Speaking At Wasatch Business Conference 2008

Quick note that I will be presenting at the Wasatch Business Conference on October 23rd. If you haven't heard of WABCON, please visit the website here. So what is WABCON:

WABCON stands for the Wasatch Business Conference, a day-long event designed to educate business owners and leaders. Experts in the fields of technology, marketing, management, and finance join together in offering 50-minute seminars developed specifically to make your business more successful. Held in October each year, WABCON allows you to select pre-designed tracks by topic or create an educational track that meets your own specific needs.

At this conference I'll be presenting on the topic of Understanding Web2.0. That is a pretty broad topic, and I'll be covering just a few of the common Web2.0 features.

If you want to attend I have some discount codes (I was only given 10, so first come first served) that will give you a substantial reduction in the conference price. Please send me a request through the contact form here.

See you at WABCON.

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Announcing PodCampSLC - January 2008

Hello everyone, well, you knew it was bound to happen. PodCamp has come to Salt Lake City, Utah. On Saturday January 26th, 2008, at the Salt Lake Main Library building, 210 East 400 South, we will hold the first PodCamp.

The web site address is www.podcampslc.org. You can confirm your registration at the Upcoming.org site.

If you would be interested in helping with the organization of this event, please send an email to podcampslc AT gmail.com.

We still have a lot to do and need a lot of help. Please consider volunteering. We also need people to present, so if you're a new media guru or RockStar, please let us know what you can share.

There are also sponsorship opportunities. We would love to share those with you as well.

PodCamp isn't just about podcasting! If you're interested in blogging, social media, social networking, podcasting, video on the net, if you're a podsafe musician (or want to be), or just someone curious about new media, then please join us -- and bring a friend or colleague.

The event will be free of charge to the public but we would really appreciate advance registration so we know how many people will be attending.

We have also created a Facebook group where we will communicate a lot of the activities of the PodCamp. If your not a member of Facebook we encourage you to join. It's a great opportunity to connect with others who have the same interest as you.

Please blog about this event as often as possible. Spread the word. Invite your blog readers, your podcast listeners and your videocast watchers. We want everyone to attend, from beginners to pros.

There will be more information to follow.

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Facebook Pages Get You Noticed

Facebook recently launched a new feature to their fairly closed site called Pages. Everyone is hung up on the advertising part of pages. But, a savvy networker can create a page as an external profile. Unless you are a Facebook member you really can't see much. But now with a Page you can create something everyone can see. Let's try it out:



As you can see from the image above, when you try and access my Facebook profile you just get a login page. Not real cool but that's how it is. Now, if you create a Page in your Facebook account you can have some public information exposed including a picture and some summary information:



The area in red to the right is where I think Facebook should allow for additional content. When you are logged into Facebook there are several sections of details.

The bottom area in red is where you are able to provide some type of summary information. A web site link, a description, a mission statement and product information. You could however set your page up to provide links to several of your web sites, a little about you and maybe what you do for a living.

This isn't a perfect solution but at least someone can see who you are without actually being a member. There is one draw back to this though, no vanity URL, mine looks like this, http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=6351869262, and I'm not sure how search engine friendly that is. You could do some type of domain forwarding like profile.digitalthom.com and point to this page but it seems like a lot of work.

Here is a link to iJustine's Facebook page. Here is her blog post about it.

Oh, and what would be really cool, is to put an invitation to join Facebook on your profile page. You really can't get the full experience unless you're a member. And being a member of Facebook isn't a bad thing.

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Excellent Utah Facebook Developer Garage

Yesterday was the second Utah Facebook Developer Garage and we had a decent turnout. We talked about a couple new features of the Facebook API, Mobile capabilities and the new Invitation screen.

I want to thank Tim Stay of Know More Media for letting us use his conference room at the last minute. We had munchies, discussed the viability of Facebook and Social network applications, and future Garage events. I think fun was had by all.

I posted a couple of pics on the Facebook group, but I also posted them here for those not a member of Facebook.

Also, thanks to Jess Stay for making sure this whole thing happened.

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Facebook Opens API To Mobile Developers

This is a very exciting addition to the Facebook developer platform. One major application I'm writing will definitely take advantage of these new features, specifically SMS. I use Facebook via my mobile device most of the time. I'm exciting this new addition to the API will bring richer applications to market.

Reading more about the SMS feature of the API it seems there is a throttle on the number of messages that can be sent out. That makes sense seeing how there is a cost to send out messages. However, I can also see this is as a drawback if you are writing an application and need to send out notifications each time an action occurs.

There seems to be 3 main parts of the SMS API.

