Here are a couple of presentations I’ve loaded up on slideshare.net/tonyzeoli. These slides will help you get involved in WordPress from a beginner’s level.
via SlideShare
via SlideShare
Author: Tony Zeoli
An accomplished tech house and house music DJ with a music industry and DJ culture career spanning over 30+ years, Tony Zeoli brings a unique blend of accessible underground dance music to a global audience through his Netmix Global House Sessions Podcast broadcast over Netmix.com, iTunes and MixCloud. Originally from Boston, Tony is a former Billboard Dance Chart Reporter who held residencies at The Loft, Roxy, Europa, Venus De Milo, M80, Cat Club, and other notable venues. Tony Z is also known as an influencer, innovator, and entrepreneur. He was a founding member of X-Mix, Inc DJ Remix and Management company, he inspired DJ and remix culture globally and subsequently went on to launch Netmix in 1995 - being the first to bring mix shows to the Internet.
WordPress and Social Media Presentation
I gave this WordPress and Social Media presentation in the Spring 2011 at WordCamp Raleigh. While WordPress does not have specific social media functions built-in, there are many ways to optimize WordPress for social media.
Solving the Omniture Brightcove integration mystery!
My work as Lead Developer in the Reese Felts Digital Newsroom at UNC Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication, at times, requires investigating and employing various web and mobile technologies to keep our student-run digital news site, Reesenews.org, humming along. When planning for this project, two mission critical objectives were to find best of class technologies to support online video distribution and analytics. On the video side, we tested a few options, like Vimeo, YouTube, and a freemium service from a provider of open-source streaming video technology, Kaltura, While these tools are all excellent for their intended uses, we found that market leader, Brightcove, worked best to serve our needs on both the player creation and analytics front.
For web and mobile analytics, we chose Adobe’s Omniture Site Catalyst product, a premium analytics tool that integrates with many 3rd party services, including Brightcove. Site Catalyst is a powerful program and there is a steep learning curve for the novice user. The documentation exists to guide you through set-up and integration, but I found few, if any, real world examples of how to connect Brightcove videos spins with Site Catalyst 15 (version 15) media tracking.
After a frustrating few weeks looking up and down the web for an answer and working with Adobe’s Client Care, I finally solved the puzzle. Here it is, step-by-step. This tutorial assumes you have Video tracking enabled in Omniture Site Catalyst and that you are returning results under Video – Video Reports, as shown below.
As you can see, Site Catalyst 15 is reporting the Brightcove Player ID and the Brightcove Video ID, but not the title of the video. The only way to fetch the title and match it with the video ID, is to set up a SAINT Classification. I learned that it’s all based on uploading an Excel spreadsheet in .tab delimited format. The spreadsheet has a few columns and rows of information Site Catalyst 15 needs to parse for the classification to deliver your data to in the report suite. I’ll get into that a little later. Here’s what you need to do:
1. Add a Conversion Variable to track your Videos. You should already have Media Tracking enabled. If not, you will have to contact Adobe Site Catalyst Client Care to set it up and add the media tracking code to the javascript file that sits in your top level directory. We named ours “Video.”
Click Edit Settings, then Conversion, then Conversion Variables.
Now add your variable, Videos, by selecting the Add New text link at the bottom right of the screen.
You can see that we’ve created a variable called “Videos” and it has an eVar of 4. After this step, you should start seeing reporting, like in the first screen at the top of this post.
Next, we have to match the video title with the Brightcove video ID. We’ll do that by adding a SAINT Classification.
2. Add a SAINT Classification, otherwise known as a “Conversion Classification” to your Site Catalyst report.
In your Site Catalyst 15 Report Suite, select Edit Settings, then Conversion, and then Conversion Classifications. If you don’t remember how to access your Report Suite, click Admin on the green top navigation menu bar, then Admin Console, and then Report Suites.
Select “Videos” from the drop down menu. This is the variable you started with.
Then mouse over “Videos” and whatever eVar is given. In the picture below, we’ve already added the classification, “Brightcove Video Name.”
Here it is again, blown up a bit.
Now that we have our SAINT Classification enabled, we’ll need to take the next step.
3. Download the SAINT Classification .tab delimited spreadsheet.
Navigate to Admin, then SAINT Classifications.
Select “Videos” from the drop down menu on the page.
