My @YouTube channel isn't completely lost, it's just harder to find

First published 5/14/12

Previously I had a YouTube "channel" that was fun. I added YouTube videos I liked to 'favorites' and/or 'playlists'. After you clicked through and played a song, you were still on my channel. In 9 months my channel had more than a million views.

On March 7, 2012, YouTube ruined its channel system.

Now if you click on a 'playlist' link it's hard to find my channel, and if you click on a 'favorites' link you can't detect my channel at all.

So I'm slowly converting all of my 'favorites' links to 'playlist' links, but for now here's how to find my channel:

-when you play a song with one of my 'playlist' links you'll see, at the top of the video player, the name of the playlist, and my name; if you want to leave the playlist and look in the other playlists, click on my name and you'll come to my channel; there you'll see a list of 20 playlists; some of my lists are listed on the front page, to see the rest you have to click "view all"

-when you click on a 'favorites' link, there's no reference to my channel at all, so the only way is to go to http://www.youtube.com/raybeckerman, where the playlists are listed [some are on that front page, for the rest you have to click "view all"].

Sorry.

I hope YouTube realizes how dumb they were to do this.

If any of you know some easier way to work around these barriers, please shoot me a comment. Thanks.
Update 12/18/12 I've also learned that with the new YouTube interface, if you're using a mobile device, or an iPad, many of my links will just take you to my playlists, but won't take you to the actual song. Sorry about that.

(Shortened URL for this post: http://goo.gl/HSJsm )

More insanity: Twitter's blocking tweets as "unsolicited mentions"

Originally published 2/23/12

It has always been my practice to try to credit authors of tweets by using their @twittername so that (a) I am informing my friends as to where on twitter these sources can be found, and (b) I am letting the authors know that I thought well enough of their material to tweet it.

Similarly, when I tweet songs, if the performer is on twitter, I add in or substitute the performer's twitter name, again to let them know I liked their material and to let my friends know where the performer can be found on twitter.

I just learned today that ALMOST ALL of my tweets that are in my feeds are being blocked by twitter as "unsolicited mentions".... i.e. because I wasn't "solicited" by the author or singer, therefore I'm wrong to credit them under their twitter name.

This is insanity, and highly anti-conversation, anti-sharing, and anti-social.

Meanwhile, it now creates probably hundreds of hours of work for me to edit the several thousand music tweets I've prepared, and to go through and edit the hundreds of feeds I monitor.

And from now on, you won't be able to tell from my tweets whether or not the author or singer is on Twitter, or what their user name is, and the authors and singers won't know that I tweeted their material.

So if you're someone whose blog posts or performances I tweeted, and you think I've gone silent... I haven't. I'm going to try to substitute #username for @username, but those won't be showing up among your 'mentions'.

I don't know what to say except !?&%#?!




 

Twitter etiquette for commenting on tweets & blog posts

Tweets

If you want to comment on a tweet you should retweet it.* That is by far the best way to comment on a tweet. Detached comments are time-wasters.

When you retweet, you are sharing the underlying tweet with your followers, helping both the tweeter and your followers. You are helping to build conversation, dialogue, and community.

If the tweet is too long to accommodate both the retweet and your comment, retweet part of the tweet and/or keep your comment short, or send the comment in a separate followup tweet, or use a long tweet tool  like twitlonger.

Almost always, the right way to comment on a tweet is to retweet it with your comment.

If you retweet, it's not even necessary to add a comment; the act of retweeting is a powerful comment in and of itself. It says: "this is something I find worthy of sharing with those people who trust me enough to follow me".

To comment on, or otherwise respond to, a tweet, without referencing the underlying tweet, is just plain w.r.o.n.g. None of your followers know what you're talking about, and the recipient usually has no idea either, so you're just wasting a lot of people's time.

If you're going to take the time to comment on a tweet, send something intelligible.

Tweets referencing blog posts

If you like a blog post which has been tweeted, you should post your comment on the blog post itself, either instead of, or in addition to, retweeting. But you should not merely tweet.

Some people try to get into a Twitter conversation about a blog post. While that's okay, it's not enough.

Where the tweeter has tweeted about a blog post, the blog itself is the most important place for you to comment.

Twitter is very fast moving, and we miss most of what goes through our stream. By leaving a permanent comment on the blog post, you help to build a genuine, lasting, growing conversation about the substance of the post. If you fail to do that, none of the blog post's readers will know what you had to say.

So if you're going to take the time to comment, you might as well leave a comment where it will have some impact -- on the blog.