1. User opt-in


2. Design features


3. User opt-out

One really cool option is a user can interact with an application via SMS. I assume this means I can send commands back to an application and have it perform some type of function. It will remain to be seen if this can be a feature that is usable or not.

The next part of the API is access to the profile and canvas areas. This gives mobile developers the ability to make mobile applications act more like the full web based version. And if I'm not mistaken, you can write one application that can be used via the web or on a mobile device. That is very cool.

As a budding Facebook application developer I hope to take advantage of these features. I hope there is more to come regarding the mobile API.

Link to the Facebook Platform for Mobile.

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Private buyout of Utah based online genealogy Company

This is a very interesting story I picked up from TechCrunch today. Local Utah company The Generations Network, parent company of Ancestry.com and MyFamily.com and other sites, sold a majority interest to Spectrum Equity Investors. Good for those guys.

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Is this the first Twitter Ads?

Everyone has noticed the increased Tip: usage on individual tweets coming from Twitter. However, just a few minutes ago, I got this:

Has it finally happened? The text says "If you like twitter you'll love ITConversations.com!". I'm pretty sure ITConversations has nothing to do with Twitter.

Anyone else seen something other than "you look *good*"?

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Create Short Custom URL’s With doiop.com

doiop.com is an interesting site that let's you create small URL's similar to tinyurl.com, only you get to choose the keyword. This gives you the opportunity to choose a vanity word for you links. Only problem I can see long term is running out of real keywords. The site doesn't look to be protected from spammers, meaning I could run a program to just kick out a bunch of keywords to spam pages. But for now it's kinda cool. Check it out.

Learned about this site from twitter.com/dmode

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How Flickr Did it Right

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of sites that will let you upload your photos and cerate online photos albums. But in my opinion, Flickr has done it right.

Several factors went into my decision to go with Flickr over say PicasaWeb or any of the others, and that was price and the API. The price for a Pro account is so cheap, something just above $2 a month, for unlimited uploads, is insane. No one comes close. The cheapest of PicasaWeb Pro accounts costs $20 a year for only 6GB of space. Some might ask, why would you need more than 6GB or even 10GB. My answer is because Flickr gives me UNLIMITED for $25 a year, and that's just better.

I've started uploading all my photos to Flickr, and creating Sets to distinguish photos for an event. Flickr also has Tagging down. You can have pretty much an unlimited number of tags for a photos or sets or groups. This makes it easy to search for one of your photos or any number of public photos.

The interface on Flickr is easy and clean. It's not cluttered by crazy ads, and that's surprising seeing how it's a Yahoo! property and I don't think Yahoo! knows how to keep in your face ads at bay. It's the reason I hate their web based email client, too many in your face ads. But the navigation on Flickr is clean and easy, and you can modify it to look anyway your want. I hope Yahoo! keeps their hands off Flickr.

If you don't use Flickr I would encourage you to look at it. They have a free account and a Pro account. I have the Pro account and its been worth every penny. Flickr is stable, has an API and several options for managing photos from your desktop. The only thing I wish Flickr had was a better mobile management tool.

Thanks Chris.

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BlogRush is pushing the envelope

Whether or not you use or even like BlogRush, I'm getting a noticeable increase in the amount of traffic my blog has been getting ever since I signed up. There have been some problems with cheaters, as happens with services like this, but it seems to be drawing readers to my blog which I really like. BlogRush is attempting to improve the service and minimize abusers.

In order to use BlogRush you have to install a plug-in on your blog. At first I didn't like that, and pretty much I still don't, but that's what's required so its on my blog. I hope they come up with something not as obtrusive as this large graphic box they have now. It would be cool to just have the headlines. It would fit into my blog a lot nicer than this big huge monstrosity, and probably load much faster.

At the moment it seem to be living up to the hype. I'm not into all the backlash that has taken place. If I can increase the number of reader by a few hundred I'm all good.

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Facebook application development and living in Utah

Jesse Stay asked if he was the only Facebook developer in Utah. And one of the comments he got on his blog asked "why is that important?" The statement was framed around the notion that anyone anywhere can develop applications, why is geographical locations important.

From my perspective its mostly for support and networking. When I am looking to refer work to someone I naturally look to my close local associates first. It's just natural. If no one there can help then I look to my extended network. I've just always done this. I hope my network in return does that for me.

But after having a short conversation with Jesse about writing Facebook application it appears the number of people actually doing it is small. Sure there are a lot of applications available on Facebook, but honestly, there are a lot of duplicate "I can do better" applications.

So yeah Jesse, I live Utah and I develop Facebook applications.

If you're looking for someone to write an application that integrates with Facebook, you can contact me here.

