We're just back from two days in Houston as the guests of ttweak, a marketing, communications and design firm that shares our belief that authentic, original voices are the best way to convey a message. ttweak's best-known work is probably their Houston It's Worth It campaign, but their extensive and varied experience also includes a number of video projects that let interview subjects, rather than narrators, tell the story. ttweak principals Randy Twaddle and Dave Thompson proved to us that Houston is indeed worth it, not only for the food (mmm, bbq. I mean mmm, Mexican. I mean, mmm, Cajun.) but even more notably for the almost unbelievably friendly people.

While we were in Houston we had the opportunity to meet with a number of ttweak's clients, all of whom reinforced our impression that Randy and Dave have mastered the art of bottom-up marketing campaigns -- and did so long before us johnny-come-latelys in the Web 2.0 world started yakking on about user-generated content. Here's some of the wisdom we gleaned from their example and their advice:

• Let participants speak for themselves. Don't drown out original voices with heavy-handed narration or moderation.
• Remain tool agnostic. If your goal is to convey a message, you'll need to choose a different medium depending on the message you're delivering.
• Production values matter. Don't kid yourself into thinking that people will see past your barebones interface to appreciate the depth or brilliant of your feature set. Appearance counts.
• Invest in your local community. Even if your business has a national or international reach, a solid reputation with clients in your own city provides a bedrock for growth.
• Build relationships with your client's entire team. During one client visit, we saw how ttweak's introduction counted with the CEO -- but we also saw Dave on hugging terms with the parking valet. We got a warm reception in the boardroom -- and a warm car waiting outside when we were done.
• Client service is the surest way to grow a business. Resist the temptation to cash in by focusing on a single hot product, or cash out by selling your company to the highest bidder.
• Do what you're great at. Over-reaching is the surest way to burn your client -- and your brand.

We're excited to work with a company that realizes Web 2.0 values of user engagement in all of its work. And thanks again to Randy and Dave for introducing us to their wonderful city!

What makes for a transformative media moment: a moment when an individual reads, watches or hears a news story and is galvanized to take action on an issue? Social Signal hopes to offer a new answer to that question with the WIDget, a tool that will turn words into deeds by marrying web-savvy media outlets with the latest nonprofit volunteer and donation opportunities.

The WIDget is our proposal to the Knight Foundation's 21st Century News Challenge, a call for "new ways to understand news and act on it...new ways for people to communicate interactively to better understand one another...[and] new ways for people to use information."

The WIDget answers this challenge by by using the latest Internet tools to match issue-oriented journalism with opportunities for concrete citizen engagement. Through a Words Into Deeds widget (WIDget), online media outlets, blogs, audio and video sites will be able to complement any issue-specific story with a set of related volunteer and donation opportunities. You can read about the WIDget and take a look at a mock-up in our draft proposal for the Knight Foundation (PDF).

We've made a conscious decision to share our proposal before the December 31 submission deadline because we think that a community converesation about the proposal can help make it stronger, and help us find the best partners to support the WIDget's development. You can contribute to this process if you are:

• A nonprofit organization that maintains organizational databases: contact Social Signal to add your database to the list of databases that will be tapped by the WIDget.
• A nonprofit organization that wants to promote its donor or volunteer opportunities: contact Social Signal to add your organization’s name to the list of nonprofits who want to appear in WIDget listings.
• A media outlet or blogger: contact Social Signal to add your outlet or blog site to the list of outlets that would deploy the WIDget to offer volunteer and donor opportunities to your readers.
• An interested observer: share your thoughts about the WIDget by commenting on this blog post or by emailing Social Signal with your comments.

To contact Social Signal, please e-mail widget@socialsignal.com.

Thanks in advance for any comments or suggested partnerships, and we'll keep you posted on how our proposal evolves.

