austinpreneur

How I use iPhoto to publish to Facebook

I have a pretty good routine down now for uploading and sharing my photos and videos on my Mac and in the cloud. Good because I'm able to do it frequently (a few times a week) and don't spend too much time on it (usually about 15 minutes). This system is actually based on a similar method for managing music songs and playlists that I use for iTunes.

I manage them in iPhoto, edit them in iMovie, and share them online via Facebook, Flickr and YouTube and also through devices such as my iPhone, screensavers and digital picture frames. I'm able to upload a lot of content with minimal time.

Here is what I do after returning from a trip or event where I took pictures and video.

First, I organize the photos:

1. Connect USB cable to camera, videocamera, and iPhone. iPhoto automatically launches and goes directly to the Import screen.
2. Click Import in iPhoto to copy photos from camera to computer
3. Hygiene - delete bad photos and duplicate photos in iPhoto
4. Tagging - Add tags to photos in iPhoto
5. Ratings - Rate all photos 3 stars in iPhoto
6. Ratings - Upgrade individual photos to 4 or 5 stars in iPhoto
7. Events - Break into Events if needed and name events in iPhoto
8. Smart Albums - Update MobileMe galleries by dragging and dropping new photos from Smart Albums in iPhoto

Next, I publish them to various physical devices and online:

1. Screensaver on my computer
2. iPhone Photo Albums
3. Digital Picture Frames
4. Facebook Photos - Publish new photos to Facebook from iPhoto, then update permissions from Facebook website
5. Flickr Photos - Publish new photos to Flickr if appropriate
6. iMovie Editing - Edit videos in iMovie if necessary (usually not)
7. Facebook Video - Drag videos to the desktop and then upload individually to Facebook and YouTube

Usually this entire process takes about 15 minutes. If its after a big trip with 1000 photos and a bunch of video then maybe an hour or two.

Do I have to use a Mac?

This is one of those places where the Mac really shines. No one has made it so simple to manage your photos, videos and music and the software is all completely free with every Mac. Everything is integrated and mostly automatic. You plug in the camera and it launches iPhoto and goes right to the Import screen. My screensaver automatically gets the latest pictures and so does my iPhone when it syncs. Everything is automatic. Everything is easy.

Tagging

I'm pretty religious about tagging my photos and videos. I have about 20 tags that I use to keep things straight. Most photos get 2 or 3 tags.

A few tags may eventually be replaced by iPhoto facial recognition - I've played with it a bunch but I haven't integrated it into my process yet. I also need to work geolocation tagging into this process.

The most common tags that I use now are:

• Family Members *
• Josh *
• Baer **
• Family **
• Friends **
• Business
• OtherInbox
• Capital Factory
• Ignite Austin
• Home 
• Holiday
• Travel
• Cars
• Dogs
• Documents (pictures of awards, certificates, etc.)

* could be replaced by facial recognition
** could be replaced by facial recognition if it had groups

I can use the same criteria to do one-off searches and I have found it to be very easy to find specific pictures I'm looking for. Usually I can just narrow it down to 2 or 3 tags and then scan chronologically to find it.

Ratings

iPhoto has a five star rating system. My default rating is 3 stars. After deleting bad photos that are out of focus and duplicate shots, I "select all" and set the ratings to 3 stars. Then I look through them for any that I want to upgrade to 4 stars or 5 stars.

• 5 stars - the very best pictures
• 4 stars - better than average, but not the very best
• 3 stars - default rating for pictures that are worth keeping
• 2 stars - below average, but kept for completeness (usually pictures from an event)
• 1 star - never show in albums, probably some special case, not usually normal pictures

By rating every photo, I can create Smart Albums (below) that contain my "best" pictures from the past few months. Or I can combine with Tags to search for the "best pictures of Cars".

 

 
 

Smart Albums

Smart Albums are like "saved searches." I combine Tagging and Ratings to create Smart Albums that update their content automatically. I then connect these Smart Albums to screensavers, my iPhone, and the albums that I publish to Facebook.

My most frequently used Smart Albums are:

• Kids Best - tagged Kids and rated 5 stars
• Kids Recent - taken in the past 3 months, tagged Kids and rated 3, 4 or 5 stars
• 3 Months Best - taken in the past 3 months and rated 4 or 5 stars
• 3 Months Recent - taken in the past 3 months and rated 3, 4 or 5 stars
• Family Best - tagged Family and rated 4 or 5 stars
• Travel Best - tagged Travel and rated 5 stars
• Amy & Josh - tagged Amy and Josh and rated 5 stars

How do I decide how many stars? Mostly be trial an error. I start with 4 and 5 stars and if that is too many then I just go with 5 stars. If its not enough then I go to 3, 4 and 5 stars.

