Jules Verne could see us going to the moon, and John F. Kennedy  actually pushed our country to do it. Star Trek could see us using tri-corders, and Motorola created it as the first cell phone. In my opinion, the iPhone, it’s market of applications, and growing user base is the best way to gain access to and interact with information. It also helps you get in touch with people, but I think face to face is the best way to interface with other humans.

Over the course of my trip to New York City this weekend, I realized exactly how valuable my iPhone is. When I got off my bus at 31st Street and 7th Avenue, I wanted to use my gym membership at the sports club. I went online on my iPhone, looked up the nearest 24 hour gym in their network, and copied and pasted the address into the Google Maps application. In about 2 minutes, I was on my way. After I arrived and couldn’t get into the side of the building which was advertised, I looked up the phone number online, gave them a call and got in. That’s convenience.

The sports club’s web site is not optimized for the iPhone, but since the built-in Safari Browser is a full-fledged browser, I was able to navigate with some effort and get what I needed. If the web site was actually created for the iPhone, it would have saved me some time from zooming in and out, panning left and right to get around. If they had an "app" for that, I might have been able to log into it with my account and it would have been geo-location aware of where I was and tell me the nearest branches of the club. Why don’t they create an "app for that"?

This is all possible and contradictory to popular belief, the functionality that I just described doesn’t have to be developed as an iPhone Application. Much of the functionality can be created in HTML as a web application and placed on the Internet. Google has done a great job by making all of their applications as iPhone friendly "webapps" which behave like iPhone applications.

Recently, some plugins have been released to make your WordPress blog iPhone friendly. Available at Brave New Code, the WPTouch Mobile Theme and Plugin for WordPress takes your standard WordPress blog and makes it look, feel, and behave as an iPhone application with nice transitions.

Static Content Sites

Many organizations have also released informational web sites in a handy, iPhone friendly format. Their sole purpose is to disseminate information. Web Apps such as the Athens Tourist Guide :  and Pocket Cambridge : are basically lists and tables of static HTML that look nice on an iPhone or an iTouch. Do you have information that can be useful to iPhone users? There are some really easy ways to get it out there.

1. iWebKit – “Iwebkit is the revolutionnairy kit used to create high quality iPhone and iPod  touch websites in a few minutes and is based on an LGPL license. In the first 4 months of it’s existance the pack has greatly evolved from a basic idea to a project that has reached worldwide fame!”

2. iUI – It has the following

1. Create Navigational Menus and iPhone interfaces from standard HTML
2. Use or knowledge of JavaScript is not required to create basic iPhone pages
3. Ability to handle phone orientation changes
4. Provide a more "iPhone-like" experience to Web apps (on or off the iPhone)

Dynamic Content Sites

Do you have programming ability or resources which you can utilize to push out your content from your organizational and institutional databases? You can probably use the aforementioned tools in conjunction with dynamic server side languages, but you might want to look into the following options to make your life easy.

1. ComponentOne iPhone Studio – ComponentOne’s studio is a rich set of ASP.NET Server Controls which is beyond compare when it comes to giving you a competitive advantage in creating dynamic applications fast. Some of the included server controls are : Calendar, ViewPort, CoverFlow ( Like the iTunes record browser ), and MultiView ( like the Photo explorer in the iPhone Camera application ).

2. iWebKit for Grails – This plugin provides integration with iWebkit, a powerful User Interface Library for Safari development on iPhone. By using this plugin, the grail developer will have an iphone web app skeleton (CSS and javascript) but also a extended tag library helping in creating iphone web pages in an easy,clean and fast way. If you are a Java developer or your company has them, and have gotten the hang of Groovy, this might be the path for you.

3. iUI with Asp.NET – iUI is very simple and some people have taken some steps to create their own integration for ASP.NET and iUI. This page points you to some third party resources which may be helpful for you in creating dynamic iUI applications.

Possible Scenarios and Tips

How can you capitalize on the iPhone and iTouch user? Here are some ideas which may work out for you.

1. If you have a Calendar of events, you can add iCalendar format links which can let users download the event data and add it to their iPhone Calendar.

2. If you have a location or event search which requires an address or a zip code, you can use W3C’s Geolocation API which is supported by the built-in Safari browser on iPhones.

3. If you have a member’s only directory, you can create an interface which can list people’s information as well as publish their contact info in the vCard format so that they can add it to their contact lists.

For better or for worse, since the global tipping point of Twitter was reached, everyone wants to be part of the action. If Twitter hasn’t come across your online radar, it’s probably because you are living under the proverbial rock and are a Luddite battling online reality. On second thought, if you are on the internet reading this blog post, then you probably aren’t a Luddite, just a Twitter Luddite. That’s ok. The Twitter sphere of knowledge is small and can be transferred from one person to another in usually a few sentences similar to the 140 character tweets.

Below, I’ve elaborated substantially to show you that there is a way that individuals and organizations can use this tool to keep their relationships better informed. I recognize that the audience for our blog here at Beaconfire  mostly consists of individuals in the non-profit industry. This knowledge however can be used by most anyone in any industry which uses the internet to interact with their customers, clients, constituents, or partners. Businesses and Governments, please utilize this knowledge wisely and don’t be evil. (That means you Google!)

