It got me to thinking about the differences between these various methods of self-expression and communication. It’s true that all these social media/social networking sites are attractive, but for different reasons, and possibly different reasons exist for different people, or different moods in the same person. I like Twitter for its immediacy and the ease of very short form updates. I like Facebook because it makes it easy to share photos and my Twitter feed, and for the interactions in comments on my page and those of my contacts. LinkedIn is a good place to keep my expanded résumé, and offers what may be more serious discussion forums than I’ve found elsewhere (although I find I don’t have time to follow them). The dozens of Ning networks I’ve signed up for took a lot of my attention for a few weeks earlier this year, but now I rarely look at them.

For me, my blogs are completely different from the networks I belong to. When I do post blog entries, they tend to be longer and better researched than social network posts, which might explain why I don’t write them as often. It’s a bigger commitment of time and effort. Blogs also have a more permanent feeling to them, with several years’ worth of entries available in their archives, while Twitter and Facebook postings quickly scroll off the page, sometimes in just a few hours, and certainly in no more than days. Indeed, some Twitter users, like Jay Rosen of New York University’s Journalism Institute have been agitating recently for Twitter to provide a searchable archive of past tweets, which highlights the fact that such an archive doesn’t exist.

As we used to say on the pre-Web BBS, YMMV (Your Milage May Vary), but for me there’s a time and place for all these expressive outlets, and I’ll keep using them at least until the next greatest thing comes along.

My account (name: KatLemieux) is only a few hours old, so there’s not much to tell yet, but as soon as enough data has been gathered to make it worthwhile, you’ll see it here. You’ll really see it here as soon as I figure out how to do that embedding thing (and manage to get my island into presentable shape).

My results were somewhat mixed. I could not duplicate the counter error she’d seen, but I did enjoy trying out another blogging software. I’ve been using WordPress for several years very happily, but it’s always good to try something new. I don’t think I’ll be switching, but I was impressed with how capable Blogger is these days.

I even tried pulling it up on my iPhone with the WiFi turned off, in case it was something that got into the router. Same symptoms. So I wrote back and the techs put a customer support rep on it. By this time, though, I had decided to start up one of the virtual machines I have on this computer, in this case WindowsXP running on Parallels. Being Windows, I keep an anti-virus program updated on that, even though it’s only a virtual machine, and being too cheap to actually pay for software to run on an Operating System I only boot up once in a blue moon, I use AVG Free. Good stuff, that. As soon as I tried to open the blog, up popped a window announcing that it had detected an infected file on the page.

I logged back into the webhost’s support page to close the ticket, and discovered their rep had also seen a javascript file that was the problem, but didn’t take the time to discover which of many I’d installed in that blog was the culprit. However, AVG Free had already told me the URI of the site that was doing bad things, and I was able to find the link with my blog theme editor. I deleted both lines of code that pointed to the offending site, restarted the blog, and there it was, as good as new.

I never thought I’d see the day when an application on Windows saved me from malware, instead of exposing me to it!

A mentioned here earlier, my new iPhone 3GS was activated with only minor problems. Now we have another data point to add to the history. My husband’s new iPhone arrived yesterday, days earlier than promised by AT&T, thank you very much! So, I set about putting to work the lessons learned when establishing service to mine.

Everything went very smoothly, and since I did not follow the on-screen instructions to wait (infinitely) for activation to happen magically, but simply switched out the SIM cards from his old phone to the new one, Phil was up and running in less than 30 minutes, including the time required to download and install the 3.0 OS on his old iPhone, then back up his data and restore it to the new phone. That sounds wonderful, and it is, but we have encountered one snag.

When he decided to call me from his new phone, to make sure everything was working as designed, my phone rang, but we could not hear one another. Very odd. We tried texting, and that worked, and Phil tried calling AT&T’s directory service, which also worked. The voice recognition at the other end apparently heard his request clearly, and he could hear the prompts. I did the same with my phone, with similar success. (It was late at night by this time, so we didn’t try calling a friend to try it out.) I tried calling his phone again, and this time he could hear me, but I still could not hear him. We repeated this experiment several times with the same results. So I am not sure what is going on, but will be calling AT&T or Apple this morning if the phone still isn’t working properly. And yes, we checked to make sure neither of us had tapped the Mute button.

