Sara Rosso's Mobile Photo Blog

How to Create a Free Mobile Photoblog on WordPress.com

With the recent Instagram terms of service changes, I’ve had several people ask me how to create a mobile photoblog here on WordPress.com, since I use it for my own mobile photoblog.

It’s pretty easy. Here’s what you do, with appropriate links. You’ll be reading this to publishing on your mobile photoblog in the next five minutes!

  1. Create a blog on WordPress.com (free!) Continue reading
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Digital Curation: The New Frontier of Knowledge

This past Saturday I presented “Digital Curation: The New Frontier of Knowledge” at KnowCamp, an Italian BarCamp in Modena about knowledge and the web.

If you’re not familiar with the Ignite format, it’s very exciting for both speakers and spectators. 5 minutes, 20 slides, 15 seconds each slide. It’s a timing nightmare and you’re always racing against the clock, but it’s a great exercise to really concentrate on the meat of your presentation and remove the extras. (I gave another Ignite earlier this year on the New Digital Company: Distributed, Online, Transparent)

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No offense, I don’t want to be friends on Facebook

If you’re reading this it’s possible until recently we used to be friends on Facebook. But before that, we probably were friends IRL…in real life. We fell out of touch, or maybe we just saw each other rarely.

And then we joined Facebook. We became “friends.” And I had a lot of friends, racing steadily towards 1,000 friends. Wow, I was popular! People liked me! What could I do with all those friends?

What could I do, indeed.

I started hiding people’s updates from my News Feed. Facebook said I could put people into Lists, so I did, and I dissected and debated contacts into this list or that one. I diligently managed permissions and access for people on those lists – this list could see my photos, this one couldn’t. This other list could see my Wall, and this one could not. I removed my comments on others’ updates from my own profile feed, as well as the notice of any new friends I added. I blocked applications. I deleted Like requests. I ignored Pokes. I change my profile picture about 1x year. I was updating about once a week.

And I started thinking, this is a lot of effort I’m investing in not furthering any of these relationships, and making sure they don’t intrude on any other relationships.

After the initial “Add to Friends”, and most of those requests included no personal notes or questions, there was still no communication. Nothing was strengthened. Nothing was reborn. Nothing was created. A few old contacts wrote me to say hi; others asked for favors. But most just stayed silent. Maybe they browsed my profile or my photos, or maybe they weren’t that curious after all.

So why does un-friending someone on Facebook feel like you’re rejecting them?

It’s a bandaid in our relationships. It’s not that I don’t want to be “friends” with you, it’s that Facebook doesn’t define what relationship I have with you. Most likely without Facebook, our relationship will remain the same as it has always been: casual friends, business-related associates, networking acquaintances, old high school friends, occasional chatters, daily Re-Tweeters, or even weekly emailers. Facebook doesn’t fundamentally change that.

But I’m not really worried about unfriending.

I am accessible; I was before Facebook and I am even more after I joined. I have websites. Many websites. All with forms and addresses to contact me. I hand out business cards with an email address. You can Tweet @rosso at me. If you search for Sara Rosso on Google, my sites are about 90% of the first page.

So why am I still on Facebook at all?

First, I have several fan pages for my websites and I do see a utility in keeping them – they’re an additional way for content consumers, if not friends, to stay updated with your very-specific content and to give me feedback.

Secondly, for some of my family members, who live more than 5,000 miles away from me, and for a few of my very close friends, it’s the only way they have decided they will participate in this whole online world. Email didn’t work, a phone call is expensive and different time zones can be challenging, and for now, I’m ok with staying in touch with them this way. But I know where they live, what their phone numbers are, and I’ve probably seen them in the last 12 months.

And for now, this small minority has priority over acquaintances, people I meet networking, and whoever else is online and has many, many, many other ways to stay in contact with me and what I’m doing other than Facebook.

I don’t know if I’ll ever leave Facebook completely. I’ll probably continue to cut down my friend list, encouraging them to interact with me in other ways.

But don’t take it personally if you get unfriended.

Do I want to be friends with you? Sure I do. But it doesn’t have to be on Facebook.

Diaspora

Is Diaspora a threat to Facebook?

I was speaking to a journalist recently about Diaspora, and they wanted to know – will Diaspora be the next Facebook?

I believe it won’t, and before I explain why, for those that aren’t familiar with Diaspora, here’s a quick recap:

Diaspora is an open source “social networking software” that was started by NYU students in February 2010 and gained attention after being listed on popular crowd-funding site Kickstarter in April 2010 – it raised more than $200,000 from supporters. The premise was pretty simple: create a social network software where you can be sure you have complete control over your privacy and your data.

