I received an e-mail today from the City of Kingston – particularly, from the City Clerk, John Bolognone. For those who aren’t aware of this often-neglected job, it’s the Clerk’s office that maintains records, transcripts and minutes of council, and also oversees record keeping, license-issuing, policy adherence and a whole slew of other duties that would bore most people, but are vital to ensuring the city and it’s people stay on track. It’s therefore also the role of the Clerk’s office to make sure the right provisions are ready for council (and committee) nights and that the right people are in the right places.

This includes the decision I wrote to him about – positions at the media desk.

As most of my readers and followers know, I’ve been dedicating myself to following and reporting on the world of municipal affairs in Kingston since this current term took office in December, 2010. Since then, I have made every effort to attend council sessions, smartphone in hand, to report on the happenings. This work now has me doing regular reports for Kingstonist, answering questions from the media, interacting with city staff and elected officials regularly and more involved in the day-to-day world of city hall than I ever thought I’d be.  It’s netted me a number of followers, too, who keep in touch with the city events through the #ygkc hashtag I coined, and follow updates from far reaches outside of the city borders. It was one fateful council night that the room reached capacity and left me without a seat in the gallery that started the cries for me to take up a more permanent seat in chambers. They started online, echoed by tweets and emails, and have continued in waves since then.

Today, they can be silenced: I was notified by our City Clerk that I have been granted a spot at the media desk in council chambers – particularly, the one closest to where I’ve always reported from.

While I’m still beside myself over this opportunity, and am excited to see what the future holds, I need to pass along my thanks. Thank you to everyone who follows, reads and uses the #ygkc hashtag. It’s your dedication, feedback, comments, conversations, tweets, re-tweets and encouragement that fuels my drive to report on council for you. I’d follow it – with or without you there – but it’s you, the community, that keeps the live-tweeting moving. An extra thanks to the members of the media, my friends and colleagues and the members of council and city staff who have helped me so far: I work to bring our city and municipal affairs to as many people as possible, and your advice and feedback has been instrumental in bettering my work.

The next chapter of my commitment to the city starts on April 17th – with my smartphone by my side, and a laptop, mouse and webcam at my desk. Stay tuned.

This year, 2011, was a real rough one for me. From my kidney stone adventure at the start of the year to the multitude of elections, to personal dilemmas and double-booking my time to the involvement with my community and a breakup with my new media and web development circles – I have had the most up and down year I think I can ever remember.

It’s taken a toll on me, both mentally and emotionally, but it’s leaving me hopeful and optimistic for 2012.

If you have played a role in my life in 2011 – and if you’ve interacted with me at all in the year, you probably have – thank you. Thank you for carrying me through and thank you for supporting me. Thank you for being an ear I could turn to – or advice I could trust. Thank you for a comedic tweet that brightened my otherwise cloudy day. Thank you for a smile. Thank you for a random “hello”. Thank you for making me a better person than when I reflected on my life at the end of 2010. Thank you for your trust, your faith, your help, your hope, your opinions, your comfort, your hugs, your joy, your praise, your criticisms, your stories, your gifts and your presence.

Thank you, for 2011. And smile – a new year full of possibility is upon us.

So – it started with me cleaning out my office. I found a number (20 or so) of books (Mostly tech/business books) that I wasn’t using any more. Some of them were programming references (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, AJAX, Actionscript and so on), others were business novels (Trust Agents, Six Pixels, Wikinomics) and others were just general reading.

While I could have sold them, given them away or donated them to a thrift store, an idea struck me – particularly for the tech/business books – I’d donate them to the library. After all, the techy/geeky section of the library (Actually, most any library I’ve been in) is always outdated. The books are teaching languages and principals not used since (sometimes) the mid-90s, and the books are often in horrendous shape.

But they didn’t wan’t my books. I was told that all books donated are given to the Friends of the Library, regardless of whether or not they appear in the library, fill a void or could help an aging collection. The FOTL sells the book, then uses the money to help the library. It seems like a great plan, most of the time.

