Since the recent Delicious upgrade, that service has had some issues.

First, that daily blog post stopped working for me entirely until I looked through the Delicious documentation and learned I now had to run the Postalicious plugin to continue making that feature work with WordPress. No biggie, I installed it.

Postalicious gave me a lot of new options for configuring that daily blog post.  I experimented with them. One option I liked was the ability to change the default title supplied to that post. Also, I temporarily changed my posting interval to hourly (so I’d show more posts with fewer links each), but decided I didn’t like that so today I switched it back to daily.

But today, I’m wondering whether Delicious has stopped working with Postalicious. Today’s links post is back to running the standard head Delicious supplied before: “Links for [DATE] (delicious.com)” I’m not happy with that heading, but right now I don’t seem to have the ability to change it.

I checked the Delicious support forum, where users are discussing the changes to this service. I noticed this interesting post from Britta of Delicious, regarding their future strategy for this service…

“This is a tough feature, with a disproportionate amount of complexity in it compared to it being a smallish part of Delicious (and used by a smallish number of people). It produces output that gets interpreted by several different kinds of endpoints (WordPress, Movable Type, etc.) – all with their own unexpected inconsistencies – and by individual servers with varying configurations. We rewrote a lot of this feature in order so that it could work on the new Delicious platform, and it seems that we didn’t do it quite right. This is frustrating for all of us.

“Daily blog posting also contains a long-standing security issue: we ask for your blog password and we store it. We take security very seriously and we carefully safeguard those passwords, but we’d rather not even know that kind of information about systems that are external to Delicious.

“So, we plan to try to shift toward encouraging community-maintained third-party plugins for this functionality, instead of having people depend on us to push updates from a central point. …We’ll be trying to fix daily blog posting, though. The [delicious.com] thing should be gone soonish”

I understand that perspective. At the same time, I think I might try experimenting with some services other than Delicious to meet my need for syndicating a daily links post. Even though I do love the 1000-character limit on Delicious posts — ample room to offer some real commentary as well as meaty quotes. (In other words, real content.)

I notice that the Postalicious plugin also will syndicate shared links from ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit, and Yahoo Pipes.

I really like Delicious for the most part and would prefer to stick with it — especially because I have created a large body of content there with a rich tag set. So I’m just experimenting to know what my options are, not necessarily to switch. And I know that one of my options is to funnel my Delicious posts through a custom Yahoo Pipe and then syndicate that to Contentious.com via Postalicious. But that would mean learning Yahoo Pipes… Something I’ve started a few times and quickly gave up in frustration…

Have you used Postalicious to syndicate content from any of these other services to a WordPress blog? What did you think of the setup process, and the results? Is it reliable and fairly simple? Please post your experiences and examples in the comments below. Thanks.

This is a great thing for people like me who use Delicious as a way to supply content to blogs (rather than just to remember or share interesting sites).

delicious support forum thread

Also with the recent Delicious.com major facelift, they’ve overhauled the “blog posting” service (available under “settings” for your account) that allows you to connect your Delicious account to your blog, and make regular posts to your blog of whatever you’re bookmarking in Delicious. In short, you can now exercise much greater control over how and when Delicious posts items to your blog. I’ll be experimenting with that in Contentious, to see how I can improve your experience of that content here.

Way to go, Delicious! At least Yahoo is doing something right these days!

Multiple account support?

My only remaining criticism of the Delicious Firefox add on is that it does not yet support multiple accounts. I maintain separate Delicious accounts to feed different blogs and other projects. Formerly I used the Delicious Complete Firefox add-on to post to Delicious because it does support multiple accounts. But unfortunately that add-on is not compatible with Firefox 3, and I don’t know if it ever will be. Sad. (Murklins hacked together an independent update attempt — I haven’t tried it yet, but I probably will.)

Fellow Delicious user Britta also would like the official Delicious bookmarklet to support multiple accounts. Follow and speak up in this support forum thread if you’d also like this feature.

Britta also suggested that Mac users who want to post to multiple Delicious accounts try the third-party tool Pukka. I just installed it, and it seems functional but very basic. Also, so far it only supports posts up to 255 characters, so I won’t be using it.

