Having the items you bookmark show up in your minifeed (old Facebook) or on your Wall (new Facebook) is a quick way to share your interests with your Facebook friends. There are del.icio.us applications, but they end up putting the links on the “boxes” tab — they can be found by someone poking around for information about you, but they won’t (I think) show up on your friends’ news feeds.

It turns out that the new Facebook interface (http://new.facebook.com if you haven’t tried it yet) has a built in way to put del.icio.us links on your wall.

• Click your name in the upper left to get to your profile
• Find the menu item “Settings” near the top (to the right of the menu items “All Posts”, “Posts by You”, “Posts by Others”
• Click the del.icio.us icon in the “Imported Stories” section.
• Enter your user name, and you’re done.

Note that there’s no need to enter your password - only your public links will be pulled into your Facebook profile.

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Notes:

• You can get the list of all members from the “edit officers” page.
• My version of Excel (2002) isn’t working too well with non ASCII characters in names. If anyone knows a UTF-8 converter that could be used here (to, say, remove diacritical marks and such — we’re not dealing with huge amounts of non-ASCII data), please let me know.
• There’s nothing but name and network here. But if you’ve got another list of stakeholders, it might be able to match your Facebook supporters with that.
• Networks don’t show for some folks. It may be a problem with people who are in more than one network — haven’t really investigated.


# convert list of members (most recent to earliest) from a facebook group
# format
# First{additional} Last {(Network)}
# to the format
# Number:First{additional}:Last{:Network}
# where number is earliest to most recent

sed 's/make officer//' | # delete cruft
sed 's/^ *\* //' | # delete more cruft
awk '{printf "%s\t%s\n", NR,$0}' | # number lines
sort -nr | sed 's/^[0-9]*.//’ | # print in order of last to first then delete numbers
awk ‘{printf “%s:%s\n”, NR, $0}’ | # renumber in the order folks joined the group, with number as first field
sed ’s/ \([A-Z][^ ]*\) (/:\1:/’ | # if a network, put separators before last name and network
sed ’s/ \([A-Z][a-z]*\)$/:\1/’ | # if no network, put separator before last name
sed ’s/)//’ # delete trailing ) for lines with a network


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Dear AAUW Webmanagers and AAUW Newsletter Editors:

I am pleased to announce the release of the second paper in the series “Facebook for AAUW”.

The links for these papers are:

#1: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ddzhjjgr_41fmk9jr
#2: http://docs.google.com/View?docID=dg5fnwtg_0c7srw2wx

The first document addresses “what is Facebook” and gives brief instructions on how to get started. The second document is a more in depth discussion of why AAUW members are finding Facebook a good platform for connecting with each other and how they are using it to advance the mission.

The documents have been authored collaboratively by a completely unofficial group of members from across the country who came together in Facebook. Many of them have found Facebook a comfortable place to exchange information on a wide range of topics — personal and professional as well as AAUW. We invite you to join us to find out if Facebook would be a way to expand your network and amplify your voice.

The documents are written for the “digital immigrants” — those of us over a certain age who may want some background information before jumping into this new environment. However, if you’d rather just explore on your own, feel free to skip the papers and go straight to exploring Facebook. Once you’ve joined, please do also join the AAUW group that you’ll find at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2419848109

At least one state convention will be using this information as part of one of their workshops. You may wish to use the link to the AAUW group or these documents on your web sites or in your newsletters to let your members know that there is an AAUW presence there.

Thanks, all.

-Nancy

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Earlier today, I virtually attended four sessions from the Women Who Tech Telesummit. This free series of webinars brought together some amazing folks thinking about Women and Technology from a number of points of view. Check out the sponsors and organizers on www.womenwhotech.com, and thank those that you know!

The slides and audio will be available on the website, but here are a few highlights from the sessions I attended.

I. Build An Online Campaign And Save The World

• Graphic tip: use faces and eyes
• Lists of tools: TechSoup.org, Idealware.org, SocialSourceCommons.org
• TODO: check out networking at Care2.com
• Message rates: Encourage at least one advocacy action per month [What does this mean for the list alerts@ncwu.org which goes quiet for months at a time between sessions?]