I’ve been told (by the library) that they used to receive over 500 books/week and that the volume, combined with the levels of staff, simply made accepting books impossible. In addition, a great number of those books are in bad shape, are missing pages, are torn or written in. I understand that – and can appreciate how the library needed to take a step back from accepting books – particularly as the city (And, therefore, it’s library) grew.

But this policy, and how it’s implemented leaves me with a pair of questions:

1. Knowing that the Friends of the Library is a volunteer-driven group – why doesn’t the FOTL make a judgement call on if a book is fitting for the collection? This keeps this decision off of the shoulders of the KFPL up front, and the KFPL only sees the book if it passes the FOTL level and meets expectations (Condition, topic, need, whether or not the library already owns a copy).

And more importantly:

2. Why can’t we – the community I was originally trying to support – bypass the library and build or own de-centralized lending library for technology and business books? Books contributed to the library reside at members homes until the next person wants it – then it changes hands and stays at the new location until the next person wants it (After, say, a three week minimum).

I’m interested in thoughts. I’ll be speaking with the library again later this week and making a decision on where my books go. The goal of the donation was to help the other geeks, tech folk and businessy folk in the community – so you, the local community, should dictate where my books go and what I do.

So – what’s the thought, feeling and consensus on this?

I’ll be back on Saturday, Dec 26th with more real content. Until then may you have a great holiday season with your families – take a break from the monitor. :)

Tommy

Courtesy flickr: bala_

So, the other day I promised you that I’d go over the settings I’m using within Facebook to manage my privacy. before we get to them, though, a few quick notes:

1. My settings are not for everyone and this isn’t a “Best” or “most secure” type of guide. I use Facebook in two capacities at the same time (Business and pleasure) and that makes it rather tricky.
2. I make extensive use of friend lists – something not everyone is comfortable with. People fall into only a single group (Well, for the purposes of privacy settings) and that often puts me into a tough spot when trying to decide where someone falls.
3. My setting are never ‘finished’. I’ve spent hours refining where they are now, but there’s always one more thing to change here and there.

So – that all said, let’s take a look. It all starts with friend lists.

Listed

So – in order to make my privacy options work, everyone is sorted into a friends list. My lists fall into 4 over-arching groups: “Inner circle”, business, pleasure and limited – and I colour code them whenever I can (Facebook won’t let me – but my personal spreadsheets all have colours. Within each groups, there are varying levels of access and what types of information are released. I’m going to cover them in descending order here:

• Inner Circle – Me: This one is pretty obvious. There are some options where Facebook has (In the past, at least) said that your choice are “Only Me” or “Everyone”. This groups doesn’t exist in facebook, but is in my spreadsheets to help me keep track of those settings.
• Inner Circle – All Access: When it come to access groups – this is the big dog. Folks in this group see absolutely everything I can share with them. All of it. I’ll admit, too – there are two people in this group: one is my wife, one was the best man at my wedding (And a friend for more than a decade). This group doubles over in the “personal” side , too – so if you’re hoping to land a seat here, you’ve got some mighty big shoes to fill.
• Personal – Family: Like the ‘Me’ group – this one doesn’t need much of a description. My family members use Facebook to keep up with one-another, so this group helps me reveal info to them (Like my address) that I wouldn’t reveal to some other people. Plus, it’s nice for birthday reminders.
• Personal – Friends: For the most part, the Personal Friends group and the Family group share settings – which means that this group’s awfully exclusive: just 17 people. I keep the groups separate mostly for photo sharing and application data – family can see the family tree stuff and this group can’t. There are a number of people who I met online who have worked their way into this exclusive little group – so that’s not beyond the realm of possibility…
• Personal – Acquaintances: If our paths have crossed in my non-work world (Or they crossed on the web but have gone offline since), you’re in this group. This is the high school friends, folks from college, friend of a friend at a party, co-worker, former co-worker, used to camp/bowl/whatever together group.
• Business – Trusted Web Friends: As we work our way ‘down’ the line, we hit this group. This group runs closer to the ‘Personal’ side of the fence than the ‘Business’ side. It’s really part of an ‘upgrade path’ between “Web Friends” and “Personal Friends” – and you only really get “stuck” here if you live to gosh-darned far away.
• Business – Web Friends: The biggest of the groups and the one you’re likely in if the others don’t seem to fit. This group is for the twitter folk, linkedin buddies, folks I met on message boards at Podcamps and so on.
• Limited – Limited Profile: Not a place you want to be. Home to 4 people so far. :(
• Limited – Super Limited: A place you want to be even less. It’s home to one.

