I've been consolidating some of my online content and decided to graph it out.

As of today, this site is now my old journal, moblogs, pizza blog, cat blog, long form blogging and my image hosting on Posterous combined. My content on status- and location-update services as well as my tumblelog aren't on this site.

Some notes about this chart:

The now-broken hiptop Nation was the first multi-user mobile photo blogging platform in the U.S. and was designed around the Danger Hiptop. skholla launched soon afterwards with some additional functionality such as commenting. All posts and commenting on both platforms were done via email submission. skholla crashed a number of years ago with no backup. These two services were ahead of their time.

I realized I was updating my location with Dodgeball before I was updating my status with Twitter (it hadn't existed yet) or Facebook (required a college email address, which I never had).

This chart doesn't include online publishing endevors I have been a part of such as MNpublius (2008-2010) and the Heavy Table (2009-present).

 

As many readers of this site know, I'm the producer at the Heavy Table. As we describe ourselves, "the Heavy Table is a Twin Cities-based magazine passionately telling the stories of food and drink — from roots to table — in the Upper Midwest." We tend to lean towards covering the local and sustainable while generally avoiding the large chains and national corporations. We have a couple links where people can submit tips for us. Here's one we received today:

From: kris b [alekalumnus@yahoo.com] Subject: MACA Attacks White House Kitchen Garden Date: April 29, 2009 10:29:30 CDT Dear Heavy Table, I was one of the people delighted to hear that a kitchen garden was being dug at the White House which would supply a small amount of food for certain functions. Michelle Obama, who is credited with the idea of the installing the garden space, was recently criticized for doing so by the Mid-America Croplife Association. Reference the article as it appears on the BBC website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8023087.stm Relevant portion: More recently she was criticised by a US farming group for her decision to grow organic vegetables. The Mid-America CropLife Association (MACA) wrote to the First Lady to encourage her to support their technological methods of farming. "If Americans were still required to farm to support their family's basic food and fibre needs, would the US have been leaders in the advancement of science, communication, education, medicine, transportation and the arts?" the group said. Mid-America Croplife Assoc. (maca.org) is based in St Louis, but these local organizations are affiliated with it: Minnesota Crop Production Retailers 7500 Flying Cloud Drive, Ste. 900 Eden Prairie, MN 55344 Wisconsin Agribusiness Council P.O. Box 46100 Madison, WI 53744-6100 MN Agri-Growth Council 408 Saint Peter St. #20 St. Paul, MN 55102-1130 Wisconsin Crop Production Association 2317 International Ln. Ste. 102 Madison, WI 53704-3154 My chief concern is that their assertions are false, and they appear to be attacking not only local sustainable/organic growers and methods, but every gardener for not using maca "technological methods" and apparently pulling America back to the 18th century. Thought you might be interested, thank you for your time, Kris Mr KRIS Burmes Director Insterswitch Unit Zenith Bank of Nigeria +234 8038 989 123 by the Instruction The President of Federal Repubic of Nigeria

Even though the phone number has been reported being involved in fraud and using a Yahoo! account with a Nigerian bank signature sets off every red flag, the body of the email is a completely legitimate tip and is not unlike many we receive. The story referenced from the BBC is also from within the last 24-36 hours -- it isn't stale news. There was some time and effort done to give us a local angle very specific to our audience. It's exactly something we may have considered putting a blurb up about. After extensive searching online with few results matching any pattern of the email, Heavy Table's Editor, James Norton and I have been scratching our heads on where this came from and who did this little bit of research. My best theory thus far: they're using a service like Mechanical Turk where one can farm out tons of individual tasks to thousands of people at once. First, compile a list of contact email addresses associated with websites by asking workers to go to a particular website and then find a contact email address. A task like that would cost about 1¢ per website. Using that list, get people to write pieces geared for those specific online publishers. For example, the question to the worker could be phrased: "Visit this website, find a current news story and write how they may be interested in that news." I'd imagine that task would be worth around 5¢ to 10¢ but most of the results would probably not be great. Even for the good ones, I'd wager that most people that publish a website online are also familiar with emails claiming to be from Nigerian banks. Either way, I'm fairly impressed. If you have any other ideas on how this happened, please drop a comment.

The Daily Show Set, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

If you were as lucky as I was, on May 1st, 2008 you got to reserve tickets to one of the nights The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is taping at the History Theatre in Saint Paul this week. I was there today and got a lot of questions. Here are the answers:

Q: If I don't have tickets, what are the chances of me getting in? A: Almost nil. I'm not sure if it's even worth trying. Q: I have tickets; what time should I show up? A: I got there at 2:00 and my group, Ann Friedrich, Rex Sorgatz and Ana Marie Cox got decent seats. My friend and coworker Ian Davis got there about 2:50 and he was seated in the balcony. Ed Kohler got there at 3:20 and got seated in the "simulcast theater." Jeremy Gibbens, Angie Dezelske, Max Sparber and Courtney Mault arrived before I did and got great seating. Get there around two. Update: Angie Dezelske states that for Wednesday's show, there was a line of 100 people not long after 2:00. Q: How do I get to the History Theatre? A: The History Theatre is at 30 10th St E. I was surprised I found a place to park. There's a lot at Jackson and 7th that was only four dollars and there were a number of open spaces. Make sure you have exact change. There's another lot nearby that's ten bucks. Metro Transit has rerouted buses and many drop you off a block away from the theater. Here's a map PDF. Q: I heard there are riots in Saint Paul. Is it safe? A: I'd say yes, for the most part. As you've likely seen in photos and video, there are forces in riot gear and an incredible police presence in Saint Paul. The Daily Show blog even calls Saint Paul a "police state". It sure seems true at times. It's unnerving, but the law enforcement outnumber the rioters by an enormous margin. Unfortunately, the History Theatre is humorously smack dab in the middle of the approved protest route. After the taping on Tuesday we were told we were on "lockdown" due to protestors outside that had the potential of getting violent. We had to remain in our seats. After most of it passed, we were given the option to leave at our own risk. Walking back to the car we had to wait to get permission from police in riot gear to cross an intersection. Q: How strongly do they enforce the no-food, no-phone, and no-camera rules? A: Ann took a photo and got her camera taken away. Ana was told to turn off her iPhone. It's enforced. I snuck the above photo before taping started and turned off my phone. I don't recommend trying it because everyone's watching. Q: When and how do we get in? A: While in line, you're asked for your name and you're given plastic tickets with handwritten numbers on them. You are given one ticket per person that you are with, up to the amount of tickets you reserved. The email tickets imply this happens at 3:31 but it happened a bit later for us. If there are more people in your party that are not present yet, I do not believe they will get tickets. By 4:30 or so they started letting people in to the theater lobby where you go through metal detectors. Around 5:15 we were seated by the numbers on the plastic tickets. Q: When is the actual taping? The opener (for us it was Paul Mecurio), started just after 6:00. Jon Stewart came up and continued to warm up the crowd, mostly by taking questions from the audience. Taping then began and it was done around 7:15. Q: Is it fun? A: It's seriously hilarious. More from David Brauer, Jeremy Gibbens, Rex Sorgatz, KARE 11, The Daily Show's Indecision 2008 blog, Bob Collins and photos of us waiting in line.

Directional Argument, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

With all the various news that was happening yesterday regarding the RNC, the huge peace protest and buzz regarding hurricane Gustov and Governor Palin's daughter, I ended up tagging along with photographers Stacy Schwartz and Jon Behm, periodically catching up with Noah Kunin of The UpTake. We all were helping with The UpTake's coverage.