Then click the “Download” link to download the SAINT Classification file for “Videos.” The file name will be, “SiteCatalyst Classifications.tab.” You can rename this file later if you need to. It shouldn’t matter on upload, which we’ll cover later.
Open the spreadsheet with Excel and you will see your SAINT Classification name. This is where you will put the Video Title. To the left, there is a column named “Key.” Here you will put the Brightcove Video ID. The “Key” is actually the Brightcove Video ID from the the Video Reporting panel. I didn’t get this at first. I wasn’t sure what the “Key” was. It’s simply whatever is returned by the Video reporting system from Brightcove. That’s what you will use to match with the Brightcove Video Name.
Note: I found that trying to save a .tab delimited file on a Mac is problematic. Unfortunately, you may need a PC for this, unless you know of another solutions. I tried many times to add my values and save it in .tab delimited on a Mac. Each time I uploaded the file to Site Catalyst, it returned an error. It was only when I saved my file using Virtual Box and Excel in Windows, that the file saved correctly. I told this to the Omniture rep, as it’s a major bug, but who knows if they are going to fix it or not.
4. Add your Brightcove Video ID’s to the Excel sheet.
To get your Brightcove Video ID’s, you can navigate to Brightcove.com, log-in, and then access your Analytics panel. Select “Video Engagement,” set your date range, then click the arrow for Export. Download by selecting Video Engagement (our screen capture did not get the full drop down on the right, sorry). This will download a .csv file with all the information displayed. You will only need the Title and the Video ID.
Copy and pasted the Title(s) and Video ID into your SAINT Classification file. Be careful NOT to remove any of the value set in the sheet. They are important.
You can see in the screenshot that I have appended “Brightcove3:” in front of the Video ID in the “Key” column. Omniture Client Care said that I did not have to do this, but I’m going on the assumption that the “Key” value should be the same value that is displayed in the Video Reporting section. It is working correctly for me.
To append a word in front of another in Excel, there are various tutorials on the web. You have to add a column to the left of your ID number and put “Brightcove 3:” or whatever you’re returning in your analytics report. Then, add another column to the left of that one and set this function: =$A5+$B5 (you may have different columns and rows). This should combine your columns.
Then, you want to copy the new column, copy it, then select Edit and then choose Paste Special. A dialog box will open. Select “Values.” This will paste what you copied, while stripping out the functions and just leaving the text.
You’ll want to save your file in .tab delimited format. Remember my note above. Saving in .tab delimited on a Mac can cause an error in the next step. If you can do it on a PC, that would be better.
5. Upload your SAINT Classification file to Site Catalyst 15.
Navigate back to the Admin link on the green navigation menu. Select SAINT Classifications. Once you’re on the page, select “Videos,” which for us also says “Converstion 4” or the eVar variable we noted earlier in this tutorial. Click “Choose File” and then browse for your file and upload. Wait 24 to 72 hours, depending on the amount of information you have to see results.
6. View your results.
Navigate to your Site Catalyst 15 main dashboard. Under Videos, then Video Reports, you should see your SAINT Classification reporting your Brightcove Video Title!
I hope this tutorial is helpful to those who are frustrated by this process. One more thing to remember: this process is manual. If you add new videos to Brightcove, you’re going to have to do this all the time, because you have to add the Video ID as a the “Key” value, in order for it to track.
Triangle DJ scene is a sad state of affairs
I moved from New York City to North Carolina’s Research Triangle region on August 1, 2010 for a job opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Wikiepedia best describes the area:
The Research Triangle, also known as Raleigh-Durham and commonly referred to as simply “The Triangle“, is a region in the Piedmont ofNorth Carolina in the United States, anchored by North Carolina State University, Duke University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill respectively.
The eight-county region, officially named the Raleigh-Durham-Cary CSA, comprises the Raleigh-Cary and Durham-Chapel Hill metropolitan areas and the Dunn Micropolitan Statistical Area. A 2009 Census Estimate put the population at 1,742,816. The Raleigh-Durham television market includes a broader 23-county area which includes Fayetteville, and has a population of 2,726,000 persons.[1]
The “Triangle” name was cemented in the public consciousness in the 1950s with the creation of Research Triangle Park, home to numerous high-tech companies and enterprises. Although the name is now used to refer to the geographic region, “The Triangle” originally referred to the universities, whose research facilities, and the educated workforce they provide, have historically served as a major attraction for businesses located in the region.
