In this adaptation of the near future, people have a “social score” based on their trade, the level they have achieved in their trade, and rating by others. For example, in this world I’d be: a level 22 information architect with a 4 out of 5 rating from a base of 143 (totally made up example). It’s my social circle itself that gives me raises and praises.

Your probably reading this thinking of all the lawsuits and litigations that might ensue from the principles of defaming. You might get uneasy thinking that anyone can anonymously give you a rating that anyone (including your mother) can see. You could think of those who would game the system by cheating to give themselves an advantage and their competitors disadvantage.

I for one, am intrigued.
First, I’ve always been fascinated by what people think of my actions. Am I really the good guy that I think I am? I might be surprised.

Secondly, we all grow and adapt from feedback from our surroundings. If I did something that might have hurt someone else, I’d like to know so that I could try not to do the same in the future. It doesn’t help me if no one tells me how I just made them feel uncomfortable. Similar systems are already in place in company’s HR departments with 360 feedbacks and performance evaluations.

Finally, if I am doing something questionable and know that anyone can make public, I might be quicker to give apologies and also be more aware of my actions overall. There are a few people I can think of who should be more aware of their actions.

Where it stands today. I believe society has to be weened into this way of thinking. In fact we are being weened into it. There are a few sites that are introducing the concept (maybe you’ve heard of them):

On LinkedIn you can give “recommendations” to others. This is like a letter of reference. Useful and powerful, but ultimately you can only say good things. You can also “like” people’s comments and follow people and you can “pass” or degrade the comment.

On Facebook you can “like” artifacts that people post such as photos, comments, or objects that exist.

Twitter is a social rating system whereas the more people who follow you the more useful your twits are perceived to be.

eBay sellers have a rating system that increases or decreases their trust from buyers. This way you won’t pay someone who has been rated poorly in the past.

Ratemyprofessor.com does just that. Students can give college and university professors a review. This can potentially help students pick and choose classes. I wonder if administrative staff put any weight to this “user feedback”.

Unvarnished is in public beta and is seemingly the closest thing so far to the world Daniel Suarez created. It uses Facebook connect to rate people over a variety of categories. There’s been many controversy over this one: MSNBC, SMSEO, LATimes. The funny thing is all these sites are criticizing a rating site by giving it a poor rating.

It seems that the world is not be ready for something like this at the moment. I’d like to believe it’s a tool that would slowly help us create a better society. It will cause more contention in the beginning just as most new ideas do. I am curious to see the implications and hear the thoughts of people as me move forward into this area. Especially since we are all rating each other in more ambiguous ways.

Feel free to comment.

Photo credited to ~Milk-Cream

Mashable just put up an exclusive article from their Twitter sources that the Twitter button will be launched this week.

The Tweet button will count tweets, retweets, and shares across Twitter. Similar to Facebook like, the Twitter button can be added to any webpage with only a few lines of code.

Read more at Mashable.

The director is David Fincher (Se7en & Fight Club). Aaron Sorkin (Sports Night, West Wing & Charlie Wilson’s War) is the screenwriter, and in my opinion, the guy can do no wrong. So I will be seeing The Social Network when it hits theaters in October.

Stay tuned for the sequel: The Social Network 2: Rise of Farmville

Facebook Developers have a simple Like Button widget that helps make this possible with little effort.

But how about WordPress posts? If you’re developing or customizing WordPress themes on your own, you probably know by now that posts require a special universal code to pick up the URL.

The widget spits out a pretty basic iframe code (this is the most basic layout with no options):

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=URL" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>

Which looks like this:

In the above code, I generated code with “URL” in the generator’s box labeled URL to Like. To make this compatible with WordPress, I’ll replace the URL with the following code after I already generated it:

<?php echo rawurlencode(get_permalink()); ?>

Your code will look something like this (again, stripped of all options):

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo rawurlencode(get_permalink()); ?>" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>

Note that if you insert the WordPress code into the generator, the characters will not convert over, this is why I changed it after the fact.

After you’ve generated and customized your code, insert the iframe within the have_posts() loop in your theme’s single.php file and you’re good to go.

Today Facebook pushed passed Google to be the number visited website in the Internet. I know that I helped Facebook reach this lofty goal and honestly it just makes sense. I mean Google.com is cool with its one text field and “I’m feeling lucky” button. But for the past 6 months my order of internet operations when I want to veg, find news, or just distract my mind a bit, has been facebook.com, mediatakeout.com, slickdeals.net and then Gmail.com (sorry Buzz you have not won me over).

