At first glance it looks very slick. Movable Type is definitely heading towards WordPress type usability and features. It might even be there already.

I’ll know more in a few weeks after working with it a lot more.

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

I do believe that the world needs more Drupal developers but that hardly means the platform is going away. In fact I think that the platform is progressing nicely. The next version ofDrupal is slated to support OpenID and localization. There are loads of great modules contributed by developers who are building on the platform.

I recently constructed a new site called New York Is My Kind Of Town using Drupal and between core and contributed modules I achieved every function I wanted to. No custom development needed.

The situation that Chris highlights is more of an opportunity than the tolling of the death bell for Drupal. Drupal is such a great platform that there is a high demand for development skills to deploy it commercially. But the fact is that there are plenty of developers contributing to the platform itself. And you also don’t necessarily need a developer to get a site up and running on Drupal. I’m not a developer and I’ve done it several times.

So I just want to tell Chris, “You are wrong. Drupal is going to be around for a very long time.” I even chuckle a little as I write this because his comment is so absurd.

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

Thankfully Drupal has a very robust community of contributors adding code and knowledge to the effort. I appreciate all of it. Recently I accessed a pair of tutorials that helped me to get some nice features added to a site I’m working on. So I wanted to pass them on to others who might find them useful.

Advanced User Profiles -  was created by Shell Multimedia and allows you to create a very robust user profile that includes links to the submitted content, friends and a photo gallery to name a few things.

Thickbox Image Gallery -  and the associated screencast by Elliot Rothman help you to add image submission to the site while creating a nice image gallery where the images pop up in a light box.

These are two very useful  tutorials. Thank you to the folks who took the time to make them available.

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

I also noticed that CEO Gina Bianchini has posted on the spam issue to the Ning blog.

Its heartening to know that they are willing to address these issues at a very early stage. The fact is that if a service like is easy to use and can reach a large audience you know they bad folks will show up. It happened with Blogger and it seems to be getting worse with MySpace.

Jason Calacanis has been riding roughshod over Squidoo on this topic recently.

Frankly, this is an issue that all community builders must deal with. My feeling is that if you make sure that content is fresh and relevant then that is good for everyone in the community. The only people disappointed by increased controls and tighter rules with respect to content will be those that are trying to game the system.

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

Like all new things in the social media space Ning is going through some standard phases of evolution. Take a look back at my post from earlier this year to see what those are.

I started using Ning recently so I could stay on top of all the features and possibilities. Things were pretty quiet for me as a user of Ning until I joined their Network Creators group. Since then I have received a half a dozen messages from people that were obviously spammers or get rich quick hucksters. These folks have found Ning so easy to use that they have set up shops over there for their get rich quick schemes.

Another issue that I’ve run into with Ning is the fact that their community contains a lot of inactive networks. Its so easy to set up a network on Ning that many people are doing the initial setup and then walking away.

I set up a site for music videos at http://musicbuggy.ning.com. I then wanted to see who else set up a music video site on Ning so I could network with other networks. I searched the term “music videos” and found quite a few empty sites populating the top of the results. I would think that Ning would have some sort of an algorithm to determine the quality of results returned by its own network search engine.

I think that Ning is a great tool for someone who wants to be able to build an online community very quickly. The features allow for unique branding and complete customization that some network builders are using to create great sites.

As a community of social networks Ning is lacking. There are a lot of orphaned networks. The SEO, spam crowd looks to be on to the possibilities of Ning as well. From my perspective there are two important initiatives for the creators of the Ning platform:

1. Identify the robust networks and promote them in the search results.
2. Create rules and features that protect real users from the spammers and SEO folks.

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

I discovered Songbird recently and I’ve been very enamored with their free, open source media player. While iTunes and Windows Media Player seem to be all about selling music, Songbird is about discovering and playing music.

That’s why I took some time to record a video tour in the Awakened Voice Learning Center. Head over there to get the QuickTime version or just watch the player below.

Click To Play

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

I’ve been spending a bit more time on another very popular blog platform lately though. Movable Type has been around since before Drupal and WordPress made it into the consciousness of social media. These days it seems like Movable Type is not quite the powerhouse it was a few years ago.

