seem to be taking the social media thing a lot more seriously as well – they’re splitting the blogs up into: Horsepower, Transmission, The Foreman, The Cupholder, Fast and Dangerous and Sunday Afternoon Club (F1 blog that looks like it may be tied to the BBC F1 coverage somehow).

Playing around with the beta for a while it looks like the blogs are WordPress hosted – which is an interesting departure for the BBC which uses MovableType for its public service blogs.

Interesting that the BBC public service blogs are hosted on a closed commercial platform and the BBC commercial blogs seem to be hosted on an open source free platform! Hmmm

As well as the very good looking, branded blogs – which will see James May and Richard Hammond join Jeremy Clarkson and Andy Willman as TG.com contributors – there’s a new media player.

It isn’t exactly the same as the EMP (BBC Embedded Media Player) used on bbc.co.uk/topgear (for a start the volume only reaches 10) but it is flash based AND unlike the /topgear player – it actually lets you embed the video.

Or at least that’s what the press release says: “nearly 300 new videos in a bright, big player that allows you to share or take away and out them on your own site.”

Although I haven’t actually been able to find the embed code yet – just a series of links to let you put the video on your social networking platform of choice. I’ll keep looking though.

You can of course just view the source code around the video player to get the embed code.

Episode Guide

There’s also something TopGear has needed for a while – something I started building myself (but got bored/lost interest/got to busy), something available in a very plane way on Wikipedia and something the good folks over at FinalGear are doing.

The most interesting feature of the Episode Guide on the new TopGear.com is the ‘The One With…’ feature – this makes it a lot easier for the more casual fan to find out about an episode.

There isn’t really much more to say about the Episode Guide – it primarily focuses on giving you video clips of that episode (which is what it’s all about really) and has a few little snippets of episode information.

For example: “The one where… Stig outruns a speed camera” and “This is also the one with… Clarkson reviews the Citroen Berlingo (and likes it) and Das Mazda6: Richard finds out if the Mazda6 can take on the Germans”.

Actually – quiz for you – without looking at the site can you tell me which episode this applies to: “The one with… all the poo”.

So back to the blogs

Instead of having the odd article (from the magazine) by Jeremy and James as an article under news and then the odd article by them in the blogs – they’ve now created a blog specifically for pieces by the ‘presenters’.

There is an outline of what each blog will do in the TopGear.com article about the new look site – due to launch on Thursday (although I’m sure it said Wednesday a week ago).

One of the blogs will be called ‘Horsepower’ and will include contributions from Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond. There’s also the suggestion that they will respond to comments. Apparently “if what you write is interesting enough, they’ll respond to you.”

‘Transmission’ is all about TopGear the show and will be written by Executive Producer Andy Wilman – in much the same vain the existing TopGear Blog is written I imagine.

Then you have the blogs by the magazine team. ‘The Foreman’ is apparently going to be full of inside information and will tell you “everything the car makers would rather you didn’t know.”

‘The Cupholder’ is the oppose and will be full of “is pure trivia, videos, links and general trivia from all over the world and all over the world wide web.”

And then there is the non F1 racing stuff with ‘Fast and Dangerous’ and the F1 blog in the form of the ‘Sunday Afternoon Club’.

Speaking of the F1 Blog – apparently they “have big plans for that when the BBC takes over the F1 coverage next year.”

/topgear

Then there’s the BBC and the issue of what will happen to /topgear with the launch of the new look and fully interactive topgear.com.

On the FinalGear Forum – controlspecimen asked the question of the public service Top Gear site “So.. is bbc.co.uk/topgear defunct now?”

That’s an interesting question – the problem is that bbc.co.uk/topgear isn’t allowed to link to topgear.com for a lot of political reasons.

So there is a bit of a requirement/expectation that the BBC has at least some kind of public service site for one of its most popular shows.

I wonder whether they will just move it towards /programmes instead – a number of programmes just have their own branded /programmes site now. Seems to make more sense than building their own site.

But there might also be an expectation that /topgear is kept and includes advert free versions of all the videos on topgear.com for a UK audience.

More still

There’s also all the usual games, car news, car stuff and a car chooser.

