Communication

Preparation

The following sites can be demoed. If you plan to do demos on any of them, you’ll need to set up an account there first. Setting up an account often takes time–it’s not something you can do during the demo.

If you plan to do demos of these systems, then you need to have them installed on a server you own or control:

If you’re planning to do slides, you’ll need to set them up for Present sections and anything else you want to cover.

Summary

Present

There’s a lot to go through. We can skip through things we’re not interested in. There’s no need to cover all the material, but there is a need to cover the material you’re interested in.

We’re going to cover blogs, feeds, copyright, licensing, podcasts, microblogs, photo sharing, and social networking.

Blogs

Summary

(30 minutes)

Present

Let’s talk about blogs.

The word “blog” is short for web log–it’s a log, like a diary or a journal, that’s published on the web.

Every blog consists of a series of entries that are sorted by time–so the most recent entry is shown on the front page of the blog.

The blogs of your peers is a rich resource of knowledge and experience. It also allows you to get a feel for what’s happening right now. Following those blogs is just like reading the newspaper: you can bookmark articles that are interesting, you can more easily keep in touch with people, and you can keep track of current events.

If you haven’t started a blog, you should. It’s a great way to process and frame your world, journal your thoughts, and share what’s working for you.

Every blog also has a feed. There are several different formats for feeds, but all feed formats are well-defined and are used for syndication.

For example, you have a blog. You’re the author of your blog. The title of your blog is “Purple flowers” because in this blog you write entries about purple flowers you take pictures of in your travels. Your blog currently consists of two entries. Each entry has a title, a body, and a date that it was published.

Title: Purple Flowers
Author: You

Entry:

   Title: Behind my house

   Date: 7/7/2010

   Body: I saw a tiny purple flower behind my house.  I'm not
   sure what plant it is, but it sure is very pretty.

Entry:

   Title: At my mom's

   Date: 7/2/2010

   Body: I was at my mom's house dropping off a load of mulch
   when I noticed the irises were blooming.  They're a lovely
   shade of purple.

That’s the data we have in our example blog. An RSS 2.0 feed for this blog could look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
    <title>Purple Flowers</title>
    <managingEditor>You</managingEditor>

    <item>
        <title>Behind my house</title>
        <pubDate>Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:00 GMT</pubDate>
        <description><![CDATA[
        I saw a tiny purple flower behind my house.  I'm not
        sure what plant it is, but it sure is very pretty.
        ]]></description>
    </item>

    <item>
        <title>At my mom's</title>
        <pubDate>Fri, 02 Jul 2010 15:00 GMT</pubDate>
        <description><![CDATA[
        I was at my mom's house dropping off a load of mulch
        when I noticed the irises were blooming.  They're a lovely
        shade of purple.
        ]]></description>
    </item>
</channel>
</rss>

Feeds aren’t meant to be read and written by people–they’re meant to be read and written by software. Their purpose is to be a well-defined format of the data that’s easily parseable by software.

Feeds solve the problem of following multiple blogs. Instead of going to every web-site for every blog you follow to see if there are new entries, you would use an application called a feed reader. You subscribe to the feeds of the blogs that you want to follow in your feed reader. Then your feed reader automatically shows any new entries when there are new entries. Thus instead of going to 20 sites, you open up your feed reader and it shows the entries you haven’t seen, yet.

Examples

(10 minutes)

If you’re using a projector or monitor or something like that, go through some blogs with the participants. Two good examples are:

http://www.danielharper.org/
Dan Harper’s website which has a blog as well as a lot of resources.
http://uugrowth.com/
Peter Bowdon’s UU Growth Blog which is a great example of a blog.

Show the blog, navigating through the blog, and then the feed.

Then show how to add the feed to Google Reader (or any feed reader) and what it looks like in the reader.

Demo: Wordpress

(10 minutes)

Ask the participants if they want to see a demo of WordPress. If so, do a WordPress demo here.

Present

There’s a lot of blog software, systems and services out there. We’re going to talk about two of them because they’re both very popular, free, easy to use, and provide a variety of features.

The first is WordPress.

http://wordpress.com/

The demo should consist of something along the lines of:

  1. go to http://wordpress.com/
  2. see the blog that you’ve created
  3. log into the blog
  4. create a new blog entry with a title, some paragraphs and an attached image
  5. look at the new blog entry on the blog
  6. look at the feed for the blog

Demo: Blogger

(10 minutes)

Ask the participants if they want to see a demo of Blogger. If so, do a Blogger demo here.

