LiveTweet at the Cool Twitter Conference in Philadelphia

I went to the Cool Twitter Conference in Philadelphia yesterday, and of course, tweeted about it. Here is a feed of my tweets during the conference, but just the first ten. At the bottom, below the friendfeed, you can click links to see more of my tweets. (Or, you can see everyone’s tweets aggregated here). I tried to focus my tweets around useful details and links the presenters provided. We covered topics like personal branding, health care uses, tweetchats, customer service, law enforcement, and more.

I wanted to set up a CoveritLive window in my blog, which would have been best for livetweeting. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with WordPress.com (making me think about switching to Blogger, or something else–>more on this in another post). But, @philbaumann (thank you, Phil!), the presenter on health care uses of Twitter, helped me come up with this alternative using friendfeed. Not my first choice, but an acceptable backup.

A big thank you to the presenters at the conference (in reverse order, more or less):

@lawscomm – Lauri Stevens on Twitter for law enforcement
@sistertoldja – Jamilah Lemieux on Twitter to build and brand your blog
@philbaumann – Health care and Twitter
@cathywebsavvypr – Cathy Larkin on chats, like #smallbizchat & #journchat
@Lifes_Dash – Michele Mattia on becoming a part of the conversation
@chefmarksmith – Mark Smith on Twitter for your restaurant business
@gloobspot – Jeff Lopez on building your brand and generating profits on
@IQMZ – Owen Stone on Twitter as a gateway drug to other social media
@whiskycast – Mark Gillespie on driving consumers to your platform
@comcastcares – Frank Eliason on Twitter as a customer service tool

New Media and The Middle East – Challenging Authority in Iran

This is another installment in my series of posts on examples of ways new media are being used to challenge authority in the Middle East. This post will focus on Iran.

Internet access in Iran has seen a particular explosion, growing faster than any other Middle Eastern country, according to Reporters Without Borders.  ”From 2000 to 2007,” reported Sepideh Parsa, “the number of users grew from 250,000 to 18 million, which accounts for 53.7% of users in the region”.

Within this explosion has been the rise of blogging in Iran, with the blogosphere becoming such a phenomenon as to warrant its current nickname, “Weblogistan”.  This rise in blogging is having political ramifications for the Iranian State.  “Blogs have become an essential medium for dissidence against the autocratic regime and its state-controlled media”, said Parsa.  “Iran has one of the strictest censorship policies in the Middle East. Thus, blogs offer Iranians the only platform to peacefully exchange their political thought, emotions, and opinions while overcoming the boundaries that have been imposed by the government”.

MediaNext: Twitter – Training Links I Used in Ukraine

Here are the links I used during my MediaNext training seminars on Twitter for Ukrainian journalists and NGOs in June and July. You will find examples of how these tools are being used by journalists and NGOs (case studies, if you will), links to articles with statistics and trends in these tools, and other misc. links backing up with at I was training. You will also find at the bottom a section of “helpful links” and one on “Twitter tips”. I was working with co-trainers, so these aren’t all of the links we used in our seminars. But, this gives you a good base.

Three other things to note:

1. Languages – You will see that some of this is occasionally in Ukrainian or Russian. In those instances, I tried to provide an English translation to make it easier to read for non-speakers. In some cases, I have used Google Translate to translate into Ukrainian. Be careful with these, because occasionally the translations are a bit funny. However, they are close enough to be informative. Also, ideally I would have a Russian version, Ukrainian version, AND an English version. But, time is finite.
2. Downloadable Version – I have also created a downloadable PDF version that might be a useful alternative for you. Please let me know if you have troubles with this, and I could post a different version.

I hope these links below will prove useful for you. I tried to stay current, using links and info only from 2008 and on. I’d love to hear any thoughts, questions, or feedback on any of this. Enjoy!

MediaNext: Heading Back to Ukraine

Well, looks like I’m on the Ukraine commute, as my friend, The Goat, pointed out. I’m heading back to Ukraine today to do another set of New Media trainings with Internews-Ukraine. For the most part, these will be the same trainings. Just some tweaks here and there. The big difference is we are hitting new cities. The first will be in Kyiv, like before, but will draw in some journalists and NGOs from Vinnytsya. Then, we head to Odesa for two days on the beach, um, I mean, trainings. Finally, to Kharkiv.

I can’t decide which I am more excited about. Odesa or Kharkiv. I’ve been to Odesa before. But it’s Odesa. On the Black Sea. And this time, it will be July, instead of March. Or April. Or whenever I was there with my wife in 2006. Should be a lot more fantastic. Though, Odesa’s a pretty cool city, regardless. So it wasn’t like it was terrible before. Even when it is cold, hey, you are still at the beach, right?