But again, the real news here is that Delicious now supports posts of up to 1000 words, and the tools that make it easy to post to Delicious without having to visit the Delicious site also are now supporting that higher text limit. Microbloggers, have a blast!

That said, many sites make it surprisingly hard to post. Not excruciatingly difficult — but just laborious enough to be a barrier to some would-be contributors.

This week I’m experimenting with using different tools to post to Contentious.com. Here’s the first one:

My Tumblr Experiment

I’m doing this because some of my clients use fairly complex content management systems, where each post requires a surprising number of steps.

Most commonly, here’s what site contributors must do…

1. Visit a web page.
2. Log in to the site CMS.
3. Navigate to the appropriate place to write a post.
4. Enter the post title and content in the appropriate fields (Including manually specifying links).
5. Fill in other fields (categories, tags, byline, subheads, siderail copy, etc.) needed to integrate the post with the site’s format.
6. Go through a separate process to upload and caption images or other media.
7. Preview the result.
8. Publish the post (or save it as a draft to be reviewed).

That many steps may be warranted if you have something substantial to say. But what if you just want to post a quick brief pointing out something interesting, a la Jim Romenesko?

Like Romenesko, I work with Poynter Online’s content management system on a daily basis. It does the job, but it’s very complex and labor-intensive. Each brief Romenesko post requires  more steps than what I listed above. And for the posts on the E-Media Tidbits blog? All told, not including editing the copy, I must take about 30 steps to get a post onto that blog and integrated with the site. (Add another 5-10 steps if I’m including an image, which I usually do.)

…Which is probably why most of those “Tidbits” aren’t very short. Personally, I think ethat’s way too much work to do for brief items. But even given the length of Tidbits, on average, I spend much more time producing those items on the Poynter site than I spend writing or editing them.

I’m not complaining about the Poynter site or CMS. It does a lot of things remarkably well. But it’s no secret that it is labor intensive.

The same is true for other sites I work with based on customized versions of Movable Type and Expression Engine, among other tools. Posting there is probably more work than it needs to be.

Fortunately, there are interesting microblogging tools such as Tumblr, Posterous, Delicious, and even Friendfeed that might offer solutions, if they can be integrated with the sites effectively.

Here’s what I think is needed to make it work:

• Bookmarklet for posting, so you don’t have to go to a separate page. When you’re browsing a page you want to post about, just hit the bookmarklet and a little posting window pops up, pre-populated with basic information about the page or other content item you’re viewing.
• Simple interface. This tools is meant for posting quick hits — so don’t try to cram in tons of options.
• Mobile-friendly posting. That’s simply crucial to any online publishing tool these days. Too many CMSs don’t make that easy — but most microblogging tools are pretty good at it.
• Posts (or cross-posts) directly to the main site. That is, the content being posted becomes part of the main site’s archives, can be linked to directly, and can be found through the site’s search engine.
• 3rd-party interface posts are integrated with posts from the CMS. That is, I could post two briefs via a microblogging service, then one meatier piece via the site’s CMS then two more briefs via the microblogging service — and they would all appear in the blog in sequence, as if they all came from the same place.

So far, Tumblr is lacking on those last two point, as far as I can tell. I don’t think (thought I’ll check again) that the Tumblr posts syndicated to Contentious.com are getting archived here. And I dont’ think I could get them to post as regular Contentious posts, mixed in with the posts I do via WordPress.

The latest version of WordPress (2.6) did bring back the “press it” microblogging bookmarklet-based tool, which is excellent. But what about cumbersome CMSs that don’t offer that kind of option? Could a thrid-party posting tool fill in the gap?

I’m sure my readers collectively know far more about this area than I do. Please comment below to help me learn how to address this issue. Thanks!

Like a lot of people, I’m an avid user of Twitter. But I don’t do so aimlessly. Twitter is worth my time because every day it offers me clear rewards:

• Posse power. The 700+ Twitter followers I’ve accumulated have proved to be a collectively generous helpful group that offers, by-and-large, on-target and useful information whenever I ask for help, feedback, or insight.
• Radar & serendipity. The 150+ people I currently follow on Twitter generally provide, at any time of day or night, a steady stream of interesing, useful, timely, or entertaining content.
• Relationship-building. This may sound strange for a text-only, short-post medium, but I’ve found Twitter to be a more natural, human tool for keeping up with friends and colleagues on a daily basis. It also relieves the sense of isolation from working at home alone every day.
• Convenience and lack of pressure. I leave Twitter on when I have time or can offer divided attention, and turn it off when I need to focus. I feel no need to “catch up” on posts that happen when I’m not online. (Replies or direct messages to me do get saved so I can see them later, however.)

