Below you will find both the video (sorry for the quality) and slides. You can watch them in two windows if you want to follow along.  If you have any questions, leave them in the comments or send me an email. You can contact me here if you want to do some one on one consulting about your online presence or if you want to discuss bigger projects. Just shoot me an email: ryan@vrazon.com.

Many of us are now Twitter users, and we’ve come to understand terms such as “follower”, “retweet”, “followfriday” and even “hashtag”. One term we think we understand is that of “Twitter Trends“. Trends are algorithm-generated insights into what is currently popular on twitter.

TAILORED JUST FOR YOU

In years past, it was possible for a group of enthusiastic wine twitterers to ‘trend’ by getting together and sharing a hashtag for the evening over a bottle or two of interesting wines. As the volume of twitter traffic has increased, it has become harder and harder to get noticed in the noise of Justin Bieber fever, US elections and amusing spoof celebrity accounts like @Queen_UK

Trends, however, are seemingly quite important to Twitter – witness their prominent position on the user’s homepage.

It was a shock recently, to see that one of our events, the EWBC, managed to “trend” for users in the UK, USA and Turkey – as many reported on twitter at the time. I’ve also seen other users mention how they’re “trending” recently.

However, on closer examination it seems that Twitter has changed the interface to create ‘tailored trends’ as announced in June 2012:

“Trends help you discover the emerging topics people are talking about on Twitter. You can see these topics as a worldwide list, or select one of more than 150 locations. In order to show emerging topics that matter more to you, today we’re improving our algorithms to tailor Trends based on your location and who you follow on Twitter.”

In other words, the trends you see (unless you have changed your settings) are not what is popular on twitter, but what is popular amongst the people you already follow on twitter.

BURST THE FILTER BUBBLES

This is a classic  example of the “Filter Bubble“, where the content we see, and therefore interact with, is increasingly limited to that which is “popular” with the people we already follow. It means we exist in echo chambers where we are always speaking to the same people and seeing content we agree with and like. It makes life easier, less challenging, but also less varied and less interesting.

So, the next time you see your favourite wine, brand or event trending on twitter it might be a lot less exciting than it first appears.

I encourage you all to change your settings to make them more general and open to discoveries where possible.

Under Lock and Key (Photo credit: Pulpolux !!!)

Hacked. All files lost. Computer hard drive wiped. Phone dead. Twitter account hijacked.

Think it couldn’t happen? Think again.

Listening to the frightening details on this podcast about being hacked that made me realize every niche community needs to hear a few basic facts on passwords.

In a world where we all are supposed to remember details for every connection we make, most of us are failing to protect ourselves. I say this from very personal experience. I get calls daily from clients and contacts about their websites, Twitter or Facebook accounts and am VERY often given their root password so that I can go in and see what is wrong. These passwords are usually as effective at protecting their identity as a glass balaclava. I won’t count the number of times I have received passwords like: password1, p@ssword or pinotnoir or worse.

You need to realize a few simple things about passwords:

1. Password strength is NOT primarily about protecting you against someone guessing your password. They are to protect you against computers attacking you by brute force and attempting to guess what your password it by running millions of combinations till they get it right! Any password of fewer than 10 letters is not going to take long to hack with this method. Just look at this example of how password strength works.

LESSON: Making a password short and hard to remember is less effective than making an easy to remember password that is extra long.

2. Passwords NEED TO BE DIFFERENT for as many sites as you have. One password to rule them all equals one password to steal all you own. Fortunately today I use a tool called LastPass. There are many of these, but LastPass is my favorite. It gives every site I have a new password, and then remembers them for me. Plus it remembers notes, and other seekret details about my life. Then I have to remember only one VERY LONG password to get into LastPass. Mine is a 7 word sentence. Now I am doubly protected, plus all these passwords are available to me at anytime from my  computers, my phone, my tablet, or any computer I use in the world.

LESSON: Use tools to make the process of remembering multiple passwords easier, don’t stick with one password

3. CHANGE YOUR PASSWORDS. Not all of them, and not all the time. But if you are not changing your banking PW at least quarterly, if not preferably monthly you are asking for trouble. Set a reminder in your electronic calendar to remind you to change them. It just makes sense. And with LastPass you don’t have to worry about trying to remember each change. It will generate an automatic secure PW when you need it!

LESSON: Change we can believe in! Change we need

4. I register for so many new things each day that to archive every one, knowing I will dump most of these registrations at some point, makes no sense. Come up with a familiar formula for a password for each site that is easy to use, for example: the last three letters of the site’s URL + an 8 digit standard code you remember. This is something you can use once and dump. When you register for the next twitter competitor, photo sharing site, online survey tool or whatever, you can use this. Then, when you realize you are going to use a new service regularly you change it. BUT REMEMBER TO CHANGE IT!

LESSON: Learn a formula for a throwaway password. It is not foolproof, but makes life easier for the short term.