I can always count on my Facebook friends to share the latest weather report, news headlines, funny videos, and updates on their lives. So I completely understand why Facebook is now number one. Furthermore, I believe tomorrow’s internet user’s patience will become even shorter (if that’s possible). The quickest way I can get my information in short blurbs…with videos and links to reference, if I want, the better. BUT there is only one caveat. After I get updated on the thunderstorm that caused the power outage at Mike’s house, I can briefly look through my friends latest albums, scan status updates to found out who is bored, happy, or mad, and when I am done with that I can play the ridiculously popular game (trust me I don’t play but my wife is addicted) Farmville…all with in a 3 minute time frame.

Peter Shankman, the founder of Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and The Geek Factory, gave the people at the NJ Business Marketing Association a great talk on how he thinks about and uses social media to make his businesses successful. Thank you Peter, thank you BMA and thank you fellow Lwer Derrick, Christine, and David for attending with me.

Here’s what I took away from the talk

Grow your personal brand
Peter was big on the individual. Businesses don’t do business with people. People do business with people. Your business is a reflection of the people that run it. He wants everyone to develop their personal brand through social concepts like texting (twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc.), phone calling, and (yes) snail mailing notes. A quick side note on snail mailing notes. Last month we were hiring for project managers the people who are standing out in my head are the ones to followed up with a personal hand written note. Its all about doing something different to capture the minds of people. So go forth and start building your personal brand, its going to define you in the future.

Plan for backup??!!?
Peter made a great point stating that he was always told to “have a backup plan”. Why? Why not concentrate on a the plan for success? It’s better than concentrating on the plan for failure. My take is that when you have to plan for failure, what you are planning is costly thus increasing its risk. In Peter’s world (and ours) big things evolve from small things. Start small, start fast, and start now.

Information is free
The world as we knew it was broadcasted to us from only a few sources. Print, radio, and television were all broadcasted from a few to many. The internet is making information free and creating a many to many relationship. Breaking news doesn’t come from CNN anymore, it comes from twitter. In this world we are creating views of the world at the exact moment it happens and sharing that view with people all over the world.

Ask your customers, how they want to get information
There is so much information out there and so many ways to take it in. We listen to podcasts on the commute into work, we read blogs with the morning coffee, we check facebook status when we come home and sit down. We have developed routines of digesting information. So how do you get your information to your customers? Ask them. Talk to your customers often and ask them how they would like to get your information.

Peter says the Social Media is having other people do public relations for you. Here are is 4 fours of social media:

1. Be transparent - it will help you connect with people and if you don’t say it, people will still find out
2. Be relevant – media is fractured so ask your customers how and what they like to hear from you
3. Be brief - our attention spans 140 characters at a time (or 2.7 seconds)
4. Stay top of mind – talk to people often

Again thank you Peter for the great talk.

I had a conversation with a guy the other day, and he told me about his son’s personal password tragedy. The kid really liked an online game. He played it often and accumulated a lot of valuable in-game items; magic swords and armor. One day another guy in the game convinced his son to give up his password. The guy stole all of his son’s equipment and left his character essentially naked.

The bright-side of this story is that his son learned a valuable lesson about password protection, privacy, and security within the safety of a game. As upset as the child was, the damage wasn’t irreparable.

My message is simple, teach your children to keep passwords secret.

After you teach them, they can choose to ignore you as a teenager… But that will be on them, you did your job.

Teach your children to practice safe computing.

Syndicated by The Geek Whisperer

As a followup to my previous post Adding Social Media Links to WordPress Without Using a Plugin, here is new code that you can use for Google Buzz:

http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>&srcURL=<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>

And the addition to the code that we use on this site (which is shown in my previous post) just adds a new list item to the existing links:

<li><a href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>&srcURL=<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>" title="Share with Google Buzz">Buzz</a></li>

Note that Buzz uses Google Reader to share links. In order for this to show up on your Buzz, you have to make sure that Reader is connected with your Buzz.

Here are a few notable quotables that stuck with me and my notes.

Everything is crap… Unless you have a strategy behind it

Social media is not WOMM

People trust people

Tactics bog us down

“No! If you build it we won’t come”

90% of WOMM occurs offline

Why should people be motivated to participate and share? Why people tell stories

• support a cause
• enable an experience
• communicate the ethos of a brand

Geno captured everything quite eloquently when he says that we should create movements not campaigns. Then he went on to explain lessons learned about movements

1. Movements are built on passion
2. Movements begin with the first conversation
3. Movements have inspirational leadership
4. Movements have a barrier for entry (invite only)
5. Movements empower people with knowledge
6. Movements encourage ownership
7. Movements have powerful identities
8. Movements live born on and off line
9. Movements make advocates feel like rockstars
10. Movements get results

So what if you want a completely custom way to share your links? Keep reading, I’ll share the code that I used to convert the Local Wisdom blog from being plug-in dependent to having our own custom code.

