With Sulia, Flipboard & Twitter, it’s never been easier to keep abreast of topics that matter to you

Guest post by Brian Blondy

Crowdsourcing and aggregation are two key functions for the modern distribution of real-time content within the online news industry. If used properly, each is a powerful method for processing and delivering your interests in a clean and concise manner on information networks like Twitter, Flipboard and Sulia. To maximize the potential for how you follow the issues you enjoy hearing about, both must be embraced and utilized to supercharge your knowledge of online news.

You should know that visiting particular websites to keep up to speed about a specific topic is almost essentially a waste of time. Web surfing is inefficient, time consuming and runs the risk that you may not actually find what you were looking for. These days, one article or one opinion is not enough, especially when you’re making a concerted effort to find information on the topics you care about most. Instead, you need to tap into crowdsourcing to target your precise interests online.

Sulia

1Sulia is a crowdsourced and aggregated social network platform that organizes tweets and tweeters into real-time topic streams. As a user, you can choose the precise topics that you want to listen to, and then the platform feeds content from publishers in your area of interest onto your own personally curated Sulia news feed. From there, you have the ability to interact and discuss the content with other users who are also following the same interest. Sulia’s mission is a brilliant spin on both Twitter and Flipboard, while not competing with either because its content comes directly from them both.

Sulia’s niche has enormous potential for giving you the option for focused content and allowing you to engage in a global discussion around the topic. While it will not replace Twitter and Flipboard, Sulia brilliantly embodies the evolution of the market by combining a real-time content stream with nichified discussions longer than 140 characters.

Flipboard

2Start using Flipboard on your mobile devices. Flipboard is an absolute game-changer for consuming content because it consolidates and presents content in an efficient and spartan manner. Within the app, you can begin following excellent curated channels such as Tech, Entrepreneurship, Film, and Travel in order to gain a fluid look into the specialized fields of your choice. Each of these channels impressively displays content from scores of reputable news outlets and bloggers. Simply put, Flipboard is the closest embodiment to what the modern newspaper should look like, and it has revolutionized how the public consumes content on tablets today.

Twitter

3If you’re looking to expand the scope of your specific interests, it’s essential that you use Twitter to digest news and content outlets on the topic itself so that you hear from a variety of sources. You also should also be listening to the content creators and influencers who are evolving and analyzing the topic online. By consuming online news in bulk, you’ll give yourself the liberty to see the news from a much wider angle, giving you an expansive view of what is actually going on. Crowdsourcing your news will give you a good opportunity to become better informed on the topics you enjoy.

To begin, join Twitter and become an active listener on the social network. In particular, Twitter houses a massive spectrum of voices that will inform you and provide short, concise perspectives on the exact topics that you enjoy hearing about. Be aware that having to seek out the right voices on Twitter is often a tedious and long process. The real question is; who should you be listening to? To answer this question, you should leverage the knowledge of the crowd and outsource your search to others who have already identified and categorized influencers on the platform that are the most relevant to follow.

Start by following the main influencers (in tech, see Robert Scoble) in the field of your interest and begin looking at aggregated lists that they have been added to on their profile.  Through the crowdsourced knowledge of others, you can subscribe to topic specific aggregated lists that will give you the most value. Chances are that if they are influential enough in their specific field, they will have already been listed and included on an aggregated list. By subscribing to lists, you’ll instantly transform your Twitter account into a powerful tool for content consumption within the areas that you’re most interested in hearing about.

Using the public to crowdsource relevant, timely content

With information dynamos like Twitter, Flipboard and the emerging Sulia, never before have you been more capable of being empowered for expanding your daily knowledge of the things you enjoy hearing about most.  Since both news outlets and individuals are constantly pushing out content to the world, all you have to do is tap into the right pipelines to reap the benefits of the exact information stream you desire. These days it’s a shame to just be an intermittent fan of your interests. With platforms like Twitter, Flipboard and Sulia being fully customizable and always updated, there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t be informed. (Could this be one reason Google killed off its RSS tool Google Reader?)

In a bigger sense, it would be wrong to say that all three are better or have replaced newspapers. After all, Twitter, Flipboard an Sulia do not employ journalists. While print journalism has changed dramatically, content creators are redefining themselves in the digital age by making themselves much more dynamic and visible through the public’s crowdsourcing of their content and their aggregated inclusion within the discussions of the niche itself. Today, it never been easier to follow, and discover anew, the topics, issues and news that matter to you most.

