Striped:Shirt

It’s been a while since I last blogged. Actually, since my university life ended last week after I took my last exam, my life online took a break too - my unread emails kept on piling up, RSS feeds were untouched, time spent on Facebook was close to none and Twitter usage dropped significantly. I’m not sure why but I’ve been busy with other things like the work here in Yahoo! and planning for my Euro trip which is happening in 2 weeks. I’ve to start picking up with my online activities again before I leave for my trip because I won’t have any time to blog or read RSS feeds then.

Fortunately, I came across this presentation by the Fake Steve Jobs a.k.a. Daniel Lyons from the Web 2.0 Expo recently, which inspired me to login to WordPress again and start writing. It’s a keynote that “You Gotta See” according to Stephan Spencer. Daniel Lyons, being a senior editor for Forbes and a blogger, talks about the shift that’s happening between traditional and new media. The most interesting part of his presentation was the background info on why he started his blog. I won’t go on too much and just let you watch his keynote. Enjoy!

I finally started my Twitter-Themed Days last week. I just hope my followers found some, if not all, the links useful. Here are the links that I’ve shared:

Productivity Monday:

• New to Getting Things Done (GTD)? Here’s a long but good read to get you started http://snurl.com/230y0
• Time management tips for students like me http://snurl.com/2310q
• The 5 Secrets to Success http://snurl.com/231n

Social Media Wednesday:

• The full potential of Social Media is yet to be seen http://snurl.com/238c4
• What are the popular social networking sites around the globe? http://snurl.com/238f0
• Be a good social media friend please http://snurl.com/238y2
• Are you suffering from Social Network Fatigue? http://snurl.com/2399g

Flickr Friday:

I wasn’t able to post anything last Friday because I busy moving from place to place. Be sure to check next Friday my Flickr favorites of all time.

Del.icio.us Sunday:

• Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Facebook http://snurl.com/23l2q
• Photoshop Disasters http://snurl.com/23l5y
• Do you have a lot of important files on your computer but do not have the time to back them up?  http://snurl.com/23llq

I hope to continue Twitter-Themed Days as long as I’m on Twitter and hear no complaints. Stay tuned for the links next week!

1. You care more about the number of followers you have compared to your Technorati Authority ranking. (You just wish that you’d make it to the Twitterholic Top 100 by the end of the year.)
2. When writing an email, you mistakenly type @(Your Twitter-buddy’s screen name) instead of @gmail.com.
3. Twitter becomes your main mode of replying to your girlfriend’s SMS. (After you beg her to sign up for an account)
4. You play Wordy Birdie and Tweet140 instead of going over to Jack’s place for Friday Night Poker.
5. You start to feel like you’ve known people like Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki and Chris Brogan for years.
6. Your whole life is broadcast on Twitter - from what you eat, your proposal and your dirty little secrets. Private life no more.
7. You prefer to read Twitter updates from events like MacWorld rather than watch Steve Jobs do his magic on stage.
8. The planning for this summer’s backpacking trip is done through Twittervision and Twitter Atlas. Goodbye TripAdvisor.
9. Every sentence that comes out of your mouth contains less than 140 characters.
10. After reading this blog entry, you copy and paste the url to TinyUrl or Snurl and share it via your preferred Twitter desktop app.

Daryl Tay from Unique-Frequency has been busy organizing Social Media Breakfast: Singapore for the past few weeks. Participants will finally be able to realize all of the effort that has been put into this event tomorrow. In Daryl’s words, SMB is “mainly for networking and meeting like-minded people who are into the social media space“. Here’s a video trailer that Daryl and Sheylara worked on:

The SMB: Singapore idea was initiated by Derrick Kwa, and both Daryl and himself setup two basic rules for the event:

1. Everyone’s equal. When it comes to Social Media Breakfast, there’s no difference if you’re a CEO or a student. Everyone has something of value to contribute and everyone should be treated that way
2. Law of Two Feet applies. If a particular conversation or discussion is not getting you what you want, feel free to move on.

I’m not really sure what will happen during the breakfast. I had a chat with one of the organizers, Nabilah, earlier and we both agreed that we’ll have to wait and see until tomorrow morning to see what comes out of this event.

Kudos to Daryl and the gang for organizing SMB: Singapore! See you all tomorrow!

After reading this very insightful post by Daryl on the power of Twitter, I was inspired to write something about how I’ve been using Twitter recently and how I should change the way I use the tool.

For the past week or so, I feel like I’ve turned Twitter into a MSN Messenger because of the number of replies I’ve been tweeting out and receiving. Replies are fine if used in moderation but our Twitter archives can’t be just be full of @ symbols because the rest of our followers might consider our replies as Twitter noise. I say might because receiving replies between other people can be powerful in a way if it leads to spin-off replies/tweets that can further build the conversation.

Jyri Engestrom, co-founder of Jaiku, hit the mark when he said that the success of all these web 2.0 applications and services depend on the social object(s) which they are built upon. These objects are the reasons why we connect or follow people on Twitter. It’s this whole ‘People Like Me’ concept again. For instance, I follow @chrisbrogan because I find the social media links (the social objects) that he shares both useful and interesting. In my opinion, Twitter is a better way to share links compared to LinkRiver or Del.icio.us because of it’s real time feature - you can share a link and get a quick response from your followers.