 

 

iMovie Editing

iMovie is a simple video editing application that comes pre-installed on most Macs. It's really easy to make professional looking videos with it. You can easily cut and paste clips together, overlay slides from a presentation, add titles and effects, and more.

It is integrated with iPhoto - so as long as I upload my photos and movies into iPhoto (which is what happens by default when I plug a camera into my Mac) then iMovie can automatically see all of those media assets and I can drag and drop them into movies I'm editing.

Facebook

For photos, I usually let iPhoto organize them into Events and end up wanting to publish Events as Albums on Facebook. After all of the hygiene, tagging, and rating, I'm usually left with exactly the group of photos I might want to share. So I just name the Event the same name I would want the Album to be named in Facebook and then click the Facebook icon in the bottom right of the iPhoto window.

 

 

If you want to share your photos with Everyone or with Just Friends, its easy. You just click go and you're done. I think that somehow it even matches up the facial recognition and will automatically tag photos with your friends.

If you want to share the album privately on Facebook with only certain people, it gets a little tricky. iPhoto only gives you the option to share your album with Everyone, Friends of Friends, or Just Friends. Most of the photos that I share are only shared with certain Facebook Friend Lists and not with Everyone. So I have to publish from iPhoto to Just Friends and then immediately go to the web page and reset the privacy controls from the web after the first photo is uploaded. Even still, I've had a few times where some friends on Facebook have seen pictures (I know because they commented on them) that they weren't supposed to see (fortunately nothing embarrassing, just cute family pictures).

 

 

This only works for uploading photos to your own personal account. Once they are in your account, you can easily post them to a Facebook event. However, if you want to post pictures to a Facebook Page for your company, you need to export the photos to a folder and then use the Facebook photo upload process from the web page.

For videos, it's similar to Facebook pages. You have to upload the video files directly using the Facebook web page. I usually end up dragging and dropping the video from iPhoto onto the desktop so that its easy to find when I'm uploading it to Facebook.

Flickr

I don't really publish many photos to Flickr but it works with iPhoto a lot like Facebook.

YouTube

Publishing movies isn't quite as simple with YouTube. The maximum time is 10 minutes, so long movies require extra editing to chop them up into 10 minute chunks and upload them each separately. This is a big pain in the ass and is making me seriously consider switching the bulk of my video to Vimeo because it has fewer limitations.

iPhone

My iPhone automatically syncs the Smart Albums to my iPhone, so it always has the best and most recent pictures on it. You configure that from within iTunes.

Screensavers

You can choose a Smart Album as a screensaver on a Mac, so I usually have the "3 Months Best" album with the Ken Burns effect on my screen. Its counter-intuitive to me at first, but I find that I prefer seeing the most recent pictures all the time, not the best old ones over and over.

Just go to the Screen Saver in the System Preferences and your iPhoto Albums and Events will appear in the list. Sometimes it takes a minute for them to appear.

 

 

Digital Picture Frames

I have a Philips digital picture frame on my desk. Unfortunately the only way to transfer pictures is by connecting it to a computer via USB or using SD memory cards. This means manually dragging and dropping images from iPhoto to the SD card and physically moving around the cards or cables every time you want to sync them. I'd really like to find a good digital picture frame that would stream the photos off of iPhoto (the problem with Facebook is that the pictures are so low quality).

What about you?

How do you manage your photos? Any tips on how to make my process smoother or more automated? Have you worked facial recognition and geo-location into your process? Please comment.

Listening but not paying attention

I've been presenting a talk titled, "Complainers into Champions" lately that gives examples of why many companies can benefit from using social media to engage with customers and talk about their problems in public. I'm usually pushing companies to engage more, listen more, respond more.

However, I recently had a personal experience where a company was listening to social media, but wasn't really paying attention - and it cost them. A tweet that I sent was taken out of context and a big company spent hundreds, if not thousands of dollars investigating it. Bryan Menell also talked about my experience on the Dachis Group Blog.

It all started with a phone call to my cell phone. This was strange to begin with, because I use Google Voice and I don't give out my cell phone number to anyone. I was immediately suspicious and figured that it was some kind of strange solicitation. Here my best recollection of the conversation:

Caller: "Is this Joshua Baer?"

Me: "Who's calling?"

Caller: "Enrico XXXX"

Me: "Who are you with?"

Caller: "Bose Security"

Me: "What's this regarding?"

Caller: "It's a personal matter."

Me: "You're going to have to give me more information than that."

Caller: "Is this Josh? It's regarding your business selling stolen Bose headphones."