Of all those rewards, “posse power” is by far the most important and valuable. I’ve come to the conclusion that Twitter has become so very useful to me because I’ve actively cultivated a high-quality posse.

Here’s how I did it…

On Twitter (as with most social media services) you can’t force anyone to follow you. Instead, to grow a quality posse you must make yourself worth following.

The basic tenet of social media is that you generally get out of it what you put into it. That’s where Twitter’s short-text simplicity helps — by making it so very easy to contribute with relatively little effort or learning. The downside of this is, of course, that it’s also easy to contribute in ways that will bore or alienate people. (Personally, I suspect this is why a lot of folks complain about Twitter being “useless noise” — they don’t contribute much good stuff, they don’t actively seek good stuff, and they get turned off if the first few people they happen to follow don’t suit them.)

If your goal is to develop a Twitter posse that will help you out when you’re in need, the trick is to strike a balance between posting content that’s both natural and comfortable for you AND attractive and relevant to the folks whom you hope will follow you.

In my case, I think I’ve been able to strike this balance fairly well by following these do’s and don’ts:

1. DO keep a good attitude. Be useful, helpful, and friendly.
2. DO demonstrate ongoing interest in others. Make at least half of your posts responses others’ posts. Remember to thank people when they help (or try to).
3. DON’T be a bummer. Specifically, don’t whine, attack, or (especially) be boring. However, it is OK to be genuinely down or angry sometimes. That’s authentically human. So it’s OK to Tweet about the down side of life from time to time. But probably, don’t go on at length about negative stuff regularly on Twitter. And also, don’t simply list the minutiae of what you’re doing moment-by-moment. Unless you’re a porn star or an astronaut, that’s REALLY boring.
4. DO post occasional personal notes, thoughts, or quips. This fosters human connections. But try to keep it entertaining or interesting, and don’t overdo it.
5. DON’T overuse cryptic abbreviations. That gets very hard to read and thus alienates followers. A better way to cope with Twitter’s 140-character constraint is to think clearly and edit concisely.

As I said, these are MY guidelines for myself. They’ve worked well for me, and I’ve got the quality Twitter posse to prove it. Your mileage may vary.

While my list may sound like a recipe for a sunny, likeable PR-style Twitter “persona,” It’s actually pretty strategic. (Trust me on that — being likeable is definitely NOT a top priority for me, and I just don’t do “personas.”) Twitter can be a big, useless time sink if you aren’t at least slightly strategic about how you use it. I’ve found out how to make it worth my while. That said, my strategy isn’t rigid. It leaves ample room for — in fact, it requires a lot of — casualness, spontaneity, responsiveness, and authenticity. Humans are always more inherently compelling than automatons.

…And, incidentally, these guidelines have made Twitter more fun for me to use. They tend to put me in a better mood, and keep me more alert and engaged.

Would you like to grow (or have you grown) a helpful Twitter posse? What’s your strategy? (If you don’t think you have one, think it over — you probably just weren’t conscious of it.) Do you disagree with my guidelines or goal? I’d love to hear how others view this issue. Please comment below.

Here’s what I like and don’t like about it so far…

(UPDATE: Heh… OK, another thing I don’t like.. Apparently embedding a Seesmic video in a WordPress blog like this one isn’t as easy as it should be. Obviously, it’s not playing. Bummer. For now, here’s a link to my video post.)

Also, I haven’t yet investigated how mobile-friendly Seesmic is. Would be nice if you could combine some of the live/mobile functionality of Qik here.

Follow me on Seesmic: I’m agahran there. Send me a video! Tell me what you think of Seesmic so far. I’ve also enabled the Seesmic widget for this blog ,so you can see my latest video posts in the sidebar. I’ve also activated video comments for this blog.

Just a few minutes ago, Jeremiah Owyang posted to Twitter:

“Is your blogging reducing due to Twitter usage? It has for Adam Stewart.”