Brian Blondy lives in Tel Aviv, Israel, and has written for The Jerusalem Post’s arts and entertainment section since 2009. You can follow him on Twitter at @bblondy325. Republished from Blonde 2.0.

Related

• How Flipboard is changing everything (Socialmedia.biz)

• Take charge of the curation wave with these slick tools (Socialmedia.biz)

• Top tools to help you curate business content (Socialmedia.biz)

The post 3 ways to tap into customized news & information appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Give more than you take — and get rewarded for it

I’ll get to the point: My secret to being amazingly and profoundly engaged with so many of my followers on Twitter, my friends on Facebook, and my circles on Google+ is because I cheat.

Whenever I am between things, in lines, waiting for something, and even on boring conference calls, I pull up Flipboard and read what my followers, friends, and circles are sharing and I generously retweet, +1, like, favorite, share and comment. I believe that Flipboard is my secret weapon when it comes to improving and maintaining my Klout score. Why? Well, the more I give, the more I get. The more items I honestly and earnestly retweet, favorite, +1, like, and share, the more willing and game the people I share are also willing to take the few seconds it takes to retweet me back.

One of the hardest things to do when it comes to participating in social media is trying to give more than you take. In order to really grow your reputation online you really need to be perceived as giving more than you take. Generosity is always rewarded in this marathon of social media engagement. In order to make the most of your work online, you need to work on becoming connected with your online community. Social media demands not only commitment to feeding the beast — the 24/7 maw of content-creation — but it also requires that you take an interest in what your followers and your friends are posting as well.

Begin with the automagically generated personalized newspaper

Flipboard makes it easy to do this. When you install it, immediately go to the red ribbon with the magnifying glass on it. Here you can login, link up all of your social networking credentials and Flipboard will automagically generate a personalized newspaper for you to peruse. Of course, you can also follow various topics and news sources and so forth — and I do that as well — but the real juice happens when you share the content of real people with whom you’re connected via reciprocal connection rather than just sharing content fed to you directly from online media sources.

And since I really only like, share, favorite, +1, and retweet stuff that resonates with me, it helps build my character online, allowing me to build not only my personal and professional brand with my followers but it also allows these real people to get to know me better based on what I like, as well. Additionally, all of this great content aggregates right to me, so I become not just more broadly informed but also way more deeply informed as well. Why? Because birds of a feather flock together.

This is especially important for us social media experts, social media ungurus, and social media marketers. We tend to be a little heavy-handed and tend to do a lot more egocentric and self-serving posts than other folks. It’s our business. Tempering our perceived abuse of these platforms with authentic sharing and an engaged back-and-forth is essential, otherwise people will tune out and we risk being unfollowed for being a little spammy.

Flipboard even knows how to set up an editable RT the right way

Because Flipboard isn’t an open mic, you won’t be tempted to read your own poetry, to just speak about your own brand. Since Flipboard is a reader that allows full social engagement and wraps it up with a very gorgeous bow (the UI is amazing and makes even the simplest blog posts feel like a full-color glossy magazine), it’s no pain to consume all the share of everyone you too often ignore. Instead of being painful torture, it’s actually quite amazing.

Even more, because of how easy it is to navigate through the cross-platform interface — including uniquely designed Apple iOS apps for iPhone and iPad and a very attractive interface for the Android as well — it’s easy to breeze past the articles, tweets and posts that don’t interest you and then move on to content that catches your eye. You can easily favorite, +1, retweet, or retweet with comment. And, for you Twitter grammar geeks, Flipboard knows how to set up an editable RT the right way, conveniently adding an RT before the quoted tweet and none of that stupid quote stuff that some of the other tools offer.

It reminds me of when I was a young poet in college. I would go to poetry readings and I would spend all of my time on my own poetry — as was everyone else. Everyone was reading, reading, reading, and nobody was listening to other poets. The audience was full of people who were spending all of their time reading or prepping to read and no one was listening.

Same thing with social media. Most brands and companies are spending all of their time talking talking talking, sharing sharing sharing, link-dropping link-dropping link-dropping, that even just listening a little, engaging a little, even responding sometimes, is really appreciated — and really unexpected, too.

Spend some time every day giving back. Before Flipboard, it was still essential but a pain in the neck. With Flipboard, it’s actually a very informative and entertaining pleasure.

The post How to boost your Klout score with Flipboard appeared first on Inside Social Media.