If you are a Government official, please do read up on the latest blunder known as “Twittergate” committed by a few in the German Parliament. Apparently results of secret votes should not be broadcast to the world using the Twitter medium. Oops. Please review your policies and traditions before telling the world how you work and what you work on. That may be a good or bad thing depending on what you do. If our National Security depends on it, don’t tweet it Barack Obama. ;)

We all know that non-profits don’t strive to make money, and can use all the help they can to save whatever money they do have. That’s what we do here at Beaconfire Consulting.

We help non-profits utilize the Internet to benefit their causes and missions because the for profit corporations have all the resources they need to be successful.

After explaining what the commotion is all about, we’ll explore how to publish a stream of information to Twitter without having to hire a college graduate to sit in front of a computer and tweet every update.  Sorry college graduates, there are better things the world can utilize you for. Tweet only if it’s part of a job with larger responsibilities, please. It’ll gain you much more respect. To all those hill staffers who tweet for their Senators and Representatives, this means you.

What is Twitter in Simple Terms?

Here’s what I tell non-technical people: Twitter is like an away message in AIM, a status message in Facebook, Linked In, or MySpace, and what you tell people what is on your mind or what you about to do when people ask you. In this case, instead of you responding to five of your friends asking you "Hey, what do you think about that book you just bought?", you can Tweet:

 "Having recently seen rural and urban India, ‘The White Tiger’ is eerily close to reality but without the bloody mess. Cafe Coffee Day!”.

Here’s what I tell technical people: Twitter is a simple micro blogging service which allows people to put in about 140 characters about what’s going on in their life. This very simple idea has been used now to do many things in many circumstances. There are interfaces to Twitter, as well as third party applications that utilize this API to make the most of what is becoming a global phenomenon.

Our own Ali Cherry wrote an excellent article a year ago “14 Tweets about Twitter” which will give you more perspectives. Brad Lehman—one of our ex employees—wrote “Tweet this! Is Twitter Actually Useful?” to question if Twitter is useful in a corporate scenario. I re-evaluate it’s utility below.

Twitter’s Real World Applications.

Personal

Twitter is a great way to tell your friends what you are doing. As it can interface into almost any application such as Facebook, it’s useful to tweet once, and have your status spread to other places on the internet. Recently using services like Ping.FM and Hellotxt it is possible to write once and have several social media outlets updated automatically. I personally use Ping.FM to update my Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Gtalk, and AIM Statuses. Since Ping.FM has an API, the iPhone application Nambu allows me to ‘Ping’ from my iPhone.

Social

Twitter can be used as a way to converse with people asynchronously through replying to their tweets. This conversation can take place with people tweeting from their iPhones, from the Web Site itself, or third party integrated tweet mechanisms built into chat programs such as Digsby. During conferences, people can track each other and have a conversation.

Business

Companies can use Twitter to let their customers know about the latest news on products, services, service changes, events, or announcements. One of our clients—the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation—recently started broadcasting regular Twitter updates as a way to broadcast their latest grant approvals. We’ll look into how Beaconfire helped them achieve this. We didn’t use Artificial Intelligence, but we did configure a Robot to do this for them.

Internet Mashups

Some of the most intriguing uses for Twitter is to graph the tweets on a world map. During election season, any tweets with "Obama", "McCain", or "election" were shown in real time as people posted from around the country and the world. If you go to TwitterEarth, you’ll visualize what I’m describing on a three-dimensional globe. All of the tweets in the "twittersphere" are available through the Twitter or Twitter Search API. There are certain applications being developed on the SalesForce.com which integrate Twitter’s data to your CRM. You can monitor if people are talking well or ill about your products and services behind your back.

The Twitter Framework: “How to change the world with Twitter”

The Twitter framework is a representation of how small messages moving to and from people through various applications can make people’s lives a little easier and sometimes a little more hectic. Once people are hooked, they will have to keep tweeting. One could say the same about blogging, riding a bike, or playing golf.

I speculate that in the near future in Business, the Twitter model will be used to standardize how business talk to each other when it comes to messages. Businesses use the Internet in various capacities. The standard messages such as "Your bill is due", to "There’s an update to our catalog, please download it immediately" will be transformed with small messages in the small business arena.

Account executives will know to act upon a delinquent client, or an unsatisfied customer because they will receive a short, sweet message that tells them to act.

I will write more on this as this is another topic altogether. Do you think that

“How to change the world with Twitter”

is too lofty an article title? Maybe. We change the world every day here at Beaconfire using the Internet so it might not be that farfetched. We’ll see.

Publishing content to Twitter, Facebook

Tweeting

How do you tweet? You can tweet from twitter.com by logging on to the website. You can tweet using TweetDeck, a lightweight application that runs on Adobe AIR. You can tweet using iPhone applications such as Tweetie, Twitterrific, and Nambu. You can tweet using IM clients such as Digsby. It might only be another year and you’ll see that the verb “tweet” get the same respect as the verb “google”.

Update Facebook and Twitter

How to update your Facebook Profile, Facebook Fan Page Status, and Twitter Simultaneously? It’s simple. If you sign up for the aforementioned Ping.FM service, your updates will be broadcast to any number out of the 40 or so social networks that they have including Twitter and Facebook. (More details below.)

