Watch the “Did you know?” video (v4.0, 2009) from XPLANE and The Economist:

There is a reference in this video to a quote by futurist, Raymond Kurzweil:

What used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket,
What fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years

What then can fit within a blood cell can in turn be hardcoded into your DNA, only to be later worked in to the sub-atomic void at which point there is no differentiator in identity.  There might be spiritual paths to explore into these depths and realize the connected oneness.  Many such journeys of self-realization and enlightenment documented in mythology, religious scriptures, and by new age gurus.  Such divining is however not for everyone, at least not in a single life time, as sincere as the endeavor might be.

Perhaps, it is for this everyone the long winded path through technology (here, media convergence) where we eventually realize this connected oneness.  When that happens we won’t need transportation vehicles and communication tools to connect.  Pursuit of material objects will be irrelevant.  For what we sought, wanted to be, and where we wanted to go we would have found them all within. The big nothing!

Everything else is pure illusion, sarvam mAyam.

Image source: aejmc.org

Where: Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu, India

On a somewhat related note, this image is a reflection of how I feel myself, about all the online profiles I have, on Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, et cetera ...

If I could add SoMe (Social Media) God into a pantheon this one below would be my candidate!

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For some details on the personalization I am referring to in this video, you can clearly see stuff pulled from my Facebook profile at 0:23 (Think English message), 0:29 (Name), 0:47-0:49 (Career Info), 0:50-0:54 (Photos from My Albums). See below:

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“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.” (Source: Wordle.net website)

Below is one of the word clouds I generated for inderSTADT:

Note: you do not need to have a website to try this. You can create a word cloud from any blurb of text at this URL – http://www.wordle.net/create. Below is word cloud generated from text in the “Who is writing this blog?” module of this website:

Try it, its fun!

1. Add something to your HTML title “the district”. Like “the district // home of amal bala” or whatever makes sense. Presently, title (“the district”) is too generic for SEO friendliness.  Nice to have: create a favicon for your site using free services such as Dynamic Drive – FavIcon Generator or favicon.ico Generator.
2. Install All-in-One SEO pack plugin for WordPress
3. Make it a point to write an “excerpt” for all your posts inside the WP edit-post screen. Very important for SEO and mashups with Facebook etc
4. Make it a point to to populate the fields (keywords, etc) under the All-in-One SEO module for each post.  You can choose the dynamically generate keywords option
5. Get a Twitter account and install a Twitter plug-in so that all your posts are automatically tweeted when you publish or update. Better, if you can publish with a hashtag.  If your Twitter account is mashed up with your Facebook account even better.  Your distribution improves many folds.
   1. Twitter plugins I use are Twitter for WordPress and Tweetly Updater.  Former pulls in Twitter feed into my blog in the form of a sidebar widget while the latter can be configured to automatically tweet whenever you publish a blog post.
6. Add a “Stay Connected” widget to summarize your various Social Media profiles. See this for icons you can use — http://www.instantshift.com/2008/12/10/20-free-social-media-icon-sets-for-bloggers/
7. www.instantshift.com seems to be a nice site for web designers and developers. You will see lots of useful pointers there.  Nice to have: you can increase the coolness of your blog with this WordPress plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cumulus/.  It allows you to display your tags and categories as a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D.
8. Get a Google Analytics account (you can register with your gmail account). Install this plugin – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/ – to integrate with Google Analytics. Track your site!  If you need realtime tracking, you can try a Freemium service such as StatCounter as information from Google is delayed by a day.
9. Add social bookmarking tools to your blog.  Try Share This.
10. Add a Blog Roll section to your site. List only those blogs that are valuable to you and you want to connect and back link with. Do not dilute yourself
11. Start commenting on meaningful external blogs with linkbacks to your site. You have to do it subtly (and not overtly) so that it does not look like shameless plugs
12. See if this tool – http://www.wibiya.com/ – makes sense for you. Try out such new social tools, plug-ins, etc. Blog about your experience if you can. My own example here — http://www.inderstadt.net/2008/12/06/inderstadt-a-complete-makeover/
13. Install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress.  This will improve search engine indexing of your site.
14. Burn the RSS feed of your blog through FeedBurner.  Google owns FeedBurner now and I say it is beneficial to have your feed aggregated by this service.
15. Get your blog listed on directories such as Technorati and BlogCatalog.  See this blog’s listing on Technorati and BlogCatalog.
16. ENJOY!

Hope someone finds the above useful ;=)

Last month, some of the bHive core team went on a weekend hike up White Mountain Peak (wiMp, 14,252ft) in INYO National Forest. The third highest peak in California, it is both fair weather and friendly… only insofar as you do not take it for granted. Boy, were there simple lessons learned from this day hike? Certainly, and all are as applicable to practicing Web Presence Management (WPM) as they are to life!

All Sugar and No Salt is as fatal to your Customer as it is to the Hiker
By some miscalculation, we all carried and snacked only on sugary stuff on our uphill hike. Big mistake. The idea was to ease our way to the top on “power” snacks, eat one of those ready-to-cook “real” hiker meals and cruise on the downhill hike. Not only did our systems reject the sugar even before we reached the top, but there also was not one tiny sheltered spot for us to light our backcountry stove. The terrain was barren and winds howling. In hindsight, a few saltines, nachos or even junk food like chips/crisps snacked periodically would have helped a lot.