Me: "This is Josh. I'm not sure what you're referring to. What makes you think that?"

Caller: "I'm looking at a Twitter message that says, 'joshuabaer @jotto I've actually got a side business moving hot bose headphones'. Did you send that?"

 

Me: "I didn't say that. It must be some kind of mistake... Oh wait a minute. I think this was part of a joke. I was selling some used headphones on Facebook and my friend said that as a joke. I think if you look at the tweets before and after that it will be pretty obvious that its a joke."

Me: "Look, I'm a big fan of your products and just got the latest version. I was selling two old pair."

Caller: "Do you know where you purchased the two headphones?"

Me: "Not really, it was a long time ago. I probably bought them directly from you, or maybe from Amazon. Come to think of it one of them was my wife's so I have no idea where she purchased it."

Caller: "Are you sure?"

Me: "No, I just told you I'm not really sure because it was a long time ago. I was really just selling my used ones on Facebook."

Caller: "I know, we bought a pair from you."

Me: (laughing) "Are you serious? That's hilarious! So you know it wasn't stolen then."

Caller: "Well we can't verify that. I need to know where you purchased them." 

Me: "Look, I wish you the best and must admit that I'm kind of impressed that you're paying attention to Twitter, but this is a waste of your time."

Caller: "Well we're going to continue to investigate this. Is this the best number to reach you at if I have further questions?"

Then we exchanged contact info.

So basically, Bose Security was watching Twitter and took this one tweet out of context. They spent at least $165 so far (that's how much they paid me when they bought the headphones) and have spent many hours researching it, tracking down my number, calling me, etc.

If they had looked at my Twitter page and just seen the tweets sent around the same time, I think they should have been able to tell it was a joke.

 

How much did this cost Bose? At least $165. Assuming that they spend a few hours researching it, we're probably looking at hundreds of dollars if not more! 

Here is the original Facebook post in the marketplace:

 

Quick links to your company Facebook page and Twitter search

For most of my companies that I work with I've created quick links to our Facebook page as well as a Twitter search for our company. This makes it really easy to promote the pages by word of mouth (literally) or on Twitter where every character counts.

For example, if you want to go to OtherInbox's Facebook page, you can just type in facebook.otherinbox.com (or even shorter, facebook.oib.com). That link is a redirect that sends you to our Facebook fan page for OtherInbox.

To see what people are saying about OtherInbox right now, go to twitter.otherinbox.com. That link is a redirect that sends you to a pre-defined search on search.twitter.com.

Here's how to set it up for yourself.

Go to your Facebook fan page. The URL will probably look something like this:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=69949101476#/pages/Capital-Factory/62503086648

I don't know why Facebook does this because its unnecessary and really ugly, but you probably want to clean it up first. Look for the "/pages/" that appears the farthest to the right (it could be in there twice). Delete everything to the left of it other than "www.facebook.com".

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=69949101476#/pages/Capital-Factory/62503086648

Now this is the nice URL to your Facebook fan page: 

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Capital-Factory/62503086648

Now all you do is set up a web redirect for a certain web page or domain name to go that URL. I like to use custom domain names because I think they are easy to remember: facebook.oib.com. However, you could also do oib.com/facebook just as easily. I use Register.com's RComExpress service to host my domains and they have a great feature where you can set up a subdomain and enter a page for it to redirect to and they take care of the rest. 

Next, I do the same thing for Twitter search and twitter.otherinbox.com. First I go to search.twitter.com and manually type in the search that finds the content that I want to show. 

For OtherInbox that is:

otherinbox OR "other inbox" OR #OIB OR oib.com OR "mr. spam" OR mrspam OR "mr spam"

which results in the URL:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=otherinbox+OR+%22other+inbox%22+OR+%23OIB+OR+oib.com

+OR+%22mr.+spam%22+OR+mrspam+OR+%22mr%20spam%22

When I tried to put that URL into Register.com's redirect it didn't like some of the characters, so I put it into TinyURL first and put the resulting TinyURL into Register.com's redirect. But that worked fine.

It doesn't take long to set up, and I find it quite handy. I hope you do too!

We need new security questions - obscurity is no defense in the long tail of social networking

Everyone knows that financial institutions are behind the times with technology and are way too paranoid to participate in social media. But it seems like they aren't paying enough attention to social media and the trend to publish more and more information publicly that use to be private.

If you're friends with someone on Facebook and LinkedIn and troll through their Twitter and Flickr feeds, you'll find that you can answer most of the typical "security questions" for financial institutions. They picked obscure questions such as, "What was the name of your first pet?" and "What street did you live on in your first house?" thinking that they would be difficult for someone other than you to figure out. But these days most of the questions are pretty easy to figure out for a social media sleuth.

