It’s clear that Seesmic is one day going to kill off their video service. They’ve demoted the video site from their main page to video.seesmic.com. Seesmic changed their focus as a company, has a nearly all new staff from 18 months ago and I think will be ending their video conversations over time.

I’m not too worried about the death of the video site, as most of the content as little value as time goes on and the community has all but died and splintered towards 12Seconds, TokBox and meeting in real life. What I’m curious about is the video comments. I know that people like Sukhjit relies to some degree on video comments for her blog. If Seesmic flips the kill switch, she loses her video comments.

This makes me wonder about how we store the content we think of as belonging to or associated with us. Seesmic might have allowed you to embed videos from their pages into your comments, but the video was always theirs. There is no button to download the videos to your server. I have a similar issue with my commenting engine Disqus, but there’s a backup. While the comments that you leave go to the Disqus servers and not the server that robblatt.com is hosted on, it’s also backed up to my servers. If I choose to uninstall Disqus, the comments won’t disappear forever.

Has the “free” economy hampered our ability to depend on the services that we use? Seesmic for video comments, Disqus for text comments, WordPress.com for blog hosting, BlogTalkRadio for audio hosting, blip.tv for video hosting, etc. What damage can these companies do to us if they decide to close shop? As unlikely as it may seem, it’s still possible. 18 months ago I wouldn’t have guessed that Seesmic would have put video on the back burner either, but it still happened.

While a white label solution or paid account might seem like the expensive route, it is the route that offers peace of mind and customer support. Is that a worthwhile trade?

Last week, the 140 Characters Conference (#140conf) was the epitome of the social media echoplex. We were underground, talking about ourselves and the impact that we one day might have on the world. Very often inside the echoplex you’ll hear people talking about doing “Twitter research”. Usually that research entails looking at their feed of their friends or an RSS search for a hashtag.

Today, the Web Ecology Project has blown every single one of those “research” reports out of the water. “The Iranian Election on Twitter: The First Eighteen Days” is a scientific look at two million plus messages produced by Twitter users.

One thing that would have been interesting would be to see messages per location and how that information spread, but the users of Twitter were poisoning that well of information by changing their locations to and/or from Iran in a futile attempt to stop the Iranian government from finding them. All this did was potentially spread misinformation about what was actually going on.

Regardless, click the image to read hard facts about the Iranian election and Twitter.

As you probably know, I’m looking for work. One of the things I do on a regular basis is to post my resume to the resume section of NYC Craigslist. As a result, I get a lot of false promises in my inbox, but today I got the absolute worst kind of spam.

Greetings,

I’ll keep this short and sweet.

I am writing to you with regards to your posting in the resume section on Craigslist.

This may no be exactly what you posted for originally, but it is an opportunity to join one of the fastest growing companies in Texas, Illinois, New York, as well as America.

“This is spam.”

Our company enjoyed an unheard of 500% growth rate last year right in the middle of our current economic situation. In the years to follow, our company will become a household name. You can start part-time and eventually work this full time.

Here’s the fantastic claim. 500% growth? Where did they start? If I made $1 last week and made $5 this week, I made a 500% jump in sales.

I am an established businessman, and an officer in the US Army Reserve, located in NY. If you are friendly, open minded, enthusiastic, coachable, and trainable, I may have an opportunity for you. If you are not, kindly ignore this one time email.

Interested in learning more? Simply send me a reply to this email, and I will send you a few links to browse.

No pressure or drama, just information for you to decide if our opportunity might be a good fit for you.

If you are not interested, no worries, I sincerely thank you for the time you took to read this, and wish you the best of luck in your endeavors.

This is a bit of a masked man fallacy. Because we’re lead to believe that US Army officers are trustworthy, we should place our trust in this guy. He plays the nice guy card and tells me that I can ignore this email if I want to.

-Regards,

Ash

Regards,

Spammer.

I have such a problem with this kind of spam because it’s praying on people who are putting themselves out there to be found. Instead of the intended audience, they have to deal with sorting through this garbage. Hopefully someone who gets this email and searches parts of it will find this post and realize that they are being swindled.

If you’ve been sent some spam that is over the top and should be exploited, I encourage you to post it online to help others out.

Spam with Cheese by kris247

How many games long was Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak? What state is Kansas City located in? What’s the record for the most times someone has been struck by lightning? And what does the bar bet have to do with your content strategy?

