We discuss Live Video Streaming, CoverItLive for live blogging during the playoffs, the relaunch of iamatrailblazersfan.com, passive engagement vs active engagement, how Toyota’s Hybrid Social Net (preview blog post) was an inspiration for a feature in the iama and more.

After watching the interview, things I learned, I talk a lot. I think I need to work on having a dialogue. We used Skype and the audio got a little funky. Sometimes I looked like I was in a 70’s Kung Fu movie. I look tired. Man, that was right before Game 6 and we had been up consistently until 2am getting stuff done for the site.

Big props to Jason and Jonathan for showing the intiative and starting this. Thanks for reaching out. Let me know anytime you would like a guy that talks a lot, looks tired and will try to throw his voice. I know a guy.

Episode 005: Dan Harbison of the Portland Trail Blazers from Jonathan Dusing on Vimeo.

danstwitter badge

This past weekend I did an interview via email with Arian Karimian for USA Today about Twitter. He created an article and posted it online, here’s a link. It was interesting to remember why we started using Twitter and seeing now where we’re at.

We started using Twitter in 2007 right after we got the #1 pick in the NBA Draft. Immediately I knew we would be getting a TON of more traffic to the site. I wanted to create an extremely robust experience for new fans that were curious about the team. The big question that people would be coming to ask, Will it be Oden or Durant. I went to the guys at Substance and asked, how fast can we create a microsite for this subject.

The guys at Substance rocked and created an amazing microsite that took about 14 days to create. One of the features was a Twitter Feed. I had heard about Twitter, but saw the application for us immediately when they framed it in the site. It totally makes sense as a way to pull back the curtain and let them know what is going on, especially during closed door events like draft workouts.

Back in 2007, there wasn’t @replies, only broadcasting. But as soon as those became functional bringing in conversation into the application made sense. We had a period where we didn’t use it as much as we do now, but I would say 50% of our Tweets now are @ replies.

Another feature that wasn’t around in 2k7 was Twitpics and the like. A picture tells 1,000 words, let alone 140 characters. If that was available during the draft, that would have gone a long way.

Our Twitter Badge

We plan on continuing Tweeting, during the playoffs we’re using it to keep the conversation going with fans and also promotion different pieces of engaging content on our site (like live game blogging, play-by-play modules, and post game live video stream). We’ve promoted the hashtag #uprise and you can see the Tweets from the people using it to showcase if they’re talking about Trail Blazers Playoffs 2009.

I see us continue to use Twitter and integrating it more into the design of trailblazers.com and especially the new version of our social network iamatrailblazersfan.com. Being able to push content out of iama, or bring Tweets in is a project for the summer to get ready for the 09-10 season. Seeing such a mainstream influx of Twitter users (1,382% year over year in February) we’ll need to incorporate the ease of use of that platform into iama. Even for my own sake, I don’t want to have to update two or three different sites. I want to update one, Twitter, and have that update iama and Facebook. Or vice versa, update Iama and have that update Twitter and Facebook.

I wonder about Twitter being such a mainstream phenomenon. I think that a lot of people are going to check it out, see their favorite celebrity Tweeting and leave about a couple of months. I’ve heard a lot of people that “don’t get it”. Not all people are content contributors. Even celebrities aren’t content contributors unless it is good content. Now you’ll be more engaged in the mundane content that they create (ate some cake for example) than a random person, but after awhile, that won’t become interesting. That’s why Shaq has been so successful. He’s an interesting person. He writes interesting content. Not all people can carry that… that’s why when people really really want our players to Tweet. If they can’t do it consistently or make it interesting, I don’t see why they would want to on either side.

Here’s an old post from June 2007 about using Twitter.

Wordle.net

I’ve never been into sloppy Tag Clouds. They always seem to be organized, but really not usable. They might look cool, but I never use them to actually navigate someones site. Really, that’s too bad as tagging is a great way to actually help your readers know what you’re talking about.

Thanks to Pat Coyle for the heads up about this link. It is a site that creates a cloud or a visual representation based on indexing your site. It isn’t about tagging or having you organize anything. It is just a visual representation on what you talk about. That is what tag clouds are really. A display on what you talk about, not really a mode of navigation. I like this better as it is indexing and pulling out the topics you talk about on a regular basis, not just 10 tags or so that you use a lot. Go ahead, make your own Wordle. It’s a pretty cool Java app. If you’re on a Mac, use Safari instead of FireFox or Flock. Just a heads up. Leave me a comment with a link to your own Wordle, I would love to see them.

