Tim Tucker Online — Digital consultant, trainer, presenter, writer

My information work flow, January 2010

by ttucker23 on January 26, 2010

I’ve been meaning to write a blog post on how I manage my information workflow for some time. Now that we find ourselves on the eve of an announcement from Apple that could change the goal posts once again (the much rumoured Apple Tablet computer), I thought now would be a good time to get this post written. Then I can compare my workflow in six months’ time and see if there are any major changes brought about changes in technology.

First some context on my requirements: I’m an independent digital consultant, working with various organisations (in the past year I’ve worked with the APA, Econsultancy, Telegraph Media, IPC Media, The National Trust, TheFilter.com and more). As part of my job, it’s vitally important that I keep up to date with relevant information as and when it happens. This is not easy, as the amount of information out there is huge and growing, while the channels through which it’s delivered are proliferating too.

Here are the tools I use right now to keep on top of the tsunami of information that confronts us in the golden age of digital, in order of importance for me.

Startup folder

I got this tip from Darren Rowse at Problogger. Basically, I have a folder in my bookmarks toolbar on Firefox (and now Chrome, which is rapidly becoming my favourite browser). Over coffee first thing in the morning, I use the ‘Open All in Tabs’ command at the bottom of the folder. I then check out each tab to give me a snapshot of what’s going on.

My Firefox startup folder.

My current list of startup tabs include the following content aggregators and social networks:

RSS Feeds

Despite the claim by some digital gurus that RSS is being replaced by Twitter, I personally still find this my best source of information, as I can categorise my feeds for easy reference. Currently I have the following folders set up in Google Reader:

Arts – this is useful for information for my blog on arts and culture The Culture Club
Blogs – updates and tips on the Wordpress platform, which I use for publishing my blogs
Business – media and technology business feeds, such as PaidContent:UK and Biz Report
Design – general design advice and inspiration, including Smashing Magazine and the The Dieline.com
Digital Media – news and analysis on the digital world, including feeds from Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, The Next Web, VentureBeat, and All Things Digital
Media News – more general news and information about the wider media world, and journalism in particular, such as Buzz Machine and Online Journalism Blog
Misc – sites like Zen Habits, which I follow for its nuggets of wisdom, and Bristol Media Jobs, which keeps me up to speed with what’s happening locally
Search – SEOmoz, Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch tell me all I need to know about what’s happening in the search space
Sport – I’m a tennis fanatic so this contains all my feeds from my favourite tennis sources, including Tennis Planet, BBC Sport Tennis and GoToTennis
UX – a wide range of blogs and sites sharing news and information about user experience design and usability issues, including UX Magazine, User Experience Network, Usability News and Boxes and Arrows

I use Google Reader as my feed reader as it has the following benefits (many but not all of which are also possible on other feed readers):

You can search back through all your feeds’ history. This is extremely useful for finding stuff you’ve missed, or re-finding information you read in the past. As Steve Rubel says you can treat Google Reader as a database.
It’s got a social element – you can see what other Google Reader users like, you can add notes, share with others and tag posts, all from within the reader itself.
You can bookmark in Delicious straight from the reader. This is invaluable when I want to save a post for future reference (see below for more on Delicious).
On Firefox, Google Reader supports the Read It Later plugin. When I find a post that is too long to read right away, or that I want to refer back to in the short term future, I can save it to Read It Later (see more about Read It Later below) by just clicking on the ‘chevron’ icon at the top of each post. This allows me to carry on browsing feeds in Google Reader and go back to longer posts when it’s more convenient. Note – this functionality isn’t possible in Google Chrome at the moment, which is a shame, as I’m starting to use Chrome for Mac more frequently as my primary browser.

The Read It Later icon in the top left of every post on Google Reader makes filing for later viewing simple.

Twitter

Many digital folks have talked about how they’ve ditched Google Reader and now use Twitter to follow news and information in real time. While it’s still second to Google Reader for me (see above), I do often use it to keep track of breaking developments, and to discover links to longer content.I follow nearly 500 people on Twitter, for many different reasons, so the recently added List functionality was a blessing as it means I can group Twitterers into different categories. I follow lists from others, including:

I’ve also set up my own lists, including:

I occasionally visit Listorious to keep up with other Twitter lists that are out there.

My favourite way of accessing Twitter from my Mac laptop is through TweetDeck, because I can arrange each list into separate columns, and it now integrates Facebook and LinkedIn updates in there too.

TweetDeck makes managing lots of followers on Twitter a lot easier.

Read It Later

As mentioned above, I often find that when I’m browsing feeds or looking at articles online I haven’t got time to read the piece in full. Read It Later is a great (free) service with which you can save articles in one place for checking out when you’ve got more time. You can sign up at the website, and keep track of your articles there or through a handy Firefox plugin. It’s also got a fabulous iPhone app (see below).