This problem is just going to get bigger and bigger. With hundreds of millions of people using social networking it is clear that its not just a fad. The generation of tomorrow will grow up without many of inhibitions that we have about sharing information about ourselves publicly. Today your photos, your day to day activities and your relationships with others are available to the world through Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter. The trend is to share more not less, so what else will be shared tomorrow?

I think this is a real concern! This is ripe for abuse and needs to be addressed proactively by financial institutions before clever social media criminals expose this common vulnerability for rampant identity theft.

So what can you do to protect yourself? Lie. Come up with alternate answers to the common security questions such as "what is your home town?" and always use the fake answer that only you know (after all, you've always wanted to be from the Bronx, haven't you?). That way even your mom can't figure out your security questions. 

I want an eye.fi card that works in reverse (thanks @egoh)

This morning I was tweeting about how much I love the digital picture frame in my office. 

 

The reason I'm loving it is because I just put new pictures on it. The problem is that it's hard to get pictures onto the digital picture frame - it has an SD card that I need to pop out, take home, copy new photos onto, and bring back.

What I really want is a picture frame that downloads new pictures wirelessly from my Facebook account - including my own pictures as well as those of my friends (similar to what Chirp does on my desktop). There is a Y Combinator company called PicWing that does this, but I'm hesitant to get tied into a proprietary platform.

Eric Goh had the great suggestion of trying to use an Eye-Fi in reverse. An Eye-Fi is an SD card with a wireless chip in it so that it can upload pictures to your computer or the Internet wirelessly (the good ones geotag the photos with GPS too). What I really want is one that works in reverse, downloading pictures automatically to whatever picture frame I put the SD card into.

Twitter is my RSS reader (and OtherInbox)

I read lots of RSS and blogs (I'll collectively refer to them as "feeds"), but I don't regularly use an RSS Reader. I've toyed around with Google Reader and with Bloglines but just never take the time to go browse them. I have some feeds bookmarked in Safari and Firefox but never take the time to look at those either.

For me, feeds can be easily grouped into three categories:

• important - I want a chance to read or ignore every post
• interesting - occasionally a post is interesting to me
• one-off - a post caught my eye, but I probably won't read that blog again

I find that I prefer to read important feeds just like they were email messages. I want to see an "Inbox" with all of the new postings in these feeds and either read or delete each one. If I don't check them for a few days a bunch pile up, I want to be able to quickly browse the list of old posts to see if I missed anything interesting. Apple's Mail.app Program has a nice feature that lets you subscribe to RSS feeds in Mail and have them show up in your Inbox just like email messages. There are also other services out there such as RSSFwd that will let you "subscribe" to an RSS feed by email. I use my OtherInbox account for this - you can set up any RSS feed to automatically get delivered to an OtherInbox Mailbox just like email messages (similar to Mail.app).

The interesting feeds and the one-off feeds come to me through Twitter. I don't actually subscribe to the feeds, rather I depend on my network of Twitter friends to post links to blogs that are of interest to me. A big part of why I follow certain people is because they post useful links. Many people log into Bloglines or Google Reader to scan for interesting posts - I just watch my Twitter feed.

How do I use LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a popular professional social networking site that is centered around an online resume. Users "connect" to other users that they know and can recommend other people they have worked with, worked for, or hired. 

Most profiles are public, so I can search for all of the people who work at a company I'm trying to get an introduction to, find out that my good friend Bob knows the VP of Marketing, and get him to introduce me.

I keep my profile up to date with every employer and organization.

LinkedIn encourages you to connect with other people you might know at companies and organizations you've worked at in the past. By filling in your complete profile, you increase the chance that people will find you and can be sure that you are the person they are looking for. My LinkedIn profile includes my first job as a grocery bagger in high school. I usually update it promptly when something changes.

I let my connections browse through the list of my other connections.

One of the easiest ways to find more people to connect with on LinkedIn is to browse the connections of your connections (in Facebook terms, "friends of friends"). LinkedIn gives you a choice about whether or not to let your connections see the list of your other connections. By default this is turned on, but many people turn it off. I guess they are afraid that people will "steal" their contacts. But LinkedIn does a good job of policing the users against trying to connect to people you don't really know so I'm not so worried about it being abused. 

I want to be a hub that my connections use to find each other

I'm more excited about the idea that people come to me to find other interesting people. I like the idea of being a conduit and think that the benefits of that far outweigh any risks of other people stealing my contacts (this idea of the pros of sharing something publicly outweighing the cons will be a common theme in the next few posts).