I found about a cool site through a ’round about way. @richjoslin posted a link to a design blog in a FriendFeed room “Web Design, The Good The Bad, The Ugly”. The design blog is called Cult Foo. They have a compliation of a bunch of different sites to check out. If you have 1/2 hour to kill, check it out (the tag cloud, literally, on the top with the fixed position and use of .png transparency is a nice touch). One of the site on there is what inspired me to write this post – Digiguru.

Digiguru is the blog/portfolio site for Craig Jaimeson in South Africa, a flash and front end designer. The site that he created is a full flash one with a clean calendar interface. It has several nice touches including Full Screen, permalinks using SWFAdress and smooth transitions. The site functions well, and allows him to create large graphics to convey his message instead of typing a bunch of paragraphs. I like this approach because if he doesn’t want to write a large dissertation, he doesn’t have to. That is where I feel blogging is difficult, writing something that matters. This is a simple way to convey a message, and if you need to add some text so you understand what the message is, so be it.

I would love to see is some sort of further organizing on the site. Either a tag cloud or even a stream of titles of posts so you know what some context the content is about. There aren’t any room for comments. This might be a tough thing to handle, but I think a timeline, or some way to inject two way communication would be spot on.

I would love to see if this could be an open source project. Now that would be cool. Be able to distribute this as a blogging engine/presentation engine… hell, I would even pay some cash for it. Not a ton, under $50, but if he’s looking to recoup his investment.

Let me know of other sites that have inspired you, as I’m always on the lookout.

I still need to pick up his book which was recommended to me by David at Substance.

This is a space that I continue to look at for inspiration. A lot of the social networks and social sites that have been built out have been built with development in mind, but the experience or UI is secondary. How will people use the cutting edge functionality that your company has invested in if your design and UI was the last thing that you looked at, and didn’t invest really any money or time in… that is a bridge that a lot of people like to cross after they have gone live with their site. I think this is a mistake. In this day in age, there are so many sites out there, first to market IS extremely important, but having your users understand how to use it is equally important. If you turn people off once they get there, you’ll have a hard time with them being a regular user. Then your competitive advantage is wasted because you will have to rehaul your design and relaunch.

This approach is how we are looking at iamatrailblazersfan.com v2.0. We’re bringing in a lot of new features, so our UI and design needed to be really solid to support these features and to make it easy for people. The team at Substance has been amazing and I’m really excited to bring their designs to life over the summer. We will learn a lot once we get live, but if we just went with some generic skins, the Trail Blazers brand wouldn’t sing in the site and fans would become frustrated. We will of course need to change, evolve and learn once we go live, that is inevitable. BUT, because we took the extra time with the UI, I believe (and the focus groups we’ve held believe) that this will a design that will support the community.

Tags: socialnetworks, iamatrailblazersfan.com, substance

Well, fast forward two years and I’ve found a void in my life – listening to NEW music. I find it really, really hard to find new music that I instantly like. I think it is really difficult to find music that you haven’t heard before, but have it relevant to you. The closest has been listening to Pandora and Last.FM. I LOVE Pandora, and I LIKE last.fm, however I still think that I find myself hearing a lot of music that either doesn’t hit the nail on the head, or hearing songs in which I like. But they’re songs I’ve heard.

Re-enter 3hive.com. On a whim today I went to check out the site today. Wow, I miss going there on a regular basis. I listened to a hip-hop producer today that goes by Rench. Here is the write-up. Bluegrass vs Hip-Hop (the album is called Gangstagrass, download it here). There was a song awhile ago by Aesop Rock f. Slug called I’ll Be Ok that uses a bluegrass harmonica to help with the casual hip-hop beats. This takes it a step further. Heavy sampling of country, bluegrass with fiddles and hits it with some solid lyrics. Is it my new fave, perhaps. Probably not. But the fact that it is something NEW and I would never have heard about it if it weren’t for 3hive. Another Northern Cali group, Meanest Man Contest is on there as well. I’ve been listening to “I Was Only Kidding.” Great spring, summer chill song.

This is why radio will die in the long run. They simply don’t have the flexible inventory to be tailored made for me. All the music stations currently in Portland get little to no listening by me. Why, 99% of their songs are irrelavant to me. I then listen to talk, NPR and talk radio. Seriously, I want to listen to new music on the radio and some side channel HD station isn’t going to cut it. It is still linear. It isn’t based on my preferences. Satelite radio has more options, but I find that to run into the same problem. Lack of flexibility to tailor make their product to you. And on the internet, that is what you get, exposure to new music that usually hits that nail. << I think that was a 2 Live Crew Song.

If you have a favorite online site, let me know, I would love to hear about it. Maybe I’ve heard about it, but maybe it’ll help find bands like Rench, Meanest Man Contest, Loot Pack and others I’ve found thanks to 3hive.com.