If you want to also comment on Twitter, great; but do that in addition to, not instead of, commenting on the blog post itself.

*By "retweet" I mean "traditional retweet" not the twitter "retweet button" rubberstamp "retweet".

(Short url for this post: http://is.gd/f66bf)

Searching for tweets? Try Google

It is hard to believe, but:

1. searching tweets through twitter's search engines will only give you the last 6 days of tweets

2. tweets are now searchable on Google.com

3. the tweets on Google.com go back much further in time

So if you are searching on twitter, and can't find what you're looking for, you might want to try searching on Google, and see what you pick up.

In order to find my tweet(s) about the screenings of the new Phil Ochs documentary I did a google search "screenings raybeckerman" which immediately produced what I was looking for:

http://twitter.com/#!/RayBeckerman/status/31437203997466624

The search results page produced lots of relevant tweets:






Supposedly, if you want to restrict your Google search results to tweets, you can start off with the following parameter: site:twitter.com I.e., if you wanted to do a search for references to the #philochs hashtag on Twitter, your search might be: site:twitter.com #philochs & hashtag. But, based on my playing around with it, it seems that using this method may, for some reason, limit the number of tweets you unearth.

I don't know if this works with other search engines. I tried it on altavista.com, and it did NOT work.

In case you're wondering why you can find the tweets on Google but not on Twitter, I'm guessing the answer is M.O.N.E.Y. Probably Twitter has been holding back on its search results to make searchability of tweets valuable. And Google probably paid for the access.

And if you're wondering why they're not showing up on Alta Vista or Yahoo ... I guess those search engines didn't cough up the dough Google coughed up (or maybe Twitter gave Google the exclusive).

Twitter lesson I learned from Denise (@dhowell): the awesomeness of retweets

I first learned about the value of a "retweet"* from something that wasn't technically a retweet at all.

Denise (@dhowell) is a dynamic, really cool lawyer/geek/talk show host/writer from California. She is an "early adopter" of technology, and was heavy into Twitter before I'd ever even heard of it.

She knew me from my blogging and legal work fighting the RIAA (see, e.g. "Recording Industry vs. The People").

When I was new to Twitter, and just starting to try to get a bit more active, she sent me a tweet. It went something like this:

Hello Ray Beckerman (@RayBeckerman) author of Recording Ind v People http://is.gd/1Y6e4 Welcome to Twitter!

Now I looked at this welcome, and thought its format strange indeed. I asked myself:

1. Why would she be using my full name, and not just calling me Ray? I know my last name, and don't need to have it spelled out for me.
2. Why would she be mentioning the name of my blog? I write the blog. I'm quite conversant with it's name, since I gave it its name.
3. Why is she telling me the URL for my blog? I should know the URL by now, I go there multiple times a day.

So I thought about it for awhile, and visited her Twitter profile page, and there it hit me what Denise had been doing.

My network was around 50 people.

Her network was around 3000 people.

She was doing me a favor. She wasn't just greeting me, she was introducing me to her friends, making me available to her entire, wonderful network. Once I'd put 2 and 2 together (I'm a bit slow), I realized what a nice thing she was doing : Denise had introduced me and my blog to all of her friends on Twitter, and at the same time had let them know that I was.... an okay guy in her book.

That was the day I understood the awesome significance of the retweet. It is saying to someone, "I value you and what you have said, and want to share it with all of my Twitter friends".

(Of course it took me another month to figure out how to DO a retweet, but that's a story for another day).

So thank you, Denise (@dhowell), for making me realize the magic of the retweet.

Or should I say:

Thank you, Denise Howell (@dhowell), host of This Week in Law http://twit.tv/twil for teaching me importance of RT's #TWiL

*4/14/10.6:06 PM EST. When I say "retweet" I'm referring to the traditional retweet, not the pseudo-retweet button created by Twitter to enhance advertising & commercial exploitation. To understand the distinction see my post "Twitter tip: don't use Twitter's pseudo "retweet" button"

(Short URL for this article: http://is.gd/4PFbJ)

My advice to new Empire Avenue players

1. Upload an avatar, preferably a photo, and connect your blogs and social media accounts, such as twitter, facebook, youtube, flicker, fousquare, facebook page, linkedin, etc.

2. In the beginning you will have very few eaves, so invest them carefully. Buy back from people who've bought your shares, and sell shares of anybody who hasn't bought your shares, or who's sold your shares.

