I’m a big fan of gMail.   I’m also a big ‘plug in’ fan.  Whether it’s for Ableton, Wordpress, or Photoshop (some of my creative tools of choice), I love flexibility and keen ways to manipulate ‘things I make with computers’.

Here’s 2 Firefox addons I use in conjunction with Posterous and gMail to write rich posts without logging in to my blog.

Zemanta

I use Zemanta on this blog and it’s great.  It ’suggests’ links and images to paste into your posts via a clickable sidebar.  Simply click any images or links that appear and it automatically pastes them in – no messy HTML.  And now you can do it from your gMail. Sweet.

How:

1. Get Firefox
2. Get a gMail account
3. Install the Zemanta for gMail Firefox addon

Xoopit

Xoopit rocks.  Aside from matching the email address of folks I’m emailing to their Facebook account (and having their status updates appear in a sidebar), it gives me options for searching, browsing and sharing files – images, music, pdfs – you name it (see screenshot).

How:

1. Install the Xoopit for gMail Firefox addon
2. Configure it
3. Relaunch Firefox and log in to your gMail to see it working.

Posterous

Posterous is new to me.  But I already like it.  Edward Harran is already making great use of it.  From my gMail, I simply send an email to post@posterous.com and it posts that email (even auto-removing my signature) to any combination of social networks I like – instant, multi-outpost broadcast from your email client – rad.  You can even mix, match and specify which social networks to post to by tweaking your “To:” field

“You can also address an email to #{text}@posterous.com and it will post to any site where the url contains that text.

#apple@posterous.com will go to apple.wordpress.com and flickr.com/apple, but NOT banana.blogspot.com”

You can even reply to comments via email.  So.  Cool.

How:

1. Sign up for a Posterous account
2. Sync your blog and social networks
3. Send emails to them and play!

Okay that’s it.  I wrote this blog post as an instruction on how to write rich posts to your blog without logging in.  Was it clear?  make sense to folks reading?  Let me know.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Enhance Your Blog Posts and E-Newsletter With Zemanta (maketecheasier.com)
• Posterous Guide To Dead Simple Blogging (slideshare.net)
• Zemanta – For Fast, Efficient Blogging (toolsforjournalists.blogspot.com)

Have you considered applying a Creative Commons license to your work? Are you familiar with what one is? From the Creative Commons website:

“Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. you can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.”

CC licenses are used the world over by knowledge seekers/creators alike. On this site, I make sure all my content is shareable, remixable, and attributable according to the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial 3.0 License. My particular license is just one of six, that take in to account things like, attribution, sharability, commercial use and derivative works.

Have you considered applying a CC license to your work? It’s pretty easy. Check out the Creative Commons licensing tool here.

you are the best curator for your work, a librarian for resources you’ve created, a dj for the music you make.

Any cool examples you’ve seen of CC licenses in action?

I’m a community technology activist and believe that access to knowledge is a key factor in reaching our potential as humans.  Lately, I’ve had a few ideas running around in my head.

• bridging the work of  old school activists (knowledge, history, experience) with new school activists (enthusiasm, technical aptitude, hyperconnected online and off)
• listservs as ’spinal cords’ to movements and communities
• moving from grassroots organizing into cloud computing for activists
• not reinventing the wheel

How we can bridge the knowledge, history, experience and resources of ‘old school’ community technologists with the ‘new school’ energy, technical aptitude and net centric thinking of some of my peers?

I’m sketching out a ‘ecosystem prototype’ that I’d love feedback on.

(Disclaimer: if the following is a bit too ‘techie’, please ask for clarification.  I’m no expert, but I’m sure between us we can clarify in the comments for those coming to this post after you)

Template for Building a (Community Technology) Knowledge Network with Common Online Tools

1. Community technology fans/supporters contribute/create knowledge about community technology (issues, resources, policy) through some open, internet channel:
   • a blog post (Blogger, Drupal, Wordpress etc.)
   • a socially bookmarked link (del.icio.us, Digg, Twine, etc.)
   • a Tweet (small, viral, quick)
   • an email (content sits in people’s email boxes, but these days, can now be emailed into blog posts, social networks etc.)
2. Each of these channels ’sits’ someplace on line and has an RSS feed coming off of it.
3. These RSS feeds are than pulled into an cross-posting service/network to proliferate outward into other networks.