I search LinkedIn to find people at companies that I want to do business with

This can be really handy for business development. It's always better to get introduced by a mutual acquaintance than to cold call someone. I rarely will request an introduction unless the person I want to reach is directly connected to one of my connections.

The goal with connections is quality, not quantity

Some people think the point of LinkedIn is to get as many connections as possible. I don't. I think the value of my LinkedIn network is dependent on the quality of the connections, not the quantity. If I have too many connections, then the various newsfeeds and other functions of LinkedIn become less useful because there is too much noise. 

My general rule of thumb on LinkedIn is to only accept connections from people that I actually know. For me, that means that we have corresponded over email, phone or in person and I would probably recognize you if I saw you. If I'm having lunch with someone for the first time, I will usually look them up on LinkedIn first but I won't request to connect until after we have had lunch and gotten to know each other a bit. This is just a rule of thumb, there are always exceptions. But please don't be offended if I don't accept your request to connect - it's just a sign that I don't know you well, not that I don't want to!

I don't accept connection requests "to grow my network." If you'd like to add me to your network, invite me out to lunch or come and meet me at Bootstrap Austin, Austin on Rails, Social Media Club, High Tech Happy Hour, or another Austin event that I attend regularly.

Also keep in mind that you don't need to be connected on LinkedIn to send messages to each other. If you want to ask me about something specific, feel free to send me a message even if we're not connected.

How do you use LinkedIn? What should I be doing differently?

What is Twitter?

I would guess that most people reading this blog have heard of Twitter, but I know many don't really understand what it is. Others are concerned about sharing so much information publicly.

I would describe Twitter as a very public, social version of online chat. Instead of just sending messages between small groups of people in a private way, the messages are all shared publicly by default. This means that anyone can go and search over the things people have been chatting about - either by searching keywords or "following" certain people they know.

Like many others, I first started using Twitter in March 2007 at the South by SouthWest Interactive festival in Austin, TX (SXSW). Between blogging, Twitter and Facebook, I have pretty much stopped sending out blast emails when I find interesting things I want to share. Instead, just post them to whatever is the most appropriate place. 

If people like the kinds of things I send out, they can easily find them or subscribe to my feeds. Short links and thoughts get posted on Twitter. More private photos and personal communications go on Facebook, and longer explanations (such as this one) go to one of my various blogs. 

This is much easier for me, and reduces the email overload on everyone else. Plus I get the "social effects" of using public tools and inviting unexpected responses and synergies (more on this later).

One of the best descriptions I've seen of Twitter is from Common Craft:

Facebook will be making your fan pages public

I recently saw a notice in Facebook warning me that sometime soon the companies, products and people I'm a "fan" of in Facebook will be made public in search results. I'm not sure that I see the user benefit here, but the obvious marketing benefit is to raise awareness of fan pages and get more people to become fans of more things.

You can opt-out of this by unchecking the box in your privacy settings. But it looks like it will be turned on for everyone by default (and retroactively for existing users).

My first facebook virus - is this the end of the innocence?

I hear many people predict the demise of email for personal communications in favor of social networking. They say that Facebook makes it hard to get Inbox messages that aren't from real people, so there is much less spam. While this may be true in the short term, I think in the long term messaging within Facebook and social network will have the same fate as email and will become more and more like email over time.

I've already talked about how Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn today are very similar to AOL, Compuserv and Prodigy of 20 years ago - separate networks that are destined to be joined together with SMTP. Do you really want to have a bunch of different social network Inboxes to check? Do you think people who are messaging you will be able to figure out whether they should send a message to on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or regular old email? It's just going to get more and more confusing.

In addition to that, I've already seen many businesses setting up Facebook profiles as if they were people instead of using Pages the way they are supposed to. They do this so that they can send commercial messages to the users Inbox instead of sending Updates which show up in a less prominent spot. They know that more people will read their message if its grouped with the other personal messages instead of the other commercial messages. However, its poisoning the well - the act of putting the commercial messages in the Inbox reduces its value and as others start to do that it will become ineffective for everyone.

For example, here is a Facebook profile for a coffee shop in Austin that keeps showing up on my "People you may know" list. And here is a music venue. I'm sure its a nice coffee shop. Considering that they both have almost 500 friends, the strategy seems to be working. I've seen many other businesses do the same thing.

Yesterday I received my first trojan horse virus in my Facebook Inbox. It looked like it was coming from a friend of mine and linked to a YouTube video I should watch. But the link was funny looking and it was a friend I hadn't talked to in a while, so I was immediately suspicious. I bet that a lot of Facebook users won't be suspicious and will click on it.

Could this be the end of the innocence for Facebook?

SXSW Panel Picker is up - cast your vote!