We followed a splinter group unrelated to the primary protest around the streets of Saint Paul. If you're new to this story, the Minnesota Independent, The UpTake and the mainstream media outlets have been covering it extensively. What I don't think has been covered though is that this group was incredibly unorganized and continually disagreed with themselves as to what they were doing. The route we took around Saint Paul around noon was completely on the fly. Police in full riot gear as well as cops in blue shirts on bikes lined certain intersections to try to persuade which direction the mob went. Groups like "Funk The War" pumped loud music from wagons which made a the scene almost feel like being in a film. Kids wearing handkerchiefs and gas masks running around juxtaposed with people dancing as if it was a rave was a moderately surreal scene. Eventually we ended up in Lowertown where there were virtually no visible police. I watched as some people in this mob smashed rear view mirrors of cars, threw bricks through Galtier Plaza and the First Bank building and one tried to rip a door off of a van. I also saw water bottles flung at windows where they bounced off. They surrounded a bus and spray-painted anarchy symbols on the side in light blue. People yelled at each other within the group, calling the violence "fucking stupid" and the reaction of bricks thrown through the glass at Macy's "does not help stop the war," yelled a girl with a torn t-shirt. At each intersection, the head of the group many times would point in conflicting directions. Some wanted to go back to the Xcel. Someone wanted to "stay away from the police." Some wanted to turn around and go back the other direction. While there were not police presence at many of the intersections, you could see police blocking off roads a block away. A smart maneuver by law enforcement, I thought: not directly engaging the group but influencing the route they were traveling by showing their presence in the distance. There were few times where tear gas and smoke bombs were use to control the direction of the mob. By the time they made it to Macy's and the Landmark Center, an entourage of police cars were following them as well as a huge presence of cops in riot gear in most directions so they scattered and dispersed seeing they were now trapped. I argue that if the police intervened when a few of the rebels threw bricks through windows, the matter could have escalated. Instead, they were able to trap the group, make some arrests and get them to scatter without much intervention at all. As I was uploading photos from what happened at The UpTake's offices (and after listening in to a great conversation between Matt Stoller and former congressman Bob Edgar), Utne Reader's Bennett Gordon alerted me that the group was rebuilding itself near the Cathedral. I walked up with him and Stacy Schwartz and saw lines of police in riot gear blocking off certain streets but maintaining a distance of about a block from the growing mob. They chanted "join us, join us" until they had a large group. Bennett stayed behind and Stacy and I followed the group to the Cathedral, down towards 35E where they crossed a pedestrian bridge, crossed 7th Street and travelled down towards Irving Park with little or no property damage. Two kids took a dumpster and after a few attempts were able to tip it over in the middle of an intersection. Getting near the perimeter, police stayed a block away in riot gear, forcing the mob to move to the river. A couple folks in masks made a makeshift blockade with a couple detour signs to "stop the cops." At the Mississippi, they marched down Shepherd road's sidewalk, not interfering with traffic. Stacy and I were talking about how difficult it is going to be for this mob to actually get back into downtown and then figured that the only way to get back was to turn around or to go through the tunnel at Jackson street. To the north was a parked train and a bluff and to the south was a river. I said, "this looks like a trap." Sure enough, by the time they got to Jackson street, the police in full riot gear were blocking the entrance back into downtown. Stacy and I knew the ramifications of this and stayed back behind the main mob to observe. We saw a reporter for MPR and two people from The UpTake continue on. There was no way out but back the way we came. Then, this happened, as filmed by The UpTake's Corrine McDermid: What the video doesn't show clearly is that the mob threw first. The police responded swiftly with tear gas and smoke bombs. There were other objects thrown at police, one I believe exploded in front of them. Stacy and I turned around and started heading the other direction, as did many in the mob and cars were beginning to back up, also trapped. While some wanted to peacefully get away, some people in masks were harassing motorists. The helpful were yelling at people to turn around and roll their windows up due to the tear gas. As Shepherd road is divided, there is a curb-sized median to climb over to go the opposite direction. Most cars did this, although one driver of a large SUV yelled to us "I don't care, I'll drive those fuckers right over." Personally, I don't think that's a good choice considering all the people that were about to surround his vehicle. Stacy and I, at this point, were now victims of this trap along with the motorists on Shepherd road. We were telling people to turn around and roll windows up, and one woman in an SUV didn't seem to understand. I tried to explain and then asked if we could ride with her out of the area. I showed her my press pass and explained who we were and what was going on as fast as I could and she reluctantly let us in. I immediately told her to turn around and go the other way, driving over the median. As she was driving an SUV, I knew it wouldn't be a problem but she was scared of damaging her vehicle. It got to the point where I was yelling at her to do so, noting the people in masks that were coming at us and the loud explosives that were going off. She made the turn but it was too late for a clean getaway. The most unnerving moment was on our way out. A man in a gas mask stood in front of the SUV staring at our driver to her the face, refusing to move. The ugly face of terrorism was standing in front of her vehicle. She froze, with her hands on the wheel and did not honk or try to move. It was a frightening scene. I yelled, "go around him" and Stacy opened her door and yelled, "Get the fuck out of the way, we're press" and another man yelled, "if you're press, fucking cover this!" Meanwhile, the mob was coming up behind us. Stacy's a concert photographer, lawyer and music blogger. I'm an IT Manager for a design firm, social media consultant and blogger. We were doing citizen photojournalistic roles and the situation changed where we decided that our safety was more important than covering the event. Finally the guy moved and ran and we drove away. Our driver, who asked her name and occupation to be off the record told us that she was a mother, works downtown and was simply trying to go home in the eastern suburbs. She said she was appalled, disgusted incredibly shaken and said she felt like she was about to throw up. I feel bad that I yelled at her how to maneuver her vehicle but I think if we would have done it any later we would have had to deal with the main mob that were attacking the police. She drove us to Stacy's car in Highland Park. Stacy and I gave her our cards and if you're reading this, we are very thankful you got us out of there. After following around these groups, I think they are fairly unorganized, do not have agreement on their goals and are being controlled and trapped fairly well by the police. It's unfortunate that the traps both in downtown as well as by the river negatively impacted some normal citizens and storefronts but I think the situation could have been a lot worse. Of course, seeing our city armed to the teeth with riot gear, police from all over the state and the Minnesota National Guard is almost as unnerving as the rioters. It's a lose-lose situation. Visit my photo slideshow on Flickr as well as sets by Jon Behm and Stacy Schwartz. Also visit The UpTake for continuing coverage. UPDATES: I've been asked about my use of the word "kids." While the group seemed to be younger teenagers to people in their early 20's, I admit I may have used the word loosely. Note though that my perception wasn't unique: Corrine McDermid from The UpTake used the same language in the above video and also referred to them as "students." Michael Caputo from Minnesota Public Radio and I had two long conversations about what happened. He was closer to the action than I was but we differ on a key part of the story. On the other hand, my version of the story seems to fit with what the police report said. Corrine McDermid, seems to agree with Caputo. He made a five minute piece about the event for MPR. Overall, good conversations regarding the recollection of stories and what really is the truth.

Xcel Energy Center, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

I haven't been updating this site for awhile so here's a short recap of what I've been up to and what I'm doing this upcoming week.

