fernandorizo.typepad.com

I love the cheerful, civic-minded emo kid in this PSA poster at Paddington Station.

iranian twitterers I'm following

There's some amazing news coming out of Iran's disputed election unrest via Twitter. It all needs be taken with a grain of salt clearly, as anyone could be posing as an Iranian on Twitter, but even still it's a unique window into this situation.

There's a few accounts I started following this weekend that I've found particularly interesting - many of the Iranian election accounts have become a swamp of re-tweets* but the following accounts have been posting links and commentary that is largely original.

• @persiankiwi - Ostensibly coming from inside Iran and producing a steady narrative seemingly day and night. The account links to a blog written in Farsi which Google is unable to translate, sadly.
• @TehranBureau - An organization of independent Iranian bloggers. Obviously new to Twitter given the awkward formatting of their posts but they are reporting whole stories and conversations via this account, amazing and compelling reads.
• @intrepditeacher - A resident of Qatar reporting from outside but a great filter who is providing an insightful Middle Eastern perspective on the crisis. Might be Persian himself.
• @Change_For_Iran - Possibly a university student. Amongst other amazing content, posted links to photos of the aftermath of a police attack on student protesters.

In addition to these, there's also the #IranElection and #IranElections hashtags, though these are so busy that they are the equivalent of drinking straight from the hose.

* If you're a Twitter novice, a re-tweet (or RT) is a repeat of a tweet that someone else made, allowing your followers (who aren't necessarily following the original writer) to see a tweet of particular significance. Example here.

I've shared this on Reader, Facebook et. al. and I'm still laughing about it, hence its appearance here.

Via Hey Okay.

an online version of my presentation from last week and also *facepalm*

If you didn't get a chance to attend the presentation Mat Morrison and I gave to the PRCA last week, the lovely Katie Goodrum of that organization was kind enough to come back over to my office were I gave my portion of the presentation again whilst staring into a webcam. The end result is that you can see a hellish distance up my nose but if you missed the presentation then here's your chance to catch it.

One more thing before you click: I listened to the presentation again just now and realized that I made an egregious mathematical error at the end in an offhand comment. I am completely horrified.

• How and When to Sell Digital to Clients: A presentation to the PRCA

i'm trying to get my blog blocked in china

"China blocks Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail ahead of Tiananmen anniversary" - The Guardian

You can see if I've succeeded with the China Channel Firefox extension.

(Image by Jon Bell)

depending on your point of view:

• the power of the Internet to free information

or

• schadenfreude, enabled by the Internet.

General Motors' Bankruptcy Petition

what my friends have been up to

I had a chance to give a talk to the PRCA this morning, alongside fellow digital PR guy Mat Morrison of Porter Novelli. It went really well - about a hundred people which is much better attendance than any event starting at 8:30 am deserves. Mat is just brilliant and there was tons of great questions, so thanks to all of you who came down.

If you've come this far to check out my blog, you might be interested in seeing what some of my more talented friends are doing.

• My colleague Gur Tsabar had a nice little scoop on our Ketchum blog, The CrowdSource about Microsoft's terribly amusing use of Google Adwords to pimp their forthcoming Bing search engine (which got picked up by TechCrunch!)
• Chikodi Chima has a post up on TechTrotter about the trials and tribulations of trying to get into Brazil (scope out TechTrotter's new facelift, too - designed by my buddy Willis Lambert)
• Harith Abdullah made a new musical discovery over at The Rev Records blog: girl folkster Brittain Ashford
• Matt Burton is staying on top of the White House's plan to nuture the next generation of white hat hackers over at Personal Democracy Forum

I've got a post in the pipeline about Google Wave, whose revelation yesterday is the same unusual mix of mind-blowing and not-unexpected that 3DRealms going out of business was. I think it might be time next week for another Web memoriam for a blog that kicked the bucket last year, too. (Previous Web memoriam for Memepool.)

google reader is all the social network that i need

It is increasingly hip to say that Facebook, to borrow from Magnificent Bastard, is post peak.It's now unquestionably mainstream. Web hipsters will also tell you that Facebook's design direction is growing increasingly confused as it struggles to play catch-up with the Twitter phenomenon (despite the fundamentally different experiences at the core of each service). The new wave of Facebook joiners showing up in my "suggested friends" is increasingly 40+. Facebook.

But while all of that might be informing my state of mind, the real reason is that another social network is eclipsing the amount of time that I spend on Facebook: Google Reader. Reader's been around for years, but it's now coming into its own, and I'd argue that it's transforming into a social network site all its own.

Reader was just an RSS reader last year, with a very clunky "share with friends" feature that let you put, say, a post from a blog you subscribe to in front of one of your cohorts. Adding a friend on Reader used to be an arcane affair that involved inviting someone to chat on Google Chat, making a blood pentagram on the floor and praying to Lovecraft's elder gods. It was unpredictable and needlessly complex: very un-Google.

My friends and I soldiered through, however, and a core group of some of my closest friends were sharing items with one another every day. One feature that was sorely missing was the ability to comment on your friends' shares, which led to a brief and ill-fated experiment with FriendFeed and the awkward practice of emailing shared items around with comments appended.

Then Google solved all of these problems over the last couple of months. In March, Reader added the ability to comment on a friend's shared item. This month, quietly, Google overhauled the procedure for adding friends to remove the byzantine processes external to Reader and made it a snap to do. And a social network site was born.

A running conversation on a shared item in Google Reader

The idea that Google has been working on ushering in a back-door social network has been in circulation for a while now, but I don't think Reader is it. I have no illusions about how mainstream this could possibly get. I have an unusually connected group of early adopters for close friends - most people don't, and the value of a social network is directionally proportional to how many of your friends are on it. I haven't seen any numbers on this, but if 1 out of 10 Web users were using an RSS reader daily, I would be shocked at that level of prevalence. RSS is still very geek, and probably always will be.

But for my purposes, Reader is increasingly my social network of choice. If the purpose of a social network is to keep you abreast of what your friends are up to - then Reader does you one better: you stay on top of what your friends are reading and thinking about, and have a built-in means to discuss. The daily conversations my friends and I have on Reader are infinitely more insightful and relevant than anything that happens on Facebook, whose status updates are increasingly a forum for drive-by witticisms. Reader is like having a private reddit*, but simpler - and just for my friend circle.

Facebook has its place - photo uploading and status updates as a passive means of staying in touch with secondary- and tertiary-tier friends aren't going to go away - but Reader is now the tab that stays open in my browser all day.

*I realize that reddit launched private reddits last year, but Reader's setup is infinitely more appealing, at least to me. Which I not to say that I don't continue to love reddit.

The short Daft Punk robot has no chance.

The Water Poet, Folgate Street.