Every year, SXSW puts up all of the great panel submissions and lets the community vote on which ones are best. They combine this data with their own advisory panel and staff to select the final panels.

At the very minimum, please show your support for me and OtherInbox by clicking here and
PLEASE VOTE 5 STARS FOR THESE 4 PANELS.
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/index/3/company:otherinbox

Here is a list of all the panels I'm involved in, of course I'd recommend them all!

Don't Declare Email Bankruptcy! Take Control of Your Inbox.
Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Your inbox is overflowing with spam, bacn, ham, email lists, Bcc's, and even a few emails that you actually want to respond to. Learn about new tools to help protect you from spam, prioritize your inbox, and save you time. Don't be a slave to your inbox!

Should I Build my Startup on Ruby on Rails? Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

You've heard Ruby on Rails is the hottest new technology for developing web applications. You've also heard of concerns about scalability and hiring talent. How do you separate the facts from the hype? Hear the business perspective on why to consider Ruby on Rails now and why you might want to wait and see. Get ready for a head-to-head comparison with PHP, Java and .NET!

Hackproofing Ruby-on-Rails Web Applications Mike Subelsky, OtherInbox.com

Ruby-on-Rails makes building web applications deceptively simple, and for most Rails startups, security is usually an afterthought. Through a live coding demonstration, I will demonstrate how thinking from the attacker's perspective can help you protect sensitive data and avoid the pain of a hacking incident.

Scaling Ruby-on-Rails Using Cloud Computing Mike Subelsky, OtherInbox.com

Skeptics argue that Ruby-on-Rails "can't scale". In this talk, I prove them wrong by demonstrating how cloud computing technologies have changed the game, enabling developers to use the expressiveness of Ruby and Rails to build high-performance applications that scale easily. Will include a case study and live scaling demonstration.

Email Deliverability Secrets from Deliverability.com Dennis Dayman, Eloqua & Joshua Baer, Datran Media

Okay so you have read all the white papers about email deliverability and you've got the basics covered - but some of your email still goes to the spam folder. Learn about advanced techniques for segmenting by IP address, building your email reputation, removing spamtraps, and more. Find out how to get your problems priority access from ISPs like Hotmail or Yahoo. Plus we'll take 3 volunteers from the audience and help to diagnose your deliverability challenges on the spot!

Spend More & Pay Less: How to Create a Great Company Culture Brett Hurt, Bazaarvoice & Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Learn from successful entrepreneurs the do's and don'ts of building a company culture. Take home a list of specific ideas you can implement to make your employees perform better and increase their loyalty. What's the rationale behind providing free drinks, catered meals or free cab rides? How much strategy and financial information is appropriate to share with the entire company? Can employees work from home? How do you celebrate your successes? Find out what really works and what is just a waste of time and money.

Hire an Employee, Hire a Local Contractor, or Outsource it Overseas? Steve Bell, ShangBy.com & Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Should you hire employees in-house, work with local contractors, or outsource overseas? Learn the overall pros and cons as well as the specific exceptions. Hear personal success stories and horror stories from entrepreneurs who have extensive experience building products in-house and overseas. At the end, we'll take specific examples from the crowd and give recommendations on how to proceed and who to work with.

So You Want to be an Angel Investor? Hall T. Martin, Central Texas Angel Network & Joshua Baer, Austinpreneur

Wishing you were an early investor in Facebook? Have some extra cash? Or maybe you just love talking to startups? Whatever your reason is, Angel Investing can be fun and financially rewarding. As software and hardware costs go down, many startups don't need as much money and Angel investors become more attractive than venture capitalists. Hear from a panel of experienced Angels to learn basic strategy, evaluate opportunities, negotiate terms and find other investors to partner with.

The New Inbox Mark Schmulen, NutshellMail & Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Everyone knows that email is the killer app. But we get so much email that we're in danger of information overload - and its only going to get worse. New paradigms for email are evolving to help prioritize the email you want and ignore the email you don't want. Hear from the innovators in Inbox management about what to expect in the years to come.

Bootstrap Your Startup Bijoy Goswami, bijoygoswami.com & Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Dell, Oracle, Microsoft and Virgin were bootstrap companies that were able to get started without raising traditional venture capital. Bootstrapping is not just capital efficient, it has many other positive influences on your business and your potential to profit from its success. Learn why you should consider the bootstrap method and ask questions of a successful bootstrap entrepreneur.

And here are some other friends doing panels that are also worth voting for:

Widgets and Mashups - Enablers or Risky Business?
David Altounian, iTaggit Inc.

Time-to-market demands on web developers are leading to the creation of widgets, mashups, and embed code to add functionality to sites. This panel will explore the options, benefits, and risks of using third party sites and modules.