RSS to Facebook and Twitter

How do you automatically post to Facebook and Twitter? A RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a published piece of information in a standardized XML format which can be consumed by any number of tools including Portals, Browsers, and email readers. It’s been popularized by blog users as a way to aggregate several blogs into one readable format.

If you have a blog or website that has regular updates and are currently publishing a generated RSS feed, you can capitalize on this on your efforts to tweet automatically. If you are confident that your site’s RSS feed will be available at all times, then you can by pass using a third party service like FeedBurner.

Once you have a stable RSS feed, go and login to TwitterFeed. TwitterFeed uses OpenID for authentication, so if you have a Google, Yahoo, AOL, or any other OpenID provider, you can login easily.

Once logged in, and after clicking on "Go to your feeds", you’ll be able to create a new feed. You’ll note that at the very top, you can create a Twitter, Ping.FM, Laconica, or a Hellotxt feed. This means that once published, all updates from your RSS feed will be broadcast on that medium.

In the process of creating your TwitterFeed (which ever medium you chose), you’ll have to specify and test your RSS feed, and specify if you want to use any of the existing URL shortening services. There are many. I recommend bit.ly. (You can use your bit.ly account as well.) You should also read Jo’s article : “URL shorteners: how to stay out of trouble”.

Be wary of how often you want your feed to be scanned. If your RSS has unique permalinks, publish dates, and GUIDs, you don’t have to  be too worried about anything. If you uncheck the “Sorted” checkbox, and have have unique GUIDs and permalinks, you can publish a hundred items in your RSS feed and TwitterFeed will tweet the specified amount of items every time it scans. This is useful if you want to tweet numerous updates. If you do check the “Sorted” checkbox, the TwitterFeed service will only post the latest item.

We published the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation’s Microblog Feed using FeedBurner. You can see how we chose to format the RSS.

Why use Ping.FM and Hellotxt rather than Twitter in TwitterFeed to publish your feed?

The answer is a no brainer. Both services relay your post to Twitter as well as many others. Ping.FM and Hellotxt can subsequently publish to numerous other social media outlets as mentioned before.

If you are a global organization with a need to be everywhere at once, having your message on all these sites could be helpful to you. I don’t know anyone that updates all of these at once, but if you do, you must have something really important to say.

If you are a non-profit organization and your message to save the world is really important, you should just hire Beaconfire. We can do it for you. Our Online Campaigns and Marketing team will be happy to assist you.

This table compares the complete lists of sites supported between Ping and Hellotxt. Of course you might not have heard of 90% of these sites, but that’s because many of these are from countries that don’t have English as a native language. In the rest of the world, small but very important spheres of bloggers, micro bloggers, and social networkers are forming and you have a chance to get in the ground floor!

I will be honest with you. I didn’t know about Ping.FM, Hellotxt, TwitterFeed, or the list of sites above until Beaconfire started to work on pipelining the feed of published grants from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation to their @mottfoundation Twitter account. If you are interested in learning more about how to use Twitter and other tools to market your organization, also check out a blog from a friend of mine. Jeremy Epstein publishes a blog by the name of “Never Stop Marketing”. He does follow his own advice, and is always marketing. Jeremy posts many updates every day and he’s the one who told me about Ping.FM.

The new world of the Internet is ever changing and Twitter is another tool which people are starting to use. People around the world are using other tools to do similar things. If you want to spread your message, you should look into all of the paths you can take to reach your prospective client, customer, constituent, or citizen. As I said before, use this knowledge wisely. With great power comes great responsibility.

• Keys to success
• Considerations and Cautions and Lessons Learned
• Structure/Pages (application Map)
• Permissions/Privacy
• Hosting
• Useful Links
• Useful Blog Posts

Keys to Success

Keep in mind why people tend to join facebook in the first place. Most users want to keep her/his friends and family updated on her/his lives. Users also want to keep in touch/keep track (perhaps stalk) one another. Facebook is a *social* network so you should design your application with that in mind. If your application doesn’t encourage users to share and interact with one another than maybe facebook is not to right place for it. Above all you need to make your application spreadable and continuously engaging.

• Make it easy for your current users to share with her/his friends
• Post your user’s actions to her/his feed.
• Design your application so that users can engage her/his friends, post things to either her/his friends profiles or her/his own, send requests to friends that will link her/him to the app.
• Don’t let your facebook application be just a passing fad. Many applications on facebook although exciting at first lose their luster after a user has tapped into all of the applications features.
• By updating your application with new features and content you can keep your users engaged and your application feeds going which is basically free advertising for your app.
• For non-profits, Facebook applications can be a great way to get users involved in a cause, provide her/him with a dashboard of tools to take action, and keep her/him posted about news and upcoming events. Email your users. If a user gives the application permission to change her/his status that is another great way to spread important updates about your cause. And again make sure you provide users with the tools to involve her/his friends.
• Here is very useful marketing post
  10 tips for releasing your Facebook application, and maximizing growth

