Geek Gestalt

Road Trip 2008 included a stop at the Corvette assembly plant in Bowling Green, Ky. Road Trip 2009 will feature visits to factories, as well as to Air Force Space Command, the Badlands, the Firefighters Challenge, and much more.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

Dear readers: I want you. And I want you to stay.

For each of the past three summers, I've spent some time on the road, driving around different regions of the United States, reporting on some of the most interesting destinations I could find, and road-testing some of the coolest gear around. The CNET Road Trip has taken me through 17 states (and one Canadian province) in the Pacific Northwest (2006), the Southwest (2007), and the Southeast (2008).

The trips have been hits, but I have struggled to organically build an audience throughout each journey. Rather, it seems most people have tended to come across a story they liked, read it, and then left.

For Road Trip 2009, which will take me through Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota, I want not just to get you here, but to give you as many reasons as I can to stay. And that, I'm learning, means being much more proactive in keeping you engaged.

To be sure, the heart of what I'll be offering up will be a steady flow of feature stories and photo galleries from places like NORAD, Yellowstone National Park, a unique Mars research program, an innovative Wyoming wind farm, the highest paved road in North America, and much more. But I know there has to be more than that. And the tools at my disposal are powerful, yet complex.

With that in mind, I asked four power social-media users for tips on how to make Road Trip 2009 a regular destination for a sizable audience. And if one thing became clear afterward, it's that I need to step it up and do a lot more personal outreach than I've ever done before.

Very busy days
Not to make excuses for my past lackluster social-media usage, but let me give a little context for how these trips work: Each day, I wake up in a new motel and quickly rush off to an appointment. I spend the late morning and early afternoon reporting, and then usually drive several hours to the next town. I eat something and then I write and process photos for a few hours. Then I go to sleep. Repeat. For several weeks.

Sadly, this hasn't allowed much time for things like meet-ups. But to hear my expert panel tell it, I need to get beyond that, and just embrace meet-ups. Or tweet-ups, if they're organized on Twitter, as many are these days.

"I'm a huge fan of the tweet-up," said Laura Roeder, a social-media consultant. "I just moved to Los Angeles...from Chicago. I've met so many of my friends through Twitter and through tweet-ups."

And despite my limited amount of available time, Chris Heuer, co-founder of the Social Media Club, says tweet-ups don't have to take all that long.

"Say, 'I'm going to be here at this place, from 6 to 7," advised Heuer. "Or have readers come and meet you and (organize the tweet-up) for you."

I also told Heuer that another element of my Road Trips has traditionally involved road-testing a number of high-tech products, and that this year is no different. Among the products I'll have with me this time are an Apple MacBook Pro and iPhone 3G S, a LiveScribe Pulse recording pen, an Amazon Kindle 2, a Verizon MiFi and more. I'll also be driving a "clean diesel" Audi Q7 TDI.

Heuer said that given that, one good way to get people to come out to the meet-ups would be to bring the technology along with me so that people could check out all the gear for themselves.

Of course, not everyone is a big fan of the meet-up. I asked Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin what she thought of them, and she explained that she has tended to skip such gatherings on her many reporting journeys around the world. Largely, it seemed, she didn't feel that meeting up with readers added all that much to the overall experience, though she did say she organized a couple of them in Latin America recently.

Still, it's clear that doing meet-ups is a natural way to energize local audiences--and Heuer suggested that even if it's only local audiences at first, getting them interested in the trip, and the trip's themes, will have a snowball effect as they tweet and blog about coming together with me and other readers.

Among the many tools CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman plans to use to build an audience for his Road Trip 2009 project is Twellow, which allows anyone to search for Twitter users by city.

(Credit: Twellow)

I wondered, though, about how to get people in the cities and towns I'll be visiting interested in meeting up in the first place. And Heuer suggested using sites like Twellow, which allow you to find Twitter users by geography. Then, by interacting with some of the most popular Twitterers in each area, it's possible to engage them in helping to promote a gathering.

To Facebook, or not to Facebook
I wondered if Facebook would be a good way to organize the get-togethers, but found that, despite the social network's incredible success, the experts I talked to were mixed about its utility for this specific purpose.

"I honestly find Facebook a lot less useful than Twitter," said Roeder. "Twitter is much easier for more fluid, instant communications....I tell my (business clients) not to even worry about Facebook. To me, the core difference is that Twitter is all about meeting new people, and a lot of people don't use Facebook that way."

Heuer, on the other hand, said he'd actually turn to Facebook first, since the site's reach can be huge, and it offers specific tools for events. Clearly, the answer is to post meet-ups on both Twitter and Facebook, and hope that the two combined can create an echo effect.

