Continuing from my video introduction of Twitter last week, here is one for Stumbleupon.

I love Stumbleupon for a number of reasons:

• It helps you discover the internet
• It can help drive traffic to your blog
• It’s fun
• It helps you understand what’s important when considering your own website design

I believe strongly that we must support each other

By giving good content a thumbs up, a retweet, or a digg etc, you support your fellow internet user, you make them feel good, and just as importantly this shows others what is good content and helps spread the word.

I know it takes a moment, but if you watch an SEO video or two you will soon realize that spamming Google is becoming more and more of a problem. We therefore need ways of promoting good content to each other. Stumbleupon offers a fantastic way of sharing this content, but it must also be done with integrity.

I hope you enjoy the video. If you do please let me know in the comments below, and BTW just for fun I set this up on iTunes in case you would like to watch on your iPod.

Subscribe via iTunes

I thought I would try to do something new today, and that is start to create video for my blog. I have a training meeting I am running this Thursday and Friday and a significant part will be around Social Media. This is for me to practice my skills, and at the same time provide a video introduction to Twitter for the people at the course to review later.

It’s longer than I had hoped. Next I have created a collection of much shorter movies covering online tools I use and some of the Strategies we use.

Well it’s not often that I am really excited about a a new web service release but I really am about the SU.PR beta having seen Tim Ferriss from Four Hour Work Week introduce it on his blog a couple of days ago.

Stumbleupon has been amazing for driving traffic to people’s blogs, including my own, but unfortunately it has been hit and miss as to whether you get listed in the directory. This relied on people reviewing your site as you were not meant to submit your own. This new service allows you to auto publish your blog url’s along with a message to the Stumbleupon service. The URL is shortened and then the message and URL published directly to Twitter and Face Book.

It’s about 1.00 am here so I’ll come back later to explain why this will drive traffic, but seriously have a look at Tim’s cool intro above.

Unfortunately the service wasn’t automated so I made a WordPress Plugin

What I wanted was an easy way to publish my posts from WordPress, and as a plug-in didn’t exist, I wrote my own. I have published it, so it is now freely available and I will refine it over time.

If you want to drive web site traffic from Stumbleupon you can use this wordpress plugin for free. There is an video going on vimeo to explain soon. Sorry the one I just uploaded is not playing.

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Ok, I have just made myself feel sick on Twitter by un-following most of the 3000 people I was following because I simply found myself in a situation where I was overwhelmed by the tweet traffic generated by that number of people.

As much as I carefully considered my reasoning for doing this, pushing that delete key on Twitter Karma, has certainly left my hands shaking.

If you find that I am not following you now I am very sorry. If however we’ve been talking directly I’ll re-follow you over the weekend once the the delete process has finished. I just couldn’t keep up with the wild stream of updates, direct messages from spam robots and most importantly I kept missing the valuable messages and updates I wanted to see. Drastic action was required.

Overwhelm has become a theme recently, but simplicity and presence are now my focus

You will have noticed in my post about “Being an entrepreneur and how not to travel” that I basically burnt myself out on a recent trip, and while this is true, it would be more accurate to say that I have been doing this more and more over recent years. So much so that last year I had to take a couple of months off due to sickness caused by stress and exhaustion. Fortunately people have been pointing out that I am heading there again and as I don’t want to go through that once more need to prioritise.

Fine … But why so ruthless with twitter?

I joined Twitter for the conversation, to make contact with people with whom to socialise, and keep up to date with information. During that time I have been deeply honoured to have built a pretty big following, and for much of the time I automatically followed people back, I guess to be polite. That was great in the beginning, but as the list grew, it became harder and harder to keep track of the people I was actually interacting with, and by now I can’t even see what people say unless they specifically reply to me because the stream of tweets moves to fast.

What started to as fun, soon turned into something of a burden as it makes me feel disrespectful if I don’t also get to see what these friends are saying, and of course I’m having only half the fun. It was never about talking at people, it needs to be about talking with people.

How I used Twitter started to change the day I found myself in trouble as I started to think more consciously about twitter spam, follower ego and how much noise there was. I love the service and love how you can interact so easily with people but felt there had to be a better way.

Simplicity and focus.

I’m hardly the first person to do this for example Loic Le Meur, a high profile geek and founder of Seesmic, did the same and deleted 23,000 followers, and although Tsudohnimh proposed a great solution for dealing with a large number of Twitter followers, I didn’t want another system.

In a post on needing to have fun, if you want to be creative I introduced a book and time management system called Zen To Done. This is now becoming a way of life for me at work. You will see it even in the fact that my blog looks different, it’s simpler, cleaner and by changing it’s focus slightly, it lowers the expectation of me by allowing me to be myself.

I’m sorry

I am again sorry that I can’t follow everyone, but I believe strongly in being present with the people I am with and therefore if you interact with me on my blog or twitter, I will with you. Say hello, let me know how life is treating you and what makes you get up in the morning and if you’re interested I’ll do the same. Alternatively if you prefer just to listen, that’s cool too.

Until we meet, have an awesome weekend and all the best.