Continue on to Considerations and Cautions after the jump…

Considerations and Cautions and Lessons Learned

• Make sure your developer is familiar with the API and one of the official language libraries. I strongly recommend PHP which is one of the two official Facebook API libraries, the other being javascript. The unofficial libraries are ASP.NET, ASP, (VBScript), Cocoa, ColdFusion, C++, C#, D, Emacs Lisp, Java, Lisp, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, VB.NET, and Windows Mobile.
• Although I never encountered a CSS issue that could not be resolved, often time’s original html/css will act funny when rendered inside facebook. You should allow time for CSS debugging.
• Same thing with JS. Most tasks I was able to work out once I became familiar with FBJS. There are limitations with FBJS is that it does not allow you to use all javascript functions.
• Issues pulling referring URLs
• Directory approval typically take a week but could be longer.
• Since the release of “new facebook” an application cannot add anything to the profile box without user approval and so far the only way to prompt this is for a user to click on a link/button. Once prompted the user must choose to add the box to the Wall tab (deign required), Boxes Tab (if designed), its own Tab (if designed).
• Allowing uploads can be tricky and the approach needs to be considered carefully.
• Admin pages and logic configurations can add complexity so take this into consideration when budgeting time.
• Once you publish your application I strongly recommend creating a development application that will not be published. This way you can test any changes and updates to your application within the facebook environment without breaking your application.

Structure/Pages

Do you want your application to be used by individual users or for pages (Page is designed for local businesses, brands, musicians, and all types of organizations), or both? There are two kinds of pages Canvas pages and Profile Boxes/Pages. Here are some examples of pages you should strongly consider having and pages that are required(*).

For canvas pages: about page*, main*, landing page*, uninstall page*, admin, help, terms of service, and a page to invite friends.

For profile boxes/pages: Wall* (this is where the app is added by default), Wide (lives in the boxes tab), Narrow (lives in the boxes tab).

I will provide a lot more information about the structure and content of these pages in a future post.

Some questions to consider:

• Who will be maintaining your application?
  If a developer is building an application for a client, they made need to build an administrative side to their application. That way application admins can edit the content of the application without going through the developer, like a CMS.
• Will your canvas pages be using the Facebook Markup Language (FBML) or iframes?
  Personally I really like to take advantage of the FBML to I tend to shy away from iframes because you cannot use FBML within iframes. However, there are several pros to using iframes. Mainly, I have found the load time for canvas pages can be significantly slow at times regardless of server speed. Iframes allow you load and change content within your application pages significantly faster. Common issues with iframes are listed here.

Permissions/Privacy

It is important to respect the privacy of your users. By adding any application on facebook a user is giving that application full access to almost all of the information listed on her/his profile. For a full list of all the information the application has access to see the response to the Users.getInfo API function call here. NOTE: facebook will never give out a user’s email or the street level of a users address.
Consider who will be allowed to access various pages of your app?

• Any internet user
• People logged into facebook
• People logged into facebook and have allowed application to access her/his information
  • Once the user has done this she/he have added the application but it has not been added to her/his profile box

Useful examples of available logic, to control what logic is displayed (*requires user to allow access):

• Is viewer an application user, meaning have she/he granted permission
• Is viewer friends with the application user
• Is viewer the application user themselves
• Is viewer a specific user based on userID*. This is needed in order to create admin pages.

Hosting

You have two options for hosting your application, using your own server or using a hosting service. Both my applications are hosted on php servers with MySQL databases. A list of hosting providers and companies that have partnered with facebook are Microsoft Developer Tools, Free Hosting from Joyent, Amazon Web Services, Audible Magic, SalesForce. The server requirements are explained in detail here.

Useful links:

• Creating your first application
• Facebook partners/hosting services
• Privacy Settings available to users

Useful Blog Posts:

• Tech: How to Develop a Hit Facebook App: 29 Essential Tools and Tutorials
• Tech: Facebook Application Development How-to: 11 Tips You Don’t Want to Miss
• Tech: 5 Development Tips for the Facebook API
• Tech: 5 Facebook Application Gotchas
• Tech: 10 Things That Would Have Been Nice to Know When Starting My Facebook Application
• Marketing: 10 tips for releasing your Facebook application, and maximizing growth

Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.

While it seems to have backed off from the stance that pretty much any use online shouldn’t be covered by fair use, AP has indicated that they want to define specific rules on pulling quotes from AP stories.

I suspect that this is an effort that is ill-thought out and doomed to failure (not to mention backlash) – to learn why, read below the fold…

First, some background on what fair use is. Publaw.com provides one of the most user-friendly explanations online:

The copyright law contemplates that fair use of a copyrighted work without permission shall be for purposes such as (1) criticism and comment, (2) parody and satire, (3) scholarship and research, (4) news reporting and (5) teaching, and that such fair use will not result in the infringement of a copyrighted work.

It’s this definition of fair use that has made blogging about non-cat related topics possible, particularly the kind of blogging most non-profits engage in. On the Rock the Vote blog, picked randomly from my RSS reader, 12 out of 24 stories posted in May included excerpts from stories originating elsewhere, mostly news accounts. This ability to pull in a few key lines from a story makes blogging possible – it provides your readers context, and gives the rest of your post meaning. If, as the AP would prefer, you just linked off to their story, it would place the burden on your readers to find what you’re referencing in a given piece, then come back to read your post. That’s a burden that many readers would balk at.

What will make this pronouncement particularly galling is that major media outlets, particularly newspapers with both an online and dead tree edition, are among the worst at attributing credit to blogs or linking effectively. In this newspaper story, again a random selection from my RSS feed, the Times links “Democratic National Committee” to a search of their site for the term, rather than to democrats.org. Similarly, newspapers are notorious for not crediting scoops from even those blogs that do more original reporting, like TPMMuckraker.