5. If given the option DO NOT use your mothers maiden name, birthday, pet’s name, or anything else that could be found on your facebook profile or anywhere else on the web as your password reminder. If given the option, make your reminder something obscure and not related to the answer. Example: Question: My favorite Wine Movie? Answer: Corkscr3w – The question is related to your reminder hint, but is not something a human could engineer. Using a 3 for the letter ‘E’ just adds another glitch in the human guessing system. These hints are for humans, so we need to trick them, more than the computers I mentioned above.

LESSON: In an era of open sharing, old-fashioned ideas of what are “private” details are dangerous. Stay alert!

These tips are for all of you, but they are for me as well. I correspond with many of you, and we might share details that I don’t want public, and if I trust you, I risk being phished too. If you get hacked I get hacked. That is the problem. If you are using insecure passwords, I am a potential target too. Imagine being hacked and having to tell everyone you know? How embarrassing! With some simple tools and simpler actions you can make life safer for all.

Just remember if your password looks like this:

password

You are not safe! But if your password looks like:

iridemybiketothevineyards!

… you are probably not going to have a problem. If you don’t think it could happen to you, think again. Let’s make our community stronger and safer. Friends don’t let friends use weak passwords.

Cheers,

Ryan

This past week, Ev Williams of Twitter was invited onto the show as a guest, and he echoed a comment I happened to make recently when talking to a friend about wine apps for mobile. People often complain about the mundane tweets that happen on twitter, with a occasional traffic update or news item. What’s interesting is that this worked to train the users to use twitter to communicate. If you had built an app  for these “traffic updates”, people wouldn’t use it since it was not part of the way they communicated. They’d forget it’s there and therefore, not tell everyone what’s happening on the freeway.

From the Show: It turns out it has a lot of different facets, because while there’s many people doing stupid narcissistic things, that gets you to use it(twitter) on a regular basis and it gets you familiar with it. But then when you see an accident, you’re trained to tweet that you’ve just seen an accident, and suddenly that’s a useful piece of information. Whereas, if we told you that this was a program only for reporting accidents, you’d never think of it. – Ev Williams

When my friend asked, “what is the best wine app”, my response was, bluntly, that they all sucked.

I might want to clarify and say that they all suck for 99% of the population of wine drinkers. The current wine apps are all what I call “destination apps”, meaning you need to make them your destination for information you need. The truth is that we need apps that are not destinations, but rather locations were we hang out. I mentioned to him that if you want to make a wine app that works, try making a “life app” that includes wine.

For me it comes down to a few apps that already exist. Evernote: a place where I share all my wine notes and store information that I find online. I use it everyday and would feel as though I was missing an arm if I didn’t have it at the ready. It’s a tool that I use for organizing my life, and wine is one aspect of my life (shocking I know, I do enjoy other things too!). Then you have the other arm of social: Twitter, Facebook and to a growing extent Google+, all of which are places where I share my life with friends and family. Since wine is a social lubricant, it only goes to show how natural it is to talk about the various wines I’m enjoying.

I don’t want to get too detailed, but I do want to offer up a challenge to wine app creators. What we need is a lifestyle app that builds wine into its core, or an app that allows for conversations, categorizations, or amplifications of things other than wine. Do this and you’ll have an app that normal folk can relate to. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for specialist apps, each discipline needs these, but they are not going to grow an audience much bigger than the niche they are built for.

Till soon,

Ryan Opaz

Read the full transcript of Ev Williams on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me 

One other tool and one that is EASY and indispensable to getting online is: Gravatar. Gravatar stands for “Globally Recognized Avatar”. Avatar is both a 3d movie featuring agile blue people, and more importantly for us, a visual representation of yourself online. Usually Avatars are small square images that you see show up in the comments section in blogs, your photo in Facebook and your icon on Twitter. Using an image of your profile can go a long ways to helping people visually connect with you and your brand. Gravatar helps your brand be dispersed everywhere, without you having to think about it.

Check out this video for more info:

Hope you like today’s tech tip. Now go sign up for your Gravatar, and then test it out in the comments below by telling us how it went!

Ryan

photo credit @Flickr .m for matthijs

It was reported today that consumers spend more time on mobile apps than on the web. Really this is no surprise. It is the way the world works, big things become smaller and smaller as technology gets better and better. If we could go back in time and start the computer revolution today, no-one would design a big box that sits in a special room in your house as a way to get online. If we started from scratch, we’d probably begin with something a bit more “iphone-like”. Small, portable and always connected to the web.

Laptops are shrinking into “pads” and desktops are more and more specialized professional tools, which brings me to today’s question:

Do you have a mobile version of your website, version that looks good on a small screen and is easy to navigate? Have you even checked?

If you’re working with an open CMS system like WordPress, or something even more cutting edge like Posterous, you are probably fine.

If you know what a wordpress plugin is, you might try one of these out.

If these don’t mean much to you, then go and check out your website on a mobile app.

Here’s a tip: if your site has pretty moving things on the screen when you look at it, it’s most likely using Flash. And what does Flash mean? It means that no-one with an iPhone can access your site, and many others will quickly lose patience and go elsewhere rather than watch your site load. If you’re using flash, get a new site.

Your customers are more likely today to find you while navigating on their phone, than on a laptop. If they can’t interact with your site you will be losing customers and fans!

Any questions?