After much thought, I decided to come up with Twitter-themed days to share links that I find online.

• Productive Mondays - It’s the start of the week so I’d like share GTD or productivity links to help everyone start the week on the right note.
• Social Media Wednesdays - I’m going to miss the discussions and presentations during social media class every Wednesday but it doesn’t mean that the sharing should stop.
• Flickr Fridays - I have no time to take photos anymore so I just browse Flickr almost everyday. Photos inspire me and I’m sure it can inspire others too in some way or another.
• Del.icio.us Sundays - When @skaplan asked me to use del.icio.us about 3 years ago, I didn’t really expect it to be any use to me. As I used it more and more, del.icio.us evolved to become my permanent bookmark keeper and I can’t thank Steve enough.

I won’t stop using the @ symbol in Twitter but I won’t let it replace instant messengers. (Though I second Daryl that Twitter is way better than MSN). I will just continue to experiment with my tweets to hopefully unleash to full power of Twitter.

Steve Rubel from Micro Persuasion just wrote a blog entry titled “Three Internet Careers That Soon Won’t Exist“. One of the three professions he mentioned is Social Media Consultant/Manager. Steve refers to this graph to depict the decline in jobs where ’social networking’, ‘web 2.0′ and ‘blogs’ is/are mentioned. (Even ‘ajax’ is on its way down.) He writes that all these jobs will soon be merged into ‘broader roles’ and that everyone is expected to be comfortable with using new media to stay employed.

Here I am studying IT and marketing hoping to find a job that’s a good mix of both. I’m even taking a course called Social Media and Corporate Communication Across Asia. Is this good or bad news for undergraduates like me? Steve’s point is that a PR role will be the one ‘managing’ the social media aspect of a corporation. At first I thought that we were going to have an advantage because of our background and interests in IT (which makes social media part of our everyday lives) plus the fact that we take courses like Social Media and Corporate Communication Across Asia.

I’m not sure how these trends are reflected in the Asian region compared to The US, but I sure do hope for a more positive prospect here in Asia with regards to social media jobs because I think companies are just starting to utilize such tools.

Steve also includes internet advertising jobs on his list. There goes another of my options. Oh well…

In the meantime, I’ll wait for his next post on emerging digital careers.

After my presentation the other day on microblogging, I was inspired to conduct a social media experiment using Twitter. SMU is proud to be a technology-enabled university and I’m going to try to add microblogging to the current technologies being used in school. I’m sure there are already a group of students using Twitter but I’m just not sure how small or how big the group is.

So if you’re a student or an alumni of The Singapore Management University and you are on Twitter, please do follow @SMUtweets on Twitter. (If you don’t have an account but want to be part of this experiment, please do sign up and join the fun!)

Other than sending alerts to SMU students, SMUtweets aims to help students develop “a sense of each other as people beyond the classroom space” as suggested by academHacK. It can also be an Emergency Notification System like what the University of Michigan is doing with Twitter. I doubt that we’ll have emergencies like what happened in Virginia Tech but an example of an SMU emergency announcement would be: “All group study room’s in business block are fully booked for the week. Try again next week.”

About a month ago, Andrew Careaga posed this question on his blog, “Should universities tweet?” My answer to that is there is no harm in trying. The corp comm office in SMU will not start Twittering anytime soon, so I’ll try to initiate something before I end university schooling in a month.

I’m not sure how this experiment will turnout or evolve.. We’ll just have to tweet and see..

Last Saturday was probably one of the last times in school that I am able to present slides wherein the design fits perfectly with the content and the course (Social Media). Our group presented on microblogging, the tools and its business application for communication professionals.

I designed the slides to look like one of the microblogging platforms, Pownce, for two reasons.

1. Pownce’s UI looks the best out of all microblogging services online mainly due to its designer, Daniel Burka, who I think is also responsible for Digg.com’s user interface/experience. He’s the man!
2. Also, the brevity of microblogging is inline with the way I usually design my slides - very clean and simple with minimal words as possible.

I’m glad that my group mates were able to pull it off and present really well, even though they were new to this style of presenting. In a way, it helped them understand the content better for them to present without using any script. One of my group mates was even singled-out by our professor saying how each SMU student should be presenting like her. Well done, Adelyn!

Anyway, here are the slides without the video interview by Robert Scoble with the co-founders of Jaiku:

One thing that I’ve learned this time is to rehearse as much as I can before presentation day. I went in there last Saturday with minimal rehearsal and once again fumbled through my parts.

’till next time…

After watching Scoble’s interview with the co-founders of Jaiku, I was pretty impressed with the guys and their vision with their micro-blogging tool. So I quickly searched the net for some invites. Interestingly, I got the invite through Twitter when I wrote a tweet and a friend who had a Jaiku account sent me an invite.

I’ll be exploring Jaiku for a while and study its differences with Twitter. I foresee it being a very powerful tool, especially with its strong emphasis on mobile. We just have to wait and see. Watch this space for my review and experiences with Jaiku.