The Settings

So, now that you know how the lists break down, it only makes sense to reveal the new settings.  Remember, that none of these are EVER final. I’ve broken them up into the two “pages” that Facebook has:

Profile Info

[table id=3 /]

Profile Info

[table id=4 /]

So That’s That

Like I mentioned – this is never set in stone. I’m always refining just how I use Facebook and how it fits into my daily routine, so I’m alway re-tweaking who can see what.

But what about you? How did this latest round of changes affect you? Did you make any changes to how you use Facebook as a result?

Courtesy flickr: chant3

So, back in August, I posted a story called Managing Facebook: A World Divided to talk all about how I’d done up my privacy settings, friend lists and so on. It was a set of rules, permissions and walls that I was happy and comfortable with.

And then, Facebook went and changed them all on me.

Now, there were a few major points to their most recent privacy update:

1. All regional networks are gone. We are now one world, one Facebook.
2. The granularization (Yeah – I think I made that one up) of wall posts and other privacy settings.
3. The opening of select information to the public as a whole.

So much as I did back in August, I decided to go through the new bits piece by piece to figure out how I felt about them and how I could tweak them to my liking.

1. The destruction of regional networks

One of the things Facebook announced was that they were destroying regional networks. These networks came in pretty handy, admittedly, for some things – events, for example, or (and here’s the biggest criticism I’ve seen) trying to figure out if the ‘John Smith’ you’ve searched for is the right ‘John Smith’. You could set profiles settings (Photos, wall and so on) to anyone in your own region, which did keep the site local to some degree, too. But as a general rule – I’m glad they’re gone.

Now, this may be BECAUSE I use Facebook more on a global level than a local one – but I’ve always found the networks to be more limiting. I understand that there’s an argument to keep them to let people find you more easily – but my thoughts are that they’ve made ‘Current City’ public (See #3) and  ’Home Town’ can be set public by you (See #2) – so this issue of using it to find people is kinda moot.

2. Privacy – Piece by Piece

Here’s one that’s been confused all over the place. As a rule, they did enable MORE options here – but they also took some away (which I’ll cover in #3). Take, for example, wall posts. You can now use privacy settings to help ensure that your “Man – drank so much last night and heading in to work hungover” posts aren’t seen by your boss. Handy. Some of the profile settings have been split up, too – such as “Family & Relationship’ and ;Religious & Political Views’ so that you can set those up separately (They were bundled in the larger ‘Profile Info’ before)

As a rule… I’m mostly OK with these changes. For the most part, using the friends groups I set up once before and a small amount of tweaking, I was able to get most of this back to where it was before. I also enjoy that I have more bits and pieces to control in the privacy options than I once did on some of these.

3. It’s An Open World, After All…

And what would a Facebook privacy post be without a rant. As part of the changes to the privacy options, Facebook opened some stuff to the world and isn’t letting you change them. These are: name, profile picture, gender, current city networks (obviously non-regional), pages you’re a fan of and your friends list. They said that this information is the stuff people use to figure out if the person they’ve found IS the person they looked for (Oh, this John Smith is in my university alumni network, lives in the city my buddy moved to, looks like my buddy, likes the same brands of beer my buddy did and has a bunch of friends I recognize – that’s the guy!). I get their idea. I really do.