II. Women and social capital

Tara Hunt, the moderator has an upcoming book that addesses this issue. She framed the conversation with some “big ideas”

• Mentioned Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and the distinction between “bonding capital” and “bridging capital”. Women build more of the first, while men create more of the second. [I think I missed that on reading it. But the book is one reason I'm so engaged in AAUW.]
• Pew Internet Research: Women’s use of social networking is (understandably) more anonymous. Men are more likely to be open, hosting an audience, more likely to mentor/support each other.

The session then was a conversation with Joan Blades and Arianna Huffington. I’ll need to get the podcast and relisten.

III. Women and Open Source

• Included a discussion of “hacker culture” which, though I’ve been working with Open Source since 1982, I’ve never really embraced. Developers lists tend to have blunt talk about how code can be improved — but the suggestion was to learn take criticism as encouragement. It’s when you’re being ignored that you need to think about finding a new community: if your comments aren’t worth criticizing …
• This leads to a discussion of “finding the right community”. Open Source work can be seen as participating in a “karma bank” and it’s not often obvious how to choose the right community where your contributions can be effective (and so you can repay what you’ve received from other projects). There was a suggestion that open source projects evolve and that later in their life cycles they are more accepting of work like documentation, user interface analysis, etc. If that’s your area of expertise, you might also choose “end user friendly” projects instead of those like coding the kernel. Another example was the Drupal dojo community where “newbies train newbies”. [There's been a recent discussion on the Systers list about women in open source. The recording of this session may be of interest there.]
• See FlossPols.org for information on policy issues related to open source.
• LinuxChix was mentioned in a couple of contexts. In particular their courses include “Spineful Living” (as opposed to Spineless). I think the archive for that course can be found at http://mailman.linuxchix.org/pipermail/courses/2007-April/thread.html.
• A slide with a list of resources, included PHP women, DrupalChix — see the recording for others.
• Ended with a discussion of nonprofit open source: Larger involvement in women, very friendly, respect contributions other than code. CiviCRM, Organizer’s database, were two projects that were mentioned.

IV. Web 2.0: Hot Or Not?

Beth Kanter’s slides are posted on her blog. I made the following notes.

• What’s new is ease of creating content, ease of shaping audiences
• Choose tools that match demographics and “technographics” [I think we're considering this with Facebook for AAUW.]
• Slide from Forrester Research — demographics and use of social networks gave an interesting picture of age vs. ways of participating. [Click through to the version on slideshare, then go to slide 12 and hit Full Screen in the lower right.]
• Learn techniques for listening — case study from Red Cross
• It’s about conversations
• Be careful with staff roles - need those who are familiar, but all need to understand; define a box — discussions about the downside. [Easter Seals -- written policy on social networking, code of professional behavior.]
• Thoughtful experimentation. Different messaging on different networks.
• How do we make it safe to fail? to learn?
• It takes time — 2 hrs/day minimum; Sisyphean task to see ROI

Connie Reece: Case study of the Frozen Pea Fund

• Amazing story. From first tweet to engage a community (12/5/07) to 501(c)3 formed (2/20/08).
• Dollar investment may be small. Consider ROI in terms of “return on involvement,” “return on influence”.
• Social media: intersection of sociology, media, technology. New tools to do what’s been done for some time.