I experimented with Instapaper, a very similar service, but I found that Read It Later offers more options, especially through the iPhone app. The most useful of these is that I can save an article from Read It Later straight to Delicious if I want to bookmark it for the long term.

Delicious

I use Delicious, the social bookmarking tool, to keep all articles and web pages that I want to save for future reference. Unlike Read It Later, which is just a short-term holding area so that I can catch up, delicious.com/ttucker is the home of all my bookmarks, which I can tag to ensure that they’re easy to find. I also use Delicious for finding stuff I’ve missed, by regularly catching up with the Popular page, which logs the most popular bookmarks on Delicious.

iPhone

Since getting my iPhone 3GS I’ve noticed that I’m using this device to access information at least as much, if not more, than I use my laptop. According to research, 40% of iPhone users are doing the same, and this looks likely to increase.

For instance, I log onto Google Reader through the Safari browser on iPhone about 2-3 times a day. I can check my feeds on the bus, train, and any ‘dead’ time during the day. I’d love a Google Reader app for iPhone, but the mobile version of the site works fine, so long as I’m online.

The other great app for iPhone is Read It Later. The best feature is that you can download all pages to the iPhone and read them when you’re out of 3G and wi-fi range, on the tube, etc. I also like the fact that forwarding an article to Delicious after you’ve read the article is very straightforward.

Summary

The above workflow may seem overcomplicated, but I’ve integrated all of this into my daily routine. This makes it quick and efficient to stay up to date on subjects that matter to me, whilst filtering the information that I don’t need.

As Pete Cashmore says, 2010 is going to be the year of digital distration, so finding new ways to make information valuable and useful is going to be an issue for many more people, not just information junkies like myself.

I’d love to hear about your information management workflows, so please leave your tips in the comments below and tell me how you’re coping with the firehose of data that’s coming your way on a daily basis!

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Creating a blog that’s optimised for mobile

by ttucker23 on January 14, 2010

As well as setting up a new office (at the beautiful Grade II listed Wool Hall building in Bristol) I’ve been spending the first few weeks of January doing the new year thing – reviewing my systems, upgrading my blogging tools and prepping for the year ahead. If you’re still in this mode and need a checklist, check out ReadWriteWeb’s 8 Things Every Geek Needs To Do Before 2010.

High on my list was getting my blog optimised for mobile. During 2009 I noticed my own behaviour changed pretty radically. I got an iPhone 3GS in 2009 and I now find I access the web at least as much via mobile as I do via computer. The iPhone has a great browser, but my blogs were not optimised for web access.

This blog is built on the WordPress platform, so, I’m experimenting with one of the most popular mobile plugins, WordPress Mobile Pack. My initial thoughts are that this plugin works really well. It’s very easy to set up – just download from the plugin directory and drag the folder to your Plugins folder. You can then set the look via the Switcher and Theme settings in the back end of the blog.

Now when I view this blog on my iPhone 3GS, it looks like this:

I haven’t tried it on any other mobile operating systems yet, so please let me know if you’re accessing this site by mobile and what kind of experience you’re having.

The only problem I’m experiencing is that the site is still scoring badly on mobiReady. The authors of the plugin say that ‘All mark-up is valid XHTML-MP 1 and the site scores 5 on mobiReady…’ but I’m getting a score of 2 and a message that says ‘It will probably display very poorly on a mobile phone.’ I’m looking into this and will post in the comments when I find the solution. If any body has any ideas, please leave a message in the comments below.

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Looking forward to 2010

by ttucker23 on January 8, 2010

It seems clear that 2009 will be looked back on by future historians as a watershed year for tech. It was the year that Twitter conquered the world, that Facebook dominated media and that Google made significant strides towards becoming the operating system of the internet.

But what’s also clear is that, to coin an old phrase, we ain’t seen nothing yet. As a new decade dawns we’ll see all this change come into focus and new changes on the horizon. As I write, the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is showcasing a wide array of new and not-so-new technologies that may go mainstream in 2010, from 3D TVs to Slate PCs.

It’s not yet clear whether 2010 will be the Year of Mobile, the Year of the Tablet, or something as yet unforeseen. But one thing is for sure – it’s going to be a time of extraordinary change.

I can’t wait to see what’s in store. January is a great time for looking forward, and I’m particularly excited about the first Digital Breakfast I’m organising in my new role as Training Consultant for the APA. On January 26th we’ll be discussing the digital focus in 2010. The agenda will include presentations from high profile speakers in the online, mobile and marketing industries, with the opportunity to discuss the digital trends with some of the country’s sharpest minds. It’s open to members and non-members, so if you’re interested in joining us, check out the APA Digital Breakfast information page, or email me for more information.