I considered moving here for two reasons. First, the region has a technology focus. Research Triangle Park houses companies like IBM, Red Hat, and Cisco. Apple, Facebook, and Google have all built data centers in the western part of the state. There’s a start-up culture rising in Durham and UNC Chapel Hill’s Chancellor, Holden Thorpe, began an Innovation Carolina initiative at the school, which looks promising. It seemed as if the time was right to leave New York City. When the opportunity presented itself, we decided to make the change.
The second reason I moved here is because I’d seen a semblance of a DJ culture scene. When I was considering this area, I attended a conference in Raleigh with the dual purpose of coming down for the event and scouting the area. During our stay, we happened across the Mosaic Spring Music festival, which takes place at the Mosaic Wine Lounge near Glenwood Avenue; a residential area fronted by a number of bars and restaurants.
Mosaic, for all intent and purpose, is specifically dedicated to the DJ culture. The venue attracts a trendy, professional crowd. Keith Ward both books the room and DJs himself, along with Stephen Feinberg. Keith schedules these festivals twice a year and books predominantly local DJ talent for a full week. After stumbling on what I think is one of the few jewels in the nightlife scene in Raleigh, I thought that might extend further out into Durham and Chapel Hill, but I was wrong. It doesn’t.
Once I moved down last year, I attended Sound Cartel events hosted by DJs Marshall Jones and Nugz. They’ve got something going on in trying to create a vibe for house music in the Triangle. Little by little, they are building a following. At Mosaic, I hear they draw a nice crowd. But in Chapel Hill, there’s not much going on for them, or anyone else playing true house music. It’s up and down. One night, there might be 20 people, and on another, they might get 60 to 100. Generally, the more heavily attended nights are when they bring in an outside DJ and promote it to the DJ culture community, who show up in droves to pay hommage to a legend that may grace “the decks.” As the college crowd latches onto Dubstep as the the flavor of the month, true house music seem to have been abandoned. We don’t know why.
What we do know, is that electronic music fans in the Triangle will go to large, open air music festivals or stop-over dates featuring DJs like Tiesto and Kaskade. IdentityFest kicked off in Charlotte and Tiesto played a date in Winston-Salem. That begs the question, if these people are attending DJ culture events around the state, why aren’t they supporting the club culture? Is it the economy? Any cover charge today is sneered at, especially since bars are considered social clubs and must charge a fee on top of the cover fee. I don’t know the reason why that is, but I can guess that fee is really a way to keep underage kids out of the bars. The hours? With so many parents living in this area, they’ve outgrown the desire to go out at night. Chapel Hill and Carrboro are sleepy little towns. While the college crowd hits the pubs up on East Franklin Street, anything that doesn’t target that market is going to be challenged with building a crowd.
Do these young people not identify house music as “electronic” music? Maybe. There is little, if any radio support in this area for dance/electronic music. Satellite radio is national and they don’t run local promotions for club nights, so you won’t hear advertising on the radio like you hear in other markets. College radio is predominantly hip-hop.. Local Internet radio gets a scattered following. It’s very hard to build a local audience on the Internet. There just aren’t enough listeners to sustain it, so the sites that are playing dance music are attracting an International audience, which doesn’t bode well for local attendance.
There are some venues in Chapel Hill with DJs, but those DJs are typically younger and playing to the college crowd. Sure, they are part of the fabric of DJ culture, but they’re not trying to develop a signature sound. They’re playing what’s hot. No problem with that, because there should be room for everything. But, there isn’t.
I played out twice in the last month at Durham’s Casbah, a rock club with a decent sound system and light show. On a Saturday night in Durham, I found the Brightleaf Square area, which is comprised of old, renovated tobacco warehouses with shops and restaurants, and a few free standing college oriented watering holes, to be very quiet. There was a distinct difference between Friday, where the street was busier, than Saturday where it was not at all. It seemed like a Monday night and not a Saturday.
The question then becomes, how do we change this? In an area full of soccer moms and dads, twenty-five thousand plus students from UNC and half that from Duke, where is the disconnect? It seems that the Latin themed parties attract an audience. I’ve been to a few salsa events, which were crowded and everyone was dancing. Have people forgotten how to dance to house music? Do they care?
Chapel Hill is very family oriented. If you move here, you’re either a student (undergrad or grad), or you have a family and you’re sending your kids to one of the top school systems in the country. There seems to be no in between. Migrate east toward Raleigh, and that’s where you’ll find a younger scene. But out here in Chapel Hill, it’s hard to get people out of their houses on a weekly basis.