Of course, I'm already using Facebook to some extent. I'm not afraid to admit that I'm a rank amateur when it comes to the massively popular social network. But a couple months ago, I started a Road Trip 2009 fan page. The response has been moderate, but not that bad, given that I haven't posted any new content to the page since then. But that is about to change. This story, for example, will be the first new post there, and every new piece of Road Trip content will appear there, as well.

That is, if I can be disciplined. Heuer cautioned against dropping the ball when it comes to utilizing Facebook. "The most important thing there is staying on top of it," he said, "and not dropping it after you start."

I agree. And we'll see how it goes.

Finding themes
One of the first people I talked to about expanding the reach of Road Trip was the futurist Jerry Paffendorf. An organizer of the Metaverse Roadmap Project, a very early Electric Sheep employee and generally a visionary thinker, Paffendorf asked me how I thought all the various destinations on the trip were tied together.

To date, I'd been thinking of the trip as concentrating on three major themes--environmental and energy research, military and defense, and America's natural wonders.

But Paffendorf said I needed to find a way to tie everything together, and that perhaps turning to my readers to help with that would be a good way to build an audience. He suggested asking readers, via the Road Trip blog, or on Facebook or Twitter, to suggest questions to ask the people I interview at each destination. That, he said, might create a dynamic where readers begin to feel like they're coming "on the trip" with me. So it's, "We're going to go on the road," not I'm going on the road.

Paffendorf also told me about a really cool project Flickr had done not long ago, commissioning a company called Uncommon Projects to build them a series of bikes complete with cameras that automatically take, geotag, and upload pictures on the go. It seemed like that would be a great addition to the car I'd be driving, especially since I'll be driving through some of the most beautiful country in the United States.

Unfortunately, after talking with Uncommon Projects, I discovered that commissioning something like that would cost several thousand dollars--money I don't have.

What I do have, however, is a bag full of things to give away to readers, things like Flip video cameras, Showtime DVD sets, and a series of video games. I can imagine handing them out to people at meet-ups, or to people who suggest the best things to go visit in a certain town, or maybe who offer the best question to ask my host at a military installation or national park. Or maybe I can offer a chance to have your picture posted on my blog, live, with awe-inspiring natural beauty as a backdrop, far from any normally available Internet signal. I want to get readers excited, and I want to give back to them for their attention.

Boing Boing's Jardin, for her part, said that when that popular tech culture blog has given away things like iPhones or iPod Touches, people have indeed gotten excited about the contests.

"People get jazzed about cool stuff," Jardin said. "But it's not just the device that's going to get them excited. The device is part of it, but so is the experience....(Giveaways) will pique their interest, but you have to have other stuff going on."

And, dear readers, that is something I feel very confident about. I may have a lot to learn about utilizing social media to build an audience, but at the very least, Road Trip 2009 will offer you an intriguing picture of some of the best that America has to offer.

On June 21, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest, and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.

This photograph of then-Sen. John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert Kennedy, was taken in April 1960 on the night of the Wisconsin presidential primary. The image is one of the millions of photos now available from Life's archives via Google.

(Credit: Life/Stan Wayman)

Life magazine announced Tuesday that is is making more than 10 million of its archival photographs publicly available through a partnership with Google.

The archive includes many iconic images from throughout the 20th century taken by famous photographers like Gordon Parks, Margaret Bourke-White, and Dorothea Lange.

This 1936 image is of migrant worker Florence Thompson, taken in Nipomo, Calif. Another Lange photo of Thompson became one of the most iconic images of the Great Depression.

(Credit: Life/Dorothea Lange)

Currently, many of the photos--searchable by keyword--are available through Google Image Search. And many more will be added in the coming months, Life said.

The project mirrors one introduced in January in which Flickr began hosting thousands of images from the U.S. Library of Congress as part of its "The Commons" initiative. Between the two different efforts, the public now has access to a wide range of photographs from the 20th century, many of which are among the most famous images of the century.

Life said that as many as 97 percent of the photographs it will make available have never been seen by the public before. These likely include shots taken at the same time as some of those that have become famous. An example is a photograph of migrant worker Florence Thompson in 1936 by Dorothea Lange that was clearly part of the same series of shots that produced what many would say is the single most famous image of the Great Depression, a close-up of Thompson with two of her children tucked into her shoulders. The newly available image shows a wider angle of the woman.

Click for more photos from the project

Flickr's The Commons project is an example of how the site's users can bring useful context to information from a single source, in this case the Library of Congress.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

SAN FRANCISCO--In return for the huge amount of work Flickr users do to tag photos on the popular photo-sharing site, they should get the benefit of the algorithms the service uses to bring meaning to the data.