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What people do online

by ttucker23 on October 15, 2009

I just finished reading Bill Tancer’s book Click: What We Do Online and Why it Matters. If you’re interested in web trends, search engine marketing, or you’re just curious about how people use the internet, it’s well worth a read.

Bill Tancer is the General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise. I had an account with Hitwise during my time as Online Group Senior Editor at Future Publishing, and I have to say it’s a great online intelligence service. Here in the UK they track traffic details of 8 million internet users (in the US it’s 10 million). That’s a big sample base.

Bill’s book Click shares many insights into online behaviour that he has gleaned from this valuable data. Highlights for me include:

The mystery of why teenage girls start searching for Prom dresses in January, way before the Prom season in May.
His insights into the celebrity worship syndrome that has driven so much traffic to the likes of PerezHilton and TMZ (I saw this phenomenon first hand when I worked on developing the MusicToob site).
The single statistic that ‘How to…’ queries account for 3% of all search queries in the US.
His insights into social media and the so-called ’super connectors’ that can push aspiring music artists over the tipping point.

You can buy Click for a good price at Amazon and no doubt many other excellent places.

Have you read Click? Share your views in the comments below.

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Good design doesn’t need explaining

by ttucker23 on October 7, 2009

Giles Colborne’s post Why I Hate Instructions reminded me of a classic example of bad design I recently found at a restaraunt in Devon.

In this instance the instructions were necessary. This was because the mechanism for locking a bathroom door was totally unintuitive and unlike anything I’d seen before.

This should be a warning signal to a designer. If your door handle needs a note explaining how to use it, you know there’s got to be something wrong with the design.

This bathroom door handle needed a mesage to explain how to use it. The designer had managed to make locking the door something that required explanation.

This bathroom door handle needed a mesage to explain how to use it. The designer had managed to make locking a door something that required explanation.

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The case for long copy

by ttucker23 on October 5, 2009

While researching good examples of sales copy for my training session on Digital Publishing Strategy for the APA this week, I’ve re-encountered the debate about long copy in digital media.

Most usability studies suggest that short copy is best for web writing, due to information overload and the scanning behaviour of users online. However, it’s clear that there are still valid reasons for considering long copy for your marketing messages, and some marketers feel that this approach is best for online marketing success.

Long copy goes back decades, where it has traditionally been used in direct marketing and print advertising. In the early days of the web it was responsible for some monstrous sales pages, centred text splattered with yellow highlights, bright red links and aggressive calls to action. Nowadays long copy pages look much better, but the techniques haven’t changed.

The advantage of long copy is that you can showcase a single product in more detail by providing in-depth information on the following:

Product benefits
Differentiation
Bonuses
Elements of the offer
Social proof
Guarantees

This information provides credibility, offers reasons to buy and convinces the customer to make the purhcase.

So how effective is long copy online today? Back in 2004 Marketing Experiments did a study that showed that in an online test long copy outperformed short copy in terms of conversions. I’ve not seen any dedicated studies since then, but its continued use online suggests that long copy will never die. Marketing consultant Michel Fortin is a huge advocate, pointing out that all your pre-selling material is itself a form of long copy.

Naturally it’s all about using the right tools for the job. I agree with expert copywriter Brian Clark that testing different approaches is essential and the best advice is to go with whatever works.

In summary, I would still advise using short copy online as a general rule, but consider using long copy for the following:

High priced products
Luxury items
Products with lots of features and benefits
Unusual products
Information products
Unsought products (life insurance, investment products, etc)

Please let me know in the comments below about your own experience with long copy online.

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Real-time search is the new battlefield for Google

by ttucker23 on August 3, 2009

The new search deal between Yahoo and Microsoft is unsurprisingly drawing a lot of attention from the blogosphere and the mainstream press right now. But while it’s big news for these two companies, it also highlights the fact that they are several steps behind Google.

While the Yahoo deal provides Microsoft with a 28% share of search in the US (and just 7% in the UK), the search battle has moved elsewhere. Google has used its massive dominance in search, and the huge revenues it derives from it ($21bn in 2008), to fund innovation. Having conquered web search, there are new areas that Google now wants to attack, and in the search space the most important of these is real-time search.

There was another piece of news last week that sign-posts this new zeitgeist in search, and it didn’t involve Microsoft or Yahoo. This was the re-launch of Twitter’s home page.

Twitter's new homepage is all about real-time search.

Twitter is fully positioning itself as a Discovery Engine. Notice its new tag line?: ‘Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.’ This is getting close to Google’s mission statement: ‘To organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’

In 2009 one of Google’s priorities is how to comprehensively integrate real-time search into its own listings, beyond the limited use of the Twitter API it currently uses. We know this because Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer says so:

We think the real-time search is incredibly important and the real-time data that’s coming online can be super-useful in terms of us finding out something like, you know, is this conference today any good? Is it warmer in San Francisco than it is in Silicon Valley? You can actually look at tweets and see those sorts of patterns, so there’s a lot of useful information about real time and your actions that we think ultimately will reinvent search.