In addition to families, the area is known for its live music venues. With that, you have to also compete with other artists trying to do their thing as well. The Independent Weekly is similar to New York’s Village Voice. It provides a smattering of coverage for EDM events, but people generally know it as covering alternative, rock, country, bluegrass, and hip-hop. I can’t say that I’ve picked it up and found a weekly update on the EDM scene. And, maybe that’s what’s needed: education.
If people don’t know, they can’t support. Maybe, they’re just not hearing it. I have some ideas, but with all my comings and goings and what I’m involved with, I’m certainly not going to be the one man army. It takes an organized and cohesive message. One bright spot is the TriangleBeats.com website and e-mail list-serve. If done correctly, Triangle Beats can serve as the conduit for people who want to learn and participate in EDM culture. It remains to be seen whether the participants can glue it together and make something happen. I’ve gotten involved on a surface level, just to give some advice. I really see EDM education as the primary driver. If TriangleBeats.com can then educate, both online and off, we may have found something. But, it’s going to take years to grow a scene. It’s not going to happen overnight.
SoundCloud Product Analysis
I recently had the opportunity to engage in a product analysis project, where I took a look at the SoundCloud home page UI and their on-boarding process. I put together this document and in the interest of open-source, am making it publicly available, so that others can learn from it and use its recommendations in their product development efforts.
The debate over Facebook Comments
Last March, popular Internet technology blogs, including Tech Crunch and Paid Content, and insider blogs tracking Facebook, including Inside Facebook and All Facebook, announced the roll-out of Facebook’s new Comments plug-in (pictured below). And, with it, Facebook has muscled in on the not so glamorous world of global social commenting.
With its entré into the space, Facebook, the world’s most popular social network with over 800 Million registered users, is now directly competing with the current crop of services, including Intense Debate, a product of Automattic, creators of WordPress; Disqus, an independent service backed by Y Combinator, Knight’s Bridge Capital Partners, and Union Square Ventures; and Echo, a social application development company who’s real-time social applications are employed by companies ranging from Hearst, The Washington Post, and Slate to Reuters, CNet, and Newsweek.
All of these companies readily deployed Facebook Connect, a product Facebook provides to web publishers enabling single sign-on capability. Wikipedia defines single sign-on (SSO) as: “a property of access control of multiple related, but independent software systems. With this property a user logs in once and gains access to all systems without being prompted to login again at each of them.”
Based in Web 2.0 philosophy of open access, single sign-on reduces the friction to login to many sites with their credentials from a single service. The technology doesn’t actually fully register the user with a new user name and password. It simulates a login using the single sign-on credentials, so that users may identify themselves to the system without having to fully register. Once signed in, a user generally may do what a registered user can do, with the possibility of some exceptions. For example, because their email address is not required to login using single sign-on, they would not be added to the systems post-notification database, which sends registered users emails whenever there is a new post to a site.
Why is this important?
You may have thought global social comments were an afterthought, but it’s quite clear the market believes there is a business in it somewhere. Wherever content–in this case comments–appear on a web page, someone somewhere is thinking about how to control and package the conversation; either to monetize the content itself and available real estate around which the content lives, or to analyze the data embedded in comments for companies, governments, and other actors who have an interest in tracking, analyzing, and deciphering the online conversation.
For Facebook, it means adding global social comments to its social graph. But, the land grab to be top dog in social comment comes with its own set of unique challenges and many unanswered questions. Will content owners give control of their comments over to Facebook? Where do all the comments go if Facebook disconnects the service? Will site visitors who comment anonymously or under pseudonyms want their posts to be visible to friends and family in a Facebook news feed? Or, will frequent commenters engage with posts by a user operating an alternate Facebook profile commonly used by brands, artists, and musicians called Facebook Pages?
According to Facebook, when operating as a Page, “you can navigate and interact with other areas of Facebook as your Page. This means you can choose to receive notifications about fan activity, Like and comment on other Pages as your Page, and get your own News Feed where you can engage with the latest and most important news from other Pages you like.”
Where comments on news sites are a school yard corporations rarely play in, what happens to a site or blog who’s stories are then inundated with generic corporate responses? Authenticity is a critical aspect of social comments. We’ve already seen a backlash against generic Twitter posts. If corporations similarly abuse Facebook Comments, could a Facebook backlash be far behind?