…So I hopped over to see what Adam Stewart had to say. This part of his post rang true for me:

“Generally, one line of thought often turns into a blog post. With Twitter, that one line of thought becomes a small post that speaks for itself, and it feels like old content once I release it into the Twittersphere.”

So I commented:

“Yeah, I’ve definitely noticed this effect re: my personal blog Contentious.com. Hasn’t hurt the blogs I run for clients, but the cobbler’s children has no shoes. Honestly, I generally find Twitter more personally useful and satisfying than blogging. Can’t sum that one up in 140 characters, so I guess I’ll have to blog it. But at least now, while I’m wrangling with a heavy workload, Twitter gives me a way to vent some of my compulsion to converse and share with the people who seem to be the core audience of my blog anyway.”

…As I imbibe more green tea and think this through further, I remember that blogs have always been an awkward tool to satisfy my deepest desires for conversational media. Yeah, I love to write — but I tend to find quality conversation far morerewarding and satisfying than merely writing. Despite all Twitter’s limitations and weaknesses (which are many) I find it to be a superior conversational media tool. In many ways.

Of course, I’m sure that whatever conversational media tools crop up in the next few years will be even more versatile, robust, and usable. I’m looking forward to being part of that evolution. What about you?

A few days ago, it occurred to me that it might be nice if there was an online tool or service that would facilitate local “tweetups” (informal, spontaneous gatherings of local Twitter users). Right now, tweetups start when one person in a town or city proposes one — like: “How about a Tweetup at The Cup in downtown Boulder this afternoon, 2pm?”

…But this approach mostly works to assemble Twitter users who already know or follow each other. What about if you want to get together with local Twitter users you don’t already know, or who don’t follow you? Since I’m a big believer in serendipity, I’d love a tool like that. Knowing that there’s no such thing as a truly original idea, I checked on the logical domain for such a tool, Tweetup.com.

There’s nothing there yet, just a placeholder page. I e-mailed the domain owner to ask of their plans for this domain, and here’s the response I received this morning…

“Still formulating what to do with it. But likely to be a mashup of an existing system with the right tools which has an API. Possibly/likely to be upcoming.org

There will be a diffenet subdomain for each city.place : eg: london.tweetup.com, melbourne.tweetup.com etc.

Then I will do the same with seesmeet.com (for seesmic.com meetups)

Sounds intriguing — but it could, of course, all be vaporware.

In the meantime, I might suggest a hack solution for people who enjoy local tweetups:

• Go to Tweetscan — a tool that allows a keyword search of everything posted to Twitter.
• Search for: tweetup [TOWN] — where TOWN = your town, city, or neighborhood, whichever would be most relevant to locals.
• Subscribe to the RSS feed for results for that search. This will let you know whenever a Tweetup has been called.

Then whenever you want to propose a local tweetup, make sure you include the words “tweetup” and your specified geographic location (TOWN). I just did that.

If you like this idea, spread the word about this proposed syntax, and see if it ends up informing you about other local Tweetups outside your immediate social circle.

I’m sure there are other solutions — and it’s possible that this idea of mine may totally suck or simply not work. But I think it’s work trying out. If you have a different or better approach, please speak up in the comments below.

Me: Do you think someday someone will post “the collected IM chat transcripts of so-and-so” like they publish the letters of Oscar Wilde?

Lisa: I’m sure of it! Won’t someone please think of the graduate students ;->

Which got me thinking: If Oscar Wilde was alive today, he’d definitely be blogging — and probably Twittering up a storm. And he’d be damn eloquent, witty, and brilliant about it, too.

As I’ve gotten more comfortable and involved with using the microblogging tool Twitter, I’ve realized that I’ve been using the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us less and less. I’m not the only one.

When I posted about this on Twitter, my friend Beth Kanter tweeted in response:

“I’ve had the same experience — less social bookmarking, more Twitter. But Twitter not great for retrieval.”

“Twitter offers immediate gratification and connection with people, not just resources. But retrieval is hard.”

This got me wondering about why I really use each of these social media tools in the first place. But Beth has a point: I’d be lying if I downplayed the appeal of instant gratification.