Heather Holdridge, Care2.com

See the recording to her answers/comments on some of these topics:

• Web 2.0 meeting human needs
• What makes campaigns work?
• Who should try social networking campaigns?
  Lots of volunteers, huge email networks, dedicated staff, max’d e-mail marketing
  Not free - will need dedicated resources
• 1.0 vs 2.0 - Save Darfur; $415,000 in 10 days through e-mail (M&R consulting) vs. $15,000 in 6 months from 1 million “friends”
• Compare/contrast Social network, website
• Goals (success?) - Awareness and Outreach (yes), Advocacy (some), Fundraising (minimal)
• Social network ROI calculator - frogloop.com/social-network-calculator
• What metrics? Might not be money or actions taken. [For me and our small Facebook experiment, I think the key metric is the number of members moved from the periphery of the organization to real participants in significant communications projects.]
• IFAW - case study; campaign specific pages

Q&A

• Digital natives vs. digital immigrants: check Pew Internet studies, Forrester, the digital native wiki - how young people are using social media
• Go deep on one platform - allow friends to spread to other platforms

Beth: beth.typepad.com
Connie: everydotconnects.com
Allyson: www.radcampaign.com/blog/
Heather: www.care2.com/politics

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• Twitter Primer from Beth Kanter. Lots of info and links like the ones below.
• Twitter in Plain English from CommonCraft. A very short video that covers the basics in CommonCraft’s engaging style.
• The Big Juicy Twitter Guide from Caroline Middlebrook. Well named tutorial.

In any event, one thing I just learned about was the “favorites” option. On your twitter home page, over on the right, there’s a set of “stats.” The ones you’ll use most often will likely be the “Following” and “Followers” — how many folks you’re following and how many are getting your tweets. Next is “Favorites.” I’d assumed that was “favorite people,” like “top friends” in Facebook, and I ignored it because I just don’t do ranking that way. But it’s not. It’s favorite tweets — a way of marking messages as ones you’d want to get back to later. Just click the dim star at the end of a message and it will be listed in your “favorites.”

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The goal of this exercise is to put AAUW info into the SMS stream so the SMS “natives” (who might not be reached with e-mail) get at least a few pings (if they choose to connect). We’re months away from figuring out if this really works — I won’t have much time to publicize it until after July 1. One piece to evaluate will be whether this really does bring in new contacts — or just reaches, say, the Facebook contacts in a different way.

But, as I said in the comments on the previous post, I think we’re there. The missing piece was twitterfeed.com. I’d heard of it before, and even got part way to setting up an account (had used my yahoo account to create an OpenID). But the full possibilities didn’t really register.  Here’s the summary:

1. Set up an RSS feed for the items you want to send to twitter. [In AAUW NC we have an "announcements" category for items that appear on the front page of the WordPress-based www.aauwnc.org. That seemed like a good subset of all the news to share in twitter.]
2. Choose an administrator for the twitter feed and set up an OpenID  for the administrator. Now this is my first experiment with OpenID, so it’s unlikely I understand all the implications here. One can use a Yahoo or AOL account to generate an OpenID (I used Yahoo). It also looks like it’s possible to link a WordPress.com or Blogger blog to set up an OpenID (if I’m reading the twitterfeed help correctly). I haven’t read the T&C’s carefully — if someone has a link to the OpenID basics (particularly OpenID for an organization rather than an individual), please post.
3. Create a twitter account that will retweet the items in the RSS feed, or choose one that already exists to tweet information of interest to the expected audience.
4. Login to twitterfeed.com with the OpenID and create a twitterfeed that links the RSS feed to the twitter account. There’s a minimal amount of configuration (titles only, include link).
5. Tell people who want to get the messages through IM or SMS to follow the twitter user created in #3 and set “notifications” for that user to “on”. [The assumption is that such folks exist -- otherwise everyone could just follow the RSS feed directly over the web.]

Now I’m not an SMS “native” (I can send and receive text messages on my phone, but it’s not something that I’ve integrated into my life). I haven’t drunk the Koolaid of IM (remembering the evil that was “write” back in the 80’s). I don’t use a PDA (paper DayTimer person, would you believe), let alone a smart phone. So I may have missed the point completely. If so, please do holler at me. But if you want to get AAUW NC announcements through twitter, follow “aauwnc”.

Other notes:

• Twitterfeed puts a limit on the number of messages it will forward - currently a max of 5 messages an hour. Consider this when choosing your feed in #1, and don’t expect “real time” forwarding of the messages.

