Weekend Roundup - March 31

Articles I read this afternoon. Sources in parentheses. Comments from me.

Nine of the Best Ways to Boost Creative Thinking (Lifehacker)

How Can I Downsize My Ridiculously Large Wallet? (Lifehacker) - I'm happy with the way my wallet is, and I still read articles like this. I like seeing how people organize their things.

On Keeping a Notebook in the Digital Age (Medium) - I go back and forth on this topic, but I still feel most comfortable with pen and paper, most of the time.

The Spark File (Medium) - I like that the emphasis is on recording bits of stuff and ideas, without necessarily thinking of the big picture or end product.

Feedly Updates with 10 New Features to Help Ease Your Google Reader Transition (Lifehacker) - Right, Google Reader is shutting down in July. That's the thing in the back of my mind that keeps making me sad. I have a few alternatives to check out, and Feedly is one of them.

You Don't Always Have to Give Two Weeks Notice When Leaving Your Job (Lifehacker)

When It's Okay to Write for Free (Lifehacker) - Be sure to check out the comments after the article for various viewpoints on when it is (and isn't) okay to write for free.

Is Clara the New River Song on Doctor Who? (io9) - Spoilers for "The Bells of St. John."

Goodreads and Three Alternatives for Soical Bookworms (PopSugar) - You may have heard that Amazon purchased Goodreads this week. Not a big deal for me, since I'm hardly even on Goodreads, but some people are worried that Amazon will negatively affect the Goodreads community. This article reviews three similar social sites.

What Extremely Successful People Were Doing at Age 25 (Business Insider)

Unsubscribing from blogs

Does anyone use RSS feeders anymore? I have a few dozen feeds in Google Reader. Some of them are active blogs. Some of them haven't posted in a while, but I really like them, so the feeds stay.

Then there are others that I haven't read in a while. I unsubscribed from a lot of those tonight.

These are the feeds I scroll through, barely scanning the post titles. The content is still good, I'm sure, but my interests have shifted and I don't care about these blogs anymore. So tonight I clicked the Unsubscribe button, and then I did it a few more times.

I'm reading Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst, and the point he keeps reinforcing is "let the bits go." We already have too many things that want our attention. We have to learn to let go of the things that don't really matter, the things that waste our time and do not provide us with value.

So when I have a pile of ignored RSS feeds (not a pile, a list–you know what I mean), I have to be okay with unsubscribing. I let go, and the thing that goes away is the weekly effort of scrolling through new posts to get the Unread count back to zero. I gain time back, actually.

11 Ways to Improve Your Online Forums

Low activity, growing pains, inactive staff...these are all problems that online forums face. Here are a few tips to improve your members' experience on your site. Everything here is based on my experience as an administrator in the Supernatural.tv Forums. 

1. Welcome new members. People want to join active communities. They want your forums to be worth their time. The least you can do is say hi after they sign up.

2. Add more content. Start discussions. Contribute to current topics. Keep the conversations going.

3. Clean up your policies. Update your rules and revise them as necessary. Be sure they are clear and concise.

4. Buckle down on the rule breakers. It's one thing to give second chances. Another to let a member break the rules over and over. Ban members who don't respect your forum policies. Otherwise, they'll keep disrupting your community.

5. Promote your site. Use Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and blogs to attract new members. Be smart about it—promote in relevant places and do not spam. The more ways you reach out to people, the more people can interact with you and discover your site.

6. Redesign the site. Or at least freshen up the banner at the top.

7. Reorganize. How can you improve the navigation of your forums? Do you  need to add new sections? Clear out old, dead discussion topics—either delete them or move them to an archive section.

8. Encourage the staff to interact with members. Your staff should talk to members—not be aloof.

9. Add or replace mods. If some of your staff members have become inactive, replace them. If your membership has grown, maybe you need to add moderators to your staff. Different people on your team gives your site a different kind of energy. Be sure the staff members are passionate and have the same goals as you do for the forums.

10. Plan activities or incentives to keep people interested in your forum. Fan of the month. A competition or a contest. Special areas for long-time members. Think about what's relevant for your community and what will encourage people to stick around, and then do it.

11. Ask for feedback. Your members may suggest something you haven't thought about. You won't know what they're thinking unless you ask.

12 Ways to Improve Your Forum Staff

As the forum administrator on the Supernatural.tv Forums I built the areas of the message board, invited members to become moderators, dealt with day-to-day arguments between members, solved technical problems, and planned contests, games, and challenges for the community.

Running a forum takes a lot of time and effort. That’s why as an administrator, you need a reliable, effective forum staff. Based on my experience, here is a list of twelve ways to help moderators take better care of your online community.