In posting about its test of the Facebook Comments plug-in, TechCrunch, a popular technology blog, completes its assessment under the sub-header, “One Big Flaw.” Why? “The big reason,” says blogger, Jason Kincaid, is “there are a lot of people who won’t want to use Facebook to leave comments.”
In a response to the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s anonymous commenter ban last year, ZombieJournalism.com said, in the case of TheCleve.com, commenters were, “less likely to share opinions under their real names because they don’t want their bosses and neighbors to know their political leanings, what they watch on TV, where they live or what they REALLY think of their jobs.” According to the blog, “It isn’t that they have something to hide or have such outrageous opinions they’d never want their names attached – they just want the modicum of privacy they feel the Internet has provided in the last decade or so.”
Angela Connor, former Managing Editor of User Generated Content for Raleigh, North Carolina-based, WRAL.com, confirms in a July 2010 blog post entitled: “8 Reasons People Rarely Login to News Sites Using Facebook,” that more people use Facebook to log-in and share links, but “when using a third-party login to post (comments) on a news site, Twitter is the clear winner, with only 25% using Facebook.” The measurement was taken well before Facebook Comments rolled out, but it is indicative about how people feel about using Facebook’s single sign-on utility to post.
If a user stumbles upon a site which employs Facebook comments and they are logged into Facebook, the plug-in presents a logged-in view. Absent the restriction to log-in with any credentials, the user could easily post a comment, which many argue increases audience engagement. While the tool does have a check-box, which asks the user if they want to share the post into Facebook, it’s default is set to yes. It becomes that much easier to use your Facebook log-in to comment on a web site, blog, or mobile application, because novice users might be unaware of cross posting on their personal page.
Facebook may be placing a bet that most people don’t seem to know (or don’t care?). But, this time, it’s not just Facebook users who will challenge Zuckerberg & Company in their quest for social media domination–it’s the content publishers that control the real estate who will ultimately decide whether giving control of comments to Facebook is a good idea.
How important are community comments?
Web sites and blogs across the media spectrum employ user generated comments not as a revenue driver, but more a barometer of community engagement with stories. From sites to blogs and now mobile apps that employ comments, a large number of relevant comments posted by the site’s readership against a story are are certainly a measure of interest in or the stickiness of a story. Comments from readers might provide supporting statements or offer challenges to a story’s factual accuracy.
Depending on the overall popularity of a web site or blog, the absence of comments on stories with certain characteristics expecting it to be popular, could indicate to an editor that readers have not picked up on or abandoned a story. While the reasons for this are many, for example, the story may not have been marketed through social media channels, or it was not well positioned on the site, frequent comments are a valuable tool for site editors and business owners to measure audience engagement.
There are some who frequently leave comments that are stars in their own right, taking the initiative to provide counterpoints or supporting arguments, where others are lurkers. Many services now provide ratings tools for comments, which surface higher rated comments to the top of a “conversation thread.”
As popular blogs have proliferated, onerous registration processes saw declines in audience engagement, resulting in fewer high quality comments. Before SSO, many blogs and sites required users to register to comment. Registering for multiple sites in an incovenience, especially for frequent, high-volume commenters, who would then have to manage different log in credentials for each site (something made music easier today by companies like Last Pass).
Prior to Facebook Connect, Disqus developed a system to build a standardized commenting widget many blogs adopted in order to offload the responsibility that comes with managing comments. The net benefit is that frequent commenters could sign up for a single service, yet post with their user ID across multiple blogs. Of course, this was and still remains dependent on blog operators to implement the Disqus software.
Seeing an opportunity, Automattic, the for-profit WordPress software and support company, entered the social commenting arena with its own product: Intense Debate. Competing services similar problem ensued. All of these services quickly pivoted from forcing users to register with them, to providing Facebook Connect (and a similar Twitter Connect and OpenID single sign-in) as a primary way to connect.
Using Facebook Connect, a user can avoid the annoying sign up process for every site log in to many different sites with only their Facebook ID, instead of having to register for each one. The goal is to increase audience engagement by providing a single sign-on system, and at the same time, authenticate all users while limiting the impact of “trolls,” who comment anonymously and leave behind a trail of comment trash, which diminishes ongoing conversation.
