I’m not a fan of having posts on my blog that just point to other content but this is an exception that I must do for the grandmother who owns Chariot, a 1964 Mercury Comet! NBC’s Flash player also allowed me to create an HTLM snippet that I could edit the video timeline to get straight to the story. I also tend to avoid Adobe Flash, iPhone/Touch mobile users, here’s a link to the same story on YouTube.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Online social networking sites could solve many problems plaguing information dissemination and communications when disaster strikes, according to a report from US researchers in a recent issue of the International Journal of Emergency Management. - via:
The role of online social networks in crisis communications.
It is fairly obvious to most Disaster Recovery Planners (DRP) that a mobile phone is a must have communication device for participants responding to an emergency. Today’s smart phones have become the Swiss Army knife of communication functionality with voice, texting, photo, video and GPS capability. Their ability to connect to the Internet also makes them a powerful reconnaissance tool.
Photograph by: Larry Wong, Edmonton Journal
Smart phones are especially valuable in gathering realtime status updates during emergencies from eyewitnesses. I have two specific examples of crisis situations where I used social media web sites on both my laptop and iPhone. The first was a major hail storm last summer in Edmonton. Extreme weather events are not that uncommon and are a good opportunity to gain experience on how Twitter provides realtime updates. This includes the ability to get very localized information on incidents that are occurring like flooded intersections and downed trees.
Hostage-taking incident over
The other was during the WCB hostage taking in Edmonton. My building is across the street and police cruisers were literally cutting me off at the pass as I got nearer to my place of work. I was not able to go to work that day but through following Twitter and tweeting questions I was able to get information quickly on what was happening at the scene. I was also impressed by the impromptu Flickr photo stream that was created.
Business Resumption Planners (BRP) must consider the impact of a disaster beyond their place of work. Along with traditional media such as television and radio, the value of gathering realtime information from this new paradigm of crowdsourced reporters should be a documented tactic within the incorporated communication plan. When disaster strikes, you want as many boots on the ground as possible!
Like a real stock market, your stock price on Empire Avenue is affected by others buying and selling your shares. But you are also spreading your online influence when you write a blog post, update your Facebook status, post something on Twitter, and so on. The more you do online, the greater your influence and the faster your stock will rise! - via Empire Avenue.
Have you ever wondered what your social capital is worth? Well now you can find out thanks to some ex Bioware employees who have created a social networking web site where you are the commodity.
The site is currently in beta so you have to apply and wait a bit for an email letting you know that you can start selling yourself. Of course you get to buy stock in others as well. The site developers have some top secret algorithms to measure your quality social activity on the Internet on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and your blog if you have one.
I hope that after the honeymoon (beta) of the buy and sell game is finished, that the people with true social capital rise to the top. That’s where I expect you will find my stock. 
Invest EA-SYM: RB today!
Bloom has already listed almost two dozen large companies who have been stealth testers of the mysterious device including eBay, who claim to have already saved $100,000 and such perennial sustainability favorites as Google and WalMart.
via Is Bloom Energy’s Fuel Cell Miracle For Real? |Triple Pundit.
Bloom Box: Bloom Energy Powers Your Whole House with a Box
When presented an email to a link for a one hour voice over PowerPoint video I am quickly tempted to say forget it! One of elearning’s advantages is to break up a video throughout your work day. I like to take in 15 minute chunks and pause then resume the video presentation later. This is what I did for:
Practical Leadership Development for Peak Performance from CSTD National Office on Vimeo.
On Friday, February 12, 2010, Jim Clemmer presented a free webinar entitled Practical Leadership Development for Peak Performance. Jim does like to use the buzzwords and I found that alone kept the presentation partially amusing. There are some interesting insights here and my biggest takeaway from it was the soft skills. The human emotional side of an organization and the effort required by leaders to foster and deal with the people issues and not just process and technology.
The reason that you want to use delicious.com is so that you can find all the web sites you have bookmarked without having them saved on a specific computer. They will follow you on the Internet no matter what computer you are on, where you are at and, if you are working, are not tied to your current place of employment. Delicious becomes your life and career references web site.