That's how at least some at Flickr feel, according to Kakul Srivastava, the service's director of product management said in her talk, "The next generation of tagging: Searching and discovering a better user experience," at the Web 2.0 Expo here Thursday.

The idea behind that theory is that as Flickr users proactively add tags to countless millions of photos stored on the site, the service is able to draw some very specific conclusions about the behavior of those users and the things that are happening around them.

This graph shows how, over time, Flickr users have continued to add a tremendous number of tags to the photos on the service, a rate that continues to grow.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

And no wonder: The sheer amount of tags users have added over the four years the service has been operating is breathtaking: according to Srivastava, if you took the average text size of all the tags added to Flickr photos and laid them out, it would line the floors of 14 Wal-Marts.

"It's an incredible amount of content to parse, to reveal, and to take the meaning of," Srivastava said.

Unfortunately, I would have to say that the talk didn't deliver on its title: Srivastava didn't share anything particularly new with the audience, discussing mainly things that were probably already well-understood by most in the room.

Still, it was an interesting presentation, particularly because Srivastava talked about some of the ways that Flickr has evolved over the years, and what it's possible to learn based on how it's grown.

One of the most notable changes has been what she termed the increasing sophistication in the way Flickr users tag photos.

At first, she suggested, people were mainly tagging photos to add context about themselves. Then, gradually, they added context about other people, and then found ways to express shared experiences through their tags.

The best example of that--though more complex than what most people get involved in--is Flickr's The Commons project.

Within the first hour after the Library of Congress photos went up, Flickr users had added 150 tags to them. Within 24 hours, users added 11,000 tags.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

This is a project that launched in January with the U.S. Library of Congress as a pilot partner. The idea was that the Library of Congress provided a large collection of archival photos for the Flickr community to add tags to for additional context.

The reach of the Flickr community was immediately obvious, she suggested. The project launched with no tags, and within an hour, users had added 150 tags. Within three hours, the number was 767 and by the end of 24 hours, fully 11,000 tags.

Beyond that, Flickr users were able to add all kinds of contextual comments to the photos. Srivastava pointed to one such photo, a picture of a stream of dock workers leaving work at the end of the day, which had several user comments appended to it.

One of them was quite striking. The user noticed that all the African Americans in the photo were on one side of the stream, while the whites were on the other.

"Looks like 'quittin' time' was a segregated as the rest of life," the user commented.

Where the Flickr user community's participation in The Commons project is useful is in bringing personal context to images that previously had none.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

For Srivastava, that kind of comment is deeply important because it adds significant cultural meaning to a photo that otherwise was just another in a large collection.

Another notable emergent behavior on Flickr, she said, is the ability to determine when some sort of newsworthy event is going on, simply because of the use of a tag.

For example, she pointed out that traditionally, "Popemobile" wasn't a very common tag. But all of a sudden, she said, it was being used by a lot of people in the Washington, D.C., area, and by virtue of that, it was possible to see that something was going on around the Pope's recent visit to the United States.

In the end, Srivastava's talk didn't break new ground, but it did illustrate the ways that Flickr sees its users explaining the world around them through the use of tags. The concept itself may not be news, but tying it together and thinking about the many ways tagging on a site as popular as Flickr adds meaning is a worthy exercise.

If you're like many people deeply wired into a Web 2.0 lifestyle, your inbox is a never-ending flow of invites to new social-networking services.

Day in and day out, it seems, there's a new one. Today it's Notch Up, yesterday it's Naymz. Last week it was Dopplr.

And that's not even counting the steady flow of requests to be someone's friend on LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo or Facebook.

For me, it's a constant annoyance. I know I probably should jump on the LinkedIn bandwagon, for example, yet I never have, and frankly, don't expect I ever will. I suppose it's possible that one day, long ago, I created an account. All I know is that every few days, someone I know--often a distant acquaintance--will ask me to be their friend on LinkedIn.

And of course, what follows some set number of days later is a stern automated message warning me that my offer to be that person's friend is going to expire. Darn!

For some people, though, the issue with the constant stream of invites is becoming more than just annoying.

"I'm suffering from sheer invite toxicity," wrote Heather Kelley, the Kraus visiting professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University, to an e-mail list I'm on. "Regardless of source, exclusivity or debatable utility of the service, my immediate response to seeing one in my inbox is 'NOT ANOTHER ONE,' combined with annoyance at the friend who sent it--'What? You expect me to join ANOTHER time-wasting thingy just because you did?'"

And lest you think that Kelley is complaining too much, and why can't she just ignore the invites and move on, remember that for many people, staying connected to their friends, and current or potential professional colleagues is a little like breathing.

Whether that's a good thing is a conversation for another day, but you know these people are hardly rare--you may even be one of them.