Tags: new, music, hip-hop, blogs

Mike Arrington talks about a company that he has seen that could be diving into waters that Facebook and MySpace have yet to fully embrace, Mobile Social Networking. Yes, there are mobile version of both of these sites, but neither harness the power of your mobile phone.

The mobile phone is an amazing device that continues to get crazy cooler as the months go by. Not once have I ever regretted waiting in line and dropping cash on my iphone. There are few things these days that I at least don’t double guess myself from purchasing later (ahem, Netflix… at times). Back to my point… mobile phones are no longer your phone, they are your microcomputer. You can do a run a ton of apps on your smartphone that eliminate having to use your laptop. So this is quickly becoming a replacement in someways, and in others an augmentation to people’s digital experience (web, video, photos email).

If you have this microcomputer everywhere, why not have your web experience be in relation to where you are at. You see more and more mobile phones tying in GPS (Boost does this, iPhones Google Maps has a triangulation feature). Having contextual information of the people that you are having online relationships while you are interacting physically. Arrington’s thoughts:

Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting – quick LinkedIn-type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.

So picture being in arena at a Trail Blazers game and you fire up your iPhone. You are able to do a multitude of things on your phone, watch instant replays from different angles than what was on the big screen, get coupons for the merch store, and firing up your social network to see who in the arena is there that night. A map comes up  and shows all your friends’ thumbnails and where they’re sitting in relation to you…  so you can say “hey”! You could also see in general others at the game that you might not have met yet, or the guy who sits next to you that you’ve become friends with is on iamatrailblazersfan.com, but you never knew.

The game operations people can see use this to create a better experience based on the psychographics of the people in the arena that night. A snapshot of tonight’s crowd might say that 85% of the people sitting there that night are fans of Jay-Z, so they’ll play more Jay-Z that night. All of this could be possible.

It sounds like Arrington saw a start-up that is harnessing the iPhone SDK to make this happen. I’m really excited to see what happens. I really think this could be an awesome addition to existing social networks for Facebook, LinkedIN, MySpace, Flickr and also niche sites like our iamatrailblazersfan.com or MyColts.net.

Having something like this only available for one phone is a problem. It would need to be cross carrier/cross model. Alas, that is a problem with our system in the states, standardization is lousy on mobile phones. That’s for another post.

1) Passion – I was on a panel today with Paul Colligan at Searchfest 2008, and he has passion for what he does. He has several podcasts and is a person neck deep in social media/web 2.0. If you ever get a chance to pick his brain about all things in the Web 2.0 space, do it. I will blog tomorrow about the presentation.

2) Over-reaction. Wow, there was a TON of buzz on Techmeme and blogs throughout the internet about the SWSX interview of Mark Zuckerberg (founder/CEO of Facebook) and internet reporter Sarah Lacy. People were just SLAMMING her on the blogs and in the audience at this session of SXSW. I’ve linked to the video from allfacebook.com. I guess after all the hype, I was disappointed as she didn’t do that bad of a job. She kept it casual and tried to have a conversation with Mark. She obviously has a past and tried to showcase some of those stories. Yes, she does a lot of self-promotion of her book, and no, she doesn’t get extremely technical… but by no means deserved the rousing she got. Someone in the audience heckled her for asking bad questions and then turned around and asked the most generic question in the world “What is the biggest obstacle to Facebook”. That’s like asking a band your interviewing, who their musical influences are. If you know who your subject is, you won’t find out anything new, therefor it is a question just to ask one.

She could’ve improved this interview if she would’ve had some specific direction on where she wanted to take it, rather than a fire-side chat with Mark. That I think would have shaped up better.

** UPDATE ** WordPress makes it way too hard to post video on your blog. Seriously, I wanted to embed the flash video from Viddler and it is taking too much time to hunt around for a plugin. I don’t freaking care that WP is “protecting” us. Thanks, I’ll start looking for another platform. In Blogger I could work on html in my posts. This is retarded, and no, it isn’t user error. I’ve been searching for 1/2 an hour and this looks like a common issue. Poop on WP today.

** UPDATE #2 ** Scoble has blogged about the Sarah Lacy/Mark Zuckerberg interview. Pretty solid post (as usual from Scoble). Great point by him… know your audience. She didn’t, and therefor went in directions that they didn’t like. Of course, unlike what these people are used to, they couldn’t just go to another site, they were “stuck” there in person. Also, after consideration, there is a way to handle heckelers and that was not the way. Either don’t acknowledge them, or have a solid comeback. She did neither. Having been in radio where most interviews are live, I’ve seen my fair share of really bad interviews, and this my friends, wasn’t THAT bad of an interview.