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Technology That Empowers Me

I'm around technology all day. I have a laptop, a PDA, several desktops, cameras and so on. But there are a few pieces of technology that empower me. My T-Mobile MDA empowers me the most. It gives me the ability to be connected just about anywhere.

1. I have mobile Internet. This allows me to check my email account via GMail, track my calendar with GCal, read my RSS feeds with Google Reader, visit web sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. However a majority of web sites are not PDA friendly and are useless to view. This is also true for video. Trying to stream video is nearly impossible. Great services such as vTap are starting to change this.

2. My MDA has a built in MP3 player, Windows Media Player, that allows me to listen to all the music I want, and because I have a large storage card I can have dozens of songs available at all times. I can even watch videos, but I can't watch many because of quality issues. But this isn't really an issue for me because I don't watch a lot of video on my MDA.

3. The ability to stay in touch with my teenagers via SMS is invaluable.

4. View PDF and Office documents. One of the reasons I decided to go with an MDA instead of the Dash is the ability to edit Office documents. I spend a lot of time writing Word documents and tracking projects in Excel. It's nice to be able to use the file on my MDA and on my Laptop.

5. I've recently started storing more photos on my MDA. I used to have a whole bunch of pictures in my wallet, but it didn't seem as cool as being able to show more recent photos of the Family, events and just plain cool pics. So I took the photos out of my wallet and put them on the MDA.

There are more reasons my MDA empowers me. One I hope will give me even more utility is Skype. It's shaky on my MDA, but I know the technology will get better. This opens up a whole new world including mobile podcasting. Now if there was a mobile version of Audacity I wouldn't really need a computer any more.

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Mobile video with vTap

I picked up a link today from Steve Rubel on a service called vTap from Veveo. I'm always looking for new technology for my T-Mobile MDA, especially video. vTap is a video service that basically streams from their server to your mobile device through their application. It's not web based its actually installed on the mobile device. I didn't really care for that, but if it made watching Video easier I was willing to try.

After downloading and installing the application I immediately started clicking on all the videos they had available. Problem; none of the videos would run. Some error kept popping up. I thought woah, this can't be good. First impressions in this game mean a lot. I could just as easily uninstalled the app and moved on.

Coincidentally there is a feedback link on the menu and I thought, cool, I'll email the problem and see what happens. It wasn't long before I got a response back from their Customer Support. The person asked me if I would be willing to help them figure this out and I said sure. After giving them the details of my device and the error, I received a message telling me they had discovered a problem with the T-Moble 3G network and they were working on a fix. I was told I could use WiFi in the mean time, and yes, the WiFi part worked fine.

The next morning when I checked my email I was excited to see an email from vTap telling me they had resolved the problem and would I mind downloading the latest version and giving it a go. No problem, I downloaded and installed. Clicked on a video from the list and it worked. Videos were streaming and it was great.

My first impressions of the video were not too good. The quality was so bad I couldn't make out any text on the screen and the whole frame was sorta blurry. So again I fired off an email to vTap to see if there was something I could do. This was my fault. I didn't spend enough time looking at all the settings and was directed by vTap to increase the quality of the video through the configuration screen. Once again, problem solved.

In the end, video isn't very fast on the 3G network. It wasn't bad, but there was a lot of buffering during preview. vTap said it was a good idea to maybe pause the video when first starting for a few seconds to let enough of it buffer before pressing play. That worked most of the time. But this isn't their problem, it's a problem with the network. And the higher the quality the worst it got.

vTap has some potential. I sure appreciated the quick response to my problem. I'm not real sure what the end game is for them. You can search for videos by key words but I'm not sure how large the database of videos is. I'm not sure if it just goes out to the web and uses your key words and sends back a list of videos? I need to find out more, Mostly because I may look at this service for delivering videos for PropertyVOX.com.

What are your thoughts on this type of technology? Check out vTap today.

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Get my Tumblr theme

I use Tumblr as my Lifestream tool of choice. I'm making my theme available for download. You'll have to load the text into the Custom theme area. You will also want to update the location of the images and maybe add your own menu options.

Let me know if there are any problems with this, and I would also like to know if you use it. Thanks.

With background image: download
Without background image: download
With white background: download

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Jott takes voice translation to the next level

I received an email from Jott.com today announcing several new services for their Voice recognition service. Some of these include translation and posting to Twitter, your own Wordpress blog and Jaiku.

Here are just a few of the really cool new features:

• Jott Folders (basically categories)
• Status alert, sort of like Twitter's "what are you doing?"
• Jott Express, a desktop application allowing you to send Jotts from the computer, using Adobe AIR technology

There are obviously some issues you may run into using Jott. It's not 100% accurate. Depending on how fast you talk or your accent, you may find what you spoke not exactly what Jott translated. This could be especially frustrating when posting your Jotts to Twitter.