1. Have a staff-only area. If you can make a part of your forum private so that only staff members can access it, do it. If your forum software doesn’t allow for a private area, come up with an alternative (such as a separate staff forum or an email chain). You need to have a place where staff can discuss issues, plan forum activities, and keep track of who does what.

2. Keep each other in the loop. Moderators should communicate with each other often. A staff-only area makes this easy. When a moderator handles a problem, he should post about it in the staff forum. This way, everyone will be aware of what’s going on and moderators won’t double up on the same problem. Keep track of troublesome members and repeat issues. A staff-only area is also the perfect place to plan activities for your forum and bounce around ideas.

3. Write guidelines for your staff. Outline their responsibilities. Explain the steps they need to take when someone violates a forum rule. List your expectations for how your staff should treat each other.

4. Write up case studies. Give your staff examples of how to handle different types of situations. For example, when two members have a huge argument and it blows up to involve a whole group of angry members, how should moderators step in? What should they say? What did and didn’t work in the past?

5. Make sure your staff knows that the rules apply to everyone. Staff members should follow the forum rules just like regular members. If a moderator violates a rule, he must face the same consequences as a regular member would. Don’t play favorites with your staff and don’t excuse inappropriate behavior.

6. Resolve differences among your staff. Sometimes staff members will disagree about how to handle an issue. As the administrator, it’s up to you to resolve those differences. Don’t take sides, but instead figure out the solution that is best for the community.

7. Demote inactive moderators. Moderators should be regular visitors who have an interest in reading discussions and talking with members. If you have a moderator on the staff who doesn’t visit your site anymore, you should demote her to a regular member. Otherwise, you and your members might think an area of the forum is covered when really no one is there.

8. Appoint new moderators as necessary. When you replace inactive moderators or when your community grows, you will need to add new staff members. Look for active members who are engaged in the community: people who start new discussions, welcome new members, follow the rules, and look for ways to improve the community.

9. Reassign areas and/or duties. Chances are, your staff members are volunteers. They want to enjoy working on your community. If you assign moderators to specific parts of the forum, make sure your moderators care about the discussions they oversee. If you have moderators in charge of running contests or other activities, make sure those moderators enjoy what they do. If moderators aren’t having fun, change up responsibilities so people can work on the parts of your community that they enjoy.

10. Utilize staff talents. Is one of your moderators good with Photoshop? Ask him to make a new banner for your forum when you need one. Is one of your moderators super friendly? Appoint her to welcome each new member to your community.

11. Listen to your staff. As a whole, your staff members cover more of the forum than you can, and they interact with more members than you do. Ask for input about what is and isn’t working in your community. Moderators will be happy to voice their opinions, and you’ll be better equipped to make positive changes.

12. Lead by example. Members look up to moderators, and moderators look up to the administrator. Each time you handle an issue, talk to a disruptive member, or plan a forum activity, your moderators will be paying attention. What you do on the forum should be a good example of what you want your moderators to do.

These tips and techniques should help your forum staff be more effective as a team and take better care of your community.

Pinterest: First Impressions

With all the buzz around Pinterest, I wanted to check it out and see why some people are saying Pinterset is going to stick around. Here are my first impressions of the latest site to break into the top ten social networks.

Pinterest is still in open-beta, so I asked for an invite to join. Three days later, I received a link in my email. At the moment, you need a Twitter or Facebook account in order to join Pinterest. I understand this helps reduce spam accounts and makes finding your friends easier. That's all well and good, but I'd rather have an account that stands on its own and doesn't depend on another site.

After registering, a page with pins (essentially images) loads and you click on what interests you. Pinterest uses your choices to generate people for you to follow. I like that Pinterest embraces new users by connecting them to people on the site, but I wish the suggestions for people to follow stayed suggestions. Pinterest automatically subscribed me to a dozen people based on my few clicks. I would rather see the suggestions and then choose if I want to subscribe to people. One image that I liked doesn't necessarily mean I will like the rest of the content that person posts. I ended up going through each profile of the people Pinterest gave me to follow and unfollowed them. Then I browsed pins by category and found people that I actually wanted to subscribe to.

I've seen taste preferences done better on Etsy. When you join Etsy, the site asks you to choose items that you like from a random selection on the page. Based on your choices, Etsy will suggest other items you might like. Suggested content based on previously-chosen content. Pinterest, though, suggests people to follow based on your content choices. Pinterest's suggestions can't match your preferences as well as Etsy's can.

On the positive side, I've seen more activity on the content I posted compared to a new account on other social networks. But that's not enough to make me check in often. It might be because I'm new and still poking around, but I've been going on Pinterest about once a day. Compare that to Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, where I check in multiple times each day. Pinterset doesn't have that much of my attention yet, but the coming months might change that.

If you'd like to see what I've done on Pinterest so far, here's a link to my profile.