My recommendation for you individuals who are interested in just growing your experience, mastery, equity, and inclusion as deeply as you can in as many relevant and germane communities as possible, you will never be rewarded unless and until you really commit to reddit. I have been with reddit way over 5 years and I have yet to get any traction there. Like I said last week in Reddit is the 800-pound Gorilla in the room, commit to reddit completely. Eschew Facebook and Twitter for a little while and replace Flipboard on your iPad with reddit. Commit making reddit your morning news and the novel you read before you go to sleep. This week, I want to add a few more specific tips.

Of course register, but register as yourself and not as your brand, your company, or you business, though naming yourself after your hobbies or passions or best feature, your sport, your team, your OS, or your geolocation seem to be popular ones. Many people use the same handle on reddit as they do on YouTube, message boards, and on Twitter, which is smart if you want to be transparent and let people on reddit who casually Fisk you know that you have nothing to hide and have an online historical context (but stupid if you want to elude detection or don’t want me – or someone like me – to find you, actually).

Just in case this isn’t obvious to you, part of listening includes reading threads and not just clicking through to the links. You need to read through all the comments, all the nested comments, all the internal dialogues and the OT (off topic) conversation. Most of the best intel that I have collected in the crisis work I neither confirm nor deny is deep in the conversation after a reddit submission has fermented for a while.

Once a comment thread really build some steam and folks pile in, people lose themselves and you can see people doing research, Fisking, checking facts, and lowering their guards. People really reveal themselves deep in the comments and you can really get to know, especially after the submission is stale enough to turn into a de facto place to chat, to compare notes and to do a little fencing for status, dueling for geek cred. It is here where you can learn more about community pecking order, status, intelligence, competence, context, what people do behind their anonymity, how old they are, where they’re from. This is where the community coalesces and builds, in the secondary and tertiary conversations – the chats you’ve ignored because they’re no longer really about the new Microsoft Surface – except they are. It is in these deep contests where young bucks can – and do – challenge the alphas for dominance. It is also where folks can work on their post count – places they can just chew the fat while positively effecting their reddit karma and reputation.

Let me explain in a way you’ll understand: you know how much you talk about frequent flier miles with your friends and how much of a pissing content you’re in with you workmates over what level you are with your respective airlines and hotels? Well, consider reddit Karma and message board post counts to be analogous to flier or hotel miles. And even though you spend most of your time drooling on yourself, looking like an idiot in your inflatable neck pillow, you fancy yourself a road warrior just because every mile you travel in the air at 600-miles-an-hour gets you closer to the hallowed “million mile club.” (Man, yuppies are lame!) Same thing with reddit (and most of the other contribution-based communities and platforms, including many of the top file-sharing sites).

Don’t worry, gaming post count is a open secret and people are pretty up-front about it. It is essential because when you play silly post count games such as “word association” you really really get to know how game folks are, how willing to be silly they can be, how tolerant people really are, and how well they play with others.

Here’s a new flash: company happy hours, lunches, dinners, and team-building exercises are not optional, they’re analogous to games meant to jack your post count. they’re stress-tests that your employers and those sneaky HR managers use to see if you belong – if you’ll ever make it to VP or partner, and if they actually like you. You can’t just blow them off because you really should be back with your toddlers and your loving wife and ailing mother. Those yearly trips to Vegas are as important as your yearly performance review – and your success and popularity – and discretion – at these (mostly) harmless events very much color your yearly reviews by either enhancing or diminishing them and what management is willing to turn a blind eye to or really obsess about. Remember that when you decide to take a winter holiday instead of attending your company’s Christmas party!

Well, the same is true for reddit and communities like it, both online, virtual, communities as well as in real life. When you’re wading in to the shallow end of the reddit pool, people are going to be judging you based on your swimwear, your fitness, your abs and how cute your butt is, like it or not. they’re going to haze you if you get a little deeper; and they’re going to be suspicious of you as you swim deeper, and they’ll jealous of you if you become more popular or prove yourself more useful or interesting.

Come on, if you’re over 30 you already know all of this stuff. Why don’t you think it maps exactly and perfectly the same way online. We in word-of-mouth constantly de-humanize the natural humanness of online communities, assuming that simple tricks of seduction and incentive – what’s in it for them – can trick thousands of people who are in a very real, albeit virtual, family. I made the same mistake when I dismissed the entirety of Second Life with a turn of my quill without thinking that maybe the heart of Second Life has nothing to do with their exceedingly heavy and mobile unfriendly-app and more to do with the beautiful universe of furries for whom Second Life is their real home. My bad. Never again.

