Conference Tech Lessons: Blogging While Brown 2012

Meeting people like the amazing Adria Richards is a plus for conferences. She approved of my C:\ shirt!

I came away from this weekend's Blogging While Brown conference inspired and willing to invest in myself to make this blog the best that it can be.   In the midst of this conference, I came away with several thoughts regarding technology.

Personal Interaction >>>> Virtual Interaction

One of the benefits of a conference is meeting people that you've only corresponded with online. The in person meeting makes a world of difference.   My online persona is a representation of me, but the in-person meeting is just as, if not more important. It must be apparent that your online persona is an extension of your personality, not something totally different.  Otherwise, you can come off as disingenuous and playing a role on the internet that is not real.  Personal connection matters.  You know that excitement when someone like Dr. Goddess, Luvvie Ajayi, or Slim Jackson interacts with you online? Yeah, that's magnified by a thousand when it's in person.

Technology is a Great Conversation Starter

When you're around people that are more successful than you and you're the new face in the room, it can sometimes be hard to approach people.  I was able to start a lot of conversations with talk about gadgets - cell phones, tablets, or my infamous gadget sandwich.   Nearly everyone was on some sort of device - engage people about them.

You NEED an Extended Charging Solution

In this era of social networking, you need access to a cell phone during an entire conference, which can sometimes last 10 hours or more, plus dinner, drinks, etc.  Having an extended battery for your phone is key. Fellow attendee BrothaTech had a several charging solutions for his gadgets. I've been using the uNU Power DX extended battery for my iPhone, and I never had my phone drop out.  Perfect for twitpics of people after they are ... a bit inebriated.

I had a great time at the conference, and I will definitely be attending next year!

Pinning All Over the World

I love Pinterest. it's a completely visual social networking tool where people post photos that they've taken or that link to other websites. But to me the links and comments aren't important. I like to jump on, browse the photos, and like / reshare (called repin) cool pictures, and jump out. This usually takes around 5 minutes or so. The elegant web design arranges everything is a grid and is very easy on the eyes.

Pinterest also allows you to follow only certain categories, called boards, that a user creates. So if someone is posting about ugly shirts, I can unfollow just that category and still have access to the other pictures from the user.

Then my man Pierre showed up. He began following me and I fell in love with his old school tech pics. The I went to his profile page and saw that it's completely in another language! If this was another network, the language barrier would have effectively prohibited us from easily connecting on the site.

Pinterest is not the first site to offer this visual view. Instagram comes to mind, but it's limited to iOS devices and the site design isn't nearly as good. And Flickr is a little dated and more suited to serious photography.

If you haven't been pinning, get to it! Follow me at Pinterest.com/shareefjackson

Space Networking: My Experience with NASA

Greetings from outer space, nerds! Wait, how can I call you nerds if I'm a bigger alien nerd that found his way to Earth? Hmm ...

I wrote an article for MediaTapper about my experiences with NASA's social networking community, as well as my experience viewing the final shuttle launch of the space program. Here's a sample:

NASA continues its excellent leveraging of social networking platforms by recently launching a Google+ page. NASA’s Twitter account has proven very popular to space geeks such as myself and others. We are connected on various social networks such as Google+, Facebook and Twitter, and the information flows freely. There are people that clearly know more than me, but not once have I felt talked down to. It’s truly an example of how technology can help to bring like-minded people together.

To read more, please click here.

What's In a Name?

1. 

   I've maintained several website personas over the years, but eventually as I got older, I decided to start using my real name online. Now why would I do this? To control my message.

   More and more interactions occurr online, and tying those interactions to my real life persona is crucial for networking. I like to be able to say that my website, Twitter account, and other social networks are united under my name. It adds a sense of legitimacy and it also makes me accountable to what I'm putting out their online.

   By publishing my content under my name, I'm also owning my search results. If you do a Google search on my name, you'll get content that I've created. Because it's not limited to just my professional work, it makes me a well-rounded person and shows that I am more than my resume. Of course there's that one MySpace model who also shares my name, but hey, that's just one result :)

   Jeff Jarvis has recently written a book, Public Parts, that talks about this concept. He believes that embracing publicness is a strong asset in this Internet connected world. It helps us maintain what we really want to be private because the public information will dominate any search results, leaving the private information as secured as it can be. It's never 100% secure - if someone wants your information, they'll get it - but by embracing a public persona, this means that you can control it to the best of your ability.

   It might be weird, and it's definitely not for everyone, but try using your name a little more on the Internet. You might be surprised at the results. I mean, y'all love me right?

Google+ and Twitter: A Month In

Every time I leave Google+ and duck back into the Twitterverse, I get frustrated at a few things:

1) Lack of stickiness. It is way too easy to miss posts. I have a bunch of Twitter lists that help, but I still end up doing a lot of scrolling. Messages that can fit in what G+ message are only broken up into dozens of tweets, filling my stream. This also has the opposite effect - if I tweet, I usually get all of the responses that I'm going to get within an hour or so. My G+ posts get responses, likes, and shares days after I post them.

2) Spammers. I'm sure G+ will get its fair share of spammers and bots, but I haven't seen any yet. I hate when i get an @ reply based on one of my posts matching some random bot algorithm.

3) Lack of visualization. Twitter's stream of text is beginning to look boring. I really, really love how visual G+ is, with pics and videos (yes, and animated Gifs) right in the browser.

These are issues that I learned to deal with before Google+, mainly because Twitter is so much better than alternatives like Facebook when it comes to having a conversation. But now, they stick out like a sore thumb.