And in May 2009, at Google’s Zeitgeist conference, Google co-founder Larry Page had this to say about real-time search:

I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real-time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. Now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about real-time.

So while Microsoft and Yahoo arrive on the mainstream search battlefield, ten years after Google launched its groundbreaking search engine, Google’s troops have already moved on. Look out for a deal between Google and Twitter within the next 6-12 months.

In ten years time, if they’re still around, Microsoft and Yahoo will be regretting not fighting the real-time search battle sooner.

More blog posts on the Twitter homepage re-launch and real-time search:

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Blog Vs Lifestream

by ttucker23 on July 13, 2009

Thought leaders like Steve Rubel and Erick Schonfeld perceive a major shift in web publishing. They see digital content moving from an architecture of pages towards information that is distributed in real-time streams.

According to this argument, the traditional web is based on the way we use books, magazines, journals and other static media. The hierarchy of information is structured and editorialised, whether this is done by dedicated content editors (BBC News) or the site’s users (Digg).

In contrast, the ’stream’ presents content in a dynamic and fluid way, driven by immediacy and organised by ‘now-ness’. Examples of platforms that publish as a content stream include Twitter, Facebook, Posterous and Friendfeed.

Our way of consuming this content is different too. It’s impossible to ‘catch up’ with a stream of content, as anyone who follows more than 1oo people on Facebook or Twitter will know. Instead you dip in and out of the stream, and if you miss something, it’s gone.

Steve Rubel has made a conscious and deliberate decision to stop blogging and focus solely on lifestreaming. But unlike Steve (and like Louis Gray) I’m not about to abandon my blog.

This is because, as Steve himself admits, publishing via blog or lifestream requires a corresponding switch between reflection and immediacy. I believe that good communicators need to be capable of both.

This is one of the reasons why I work hard to balance time spent on Twitter and Facebook with more traditional long-form content, including books, essays and full-length articles. Indeed my channel for this activity is not Twitter or Friendfeed, but a blog: The Culture Club.

To summarise, I’m a big believer in content streams, but I don’t see blogs and other forms of ‘reflective’ content dying out. To be a good communicator you need to embrace both.

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The Age of Networking

by ttucker23 on May 21, 2009

Visualisation of network effects. Illustration used by permission from the VM Foundry.

The legendary historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote a four-part history of Europe which broke down the key stages of modern European history like this:

Age of Revolution: 1789-1848
Age of Capital: 1848-1875
Age of Empire: 1875-1914
Age of Extremes: 1914-1991

If Hobsbawm were to continue his series into the 21st century, I’d like to suggest that he’d have to call the current era the ‘Age of Networking’.

Clearly the rise of online and digital media has shown that the killer apps online exploit the network effect. Consider these examples:

Google – the networks of links.
Ebay – the networks of buyers and sellers.
Facebook – the networks of friends, family and colleauges.
Twitter – the network of like-minded people.

But networks aren’t just limited to popular websites. In his fascinating book on the subject, Linked: The New Science of Networks, Barabasi explores the ways that network effects are transforming our understanding of many other areas of enquiry:

The robustness of the laws governing the emergence of complex networks is the explanation for the ubiquity of the scale-free topology, describing such diverse systems as the network behind language, the links between the proteins in the cell, sexual relationships between people, the wiring diagram of a computer chip, the metabolism of the cell, the internet, Hollywood, the world wide web, the web of scientests linked by co-authorships, and the intrcicate collaborative web behind the economy, to name only a few.

This new perspective provides new insights into familiar phenomena. I will take some examples at random to illustrate the point:

Project management – new theories of extreme project management put networking at the heart of the process. As Rob Thomsett says in his book Radical Project Management: “Build a relationship with your stakeholders and you will be doing your job. It is all about relationships.”
Media content – user generated content, commenting, peer reviews.
Business – empowerment, ownership, partnership.
Knowledge management – wisdom of the crowds, Wikipedia, etc.
Marketing – the Cluetrain Manifesto.

Living in the age of networking means applying network thinking throughout all areas of activity. Try applying network thinking to your own work and you will find new opportunities and perspectives emerging.

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Digital consultant, trainer, presenter, writer

My information work flow, January 2010

Startup folder

RSS Feeds

Twitter

Read It Later

Delicious

iPhone

Summary

Creating a blog that’s optimised for mobile

Looking forward to 2010

What people do online

Good design doesn’t need explaining

The case for long copy

Real-time search is the new battlefield for Google

Blog Vs Lifestream

The Age of Networking

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