So will Diaspora be the next Facebook? Not likely. Even Diaspora co-founder Maxwell Salzberg says, “Facebook is not what we are going after.”

Here’s why I think it won’t be a threat to Facebook – from a concept point of view:

  • Diaspora is a distributable software package, not a single website. Since Diaspora is open source software, that means that anyone can download and use it, and modify its code and redistribute it. There’s no need to sign up just in one place to use it, and therefore the mass of people replicating itself in the same quantity as Facebook is unlikely to occur.
  • The people that cared about the privacy issues on Facebook are a small percentage of its users. Unfortunately, the number of people genuinely concerned with any breaches in privacy and leaving Facebook is not enough to make a dent – Facebook’s growth continues to soar despite its privacy debacles. Facebook is learning from its mistakes, too – it’s providing more communication about changes as well as teaching users how to opt-in or opt-out of services. It will take significant breaches of trust for users to consider abandoning Facebook now.
  • Facebook is the new home page. For some users, asking them to move from Facebook is akin to asking them to switch email addresses, websites and phone numbers all in one – and with no obvious benefits. Facebook is their home new page, and changing that will result in isolating them unless their friends are using it, too.
  • People “know” Facebook and “know” Mark Zuckerberg – they don’t know Diaspora. With the release and success of the Social Network movie, though considered a fiction and not a real-life story of Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg, the affinity between Facebook and its users has only been strengthened. After June 2010′s disastrous interview with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Mark has worked hard on communicating more and becoming a press-worthy figurehead of the company, and it looks like it’s working. Who, on the other hand, is Diaspora? Alpha invites went out at the end of November, and very little has been communicated since on the Diaspora blog.
  • Open source communities traditionally grow organically from a devoted volunteer base, not starting with a capital injection. This perhaps is the most interesting point for me, as I work for a company whose business model rides on open source software: the community came well before the software-as-a-service and passion drove its development and features at the beginning. Has the capital injection Diaspora received really created a sustainable, passionate core development team? Before people jump ship from Facebook, they’ll want some evidence Diaspora is around to stay and that it has a future. Their code Roadmap hasn’t been updated since the end of October.
  • Good software takes time. Facebook has several years’ head-start in code and feature development when compared with Diaspora, not to mention hundreds of people dedicated full-time to developing it and marketing it. Diaspora’s small team can only do so much, and if they grow too fast, they might run into other problems with the project’s vision, code quality and investor pressure.
  • Facebook started with a niche, and grew outward. Facebook started with the Ivy League schools, and grew outward. MySpace started with eUniverse users and music lovers. It wasn’t lonely at the beginning. Diaspora doesn’t have a killer app or a niche it’s marketing to – thus is the beauty of open source, but it will also result in a lack of clear target for user migration.

Despite all of these reasons Diaspora won’t become the next Facebook, it in no way means it won’t be a success.

Here’s some reasons why I think it could be successful:

  • Independence rocks. Different from privacy and data ownership positive points, the ability to download and install the software anywhere will be its biggest strong point. It can give many niche networks a new, independent home they can control and support over the life of the network, without worrying about being “shut down,” as many Ning users saw in April 2010 when the service went to a paid-only service. I’m sure many niche networks could build very nice new homes for their purposes.
  • Development can go any which way. If the current core team doesn’t prove dedicated to the software, the good news is another group of developers can pick up where they left off. The project can fork – it can split off at any time and maybe that fork will become the next Facebook killer – that in itself is exciting.
  • It has many alpha/beta users and an interested support base to help it get better. With all the press the project has gotten, people are clamoring for invites and the level of usage for the early releases will help the software get better, faster, if the feedback is properly collected and managed.

I was lucky to get an invite to Diaspora while I was writing this article. My first impression is as I stated above: Lonely.

Here’s a few screenshots from my home page. Maybe things will liven up? :)

Sign up and filling out your profile – the open text box on Gender has gotten some attention and props from users. No word on if “it’s complicated” will come into play with the introduction of a relationship status, too.

What I “shared” with the world (public RSS is enabled on these updates & they are visible to people not signed up on Diaspora).

Managing aspects – you organize your contacts into “aspects” – this drag-and-drop approach is interesting but I think it will not scale when I’m managing hundreds of contacts. They start you with two aspects – Family & Work, and you can create and add as many aspects as you desire.

What I shared with all my aspects - essentially, all my contact groups. The aspect naming is awkward and I would vote for it to be the first thing to change.

That’s about it for now – a simple, clean interface with nothing new or groundbreaking, and a whole lot of  features missing we’ve become used to through our blogs and Facebook. I’ll be keeping my eye on Diaspora, though.

What are your thoughts?