The demo should consist of something along the lines of:

  1. go to http://www.blogger.com/
  2. see the blog that you’ve created
  3. log into the blog
  4. create a new blog entry with a title, some paragraphs and an attached image
  5. look at the new blog entry on the blog
  6. look at the feed for the blog

Quick note about setting expectations

Present

If you’re keeping a blog, help your readers by writing up a set of expectations that answers the following questions:

  1. what frequency do you plan on blogging?
  2. what is your comment moderation policy?
  3. how can someone contact you?
  4. is the blog licensed under a Creative Commons license?

You can write the answers to these questions on an About page. Make sure to check this page every now and then and make sure that you’re keeping up with the expectations you’ve set.

FIXME - I think the UUA has a comment moderation policy that can be used–need to add link here.

Activity: Blogging the workshop

If your workshop lasts several days, it’s a good idea to have participants create blogs on WordPress and write one or more blog entries for each day. At the start of the next day of the workshop, one person can present his/her blog entry. Encourage participants to experiment with features and read each other’s entries.

If you’re planning to do that, then this is a good time to have everyone set up a WordPress account if they don’t already have a blog account somewhere.

Podcasts

Present

You’ve seen a blog already. All blogs have feeds.

Podcasts are a special kind of blog that additionally has audio or video content associated with each entry. Instead of reading the blog like you would a diary, you watch or listen to it like you would watch a news program or listen to a radio show.

You can use WordPress to set up an audio podcast. You write a new blog entry and in that blog entry create a link to an audio file you have hosted somewhere on the Internet.

If you use the free WordPress account, it doesn’t automatically create enclosures for media items in the post. One way to deal with this is to set up the feed in FeedBurner which will look at the feed from your blog, see the media items, add the appropriate enclosures, and thus create a new feed. You would give the FeedBurner version of the feed out to people.

If you’re creating a video podcast, you can use WordPress and host your videos on blip.tv or archive.org.

You can put videos on YouTube, but YouTube feeds don’t have enclosures, so your viewers will be restricted to watching the videos on the YouTube web-site and through systems that YouTube has licensed.

FIXME - Shelby mentioned using Podbean for audio podcasts.

Demo: Creating an audio podcast

We’re going to demo an audio podcast using WordPress and FeedBurner:

  1. log into the site
  2. create a new post
  3. add an audio link to an .mp3 or .ogg file hosted somewhere else
  4. publish the post
  5. show the WordPress feed (which doesn’t have enclosures)
  6. show the FeedBurner version of the feed (which does have enclosures)
  7. load the FeedBurner feed in a podcast application like iTunes or Miro
  8. download the audio item

Microblogs

(15 minutes)

Present

A microblog is like a blog, but posts are very short thoughts: a link, an image, a video, a bumper sticker, a quote and so on.

A microblog is raw and unpolished. If you look at posts on Twitter (otherwise known as tweets), you’ll see reactions, short statements, status updates, and other chatter.

Additionally, microblog systems like Twitter and Identi.ca, connect people. You subscribe to other people’s microblogs and they subscribe to yours. Your account will have a feed of all the posts from all the people you subscribe to. You can follow the people and other entities that you’re interested in.

Most microblogging systems restrict you to 140 character posts. The reason for this is that it allows you to post from any cellphone that can send SMS messages.

http://twitter.com/
Twitter is a microblogging service. Accounts are free and there are a lot of people on Twitter.
http://identi.ca/
Identi.ca is a microblogging service. Accounts are free and there is a good community on identi.ca, but it’s not as popular as Twitter. However, identi.ca has several features Twitter doesn’t have, it’s built on Status.net which is Free Software you can host yourself, and it interoperates with other systems. For example, you can subscribe to users on other systems.

Microblog services have APIs that allow developers to build programs that enhance the microblogging experience. For example, Twitter and Identi.ca have APIs and that allows developers to write applications that allow you to follow your subscriptions and create new posts from your iPhone or an Android-based phone.

Every account on a microblog service also has a feed. You can incorporate this feed into your web-site.

Examples

http://twitter.com/uua
This is the UUA Twitter feed.
http://identi.ca/willkg
This is my identi.ca feed.

Demo: Microblogging

(10 minutes)

If you have a Twitter account, you can do this there. If you have an Identi.ca account, you can do this there.

  1. log into the account
  2. write a post
  3. respond to a post in your feed using the correct formatting markup

Photo sharing

(10 minutes)

Present

There are several photo sharing sites on the Internet. Like other social media sites, you can post your content, other people can subscribe to feeds, and you can connect with friends.

Flickr is a great photo sharing site that is working with Creative Commons to make it easier for its users to license their works with Creative Commons licenses. This is a great resource for photos and images.