What’s the parallel here to WPM? Corporate communications are like sugar. Customers, like your system, will reject it to the point of fatality if that’s the only diet they are fed. However, a contextual Social Media (SoMe) practice will keep your Customers trusting and engaged, just like the right pinch of salt snacked periodically keeps the system healthy and balanced. In salt, we trust (in just the right doses, of course)!

“Done that Altitude” is PAST, “Must Do Attitude” is PRESENT
Our hiking team has had its moments. Latitudes stretched, longitudes tested. And, some record altitudes attained, all in good health. All, however, in the past still did not adjust our attitude, what’s a wiMp by any other other name?

What indifference! Continue to be stuck in the past on the only ways you have talked to Customers, taking them for granted, and rest assured the wiMps will become IMPs – InsurMountable Peaks (or, Problems). What worked then is past. What must be done today is to engage in each uphill task with full transparency and deference (or, empathy). Always respect the Mountain, high or low. We need to Listen and Learn from our Customers – and give them a Voice — daily … today, everyday!

The Curious Case of Turtle Tao
We met a septuagenarian on our climb. He was on a solo road trip from Colorado to hike in Utah and California. Let’s call this gent Turtle Tao. He was ahead of us in the morning when we were driving from the campground to get started on the hike. He was driving slow-and-steady on the single-lane dirt road. Needless to say, us can’t-wait-to-calculate-return-on-investment-(ROI) types “forced” him to yield so that we could get there sooner. We started the hike much ahead of Tao. Surely enough, he caught up with us within the hour! He gave us company for the next 1-2 hours and then moved slowly ahead even as he seemed to accelerate without increasing his speed – walking or breathing. Finally, when we reached the summit Tao was there, again pleasantly inquiring after us. Offered me a sandwich bite and did take some summit pictures for our ROI. We lost sight of Tao shortly thereafter in our downhill delirium. He was the proverbial Tortoise, seemingly slow but surely steady and earnest. We were the insolent hares…already at the finish line with ROIs and dashboards!

There seems to be this raging, current fixation on SoMe ROI. Hopefully, we all do not forget that the main goal of Social Media (and WPM in general) is the trusted ongoing engagement it facilitates. Not the arrival at any specific end points or summits. To twist a famous traveling quote: “the point of this WPM journey is not to arrive.” Instead, the engagement and participation it enables are to be enjoyed, to be learned from, and ultimately… to be continued.

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Here is a short slideshow from this hike:

Below is example of video embedded on an external website with the current Standard resolution of 425×344:

Standard (425 x344):

Share URL for video in the example above is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VmGvjQMkH4, which will take you to the page shown in the image below that has a Large (640×360) video player but plays the video by default in normal quality (and not HD):

Large (640×360):

If your video is available in HD quality, you will see a HD button in the video player as shown below:

Clicking on the HD button will take you to a video detail page that has the eXtra Large format player (850×500) as shown in the image below:

eXtra Large (850×500):

Now, if you want to share your HD video in L or XL format as a direct URL, simply do one of the following:

• Append the “key=value” pair of “fmt=18” to the share URL.  So in our example, we get http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VmGvjQMkH4&fmt=18 to access the video on YouTube in a 640×360 (Large) player with HD turned on
  
• Append the “key=value” pair of “fmt=22” to the share URL. So in our example, we get http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VmGvjQMkH4&fmt=22 to access the video on YouTube in a 850×500 (eXtraLarge) player with HD turned on
  

Per my understanding, turning HD on as the default play mode is not yet available for external website embeds, as you can evidence in this post.

Be warned that people would know your true colors if you tweeted about these videos or posted them on Facebook and claimed not to belong to this breed.

Enjoy!

New Media Douchebag:

Twitter Madness:

My primary use case is to get the audio track of some of the videos posted online on YouTube. See my post – janani ninnuvinA – for an example of a YouTube video and the converted audio (.MP3) file.

The CatchYouTube service is also accessible through URLs: catch-video.com and catchvideo.net.

If at all there is a gripe, it is the (un)reliable online availability of this site. I have noticed the service to be down or unreachable from time to time. Also, not sure how long this service will last before it “vanishes” like the so many cool ones I have seen in the past do for a variety of reasons. So catch your YouTube video while you can and while this service lasts!

YouTube automatically generates up to 3 thumbnail images that are 130 x 97 pixels in dimension and in JPEG format. These thumbnails are accessible in the following URI format:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/videoID/1.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/videoID/2.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/videoID/3.jpg

Using the Power of Ten video as an example, you can get its videoID (BBsOeLcUARw) from the video URL and hence the thumbnail images as follows:

Video URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBsOeLcUARw

Thumbnails:

Powers of Ten - 1 of 3

http://img.youtube.com/vi/BBsOeLcUARw/1.jpg

Powers of Ten - 2 of 3

http://img.youtube.com/vi/BBsOeLcUARw/2.jpg

Powers of Ten - 3 of 3

http://img.youtube.com/vi/BBsOeLcUARw/3.jpg

Bonus:

The bonus is you get a 320 x 240 image with the following (0.jpg):

Powers of Ten - 320x240

http://img.youtube.com/vi/BBsOeLcUARw/0.jpg