Some of the components for building this already exist on the wide open web:

Posterous

you can email just about anything to a special address and have it appear on a webpage (with it’s own RSS feed).  Can even integrate with your other social network accounts.

Twitterfeed

This service allows you to pull in any RSS feed and have it ‘autotweet’ into the Twittersphere.  Mash it up with bit.ly and you can track the analytics/virality of the shortened URLs on the web.

A Working Prototype

I’ve built a working prototype of how something like this work here using Twitter, del.icio.us and Twitterfeed.

http://twitter.com/ctnetwork

To see your posts appear in the Tweets for this Twitter account, simply bookmark you CTC related posts on del.icio.us with ‘ctcnet’.

Connect with Other Activists

Check out the following links to connect and learn more about community technology:

The CTCNet Google Group
The CTCNet Facebook Group

I recently took part in the ‘Fake Album Art Contest’ making the rounds on Facebook.  After getting tagged in a note, I created one myself and then tagged my friends.  Included above are the results from my network of friends*.

The rules for playing are pretty easy:

Rules For Playing

1 – BAND NAME Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random article” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – ALBUM TITLE Go to “Random quotations”
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 – COVER ART Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 – Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together. (or mspaint if you’re using a borrowed PC). I used http://www.picnik.com and put mine together, uploaded into Facebook and created this note in under 5 minutes.

5 – Post it to FB with this text in the caption field and TAG the friends you want to join in. (be sure to tag me, so I can see your creation)

Have you played yet?  What are some other variations that you might make on this game?

*Big thanks to Louis Haiman, Kira Tucker, Taylor Wright., Taylor Singletary, Tyler Fosse-Meeler, Reannon Kerwood, Nettrice Gaskins and Nickey Robare.

(click image above to enlarge)

This is a quick ‘how to’ I wrote for a friend who, in using Facebook, wanted to learn how to write a Note and Tag her friends in it.  Since I imagine that there are other folks interested in learning how to do this, I thought I’d throw together this quick tutorial.  Feel free to share this on Facebook too:)

How to Post a Note and Tag Your Friends in Facebook

1. Enter in the title of your post.
2. Paste or write the text of your Note in the ‘Body’ section
3. Begin typing the names of friends you want to ‘Tag’ in the note.  This will send them an email saying ‘[you] tagged you in a note on Facebook’, with a link to the note.

Notes are a great way to direct people’s attention to things you want to share.  I’ve seen people use it to invite people to participate in a ‘list’ type memes (25 Things About Me, 15 Albums That Changed My Life, Fake Album Cover Contests, etc.).  I’ve used it to post my job availability/resumé and than tag people who I thought could share it or have a lead for me.

What are some ways you might use Notes creatively?  Any innovative ways you’ve seen notes used?

(Thanks Jady!)

During my work with NAMAC, I created a ‘Social Media Engagement Cycle’ template in order to communicate with my supervisors just how we might dive in to using blogs, RSS, Facebook and Twitter to engage with our members.  Inspired by Beth Kanter’s post ‘How Much time Does it Take to Do Social Media‘ I thought I’d remix it specifically for electronic musicians and provide a template for ’social media engagement’ – self-directed online information gathering that transitions into community-based offline knowledge exchange.

I’ll cover 5 basic stages of social media engagement, how you might start and some handy tools to play with.

Getting started

1. Listening
   Listening is knowing what is being said about topics in electronic music elsewhere online and analyzing and extracting patterns from these conversations.  You can let these inform your future trajectory in conjunction with your internal strategy.   What are other electronic music enthusiasts talking about? Are they talking about the latest technology and gadgets?  Perhaps there are some new styles of electronic music that you should be aware of or a local event?  What kinds of keywords/ideas pique your interest?
   
   Tools/Things Needed :
   • An RSS feed reader like Google Reader or Bloglines
   • A startpage/aggregator like Netvibes, iGoogle or Protopage

   How:

   1. Find some RSS feeds.  Here’s a few to get you started:
      • http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%22electronic+music%22
      • http://feeds.technorati.com/search/%22electronic+music%22?language=n
      • http://feeds2.feedburner.com/cdmcomments
   2. Plug them into a feedreader (or assemble a social media monitoring dashboard)
   3. Respond/connect as necessary (see next step: Participating)

   Hot tip: Think of feedreader as you would an iPod or turntable – they’re listening stations essentially and you can put in and play what ever you want;)
   

2. Participating
   After getting a good grasp of what’s happening out there, participating entails joining in some of those conversations with fans of electronic music on other platforms – blogs, Facebook, and Twitter readily come to mind.  Simple ‘Hello!’ s and ‘Thanks for the Add!’ are common courtesy.  There are also LOADS of forums and listservs that existed long before these platforms, though participation in these is subject to it’s own ‘good nieghbor’ policies.  Any good forum will have ‘Start here’ or ‘community guidelines’  post to acclimate yourself.Also remember that you are talking with people here – the golden rule generally applies.  Be nice.

