Following SXSWi Conference
I have to admit that I am a little disappointed to not be in Austin this weekend for the South by Southwest Interactive Conference. I had planned on heading out there but given the fact that I am running behind schedule on just about every project I have going on right now I figured it was in my best interest to just stay behind this week and get caught up. As a lot of you may already be aware, my wife and I had a tragedy recently and needless to say I didn’t get a lot of work done all last week. My partners and I also attended the Rackspace Conference in Atlanta earlier this week, so not only has my productivity and focus been down but I have also been out of the office a lot. Staying home from SXSWi this year was the right thing to do… Okay, I have justified it.
What’s the big deal about SXSWi you might ask? Well, that’s simple. In terms of conferences / conventions, this is the big one for the interactive industry. In fact, many of the trends and products that will shape our industry this next year will be unveiled at SXSWi in Austin. Fret not though, I have some friends that are attending the conference this year and have been tweeting and blogging up a storm about what they are seeing. Here’s a few if you are interested in following along…
- Bryan Jones / @bryanjones
- Wade Austin / @k_wade_a
- Daniel Spillers / @almostdaniel
- Justin Wright / @mrjawright
So, what to do this weekend??
So, besides getting caught up on my backlog of client projects what am I doing this weekend? Well, turns out it’s not that bad of a weekend after all. My church, The Church Alive, is hosting their annual Unlimited Realm conference this year. Nick Brewer and I have been managing our live video stream and social media presence for the conference and it’s been a big honor to use our talents to further the kingdom. Tonight we led a young man to Christ in a chat room that had been dealing w/ drug addiction. We also prayed w/ several others on matters related to their health and healing. This sort of ministry opportunity doesn’t present itself very often but when it does, I like to roll up my sleeves and get involved however I can. If you are interested in tuning into the conference this weekend, you can do so by clicking here…
EP:006 – The Cotton Club Podcast
In this Episode…
My co-host Keith Crawford and I discussed a very popular topic this evening, and that’s the rollout of Google Buzz. In this episode we both give our first impressions of this new social network / aggregator based on our initial 3 or 4 days of testing. Keith has been an authority on FriendFeed for some time now so given the similarities between what Google is trying to accomplish with Buzz and what FriendFeed already does, he provided some excellent commentary.
Also, anytime Keith and I get together for a show we always like to close out w/ a few iPhone application recommendations. This week we discussed Siri™, Waze, SleepCycle, and My6Sense. Keith also discussed Appolicious, which is a resource that no iPhone app junkie is going to want to live without. I also mentioned a story I saw today on CNN where several companies like AT&T and Verizon are getting together to open a competing APP store, you can find that CNN story here…
Since Keith and I are both avid NASCAR fans we dedicated a few minutes at the end of our show to discussing Jamie McMurray’s victory at the Daytona 500. Stay tuned for another post on this blog dedicated to the race.
Win Dinner for 2 on Cotton & Keith’s ‘Name That Podcast Promotion’!
As some of you might already be aware, Keith and I are looking for a new name for our podcast that we host together. We are looking for something unique and innovative that best describes our show. If you are unfamiliar w/ our show, be sure to listen to this weeks episode by clicking on the play button below to get an idea. We typically discuss social media, web services, and iPhone applications. You can enter our ‘Name that Podcast’ promotion by leaving a comment below w/ your suggestions or by posting your suggestion on twitter to @tsudo and @cottonr using the #NameThatPodcast hash tag. Keith and I will go over each entry and select the one that we like the best. If we chose the name you suggested, you will win dinner for two at The Market Place grill here in Conway, Arkansas. You can enter as many times as you like.
Listen to This Episode / Subscribe to The Cotton Club…
Click on the play button below to play this episode on your computer, or you may subscribe to The Cotton Club in iTunes or using Microsoft Zune. For step-by-step instructions for subscribing to this podcast, click here…
Quick Thoughts on Google Buzz
Okay so when Google started pushing Google Profiles the other day I knew that they were laying the foundation for something social, and it wasn’t going to be Orkut on steroids, insert sarcastic giggle here. I went ahead and setup my profile a few weeks ago, you can find my profile here…
Turns out my assumption was correct, Google launched Buzz this past week inside of Gmail, which I thought was a little odd of a way to launch at first, but after giving it some thought, it was probably a pretty stealth way to roll the product out. I know a few people that didn’t even notice the link on the sidebar until I showed them, and one person totally missed it and didn’t know about Buzz until they hit the internal landing page that slapped them in the face once they had logged into their Gmail account.