Once you’ve checked your ego at the door – who you were in high school, what college you attended, how much you make, how hot your spouse is, and how good you look in skinny jeans – dive in. Just remember that nobody knows you in this, your new school. They don’t know how hot or successful, they’ll just know you don’t know the difference between they’re, there, and their, and they’ll crucify you for it.

I do recommend you don’t do three things:

1. Don’t comment right away as this community has a lot of history and people all sort of know each other and until you get a little context, reserve your judgement to an up or down arrow for now).
2. Avoid being sarcastic, snarky, or a troll until you have enough history and reputation – acceptance – that folks know you’re not a dick but just dry-witted or dickish-but-with-a-heart-of-gold
3. Don’t start a fight you know you can’t win, meaning, no matter how good a case you have and no matter how correct you think you are, reddit is not rule of law it is mob rule – reddit is not (yet) your home so the locals are under no obligation to support you just because you have the evidence when their allegiance and loyalty is to their friends and family.

Oh, and final rule: prepare your armor and take nothing too seriously because any community that does not enforce real names, like Facebook does, tends to be pretty brutal since everyone has a veil of anonymity. You might very well be bullied mercilessly by the very 98-pound weakling you terrorized in high school. Just desserts is what I call it, but be forewarned and don’t forget to gird your loins before participating.

That said, what I recommend to everyone is spending more money on brand representatives and social media community managers than you do on technological solutions. Learn from the CIA, the FBI, the NRO, the DIA, and the NSA: no matter how awesome your spy tech, you live or die on how many and how good are your analysts. The top online analysts are worth their weight in gold – don’t I know – and even the top big-data-munching-and-interpreting “carnivore” platforms need online analysts online to check for false-negatives, false-positive, and blindspots.

And, unlike monitoring and responding platforms, the longer you have worked with an online analyst, the better he or she is – be it in experience, corporate knowledge, or just because the best employees should be inexorably linked to your brand and surgically removing them can be the gut wound that never heals or it can result in a dangerous shift if (when) your (former) employee takes up with your competition, lending all of his or her equity – that was portable, after all – directly to your competitor. Whatever you believe, company-who-thinks-their-social-media-community-managers-are-fungible-assets, when you let a social media asset leave, get poached, or go, that person is leaving with 80% of the equity they developed while working with you. Are you ready to be 80% poorer as a result?

As an aside, deep infiltration is still going on, I am sure. In full disclosure, I participated in deep infiltration on behalf of many very high-profile clients from until I started my own company back in 2006. While there are many disclosure laws on the books and “everyone” has reformed, I can’t imagine that any of it had gone away. I am sure it has either submarined, distanced itself from the operators, or just expatriated itself to nations where this isn’t a thing.

The only reason why my past company, Abraham Harrison, or my new company, Social Ally, don’t do this sort of black ops thing is because we don’t need to because you really don’t need to be sneaky on social media – you don’t need to master NLP or have a nom de guerre or even wear a trench coat and disguise your voice with a synthesizer – you can just waltz right in, say hello to the owner or high priests, and tell them what you want and what’s in it for them.

But no, folks are still spending too much time listening to Bernays and Freud, assuming that American consumers are ever vigilant and informed and in order to sell them anything you need to come in nap of the earth, under radar, by the inky cover of the night in order to drop your paratrooper and payload. Advertising and PR has earned its reputation by constantly buying into better and better anti-radar and radio-jamming technology and not enough on proper diplomacy and diplomatic channels, that’s for sure. More money on our special forces than on our diplomatic corps.

Reddit’s a little bit like a unicorn: you’ll only see a unicorn – and make it to the front page of reddit — if you’re pure of heart. You can start by faking it ‘til you make it, but at the end of the day, most of the folks on reddit are smarter than you so being yourself is really the only way that this is ever going to work out for you if you ever want to become an influencer on reddit, so give it a go and let me know what happens.

Good luck, soldier!

The post Don’t mess with Texas (or reddit) appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Afew days ago I sat down with Gal Brill, the founder and CEO of UppSite, an Israel-based start-up that can turn your website into an app in just minutes. At top is a video UppSite produced about their service, and at bottom is my interview with Gal.

As the Web turns increasingly mobile — with a majority of online Americans set to access the Internet through their mobile devices rather than their desktop or laptop computers within a couple of years — any sensible Web publisher should be thinking about how to optimize his or her site for mobile users.

I’ve written about a few such services, including WPTouch Pro (Have you made your site mobile-ready?) and OnSwipe (Make your site ‘swipeable’ on the iPad). But UppSite is the first service to come along that can turn any website or blog into an app — on the iPhone or Android — for free, in a matter of minutes. That’s pretty cool. (A Windows Mobile version is coming in a few months.)