MediaNext: Teaching Twitter in Ukraine, Convincing the Skeptics of Its Power

Twitter was the tool I was most excited and nervous about teaching in Ukraine. On the one hand, I think Twitter has a number of uses that make it a powerful tool for research, communication, and broadcast that are rather distinct in the Web world. On the other hand, it’s not something widely used in Ukraine, nor are these powerful uses immediately apparent from Twitter’s front page—the result is that Twitter may seem too simple to provide many complex uses. In other words, it can appear to the beginner to be a gimmick, something fun at first, but ephemeral. I was excited to teach Twitter precisely because I think it is powerful, and that few in Ukraine were using it at all, let alone to its potential. But that is also why I was nervous—the hardest thing about Web 2.0 technology is behavior change.

There were some things about Twitter in the Ukrainian context that I was particularly concerned would stand in the way. First and foremost, united among all of the Web 2.0 tools we were teaching, was this idea of freely spreading information to the world, letting go of control over it, thinking “What will be useful to someone else?” In my past experience in Ukraine, I have found that information is not something you just give away for free. In the Soviet Union, information was the real currency. It didn’t matter how much money you had, because there was little on the shelves to buy. You had to know someone with the goods on the black market. That information was the real commodity in the Soviet Union.

Now, fast forward to the generation following the Soviet Union, a generation upon which we are still on the cusp. There are still feelings that information is not something you just throw around for all to benefit from at no direct cost. Not everyone feels this way, but it’s still an issue. How weird the idea must be to suddenly be told you should regularly send Tweets with your daily pearls of wisdom, useful online articles you found, your feelings and reactions to a public event. This last one is especially pertinent—for many in Ukraine, what you think about things are still very much reserved for private spheres. Imagine how vulnerable one might feel at the thought of saying to him or herself, “I’m going to Tweet this information so ANYONE can see it, and not just the people in my immediate circle of trust”.

This approach to information, in my travels in Ukraine, has often presented a real challenge to NGOs there. Those I haveencountered tend to see information as theirs, and not something that should be available for all who can benefit from it, especially competing NGOs. NGOs in Ukraine can be VERY competitive for funding and resources. It was not rare, in the past, for me to encounter NGOs that would rather keep information that, if free, could have been very helpful to the public, in the name of maintaining their comparative advantage. It’s the mindset that if you have something that others don’t, but that others want, they will need you. Once they have what you have, it can threaten your existence as an organization. Never mind that your whole purpose as an organization is to help the public as much as possible, and to build your programs around the idea that, hopefully, you will one day no longer be needed. This is very complicated in Ukraine. And an American that comes in slinging around Twitter and encouragement for you to be free with all of your best information can easily be met with skepticism and suspicion. 

MediaNext: If You Can Play Donetsk, You Can Play Anywhere

I figured something would be different about this New Media training experience in Donetsk, vis-à-vis the west, since I had arrived with my share of preconceptions. Yet, I wondered, “Could I go a whole two days of trainings only to learn that there was nothing tangibly different? Did there need to be something different?” Certainly and no, of course.

It took me a while to put my finger on something that struck me as different about training New Media here. Everything began more or less like the other two, or at least it seemed to. But that could easily have been the fact that I had come in more focused on what I had planned to present, rather than how they were reacting when they first entered the room, or those first few sessions. I wanted them to come away significantly impacted by what we were there to teach. Since all I could really control was myself, I set my sights for that zone that we hear about in great athletes—that place where all ego strips away and all that remains is reflex. Assuming I was capable of this, of course.

It wasn’t till lunch that “it” started to sink in.

I joined the trainees at the big table, in the café where we ate lunch, to see if I could connect with them. If there’s one thing I have found it easy to connect on with Ukrainians, it is food. All I’d have to do is ask some questions, make some comments about food, get people talking food. Ice would be broken. Now was a good time to set the tone for the rest of the training, build those bridges that would open things up for the remaining 3/4s of the sessions. Time for some food talk.

MediaNext: Some Resources from Our Training in Kyiv

Here are some resources we used for our training in Kyiv. I’ll blog about it in more detail later, but figured this would be cool to share.

Maxon’s training on LiveJournal and Blogging

02 Livejournal & Blogging (MediaNext, module 1)

View more OpenOffice presentations from Maxon Pugovsky.

Twitter in Plain English

Social Networking in Plain Ukrainian

This is a massive list of links that I am using for this training – examples, facts, tips, downloads, etc.

Any feedback or links you’d like to provide will always be welcomed here. I will try to publish more training materials later.

Author’s Note:  This is part of a series of posts on my experiences doing New Media trainings with Internews-Ukraine in June 2009, as part of their MediaNext initiative, in partnership with European Journalism Centre. These views are my own, and do not reflect those of Internews-Ukraine or European Journalism Centre. Just so we’re clear on that.

MediaNext Training: The Internet is Not Your Friend

Sometimes, the Internet can be your worst enemy. Well, I should say, your Internet connection. But I won’t, because really the enemy is the Internet.