The question then becomes: What precisely am I finding so gratifying with Twitter?…

For me, the main reason I use social media tools is they allow me to express my natural urge to share and connect. I’m actually a fairly social person. I enjoy feeling connected, feeling useful, and interacting with people. That has always been fun for me. I guess it provides a sense of belonging and validation — but based on authenticity rather than conformity. (I always sucked at conforming.)

Social media tools also provide me with a sense of relief, to have a community available that’s a source of inspiration, energy, and connection. It’s becoming a valued resource. I no longer feel like I have to do everything myself. I can see more clearly that I am but part of a greater whole, and that takes a lot pressure off.

To be honest, the practical benefits of social media are (at least for me) mere icing on the cake of the emotional rewards. Of course, the practical benefits not insignificant.

• Twitter often gives me my first heads-up of news that’s important to me. It also provides ongoing context on what various smart people are up to, which leads to ideas and opportunities.
• I use del.icio.us to keep track of interesting items that I also wish to publish as linkblog posts on my various blogs. I also follow some del.icio.us tags to track issues.
• I use Google Shared Stuff to pass links along to specific people, without publishing them to my blog, while also not losing track of what I sent to whom.
• I use Furl and Google Notebook to coordinate more concerted research projects (although Furl’s losing ground with me)

Of all these tools, Twitter is the only one that supplies me with a steady stream of engaging but manageable feedback that feels (and is) personal — and therefore matters more. Basically, when I post something interesting or thoughtful to Twitter, I’m rewarded by getting responses (not all the time, but often enough). I don’t get that sense of engagement through the other services I use. And maybe that’s just me.

The end result is that I find myself increasingly posting to Twitter about things that formerly I would have posted to del.icio.us — even though I would have gotten more mileage out of posting to del.icio.us, since del.icio.us generates my daily links posts to Contentious.com. Why? Because it’s more likely that by posting to Twitter, someone will respond with either a simple reaction or a statement that makes me think or that piques my curiosity. And frankly, that’s more fun.

I’m not sure what all this means; but it is what it is. Thoughts? Please comment below.

This morning as I was making tea, I learned via NPR that Pakistani opposition leader and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated at a campaign rally in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

Google News already offers a slew of mainstream news coverage of the assassination — based almost entirely on reporting done outside Pakistan, since tight restrictions on journalists remain in force in Pakistan even though President Pervez Musharraf lifted lifted six weeks of emergency rule on Dec. 15. (More on that country’s press restrictions from the International Federation of Journalists and the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists.)

Given the current dearth of available professional journalism from within Pakistan, the country’s lively blogosphere — much of it in English — has become a key source of original and diverse news, analysis, commentary, and context from around that troubled nation. Today especially would be a good time to start paying close attention to Pakistani blogs.

One of the easiest places to get started is a blog aggregator with the unlikely name of Teeth Maestro…

Teeth Maestro is run by Dr. Awab Alvi, a Pakistani dentist practicing in Karachi. This site offers an RSS feed and e-mail alerts — but for a couple of months now I’ve been following alerts from this site via Twitter.

In fact, I would recommend that if you’re skeptical of the value of microblogging services like Twitter, you should definitely sign up for Twitter today (if you haven’t already) and start following Teeth there. The key value to keep in mind about Twitter: Since it’s mobile-friendly for posting and receiving, and since it just works, it’s proven exceptionally useful during crises.

Since the Twitter site is rather a blunt instrument for using the service, you might want to download and install Snitter — a slick third-party Twitter interface based on the Adobe Air platform, for Windows or Mac. Snitter offers many nice interface options, include optional pop-up/fade-out mini-window notifications of new “tweets.” There are many Twitter applications to suit various devices and needs, including various mobile interfaces. You can find a fairly comprehensive list on the Twitter fan wiki.

Another great resource for following Pakistani blogs today is the Pakistan section of Global Voices Online, a popular blog aggregator that syndicates blogs from over 100 countries. As a matter of fact, GVO editor Georgia Poppelwell tipped me off about Teeth on Twitter at a November conference in Catalonia, and I’ve been following both Teeth and the GVO Pakistan section ever since. (Thanks, Georgia!)

What do you think of the contribution Pakistani blogs are making to the coverage of and public conversation about the Bhutto assassination and other current events in that country? What other resources would you recommend? Please comment below.

(NOTE: I originally wrote this for Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits. This is a re-edited cross-post.)