I've been updating my tumblelog. Add it on Tumblr or your RSS reader if you'd like. I've also been covering the U.S. Senate race between Al Franken and Norm Coleman at MNpublius. It's a ton of fun, honestly. As well, I've been maintaining my day job. This weekend, I pick up my press pass with The UpTake. I've been a supporter of the UpTake since day one and I'm happy to help them out during the Republican National Convention. I also pick up Rex Sorgatz at the airport and the upper floor of my house turns into his space for a project he's working on relating to the RNC. While there's going to be a ton of press locally, nationally and internationally on almost every aspect of the convention from the speeches, the reactions from delegates, the protests, the looming hurricane in the gulf, the newly chosen vice president candidate and everything John McCain, I'm going to focus on three things: Norm Coleman, Jeff Larson and the parties. I'm also going to be at The Daily Show on September 2nd. This upcoming week might be a huge mess but I think it'll be fun. Thanks for reading and my apologies for the lack of updates recently.

Ever wonder why the Star Tribune includes code that forces your browser to reload periodically? Ever wonder why they don't have full RSS feeds? I understand that stories evolve as more information becomes available, but watching the Star Tribune's headlines change online before (and sometimes after) they go to print has been an interesting experience for me the last week or so. My handy RSS reader, Vienna, treats each time a headline changes as a different link and stores it. Below are a few examples. In the final headline I link to the story: On July 22nd, the Star Tribune published a story titled "Senate votes to move ahead with plan to curb speculation in oil markets that some blame for high oil prices." A few hours later, the headline changed, pointing to the same story: "Oil speculation bill provides Senate forum for partisan energy blame game." This change took the focus off of "oil speculation" being to blame to it being a "partisan energy blame game." The next day, on July 23rd, "Help for homeowners, mortgage giant sails through House, on track to become law" was updated after the vote to "House approves bill that aims to help strapped homeowners facing foreclosure, mortgage giants" but ultimately the final headline read "Help for strapped homeowners, mortgage giants sails through House after Bush drops opposition," where it now sounds like Bush gets a lot more credit. On July 25th, a story that head a headline that sounded like good news for Obama turned into a pro-McCain headline: "In shadow of Obama trip, McCain works battleground states and raises campaign funds" went to "McCain claims Obama's policies for Iraq could have led to war across Middle East" in the afternoon. Before it went to press it became "McCain mocks Obama policy for Iraq as 'audacity of hopelessness' that could have lost the war." Ouch. On July 26th, I saw a headline go through eight different versions. "Obama defends decision to travel to Europe, Middle East, says it'll help Americans in long run" changed slightly to "Barack Obama defends trip to Europe and Middle East, saying it'll help Americans in long run" to "Obama defends decision to travel to Europe, says US must work with allies" to "Barack Obama defends trip through Mideast, Europe, says US must cooperate with allies" to "Barack Obama defends decision to travel to Europe and Mideast, says US must work with allies" to "Obama defends decision to travel to Europe and Mideast, says US must work with its allies" to "Barack Obama rejects criticism of trip, says John McCain moving his way on Iraq, Afghanistan" to finally "Obama rejects criticism of trip, says McCain moving his way on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." The key words here are "Obama defends decision" changing to "Obama rejects criticism." Also on the same day, a story titled "Bush signing legislation next week to triple funds for AIDS around the world" changed to "Bush says he's eager to sign legislation to triple funds for fighting AIDS around world." It changes from the fact it will be signed to talking about how Bush is eager to do so. On July 29th, bad news for McCain: "John McCain steps back from 'no new tax' pledge, gets rebuked by conservative anti-tax group" turns to "John McCain returns to 'no new tax' pledge after criticism from anti-tax group." Funny though, how bad news for McCain can turn into positive news: after another headline change he sounds proactive: "Analysis: McCain eager to reassure anxious conservatives he won't raise taxes." On July 31st, "Bush poised to report Thursday on progress in Iraq war." After the report, the headline and story was updated: "Bush declares significant progress in the Iraq war, saying terrorists 'are on the run.'" Sounds like the same old news right? Well, the headline changes again to "Bush cites progress in Iraq, suggests further US troop withdrawals possible." The final version, headline changed later in the day reads: "Citing gains in Iraq, Bush hints at possibility of further US troop withdrawals this year." Sounds like great news now. While not presidential in nature, it was too interesting not to include: Also on July 31st, "Alaska Sen. Stevens, in arraignment, expected to plead not guilty to hiding $250,000 in gifts" turned to "Alaska Sen. Stevens, in arraignment, pleads not guilty to hiding $250,000 in gifts" which later read as "Alaska Sen. Stevens pleads not guilty to corruption, gets chance to clear name before election." Overnight it got its final title, "Sen. Stevens takes 'gutsy' tactic, asks for speedy corruption trial in time for elections" which doesn't include the words "guilty" "hiding" and "$250,000 in gifts." On August 1st, "Obama calls for $1,000 energy rebates to be paid with windfall profits tax on the oil industry," which was mildly edited to say "Obama proposes $1,000 rebate checks from oil company profits as part of pitch to Fla. voters." Sounds like a great deal. The headline then gets changed to focus on a right-wing hot-button issue: "Obama shifts, now says he would be willing to back limited additional offshore oil drilling." The final story reads: "Obama endorses energy compromise that includes additional offshore drilling." On August 2nd, a headline about Obama and McCain agreeing on debates turned into different story: "Obama campaign agrees to 3 debates with McCain and 1 between their running mates" changed to "Obama steps back from McCain challenge for series of debates, agreeing only to standard 3." That's quite a different story. The final headline painted Obama even weaker: "Playing it safe, Obama steps back from McCain's challenge for a series of summer debates." I want to stress that in all of these cases, the changing headlines all link to the same story URL. I think there's a pattern here.