Turns out Google had all of their ducks in a row in one regard prior to releasing Buzz onto the mainstream, they even have a wireless version of Buzz that they are promoting. Setting up Buzz was pretty easy for the most part w/ one huge exception that might have only affected me, but it was annoying nonetheless…
The Problem Connecting Sites to My Buzz:
When I went in to setup my sites w/ my Google Buzz I first thought that surely they would just bring over the sites that were connected to my Google Profile page that I had created a while back, but that wasn’t the deal at all. I had a list of sites that I could connect initially, like my Blogspot, Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, Digg, and YouTube just to name a few. I set these accounts up, although I haven’t used Blogger in forever. Underneath these sites I had 5 or 6 more sites that I could “connect”, none of these sites were my blog? I found this odd and sat here scratching my head for a few minutes trying to figure out how they got the list of “suggested sites” that were my options. These websites were actually sites that I had built for clients, and I had them listed and verified inside of my Webmaster Tools account, where I record their sitemap links, etc.
I thought to myself for a moment that if maybe there was some way to delete these suggested sites that I would eventually work my way through the list of 800+ sites that I have in Webmaster tools until I got to my blog and I could do it that way. Well, that wouldn’t work because I wasn’t able to do anything but add a site, couldn’t remove it from the “suggested” group of sites.
I went into my Webmaster tools account and went ahead and verified my blog (surprised I hadn’t done this a long time ago). Once I did the verification process I went back into Google Buzz and clicked on selected sites again and noticed that my site was now in the list so I added it that way.
What a headache! I think it would have been much more efficient if users Buzz feed was originated by the sites that are connected to their Google profiles. I am sure that Google had a reason for doing this but for the life of me I can’t think of why they would do it that way.
Now, here’s another dilemma I encountered. While I was able to add Friendfeed as one of my connected sites, I got to thinking, if I connect all of these other sites to my Buzz, why would I need FriendFeed connected to my Buzz? Wouldn’t that be overlap and duplicate content in my feed? I opted to disconnect my FriendFeed from Buzz. I still haven’t been able to get my Delicious links connected to my Buzz either. Kind of makes me wonder if Google even wants third parties involved w/ their Buzz stream… Has anyone else encountered the same issues that I have? What am I missing??
Do We Need Another Social Network? And from Google??
It’s no secret that Google has attempted to get into the social networking business before, their Orkut product never really got wings for some reason, and I honestly think Google has known this for a while, which is why they never gave it a big push. If you are unfamiliar w/ Orkut, here’s my profile you can checkout…
While Google Buzz is being labeled a Social Network, I don’t really see it as a “social network” like Facebook or Twitter. In fact, I see it being more of an aggregator, sort of like what FriendFeed is. I think eventually Google wants to be the place where you can plug in all of our “social properties” and content feeds. If I was Google, that’s exactly the direction I would be looking as well, but I think they are going to have to package it a lot differently.
One component of Google Buzz that I did notice was that you can add friends more or less by “Following” people. This component gives it the “social networkish-ness” but that’s honestly about all I have seen in that regard. Friends can comment on other friends posts, etc. I guess it’s sort of like Facebook w/out all of the Farmtown…
In Conclusion…
I don’t want to sound like I am down on Google Buzz, because as I mentioned earlier, I think that they have the right idea. I just found the initial setup phase of joining to be somewhat frustrating and still don’t have my account setup w/ all of the sites that I want to connect but will live with things the way they are for now.
The bottom line, I think eventually if Google is persistent, they can grow Buzz into something cool that will rob other networks like Facebook and Twitter of face time, but it’s going to take some work. I am advising my clients if they have the time to get their profiles setup and to start adding their sites to Buzz but not pushing it as something they need to do urgently…
Stay Tuned…
I think that the next edition of The Cotton Club might include some discussion regarding Google Buzz so be sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes so you don’t miss it.