Truth be told Movable Type is used on quite a few corporate blogs. Some major indie bloggers like Todd Cochrane at Geek News Central and Boing Boing use Movable Type as well. I’ve been using Movable Type on my personal website for a few years now. I’ve also used it to set up sites for my brother and daughter.

I recently moved a whole installation of my personal websites based on Movable Type from one web host to another. The move went well and I didn’t lose any data. I’m also getting better with incorporating audio and video into Movable Type as well.

There are some definite benefits to going with Movable Type over the other systems. Ease of use on managing multiple sites is one of them. I also like the fact that Movable Type actually creates html pages for my posts.

To make a long story short I plan on working on my Movable Type chops over the next few weeks to see how far I can take Movable Type as compared to WordPress and Drupal.

[tags]Social Media, Blogging, Movable Type[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

You Send It solves a very simple problem that is not so hard for the average web user to deal with. They let you send big files by email. You upload to You Send It, specify the recipient email address and the recipient gets a link where they can download the file from. Free accounts allow you to send a file up to 100MB, while paid accounts allow you to send up to 2GB. Podcasters who need to collaborate and share files now have an option besides FTP.

Zamzar solves the file format issue. Upload audio, video, images or documents and Zamzar converts them to alternate formats for you on the server. You just need to give the site an email address so they can send you a link to the converted file. I’ve used this service to convert QuickTime videos to flash and ipod formats.

Both services are free and include ads on their pages to help pay the bills. You Send It has a couple of levels of paid service that could work for those who need to receive lots of big files.

[tags]Social Media, File Conversion, Large Attachments, You Send It, Zamzar[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

The stats that you get on WordPress.com are basic but are a good alternative to Google Analytics for those who want to answer very basic questions about how many people are reading their blog posts and who is linking to them.

This plugin works different from most other plugins in that the results of the stats are displayed over on WordPress.com. So you need to have the API key from your WordPress.com account. This is the same API key that is used for the Akismet spam service.

Its an interesting approach by WordPress in hosting the stats on their database. It is definitely a good idea. I ran a WordPress stats plugin previously and the program took up a heck of a lot of space in my database. You need to have at least WordPress version 2.1 on your site to work with this plugin. I’m at 2.0.5 on this site but I am trying it over at the Awakened Voice Learning Center.

I’m going to try it alongside Google Analytics to see which one is more useful to me. You still do not get feed statistics with this plugin. You need to host over on WordPress.com or use a service like FeedBurner to track feed stats.

[tags]Social Media, Statistics, Automattic Stats, WordPress[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

This video features Drupal founder Dries Buytaert speaking at the Open Source CMS Summit at Yahoo! earlier this year. He makes some very important points about how Drupal technology could eventually eliminate the designer, developer and webmaster.

Dries also talks about some important improvements to Drupal, including lightweight media file handling and improved forum functionality.

There’s a lot to love about Drupal but there are also a lot of areas that could be more user friendly. Based on the tone of this speech I can say that I am encouraged that these issues will be addressed and then some in Drupal 6.

[tags]Social Media, Drupal, Video, Dries Buytaert, Open Source, CMS, Webmaster[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

They announced a new show player yesterday as part of a scheduled upgrade of the service. I learned this info while I was in the midst of creating an archive there for my social media lessons.

The new player has a few simple configuration options and allows the user to watch the most recent show while also being able to go back and watch previous shows. This is a big step forward from the single player format because the latest show will be available anywhere your player is positioned on the web.

The flexibility of this player, combined with the already advanced (and very simple) publishing tools continues to distance Blip.tv from a pack of competitors that includes Brightcove, Google Video, YouTube and others.

[tags]Social Media, Video, Video Blogging, Flash Player, Blip.tv[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

The goal of the campaign is to raise funds for the Boomer Esiason Foundation’s Exercise For Life Scholarship fund. This fund benefits young people with cystic fibrosis by providing financial support for college tuition. You can find out all about the campaign over at www.blubrryjam.com.

I wanted to put this together and make it as ’social’ as possible so I’ve gone with a ‘best of breed’ approach with respect to the tools and services I’m using to pull all of this together.