James Norton and Taylor Carik, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

A little more than a year after my first guest host appearance on Flak Radio, I was invited back. Hosted by Taylor Carik and Jim Norton, the studio has traditionally been the guest room at Jim's house. He has since moved from Uptown to Longfellow and the studio came with it. It's a bit more roomy compared to the photo above from last time! They even have some space for their audio engineer, Adam Voreis.

Being a guest has its perks. Immediately I'm served a pint of water with ice cubes made with cranberries frozen in them. I'm greeted by one of their cats. I'm offered almost every beer or liquor in the house, including vodka personally distilled multiple times in a Brita filter, as taste tested in a previous Flak Radio segment. I should have taken him up on the offer as my first few minutes I continue to lose my words and stutter a bunch. I can't say I have much practice behind a microphone and it shows. I loosen up towards the end though.

Some highlights:

• I announce my new gig with MNpublius.


• We played some funny clips from NonSociety.


• We talk about a pizza a lot.


• Senate Candidate Dean Barkley's Match.com profile.


• I admit publicly that I'm a super picky eater.


• We all try some Michelob Ultra Pomegranate Raspberry and Michelob Ultra Lime Cactus. Yes, that's a highlight!

Always fun and I hope they'll have me back on as a guest next year too.

Listen to it at Flak Radio.

Google Maps, Limbo and Whrrl, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

It's been more than a day now since Apple released iPhone OS 2.0 and released the new iPhone 3G. With GPS and the ability to add third-party applications, mobile social networking tied with location information may finally take off.

As many of my friends and readers know, there's a real soft spot in my heart for Dodgeball. It was created way back in 1874 or something and bought out by Google a few decades or so later (okay, about 2000 and 2005, but it feels that old). Dodgeball was the first mobile service that told your friends where you were. Even though there is no longer any active development on it, it is still one of the best, most reliable and most simple services to use from most mobile phones. There's one other service that might be more simple than Dodgeball but doesn't currently have location information (for the most part): Twitter.

A frequent joke about all these new services coming out is "if it's harder to use than Dodgeball, it will fail." Some technology-minded friends might laugh at the joke because Dodgeball is as simple as saying "@turf club" or "@town talk diner" and you're done. It's not so much of a joke though because I actually believe it. My idea of a successful mobile social networking application is one where you can actually spend your time being social. If I'm at a bar or music venue with friends and I need to stick my nose in my phone for more than 30 seconds to make it work, I'm not going to use it half the time if at all. Lastly, if it is not easy for the non-techie to use, those non-techies won't use it. What good is a social network if it's all nerds like me? ;-)

I took a bunch of the new iPhone social networking applications for a spin. There's a bunch I'll skip because I want to cover the most popular ones.

Limbo

Limbo might be the most thorough and detailed mobile social networking site I've ever used. In fact, it blows my mind how big it is. It has everything from telling your friends where you're at, where you're going, being categorically specific about the type of activity you're doing, being specific about when you are starting and stopping activities and even selecting if specific activities you are doing throughout the day are ones you do or do not want to be disturbed during. You can search for other members based off of what kinds of activities you are doing right now. You can search for restaurants, bars and shops near you, you can play social networking games, subscribe to events, weather, tips, sports scores, horoscopes and the like and even accrue points that you can earn stuff with.

Holy crap, I just want it to know where I am and find my friends. In the photo at the top of this post I show a three screenshots. The one on the far left is Apple's implementation of Google Maps with GPS, which is fantastic. In the middle is Limbo telling me where I am: "It looks like you're in the Minneapolis, MN area." Yeah, no shit.

The interface looks nice but isn't very intuitive on some of the basics. For example, when I click "Find Me," I don't need it to give me a dialog box. There's separate "who" and "what" sections that both list my "Faves," "Friends," "Contacts" and Members" but I still can't remember if I go to the "Who" or the "What" part for different tasks. I still can't figure out how to change my profile photo. The default it gave me was a scene of smokestacks and smog! Is that supposed to mean that I'm polluting their service?

Lastly, this application takes time. There's a learning big curve and it takes a lot of time to do anything with it. I can see, though, that if you live in Limbo's world it could become addictive. I'm uninstalling it though.

iFob

iFob is a simple application that finds people using the same WiFi network you are on that are also using iFob. It alerts you and you can see the basics about them such as their first name, a one-line comment from them and their photo. From their site:

In public hotspots the isolation gets so thick it chatters and hums: people sitting behind their computer screens not meeting -- typing email and chats, and clicking through profiles of virtual, distant people. iFob changes this. iFob only shows profiles of people who are so close that they can look up and smile at each other.