Beyond the hypocrisy factor (and just to get in one more point here – anyone else find it ironic that a news service with a whole section linked on their homepage headlined “AP and the People’s Right to Know” would be opposed to the free flow of information?), though, there’s the sheer difficulty of AP trying to enforce any set of guidelines. The Times story alludes to this somewhat, when it discusses how unlikely these guidelines would be stand up to a court challenge, but beyond that, there’s a problem of volume. With Technorati tracking over 112.8 million blogs, and countless more untracked, it would be difficult for AP to just find all their excerpted content. Assuming they accomplish that feat, they would then have to send cease and desist letters to bloggers who may not publish an email address, much less a way to get in touch via snail mail. And those bloggers who ignore them would be difficult to track down in court, not to mention costly – bloggers’ rights to anonymity and pseudonymity are being protected in more states every year.

Hopefully, AP will back down on this front – a quick google shows many a blogger up in arms over this, with TechCrunch comparing them to the RIAA and declaring them “banned” and Jeff Jarvis stating, “I have my own guidelines. I stated them below. The point of fair use and fair comment is that there can be no set guidelines. That’s just ridiculous.”

I’ve written before about how information on the internet wants to be free – this is just another example. I don’t predict that the AP’s interest in their own set of fair use rules will last long, and don’t recommend altering how you blog if you’re already in accordance with existing law [see second update] (of course, if you’re just posting whole articles wholesale, you probably should mend your ways). And most of all, you should encourage others to excerpt and link to your own work – for most non-profits, the most important thing to spreading your message, so if your supporters want to do it for you for free, don’t stand in their way.

Update (6.17.08): Simon from Bloggasm has more, including backstory on other clashes between the Drudge Retort and the AP.

Update (6.19.08): The AP has elevated the fight to the next level by setting up a pricing chart (h/t: BetaNews via Personal Democracy Forum). In light of this, we’re going to stop quoting AP stories here at the Wire for the time being, not because we agree with this sort of thing, but because there are plenty of bloggers who will do a better job of picking this fight. I’ve updated the post to remove my recommendation that you continue to excerpt AP, since we’ve decided to stop doing so ourselves for the time being.

^*Yes, I’m aware of the irony in excerpting an article about excerpting articles.

That’s why non-profits who have a significant RSS readership should consider ways to advertise their other services in their feed to push people to donate, take action, or join the email list. While visitors to your site will already be pushed this way by a strong information architecture, most feeds are pure content.

Several services exist to let you make more of your feed, by placing ads or links back to your site in your feed. Feedburner is perhaps the most popular, because it’s already widely used for other things. On the Beaconfire Wire, we use Feedburner to get stats on our feed and to add a few other neat features. And, as I wrote last year, it’s completely free. One feature independent bloggers will find useful is that it integrates with AdSense, allowing you to monotize your blog in another way. For non-profits who have specific links to include (like “Make a Contribution” and “Sign the Petition”), you can add custom “FeedFlares” at the bottom of each post so you don’t miss a chance to bring in more donors or activists.

So what if you’ve been advertising on the web in traditional ways, and want to diversify? Consider using a service like Pheedo to serve ads in a variety of content networks. Pheedo came to my attention in my NY Times feed, and they claim to have a pretty diverse network. Rates vary depending on the network you want to buy in – for sub-$5,000 purchases, you’re limited to buying in a network rather than choosing a specific feed or feeds, which makes it more difficult to segment your audiance – the site indicates that advertisers can make segmentation choices on a variety of criteria, but this may be restricted to larger buys. Update (5.28.08) – As Bill from Pheedo notes in the comments, advertisers can specify which segments of the network ads will appear in.

While RSS giveth, it also taketh away. New ways to promote your organization allow non-profits to expand their efforts to this space to take advantage of changing user habits. And as RSS becomes more ubiquitous, we’ll hopefully see an expansion of ways for non-profits to take advantage of it.

The key requirement that bloggers and the rest of the social web seems to be asking for is disclosure. They don’t mind if you’re paid to shill for a product, just that you point out that you’re doing so. This is little different from the long-standing practice on political blogs of requesting that users disclose if they’re paid by a campaign when posting and commenting – it helps users understand the context and take the remarks with the appropriate amount of salt.

I look at some of the ways to provide this disclose, as well as why non-profits should consider paid posting, after the jump…

Users also have come to expect that if a blogger does endorse or favorably review a product for money (there really hasn’t been a market for negative pay for post, though I’d be interested to see how long that lasts – paying a blogger to trash the opposition seems like something people would be less willing to disclose), it’s something that they also personally endorse. Most bloggers would balk at pitching a product that they weren’t actually a fan of, and I think that most companies would shop elsewhere for bloggers rather than sponsoring a half-hearted review or implausible endorsement that readers won’t believe. And while there’s an implicit contact (or sometimes explicit) that if you’re writing a sponsored post, you at least make it mostly positive, including some negatives in a review can make it more real for readers.

A key element of the Pay per Post product offered by Izea is a mandatory disclosure on every blog that participates. While I think that many readers would prefer a more open disclosure (like requiring the sponsored posts to indicate who specifically paid for them) over the blanked disclosure that somewhere on this blog, there may be some posts that are paid for by someone, their system does allow advertisers to require these additional disclosures.