The bar bet has evolved over time. Traditionally, a bar bet was settled by the bartender. Bartenders are trusted to know weird information. As an example, head over to the Roger Smith Hotel on 47th and Lexington Ave in Manhattan when Paul is behind the bar at Lily’s. Ask him nearly any random fact or plot from the movies. Most likely, he’ll have your answer. He’ll also make you one hell of a Bloody Mary if you ask for one. In “the olden days” you’d ask the bartender and he or she would tell you that Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games, Kansas City is Missouri or that Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning seven times.

Bar bets and random information became so popular that Guinness made a book of those records. Now, if someone wanted to settle a bet, they could ask the bartender or look in the book. The book was much more comprehensive than any bartender’s knowledge and more importantly it was relatively accurate. For a long time, the Guinness book seemed to be the standard way to settle these kinds of bets.

In 2007, my family went on a vacation to Disney World and we had lots of questions. Instead of asking a tour guide or someone who worked at the park, my family turned to me and asked questions that I would then look up using my iPhone and Wikipedia. We found out all kids of things about the attractions and the grounds of Disney. How many square miles is Disney World? When was the Haunted MAnsion made into a ride? Did anyone ever die inside of the Magic Kingdom? We answered those questions waiting in line for rides and on the various buses around Disney. The amount of information at my fingertips was staggering. I could answer any question anyone had about Disney World. There wasn’t much conversation about possibilities, just questions and immediate answers.

Knowing everything sure gets old quick. There’s no purpose in having a conversation about when Kurt Cobain died or how many gold records Elvis has sold. The answers are available with a few keystrokes. There’s no fun in debating history or facts anymore when we live in a connected society. What’s Shaq’s free throw percentage? Who needs to talk about how bad Shaq is at free throws? Just answer the question and move on to the next topic.

Turn the information gun onto social media for a moment. I am the community advocate for Blubrry and as such, I represent the company on social networks and do my best to spread accurate information across the ‘net about how awesome our podcast hosting, WordPress plugins and statistics are. I respond to most people who are asking questions or talking about similar products on Twitter using @blubrry, but in the “real time” world the question that I often ask myself is “when should I interject?”

If I jump in too soon with an over abundance of information, then the case is closed. The authority on the subject has spoken and the subject is dead. There is no conversation, just a question posed and an answer given. If I don’t jump into the conversation right away, the information might not be totally correct, but there’s a conversation happening. As an example, one of my goals is to convert people to our WordPress plugin over an older plugin. If two people have been going back and forth about which is better, what’s the benefit of jumping in mid-stream? Yes, I’ll answer the question, but at the cost of allowing the community to bring someone in on their own.

It gets into the bigger question of what your role is when you are on Twitter. Are you there to answer questions or facilitate conversation? With Blubrry, I do my best to promote podcasts in the Blubrry community, give accurate information about our products, provide tech support and give people insight into our company to feel more connected with us.

Jumping into conversations with information feels too much like answering settling bar bets with my iPhone or answering trivia questions with Wikipedia while walking around Disney World. The magic and the wonder of the conversation are gone.

arguing about YUI by Frances Berriman, rob’s brother and dad by the amber show & Greeks always argue about facts by greekadman via flickr

Wow. I made a big mistake.

Over on the site forCreate Consume Delete, we had been tracking people who clicked on the “Subscribe in iTunes” link with a shortened URL. When people click on the link, it goes to an address at the URL shortening site we were using to, then it forwards people to the page in the iTunes Store for Create Consume Delete. The shortening service tracks how many people clicked on the link and it was one big happy ecosystem of traffic forwarding and statistics gathering.

That changed today. I got an email from someone asking if I was intentionally forwarding people to “cakefarts” (WARNING: DON’T GO THERE) instead of iTunes. Sending people to watch a woman fart on a cake isn’t exactly what I want when they want to subscribe to my show. hint: I want them to go to iTunes.

Clearly something has gone wrong here. What happened? I imagine that in order to keep URLs short, shortening services eventually rotate out old URLs, and my URL was rotated out for this lovely site featuring the lady with the flatulence. Instead of people subscribing to the podcast, I likely offended them. That’s awesome! What’s a better brand building exercise than “You want to subscribe to my show? How about this porn instead!” Wrong.

What’s the lesson? Don’t use URL shorteners when the link is important. Bad things happen to URL shorteners and putting an unnecessary step in the process means there’s one more thing that can go wrong.

URL shorteners were meant to save characters when using Twitter or making Google Maps directs easy to send using a URL that’s easy to remember. Shortened URLs are like directions you might scribble onto a piece of scrap paper or the back of an envelope to go to the house of a friend. Once you’re there, forget about it. It’s trash.

“Boredom” originally by ttcopley via Flickr