Reid Dossinger

I was thrilled today to see this article  today calling for what I think it crucially necessary for Google Circles: a way for people to choose what content of different users that they see. The "follow" Circle is really useless without it, unless you're following a person who ONLY talks about one subject publicly. The way I think it should work is much like the way I have my different Twitter accounts set up: I have a personal account, which is just kind of a dumping ground for my random thoughts, including sports and politics; I have my professional account, where I talk mostly about tech, web services and business and is set up to be completely open, public and findable; and my music account. I mix up the content every now and then, getting personal on my professional and talking about music on my personal account, but I've found that the division works pretty well. But it's still three separate accounts, and while Tweetdeck makes it pretty easy to manag...

One of the biggest advantages of social media-style communication is the ability for your audience to choose itself rather than for you to assume interests and choose the audience yourself, likely leaving out people that would be interested. Anyone who's started a blog knows the surprise in finding that the people who read it religiously are the people you never would have thought would be interested, while many of those people that you thought would read every word never look at it. Likewise with Facebook, where many of the people I interact with are old friends from the past who have turned out to be surprisingly funny and interesting, whereas closer friends are never to be heard from. The flip side of this is email, where every "To" box requires you to decide who your audience is. That's all fine and well when you just need to get through to one person, but when sending information to larger groups, how do you know you're not leaving out the people who...

I'm one of the many people who love last.fm . I love getting a view of my listening habits over the course of years, and I love being able to see what my friends have liked and have been listening to lately. There are things about last.fm that I would like to see changed/added, but it's a great site for music sharing. And in the days when it was active, I found that the wall page on Lala to be extremely useful: seeing what friends of mine had listened to and liked. Lala and last.fm got so close to creating the perfect simple music sharing site. Why is it so hard for Google, Apple and Amazon--companies with more than enough resources to finish the job--to give us something great? What people want from a social music site: To be able to share what their music statistics are (like last.fm ) To be able to see what their friends are listening to and liking What I'd love to see is a Facebook-wall type page that can either show only the songs that your friends have liked or show...

I was looking around for a way to do like those folks at Mashable did and create a Google profile page for The Org so that folks could follow us in Buzz. I wanted to attach our Wordpress site (which, by the way, is NOT a blog if anyone asks) so that it would update automatically, so I added it to the list of links on the profile. But when I clicked on "connected sites" in Buzz, the Wordpress site was, unsurprisingly, not in the list. After scouring the internet for clear instructions on how to add a Wordpress site to a Google profile so that it would feed into Buzz automatically, I finally came across these instructions . While they were useful, they were not the most clearly written instructions in the world, so I thought I'd simplify a little: Add your site to your Google Profile (Edit Profile > Links) Add in the following line of code to the <head> section of your website, replacing the link with the link to your public profile page: <link href="http:/...

You know, headlines like that one really put me on the fence, balancing between "Ooh! Metrics!" and "Wow, no wonder people think it's boring and geeky." ANYWAY...today I'm definitely in the former camp, in the sense that it's exciting because it's a philosophical puzzle: how can you solve a problem that can never really be solved? Yesterday, I commented on Avinash Kaushik's post where he asked, "If you were to measure the success of a company’s social media efforts how would you do it?" My answer: For social media, the obvious metrics still hold: referrals and conversions from referrals. But being from a nonprofit background, where the higher-ups are often skeptical of social media, the real metrics are the words. There’s nothing more valuable than the tweet that says "I love that {your org} is on Twitter" or the time you respond to a comment on Facebook addressing a wide concern about your organization or when you comment ...