• I “own” bbvx, so setting up twitter.com/bbvx was okay. I’m currently board chair for the all-volunteer AAUW NC, so I think I’m okay there, too. I do have a question, though, on what approval would be required to set up similar accounts for “aauw” and “nccwsl,” and what safeguards we should think about when passing, say, “aauwnc” from one person to another. [Yeah, yeah, I've been webmanager for nearly 10 years, but at some point ...]
• What happens to the tweets that are sent to the account set up in #3? If one uses an account that is set up just for that purpose, it, presumably won’t be “following” anyone, so there will be little motivation for anyone to check the twitter account. That means, I think, that direct messages will go into a black hole. Replies (@ messages) could be followed via RSS using an RSS reader that allows for authentication on the feed (I’m using RSSOwl).

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I’ve made some corrections to the previous post based on what I’ve learned, and I may have found the missing piece to the kludge I started in this post. [Follow bbvx on twitter to see if I'm right -- should get notifications of new posts to this blog.] This may be the “hour delay” that Kari was talking about in the tutorial — or there may be some other solution that they’re working on.

The problem I’ve been trying to solve is how to use twitter to get info about an event out to folks who can’t attend the event. Kari’s concerned about twittering at NTC and needs a a way to get almost real-time messages (”cookies in the ballroom”) out to the attendees. I’m more concerned about getting highlights (”great speaker who made these points…”). Her solution (retweeting posts directed @08NTC) would be more general than mine.

That, I think, is the missing link in the instructions for “using Twitter for an event“. In thinking of 08NTC, I think the options for an attendee/non-attendee to get updates are:

1. “All messages from 08NTC and its friends” is too much information (and is, perhaps reasonably, only available from the web, I think).
2. “All messages from 08NTC” is too little (and puts the burden on the few 08NTC folks to keep everyone posted).
3. Setting “track 08NTC” is close, but seems to have some bugs (ktlove’s recent message was cut off after just a few characters when it got to my phone) and has no web interface.
4. Using #08NTC is close, but until just now, I hadn’t discovered any IM/phone interface. Twitterfeed.com might provide that, but since the service’s forwarding is throttled (5 messages an  hour) it isn’t be appropriate for conferences with lots of tweeters.
5. I think having 08NTC retweet all the @08NTC messages is “just right”. Even with the delay it’d be useful for the large number of folks who aren’t able to attend, and if the delay can be eliminated, and folks turn on “notifications” for 08NTC, I think you’ve got the “cookies in the ballroom” announcement scheme!

If #4 or #5 is feasible, then there’s probably no need to set up the “event” twitter account which is used now to provide a “with others” list of tweets. That list inevitably includes lots of messages that have nothing to do with the event. [This wasn't a problem for the AAUW 2007 convention because the few of us following aauw07 were only there so we could tweet about the convention. But for NTC? Talk about information overload!]

I can’t really tell you why I’m not letting this go — but if the BBVX experiment works, maybe I’ll talk to Patty again about setting up something similar for NCCWSL.

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One “aha!” moment is that I now realize that while the Twitter canonical question is “what are you doing?” the users in the twittersphere have morphed that to include:

• What are you thinking about?
• What key resource have you just discovered?
• What problem are you having “right now”?
• What solution can you offer to someone else’s problem?

Looked at that way, a Twitter “conversation” can be much more content rich than “I’m sitting down to a tuna sandwich” nonsense that might have provided workers in a virtual office with the “background chatter” they might miss — but which, to me, just seemed like so much noise.