When Facebook released it’s Facebook Connect single sign-on script, global social commenting providers quickly moved to utilize this free tool. For Facebook, providing a single sign on utility helps ties the service to the fundamental underpinnings of the web, making a Facebook account indispensable for its users. Blogs and web sites were happy, because they could pass off the management of comment spam to a 3rd party provider. Exhausted users who previously signed into individual sites cound finally log-in to multiple destinations with a single Facebook ID.
For many blogs, preventing or limiting comment spam has become a job unto itself. Hackers have developed various exploits to attack a blog’s commenting system, in an attempt to fill it with anonymous posts or posts with false identities promoting counterfeit Viagra pills, porn advertisements, and online banking scams. Instead of spending hours on cleaning up comment spam, blog operators quickly adopted global social commenting tools, relieving themselves of policing trolls while simultaneously creating a new industry. In 2008, Disqus brought in a $500,000 investment round from Union Square Ventures.
A secondary, but no less important issue is the fight to control commenters to post, while simultaneously attempting to limit anonymous commenting, which for many blogs has become a plague. They then added Twitter, Yahoo!, and Google authentication plug-ins, which enhance opportunities for audience engagement, but at the same time clutter the comment area dashboard with multiple single-sign on buttons. At some point, there could be too many SSO services occupying valuable site real estate, which may serve more niches, but becomes confusing to the user, because they would then have to remember which service they used their last time on the site. Did you have that conversation using your Facebook login? Your Twitter login?
On ReeseNews.org, the digital publication I work on as Lead Developer at UNC Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication, site visitors have posted more than 700 comments since our launch in November 2010 using the Intense Debate tool. While I don’t have the ability to track statistics on which visitor signed in with using an SSO, the site has not received a single request by our readers to employ Facebook Comments. While ReeseNews certainly enjoys traffic from Facebook after our multimedia journalists cross post our stories into our Facebook Page news stream, there is very little engagement with the story on our Facebook page in the form of comments. If there were, those comments would appear both on our site and in our Facebook Page news feed through the Wordbooker plug-in.
Since I have yet to test Facebook comments on a story, there’s no specific data to measure an increase audience engagement. Further research is needed, which would include testing the Facebook Comments system on a single post. For most websites, the ability to test Facebook Comments on a single post is left to the realm of the site’s developers. For small news organizations, it may not be a priority or within budget to test.
Issues of control
A critically important issue news organization face when deploying Facebook Comments is control over comments. When a user leaves a comment on a news story, that comment is then logged and registered in an integrated “Comments” control panel in a website’s content management system. Each content management system and each social commenting engine handle comments in different ways. Because Intense Debate is a product of Automattic, it is a fully integrated solution, which registers comments in the WordPress database and adopts the style of the native WordPress Comments administration area (shown below).
In my experience, I have found this to be the most integrated solution to date, allowing the moderator to easily control comments within the site’s WordPress administration area, with the knowledge that while Intense Debate controls the display of those comments on the website, they are safely stored in the site’s database (shown below).
Storing and displaying user comments directly from the site’s database has a direct impact on Google Search results and search engine optimization. A concern with Facebook comments, is that comments are stored only in Facebook’s database. The site owner has very limited control over the comments, including how they are displayed and in what order. Facebook provides a feed for your comments (see example below).
While it’s beneficial to have this feed, Facebook admits that their comments are not searchable by Google on your site, which has a direct impact on your SEO. They offer a solution to float the feed in an iFrame behind the Facebook Comments widget to allow Google to search the comments and target where they appear. I have not yet researched the advantages of disadvantages of this model, but it does have a cost associated with it in development hours.
Generally, comments are displayed in reverse chronological order, with follow-up comments displayed in-line in a parent-child relationship. Facebook does not follow this rule and surface the most relevant comments based on an algorithm. What happens if this method fails to surface and important comment or pushes down comments from some in favor of comments from others? This is a risky way to handle user generated content. Once you start deciding for your users how you are going to surface their content, it could cause ethical issues, especially for news sites that follow a time/date stamp format. For news, time and date are important functions. For general blogs, that may not be so important. Employing Facebook Comments could impact your overall site strategy and how your audience participates. It’s prudent to first assess how Facebook Comments will affect your site and readers, before deploying this tool.
The Google Effect
Now that we’ve gone over the pros and cons of implementing Facebook Comments, let’s focus on how Google factors into this equation. I started writing this post before Google launched its Google+ social network and updated it a few times since, before publishing it. The web moves fast. Every day, new technology reveals itself that could be a game-changer. Google’s new product certainly impacts one’s decision to deploy Facebook Comments.