Watch, download or embed our video interview on YouTube.

CEO Brill likens UppSite’s entry into the marketplace as akin to WordPress’s disruption of the blogging world, when it make it drop-dead simple to get a blog up and running in 5 minutes. UppSite’s mission is to help you enter the mobile era “in a truly easy way,” he says. In the coming years, he hopes and expects millions of sites — particularly small or mid-size publications — to do so.

“We’re democratizing the mobile era for any publisher,” he says.

A cross-platform solution that actually works

Up until now, online publishers have had to deal with the nightmare of developing and maintaining applications for each separate operating system: iOS (iPhone and iPad), Android, Windows Phone 7 and so on. Not only that, you’d be out of luck in some cases, depending on whether your site runs on WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, etc. While other services often offer little more than a prettified version of an RSS feed, UppSite promises native apps that offer a complete version of your site, with all of the important content and functionality.

How simple is UppSite to use? All it takes is for the website owner to enter some basic information, choose a theme, upload a logo and you’re good to go. Presto! After you’ve gone through the customization process, a mobile, iOS and Android version of your site will be generated. Critically, UppSite handles the submission process to the various stores, and will keep you updated on its progress.

Says Gal: “Some app providers will create a compiled file for you but then leave it to you to upload and implement it. ‘OK, so head to the app store, here’s a manual, figure out how to do it.’ We do it for you.”

The other nice part is that UppSite apps sport features that enable publishers to engage with readers and users. For example, site publishers can engage with readers directly from the app or notify readers whenever blog content is updated, resulting in more engagement and retention.

Coming soon: A shiny new Socialmedia.biz app

We just put UppSite through its paces by creating an app for Socialmedia.biz and will report back here when it’s live in the iTunes Store and Android Marketplace. What’s nice, though, is that even though it can take a couple of weeks to get an app approved for iTunes, the Web version is good to go almost immediately. So a user arriving on your site through a smartphone will see a site that’s ready for a mobile experience, even if it’s not as perfect as the native app that a user would have to download. (Unless I totally misinterpreted this!)

Publishers can choose from three types of payment options: a free conversion that gives all mobile ad revenue to UppSite, a $9.99 per-month option with a 50 percent ad revenue split with UppSite, and an enterprise solution that can be customized with UppSite as a per-demand, per-month option that allows the site owner to fully control the application. Most of the competitors we know about, like AppMakr, Duda Mobile, Conduit Mobile or BloApp, typically charge a fee for converting a site to mobile and shepherding it through the approval process, but UppSite hopes to make money through an ad network it’s launching.

UppSite officially launched at DEMO Spring in Silicon Valley, and I caught up with Gal a couple of days later on a sidewalk in San Francisco. I’m still playing with the service — as with any start-up, it still has a few kinks to iron out — but if you’re thinking about how to serve this teeming new audience of mobile users, UppSite should be very high up on your list of services to check out. Give it a spin!

Let me know if you have any questions about the service and I’ll pass them along to Gal and his team. Here’s our interview:

The post UppSite: Turn your website into an app in minutes appeared first on Inside Social Media.

How Mobli can take virtual experiences to a new level

As we all know, there’s a huge amount of data on the internet– the biggest challenge is sorting it all and finding what’s relevant for you. This is such a big challenge that there’s a whole branch of the tech industry, called Big Data, that is dedicated to finding, sorting, and doing something with all this information.

If you’re wondering how big “big data” is, Microsoft’s R&D center in Israel is focusing on finding new ways to use it.

I’ve written in the past about mobile service Mobli, but today I want to focus on a different aspect of the product and what it means for the future of social media. So what does discovery and big data have to do with Mobli? The coolest feature about Mobli is not how you take the photo or edit it but how you find and discover content on the app, and on the flip side how you get your content to the people who are most interested in it.

A huge part of Mobli’s vision is about indexing the data they have in the best way possible since they figured out the most important matter for content creators – getting feedback from others. When using a new social product, if you don’t get feedback from other users, you stop using it. Mobli figured this out and provides immediate feedback via the live stream,  usually from people you don’t know but are interested in your content. (Disclosure: Mobli is a client.)

The New York feed on Mobli: A deeper online experience

So what does this mean exactly? Mobli has put in most of its effort into creating the best content funnel they can, with location-based content and user-based indexing, thus truly fulfilling their vision of helping people to see the world through other people’s eyes.