Even without using networks that connect blogs with advertisers, most bloggers that write sponsored posts include a disclose. Note how on this post sponsored by SEIU, a graphic (albeit animated) is included at the top and bottom, along with a note in the text itself. Similarly, Jarvis himself maintains a pretty solid disclosure on his “about me” page.

For bloggers, paid posting is a useful tool toward financial sustainability. Traditional ads bring in some revenue, but it’s often not enough to completely support a blogger. By adding a revenue stream from sponsored posts, bloggers can bring in additional money while simultaneously filling in a need for content.

For advertisers, paid posting can be a valuable tool to get buzz, as well as a quick way to improve your search engine rankings.

For non-profits, there’s still another incentive: building up the sector of the blogosphere that supports your policy area. While a few thousand a year might be a drop in the ocean of your media budget, it could mean the difference between blogging once a week and once a day for bloggers interested in your cause. And the free media dividends they’ll pay in the years to come could be more than worth the cost of sponsoring them now.

So while there are still some purists who detract from pay per posting, I would argue that as long as a healthy disclosure is included, it’s worth the effort.

Update (5.8.08): This was originally mistakenly posted under the wrong user acct.

Marcus Peacock, the deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, blogs about EPA internal affairs. His blog, Flow of the River, is aimed primarily at EPA staff, but it is publicly accessible and surprisingly entertaining (even laugh-out-loud humorous at times). It reads like the thoughts of a real person — a person who is unabashedly positive about his agency, but clearly not a PR machine. There are relatively few comments on the posts, but Peacock responds personally to many of them. His blog offers a glimpse of what’s actually going on inside EPA, and for EPA staff, it lets them know what is on their deputy administrator’s mind.

Even more impressive to me is the fact that TSA (the Transportation Security Administration, aka the people who require you to take off your shoes at airports) has its own public blog. Evolution of Security discusses recent security issues and how TSA works to make airports safer. Though many of the posts read like press releases, they are liberal in their acceptance of comments. Their main page has a counter of recently deleted comments (currently 161 out of several hundred) and links to a list of reasons why a comment might be deleted, such as profanity, off-topic content, and threats. A quick browse through past comments proves that most anything goes: reactions range from “thank you for keeping us safe!” to annoyed passengers to harsh and pointed criticism, with some Orwellian analogies thrown in for good measure — and if you need to tell TSA that you think they’re Big Brother, the blog is definitely a better forum for you than the security line at the airport.

The two-way communication goes further than just angry venting in comments, however. I was pleased to see that popular topics in the comments are often addressed by TSA in subsequent posts; for an agency that inspires so many strong emotions in travelers, this back-and-forth in the blog sends a nice message: yes, they hear you.

In both of these cases, a blog represents a big step forward in communication both within and outside these agencies. If they choose, they can gather a wealth of honest feedback from the comments alone, while letting their audience feel that their voices are heard. So as much as I can’t believe I’m blogging in praise of TSA, well, maybe that’s a sign that their blog is working.

While spam used to be confined to the world of email, spammers have recently branched out to new frontiers: blogs, social networks, and search engines. It seems that no online garden can stay a spam-free Eden forever (perhaps an inapt metaphor: the apple represented knowledge, not pharmaceuticals).

What all these techniques have in common is that they put practically the entire cost onto the recipient. While direct mail, junk faxes, and robocalls at least have a cost to the sender, all the methods of spam that I discuss here are pretty much free, once you have the system set up for delivery.

More on these new theatres of spam warfare below the fold:

Blog spam has been around for a while, but it’s been getting worse in recent years, partially just due to the number of blogs that have built mechanisms to counteract it. In what should be proof that the Star Wars/Rube Goldberg missile defense system is a bad idea, with more blogs adopting CAPTCHA and moderation, spammers have adapted by posting so much spam that some of it will get through.

But while some blog spammers have been fighting with quantity, others have improved the quality of their spam, where by quality I don’t mean that they’re marketing products that you should be interested in, but that they’re just doing a better job of disguising their spam.

On the Beaconfire Wire, we use Akismet as our spam capturing tool. Since we installed it, it’s captured no less than 28,011 spam comments, with very few false positives. But there have been a few that have fooled it – many spammers are now use putting their link in the "URL" field of our comment registration, and including a comment that is semi-relevant, like

Hey! been surfing the net for Internet Marketing Tools Online Affiliate Marketing and found your blog reg The Power of the Pipe. You relly know your stuff! I\’d like to see more posts here. Will definitely bookmark this one and come back.

Seems a lot like a legit comment, but how many people directly pull your post title into their response? The URL and email address attached to the comment were also in no way relevant to the content of the post or comment.

How do we prevent blog spam? Unfortunately, the barriers we build will also hurt our ability to receive legit comments. While we haven’t implemented CAPTCHA, higher traffic blogs might not have that luxury (though before doing so, they should read up on the accessibility problems associated with it). We do have pre-registration, a spam filter, and manual moderation to keep spammers from overwhelming our system. We also recently installed a WordPress plugin (Comment Timeout), which automatically closes comments on older posts.