Dancing With Zombies: Monetizing the 'Old Media' Graveyard Matt Cohen, OneSpot

With online content exploding, the “old media” deathwatch has become a popular spectator sport. But with large financial war chests, millions of readers, and a burning need to re-invent their business models, big media brands aren’t joining the departed anytime soon. They’re just turning into something new. This panel will contemplate the old media metamorphosis and discuss why these brands will offer substantial syndication and revenue opportunities to third party online publishers in the years ahead.

Blog Revenue Strategies for the Web Discovery Era Matt Cohen, OneSpot

What will it mean to be a professional blogger three years from now? As the Web becomes more intelligent, bloggers must be prepared to evolve their publishing, syndication and monetization strategies. A better collective understanding of individual consumers, “smarter” content aggregation tools and new models for content distribution will transform the current landscape, creating new opportunities for market leadership and revenue generation. This panel will examine the major trends at work, and dig deeply into these new opportunities for the online publisher.

PR for Pirates Jeremy Bencken, BuzzStream

Doing your own PR? How to use the latest tools and techniques for finding the right bloggers & reporters, researching their contact info, writing a great pitch, and conducting highly personalized outreach, without making it your full-time job.

The Whole Business Web - Making the Shift Jon Lebkowsky, Social Web Strategies

The accelerating emergence of Web 2.0 and the new converged digital social media enables business to move all its processes, not just sales/marketing/PR, out of the deep-hierarchy low-velocity world of conventional mass-based operations, up into the high-knowledge high-velocity network structures of the Web, creating a whole new platform in which the old tradeoffs of quality vs. speed vs. cost no longer apply. This panel explores how the Whole Business Web is emerging, and how you can make the shift now.

Making Green Visible Jon Lebkowsky, Social Web Strategies

Sustainability requires informed buyers. The accelerating convergence of real and virtual is opening vast new potentials for us to make the “green” visible in every purchase by increasing the interaction between the product and the buyer, making the product’s true history and composition transparent. This panel explores these trends and the globally emerging new technologies and businesses working to make this happen.

Showtime -- Bringing the Co-Web to a Screen Near You! Andrew Donoho, IBM

The Co-Web, the collaborative, media converged web, is upon us. Showtime uses Web 2.0 technologies (OpenAJAX, XMPP and RTP/RTSP) to build a Co-Web page where we all interact on the same data at the same time, see the same context and make better decisions as a result.

Measuring the Health of Your Online Community: Metrics That Don't Suck Miles Sims, Small World Labs

There is a lot of buzz today around measuring & defining community health. This panel will focus on the right way to work WITH your community to measure success and make sure value is being provided for both sides.

In the Cloud: Massively Parallel Computing for Everyone Mason Hale, OneSpot

"Machine learning" once implied PhD's and racks of servers. No more. With projects like EC2, Hadoop and Mahout, and accessible texts lining bookstore shelves, advanced distributed computing techniques are going mainstream. After introducing the basics of map/reduce and collaborative filtering we will ponder the possibilities of web-scale computing for everyone.

Martha Stewart-izing Your Site with Rich Complementary Content Steve Waters, OneSpot

Recipe for Vertical Media Destination Site: Place high volumes of exceptional content in bowl. Add 2 cups of affinity focus. Stir in 1 cup of SEO flavoring for richness. Bake at 500 degrees all day. Serve hot. Repeat indefinitely. Until now, only fabulously wealthy master chefs could make this dish, because only they could afford the staff and tools necessary for its successful creation. This panel will explore the emerging content syndication trends and technologies that are allowing the rest of us to turn our humble sites into vertical media destinations. Felony conviction not included.

Lessons Learned from the Open Source Software Neelan Choksi, SpringSource

Open Source Software, once considered revolutionary, has increasingly been accepted as mainstream. In this panel of some of the most experienced open source leaders and analysts, we will explore what has made open source successful and what lessons all businesses can learn from this paradigm shifting technology.

Making Money with Royalties and Revenue Share Agreements
Lou Ellman, RoyaltyZone

Technology companies often enter licensing or partnership agreements to target new markets and increase revenue. The panel will discuss common licensing agreement strategies, keys for success, and effective ways for companies to track and monitor agreement performance.

Great introductory video about Twitter

A few weeks ago I came across this entertaining, three minute introduction to Twitter, created by Common Craft. It does a great job explaining the benefits of Twitter and also uses this funky, low-tech production technique with a video camera and paper cutouts that is innovative and fun to watch.

If you have heard about Twitter but haven't started tweeting yet, I highly recommend you take a look!