   Tools/Things Needed:

   • A list of a few electronic music communities/people to connect to
   • Something thoughtful, supportive or even constructively critical to say, though be sure you’ve got the particular netiquette down.
   • There’s also never anything wrong with introducing yourself and saying what you’re there for (this helps community managers too;)

   How:

   1. Creating a profile on an online network/community/blog/forum
   2. Adding some friends/connections
   3. Beginning to comment on other blogs, platforms, forums and online communities.

   Hot tip: Think of your online profile as a business card you might give a venue owner, fan or fellow electronic musician.  What would you want to communicate in that brief exchange?
   

3. Generating Buzz
   After establishing your own presence/ways of participating on various networks,  you can start raising awareness about things important to you mixed in with some of what you make, whether it’s original tracks, dj mixes, events/parties you are playing at or a new podcast you’ve just started.  Be careful though about tooting your own horn a little too much – nothing is more annoying than someone who’s constantly trying to ’sell’ their products to their friends/network.  Most people are immune to ‘buzz’. You also have to build trust.  Many people jump straight to promoting/marketing their own work before getting at least a basic understanding of the netiquette involved by participating in/on a particular network.  Why would anyone want to listen to you?A general rule of thumb is to promote the work of others as much as or more than your own work – we are all doing this together, plus it’s generally good karma;)
   
   Tools/Things Needed:
   • Passion about what you’re doing
   • Knowledge/experience the will contribute value to your network/community
   • Something you are proud of – that you’d do regardless of what anyone else says.
   • Discounts on stuff (shows, cds, artists’ merchandise) – music downloads are always nice too

   How:

   1. Create something awesome – be it a new track, a dj mix or even some other form of electronic music.
   2. Upload it somewhere (your blog, MySpace, Facebook, Last.fm, drop.io)
   3. Share it in appropriate places
   4. Ask for feedback
   5. If your stuff rocks, people will share it.

   Hot tip: think of what you’re offering up as demos.  Perhaps it could use a little refinement, but at least it gets your foot in the door – and people paying attention.
   

4. Sharing Knowledge
   Here is where – after you’ve listened, participated and perhaps even generated a little ‘buzz’ discussions – you start making sense of and refining the information and research you’ve gleaned, solidifying and taking action to share what you (and your connections) have learned.  All communities go through this process.  By reflecting and documenting what you know (whether it’s a blog post, workshop you decide to run or something else entirely) – you empower yourself and those around you.   There will always be ways to improve on what’s already out there.  How might you contribute to that bettering?  How might you add to or refine what’s already there?

   Tools/Things Needed:

   • A good ’sample bank’ of knowledge;)
   • A network of friends you can bounce ideas off of
   • A personal publishing platform (like a blog, website, listserv – heck, even email;)
   • You can even use a few ‘techie’ tools like Lijit, Zemanta or ShareThis – these faciliate knowledge finding/sharing online if you’re an avid blogger

   How:

   1. Gather, refine and produce your knowledge (hopefully gathered from previous steps)
   2. Pick a platform or two to share on, though don’t overdo it.  No use spreading yorself too thin or reinventing the wheel. Ideally you know where where your fanbase is already by having Listened, Participated and Generated some buzz around your work.
   3. Share and email useful posts from within your community.

   Hot tip: Chances are, if you’re into electronic music, you already know about remixing and sampling.  Information, learning and knowledge are no different;)  Almost everything is remixable these days: information, knowledge and of course tracks;)
   

5. Community Building and Social Networking
   Continued fostering and nurturing of network relationships on established platforms.  This exchange is also facilitated quite well when you have offline places to meet and socialize and perhaps – gasp – even get off the internet to actually go and meet some people.A good example of this are the Share events which happen around the world.  Share provides ‘infrastructure and support for new media communities worldwide’.  Folks who may have only initially met on the Share Global listserv meet up in real time at a physical location to have impromptu audio/video jams and exchange knowledge, tools, feedback and sometimes even toys;).