An old idea internationally but something that hasn't taken off here. The application seems simple enough, but I haven't found anyone using it yet. I'll keep it on for awhile.

Whrrl

Whrrl comes across as one of the biggest up and coming players but I'm not sure why. Every time I use it I get frustrated. When I use the map, I can't zoom in or out. In fact (as shown by the screen capture in the top photo on the right), my street is missing! When I show a list of what's near me, it shows "Auto Mart," "Honda Town," "Taco Bell," "Nielsen Framing Studios" and "Adprint," none one of them places I'd ever meet up with friends at. When I hit the "current location" button an option comes up if I want it to identify my current location or not compared to the Maps application where it just does it.

In fact, I can't seem to get anything to work the way I want it to in Whrrl. I gave up and started playing with Whrrl with a browser. Even if it knows my last location as being at home in Minneapolis it says:

Welcome Aaron!
What are you doing right now?

Where in Seattle, WA are you?

Weird. I've never been to Seattle in my life. I'm uninstalling it.

Brightkite

Oh wait, Brightkite didn't release an iPhone application! They have had, however, a ton of hype amongst the tech crowd. They've successfully deployed a private beta invite strategy that got a lot of people excited about it and on paper, Brightkite looks perfect: you can declare your location by a specific place, an address or just a city, you can manage your privacy settings and select who gets to know to what detail about your location you want to share and you can attach photos to what's going on at the location you're at.

My problem with Brightkite is that it isn't even close to passing the "is it as easy as Dodgeball?" litmus test. Even their iPhone-friendly website takes too long for me to even check in somewhere. That, and their preferences take a lot of time to go through to get everything just right. The defaults are way too noisy and bombard you with a ton of text messages even if they aren't your friends nearby. The good news is that the preferences are granular enough for people extremely interested in the service but why not make some good defaults so it is friendlier for everyone else? I figured a nice iPhone application would fix all of this. Where is it?

Brightkite had a lot of hype and now they're missing the boat.

Twitterrific

Twitterrific, the popular application for Twitter, will supposedly use (at some point) location-aware features that exist with Twitter's API but are not widely used yet. It doesn't matter to me much because Twitterrific has two serious faults that prevent me from using it: the UI can be jerky but more importantly it doesn't pull any of the messages on Twitter between the last twenty and those from the last time I loaded Twitterrific. It is mostly a limitation of from Twitter, not Twitterrific, but it is still pretty important. Once they clean things up and location-aware features are more widely used on Twitter, Twitterrific might be a big player in this arena.

Loopt: "List" view and two "Map" views

Loopt

True story: The first time I opened Loopt after setting it up initially, it automatically found where I was and put my friends that were nearby on a map. I saw my friend Dave was a few blocks away so I texted him and we went out for beers.

That, my friends, is how this shit is supposed to work.

Loopt has been getting some great plugs from Apple and for good reason: they're the one mobile social networking application you should get for your iPhone. Or Blackberry, even. (By the way, it humorously shows the Motorola Razr on their site but it actually isn't supported.)

Loopt, like most applications of this type use your mobile phone number as your primary user ID. While some people may argue against this as a privacy issue, I think it is a great assumption: if you aren't comfortable giving someone your mobile number you probably shouldn't be comfortable with that person knowing exactly where you are all the time.

Loopt, by the way, doesn't show friends-of-friends or random people in the area.

Wherever you are at, you can also give a short message about what you're up to, similar to Twitter. It can give your friends a good idea of what you're doing at a particular location. You can easily take and attach a photo of what's going on too. It logs it with your location without needing to think about it.

On the map screen, in addition to your friends you can overlay search results for restaurants, bars and other places. That portion is powered by Yelp, which completely negates needing to download the separate Yelp application because the integration is fantastic. I saw a friend of my map and was able to find a great place to meet that was almost equidistant to our locations.

The integration with other iPhone apps is great as well. If it sees my friend on the other side of the city, you can choose to have it use the Maps application to give you driving directions to where they are. You can easily call or text your friend directly from the application as well.

Loopt isn't without its faults though, but only the kinds of things that'll likely clear up in a minor version release.

The "Map" page is powered by Microsoft Virtual Earth. While there may be a few advantages compared to using Google Maps, it is clunky for zooming in and out on the iPhone. If you zoom in on a location, the center of where you zoomed ends up not where you'd expect. Sometimes it screws up and throws my view into the Caribbean Sea! Sometimes, as shown in the screenshot above on the right, the address and the map don't match up. It seemed like my friend Brian was only a couple blocks away but the address indicates otherwise. So the map is a bit clunky but overall hasn't been too bad.

The "List" page view gives the option of viewing my friends by how close they are to me or in alphabetical order. Alphabetical order doesn't do too much for me because I am usually not concerned with my friends out of state. Viewing by "Distance" makes sense, but it shows some pretty stale entries. As I'm looking at my phone now, it is showing me some friends that haven't updated with Loopt for more than 8 hours. I wish it'd grey those entries out, not show them at all or otherwise indicate that the data is stale and quite possibly inaccurate. Thankfully for now, it does show a time-stamp in small print.