Unfortunately, they aren't taking on any custom projects right now. If you know of anyone who is capable of producing a video like that please let me know because I want to make an introductory video for OtherInbox.

Nice WSJ hits for Chirp and Minggl

Congratulations to Eve Philips at Chirp (Trilogy University 99) and Dewey Gaedcke from Minggl (Austin-based startup) for getting mentioned in a recent Wall Street Journal article about social aggregators. Christopher Lawton interviewed me for this article as well but none of my comments made it in.

Learn about private-label social networks at the Social Media Club meeting this Thursday

On Thursday June 19 we're hosting the Austin Social Media Club meeting at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices (third Thursday of every month, 8th floor of the Omni Hotel at 7th and Brazos downtown).

Sam Eder from Small World Labs will be talking about private-label social networks:

You’ve all heard of FaceBook and MySpace, but do you realize that there are social networks springing up all around you? Sam Eder from Small World Labs will be presenting the landscape of private-label social networks and case studies of how companies have created their own social networks to increase customer retention and attract new customers.

I'm looking to hire a product manager in the social media space for Datran Media as well as Facebook app developers for Datran Media and OtherInbox. If you know of anyone who might be a good fit, please encourage them to attend and introduce themselves to me.

Same Script, Different Cast -- How Social Networking Can Learn From E-mail

eMarketingandCommerce.com just published my article about How Social Networking Can Learn From E-mail. This was based on my earlier blog posting to Deliverability.com and edited by Carla Vicens.

Join me at Interactive Austin on June 19

I'll be speaking on a panel at 11:00am called "Managing Your Digital Landscape: Success Stories" along with
Andy Meadows, CEO, Live Oak 360; Tony Schum, Director of Economic Development, Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce; and Sam Decker, CMO, BazaarVoice.

Looks like a great lineup with lots of good friends participating including Dave Evans, Bill Leake, Jon Lebkowsky, Lorin Rivers and Michael Wilson.

My personal portfolio of companies is well represented! BazaarVoice, Datran Media, OneSpot and Small World Labs.

Will the real "Joshua Baer" please stand up?

For all of my childhood, I was the only Joshua Baer.

Sometime in high school, my cousin sent me a picture of the sign in front of Joshua Baer & Co, an art dealer in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I realized that I was not the only Joshua Baer in the world. My innocence was shattered.

10 years later I set up a Google alert for "Joshua Baer". Except for the occasional message about the art dealer, I only received alerts about myself.

Then last year I joined Facebook and was surprised to see 26 other Joshua Baers! From their pictures and school info, they all seem to be much younger than me - most graduated after 2000. LinkedIn shows 5 other Joshua Baers. I can't figure out how to find Joshua Baers on MySpace.

Are my Google alerts doomed to be polluted with news about other Joshua Baers?

I have joshuabaer.com and joshbaer.com and @baer.name. I have joshuabaer on twitter and on MySpace and on Linkedin. But how long can I keep it up?

Will the real "Joshua Baer" please stand up?

Austin Social Media Club meeting - 60+ attendees!

Tonight we hosted the Austin Social Media Club meeting at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices. More than 60 people showed up to hear Jon Lebkowsky and David Armistad discuss "The Headless Organization". It was an engaging discussion and I found it particularly relevant to the MailThink conference I'm organizing in September.

I'm hosting the Austin Social Media Club meeting at Datran Media on Thursday, May 15

On Thursday May 15 I'm hosting the Austin Social Media Club meeting at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices (fourth Tuesday third Thursday of every month, 8th floor of the Omni Hotel at 7th and Brazos downtown).

We'll have free pizza (thanks Datran!) at 6pm and things will officially start at 6:30pm and wrap up at 8pm.

Jon Lebkowsky and David Armistead from Social Web Strategies will be talking about The Headless Organization:

Throughout the history of the Internet, we’ve seen an explosion of new, relatively frictionless communication channels, broad access to the means of media production, and a blurring of the distinctions between professional and personal media. We’ve seen an ascendance of many-to-many communications resulting in “out of control” communications, flatter hierarchies, and the emergence of new, agile forms of social and political organization. The rise of networked communications and the appearance of robust platforms for social networking has been accompanied by an increasing tendency for groups to self-organize — and the proliferation of entities referred to as leaderless or “headless” organizations. In May’s SMC presentation, we’ll consider how these headless organizations have evolved, discuss some examples, and talk about challenges, limits, and potential future developments.

I'm looking to hire a product manager in the social media space for Datran Media as well as Facebook app developers for Datran Media and OtherInbox. If you know of anyone who might be a good fit, please encourage them to register for the meeting and introduce themselves to me.