Thanks to the content funnel and UI, you can see how other people see the world, whether it’s in a particular location, related to a particular topic, or taken at a particular time (on Halloween, for example).

Yesterday, I wanted to take a stroll in New York City. Now, the most common way to do this is via Google Maps’ Street View and virtually walk around downtown Manhattan. But this isn’t really taking a stroll in New York, now is it? New York is not buildings and city blocks and streets. I’m not interested in how the Google Street View car sees New York. New York is about people, smells and experiences, so I started looking at the New York feed on Mobli. This made me feel like I was right I the heart of it all,  feeling the city. (I lived in New York for a while.)

Think about what this means. Let’s say there’s a Madonna concert, and you can’t go, for whatever reason. You can watch a live feed from Mobli of how other people see the concert, not the cameras recording the concert for the DVD but how people at the concert actually see it, how they feel it, from as many angles as there are via Mobli’s eyes.

Bonus: To celebrate its first birthday, Mobli has decided to run the “Every day in May” campaign in which they give out an iPad every day in May. Want in on the action? Click here!

Disclosure: Blonde 2.0 handles Mobli’s social media activity.

The post Big Data in the visual age appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Unlike Friendster and MySpace, these message boards are generally privatel -held and heavily sponsored. They’re also pretty well monetized, from offering membership levels to running raffles; from placing in-line textual ads to being framed by banners. Additionally, most of the more popular forums have over 5,000 active users and have been online for well over half a decade. Since they’re not tied to Facebook or MySpace, they’re safe from the fickle tide of funding or popularity. These forums don’t care about what happens at Facebook, they only care about whether they can pay their escalating server and bandwidth fees.

What’s even better is that forum application developers such as vBulletin have hungrily adopted all the best parts of all the blogging platforms, publishing frameworks, social networking services, microblogging platforms, photo sharing sites, and social graphic services. It’s pretty amazing how comprehensive and mature these message board suites have become.

How do I know this? About a year ago I picked up a new hobby: shooting sports. I knew nothing about it but I knew where to go: forums and message boards.

There has been a real renaissance in both blogs and message boards because of social media and the ability to share, cross pollinate, and make easy reference to not only boards but to threads and replies. Most message boards have adopted all of the modern conveniences offered by blogs, including RSS feeds, email reminders, email updates, social media share buttons for Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and others.

Additionally, if you happen to visit a message board or forum using your iPhone or Android, you’re likely to receive a pop-up that lets you know that there’s an app made especially for your device that will allow you to easily and simply read, post, and share on that online community site.

Mobile devices today can not only read and post to message boards but also help you discover other boards and forums. Mobile has opened up ease-of-access via smart phones, Androids, iPhones, iPads, and tablets. Not only that but access via mobile devices strips ugly advertisements, garish color choices, and a plethora of in-line and banner ads.

And if you thought that blogs are like catnip to Google organic search then you need to explore the prevalence of message boards and forums in the top results of their respective topics. This is important for several important reasons: first, it seems to me that while message boards and forums are still powerful platforms for sharing, conspiring, debating, and alerting, forums have gone out of favor among the digerati.

Unfortunately, if you look at the sort of topics that have popular forums, they’re generally not at the social media cutting edge, they’re less meta — social media about social media about social media — and more practical: What caliber should I get in my first hunting rifle? What protein supplement should I buy for my CrossFit obsession?

Even though these may well be places where you can just pop in, look around, and find what you need without even registering, they can also be decades old, and all associated protocol and terms of engagement must apply. These are tight communities and if you don’t know much about virtual communities and message boards, they’re real families and the mothers and fathers of these communities are the owners, the uncles and aunties are the members with the high post counts. And, you really should take post count and join date very seriously, too, because message boards and forums are one of the few places in today’s anti-anonymity Internet that still encourages being who you are while also protecting your identity.

How message boards became a nightly ritual

My first return to message board was RimFire Central because my first pistol was a Ruger Mk III “678” Target. At that time, I was maneuvering clumsily via their web interface. It felt antiquated and it was tough to sort out my latest posts or responses I needed to engage. Later, after getting my first Glock, I joined Glock Talk via my iPhone and it offered me the ability to download OutdoorHub, the sponsored app for GT. It opened everything up for me because it became as easy to track new content, unread posts and replies, and engage both via the boards or via personal message from one single place.

However, I soon wanted to read Rimfire Central the same way. And local shooting boards like Maryland Shooters Forum and VA Gun Owners Forum. I then discovered Tapatalk, an app for my iPhone that does cost $4.99 but is well worth it. I just checked and Tapatalk has an app for the iPad, Android, Blackberry and Chrome. The only thing it doesn’t have is iCloud support, which supposedly is in the works — so all the boards I am registered with on my iPhone don’t translate over to my iPad.

