Social media has become the buzzword of the new millennium. As more and more people begin to cocoon within their own little environment social interaction within the real world begins to deteriorate.

As a child I remember the neighborhood was a community. Your family interacted with other families living around them. Yards rarely had fences and everyone congregated in front of their houses. When they saw neighbors out they went out of their way to greet them and engage in conversation.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve noticed that neighborhoods and communities have changed. Now there are gated communities where people are locked behind enclosed fortresses. Everyone has a walled fence around their property and few people venture outside of their home or converse with anyone outside of their family.

Perhaps this is a function of growth and change or perhaps it is indicative of the fear people are developing about the horrors of society. No matter the reasons, people have become closed off from others.

Humans are by nature social creatures and this isolation is difficult for many to manage. With the proliferation of the Internet and immediate communication channels, communities have emerged in the digital world. People feel safe hiding behind a keyboard and screen knowing that if they are rejected there are thousands of others who will accept them.

These social media communities are similar to those created on this continent during the expansion westward in the early days of this country. Rather than travelling by wagon train or horse, the adventurers are arriving via the browser.

If the traveler feels comfortable, they may stay in the community building it up adding another resident. Many though are just passing through trying to find a place to settle where they feel comfortable. In this case the traveler may create an account in a community then wander away to continue searching for the right place.

In some cases like myself, I am more of a mountain man. I may be gone for an extended period of time then return to one settlement or another trading my wares with the local citizens then disappearing again into the wilderness.

From this perspective it sometimes becomes hard for a community to find you since you come and go with the seasons. What is needed is a mailbox or some way for the other settlers to know who this mysterious man is that wanders into their community.

For that reason I created a Social Media Hub. This is a type of address book where settlers can go to find out what my address in the various Social Media communities. The hub resides on my personal web site and graphically displays each of the social communities where I belong.

This is a Joomla module that I wrote. In the administration tool the Social Media Hub module will track your social media profile for 56 different social media web sites. For each of these you can enter your user name and it will direct site visitors to the appropriate profile page on each service.

So far it has worked quite well. I have set it to be able to adjust the icon size and icon type. Through testing on the 26 different social media sites I personally have accounts for it seems to be working as designed.

Now when someone wants to find me on a specific social media site all they have to do is visit my web page and click on the appropriate icon and it will redirect them to my profile allowing them to send me a message. The next time I wander out of the wilderness and visit that social media community I will have a message.

I seem to be spending more and more time on Twitter. I initially began using Twitter out of curiosity. I had no idea how I could utilize a service that limited my conversation to 140 characters. I further questioned whether or not the service was even manageable from a personal perspective. Conversation is difficult at best and depending on the number of people in your Twitter feed, it is quite easy for the messages to be overwhelming.

That being said, I have found the service to be an absolute godsend when it comes to finding people with similar interests and keeping up to date with information of an immediate nature. I have found that Twitter is best suited for broadcasting out information to others who are following your stream. These broadcasts seem to reach a large body of people quickly and often then spark conversations that can either be attempted via Twitter but more often by other mechanism such as email or through blog comments.

When I moved my blogs from Movable Type to WordPress I wanted to make sure that I could continue to post new blog entries to my Twitter feed to notify others of when I update my blogs or add new content to my sites. Having this capability offers a service to notify users of new information without them having to subscribe to an RSS feed.

Looking over the WordPress extension library I was amazed to see how many Twitter integration programs there were. I must have tried over a dozen before finally settling on the one I am currently using.

I chose WP-Twitter written by Joseph Dolson. This plug-in seemed to have the most flexibility of all the Twitter integration packages. The installation is relatively straight forward using the Plug-In tab of the WordPress Administration Dashboard.

Once WP-Twitter is installed you will find a new menu item under the Settings tab of the Administration Dashboard. You are presented with several options which gives you a lot of flexibility as to what information will appear in your Twitter stream.

You are able to configure the plug-in to post to Twitter when a new blog entry is published and also when an entry is edited. You can publish the same for WordPress pages announcing when a page has been published or if it has been edited.

The WP-Twitter plug-in supports the use of hashtags and allows you to send custom text both before and after a message is sent. The plug-in supports both Cli.gs and Bit.ly URL shortening services and gives you some flexibility as to which service is used to condense URL length.

For those blogs who have multiple authors, the plug-in allows each blog author to have their own Twitter accounts. This flexibility allows the plug-in to be configured for a wide range of uses.

The WP-Twitter code is updated quite regularly. I have been notified of several updates to the code since I have installed it. Most of the updates work seamlessly but there have been cases when updates have broken the plug-in leaving me without Twitter integration until a new version is rolled out or I have reverted to an older version.

Care should be taken to review the change log and do a quick search on the Internet before blindly accepting an update to the plug-in. That could save you a lot of frustration and hassle. Overall though the plug-in has been relatively stable and I continue to use it despite the occasional problem that crops up.

I stumbled across the Plurk social networking site in June 2008. I had been using Twitter for a while but was struggling with how to make use of the tool to establish communication. Twitter was great for broadcasting out a message but the Plurk interface was much better at providing a visual conversation and message flow.