The second new kind of spam we’ve seen growing is social network spam. And here I’m not talking about that friend who posts about 12 links a day (and yes, we all have them, but just can’t bear to quietly remove them from our friends list), I’m talking about actual spam.

While MySpace is inundated with it, largely as a result of the openness of their platform, Facebook has largely remained immune. This is, for the most part, due to the difficulty of mass messaging – unless you join a group or become a fan of a page, it can’t mass message you (for good or bad) and the only way to send person-to-person messages is through the web interface, which is a slow way to spam.

Indeed, one thing that makes Facebook largely spam-proof is its focus on real relationships between people. If I get a message from someone I don’t know, I’m pretty likely to delete it. Unfortunately, the way that spammers get around this is through the use of an even more unsavory process: phishing.

A friend recently became a victim of this practice: I logged in one day to see that he had written on my wall. Naturally, I went to my wall right away to see what he wrote, which was:

wasdasi finally found the best source out there for all the latest ringtines for my phone at [link removed] they dont sound bad like the ones from my actual phone company, these are 100 times better and they have thousands and thousands of ringers to choose from and when you use them the first time you get 20 free ringtones. stop paying so much for your ringtones,don’t be a sucker, get them from my place, [link removed]

This, I thought, was rather uncharacteristic of this friend. He’s usually not so enthusiastic about ringtones. I then noticed that he’d written the same comment on at least ten other walls, and wrote back to ask what was going on. He responded that his password had been stolen (he didn’t mention where, but it was likely a cloned portal), and someone hacked his account.

This seems like a particularly insidious practice, not just for the annoyance factor of spam, but because people who can break into your account can do a lot more harm to you than just messaging your friends. Many Facebook users store a great deal of personal information there, including email and IM addresses, school and work history, and more. This seems like an identity thief’s dream come true.

What’s more, many people will use a single password for most online applications. Since many Facebook users have their email addresses listed on their page, someone who knows their password could get into their email account, and from there, their Amazon, Paypal, eBay, etc.

The solution to being an accidental spammer is just to verify that you are where you think you are before entering in your password. It might also be worth diversifying your passwords to avoid a chain reaction of identity theft. As for receiving spam from friends? Not much you can do about that, except to have less friends.

The last kind of spam I wanted to mention is the increase in search engine spam. Search engine optimization has become a more and more frequently used tool in the last few years. What began as a fun tactic known as GoogleBombing (google French Military Victories – the infamous "miserable failure" is no longer active) has evolved into a full-fledged practice.

While every non-profit and business should think about SEO as a way to get their relevant content to the top of the Google rankings, many spammers are using more aggressive versions of the same tactics to get their products on top. This is particularly the case with competitive search terms where top ranking can lead to significant profits.

This form of spam is often linked with other forms, particularly blog spam, since spam comments allow the creation of links to a given page from multiple other pages easily. Whole spam blogs are built every day to do nothing more than monotize search terms, and while Google has a whole team modifying their ranking system to keep anyone from gaming it, there’s only so much tweaking they can do without breaking legitimate links.

The one boon here is that some users have become more willing to trust paid search links now for certain terms where the organic results have become unreliable. This means that non-profits powered by Google Grants will have an advantage and be better able to reach people through search.

There’s no real solution to this kind of spam from a user standpoint – unfortunately, it’s up the search engines to fix the problem. Fortunately, they have an economic incentive to do so – if their results become unreliable, people will stop using them, so they want to police their own rankings.

Blogs, social networks, and search engines are three of Spam 2.0′s targets, but what will Spam 3.0 target? SMS seems a likely candidate, and one likely to set spam recipients off to a new level of anger, since it’s a medium that forces users to actually pay for each message received with money as well as time. Where else could spammers hit in the 21st Century? Leave your ideas in the comments.

More interesting than “what” is “why” Twitter? As the site says, “Because even basic updates are meaningful to family members, friends, or colleagues – especially when they’re timely. Eating soup? Research shows that moms want to know…”

Though I don’t think it will take me 10 years to latch on to this trend (i.e. how long it took me to take up blogging), “microblogging” is going to have to evolve past its hyper-connected, information overload, time sucking, egocentricity before I add another tool to my box. To be fair though, here are some “tweets” about Twitter in true Twitter form, which limits all messages to 140 characters. What do you think? Over hyped or exactly what you’re looking for?