Facebook so you don't have to

Facebook is supposed to make social interaction easier. You post status updates and photos. All of your friends see them. Your news feed shows you everything your friends have been doing lately. It makes sense: friends update each other all the time. We have a central hub that shows what's happening in each others' lives.

But more and more, I find that Facebook gives me less of a reason to talk to friends, or to catch up with those I haven't seen in a while. Facebook has taken on the effort of maintaining relationships so we don't have to.

Before Facebook, if I wanted to ask a friend how she's doing at her new job, I'd pick up the phone and call her. Or we'd hang out sometime and chat. With Facebook, all I have to do is read her status updates to know if she likes her job or not.

It's not just status updates. I don't have to remember birthdays anymore. We don't print photos and share them. Job promotions, accomplishments, and even wedding announcements are on my news feed before I talk to the person offline. 

But reading a Facebook update is not the same as talking to the person and, for some reason, there's still an unwritten rule about Facebook conversations crossing over into "real life." That leaves us in an odd place.

Say I wish a friend happy birthday on Facebook. Then I see that friend over the weekend. Does my birthday message on Facebook replace me saying happy birthday in person? If I say happy birthday in person after saying it on Facebook, am I repeating myself? Should I mention the Facebook message when we talk in person? Or is that a faux pas?

Maybe I'm over-thinking it, but Facebook is changing the way people interact and I don't think it's an improvement.

formspring.me

Formspring started a new free service, formspring.me, that allows people to send you comments, questions, or any other text.  They can send it anonymously or leave their contact info.  You can reply on formspring.me and/or integrate your answers onto Twitter, Tumblr, Blogger, and Facebook.  It's easy; it's simple.

Feel free to contact me on formspring.me here.  You can send questions, get in touch, or suggest topics for me to write about.  If you'd like me to respond to you personally, please include a way for me to do that.

One week on Twitter

Tonight at 1:21 a.m. marks exactly one week that I've been on Twitter. Now if you've read a lot of my posts here, you probably know I've written why I wasn't on Twitter. The first post was about how I didn't think Twitter was useful to me. The second post was a list of how people can use Twitter as a tool for various things and how I managed to do the same things without it. So what happened?

In all honesty, I was bored. I tend to try something new when I'm bored, and last week that was Twitter. I signed up as digitalfare and followed people I subscribe to on YouTube and a few sites I often read. My Tweets so far have been about things I might blog about, except I don't want to write a whole post so it's just a quick remark on Twitter. You can see my most recent Tweets in the sidebar to the right.

I check my RSS feeds, Digg, and Delicious bookmarks, and now Twitter is another way for me to get information. The 140-character limit allows me to determine at a glance if something interests me or if I'll continue skimming the stream.

I found out about BEDA on Twitter, actually, and now I'm blogging every day of April. I haven't mentioned yet that part of BEDA is to promote Maureen Johnson's book, Suite Scarlett, that comes out in paperback May 1. You can check it out at Amazon here. I haven't read any of her books yet, so that might be where I start.

Living Without Twitter

Earlier this month, I wrote a post about why I don't need Twitter.

Everything I wrote in that post is still true for me, but as I looked through popular bookmarks on Delicious yesterday, I started thinking of ways I might use Twitter. I came across a collection of social bookmark icon sets and Mashable's post about Blogger widgets, many of which were Twitter-themed. I considered incorporating Twitter into this blog and posting interesting links I found throughout the day. Hypothetical Tweets floated around my mind.

Then I thought about how I don't need to get involved in another web service, that I stopped using StumbleUpon and hardly Digg anything anymore. I remembered I don't even update my Facebook status that much. Currently it says something about not having anything to write as my status.

Leo at Zen Habits posted How to Get Things Done with Twitter today. I know the post is for people who already use Twitter a lot. It's not meant to convince people start Tweeting, but I still read the post looking for a reason to start.

I realized most of the tips and uses listed in Leo's post I already have covered.

My version of his list:

1. Reminders. Post It notes, a comment in my planner, or a calendar event in my cell phone.

2. To-do list. I use to-do gadgets in iGoogle and NetVibes, and I keep paper to-do lists. I used Remember the Milk for a while too.

3. Calendar. Regular paper planner. I take it with me everywhere (which is handy, being a college student) and write down assignments, meetings, and anything else I need to keep track of.

4. Delegate. I don't have to delegate many things, but e-mail works for me when I do.

5. Follow up. E-mail again. Phone call if necessary.

6. Accountability with goals. Not something I really need, but I could use Facebook for it. Use my status, write notes, or write on friends' walls.

7. Get info or ideas quickly. I think this would be the most useful for Twitter if you had a good network. I'm limited to people I know or browsing the internet for ideas and info.

8. Do real work. I know people write poetry and even stories on Twitter, but the 140 character limit would frustrate me. If I want to write something, I'll open Word or pull out a notebook and write it down. No limits, no formats to worry about.