The main page is published using RawVoice’s own RawVoice Generator that powers the Blubrry, Podcaster News and Podcast Promos websites. The videos are hosted and published using Blip.tv. The Blubrry Jam playlist player is powered by a sleeper service known as Big Contact. Donations are managed via PayPal. Ticket sales and invitations to the live event are being handled by Eventbrite. Plenty of blog posts powered by WordPress. We’re also using offsite presences on YouTube, MySpace and Twitter to extend the message to a wider audience.

There are quite a few other services that we could put in play to spread the message of the campaign. And we will probably keep expanding the reach all the way up until the end of the campaign. The fact that I’m using so many different services points to a gap in the toolset available for people who are running events that have multimedia and financial components. Of course, if such a Holy Grail type of service were to come along it might not do as well and the individual tools and communities being leveraged for this effort.

One thing I can tell you for sure is that OpenID will be very welcome once more services start adopting this technology. There will never be one service that does it all. Our online footprint is constantly expanding. That expansion could occur much more quickly if people didn’t have to maintain separate logins for every service.

For now though, I’ll continue to maintain my many ideas and use the services that work best for the particular goal that I’m trying to achieve.

[tags]Social Media, Tools, RawVoice, Blubrry Jam, OpenID, Events, Organization[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

We now have AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Skype and ICQ versions of instant messaging platforms. Integrating all versions so you can chat with all of your friends and colleagues is nothing less than a pain in the neck. For years I’ve used Trillian to bridge the gap between the services. And while the Trillian Basic program has worked well for me so far it still hasn’t helped me to integrate the Google or Skype versions of IM.

A service called Meebo gets me part of the way there. Meebo is a web based, multi-platform IM service that allows you to login to all of the above mentioned services, except Skype, from your web browser. As far as I know you can’t get Skype anywhere but using the official Skype client so their lack of support for that platform is due to the closed nature of the Skype system. Not the end of the world since everyone I know who has Skype also uses one or more of the other services.

Meebo is really easy to use. You can use the service without setting up an account by entering your login info to the various IM services on the Meebo home page. If you create a Meebo account you will be able login to all of your IM services with a single sign on.

I’ve been using the service for a week now and I find myself using IM much more as a result. I’m using it to get quick questions answered for business reasons. I’m also running into family members who I rarely connect with online. I have more access than I do with Trillian because corporate firewalls that I frequently work behind block my Trilian client. I’m not having those problems with Meebo.

The improved access and integration provided by Meebo has reinvigorated my outlook on IM as a powerful tool for social networking and business communication. Heck, I can even use IM to send out updates using Twitter.

[tags]Social Media, IM, Meebo, Business Communication, Social Networking, Twitter[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

He concludes that Google Reader, ” is making its mark as an RSS aggregator.” He sees a larger percentage of subscribers now using Google tools as opposed to other popular readers like Bloglines.

Todd Cochrane took a look at his Google subscription stats and was surprised at what he saw.

It’s becoming obvious that Google is swallowing up a decent portion of the online and mobile feed consumption sector. Don’t forget that you can easily access your Google Reader account via most mobile devices with web access.

By my estimation Google has two-thirds of the puzzle solved. They’ve built a strong, browser based feed management tool. They’ve built a mobile interface that works. What they don’t have is a desktop based tool to allow for offline browsing and synchronization with the web based account.

A move to feed management via the desktop would be a bold one. But Google is already there with the Google Desktop search and widgets.

I currently use Onfolio for local feed management. Onfolio was purchased by Microsoft last year and integrated into Windows Live Toolbar. I would gladly move to a product that would allow me to keep my Google Reader items cached locally and synced with the web. Any takers?

[tags]Social Media, RSS, Google Reader, Bloglines, Microsoft, Onfolio, Windows Live Toolbar[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

1. Aggregate a group of feeds into a single feed. I did that here.
2. Create a tool to search for a term across multiple sites. I did that here.

One of the coolest things about Yahoo Pipes is the fact that you can view and edit the details behind each pipe so you can learn how to create your own.

RSS inventor Dave Winer doesn’t seem too impressed. I can see where he’s coming from as a programmer with skills around RSS. People with those kinds of skills always have the option for building their own stuff. It’s people like me who know the data they’re looking for and don’t quite have the skills to program that stand to gain the most from this tool.

