If someone is in doubt that I may know what I’m talking about online, I’ll forward them to Heather Whaling’s (@prtini)presentation on learning to use Twitter. I’m quoted in one of the slides repeating my “Be a person, use a tool” mantra.
A while ago I installed Disqus into my WordPress install at robblatt.com and liked the results. It handles my spam, allows me to email replies to comments and in short, gets the job done. In general, robblatt.com is my testing grounds for new WordPress related technology and the implementation of Disqus was no different. If one site of mine is going to be borked, I’d rather it be my blog than one of my podcasts. Disqus was stable, so I went about implementing it across all of my different sites.
Last Friday I was interviewed on the Disqus blog by Giannii as one of the co-hosts of Create Consume Delete, and I think the interview went pretty well. You can read about how I got started on the internet, Create Consume Delete, what I feel is the most important thing and my thoughts on Disqus and comments at the full interview.
It’s no secret that the last company I worked for full time set a trend of newspapers closing shop for good. When the opportunity to help with LaidOffCamp New York came up, I jumped. The team running the event is great and I think it’s shaping up to be an event that can hopefully change some lives. Tickets are now available. There are two options, a free ticket, or a ticket that is accompanied with a donation.
You can find out more about the event at the official site for LaidOffCamp New York.
Could you imagine if you had your music or show on a cassette tape, would you label the tape before handing it out? Not filling out all of the information on an mp3 is the digital equivalent of that. My mp3 collection spans hundreds of artists and tens of thousands of songs. If those songs or albums were tapes, how could I tell your blank tape apart from all the others that I’ve been given over time? In order to stand out, you have to optimize your use of ID3 tags.
I was looking through the music on Free Music Archive .org for more podsafe music. I downloaded a few dozen tracks and loaded them into a folder. There was only one track stood out.
As musicians or podcasters, we have an opportunity to make an instant impact the moment our content is downloaded onto someone’s computer or personal media player. If you leave the artwork empty on that file, you’re missing out on an opportunity to stand out amongst a sea of blank files.
The files I downloaded were from a high level collection on the Free Music Archive’s pages. I downloaded most of the two volumes of the WFMU curated collections. I’m not sure if Clockcleaner completely understood the impact that they would have on me when they included some simple album art in the ID3 tags, but they made quite an impact. Everyone should go check out Caliente Queen by Clockcleaner for their efforts.
A little about the Free Music Archive: All of the music in the collection there is licensed for redistribution in one way or another. The Clockcleaner track from the album Babylon Rules is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. For the most part, this site seems like it has all the shiny sparkle that I hoped Muxtape would employ.
Next time you release something publicly, stop and make sure that every piece of information that can be filled out, is filled out. Each podcast I release had every possible piece of information filled out. Lyrics, comments, and everything else that you have the option to fill out NEED to be filled out. Leaving out information is leaving money on the table.
image by CoreForce via Flickr
A few weeks ago I set up an account with a service that puts advertisements into your Twitter stream. The advertisements offered there are, for the most part, useless. Magpie opened up the door to affiliate sales and everything seemed to go downhill. I don’t have time or care to try to sell someone a MacBook Air for a 7.5% commission. I wanted to be detached from any advertisements that would wind up in my stream and I wanted to label them clearly. When they slipped affiliate links into my stream without my realizing it, I started to have serious doubts about my involvement with them. You can take a look at a search for #ad-space to see what a douche I looked like. These were the advertisements that I ACCEPTED. Could you imagine how stupid I would have looked if I didn’t pre-approve advertisements? Look at a search for #magpie to see.
Who wouldIf you’re not sitting on top of your email waiting for Magpie emails, you’ll likely miss out on the “per view” ads that are offered. When I got offers that weren’t offensively stupid or looked like personal endorsements, I would approve them only to see them end up in an expired queue because I clearly was not on the ball in checking my emails.
If you really want to make some money off of your work on Twitter, use your account to establish your expertise in your field of interest. Earn whuffie and make money off of your reputation for being a smart person instead of 140 character advertisements. However, if you’re looking for a way to make a quick buck off of Twitter, here’s an idea for you to take. Find a clever account name like “newalbums” and talk about new CD releases each week and fill the account with amazon affiliate links. Focus on providing people an easier way to find about what CDs are being released that week. All your discovery work is already done for you. All you have to do is be the curator of the account. It’s not as simple as allowing someone else to have access to your Twitter account, but then again, you’re not spamming your friends either.
Who would Magpie work for? The account I maintained for the New York Sun while it was still around would have been a good candidate. The account had very little besides headlines and links. We were already spamming our followers with headlines, so a few ads along the way wouldn’t have made a big difference.
Listen to the talk that Merlin Mann and John Gruber gave at SXSW (HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbo Charge Your blog with Credibility) and I think that you’ll come to the same conclusion that I did about how useful Magpie really is.
Needless to say, Magpie is now disabled on my account.
If you wind up using my idea for the newalbums twitter account, let me know how well it works. I think it could take off for the right person, but I’m not that person.
UPDATE: Looks like Read Write Web also noticed some of the affiliate sales that are going on in their post How to Sell Your Soul on Twitter and Who’s Buying
photos by zzzack and Kris Taeleman via flickr