Then, after I got to know Tapatalk better, I started exploring their Network directory of cataloged forums available and discovered and joined other shooting sports communities, including The High Road Forum, Remington Owners Forum, Elsie Pea Forum, The Original CZ Forum, Defensive Carry Concealed Carry Forum. Now, over time, these communities have become a rightly rite, and I have accrued 431 posts on Glock Talk. And, to be honest, nobody has really paid any attention to me at all on Glock Talk until now and I am really hoping that I am able to earn some awe and fear by the time I make my 1,000th post.

In next week’s post I want to go into how to market to message boards. I have recently seen a maestro in action in the form of Paul M. Barrett, author of Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun, a new book that is categorized by Amazon as a Company Profile involving social U.S. history, and conventional weapons & warfare. When Paul started promoting online, he didn’t limit his online pre-sales time and energy to just blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. He recognized that the most passionate owners, collector, and proponents of the shooting sports spend a lot of their time learning, sharing, bragging, and teaching on online message boards and that he needed to engage these communities before his book went on sale to the public if he wanted to get the kind of buzz and word of mouth he needed to be able to reach the least obvious but most important brand ambassadors.

It was really a beautiful thing to see, honestly, especially after I spent years marketing on message boards and forums when I was an online analyst and project manager at New Media Strategies. Things have changed a lot since I was promoting brand online in message boards and the state of the art has evolved, become more savvy, but is very ripe and very transparent.

Man, I have a lot to share with you next week, I can’t wait!

Via Biznology

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Free service lets you enter the new world of tablet publishing

One of my favorite discoveries of the past few weeks has been OnSwipe, a service that enables you to optimize your website for the iPad — for free!

If you go to most websites using an iPad, the experience is hit or miss. Website navigation is quite a bit different from tablet navigation, and as a result reading on a tablet can sometimes prove to be a chore. Not so with an OnSwipe-enabled site. Your home page looks completely different — see Slate.com at top — and the entire experience is one where you touch instead of click and swipe instead of search for a scroll bar.

Call up Slate.com or SFGoodwill.org on the iPad and you’ll see what the experience feels like. If you’re game, it takes about 5 minutes to set up, and it’s free. Go ahead, do it for your business or brand and be hailed as a rock star when you show it off in the C-Suite.

OnSwipe: ‘Make your site look beautiful on Web tablets’

The other day I interviewed Jason L. Baptiste, co-founder and CEO of the New York-based startup, which has 16 staffers.

“It’s a very simple idea,” he said. “We let the publisher of any website make the site look absolutely beautiful on Web tablets. It’s for the new world of touch and swipe.”

It works like this:

You don’t need to add any code to your site or blog, and the end user doesn’t need to download an app. All you do is head over to onswipe.com and register. The process takes you through four quick steps, where you plunk in your site’s url, RSS feed or feeds, desired layout, hit Save and you’re done.

The service still has a few rough edges: For example, when I first registered my site Socialbrite, I entered my name under “Username” when I should have entered “Socialbrite,” and the url wound up being onswipe.com/jdlasica. And including your Twitter feed makes your tweets show up in a clunky way.

But those are quibbles. Just minutes after you register, call up your site in Safari (or another Web browser) on the iPad and you’ll see a marked difference. Your home page is transformed into a series of vertical strips holding your latest posts as well as photos, videos and more. Click on any of them and you’ll be able to read stories in a magazine-style format. Swipe and you’ll see the next story. Nice.

Tablets are the TV of this generation

Baptiste said OnSwipe will never charge for the service. The plan is to scale to millions of sites, and then share revenues from full-page magazine-style advertising sold by the publisher. But you’ll never see irrelevant banner ads, he promised.

“Tablets are the TV of this generation,” Baptiste said. “There’ll be millions or billions of channels. We have an interest in making people money.”

There are some other solutions out there, like Brave New Code’s WPTouch Pro, which you can use to optimize your site for the iPhone, Android and other smartphones. But Baptiste said such services are geared to tailoring the website experience for mobile devices instead of reinventing the experience. Sites like Flipboard want to be a destination, he said, and “we’re creating a platform anyone can build on top of.”

Sites currently using OnSwipe include Slate, Ziff Davis’s Geek.com, BBC America’s blog, Code Nast publications and many others. OnSwipe plans to support non-Apple tablets in the future, Baptiste said.

