We’re developing social media training systems together with association / corporate marketing groups and consultants who add their training content to the platform. For example, we’re working with a wine consultancy developing a national social media marketing business using the platform for “basic training” and reference for their client base.

Register for a peek at http://domusu.com/admin/first-time-users. We welcome discussion on this unique idea.

I originally intended this slideshow for local business people who wanted a blog for marketing purposes, but didn’t have the inclination to start a blog due to writing and time commitments. After posting the slideshow, I received feedback that Posterous was a great method to create new “blogs” on a variety of topics and interests that were parallel to the principal blog. One mentioned how fast Posterous blogs were indexed by Google.

from last year’s 06/02/08 slideshow: Explaining Twitter, Friendfeed & Social Media 2.0. I just added Lifestreaming.

With the advent of Twitter and the real time web, can blogs can chronicle real time as effectively as micro-blogging tools? Last week Steve Rubel introduced his move from blogging to lifestreaming with a new lifestream site based on the Posterous platform.

For the uninitiated, the lifestream looks curiously like a blog:

Q) Cmon Steve, isn’t this “lifestream” just basically a blog?

Sort of. The site is certainly structured like a blog. However, the approach is different. It’s less formal. There will be more bits, fewer posts. What’s more, I will employ creative ways to share and engage - such as mindmaps, image galleries and short videos. In addition, this will serve as a key way I connect to you on various social networks.

The principal difference between a blog and a lifestream: to comment on a blog, a reader needs to be on the blog itself.  Commenting on a lifestream can be done from any social network where the lifestream content is distributed – Facebook, Friendfeed, Twitter, etc.

However, there is a real reason why individuals or companies need blogs or a central repository of content like a lifestream to give them online presence. Twitter and other micro-blogging services suffer from massive data overload (literally multimillions tweets per hour), and Twitter search can only query across a few weeks of Twitter data at most. Robert Scoble points out:

Here’s an easy search: find the original Tweet of the guy who took the picture of the plane that fell into the Hudson. I can do it on FriendFeed after a few tries, but on Twitter Search? Give me a break. Over on Google? One click, but you gotta click through a blog or a journalistic report to get there. Real time search is horrid at saving our knowledge and making it accessible. (italics mine)

Conclusion: it’s essential to have the central repository of content that micro-blogging tools can drive traffic towards.

San Francisco’s “second” newspaper, the Examiner, launched Examiner.com last year not as the online equivalent for the San Francisco paper, but as a national forum for recruiting citizen journalists to report on the variety of topics a typical newspaper would cover. Participants set up blogs for their topic and city that allows them to develop a unique, granular voice. For example, one of the more popular “columnists” discusses San Francisco radio.

The mission behind Examiner.com is to create massive local blog networks covering as many topics as possible. The Examiner.com management then encourage their bloggers to virally market their blogs themselves, and provides pocket change incentive of $.01 per pageview.

In conclusion, Examiner.com is a great experiment taking an obscure local publishing brand and creating a new online journalistic (albeit not a professional journalist) business model. It melds its mass media name with the social media. I’ve signed on as a Social Media Examiner and will test the concept.

In any case, at least the Examiner is creative enough to try a new business model in light of the horrid newspaper advertising collapse now happening:

(fr. Techcrunch)

The Denver Post already plans to start charging for content. Would the overwhelming results of this informal reader poll change their mind? It boils down to, how stupid are they?

This is a followup from yesterday’s article about news feed aggregation – the advent of  “real time” news in the past year with Twitter and micro-blogging citizen journalism has commoditized news content. The public realizes they can find their news anywhere and everywhere online… this perception didn’t exist a year ago.

Children to leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication. They must gain “fluency” in handwriting and keyboard skills, and learn how to use a spellchecker alongside how to spell.

This seems inevitable. Online literacy, and even more important, online presence has become critical for interacting with and arguably, acheiving success in society. I’m making sure my children understand the importance of writing well because the written word will always remain the most efficient mode of communication between man and device.