I did a test post on my SciFi blog and it worked just as I expected. And the really cool thing was the audio link that was posted along with the translated text. Very cool. Can you say mobile podcasting?

I've used Jott for some time and found that it works about 90% reliable. I speak clearly and slowly, normal actually, and it seems to work fine. Give it a spin today.

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SplashCast goes Facebook

If you're a SplashCast and Facebook user *bling* you're in the money. By adding the SplashCast application to your profile, you can build media content right in Facebook using video, audio and images. Check it out.

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Review: I’m on LinkedIn Now what???

I've had the opportunity to review the new book from Jason Alba, founder of the wildly successful JibberJobber.com, called I'm on LinkedIn Now What???

This is the first book I've read which focused solely on LinkedIn. When I first found out Jason was writing a book about LinkedIn I wasn't real confident it could be pulled off. I did a quick search of sites and other resources on LinkedIn to see what was already out there and if there seemed to be a need.

I have to say I've read the pre-release version of the book twice. I wanted to make sure I understood the premise of the book, what Jason's direction was and whether it hit the desired mark.

This book is definitely for someone who is just joining LinkedIn and isn't very familiar with other networking services. LinkedIn has a specific purpose and it may take a n00b (that is gamer speak for newbie) some time to figure out how to make LinkedIn work for them.

What you will get is a solid list of ideas and recommendations for using LinkedIn right away. There are plenty of suggestions, guides to the various sections of the application, and where you should focus most of your attention.

I really appreciated the recommendation to be patient and build your network, and not be tempted to connect with every invitation that is sent to you. I admit I made that mistake early on because I didn't really understand what LinkedIn could be.

Jason covers searching pretty thoroughly. It's important to understand how this feature works. It will really make your LinkedIn experience better when you know what you can find.

The book could stand to use a few more visual examples from successful LinkedIn users in the key areas. For example, I would have really liked to see some solid profiles. Personally I think this is where most people fall short on LinkedIn. They worry so much about past and current employment they forget about the profile. I'm guilty of that.

Overall this is a great book. I think Jason did an excellent job. I would recommend it to anyone who is just starting to build a LinkedIn network or for someone who has been a member for some time but is just now seeing the advantages LinkedIn provides.

You can visit my LinkedIn profile here.

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Speaking at the Utah New Media Conference

I will have an opportunity to speak at the Utah New Media Conference on October 18th. The topic will be Podcasting. I will be sharing the stage with Lorri Randle of MediaJoltz, who will speak on Videocasting.

I will share more on the event as it approaches. I do know that the topics covered will be Blogging, Podcasting/Videocasting, Social Media (Facebook, MySpace) and Monetizing your website.

Make plans to be there. Visit the conference web site here.

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Facebook Applications zuPort for Flickr and YouTube

If you use Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, you will want to try the Facebook applications zuPort: Flickr and zuPort: YouTube.

I was looking for a way to share my Flickr photos without having to upload them to Facebook, or send a Friend to Flickr just to view the pictures. zuPort does all I wanted. New photos show in my mini-feed, and if you click on one of the thumbnails in the feed, it takes you to a viewer in Facebook, not Flickr. Seamless in my view.

zuPort: YouTube accomplishes the same thing, seamlessly integrating your YouTube videos into Facebook. It's great not having to leave Facebook just to view content. That's what makes Facebook applications so cool.

Try these applications out. They are one of the reasons I continue to use Facebook.

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Moving my feeds to a Life Stream

Just like Steve Rubel, I've been creating a Life Stream. It's actually more like a big bucket that collected all the various RSS feeds where I submit content. This includes Flickr, my blog, Twitter, Facebook and del.icio.us. I have others, such as blip.tv, but I'm not sure I include them all.

I want to be part of all the really cool social networks, but I also wanted to give everyone who cares a place to get all of my various posts. Thanks to Tumblr and Feed Burner, I've pretty much solved the problem.

The only real drawback is Tumblr doesn't allow for comments. I'm ok with this because Tumblr's not really an interactive tool it's a Super Aggregator. If you want to comment on my pictures, click through to them. If you want to comment on my latest blog post, click through to it.

Tumblr also provides a mobile version of your site. If you go to www.thomallen.com/mobile on your PDA browser you get to see a mobile friendly version. I can also publish to my Tumblr with my mobile device. Very cool.

Now I have one RSS feed, but the ability to send people where they want to go. Steve mentions using Tumblr for a specific feed or subdomains. For example, you could go subscribe just to my Flickr photos at photos.thomallen.com. This would point to my Tumblr that just displays the photos. You could do this for Twitter or any other number of sites that publishes its own feed.

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