But I don’t understand why we can’t opt out of some of that. Specifically – the friends list. I’m fine with people seeing my name, picture and gender… But everything else SHOULD be opt-out in my opinion. I see the value in forcing it to be public – but hometown is probably more useful to some folks than current city – and I can hide that. And why should I have to reveal my ENTIRE friends list, when you’re really only looking for MUTUAL friends in the list – why not just show the mutual ones?

Not to mention, of course, that the entire point of setting these to public is to allow ‘Everyone’ to find you – but I can still use privacy options to set my search result to only appear if we’re already friends. So why, then, can’t I limit some of this other stuff to subset of friends? My boss, for example, doesn’t need to see who my mom or high school best friend is. Facebook has, since, allowed you to hide the friends list from appearing on the profile – but the information behind the scenes is still public… and it’s an all or nothing deal: I’m fine with SOME people knowing my full friends list – just not everyone.

Two Steps Forward…

Overall, I think it’s two steps in the right direction – the abolishing of regional networks and the modularization of a number of privacy settings. But it’s at least a step backwards because we’ve lost control of some info (Like our friends list). I think my wife said it best when I was chatting with her about the changes: “I feel bad for Facebook” – and I can see that compassion. With so many millions of users – they’re in a position where they can’t ever please everybody. If they gave us full, bit-by-bit control – they’d hear that it was too complex. And to have things to simple gets them a “It’s not specific enough” scream. They can’t win.

This weekend, I’ll break down my new settings on a per-friends list basis and take another look at how I’ve broken down my friends groups.

Courtesy flickr: melindashelton

So, it’s been nearly a month – again – since I’ve posted anything. That makes me super sad. So I think I’m going to steal an idea from The Book of Wooby and toss an offer out there. See, Francis has this thing where he promises to post once each week (Assuming he’s not overrun with other stuff) and if he doesn’t, he sends one of his commenters $20.00. I like that idea… And have been trying to light a fire under my seat for a while to post more often. So I’m going to steal and tweak it a little.

The Promise

I’m committing to post once at least every 3 days. So today is Monday, meaning you’ll get another post on Thursday. Then Sunday, Wednesday, Saturday and so on. Like Francis, I’m offering a $20.00 (CAD) reward to a random meaningful commenter (No “Good job” or “I like this” comments allowed) if I don’t post – but the commenters I look at will only be in the past 3 weeks starting with this post. Yes, that means you have to comment regularly to stay in the draw. I’ll end this if I end up run too poor, so get in while the getting is good. Yeah… This just ain’t happening anymore.

Topical Texts

One of the other things I’m trying to do is get a little more topical with the blog’s subject matter. I’m doing this with alliterative topics for each day of the week. Today, for example, is ‘Meta Monday’ – where I can talk about the projects I’m involved in, site changes, updates and so on. I’ve also got ‘WordPress Wednesday’ planned and ‘Follow Friday’ will probably show up.

But I’m stuck on the Ts and Ses and am open to suggestions. Feedback is welcome – and hey, if you do it via comment, you get entered into that lovely potential cash giveaway!

Of ‘Press and Snowmen

A couple of weeks ago now, I launched a new look over at the WPBTM site. The site is now looking more like how I’d wanted it to look for a long while, and has some handy new features like the front carousel and the availability meter on the side bar. With the new site came a re-structuring of the monthly services offer, new pricing across the board and (By request) the option to bring us in on a retainer. Oh yeah – and I say ‘us’ because there are two part-time developers working on the project, too.

We’ve also dressed the site up for the holidays with a snowman and some falling snow. :)

Courtesy flickr: Kingstonist

So… I’d planned on doing a nice, long post today and add in a paragraph about last night’s meetup… but writer’s block struck and I’m stumped… So all you get today is the meetup stuff.

Last night the LNMG entered our 3rd year of meetups by getting people together at the Coffeeco location at the Kingston Centre for some coffee, snacks and tech talking. In addition to our largest turnout yet (11 people showed up, but we only had 10 simultaneous there), we launched a new format for the meetups with a local speaker and discussion, followed by the more general tech chatter we’re used to.