In the meantime, I should mention that in order to use my old iPhone as an iPod Touch (without signing up for yet another phone plan), I had to jailbreak it. This was a new experience for me, but after some heart-in-mouth moments waiting for the EPROMs to be flashed, everything come out just fine. I will not be doing this with our new 3GS phones, but since otherwise the old devices would be useless, and we did fulfill the phone company’s 2-year contract, I see no reason not to do it on them. That will give me a platform for on-machine testing of the applications I’m planning (yes, I’m getting on that bandwagon along with tens of thousands of others), and a machine to use for demos once the apps are published and we start flogging them at shows and conferences. So stay tuned for some deep development geekery as I get into programming mode.

Update
On a hunch, I suggested Phil turn his phone off and on again, then try calling me. That did the trick! We could both hear each other just fine. Activation complete.

I haven’t been keeping up with what other users are seeing (on Twitter, of course) because I was doing school work like a good girl, but now I think it’s time to check it out. I have even followed @ATTNews, all to no avail. One article I read (but have since misplaced) said they got a message in iTunes saying activation could take as long as 48 hours, but I got no such message, probably because my account is already active. I’m sorely tempted to try switching the SIM cards, but might hold off a little longer.

In the meanwhile, I have been having fun playing with all the apps that don’t require the phone service. Since I have WiFi here, that’s just about everything except the actual phone. This puppy is fast! How fast, you ask? Have a look:

First, I had to choose a WordPress “widget” to use. There are at least 20 in the WordPress website, and who knows how many more elsewhere on the Web. I settled on Twitter Widget Pro by Aaron D. Campbell, but after installing it I got a fatal error message, so I went to the author’s blog and read the comments about this app. Aaron is good at replying, and sure enough, several other people had the same problem. The solution was to use PHP 5.2+, but according to the readout on my site’s control panel, I was using the latest and greatest… So, it was off to the Knowledgebase on my webhost’s support site. Ah ha! Even though the latest version was shown to be available, the default was to use PHP 4.x! So, I had to rummage around and find the place to make it default to version 5. That done, the widget worked like a charm (aside from being a little slow updating).

So, now that I know what I’m doing, it’s time to add this widget to another blog I’m working on, one for a new ePublishing venture. Oops, sorry, we’re not ready to launch that site yet, so I can’t give you a link, but rest assured that when it is time, I’ll post about it here, and on Twitter and other places as well.

But that leads me to another topic. Since I started a new Twitter account for the new venture, now I’m in the market for a Twitter client that will not only allow all three of us involved to post to its account, but will also let me easily manage multiple accounts I’m using. It could get messy, especially since I’m involved in yet another ePublishing venture and will want an account for that one, too. I found something that looks promising, CoTweet, but it is still in private beta so it could be a while before I can try it. Since the new Twitter accounts aren’t active yet, though, I can afford to wait.

Twitter and WordPress are not the only online communications tools out there, of course. You may have noticed another addition to this site, a collection of icons at the end of each blog posting. This widget was (thank goodness!) very straightfoward to install. It’s called Sociable. The configuration page for that widget offers a plethora of linked icons for an enormous array of social networks, including of course Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as well as email and your printer. As dynamic as social networking tools are, though, new ones are always popping up. No problem! Sociable allows you to create your own icons and link them to sites you choose. It doesn’t get much more flexible than that.

At the same time all this is going on, I’ve been working with a new volunteer at the International Spaceflight Museum who is taking over our exhibit sponsorship auctions on eBay. Our original “auctioneer”, Opal Lei (Second Life name), bowed out after working very hard to not only set up the auctions, but also scripted signs in Second Life that display the sponsor’s name and automatically reset when the sponsorship expires. She also wrote up very clear instructions for her successor, making it not just easier, but possible, for someone to follow her footsteps without going completely crazy trying to figure it all out. She even did an inventory of all our exhibits, which she put in a wiki! Those early auctions kept the museum solvent for months, but since they ended we’ve struggled to pay the bills. So finding a replacement auctioneer has been a true blessing. I just hope we can get his first round of auctions rolling in time to avoid losing the islands, since the rent is due next week. If you’re interested in helping, either by sponsoring an exhibit or simply donating, please visit our website for more info on how to do that. We have a PayPal donor button as well as info on the auctions and even a Google spreadsheet that shows our current (sorry) state of financial affairs.

While mentioning the ISM and communications, I would be remiss to not also mention a new book by a friend of mine, Kimberly Rufer-Bach, The Second Life Grid: The Official Guide to Communication, Collaboration, and Community Engagement. She interviewed me for a case study on how the ISM uses a wide variety of Web tools to manage our world-wide distributed nonprofit organization, and according to another friend, Dave Taylor, the ISM was featured very prominently in the book, perhaps getting the most space of any of the case studies she includes. I’ll find out for sure next week when my copy arrives.