   Tools/Things Needed:

   • A dedicated connector/community manager/convener/planner/organizer – you?
   • A passionate community
   • A space

   How:

   1. Put the idea out there of ‘a gathering of cool folks’
   2. Assemble a good ‘core’ of people together for feedback and mutual support
   3. Delegate some tasks
   4. Implement the project
   5. Refine as needed with community input along the way

Hot tip: Nothing beats face-to-face interaction for knowledge sharing and creating value for yourself and your community.  This really isn’t that much different than planning a sweet party either.  Except maybe not as much beer;)

Do you have any other tips, resources to contribute to this blog post?  If you liked it or found it useful, don’t hesitate to share it using the little social/bookmarking networks below.
Related articles by Zemanta

• 5 Tips To Boost Your Performance in Ableton Live (memeshift.com)
• How To Start Making Electronic Music (memeshift.com)
• How To Webcast Live Electronic Music (memeshift.com)

The great thing about the internet is that it allows those with access* connection to people and ideas in a lot of easy, organic ways.  However, while the tools to do this are always changing and evolving I’d argue that the techniques are timeless and work online as well as offline.  Regardless of technology, you can’t start your garden if you don’t have seeds, but people tended to gardens long before there was ever a hose.  Hopefully the resources below plant some ideas for you.

106 Tips to Become a Master Connector
http://www.lifeoptimizer.org/2007/06/06/106-tips-to-become-a-master-connector/

I love this post.  I bookmarked it while ago  and there are just so many good tid bits in it.  My favorite tips are:

• Make other people more successful.
• Find your own mission in life.
• Build your network before you need it.

100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/100-personal-branding-tactics-using-social-media/

Kinda hard not to talk about online social networking (or social media in general) without some mention of Chris Brogan.  This list collects all kinds of great ideas for maximizing your personal brand – how you represent yourself professionally.  My favorites include:

• Your community knows more than you. Ask them questions often.
• Ask questions of people you meet. Get to know them.
• Contribute to your community’s blogs and projects.

Community is important.

25 Absolute Essentials for Networking Success
http://www.dumblittleman.com/2008/06/25-absolute-essentials-for-networking.html

This one also has some neat take aways that I dug:

• Promote your purpose more than yourself
• The answer to every request that you DON’T make is no
• Know people in different worlds

Do you use LinkedIn and other online resources to build your reputation or brand yourself? How do you do that?

http://www.linkedin.com/answers/marketing-sales/advertising-promotion/internet-marketing/MAR_ADP_INM/349646-25622973

This one’s a goody.  This is a great crowdsourced resource of people on LinkedIn weighing in on how they use LinkedIn (and other resources online) for building their reputation and brand.  Having a strong reputation and brand online is helpful when when augmenting the quality and scope of your relationships offline.

You!

Oh yeah, don’t forget that YOU yourself are a resource.  Many of the tips above apply to yourself – make yourself more successful, build your internal reserves before someone else needs it, know yourself in different worlds, etc.  You can’t be a master connector unless you yourself are connected.

Any resources out there that you’ve found to be helpful?
*Those that don’t is a subject of another post – volunteer with CTC VISTA if this is something you care about.  I did!

Related articles:

• 5 Articles to Help You Write a Great Artist Bio (memeshift.com)
• How Create a Mission Statement For Yourself (memeshift.com)
• 5 Awesome Resources For Becoming a Master Online Networker (memeshift.com)

Yesterday, I began participating in the Be the Media Project: The Social Media Empowerment guide for Nonprofits. It’s a collaborative project curated by N-TEN with wiki curation by Beth Kanter. Here’s the blurb from the site:

The Be The Media Project is a community of people from nonprofits who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world.

We’re (that sounds so nice to write:) developing a modular curriculum covering various topics on nonprofits’ use of social media. Right now, we’re covering: Why Should Your Nonprofit Embrace Social Media? (Or Not?) It’s pretty fresh.

You can contribute via the wiki. However, if wiki’s aren’t your thing, there are numerous other ways to contribute. You can read more about the project here.

Go ahead, contribute!

Technorati Tags: bethemedia

what about the people NOT on the internet?