We opened the meetup around 6:30 or so (Though official start time was 7:00) and invited our guest speaker – Rich Ottenhof of Coffeeco – up to speak around7:30. Rich talked about how the company is using Twitter to build brand recognition using geocaching-style giveaways every week and then asked everyone for some feedback on a larger-format, Twitter-based game he’s been thinking of.

The snacks (Thanks, @delilahevening!!) were tasty, the coffee was flowing and the chat was wonderful. Thanks to the whole crowd who came out last night! Stay tuned to this blog, the LNMG blog and the @LimestoneTweets account and we’ll announce December’s as soon as we confirm the date.

1. I am SUPER excited to finally announce that the speaking page is live. I’ve been presenting for audiences large and small for over 2 years now and while I’ve still been doing presenting in the private, corporate world for select clients, I haven’t been advertising these to date. I’ve got two “Keynote” style presentations listed (Living On The Cloud and Making Minutes Count) and am putting some finishing touches on presentation #3 (Broken Fishbowls) right now.

Even MORE exciting on that page, though, is a series of talks I’ve built that I’m calling ‘The Twenty-threes’. These are short (23-minute) presentations that were built to be modular and sectional so that they tie themselves together quite well when presented as a group. There are 35 of these right now, and I’m on track to be adding one each month or so.

2. I’ve also added a sidebar widget (Based, actually, on a few emails I received) that highlights some of the projects I’m involved in. This will, in time, become a page, too, but the widget should suffice for now.

That’s it. Until tomorrow!

Courtesy: @applecrispmusic

Being an early adopter is an exciting game with ups and downs every day. Sometimes, you get yourself into an awesome service before they close the doors and tell you you’re not allowed in. Other times, you end up paying more for a product than you probably should have. And sometimes, you get to see something so early that it you see it start, grow and die before it gets the chance to go mainstream.

As one of people behind the Limestone New Media Group initiative, I’m always keeping Kingston – and Kingston’s businesses – in mind as I browse the web. Fairly early on, I had a feeling that Twitter was going to get pretty big, and I registered a number of account on behalf of local businesses. I did this again earlier this year.

Twitter’s position on these names is pretty clear: Don’t do it. According the the use policy, bulk registrations, impersonating others and trying to sell names back to corporations for profit is a clear no-no and will end in a suspension of the account – as well as potentially other accounts you manage/’own’. I have, twice now, flown straight against this rule and registered a whole bunch (8-10 each wave) of accounts.

I bring this up because I got a wonderful email the other night that allowed me to turn over another account to a local business. I didn’t charge them anything, didn’t have them buy a time share and didn’t even add their email to a mailing list. They wrote to me – and I simply replied with the password.

While it may be that Twitter’s not shutting me down because the haven’t found me, I’ve also been very careful about what I’ve done with the accounts:

1. I don’t tweet on their behalf. In fact in the second wave, I only post a single tweet that reads “This account has been set up as a placeholder. If you feel you should have it (It’s free!), follow the link in the profile for details.”
2. The profile links to this page – which is a letter explaining who I am, what the LNMG is, why I’ve ‘stolen’ their account, and what to do to get the password.
3. I don’t edit defaults: The background, icon and everything else stays to whatever Twitter says it is.
4. Once I get an email, I check who it’s from. If it’s from the domain I’d expect it to be, I just turn over the account. If not, a few quick Google searches will usually confirm who the person is. In either case, once I can verify the person, I blank out the profile link, delete the tweet and send them the password.
5. I don’t market them – I don’t want to be seen as ‘that guy’ who’s squatting the names and approaching people with them. Though I’m not asking for money (Or even suggesting they turn to me for a strategy or consulting), I know that “cold-calling” in this way is frowned upon, so I just don’t do it.

My entire first wave of accounts went to their proper owners in just over 6 months. This second wave is taking a little longer to be disbursed - but I crossed the halfway point by turning over @applecrispmusic recently.

It makes me SO excited to see so many Kingston companies beginning to to adopt social media tools – and I’m honoured to be able to play a small role in helping them along.