Another bonus: MyOnswipe lets you save articles to read for later, even if you don’t have Internet access. It works anytime, anywhere and on any device, Baptiste said.

If your site is old school — static brochureware — you won’t have much use for OnSwipe. But if you have a site or blog that’s regularly updated with new content, you should give OnSwipe a try and enter the new world of tablet publishing. As more people gravitate to iPads — more than 40 million and counting — OnSwipe is a service you’ll want to take advantage of.

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By now you may have heard the buzz about Flipboard, probably the coolest app invented for Apple’s iPad. (I’ll be getting both later this year.)

The Flipboard is a personalized social magazine that lets you flip through the content being shared with you across your social networks. (On Socialbrite today we have a Q&A with a developer of paper.li, a free service that lets you create media-rich publications based on any Twitter profile, list or hashtag.)

With Flipboard you can build a custom magazine, either by choosing from its pre-built curated “boards” or by importing Twitter profiles and lists. For instance, you can turn Robert‘s or TechCrunch‘s tweets into a sleek magazine-like interface that’s more fun and easier to read than any other reader.

In this 28-minute interview for RackSpace’s building43 series on cutting-edge technology, my buddy Robert Scoble chats with Mike McCue, co-founder and CEO of Flipboard, about his company, his business philosophy, where he’s planning to take his company — plus a demo of the new app.

Related

• Exclusive first look at “revolutionary” social news iPad app: Flipboard (building43)

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We’ve all had this moment. You want to talk to a friend about some great TV program you just saw. Instead of engaging or heeding your recommendation they simply announce, “I don’t have a TV.”

We all know where that conversation leads. Either they’re considerate and just let it go. But more often they tell you with a wave of their hand, “All television sucks” and/or that will be followed up with the declarative statement, “I read.” It’s impossible for this whole episode to go down without the non-TV owner coming off as incredibly pompous and you being resentful and condescended to.

There are tons of things I don’t have. I never feel compelled to publicly announce to people what I don’t have. Why do people who don’t have a television feel compelled to publicly announce that they don’t have one?

Why can we proudly announce we don’t watch TV, yet nothing else?

Next time someone recommends a good book, go ahead and say, “I don’t read books…Everything written sucks.”

Next time someone recommends an exhibit at a museum, go ahead and say, “I don’t go to museums…All art and history suck.”

Next time someone recommends a new album, go ahead and say, “I don’t own a stereo…All music sucks.”

Why can’t we say that? Just like there’s plenty of bad TV, there’s plenty of bad music and poorly written books and bad art.

The reason is TV’s branding has been poor for decades. We happily call it “the idiot box” and “the boob tube.” While we may deride certain categories of music, books, and art, we haven’t collectively denigrated all the output of a single media.

With the Internet it’s now possible to announce “I don’t have a TV” and not be arrogant

Today, if someone announces, “I don’t have a computer…Everything on the Internet sucks,” you feel sorry for them. Good luck trying to belittle someone with that statement. With that admission you set yourself up for exclusion. “Yeah, we’d like to invite you, but you’re not online.”

The Internet has become such a massive distribution platform of all media that the need for a traditional TV may no longer be necessary. Yes, TV-Internet convergence has been going on for more than a dozen years, but that viewing experience is becoming more personalized. Instead of being a self-important Luddite by announcing, “I don’t have a TV,” you can appear as a forward thinking consumer by announcing, “I don’t need a TV.”

Just as mobile phones can supplant landline phones, where many people don’t need a landline phone, it’s possible the iPad could be a substitution for many media devices. As soon as the Adobe-Apple Flash debate resolves itself, you may hear people saying, “I don’t have a TV, stereo, or books, I have an iPad.”

So you never owned a TV?

I’m sure there are people reading this who for years have not had a television and they don’t believe that they’re being pompous when they tell people they don’t have a TV. I know you don’t believe you were sounding self-righteous, but you were. And I feel I can say that with some level of assurance, never having met you. Because unless you were poor or homeless, it’s been very difficult to say, “I don’t have a TV” and not come off as a pompous ass.

Today with ubiquitous video on the Internet, you can probably get away with it, and often be admired. Still, it’s best not to be confrontational.

Next time someone recommends you watch a certain show, instead of responding, “I don’t have a TV,” just say, “OK,” and then ignore their advice. It’s exactly what I do when people tell me, “You HAVE to read this book.” It’s far more polite than saying, “Reading is stupid.”

Creative Commons photo credit Robert Scoble / CC BY 2.0

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