Delicious is a social bookmarking web application and is one of the most underrated Web 2.0 social media web applications currently available. This is one of the best examples of developing an application with a single purpose that is made 1.7 billion times more powerful because it has been socialized. The 1.7 billion represents the total number of Internet users as of this writing that have the potential of contributing to the power of social bookmarking. Computing power has experienced a quantum leap in capacity due to the human factor. At this point Skynet’s exponential decision making is powered by you and me.
Social bookmarking’s hidden power is the use of shared tags. Tags are known as metadata or data about data. The reason tagging is powerful is that you can then reference web sites based on more than one subject or any topic in any order. Traditional methods of sorting and finding information electronically is through the use of file folders. So you would create a hierarchal file structure such as:
C:\HR\Budget\2010\
With this approach, you have to remember that you are in the HR (Human Resources) department, looking for budget data from the year 2010. The same names can be used with tags but you can find the same information starting from a different perspective. I’m looking for this year’s HR budget information. But what are the best tags to use? Librarian’s will tell you that the Dublin Core of Metadata definitions is the set of standards to name and define these tag elements. This is known as Taxonomy. Social media web sites such as delicious have changed the game. Folksonomy is the primary directive of delicious. When you save a bookmark using delicious the most popular tag names will be suggested to you based on what other people have already used to tag the same web site within delicious. The most popular metadata tags become the Darwinism approach to establishing the standard.
Starting Over
But like many other social media web users, I have found that I stopped using it. I have no real good excuse for not using delicious other than I have not developed the behaviour of social bookmarking into a productive habit. So like many other social media tools that I’m trying to master I have decided to start over. This time I’m not going to frustrate my social friends and delete my account. Not that it would matter on delicious because I have no fans in my network. This could be one reason that delicious use drops off; the social aspect is not front and centre. What I have decided to do instead, which I’ll probably regret when I go looking for a past web site that I have visited, is to delete all of my over 120 bookmarks. I have done this in order to share my journey with you as I rediscover delicious all over again!
Delicious is a great social web site for people who are new to social media or worried about sharing their personal information. There are only three public settings in delicious; name, email address and web site.
delicious Edit Public Profile
You do not have to share any of these details about who you are. Once you have set up a delicious user account I highly recommend that you do not bookmark every web site that you visit. You want to bookmark web sites that are more reference in nature that you want to return to from time to time. There are other methods to bookmark news related web sites. More on both of these two topics in a future blog post. So I’m encouraging you to set up an account and become my fan at: http://delicious.com/Robert.Burwood
I am often associated with facebook. The perception is that I’m always on facebook, that I love facebook. Of course there are some elements of truth to this. I approach facebook like all social networking sites that I use; as a collaboration platform for sharing ideas and learning from others. But facebook’s image still inhibits people within my physical social circles from going there. Their reasons, which I respect, mostly centre around personal privacy.
Latterly I have discovered a way to expand my social circles by inviting those same people to connect with me on LinkedIn. I like to refer to LinkedIn as the “socially acceptable social network”! Like many other Social Media web sites I have tried, I have created and then deleted my account more than once. Early on I did not find the platform rich enough and few people truly within my close working circles were on LinkedIn.
Prompted by a recent conference on Social Media I attended I decided to go back and I am glad I have. One aspect that I like is the richness of the LinkedIn iPhone application and the site design itself seems more pleasing to me now. The biggest excitement though is getting none believers of Social Media engaged and the opportunity to demonstrate the power of collaboration within these platforms. I believe they are less guilt ridden if caught at work surfing LinkedIn. It is after all, a professional social network!
I hope they will discover over time that common elements such as status updates can be as functional or as frivolous as on facebook. I’ll be pleased when the big “aha” occurs and they discover that the Social Media power users have their status updates interconnected and realize that I am not on facebook nearly as much as they think I am. 99% of my status updates are tweets so now I can share an idea with more of my social circles. It will just be explaining why I typed #yeg that will be the tricky part!
