Toluu

Justin Kistner

Socializing in the business world

How to use the WordPress bookmarklet for fast blogging and reblogging (screencast)October 8

During my WordCamp presentation, I shared that the WordPress bookmarklet, called Press This, was the Jesus. I use it for two primary reasons:

1. To quickly create microposts, and
2. To reblog from one blog to another.

I use password-protected WordPress installs to coordinate blogging activity with other people. I recently converted Press This for use in a theme so we can easily reblog anything shared in that back channel. The bookmarklet works by passing data through the URL. So, to add Press This to a theme, you simply a link to your theme formatted like the URLs spit out by the bookmarklet, but using WordPress template tags to populate the content. The receiving WordPress install will process the link created by both the bookmarklet and the reblog link exactly the same, which is to spawn your blog’s admin in a new window with the content prepopulated. Now, you have a chance to remove any sensitive content, add context, and any other edits you need to complete your reblog.

See, I told you Press This was the Jesus

All Media Is SocialOctober 7

“…in reality, none of these behaviors are new. If you think about all of the social tools and behaviors happening today, in almost every case there is an equivalent comparison to activities in the past.”

via birdahonk

Context is the new kingOctober 6

The first dot com bust aligns almost perfectly with the generally accepted inflection point between web 1.0 and web 2.0. Economic forces killed tired business models in favor of new and better ones. Well, here we are again. Economic forces are threatening to kill off many 2.0 businesses in favor of tech that improves productivity, not the ones working on luring eyeballs. Expect consumer innovation to slow as the available money shifts from the hands of advertisers to Enterprises hungry for productivity innovation.

Evidence that the party is coming to a close:

• Yahoo! merger
• Kleiner-Perkins announcing they won’t invest in 2.0 any longer
• Failed economy pushing for tech that will maximize productivity

The rise of meta data and the birth of context

Web 1.0 connected people to content. Web 2.0 connected people to each other. Web 3.0 will push contextualized content to people. Some are calling it the semantic web. It has to do with distribution like RSS, SaaS, and APIs. Application architecture is overtaking the idea of a “page” as the basic building block of the web.

The economic impact of this is the loss in inventory as pages disappear in favor of applications, dashboards, and aggregators.

The next Holy Grail of collaboration is to kill the 28% of our day spent on distractionsOctober 2

In June the NY Times reported that the average information worker is distracted for 28% of their day. Unstructured email communication makes it difficult to stay focused. I know I loose focus daily from some of these email offenses:

• Rambling thought dumps
• The “FYI” atop a monster string of replys
• The CYA email that the sender incorrectly assessed needed to be CCed to you
• Noisy DLs

So, if unstructured email is a distraction, what’s the solution?

Ultimately email is just a way to communicate. It’s not the one to blame. It is the lack of structure that allows people to ramble off topic, play “I didn’t get that email” games, and forward long conversations. IBM and its clients have known this for years, which is why they’ve earned and defended market share with their Lotus software. Lotus added much of the structure around email that was needed to make it productive.

But, mail, electronic or otherwise, isn’t a silver com

What makes Socialtext’s Signals exciting to meSeptember 30

Socialtext delivered version 3.0 of their software today, and announced Signals, which will be part of their 3.5 release. Signals is a micro messaging service that goes beyond copying and pasting Twitter behind the firewall, and the reason for much of my excitement.

In an increasingly crowded market, content management just isn’t that compelling anymore. I can grab any number of solutions that will allow me to create and manage my content. Vendors have been working on this problem since it was called knowledge management and even before that. CMS providers have made it really easy for me to publish and distribute content. Thanks everyone, I totally love it!

Today, I need help making sense of all of the content being created. I, like many others, am drowning in an ocean of content! What I need is less content and more context. If you know me, you know that I drank Marshall’s RSS kool-aid a while back and have been happily leveraging the tech to manage my own context and a