When I say danger, I am not exaggerating. If you are online and geotag your photos you risk being robbed, raped or murdered if you aren’t very careful. I do apologise, I don’t like having depressing stuff on my blog, but you do need to be a little scared; you do need to consider how you work online.

If you value your property and especially your life read on.

So what is Geotagging

Wikipedia describes Geotagging as: the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs, video, websites, or RSS feeds, and a form of geospatial metadata. These data usually consist of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, accuracy data, and place names.

That sounds pretty harmless, so what’s the problem?

The problem is that people innocently take photos of their home, where they hang out, their friends’ places etc, and then upload them up to the web. If your camera saves geo-tag data, as my iPhone does, that information is uploaded with it. We are becoming very social beasts and share our lives on twitter, facebook etc, and unfortunately, that places location data in the hands of potential cyber-stalkers. Having an unlisted number is useless if you do things like this.

There are two problems with this. One is that through facebook and twitter etc these people know your habits. And secondly, with geo-tagging, combined with Flickr and Google Street View etc, they know where you do it. Potentially where you live, where you walk the dog, where your kids go to school etc.

Scary … but what’s a Cyber Stalker?

Essentially Cyber Stalking is where one person becomes infatuated with another and starts obsessively following them online.

I’ve had this happen a couple of times and it can be quite scary. Sometimes these people are covert and remain largely silent, other times they will make every attempt to make contact and be noticed. This can be emotionally very stressful, but it becomes physically dangerous when that obsession moves offline, and that is the point of this post. If you geo-tag your photos carelessly you make it so much easier for this to happen.

Here are a couple of useful resources for assistance with Cyber Stalking: The National Center For Victims of Crime, and WiredSafety.org

Here are five things you can do to protect yourself

#1. Consider turning off Geotagging in your camera and mobile. Certainly if it asks, “Can I use location data?” don’t do so at home or other places you consider ‘private’. I wouldn’t care too much about it when on holiday for example, and in fact it’s quite a cool feature in iPhoto, but I wouldn’t use it where my family regularly hang out.

#2. Talk to the kids. Make them aware of the danger of this. In fact monitor all your children’s online activity and set strict rules around interacting with strangers.

#3. If you like this feature, then just don’t upload to flickr etc without first stripping the meta data out of the photo.

#4. Don’t be scared online, but don’t be blasé either. Be considered about how people are interacting with you and whether or not they might be a risk. Some of my best friendships are with people I have met over the internet, but you must be careful.

#4. Spread the word. Please Please Please. Re-Tweet, Digg, and Stumble this post and let people know about the risks. The more people are aware, and the more we pressure places like Flickr to provide features that protect and/or educate us the safer we will all be.

Am I being over zealous? I don’t think so, but I’m curious what you think.

Step 1 – Spread the word NOW … Thanks :)
Step 2 – Let me and others know what you think, and/or do to stay safe online.

All day I have been trying to find a moment to publish a quick post, giving a shout out to Google for another awesome product that’s in the works.

We already use analytics, webmaster tools, gmail etc and think this is probably one of the most exciting announcements since search. As a company this offers us exciting collaboration options to supplement what we already have, but it’s even more exciting when you consider the integration with our wider community.

Well done Google … simply awesome.

Mashable have 4 great articles on Google Wave

http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/ the complete guide. If you don’t want to watch the 1 hour 20 min video above, then read this instead.

http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/twave/ a link to a twitter app for google wave

http://mashable.com/2009/05/31/google-wave-test/ a first test … cool.

http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave/ Could Google Wave Redefine Email and Web Communication? Redefine possibly, replace, I don’t think so.

Thanks Mashable for the awesome resources as always.

I found myself in trouble on Twitter this morning … ok “in trouble” might be a bit strong, but a tweet I received did make me realise something I was doing was causing offence and of course don’t want to do that.

In my “Direct Messages” (inbox) I received the following tweet.

At first I thought #DM meant “Deep and Meaningful” … what no deep and meaningful conversation?, what a weird thing to say … but then I realised more seriously that they meant “Direct Messages”.

So what happened, and why is this important?

juhasaarinen seems like a pretty cool person. Certainly they have an interesting blog, and write good articles. I followed them as I wanted to follow their tweets, and I guess they followed me in return. All good until this point. The problem was I use a service call Tweet Later, and had set up an ‘Auto Direct Message’ to say “hello and thank you for following me”, in it I pointed harmlessly to my blog.

Tweet Later is a service for managing your tweets, and other twitter activity. As I got busier on Twitter, and the number of people following me grew, I found it more and more difficult to respond and say thank you in a timely manner. I thought it more polite to send an ‘auto thank you’ quickly than attempt to send a personalised one knowing in most cases I probably never will.

I realise now that’s wrong. Twitter is about a conversation, I joined and love it because I get to connect with our clients who are photographers, my friends and people in the Wordpress community … actually anyone that wants to say hello. Auto responders might be efficient but they aren’t personal and they aren’t about conversation or entertainment. With Twitter being overwhelmed with spam, it also sends the wrong message about who you are.

So my thanks goes to juhasaarinen for this reminder … DM Auto Replies are now turned off … Tweet Later however is still helpful in many other ways.”