Demo: Flickr

Show how to post photos to flickr.

  1. log in to your flickr account
  2. post a photo to your account
  3. show the photo on the page

Activity: Finding photos

Present

Flickr is a great resource for Creative Commons licensed photos and images.

Think of an event that’s happened in the last year or a place that you would like to go to. Go to the Flickr site [7], run a few searches, and look at the pictures that come up. Pick a picture to present to the other participants that is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribute license (anything that starts with CC-BY).

CC-BY license allows you to print the picture out and use it in a classroom, use it during a chapel service, use it in a blog post, send it in a newsletter, copy it, share it with friends, and so forth as long as you attribute the creator.

Go around in a circle. Each person should specify what they were looking for and a picture that they found.

[7]http://flickr.com/

Social networking

(30 minutes)

Present

Social networking sites allow you to connect to others and in this way send messages to large groups of interconnected people without having to deal with mailing lists and other subscription-based systems.

They also allow you to keep track of people in your network.

In many ways they combine the social aspects of a lot of the things we’ve talked about today already into one big application. This makes it easier for people because all their tasks are under one roof rather than spread out across a bunch of different accounts.

Because of this, these are great resources for tapping into communities and networks. This makes it easier to do announcements, PR, marketing, and other things of that nature.

FIXME - Shelby is going to cover this in her presentation

FIXME - The UUA has a behavior policy that can be used.

Facebook, Elgg

Workflows

Present

We’ve talked about a lot of social media sites and services that allow you to communicate. Let’s talk about organizational problems in our programs that using these social media sites and services could help.

Activity: Using communication tools

Discuss as a group the communication tools we covered.

Spend 10 minutes to about their properties and what kinds of things they could make easier in a program.

When the conversation peters out, bring up one of the following:

  • announcements

    How can you use social media for news-types of announcements? How do you integrate the system into your program to make it useful for announcements?

  • maintaining history

    How can you use social media for maintaining the history of your program? New volunteers, volunteers that have stepped aside, changes in the program, changes in the size or scope of the program, and so on? What other kinds of things would you want to keep track of over a period of time?

  • sharing events with people who aren’t there

    How can you use social media to share events with people who weren’t able to make it? Concerts, plays, workshops, meetings–what other kinds of events can you share?

  • training

    Which tools will make training volunteers easier? It’s something we spend a lot of time on–would these tools alleviate some of that work? Video podcasting might help a lot. Once you make the videos, putting them online in a video podcast and putting them on a DVD are both possibilities and will allow you to reach a large group of people.

  • getting feedback

    Which tools will make it easier to solicit anonymous and non-anonymous feedback from volunteers and participants in our program?

  • tools that require accounts vs. tools that don’t

    Blogging tools require accounts for anyone who’s blogging. Microblogging tools require accounts for anyone who is microblogging. Facebook requires an account to participate.

    Blogging, microblogging, Flickr and podcasting don’t require accounts for people who are reading the blog and microblog, looking at the photos, and listening or watching the podcast.

If people mention things that aren’t on the list, work with that, make a note of it, and send it to me for feedback.

Resources

Social media services and software

http://wordpress.com/
Web-site for the WordPress service and project.
http://www.blogger.com/
Web-site for the Blogger service.
http://blip.tv/
Blip.tv web-site for video hosting.
http://www.archive.org/index.php
Archive.org allows you to host video and audio files.
http://feedburner.google.com/
FeedBurner adds additional bits to feeds making it easier to produce podcasts with WordPress and other blog systems that don’t automatically add enclosures for media files. Additionally, they provide viewer and tracking statistics which can help you understand your readership/viewership and what’s popular on your blog/podcast.
http://youtube.com/
YouTube web-site for video hosting.
http://twitter.com/
Twitter web-site for micro-blogging.
http://identi.ca/
Identi.ca web-site for micro-blogging.
http://status.net/
Status.net web-site for software to host your own micro-blogging site.
http://flickr.com/
Flickr web-site for photo sharing.
http://facebook.com/
Facebook social networking site.
http://elgg.org/
Elgg web-site for software to host your own social networking site.

Blogging resources

http://www.uua.org/socialmedia/blogs/
Resources the UUA has gathered for blogging. There are tips for new bloggers, links for setting up a blog, a list of UUA blogs, and best practices.
http://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s collection of information on blogger’s rights. There’s a lot of legalese-like things here and it’s focused mostly on bloggers as journalists. However, it’s a great resource for the legal side of things and they’ve created a Blogger’s Legal Guide which covers fair use and copyright issues.

http://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal

http://uua.org/news/rss/index.shtml
The UUA page on RSS feeds.