Other things I’ve learned:

• Track vs. Hashtags
  • You can “track” a term and get all tweets with that term sent to your phone or IM. [In about three weeks of tracking "aauw" and "nccwsl" there's been one (count it!) tweet containing either. I did make a new acquaintance of the twitterer, but I'm not sure our community is ready for this yet.]
  • You can add a “hashtag” to a tweet. Examples would be “#aauw” or “#nccwsl”. [In some communities the # symbol is referred to as "hash" -- anyone else ever use the term hashbang?] If you are also “following” the twitter user hashtags, then your posts will be accessible from www.hashtags.org, and folks can even subscribe to an RSS feed attached to a particular term (e.g. the #aauw feed is http://hashtags.org/feeds/tag/aauw/
  • Note that “track” gets messages to your phone. Hashtags can be followed over the web. Track follows “everyone,” Hashtags follows those who are also following Hashtags and who remember to use the hash character. I’d actually prefer to see Hashtags on my phone and follow tracks on the web: using the hash indicates an intentionality that, to me, improves the chances that I’d need to “see it right now”.
• D vs. @: sending a message to a particular person
  • When you send a message to a particular person, you use the D command (e.g. “D nes49″), and it works pretty much like an ordinary text message. The benefit is that you remember their twitter name, not their phone number. The message isn’t stored, it just goes into the either –so, it’s okay to use this for posting private data. On the other hand, if the person is reading tweets over the web it still works. On the other other hand, if the person isn’t following you, you cannot use the “D” command.
    
  • When you use the @ in a message, you’re saying that the message is a specifically to someone, e.g. @nes49. It differs from D (which is just between you and the other person) in that this is a public message, and your followers can choose whether or not they want to see your messages to others. I find reading others’ @ messages pretty confusing (I’m rarely following the person to whom they are directed, so I’m seeing the reply out of context). But it’s a useful tool for those “let me help you with a problem messages” that are becoming a significant portion of the twittersphere, and you can send an @ message to someone who’s not following you.

So, some conclusions:

• While I may continue to post AAUW and NCCWSL tweets (as nes49 and aauw07), the intersection of AAUW members and twitter users is so small that this is pretty much like spitting in the wind. If anyone (maybe from NCCWSL) disagrees and wants to take over the community building here, feel free.
• I’m connected to a *very* few “real folks” in twitter — and have already had a seredipitous outcome through that connection:
  • He posted a query
  • I forwarded a link to a possible helpful item on wiki.bbvx.org
  • He noticed the spam problem that was announced there and sent me a link to a media wiki extension I hadn’t been able to find on my own.
  • All is now well on the wiki and rogue folks trying to register.

  Could the exchange have happened in e-mail — very unlikely. In Facebook — possibly, and it’s likely I saw his first question as a Facebook status update imported from twitter. In any event, it’s enough of a “good outcome” that I’ll stick it out awhile longer (though as I look at my twitterfox bug - I’ve got 22 unread tweets…).

3/14 update: clarifications to D vs @

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Sounds good, right? Follow the hashtag #aauw or #08NTC and we’re done.

So I test. And nothing. Nada.

More research. Turns out that’s not the only list of twitter commands — but it may have been an early one that prompted this at twitter.com. Ah, there’s the rub. Only works with IM and phone, and I’m using the TwitterFox extension to read the tweets.

So…

If I want to follow #aauw on my computer, I can do it through RSS or I can climb another learning curve and get onto IM. [Eeks. "Talk" was deemed evil back in the 80's. Can I overcome my resistance??]

Or do I go back and reinstate the unlimited text on the phone that I had during Phoenix?

Sigh.

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• Go to twitter.com/hashtags and click follow
• Post a message with an the agreed upon tag, preceded by the # symbol (called a “hash” in some dialects). An example:

Exec director interview to air on CNN tonight at 9:15 ET #myorg

• Go to twemes.com and get the RSS feed address for the hashtag — probably something like

http://twemes.com/myorg.rss

• Go to feedblitz.com and subscribe to that feed via twitter

Looks good in theory — hangup is that feedblitz complains that the twitter account name isn’t formatted as an e-mail address. Anyone see what I’m doing wrong or have an alternate strategy?

And there are several things I haven’t thought through … What’s the risk of a spammer glomming onto the tag? How do I separate some tags for special handling (i.e. send to the phone, not just the web). [Maybe take the RSS feed, connect it to a special twitter account and watch that?? Ouch.]

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