Having said that, is their response being short sighted?

I don’t want to give with one hand, and then take away with the other. The learning is certainly appreciated, but I do think the response could be a little short sighted. If something about my profile made the “follow” worth while in the first place … is an instant “un-follow” necessary. Of course I respect their right to, and appreciate that setting standards is important, but I think a persons previous updates and blog etc says a lot more about them than a single #DM message.

Which brings me to another service I enjoy

Twitalyzer is really interesting. It allows you to review, at least from Twitalyzer’s perspective, your behaviour on Twitter.

The Idea of Generosity is clearly important in a conversation as it shows how much you contribute. On Twitter this is done by sharing information (links) and by re-tweeting (RT) others. I’m therefore reasonably happy with those figures. I don’t care to much about velocity as I spend as much time there as I want, and don’t want to spam my followers. The 1500 tweets a week, that this is measured against seems exceptionally high so question if this measure is set realistically. In terms of ‘clout’ and ‘influence’, I guess we all want to have some influence over the people we communicate with and therefore took most interest in those being so low and that’s where this service has so much value.

If I cared about influence, and wanted to be a “Twitter Star” then it tells me what I need to do. Relative to the 1161 people Twitalyzer are tracking that have 25% more influence than me, I would need to send out about 40 more tweets a week, reference a lot more (20 ish) online resources and Reweet at least another couple times each week. Of course I would also need to make sure the content of those tweets was of value or no one will follow.

Seems simple … But do I care?

Yes and No. I do care in that I want to be a valuable twitter community member, and of course I want to be a little entertaining or provide information to the people gracious enough to follow me, but I don’t have any aspiration to be a Twitter Heavy Weight.

I’m there to have fun, and learn what I can, and it seems that is what juhasaarinen wants as well, so that is why we should NOT Auto Direct Message.

A few month ago I wrote a blog post about the Wordpress 2.7 image upload problem. At that time like hundreds of other wordpress users I could not get images to upload to my blog properly.

It seems to me however that there are two separate problems, and people aren’t clarifying which of the two they have.

#1 The upload feature starts properly, but the images don’t upload correctly. This issue seems to have been dealt with extensively here and appears to be a permissions / caching issue.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/164999?replies=1

#2 The uploader is meant to open in an ajax layer like the following image, but instead moves to a new browser window so the upload can not be inserted into a post. Because the “insert into post” button goes to a white screen it looks like things haven’t uploaded, leading to more confusion.

At the time, I made this video to demonstrate that I had found the culprit on our system was the comment luv plugin. As you can see, I can show it having an effect, but couldn’t explain why and suggested it was probably just conflicting with another plugin.

Wordpress 2.7 Image Upload Issue from Stephen Baugh on Vimeo.

For best quality, view on the vimeo site

Anyway, I felt bad as I liked the plugin but couldn’t use it, and really just wanted to demonstrate to the wordpress community incase this gave someone a new lead towards a solution, and I didn’t have time to trouble shoot the problem further. All has worked great for a number of months and now suddenly after the last Wordpress update the image up-loader stops working again despite not having the plugin installed any more.

So today I find that a plugin called “Google Positioner WordPress plugin” is the culprit. I deactivate and the image up-loader works, reactivate the plugin and the up-loader dies.

I don’t know why, but this time I wonder if I can guess the answer. That is that wordpress 2.7 relises very heavily on jquery and this plugin does too. Unfortunately instead of using the wordpress script the plugin installs it’s own older version. Could it be that these are conflicting with each other causing the issue?

When I started to look at Wordpress themes and plugins I was shocked how many distributed there own copies of the script and were out of date.

That doesn’t however explain the Comment Luv plugin as that doesn’t seem to use jquery at all.

Oh well, again, I am just sharing hoping it gives someone a clue. And again my humblest apologies to the plugin authors, these are two great plugins and I am not trying to be disparaging.

All the best.

Stephen

I had my first play with WolframAlpha this morning. I was watching the launch on justin.tv and saw the search url people we using. By doing this I got around the opening soon window … Hope that’s ok.

Anyway very cool. Sorry for the poor video really just recording my play. The big thing is knowing what you can do and how to approach searching. Was very fast until they started load testing and then things started timing out.

Cool as a first experience though.

As I watched an introductory video for the WolframAlpha launch, my memory raced back to when I first saw the internet in the early 90’s and told my wife how it was going to “change the world”.

WolframAlpha isn’t a search engine like Google, it’s something completely different. In my opinion there is a place for both as they do things differently … but if this gets hold this will change the world. It’s offers a completely revolutionary way of looking at data and for the average person to explore relationships.

As Danny and I discussed today, we can in our heads imagine how the search works at Google, but we have no idea how this works … but it is DAMN AMAZING.

Almost immediately I was Skyping, and twittering my friends telling them to watch the introduction movie.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

Go see it now … I think we might just be seeing another billion dollar company in the making… In fact Danny and my prediction is it will take only a couple of years.

Once you’ve done that, go over to Tinker and join the discussion I just started

UPDATE: Oh sorry, I meant to say. Popular rumour is it will launch tomorrow.