Attachment	Size
WordsIntoDeeds-30Nov06.pdf	354.07 KB

I wanted to send people a direct link to Tivo in my post about our home media server, but Tivo’s refer-a-friend tools don’t include a web badge! If I had a little snippet of code that let me put a trackable link to Tivo into a blog post, I’d be motivated to blog more about Tivo as a way of getting reward points. OK, maybe I blog too much about Tivo anyhow, but when I invite everybody over to our place to watch an ad-free episode of Grey’s Anatomy in HD, timeshifted so we can watch it two hours before it airs in our time zone, they’ll be glad I earned points for my referrals. My point is, making it easy and valuable for bloggers to talk about you is an easy, low-cost way of encourage positive referrals from trusted peers.

Earlier this year we purchased a 32″, HD-ready Philips LCD TV. So when our DVD player died a few months ago, we found ourselves staring at the PC input on the back of the TV and wondering whether our next DVD player should in fact be a computer.

About eight weeks ago we bit the bullet and bought a Mac Mini as a home media server. We’ve been delighted with the results, so I thought it was time to share the details of our set up, the ways in which it’s changed our entire relationship to the information age, and our remaining wishlist.

The hardware:
Mac mini 1.66 GHZ Intel Core Due with 2 GB of SDRAM
Ministack 465 GB hard drive
Apple Bluetooth keyboard
Logitech cordless optical mouse (replacing a Macally Blueooth Mouse Jr that wouldn’t track)
Series 2 Tivo with 300 GB hard drive upgrade from Weaknees [UPDATE: Our hard drive -- and thus our Tivo -- is toast, just under a year from purchase. Weaknees only warranties for 6 months so we're looking for alternate vendors before replacing the Tivo drive.]
Motorola HD digital tuner
Yamaha stereo receiver

The software:
Mac OS X 10.4.8
Parallels (for PC virtualization)
Windows XP Home edition
Tivo2Go
Mac the Ripper (for ripping DVDs)
Bits on Wheels (for downloading BitTorrents)

Earth-shaking ways we use our new server, starting with the most fundamentally life transforming:

1. DVD archiving: We have quite a collection of kids DVDs. Make that scratched DVDs. As any parent of toddlers can attest, the value of that Dora the Explorer collection is seriously challenged by a toddler’s interest in laying dirty hands on each and every disc. Now we use Mac the Ripper to copy our daughter’s favorite DVDs to our massive external hard drive, and keep the originals safe on a high shelf. Our daughter can watch whatever DVD she wants whenever she wants, and all we have to do is play it back on the computer (by using the Mac’s built-in DVD player and selecting “Open DVD media”…then navigating to the DVD we want on the hard drive, selecting its Video_TS file, clicking “choose”, and then choosing “Play” from the DVD Player menu.)
2. TV downloads: For a long time it seemed we’d been excluded from the joys of BitTorrent by our ISP’s throttling BitTorrent packets. Maybe we’ve become more patient, or maybe our ISP has relaxed: BitTorent has finally become viable. And with the computer hooked up directly to the TV, we can easily watch any shows that we’ve forgotten to Tivo. Most crucial use case: downloading HD BitTorrents of Battlestar Galactica, which is not yet shown in HD in Canada.
3. DVD timeshifting: Notwithstanding Blockbuster’s “no late fees” policy, we’re able to incur a decent number of restocking fees before we get around to returning the movies that we’d hoped to watch weeks ago (another hazard of life with toddlers: no movie time!) Now we rip a DVD as soon as we rent it, and watch it when we have a chance (before we delete it — just for the benefit of our MPAA buddies).
4. Audio landscaping: I’ve always wanted to be one of those people with mood music playing whenever my friends are over. Now we’ve consolidated all our MP3s and iTunes playlists on one server, and can easily choose to listen to any of our playlists, which play back through the stereo.
5. Video landscaping: Instead of having our photos scattered across multiple hard drives, we keep our camera’s USB cable hooked up to the Mini. All new photos get loaded onto the Mini, but we keep sharing turned on (within iPhoto preferences) and iPhoto running so that we can still access the main iPhoto library from each of our laptops. We use System Preferences/Desktop & Screen Saver to set an iPhoto album as our screen saver, and set a “hot corner” so that we can activate the screen saver by moving our mouse to a corner of the screen. Once we’ve chosen a playlist for our audio landscape, we activate the hot corner and enjoy an on-screen slideshow of our favorite photos.
6. Long-term Tivo programming storage: As Mac users, we were locked out of the joys of Tivo2Go, Tivo’s option for dumping Tivo-recorded programs to a PC. Thanks to the combo of Parallels and Windows XP Home we are now part of the Tivo2Go universe! We haven’t actually watched any of the programs we’ve dumped — this will require us to figure out how to move stuff off the virtual PC and onto the main folder for our Mac so that we can play back the programs. Or we could download the premium version of Tivo2Go to get decryption capacity on the PC side.