Actually the car chooser is pretty cool – in stage one you tick a few boxes for what you want in a car, stage two you move a slider to show how much you want to spend.

And in stage three you refine your choices.

It then orders the cars and you can add as many as you like (I think) to your ‘car bar’ that you can then use to compare your shortlist and read a mass of technical details, see photos and read the TopGear review.

It’s all very impressive and I can’t wait until its finished and live. It’s going to be great to have another place to regularly read the writings of Misters May, Clarkson and Hammond.

Oh and it looks like TopGear will be back on TV around 2 November – I’ll try and do a piece soon on what’s going to be in the upcoming series.

Speaking of which – there will also be a schedule that shows when TopGear is on TV – although most of the time it will just be repeating the word Dave over and over and over again.

Sep
12

By Ryan Morrison

Get the Flip Away – You

Category: Blog, Web Tags: blogging, laconica, Leo Laporte, microblogging, sharing, shorturl, social media, tinyurl, twit, twitter, wordpress 2 Comments

Forget del.icio.us and Digg, put Facebook and MySpace aside – the real big hitter of the new social web is TinyURL and the various clones floating around the web.

Thanks to the massive success of Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku and even Twit Army (running Laconica – short URL services are in high demand.

I mean – how are you supposed to share a link with someone, given that the vast majority of sites are now using CPS systems (like WordPress) that lead to long URLs, when the URL itself is longer than the 140 character limit.

So you can get a bit of text before the URL ShortURL services are used to … well shorten the URL. In fact every post on UpYourEgo has a short URL automatically generated on the right hand menu for that post.

And TinyURL now lets you create personalised URLs as well – I recently created one for the new Top Trumps show on five (that I wanted to post to Twitter) and was able to use tinyurl.com/toptrumpsd5 and even more recently I used tinyurl.com/deadyet for a link to a funny site about the Large Hadron Collider.

The problem with this though is that all the useful urls will be gone pretty quickly and then you’ll be left with a selection of choices that may as well just be random.

There is also the chance that 1) the site hosting the URL could give up, get bored, shut down or go out of business and 2) they could start charging for custom URLs or even random ones (although this is unlikely as people don’t like paying for things on the web).

Recently, during a debate on the merits of microblogging – Leo Laporte, one of the hardest working men in the world of online video streaming, suggested that as sites like Twitter grow to a point of unsustainability – it would be better to host communities around a product/idea/service or brand and have them all linked together.

So he launched Twit Army – this is for fans of the Twit Network to use as their social networking service and I believe your posts can also be published on Twitter.

So, using the GNU licenced Laconica software I could set up my own microblogging platform at nuts.upyourego.com that automatically re-posted to Twitter and everywhere else – as well as letting users of the EgoNuts platform communicate in a more specialised environment.

I’m not going to because, my theory is that about 3% of the readers of a blog or listeners of a podcast would actually join an associated community – in which case that would probably be me and my dad.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t played with the idea of a Microblogging platform – I recently launched JerseyGuardian.co.uk – a simple microblogging site for people in Jersey to post what is on their mind right now – using WordPress as a platform.

I’ll write a post specifically about this another time as it requires more explanation than a couple of paragraphs I’m giving it here – but check it out and let me know what you think.

What I have done is launched my own ShortURL site at gtfa.eu or Get the Flip (yes Flip!) Away – You.

It’s a pretty simple interface – you put your long URL in the top box, enter a word (or not – you don’t have to) and click generate.

Underneath it will give you a short url – either to your specification or as a random sequence of numbers – your choice really.

I might develop it more (it’s using some of the shelf code I found online) but as it does what I wanted it to do – I’m happy leaving it as is right now – although I’ll probably replace TinyURL with GTFA on the right hand side shortURL box on this site.

I’d love your feedback.

Sep
4

By Ryan Morrison

Popping the radio

Category: Blog, Media Tags: audio, BBC, BBC Radio, Music, Radio, radio labs, radio pop, sharing, social media, web2.0 Leave a Comment

Please repeat after me ‘data data data data data data data’ and repeat it until you die. I did toy with just filling the whole post with that one word – but maybe I should explain a little bit first. Read More

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