Everything was fine with our Internet connection in Kyiv. Of course, you’d kind of expect that, because it’s the capital, and Internet connections tend to be better in capitals, right? Two days, the Internet connection was the least of our problems (not that we had a lot of problems).

Then, we got to Lviv, and our Internet connection at the training dropped a bomb on us. It planted itself in the foundation of our sessions, and exploded into a burst of shrapnel that ripped through our structure, shredding flesh and concrete and electrical wiring and everything else in its path.

Let me tell something that I am now a expert of:  It is QUITE a challenge to train people how to use Internet tools when your connection won’t allow you to load Webpages. Trust me on this. It might take a while to fully comprehend. Especially for those who have been using broadband so long that they’ve forgotten what dial-up was like, and just how creative you have to be to make the best use of your time to avoid losing half your day to page loads.

Needless to say, a lot of other adjustments in our training were needed.

YouTube videos were suddenly difficult to show, since they require so much bandwidth to watch. I had been planning on providing links to people so they too could click on the various videos I was showing, should they so desire. But, during the disaster that was quickly becoming our attempt at having everyone load Webpages, I backed off on this idea of providing a whole mess of high bandwidth links.

My blogging strategy session wasn’t so bad, because I was mostly talking and loading pages. And I could kill a lot of download time talking stats and how to think about blogs. Good think I had this information on my hard drive, and didn’t need to keep loading pages just to get this info.

Twitter wasn’t so bad either (compared to what was to come), because we weren’t showing a lot on Twitter. Mostly just how to send messages, how to find and follow people, some examples of news organizations using Twitter, and a lot about how I approach Twitter for research and how journalists can benefit from this.

What was really challenging was when we had people actually working on these tools. For a number of sites, people had to register (I had recommended that we require people to register before the training, but only got my colleagues as far as telling the trainees to register for Twitter, because of it’s issues with many people trying to register at once from the same IP address, woo HAH). So, this made YouTube fun, especially when I walked them through how to create a playlist and their own channel. It easily doubled how long these activities took, given that we had to spend a lot of time enjoying the lovely green or blue of the load progress bar. And, some people’s connections were loading much faster than others, so some people got to sit and wait for others to catch up. How do you accommodate both? There’s only so much content I can tell them. This was a training to show them how to do something.

Yeah, we could just show them on our main computer, projected onto the screen, and told them not to do anything on the Internet, letting them just sit and watch. (Works GREAT!!! when you give people an Internet connection during a training and expect them not to wander). The rub here is that our feedback from the Kyiv training was consistently:  ”More practice!”

The beautiful irony here-like so many that life loves to gift us no matter how much we try to prepare for everything that can go wrong, Murphy-is that we tweaked our sessions to give the trainees in Lviv a lot more chance to practice the sites we were showing. Man, I was so ready to blow their minds with practice (and of course fully expected to hear “More theory and cases!” on our feedback forms).

Then came my “Facebook and Social Networking” session. I’m not going to relive the gore and the devastation for you. Sorry. But, I will say this. As you should expect, I most certainly began my session with, “Hey, everybody, let’s REGISTER!”. Yeah, that lopped off pounds of flesh. This was an experiment in how people can somehow manage to click the links I wasn’t asking them to click, and going off in completely wrong directions. I’d ask if everyone was okay, and a few didn’t seem to want to admit that they were very much on the wrong page and couldn’t find their way back. Or, a few had to go to their email and confirm their accounts, and though it was written in Ukrainian, there was some kind of mental disconnect preventing them from taking this action. Then, I had the great idea to show them how to create an RSS feed into their profile from their LiveJournal blogs. More flesh pounds. I never even got to how to feed Twitter to Facebook. There were a lot of blank screens and progress bars. And I had all these great examples of how various journalists and news organizations were using Facebook, a plan to show them how to create a group and a page, show them Causes, and perhaps even have a little fun with the search function-those ideas were leveled by the aftershock of the Internet connection. I think all I really did was confuse the begeebers out of them.

After the session, I asked Maxon, “How do you say ‘disaster’ in Ukrainian?” He said, “катастрофа”.

At least I was able to show them how to convert Facebook into Ukrainian in the beginning. I can only imagine what kind of disaster this would have been in English. (Actually, I would have stuck with Vkontakte).

So, you might ask, “Why are you saying that the Internet can be your worst enemy, and not your Internet connection?”