The open nature of the pipes platform, combined with the fact that you can’t yet run a pipe off an external website, means that the service can’t be used to any kind of strategic advantage. I think that Yahoo could make a pretty penny selling licenses to allow application developers to run pipes from their own web server.

[tags]Social Media, RSS, Yahoo, Yahoo Pipes[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

Since both services are now owned by Google they are in the unique position to win no matter what I say here. Hopefully the lords of Google will listen and use my feedback to improve both services.

The title of this post says it all as far as I’m concerned. If I’m a business wanting to publish viral video on the internet then I go with Google Video for the following reasons:

• Less Distracting Interface - GV has none of the very distracting ads that you’ll find on YouTube. At any given time while perusing your content on YouTube a viewer is inundated with a variety of other distractions that can take them away from your message.
• Simpler Content Options - YouTube hits you with a wider variety of options on content info such as whether or not to allow comments in video format. GV is simpler and doesn’t allow commenting, which means you can bring the conversation (along with the video) to your own domain.

• Better Flash Encoding - I’ve uploaded the same video to both services several times and the result of GV is better every time. YouTube stretches out the video to the size of their player causing blurriness and pixelation.
• Downloading and RSS Support - GV allows users to download your videos in a variety of formats. No such luck with YouTube. As a bonus you get a nice (albeit hidden) RSS feed with enclosures for your content. So people can subscribe to you in podcast catching apps like Juice or iTunes. 
• Sortable Stats You Can Download - I like GV’s very basic but very usable reporting features that allow you to look at both plays and downloads over varying periods of time. You can download your stats views to a CSV file. Google recently added a feature that provides a small chart showing views with a breakdown between web plays via their site, email or embedding.

For all of these reasons I think that Google Video trounces YouTube as a video platform for business. Those who disagree will probably say, “But the audience is on YouTube!”

Those words are true enough. But increasingly YouTube has become an out of control environment. Sure, some YouTube vids will become sensations. But I don’t think businesses get too much benefit in the long run from being a one hit wonder. And YouTube is not a site that respects the brand of any other company.

My strong recommendation is that businesses who desire the benefits of free hosting do so with Google Video. They can then take their videos and create communities around those videos on their own domains. More on how to do that later.

At least for the moment, I think that Google Video should be the platform of choice for businesses looking to leverage free hosting,  search engine visibility and value added features.  

[tags]Social Media, Google Video, YouTube, Video, Video Blogging[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

Despite multiple assurances on the screen that everything would be okay with the switch over something has happened with the resulting feeds provided by Blogger.

I’m seeing that some of the posts are now presented in the atom feed out of order. Even worse, I can’t get the feed to display more than 20 items no matter what setting changes I make in the Blogger dashboard.

I’ve been on Blogger since 2000 and I’m very familiar with the interface. The help section for feeds isn’t much of a help either. There are still some bugs to be worked out. Unfortunately they are bugs that affect the flow of information from some of my sites. And I’ve been trying to use the site feed to help me port over a blog to WP 2.1.

That process will now take quite a bit longer since I need to adjust the dates in the items after import into WordPress so that posts show up in the correct order. But that’s my cross to bear for the moment.

The point I want to make is that I’m thoroughly unimpressed with the progress Blogger has made since acquisition by Google. Support for RSS has been very slow, and now hidden. You can add ‘?alt=rss’ to the end of your feed to get RSS. TrackBacks are still not natively supported. Way too many spam blogs exist in their system. No plug ins to extend the features. I could go on.

Blogger had been good to me as a basic blogging tool up until a couple of years ago. Then when my needs got out in front of the capabilities of the Blogger system. You would think that a player with the position of Google could keep the service competitive. They haven’t. And I’ve moved on to WordPress as my the default provider that I recommend to new people starting a blog for the first time.

[tags]Social Media, Blogger, Feeds, Atom, Google, Problems[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

I’m thankful for Dries’ (and many others) contributions in building this excellent platform. And since I can’t code a lick I figured that this was the least I could do to help others out ;).

[tags]Social Media, Content Management, Drupal, Screencast, Thanks[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

WordPress 2.1 is out and contains some significant upgrades that publishers will really like. Drupal 5.0 was recently released and contains some significant upgrades that make it easier to use and more flexible than ever. So which one should you use to satisfy your web publishing needs?