What’s next:

A series 3, HD-compatible Tivo with another massive Weaknees hard drive. Sure, we could download all those HD shows with Bittorrent — but we like the ease and control of having a Tivo.

We're delighted that Change Everything has been noted on TechCrunch as "a nice alternative to the user generated advertising model".

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes:

I think this is a great example of a company making use of Web 2.0 tools to promote themselves in a way that places the ballance of the impact on providing value to users and incurs promotional benefits for themselves as a consequence of that. Though this model may seem less immediately lucrative, it’s also much less likely to face the kind of anti-corporate backlash bubbling up in MySpace and YouTube.

Marshall had a couple of tips for us, too:

Unlike at 43Things, there’s not the option at ChangeEverything to mark a goal as something you have done already or the question of whether a goal is worth persuing or not - perhaps leftists are too Quixotic for such features.

These are both options we hope to introduce on the site soon - so no, lefties aren't too Quixotic (in this respect, anyhow!)

We're delighted that Change Everything has been noted on TechCrunch as "a nice alternative to the user generated advertising model".

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes:

I think this is a great example of a company making use of Web 2.0 tools to promote themselves in a way that places the ballance of the impact on providing value to users and incurs promotional benefits for themselves as a consequence of that. Though this model may seem less immediately lucrative, it’s also much less likely to face the kind of anti-corporate backlash bubbling up in MySpace and YouTube.

Marshall had a couple of tips for us, too:

Unlike at 43Things, there’s not the option at ChangeEverything to mark a goal as something you have done already or the question of whether a goal is worth persuing or not - perhaps leftists are too Quixotic for such features.

These are both options we hope to introduce on the site soon - so no, lefties aren't too Quixotic (in this respect, anyhow!)

Today’s online customer service award goes to Movie Central — that’s the (Western) Canadian equivalent of HBO.

I emailed the address listed on their web site last Monday (August 8th), as follows:

Subject: Six Feet Under season 5

hi,

I’ve somehow missed Season 5 of six feet under — I only just now
discovered that the season is almost over!! and it’s our whole reason
for subscribing to movie central, so i’m heartbroken. Can I ask when
you’re going to start showing season 5 again from the beginning so I
don’t miss it again?

Let me tell you, I wasn’t really expecting an answer. So I was just delighted when I got an actual e-mail from an actual human being today:

I’m sorry to hear this! We premiered Six Feet Under in a similar
time-frame to HBO. We will be re-airing this season likely in about 4
months or so. So you don’t miss it again you might consider subscribing
to MCeNews which will send you weekly updates on the series and movies
airing each week. Another great new series about to start is the HBO’s
Rome premiering on Movie Central August 28th. Check into our website for
more details.

The truth is they’re obviously flogging this Rome thing, but I was impressed that they thought to suggest a consolation prize. And really thrilled that Six Feet Under will indeed be mine, if subject to delayed gratification.

Meanhile would all Six Feet Under watchers please take this as a big NO SPOILERS warning. If I hear so much as a peep about Season 5 from any of you I’m going to be scouring my site logs for evidence that your IP number accessed this post. If I discover that you knowingly ignored my NO SPOILERS warning I’m going to subject you to creative RSS-enabled public humiliation.

Salon now features Technorati trackers that tell you who is blogging in response to any given Salon story. This would be a great feature for lots of sites, and while I can imagine some workarounds that would allow sites to effectively achieve this, the Technorati/Salon implementation is particularly nice.

On 24 tonight, in the face of a fictional denial-of-service attack, the fictional cyberwhiz of the fictional intelligence agency notes that they’re in good shape because “the Cisco network is self-defending.”