This is simple. The Internet promises us so much. Web 2.0 came along and made everything so easy, so quick. Every day, more and more people are doing more and more on the Internet. Because it is so easy, so quick. But, there is another side to this. A dark side, with snarling dogs, crying babies, and little devils that hate us and constantly look for ways to inflict trouble and harm. The Internet calms us into thinking that nothing can go wrong, that it will all be so simple. Just point. And click. And boom. A Webpage appears. Just like that. Except when you find yourself in the presence of a bad Internet connection. And you find yourself at a two-day training, telling everyone, “Oh, it’s so SIMPLE! This will CHANGE YOUR LIFE! All you have to do is… um… wait… and… well… on this page, once it finally loads, you will see… well… maybe we should just wait… it will be easier to explain when you see it… ah, technology…”

Thank you, Internet. You charmed me with your blissful offers of hope and promise. You lulled me to sleep in your arms. And finally, you ripped off your mask and revealed your other face. Friends don’t deceive each other like this.

Man, here’s hoping the Internet is our friend in Donetsk.

If anyone out there has any recommendations for how to approach a training situation like this, or would like to share their experiences, please do.

Author’s Note:  This is part of a series of posts on my experiences doing New Media trainings with Internews-Ukraine in June 2009, as part of their MediaNext initiative, in partnership with European Journalism Centre. These views are my own, and do not reflect those of Internews-Ukraine or European Journalism Centre. Just so we’re clear on that.

Photo: Me and Coffee McGee in front of what I understand to be a Ukrainian nationalist flag. Courtesy of MediaNext.

MediaNext: A New Ukrainian Adventure in New Media (Continued)

I’ll pick up where I left off in my previous post…

I strike curious poses when I train

We’re teaching Vkontakte, and showing examples of how journalists are using Facebook. I’d prefer it was just Facebook, because to be honest, Vkontakte is the runt you throw back, by comparison–you can only do a fraction on it of what you can do on Facebook. But, it’s the top site, period, in Ukraine, so Vkontakte it is. Early indications from the training are that some of our trainees think Vkontakte is mostly for young people to goof around on and share silly pictures, and not really something for journalists to conduct serious business. Of course, I’d like to point out that McDonald’s figured out a long time ago that if you target young people, they develop lifelong habits, and begin to think of your brand as something familiar, kind of like going home.

Of course, Twitter is on our list, as well. And Twitter seems to be getting the same treatment that Vkontakte is getting, at least by some of our trainees. I love this about Twitter. It is the easiest tool to use, and the hardest to understand. Ah, Twitter, so powerful, and yet so misunderstood. Journalists who know how to wield you will gain a significant edge on those who don’t.

Coming into this whole experience, I had to really think about what it was we were really doing with this training. This isn’t just about New Media vs. Old Media. This is a complete paradigm shift here in Ukraine. Ukraine is a country  still emerging from a long and brutal history of authoritarian control of information, secrecy, and propaganda. Information was long the real currency of the Soviet Union. People had money, but there was nothing to buy on the shelves. You needed information to know who had the goods that you could then buy with your money. So, information was horded, and exchanged like a commodity.

In my experience in Ukraine, a lot of people still relate to information this way. The idea that information should be free, and not hidden from sight, is still the first blade of grass desperately fighting its way through the last of Spring’s blanket of snow. Or, to keep the metaphor’s going, Jefferson’s idea of knowledge being like a lit candle doesn’t seem to have caught on yet. So, as I was thinking about what to train about Web 2.0, it hit me that really what I was here to train was pushing the thinking of letting go of information completely, opening it up for all to see, making it as visible as possible, spreading via the people you trust to well beyond that circle of trust into the far reaches of your friend’s friend’s friend’s friend’s friend’s casual acquaintance-who knows where the turtle ends. To a Ukrainian, this might be like walking out the front door naked. And I am here to encourage people to feel as okay as possible about this. Fascinating.

Is Google Eating Us?

I’m currently working with some Ukrainians to set up some trainings in June to teach New Media skills to NGOs and journalists in Ukraine. This is giving me a chance to take a stroll through New Media on a macro level, as I think through which tools make the most sense to teach, and what sorts of big picture things we should say about them.

I was talking to Rebekah Heacock the other day about Google-well, no, I should say I was having a conversation via Gmail about Google-when I began to wonder just how deeply enmeshed we should allow ourselves to become in this Google beast that is consuming the cyberworld. The conversation started with me saying that I’d finally, at long last, and after much ribbing and coercion from Rebekah, made the leap over to Gmail, giving Hotmail the boot. It would have happened sooner, except that I was in grad school at Columbia, where there is no time for midstream mass behavioral change like switching your entire email life over to a new platform. Now that I have finally made the switch, I feel like Mohinder being handed the keys to his very own multimillion dollar research facility (for the record, I don’t feel like Mohinder in any other way, because I am not a bad character on a not-very well-planned TV show). I had to tell someone about it.

Rebekah said something to the effect of her whole life being on Google, that everything she does is on some Google platform. Not really, of course, but very close.

This got me to thinking:  is it really such a good idea to use all these Google tools? Can we get too enmeshed in Google? I think so.