In case you are unfamiliar w/ Google Buzz, here’s some info I found on the Google Blog:
We’ve blogged before about our thoughts on the social web, steps we’ve taken to add social features to our products, and efforts like OpenSocial that propose common tools for building social apps. With more and more communication happening online, the social web has exploded as the primary way to share interesting stuff, tell the world what you’re up to in real-time and stay more connected to more people. In today’s world of status messages, tweets and update streams, it’s increasingly tough to sort through it all, much less engage in meaningful conversations.
Our belief is that organizing the social information on the web — finding relevance in the noise — has become a large-scale challenge, one that Google’s experience in organizing information can help solve. We’ve recently launched innovations like real-time search and Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step with the introduction of a new product, Google Buzz.
Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.We’re rolling out Buzz to all Gmail accounts over the next few days, so if you don’t see it in your account yet, check back soon. We also plan to make Google Buzz available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features for sharing within organizations.
On your phone, Google Buzz is much more than just a small screen version of the desktop experience. Mobile devices add an important component to sharing: location. Posts tagged with geographical information have an extra dimension of context — the answer to the question "where were you when you shared this?" can communicate so much. And when viewed in aggregate, the posts about a particular location can paint an extremely rich picture of that place. Check out the Mobile Blog for more info about all of the ways to use Buzz on your phone, from a new mobile web app to a Buzz layer in Google Maps for mobile.We’ve relied on other services’ openness in order to build Buzz (you can connect Flickr and Twitter from Buzz in Gmail), and Buzz itself is not designed to be a closed system. Our goal is to make Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations. We’re building on a suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API, and we invite developers to join us on Google Code to see what is available today and to learn more about how to participate.
We really hope you enjoy the experiences we’ve built within Gmail and for mobile phones. If you want to learn more, visit buzz.google.com. We look forward to continuing to evolve and improve Google Buzz based on your feedback.
If you are already using Google Buzz, I would love to hear your comments about the product.
I have only had 48hrs with the product and I will admit that there might be a lot about the product that I am totally missing.
Attention Conway, AR Twitter Users – #ToadsuckTweetup
I posted last week to see if there was any interest in having a Conway version of the #LRTweetup or Little Rock Tweetup. I got numerous tweets back from people saying that they would be interested in launching something like this and even a few folks volunteered to help coordinate everything, which was very promising because I know first hand from helping to establish the Central Arkansas Refresh group that it takes a little bit more to pull something like this off than people think.
One representative from the Conway Chamber of Commerce, Jamie Gates, @chambergates offered his support as well. I am going to follow up w/ him this next week to see what we can come up with. This whole thing should be a lot of fun, not to mention an excellent networking opportunity for everyone in the Conway area. I have dubbed this thing the “Toadsuck Tweetup” but we can tweak the name later if everyone thinks that’s lame. So far, the people that have spoken up to say they wanted to be involved were:
Update: I have setup a Twitter list for the people that have expressed an interest, you can find that list here.
- @cottonr (organizer)
- @mscottonz (organizer)
- @chambergates (Conway Chamber of Commerce, TheChamberLife.com)
- @chamberjamie (Conway Chamber of Commerce, TheChamberLife.com)
- @chamberkathy (Conway Chamber of Commerce, TheChamberLife.com)
- @hillreflects (organizer)
- @dspurgers (organizer)
- @varvil
- @SavannahB
- @ambersharae
- @thelukeirvin
- @jgreghenderson (volunteer from LRTweetup)
- @tsudo (volunteer from LRTweetup)
- @brewern
- @tarkka
- How to Get Involved:
- I think that I have everyone that responded to my original post included in this list but if I left your name out, sorry about that… Please comment below and leave me your Twitter name and I will get you added. Also, if this is the first that you have heard of the Conway Tweetup and you live in the Conway area and would like to be a part please comment below and leave your Twitter name and you will be added. The group is totally open to anyone… Also, please Retweet this link to your friends to help us get the word out.