First off, if you’re currently invested in one package or the other I would recommend that you upgrade and stick with your platform for the time being. There are too many variables in place with each implementation to justify me blindly recommending migration.

If you’re starting fresh then you have an opportunity to consider your options. I’ll try to make my assessment as simple as possible.

There are a few similarities between WordPress and Drupal that should be pointed out. Both sites facilitate traditional blogging for one to many authors. Both platforms foster interaction via commenting. Both sites have vibrant developer communities contributing themes and plugins. Both sites can handle rich media and integration with other communities. Both also have hosted options available via WordPress.com and Bryght.

I like WordPress for sites where publishing content among a defined set of authors is the primary objective. I like Drupal for sites that require community input, persistent presence and/or aggregation from other sites. By persistent presence I mean the ability for a community member to set up a profile and return to contribute information at later dates of their choice.

WordPress is simpler to implement and manage. But Drupal has more powerful features that allow you to scale your site into a full blown community if that’s what you want.

The choice is yours. Think about the kind of web presence you would like to build. Think about who will be contributing content. Think about whether or not you will aggregate information from external sources. If you have the time and inclination you should set up a couple of test sites and try out both to get a feel for the experience.

Both tools provide the backbone for a lot of great sites. You can’t lose by considering and trying out either of them to meet your needs.

[tags]Social Media, Tools, Drupal, WordPress, Drupal 5, WordPress 2.1, Comparison, Blogging, Community[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

[tags]Social Media, Lessons, Screencast, Drupal, Drupal 5, Awakened Voice[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

If you want to start a single blog get WordPress. If you want a robust forum try PhpBB. If you want to build a rich media gallery try Broadcast Machine. If you want to do all three together and add social networking then Drupal is for you.

So the Drupal folks have finally gone live with their latest major release, Drupal 5.0. Lots of great feature updates and a very cool new default theme can be found in the latest version of Drupal. The admin interface is much slicker and the install is simpler with their web based configuration tool.

I’ve been playing around with the previous release candidates and I’ve been very impressed with the upgrades. I can’t wait to get to Drupal Camp NYC 2 this coming weekend to talk about it.

[tags]Social Media, Drupal, Drupal 5, Open Source, Tools, Drupal Camp[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

The new version is finally out. It features a new look and “Significant improvements in the levelation algorithms.”

If you’re a podcaster or amateur audio producer who needs a dead simple tool for optimizing your productions then this free tool is definitely worth investigating.

[tags]Social Media, Podcasting, Audio, Tools, Gigavox Media, Levelator[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

So I finally got around to taking another spin through the updated interface, which you can watch on the Google Reader Update Tour.

[tags]Social Media, RSS, Google Reader, Video, Tutorial[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

Most will probably be supported, but I ran into a potentially sticky situation with my desktop RSS feed reader of choice, Onfolio. Onfolio was acquired by Microsoft earlier this year and they have since ceased developing on the product I purchased. So there are no guarantees that my version Onfolio will work with future browser upgrades.

In the case of Firefox 2.0 Onfolio is definitely not compatible with the upgrade. What’s a guy to do?

Luckily the Onfolio Support Forums are still alive and I’ve successfully found the answers to many issues since the purchase by Microsoft. No exception in this case. I found this post that includes a link to a Firefox extension that allows Onfolio to work properly on Firefox 2.0.

The extension is working well. And I’m breathing a sigh of relief.  I’m pledging to use the OPML export feature in Onfolio on a weekly basis to back up all of my subscriptions just in case I want (or need) to move to a new aggregator.

[tags]Social Media, RSS, Aggregator, Onfolio, Browser, Firefox, Upgrade, Microsoft[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

They have bulit a good service over there that works for a lot of people. I put my wife on a WordPress.com blog when she wanted to start photo blogging.

What’s wild about the WordPress story is the fact that I’m sure many people thought Blogger and TypePad had the market wrapped up. This just proves that there is always room for people who are doing things a bit differently than the rest.

[tags]Social Media, Blogging, WordPress, WordPress.com[/tags]

© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.