Part 1: The Code

In order to pick up the URL and title of the blog post, whether it be on an index, archive or single page, use the codes below. If you’ve been playing with your WordPress theme code, these links should look very familiar.

Permalink to post:

<?php the_permalink(); ?>

Title to Post:

<?php the_title(); ?>

Part 2: Inserting the Code into the Correct URLs

Now that you have the code that will pick up the title and URL of a single post, you need a way to actually link them into the social networking sites. Below is a list of commonly used social bookmarking sites:

Email with Feedburner

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailFlare?itemTitle=<?php the_title(); ?>&uri=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&loc=$loc

Bloglines

http://www.bloglines.com/sub/<?php the_permalink(); ?>

BlogMarks

http://blogmarks.net/my/new.php?mini=1&simple=1&url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>

http://blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&Title=<?php the_title(); ?>

Del.icio.us

http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>

Digg

http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>

diigo

http://www.diigo.com/post?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>

dzone

http://www.dzone.com/links/add.html?description=<?php the_title(); ?>&url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>

Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=<?php the_permalink(); ?>

Google Bookmarks

http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&output=popup&bkmk=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>

Kaboodle

http://www.kaboodle.com/za/selectpage?p_pop=false&pa=url&u=<?php the_permalink(); ?>

LinkedIn

http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>

Mixx

http://www.mixx.com/submit?page_url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>

MySpace

http://www.myspace.com/Modules/PostTo/Pages/?c=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&t=<?php the_title(); ?>

Newsvine

http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed?popoff=0&u=<?php the_permalink(); ?>

Propeller

http://www.propeller.com/submit/?U=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&T=<?php the_title(); ?>

Reddit

http://reddit.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>

Shoutwire

http://www.shoutwire.com/?p=submit&link=<?php the_permalink(); ?>

Squidoo

http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/bookmark?<?php the_permalink(); ?>

Slashdot

http://slashdot.org/bookmark.pl?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>

StumbleUpon

http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>

Technorati

http://technorati.com/faves?add=<?php the_permalink(); ?>

Twitter

http://twitter.com/home/?status=<?php the_title(); ?>+<?php the_permalink(); ?>

Windows Live

https://favorites.live.com/quickadd.aspx?mkt=en-us&url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>

Yahoo! Bookmarks

http://bookmarks.yahoo.com/toolbar/savebm?opener=tb&u=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&t=<?php the_title(); ?>

Part 3: Automatically Shorten the URL

On sites like Twitter, you may want to consider adding code that automatically shortens the URL since you have a character limit within the posts. For Local Wisdom, I am using code that I found over at mattflies.com that automatically creates bit.ly URLs. Here's a quick overview of it:

First, be sure you have an account with bit.ly. You will need to insert both your user name and API key into the code. You can find your API key on your account settings page.

Add the following code to your functions.php file. Remember to back this file up before playing with it just in case you have to revert back.

/* bit.ly urURL */
function getBitlyUrl($url) {
$bitlylogin = 'YOUR LOGIN NAME';
$bitlyapikey= 'YOUR API KEY';
$bitlyurl = file_get_contents("http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version=2.0.1&longUrl=".$url."&login=".$bitlylogin."&apiKey=".$bitlyapikey);
$bitlycontent = json_decode($bitlyurl,true);
$bitlyerror = $bitlycontent["errorCode"];
if ($bitlyerror == 0) {
$bitlyurl = $bitlycontent["results"][$url]["shortUrl"];
}
else $bitlyurl = "error";
return $bitlyurl;
}

Don't forget to change this part with your bit.ly username and API key:

$bitlylogin = 'YOUR LOGIN NAME';
$bitlyapikey= 'YOUR API KEY';

In order to use the short URL conversion for your link, you will replace the <?php the_permalink(); ?> code inside your link with the following:

<?php $burl = getBitlyUrl(get_permalink()); echo $burl; ?>

Note: you can change <$burl> to anything you please. If you would like to read more about the URL shortening, refer back to mattflies.com's blog entry.

Part 4: Our Code - an Example

To see a working example, here is the code that I used for Local Wisdom's social sharing links as they are now (minus our formatting). Notice the custom message and bit.ly URL in the Twitter link.

<ul>
<li><a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>">del.icio.us</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>">Facebook</a></li>
<li><a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>">Digg</a></li>
<li><a href="http://twitter.com/home/?status=<?php the_title(); ?> - <?php $burl = getBitlyUrl(get_permalink()); echo $burl; ?> (via @localwisdom)">Twitter</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailFlare?itemTitle=<?php the_title(); ?>&uri=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>&loc=$loc">E-mail</a></li>
</ul>

Place this code anywhere within the have_posts() loop and you're good to go! (added 4/5/10)

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