Got all that? Good. I’ll stop writing now and get back to work. Thank you for your attention.

part of a page from the 2009 Virginia Guide at Dirxion

Dirxion eBook webpages include space for banner ads or badges, if you like, so it’s possible to generate revenues on top of book sales. Your eBook can be published on CD-ROM as well as (or instead of) the Web, too, so your sales aren’t limited only to those readers with good internet connections. Dirxion doesn’t handle sales — you need your own ecommerce site, or list your eBook with distributors like Ingram and OverDrive, or distributor-retailers such as Lulu or Ebooks.com, but they can encrypt your eBook for security. They do offer some marketing services, including listing your page with major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN in such a way that search results link directly to your eBook page. Also, one of their blogs is all about marketing your eBooks. They offer tracking reports of your site’s traffic and even direct mail or telemarketing services.

Clark told me Dirxion was the first company to do electronic “flip books” like this, starting back when the four founders were working at AT&T, when they published the phone book on CD-ROM. In 1996 they left AT&T to form this company, and have since then grown to 85 employees and over 3000 eBooks annually. Clark agreed with me that ePublishing is still a growth industry, in spite of general economic trends. The founders are still active in this privately-held company, and they are still hiring.

So, how does a prospective eBook writer get their book published at Dirxion? Technically, it’s quite simple. Just provide camera-ready copy in PDF format, and Dirxion does the rest. They put the finished product, with visual navigation menu and flip page eBook, in a directory on their website, using a subdomain for your name with their domain name, or using your own chosen domain name (virtually hosted, still on their website). They handle all the coding and hosting, so there is no worry about bandwidth overruns on your own website, and your eBook is updated automatically whenever they revise their software. Or, as mentioned earlier, you can get your eBook on CD-ROM. All of this comes at a cost, of course, but I don’t have information on that yet, and naturally pricing depends on the number of pages, platform (Web or CD-ROM), extra services, and so on. Clark said he would get back to me with a rough estimate for the project I’m working on right now, but we are still in the planning stages so don’t even know how many pages we’ll be dealing with. I gave him a ballpark figure, and we will use that in our discussions over which publishing service to use.

eBook publishers need to make sure they retain their copyrights, regardless of who they use to “manufacture” their self-published eBooks, and it is not unreasonable to consider publishing in a number of different formats. When my company published Chris Andrews’ book, The Education of a CD-ROM Publisher: An Insider’s History of Electronic Publishing back in 1998, we did it in five different formats (hardback, paperback, CD-ROM, Website and Palm Pilot versions). Once the content is written and edited, it is frequently not too much extra effort to put it out in different ways for greater audience penetration, especially if you plan for that strategy ahead of time, and use appropriate publishing software that can export in various formats.

I’ll be talking with people from other companies in the epublishing industry, and will write about them here, so bookmark or subscribe to our RSS feed to keep up with the latest research and commentary. If you represent such a company, please feel free to contact me, too.

For instance, in late December I discovered a nifty website/Web app called Scrapplet. When I created a free account and started building pages on this site, it was more or less just for fun, to see what was possible. Now, though, I use it for my own organization, mainly to keep track of all the social networks I’ve joined. One of my pages is simply a collection of hyperlinks to each network’s page, so when I have a few minutes to check out the discussions, but don’t want to bother with organizing browser bookmarks (which are only up to date on one computer at a time), I just pull up my “social networks” page and click away. I was even able to quickly sort the network links by topic. Most important, the app works visually, via drag and drop. It’s possible to enhance the pages by adding code, of course, but that’s not strictly necessary. Virtually anyone capable of handling a web browser should be able to create a personal site at Scrapplet. It could be used to quickly prototype webpage designs, too.

Oh, and those online social networks! Obviously, to be active, it’s necessary to be online. Yes, I can see the sites on my iPhone, but except for a few individual networks, they are dependent on full-sized web browser screens, and use lots of visual effects. In at least one, I can’t even post a comment in a group discussion from my iPhone because of the underlying code. Apparently it requires a plug-in not available on the iPhone, like Flash or something.

But the thing that is really irritating is the way flakey internet access is making it difficult to do research for the book I’m working on (about ebook publishing), and to work on my websites. I would like to revamp my old History-eBooks website, and I have been working on it, but being frequently interrupted by crashing routers or bandwidth restrictions make that an uphill battle. In the time I’ve been able to get online, though, I’ve found a new tool for developing blog page themes, WordPress Theme Developer. It’s a free application running on a website, and works very well indeed, but yes, you have to be online to use it. Argh!