And for people like that, there is an intense social and professional pressure to join whatever new social network is on offer, especially if the invite comes from a friend.

"That is pretty much exactly how I feel about it," said Mark De Loura, a San Francisco-based video game technology consultant. "There's enough of a net gain out of joining that I always (feel I have to) do it."

One of the major problems behind the flood of invites is that many of the services seem to mine users' contacts lists for names to send invites, either for joining a new service or for, say, using a Facebook application. Similarly, some systems force users to opt-out of adding their contacts to new invite lists rather than opt-in.

To some, that is a real problem that the companies behind the social networks need to solve.

"That behavior," said Kim Pallister, a technology blogger who works for Intel, "the opt-out spam list is going to piss off the user base...You need to have that be opt-in, not opt-out."

That's particularly true because, practically speaking, since many users quickly click through such opt-outs without noticing what they mean, they may not even see what they're agreeing to.

"The interesting thing about those invites," said Judith Meskill, a longtime social networks observer and blogger, and currently COO of a startup called CrowdFusion, "is that they are being spawned often without the knowledge of the spammer. This practice really must stop."

Meskill suggested that the only way it might stop is if the companies behind some of the services band together to create a set of behavioral regulations.

"It's their industry," Meskill said. "They should be protecting its rep. It really makes the whole industry look bad."

Still, if such standards were to be implemented, it's certainly not going to happen any time soon. And in the interim, the problem of people being endlessly frustrated by more and more invites continues.

One rather well-known tech executive, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates recently decided to quit Facebook because he was getting more than 8,000 friend requests a day.

That, of course, is an extreme example, but to people like Kelley, the never-ending invites often feel like a plague, and one that simply won't go away.

"I first noticed it like one notices a new allergic reaction," Kelley, who said she is or has been a member of at least 14 social networks, told me by IM. "Over time, I started noticing a more and more negative reaction to each new one that surfaced. It was similar to the feeling of hearing about a new startup during the height of the (dot-com) bubble. It just defied all logic and kind of offended me as a thinking human."

Not everyone, of course, feels that the number of new social networks is a problem. For some, it creates ever-changing ways to connect to important people in their lives, and more focused ways to filter lists of friends and acquaintances.

"I receive invitations for new social networking sites almost every time a new one hits beta," said Souris Hong-Porretta, vice president of interactive media at Entertainment Media Ventures. "I'm not so tired of receiving invites. It's part of my culture and part of my job to know what's out there."

Hong-Porretta said that she's even moderating a panel at the upcoming South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, about such applications.

But even she wishes the services weren't such time-sucks.

"I do sometimes wish that there was a magic button I could push that would fill in all my relevant information for me though."

Hong-Porretta, though, can see why for people less interested in staying abreast of every new service, the invite stream is a problem.

"I'm not surprised people are experiencing social networking site invite fatigue," she said. "The sites are time capital intensive in the beginning...I think people are going to be much more particular about the sites they sign up for now. I think a defining factor will be, 'Is this site useful or helpful to me?'"

One thing some would like to see would be an actual consolidation of the many services, precisely so there isn't social networking site overload.

"What I'd ideally like would be to have a couple different networks, personal and professional (that I could) keep separate," said De Loura. There might be "somebody I might want to connect to for personal reasons, but not for business reasons. (And) there are people I want to protect. I don't want everybody to be linked to execs at Microsoft who have been gracious enough to link to me."

Meskill thinks that De Loura is on the right track. She said she foresees a new set of social network sites that are "strong vertical offerings," sites like Flickr that give users a specific and focused set of things to do.

"I think a new generation of strong, user-focused offerings would be very well received," Meskill said, "in verticals like photos, music, food, tech, etc. Those plays have not arrived yet, however."

The thing is, though, that even if social-networking services do evolve as Meskill suggests, users will still find themselves accosted with nearly daily invites. And that's not necessarily a good thing. Especially when the invites come from friends.

In fact, there's even a term for the invites that come from friends: "bacn."

"It's spam from people you know," said Pallister. "It's worse than spam because you're not sure you should ignore it. 'Did they mean to send this to me? Should I delete it?'"

Meskill said she's aware that bacn has become a big problem on Facebook.

"Friends are dropping friends as friends," Meskill said, "because they are being hammered by a ton of this stuff."

So what's the solution?

It's hard to say. But to people like Meskill, it's become clear that the social network services are going to have to take action soon, or else they're going to risk turning off their users. And these days, it's more important to those companies than ever that that doesn't happen.

"Since we have advanced beyond the first adopters," she said, "and the next wave and are now into the broader wave of medium-to-late adopters, this is more imperative than ever."