First, Google and Facebook are enforcing what is known as a “Real Name” policy, where identification is good and anonymous comments are inherently bad. Both companies agree on forcing you to use your real name when engaging in their social media products. The theory is that it increases civility. Some argue that it decreases engagement. In response, the Geek Feminism Wiki was created. It’s purpose is to list: “groups of people who are disadvantaged by any policy which bans Pseudonymity and requires so-called “Real names” (more properly, legal names).”
Whether you’re for or against Real Names, the point is, Google has now entered the world of social networking with it’s Google+ product. Now there are two. Deploy Facebook comments and hope all your readers aren’t abandoning Facebook for Google+. Or, hope that your Google+ readers won’t abandon you because they no longer engage in Facebook.
We have yet to see an integrated social commenting plug-in from Google, but if they do release one, it becomes even riskier to tie your organization to a social network, instead of staying independent with other products in the market.
Correction: The Facebook Comments to WordPress 1.5 plug-in states that it has the ability to post Facebook comments to the WordPress database. A user in the forums confirms this. I have not tested this plug-in. There is another plug-in for Facebook, Facebook Comments for WordPress 3.1.3, which has importing comments to the WordPress database on its road map.
I also misquoted the article from Zombiejournalism.com. The Cleveland Plain Dealer did not “ban” anonymous comments. They “outed” an anonymous commenter. The blogger wrote: “recent outing of an anonymous commenter on their site.” And, I confused TheCleve.com with Cleveland.com. My apologies to John Kroll and thanks for the correction.
I have also updated this post to reflect “I” and not “we,” as this is my personal blog and my opinions are my own and not that of UNC Chapel Hill or Reesenews.org. I am not a journalist. I’m a digital strategist. Cut me some slack!
A budding sports journalist…Billy Zeoli
My girlfriend, Missy, and I drove down to Holly Springs, North Carolina today to see my niece, Alexa, and nephew, Billy, who was home for the weekend from Methodist, where he is studying sports journalism. We got to talking about his coursework and he told me that one of his upcoming projects required setting up a blog. He was thinking about grabbing a free account at Blogspot, but I let him know that I could set him up with his own domain and a WordPress blog on my hosting account at MediaTemple. After I got home tonight from watching the Pats put the Jets away today, I purchased his domain, got him set up with a hosting account on my server, and installed WordPress. I gave him some basic instruction over the phone to get him started, and now he’s raring to go at https://www.billyzeoli.com. You can also follow him @zeoli100 on Twitter.
Good luck, Billy! Can’t wait to see what you do with it!
Hot Randall Jones and Soul Funky Remixes of Alicia Keyes “Empire State of Mind”
There are some records in life that touch your soul. When Alicia Keyes and Jay Z rolled out with “Empire State of Mind,” an ode to the New York City experience, it was a both a transformational and inspirational anthem, embraced by all those whose lives are touched by the opportunity and diversity that exists in the most exciting city in the world. I’ve listened to so many versions of the song, including a beautiful acoustic version she’d done for an iHeartRadio event in New York City, which is my favorite.
I was searching for house music remixes of the song and found not only an amazing mix by Randall Jones, but a nice video tribute to New York City. The track provides the backing for a cool video collage. I especially love the break-dancing parts. I grew up on “breaking” and it brought back memories of challenging myself to learn new moves that I could show off to my friends.
Having lived in the New York City metro area for over 15-years, building a career first in Internet music and digital media, I’d gone through tumultuous times and faced incredible odds. I somehow found a way to make my mark. No matter how difficult, there was always a new place to go, new people to meet, and new things to do. New York is so big, it’s like 5 cities in one. You’re never really in the same place twice for too long. For each ride on the subway or walking across blocks brings a different experience.
The Soul Funky Mix I’ve posted is another incredible mix of this amazing song. I love this track, because it reminds me of my time spent on Friday nights at Twilo, were I’d listen to two of the world’s best producers, Sasha and John Digweed, blend a mix of trance and emerging tech house sounds. The breakdown in this mix reminds me of those last nights spent twirling amongst the glow sticks and go-go dancers.
I found both the Randall Jones remix and the Soul Funky remix on SoundCloud. Both players offer free downloads of the track.
Randall Jones Remix
via Soundcloud
Soul’s Summer Bootleg Mix
via Soundcloud
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