1. Launched in Oct ’06, many point to last year’s SXSW conference for its take off. More info & useful links from Mark Glaser & DoshDosh
2. In Jan ’08 Twitter reported just over 750,000 registered users with 3,399 new users daily (for sake of comparison, Facebook has 250,000).
3. “…its status & image has been upgraded from toy to tool – can [it] ‘leap from’ a small, enthusiastic group of tech-savvy people to the mainstream.” ‘ Mark Evans
4. “A hybrid of chat, social networking and blogging,” it’s built on the attraction to community, need to be social and desire to matter.
5. Pres. candidates are twittering “the new reality of Campaign 2.0, where web-savvy campaigns are trying to attach themselves to as many social networking sites as possible.” (ABC)
6. Even if you don’t use it to chat, there are a number of practical uses of short, concise messages like RemembertheMilk.com
7. “…as with most Internet phenomena, users hacked [it] into something completely different – place I turn to if I need a quick question answered…”‘ Patrick Ruffini at TechPresident
8. “Twitter hate is the new black – [though haters] do have a good point. Do you really need to know that I’m eating a tuna sandwich for lunch? Probably not…”  Robert Scoble, a top Twitterer with almost 7,000 followers
9. “…intriguing, useful & addictive for those who live on the move. One observer called it “the Seinfeld of the internet…a website about nothing.”  The Guardian
10. “More than a status app, it is being used as a 1st alert mechanism for the dissemination of news & for immediate discussion surrounding [it].” Josh Catone, ReadWriteWeb
11. Is it worth it? “the average Twitter user lists six to 12 “friends” on the site and choose to receive cell phone updates from three friends.” (ABC)
12. ‘[it's] different from other e-tools. “When u get an email, you have to respond to it, but with Twitter, there’s no expectation of a response.” ‘ Twitter founder Biz Stone
13. “…has turned distraction into an art form. It’s like hanging out at a bar with a bunch of interesting people…& forgetting that you have to go home.” Scott Karp
14. “…inability to immediately embrace Twitter means you’re old…Admitting you don’t ‘get’ [it] is like admitting you can’t hear those specialized ring tones only audible to the young.” – Helen A.S. Popkin, MSNBC

While it had the effect of giving the class a sort of sweatshop feel, the practical reason for his argument was that the faster you painted, the more work you could do, and the more money you could make in a year.

Today, who among us doesn’t wish we had more time? My available time at the office for blogging is limited, so any tool I can find that lets me blog more efficiently is one that I’ll latch on to. Here are five ways I’m able to get posts done faster, so I can blog with less time or churn out more posts in a week:

1. Trade out the web interface for a desktop app. Web interfaces are nice in that they can be accessed anywhere and provide a direct link to your blog. But they also have some shortfalls, namely that it’s easy to lose unsaved work and you can’t always see what you’re doing. WordPress, on which the Beaconfire Wire resides, is particularly problematic in this way – I used to have to take another half hour or more to add graphics, just because of the difficulties of positioning them without seeing what I was doing.

I evaluated a few options and ended up settling on Windows Live Writer. It’s free, interfaces with major blog software (though it would really prefer you use Windows Live Spaces), and provides a familiar feel, including a spellchecker that provides the red squiggly underlines that have substituted for strong spelling skills in my generation.

In particular, the ability to line up images and set their attributes quickly has sped up my blogging. And while there are still some bugs (<a name> tags will crash it badly), it’s largely a stable project. Plus it’s free.

2. Set some standards, and conform to them. Yeah, it’s cooler to fight The Man. But self-imposed standards can save you time on decision making and let you automate some actions. For example, for the last few months, almost all my callout images have been a set width (239 px, since we widened the blog), plus a black border and white margin that do my spacing for me (for a total width of 250 px).

This means I don’t have to worry about how the wrap will look, since I’ve seen it before, and know that it’s about the right size. It also helps me pick out my source images – if I can’t imagine something looking good either cropped or shrunk to that size, I don’t use it.

3. Take advantage of automation. As mentioned above, I’ve made a habit of setting up all my images to some basic standards. I’ve set up a photoshop action to perform this formatting for me. This can be particularly helpful for photobloggers – there’s little more tedious than creating thumbnails of 300+ files every time you want to make a post. But with Photoshop’s automate command, you can just create an action, point to a folder, and walk away.

Other tools have their own automation functions – it’s worth investing a little time upfront to learn to use them so you’ll save time in the future.

4. Write, then edit and format. As a blogger, you’re almost certainly your own editor and researcher, and possible your own designer and layout guy. Since these techniques require different parts of your brain, finish one before you start the next – write the whole post without worrying about typos or graphics. Then go through on a second (and possibly third, depending on complexity) sweep to clean it up, add your images, and make sure the layout keeps it readable.

The only exception here is when your graphics are tied to what you’re writing – when I wrote a walkthrough of the process of creating a Facebook social ad, I needed to screenshot my work as I was writing. The result was a post that took about twice as long as it should have. That said, there was really no other way to put it together without grabbing the screenshots as I was making the changes that I was writing about.

5. Let the tools do as much work as they can. You’re the ideas guy and the writer – use tools that do as much of the rest as you can. I use SnagIt to grab screenshots, Photoshop for quick graphics edits, and the aforementioned Windows Live Writer to put it all together. If it’s a code-heavy post that Live Writer is having difficulty with, I’ll sometimes move over to Notepad++ to help me see what’s going on with the format. Good RSS aggregators, like NetVibes, help you find material quickly from a variety of sources, from a Google News Alert to other blogs to crib from. Putting together the RSS feed can be sped up by using Feedburner. And when it’s time to find graphics, I’ll use services like these to quickly find royalty-free content to drop in.

That said, there’s no tool to do the writing for you. Sometimes, it can just be hard to get started, or you’re just short on ideas. This is the other place where blogging faster can help you – the more time you save on writing, the more you can spend on research for new topics and the more you’ll be willing to just toss posts that didn’t pan out to meet your expectations – I always have three or four in my queue that are topics I hope to get back to, but just aren’t where they need to be at the moment.

Volume isn’t everything, but whether you blog for work or for fun (or, as in my case, a little of each) the more time you can spend writing and researching the better your posts will be. So blog faster, fellow bloggers… blog faster!