Waze Brings Back Treasure Chests for Valentines
A few days ago Daniel from Waze sent me an email to let me know that Waze is bringing back their Treasure Chests in a Valentine’s Day themed promotion. This promotion is pretty cool, let’s say you are driving along and you open up a treasure chest, it might be filled with tickets to the movies for 2 or a heart shaped box of chocolates. How cool is that? The themed goodies are also going to look like cupids arrows and love balloons.
If you are unfamiliar with the Waze app for the iPhone, I strongly recommend you check them out. I have reviewed this app twice on my blog and talked about it extensively on my podcast, The Cotton Club. If you missed those posts you can find them here and here…
Here’s a press release from the company about this new promotion:
Palo Alto, Calif. — February 8, 2009 — Waze, the first free provider of driver-generated maps and real-time road information geared towards everyday driving, today announced a Valentine’s Day treasure hunt to help save the day for techies who might have forgotten to consider their sweethearts this February 14th.
Waze’s ‘Valentine’s Treasure Hunt’ will feature ‘road goodies’ as well as virtual treasure chests that, when driven over, have the potential to reward users with a real-world prizes – Valentine’s ‘movie night for two’ gift cards or heart-shaped boxes of chocolate. From February 8 to February 14, 2010, users in the US and Canada, should start looking for treasure chests along their daily commute for their chance to win. More details can be found on the waze blog.
Waze’s holiday-themed ‘road goodies’ – small icons worth bonus points – will be implemented on the map, internationally. The Valentine’s ‘road goodies’ include a cupid’s arrow, worth 15 points, as well as heart-shaped love balloons, worth 10 points, scattered all over the map. Users can use these road goodies to increase their point totals, in prep for waze’s next version which will include a scoreboard, allowing users to check out where they stand among their local driving communities.
I am hoping to have a representative on my podcast from Waze in the very near future so stay tuned for that. Also, Daniel sent along some screengrabs that I thought I would share:
Road Trip Using Waze
I am going on a road trip this weekend w/ some friends to the bottom of the Earth (South Texas). Normally I am not that big of a fan of road trips, I guess I outgrew that a few years back. I guess for the most part I am just not that much fun anymore. However, something about this trip has me a little excited.
As someone who sits behind a desk for the most part of everyday, I don’t do a lot of commuting, and the only time I travel is when I am heading to and from meetings. There is a social application called Waze that I have been wanting to test out for a while now.
Waze is a free social mobile app that enables drivers to build and use live maps, real-time traffic updates and turn-by-turn navigation for an optimal commute. Waze is 100% powered by users and the more you drive the better it gets. I have played w/ the app a little bit just driving around town and have been able to report speed traps, backed up traffic, and even accidents just by having their app open.
I recently learned that Waze also acts as a turn by turn navigation system, I am looking forward to testing their service versus the GPS navigation system that we presently have. I was talking w/ Keith Crawford last night on our podcast, The Social Radar, about the Waze app and he and I both agreed that they have probably one of the coolest applications going right now. I look forward to reporting back how my weekend road trip went w/ Waze.
Now, here’s the only thing. My wife complains that I spend too much time Twittering and all of that, I am sure that some of you have caught heat about this before too. Well, I am going to have to try to use Waze covertly on this trip so that I am not accused of spending too much time on my iPhone. It’s going to be tough, wish me luck… If you want to know more about Waze, here’s a guided tour I pulled from their website. (also, I have been in communication w/ Daniel from Waze about someone from their group being a guest on one of our upcoming podcasts, stay tuned)
Current Projects: The Social Radar
My good friend Keith Crawford and I have been working on a sideline project / podcast for the past month or so called The Social Radar. The Social Radar is a weekly podcast that Keith and I record to discuss the ever changing world of social media. Some of the areas we cover include desktop and wireless applications used to manage social media (ie. Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Twhirl, etc.).
We also plan to cover new products that are released onto the market that are of a social nature. It is our goal to update our show on a weekly basis with new information. The Social Radar podcast will soon be available for download from iTunes, stay tuned for that announcement in the very near future…
The initial design for The Social Radar is extremely simple but expect it to evolve as we add new shows. Below is a screenshot for The Social Radar in it’s current state:
You can click the screenshot above to visit The Social Radar online and listen to our first podcast…






Recently I did a blog post asking for feedback