3. If you value interactivity, don't buy shares in people who've had no "Empire Avenue actions this week".

4. If you care about your E. A. "earnings" and how much you generate in "dividends", be interactive both on E. A. and on your connected social media accounts.

5. Empire Avenue is the worst possible thing for an internet addict because it punishes you for doing the healthy thing -- unplugging. Your price and dividends will take big hits whenever you go on vacation, take off for a weekend, take off for a few days because you're busy at work, etc.

6. The best way I've found to view, and to keep track of, your EA portfolio is the website http://empireave.net. You can review and work with your portfolio online, or you can download your portfolio and play with it as an excel worksheet.

(Short URL for this post: http://is.gd/1GVdWT)

Secret negotiations to regulate the internet ~ @EFF

This week in Dallas, trade representatives are secretly negotiating new regulations for the Internet – including intellectual property provisions that could choke off online speech. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement may be even worse than ACTA; it could tie the hands of democratically-elected legislators and create new, international standards for intellectual property enforcement. Worst of all, Internet users and free expression advocates like EFF aren’t allowed in the room and are forbidden from seeing the negotiated text. Click here to join EFF in demanding a Congressional hearing so lawmakers can learn what’s in the TPP and hear from all affected stakeholders, not just deep-pocketed industry representatives. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk claims they have made “extraordinary efforts” to include public stakeholders in negotiations, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Like ACTA, negotiations have actively excluded civil society and the public, while welcoming private industry representatives with open arms. EFF’s International IP Director Gwen Hinze traveled to Dallas to demand transparency, but she wasn’t allowed to see the draft text or be present for the negotiations. Here's how Gwen described the tactics the USTR is using to shut Internet users out from the negotiations: Unlike previous negotiation rounds, there will be no official forum for stakeholders to present their views to the assembled TPP country negotiators. Instead, stakeholders are being asked to register their interest in sponsoring a table to provide negotiators who might so happen to stroll past with information on particular topics. The public should be front and center in these negotiations, not relegated to a table outside. Join EFF in calling on Congress for more transparency in TPP. Negotiators can't just shut out the public and their elected representatives. Act now Defending your digital rights,

Maira Sutton International Team Electronic Frontier Foundation Please donate to EFF to support our work.

Now twitter is blocking my tweets as 'duplicates' even though I never tweeted them before in this account

I use SocialOomph.com to increase my efficiency on Twitter in several ways. One thing I use it for is to review the material in my feed reader accounts.

I have 2 twitter accounts (@raysfh & @raystlh) which I've been using as feed readers, to help me monitor the hundreds of feeds I review . I look through those posts, and pick a relatively small number of them -- maybe 10% or so -- to tweet in my real twitter account, @raybeckerman

Now twitter is blocking all of my @raybeckerman tweets as duplicates which I obtained from my feeds.

Which means I'm going to have to spend many hours reconfiguring each of approximately 300 feeds.

I really don't know whether I can afford to spend that kind of time.

Every day Twitter comes up with a new way to destroy everything I'm trying to do.

My 3 basic rules for playing the Empire Avenue game

1. I will buy, and hold, at least as many shares of yours, as you have of mine.

2. If you don't buy any of mine, I will sell all of yours.

3. If you sell mine, I will sell yours.

Exception: I may also sell all of your shares if you (a) become totally inactive or (b) hold less than 6 of my shares (If I sell your shares for inactivity, but you later get back in the game, give me a shout so I'll know to buy your shares back).

*******************

Other policies:

The number of shares I initially buy (above the amount you buy in me) depends on various factors, especially (a) your stock price compared to mine, and (b) how many eaves I have on hand.

The number of shares I continue to hold (above the amount you hold in me) depends on various factors, especially whether you keep on buying my shares; I will never knowingly sell any shares of someone who's made recent purchases of my shares.

My "watch list" is a temporary list of "recent arrivals" who I think really "get" the Empire Avenue game, and whose shares I will probably want to buy more of, once the "recent arrival' 200-share limit is lifted.

My "recommended buys list" is a short, rotating list of some of the people I know who (1) are enthusiastic reciprocal buyers (2) have decent dividends (3) are considerate, pleasant Empire Avenue citizens AND (4) have a reasonably promising chart pattern at the moment. I keep the list short, and rotate it constantly, to keep it fresh.

(Unfortunately, when Empire Avenue changed its interface a few months ago, it destroyed our ability to view these "public" lists, and stopped showing our recommendations on the splash screen which popped up after purchases; but I am continuing to maintain the lists in the hope that EA will make them relevant again :)

(Short URL for this post: http://is.gd/mDpO85)