The friend invitation portion of Loopt has a big quirk I'd like to change: It shows your address book and you can choose who you'd like to invite to be your friend. You can also have it search your address book to find if any of your friends are already on Loopt. If you use that feature, by default it selects those people as wanting to receive an invite and you have to deselect them. This is a serious problem if you have people in your address book that you don't necessarily want to friend on this service. My friend Justine just made a mistake because of this issue. I'd like an option to permanently block those people I never want to add on Loopt or have it never default to send an invite to anyone.

Overall though, those are mostly minor UI bugs and such. Well honestly, I've had it crash too. And Dodgeball co-founder Alex Rainert today expressed his disappointment with it. Even with those things, Loopt is still a good version 1.0 app for iPhone OS 2.0 and it's my favorite of the bunch. I think they have a real chance to become huge because Loopt is easy to set up, very fast to use and it's simple. You use it to find your friends then you put it back in your pocket so you can be social. If you haven't already, download it and try it out.

University of St. Thomas, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

Yesterday I spoke at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits' "Nonprofit Essentials: Nuts and Bolts of Practical Management" event at the University of St. Thomas' Minneapolis campus. My session was called "Web 2.0 101." It was a lot of fun; the group ranged from a few people that currently blog to people that don't know what a blog is and a few people that have presences on social networks to people that have never seen Facebook or MySpace before. In an hour's worth of time I wanted to tell a few success stories, answer as many questions as I could and leave with four main takeaway ideas. Keeping it to the fundamental basics was a challenge.

As I didn't have any handouts, this post serves as my recap, notes and links.

Web 2.0

"Web 2.0" is less about new technology and more about understanding a philosophy. It's the idea where instead of translating traditional media to work online, you utilize the power of the Internet to work in new ways and to connect with people more directly. The only slide in my presentation I read out loud was a quote from Tim O'Reilly:

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.

I made a facetious but common example of traditional media where an organization may have a press release and that press release gets to newspapers and there's a chance that the newspaper would want to follow up with the organization on it and possibly there'd be a story. If a story is printed, the newspaper readership may read it and people may talk about it at the water cooler at the office, leaving a huge gap between you and the conversation people are having about you. Organizations are starting to understand different ways to close that gap online.

Listening and Responding

I talked about my friend Bill who used Twitter to broadcast a vulgar message about his problems with a product developed by SAS. He soon got an email:

did you convince sas/graph to do your bidding?

The kicker is that it was sent to him directly from from a guy at SAS in Research & Development. After a couple email exchanges, Bill's last email ended with:

I got everything working the way I wanted, it just took some time to work through understanding everything that was going on with the preexisting code. Now to clean up those macros and get everything packaged back up again permanently.

Thanks again!
Bill

Bill never asked for the help and he was only broadcasting his message for the intent of his friends to read it. For SAS to be able to, as an organization, be able to respond directly to people that are talking about its products and services and reverse their opinion is, on a basic level, a true "Web 2.0" success.

I gave a couple other examples and there are a number of ways to try to monitor who is talking about you online. If you are just getting started, the service that will catch a lot of it is Google Alerts.

Publicly Conversing

A lot of people describe "Web 2.0" as "a conversation" and one way to participate in that is to blog. I spent some time explaining what a blog is but I won't go into it on this post. Wikipedia has a good entry on "Blog" as well as an even more basic entry on "Blog" in, well, "plain English".

I showed a number of blogs but paused on a couple local non-profit examples of successful blogging. The Parents for Ethical Marketing has a blog where they talk about things relevant to their mission but not necessarily news items or press releases. Sometimes, it's just sharing a link or a video, such as a piece on a firm utilizing six-year-old children to sell products and sometimes it's sharing opinions on corporate-sponsored exhibits on historical public property. The Nonprofits Assistance Fund has a blog giving tidbits relevant to nonprofit organizations such as addressing economic stress and chiming in on Vermont's new type of hybrid "Low-profit Limited Liability Corporation."

On these kinds of blogs, the organization has a voice that's human, many times opinion-based and personal. They have the ability for people to comment publicly on every item. It's a different way for people to interact, communicate and become more interested in your organization.

I also mentioned Beth Kanter's blog as she effectively works for nonprofits and blogs about how nonprofits can blog effectively. Thanks to those who laughed when I said that. While Beth and I have sometimes very different tactics, she is regarded as one of the most effective and most influential people with helping nonprofits leverage efforts online. She is absolutely worth reading.

On a side note, if you're raring to start blogging now and if the people managing your website are not sure what blogging platform to use, for most organizations these I've been recommending WordPress.

Publicly Conversing on Their Turf

Many times, if not more often than not, it is more important to converse on sites that aren't your own than it is to have your own blog. The main example I used is Robert Moffitt from the American Lung Association of Minnesota. I believe they had a blog at one point but as far as I'm aware they do not have one anymore. I don't think they need one either because Moffitt has become proficient at being the ALA's side of the conversation everywhere else on the local Internet. I joked that I "see him everywhere online" and it's true. There's been a number hot-button issues for the ALA in the last couple years, two of which were getting the Minnesota state-wide smoking ban passed and promoting fuels that are cleaner and cause less air pollution.