The speed of online communication is accelerating because, in simplest possible terms, there are now more people online to communicate with. The development of the social network has become an objective unto itself, and the most efficient way to grow the network is to have shorter but just as impactful conversations. The analogy is the Hollywood producer in the 80’s who would limit each phone call to 1 minute, if not 15 seconds in order to optimize productivity without chitchat. Dry, but effective.

Online conversations are like watching chat boxes:

(from today’s Friendfeed)

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The evolution towards small talk continues with unveiling of the Facebook Connect Comment Box:

(screenshot from Mashable article on Comment Box)

Now conversations can devolve into salutations, affirmations and “Awesome”.

Don’t get me wrong, I actually like these micro-communication features because frankly, I was never garrulous to begin with. I just ignore the chaff.

I Twittered a link to a NYTimes article:

My Twitter feed is incorporated into my FriendFeed account

Which then gets fed into my Facebook account:

Where friend Ross Rylance commented on it.

Veterans of Facebook, Friendfeed, Linkedin and Twitter know this phenomenon well. This is a simple, practical demonstration of the new personal syndication: belonging to all these major social networks / platforms expands and distributes your message. Write once, be read everywhere.

When your message is distributed, and somebody like friend Ross responds in conversation, that conversation gets distributed through Ross’s networks, and the conversation spreads. This is the essence of VIRAL.

“I think big-city newspapers, the way we have known them, are not long for this world, as they’re now configured.”

Over the weekend, John Jarvis on Huffington Post glommed onto another quote by Stanton:

“(The)Times’ Web site revenue now exceeds its editorial payroll costs.”

And after some confirming emails with LA Times management, Jarvis concludes that the Times can conceivably survive on Web revenues alone. If true, during the Tribune Company’s bankruptcy restructuring, Jarvis advises to cut out the costly print production and distribution business and make LA Times a pure online news play. Then,

1. Expand the journalistic reach of the newpaper into the community by including bloggers and other forms of citizen journalism.
2. Have each major city newspaper cooperatively act as the local news hub and syndicate its local news nationally to the other newspapers. This would allow newspapers to dispense with national (Washington, New York) correspondents.
3. News becomes a network of links made by those who do what they do best and link to the rest.

On Twitter, the LATimes, with their social media director @LATimesNystrom, has pursued a more social strategy to interact with other Twitterers, unlike the one-way Twitter broadcast policy used by CNN and the NYTimes. Since most Twitterers are also bloggers, the LA Times positions itself as social media friendly for the future recruitment of bloggers as potential journalistic content sources.

Breaking news is critical for making time sensitive purchase decisions – nobody should buy GM stock, purchase a home or car, or lock in an interest rate without checking what is happening in the markets and how it impacts their purchase decision.

How Breaking News Real Estate Sites Become a Mass Media Property

The new breaking news websites like Homescopes, a real estate site of blogging Realtors devoted to granularly chronicling the Northern California housing marketing in real time, is a far better resource for analyzing this local market than any journalist writing a weekly real estate column. Homescopes is planning to expand to having 100 real estate “journalists” covering this regional market. Once this happens, Homescopes becomes a bona fide source of professional real estate opinion, and can now leverage their collective knowledge base by teaming up with the traditional mass media for supplemental content delivery. Imagine Homescopes as a part of the San Francisco Chronicle coverage of the real estate market in the Bay Area… Homescopes’ agents benefit from exposure in a mass media publication that is akin to free advertising.

In addition, Homescopes will be able to leverage their portable social graph – readers can log into Homescopes through their Facebook account via Facebook Connect or via similar channels like Google Friend Connect. Like all social media plays, these various Homescopes social networks will build on the trust and credibility that develops among the membership.

Conclusion

Homescopes is singular in the landscape of independent real estate sites by providing breaking news cooperatively and in hyperlocal detail by its participating agents. No other real estate sites – Trulia, Inman News, Realtor.com – can provide this level of local detail in a news feed based format. Simple to build at little cost, all it takes are ringleaders who see the opportunity to replicate Homescopes in their markets.

Related articles:

Homescopes – providing breaking news for the Bay Area housing markets

Entrepreneurial Real Estate Marketing

Incorporate “Breaking News” into the Website and Make Them Compelling Reads

The Portable Social Graph