I've never used Twitter, so I can't speak from experience but it seems like it would be a huge distraction for me. That's why I stopped using StumbleUpon. I wasted too much time on it. Same with Digg. I don't even sign onto instant messenger anymore when I have work to do because I find it's too much of a distraction.

Social networking is a great way to get up to date information, stay connected, and find people with similar interests. There is a breaking point, though, where social media cuts into your other work and hinders your productivity. Twitter would push me to that breaking point.

Social bookmarking: Diigo and Delicious

I started using social bookmarking last year after using Bookmarks in Firefox became messy and inefficient. I set up folders and subfolders but I was bookmarking so many sites--to read later on or for future use--that it became impossible to go back and find the sites I saved. Firefox 3 has a tagging feature for bookmarks, but I thought if I was going to go through all of my bookmarks and tag them, I might as well use a social bookmarking service so I could organize my bookmarks and also access them from any internet connection.

I came across Delicious early on. It’s a popular service and probably one of the oldest. It’s simple, dependable, and easy to use. Delicious integrates nicely with Firefox (just three small buttons next to the address bar). You can pull up a sidebar with your bookmarks or you can access your bookmarks through www.delicious.com. I also like keyboard shortcuts and the ability to keep individual bookmarks private.

I was happy using Delicious and some months later, I stumbled across Diigo. Diigo is similar to Delicious but it has more of a social aspect. You can leave comments and sticky notes on sites that other Diigo users can see. You can highlight text on sites so you can reference the important parts later. That's handy for research. The service emphasizes social networking with groups and friends. There’s social networking in Delicious, but it’s more prominent in Diigo.

The downside to Diigo is that you have to install a whole toolbar if you want to integrate it with your browser. I didn’t see an immediate way the added features in Diigo would be beneficial to me, but I tried it out anyway.

I imported my Delicious bookmarks into Diigo easily enough. All my tags carried over. The bookmarking aspect of Diigo is exactly the same as Delicious, so I didn’t need to figure out anything new to use Diigo.

I used Diigo for a month and a half and then switched back to Delicious. Why? For starters, I was using Diigo exactly the way I used Delicious. I wasn’t leaving sticky notes on any sites, and I wasn’t highlighting any text. I didn't use the social aspect of Diigo because I had no use for it. So I updated my Delicious bookmarks and uninstalled the Diigo toolbar.

The only thing I miss about Diigo is the hot bookmarks list. I do think it’s better set up than the Popular and Recent bookmark lists in Delicious. Anyone can see Diigo’s hot bookmarks, though, without using the service. (Same goes for the Popular and Recent lists in Delicious. You don’t have to use it to see them.)

Delicious is all I need in a bookmarking service, so that’s why I went back to it. What are your thoughts on social bookmarking? Which service do you use?

Twitter: I still don't get it

On average, I read (or at least skim) 2-3 articles or blog posts about Twitter every week thanks to Delicious.com's popular bookmarks page. I don't have a Twitter account, but I'm waiting for a convincing reason to start Tweeting.

I do prefer textual communication, but here's the thing. I use Facebook and e-mail most of the time. (I should say I don't use my phone a whole lot either because I have access to a computer throughout the day. I can hop online to send or respond to messages easily.) That works for me because I can leave a message for someone when I have the time to, and they can reply when they get a chance. We can communicate without being available at the same time. Twitter works like that too, sending and receiving Tweets without you necessarily being at a computer or with your cell phone.

But my point is, if I'm functioning fine, why would I add Twitter? I don't know anyone on Twitter that I can't contact some other way. It's a great way to keep up with people and interests, yeah, but I'm not sure that's enough to make me sign up. I'm not sure that's enough motivation for me to get involved.

I've visited quite a few Twitter pages of bloggers and YouTubers. I can see how Twitter is useful for many people. I'm just talking about me, personally, though, or anyone else who doesn't see a need to use Twitter.

I just read this article and it's well-written, but still...

Readers, I'd like to hear from you. If you're on Twitter:

• How long have you been (actively) using Twitter?
• What do you use it for? (Talking to people, sending links, posting information...)
• What benefits have you seen from your Twitter use?
• Any down sides? (time you spend on Twitter, for example)

Feel free to answer any or all of the questions. Post a comment below or write a blog entry/record a vlog in response and leave a link in the comments.

Have you heard of Lymabean?

I didn't know about it until a few days ago.

Lymabean looks like what Facebook should still be: a social network for college students where you can write to each other as well as share interests, pertenient information, photos, and videos.

Based on the video tour on the site, Lymabean looks like it has an intuitive design and you can customize a few things. I like that you can read and write reviews of local businesses and restaurants as well as check out job listings in the area.

No sign of irritating applications. I'm tempted to try it out.