If people are talking about these issues online, more often than not, Moffitt will chime in. At the nonprofit news source "E85's chicken-and-egg scenario" and the example I used in my presentation, "High drama in the courts: Bar owners try to skirt state's smoking ban." He frequently shows up on blogs such as MNspeak where for an example, a story about how "Ethanol May Fuel Health Problems" the very first comment read: "What do you say [Robert Moffitt]? Does this change things?" It's to the point where people expect him to be part of the conversation. (Would you like it if people online were begging your organization to give your opinion and respond on the issues you fight for?!)

He responds in part by giving a personal, person-to-person take on it:

The study can't really doesn't stand much scrutiny. He used computer models, basically turning all of America in to a super-heated LA of the future, fed only "worst case senario" data on E85 into his machine, crunched numbers on smog-related morbidity and mortality and Lo, I become Ethanol, destroyer of worlds...

...and also gives a more sturdy "official" stance on it:

The American Lung Association of Minnesota does not support issues or projects without rigorously testing and researching first. We have real data, from real vehicles using real E85 and gasoline we bought at Twin Cities stations. We used independent scientists and laboratories. What we have is hard data, proven and replicated by other researchers around the globe.

...and otherwise participates in the conversation. He effectively is able to mix being a human having a person-to-person conversation about the issues while delivering the American Lung Association's stance and setting the record, in the ALA's view, straight.

Working Social Media

The most difficult part of my day yesterday was explaining how social networking works on a fundamental level (using Facebook as my primary example) and showing how it can be effective for nonprofits in ten minutes.

Social networking sites, such as Facebook, are generally places where people create a page or profile for themselves and they declare who they are friends with on the site. You then can inform your friends what you are up to, what you're writing and share your photos, for example. In some situations, you also see what your friends are doing and what events you are going to.

It is relevant for nonprofits to be involved in this space because it is a way to promote what you are doing, share your events and publish your messages in a place where people are already communicating with each other. More importantly it is a great way to utilize the people's social networks as online word-of-mouth promotion.

Whew. I used the Minnesota Historical Society's Facebook page as one example of a presence on a social network. I showed how when people declare themselves as "fans" of the MHS, it shows up on their profile page for all their friends to see. I also showed how a lot of their content links off of Facebook and back to MHS... many times to places people wouldn't normally access on their own without the influence of Facebook.

Unfortunately, having a page on Facebook isn't effective alone. It's people that make social networking magic happen. To illustrate, I showed some items from a typical "news feed" on Facbook: some of my friends attending a birthday party, some of them declared they were going to a concert and a couple friends going to the Marcy-Holmes Neighborhood Association Land Use Meeting. I wondered, "why would my friends be going to that?" I saw that the event on Facebook was placed by a group called Stop the Destruction of Florence Court and then noticed that more friends of mine were also part of that group. In one minute, I learned about a group of people and an event that I was not familiar with, possibly am interested in, and I already received the best referral: the declaration that my friends are part of it. If it wasn't for Facebook, I wouldn't have known about it.

If word-of-mouth is the best marketing, this is word-of-mouth on speed.

There's hundreds of other ways social networking can be used and this was only a couple small examples. Facebook Business Solutions has a lot of good information on getting started on Facebook, but keep in mind there are a lot of other social networking sites that may or may not be more relevant to your organization and what you are trying to accomplish.

In Closing

Web 2.0 is really about the philosophy of utilizing the medium of the Internet in ways to bring you and your organization closer to people and to leverage that to your advantage.

Not everything will work and there isn't a solid plan that works for everyone. Plan on some of your efforts failing. The best way to start finding what works is to try. Even if your organization is not comfortable jumping into blogging and social networks yet, do it yourself. Search for blogs on Google that you might be interested reading and commenting on. Start your own blog using Blogger or Tumblr and write about whatever you want. Maybe you want to document a project you're working on at home or perhaps you'd like to have a record of photos of your new pet. It doesn't matter what you write about -- it's good to just do it and get a feel of how it all works. If you're not on a social networking site, sign up as regular user on Facebook or LinkedIn. My guess is that you'll find friends or colleagues on both.

It was a fun hour. If you attended, I hope you were able to get something out of it. Feel free to comment below or contact me if you have any questions.

Everyone else that reads my site: Agree? Disagree? Think I went wrong somewhere? Bring it!

The Minnesota International Piano-e-Competition runs their e-Piano Junior competition from July 4th through the 11th. In January and February of this year, young pianists meeting the repertoire requirements from all over the world were recorded using Yamaha's Disklavier technology, recording every aspect of how the pianos are played. The files get played back on the same type of piano so they can be judged together. What a great idea to have a truly international piano competition. The finalists fly to Minnesota to compete in person at Sundin Music Hall at Hamline University this weekend and throughout the week. The final rounds are at Orchestra Hall on Friday, July, 11. All performances are open and free to the public. Minnesota Public Radio also has a live stream of the event. What I've watched so far today has been fantastic. I'll likely go see some of this competition in person.