After trying out Plurk for a few days I was clearly hooked. It allowed me not only to easily find others who had similar interests but actually facilitated conversations. The horizontal timeline did take some getting used to and the service continues to go through some growing pains but overall it has been much more stable than Twitter for my use.

Another important aspect that kept me close to Plurk was its ability to be “themed”. The Plurk developers made an early decision to allow users to modify the look and feel of their profile and timeline through the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This really connected with my artistic side and soon I was creating outlandish themes just to entertain myself.

With my Movable Type blog I searched for an extension that would allow me to notify followers of my Plurk timeline whenever I updated my blog. Since Plurk has not officially released an API to allow developers to extend their service, it was difficult to find anyone who had created a Movable Type to Plurk communication module. I found one but shortly after I started using it, it stopped working and the developer fell off the face of the earth.

When I moved my blog to WordPress I thought I would try again to see if someone had developed a Plurk to blog plug-in this time for WordPress. Fortunately Herdian Ferdianto developed the WP-Plurk plug-in that did exactly what I wanted.

The plug-in is installed through the WordPress Administrators Dashboard like any other plug-in. Once it has been installed, you will find a new page under the Settings tab of the Administrator Dashboard. You have three input fields to enter data. These include your Plurk username, your Plurk password, and finally Plurk Template.

Of the three only the Plurk Template field requires any introduction. Here you will describe what you want WP-Plurk to post to your Plurk timeline. For my purposes I entered [shares} {{url}} ({{title}}) The [shares] means that the post to Plurk will include the Plurk qualifier Shares. The next two entries will post the URL of the WordPress post followed by the post title in parenthesis. I did this so that Plurk would make the title a clickable link to the URL.

The WP-Plurk plug-in works flawlessly. It allows WordPress posts to be included on my personal timeline and provides a way to allow me to interact with Plurk users and create conversation based upon my blog posts. Using this plug-in I have introduced new readers to my blog and I have been able to meet several new people on Plurk who have similar interests.

This is definitely a well written plug-in that is a must for anyone who is using the Plurk service. I highly recommend this extension to anyone having a WordPress blog.

I began using Facebook as a way to stay connected to my kids. I know that sounds kind of funny but as the older girls graduated from high school and began their college careers, we turned to Facebook to try and stay connected. They could post pictures and update their status to let me know what was going on and I could do the same so that they felt like they were still a part of the family home life. Somehow though Facebook kind of blossomed and became a larger service.

Soon I had friend requests from current people in my life as well as classmates and friends who I had not seen in ages. My problem became how to keep my friends on Facebook informed of what was happening in my life. I had a personal blog and a baseball blog that had most of this information but I found myself repeating much of the same information to my Facebook friends.

Clearly what I needed was a way to have my WordPress blog feed into my Facebook profile stream so that both groups were made aware of when I added or changed information on my WordPress blog.

A quick search resulted in more choices than I cared to think about for integrating WordPress with Facebook. I think I must have tried about every integration point out there before finally settling on Wordbook a plug-in written by Robert Tsai.

What drew me to Wordbook was the simplicity of the interface and the flexibility it provided to allow me to choose what would be posted to Facebook. The plug-in is implemented like any standard extension through the Plug-in tab of the Administration Dashboard of WordPress.

Once Wordbook is implemented it will add a page to the Settings page of the WordPress Administration Dashboard. Clicking on the Wordbook settings page will allow you to connect WordPress to your Facebook profile. You will need to allow access through Facebook and once configured your Facebook feed will be updated with an excerpt from the blog entry along with a link allowing your Facebook readers to be redirected to your blog to continue reading the content.

The connection is fairly seamless and once initially set up works completely in the background. You should be aware that if a Facebook user comments on your blog entry through Facebook that comment does not appear in your blog. I didn’t expect it to but I wanted to make sure everyone is clear about the level of integration that Wordbook provides.

I’ve been very happy with the functionality of Wordbook and recommend it to anyone who is looking to integrate their blog stream into their Facebook profile.

It seems like everywhere we turn these days another social networking site is springing up. From My Space to Facebook to LinkedIn to Twitter to Plurk there is always a new service being brought up to help us connect with other computer users with similar interests. The problem with all of these services is that you never know which ones are the ones where your friends are actually hanging out. After all there what good is a social network where you are the only user?

As a precaution from being caught on the wrong service, we just enroll in all of them. The problem with this approach is that you can’t quite remember which sites you are on and what you used for your user ID when you signed up. Even if you do remember all of this information, how do you notify all of your friends and readers which services you are a member of?

This was my dilemma. I was trying to embrace social networking but found I was spending way too much time managing my various accounts and attempting to build a following and find friends and others who share similar interests. Once I had all of this information I needed a better way of letting people know where they might be able to find me.

WordPress in its generic form didn’t help much with my problem. So like so many times before, I began searching for a plug-in that would help me better manage my social networking identities and allow me to tell my blog readers where they could find me.

After a fairly extensive search I came across a plug-in written by Kareem Sultan called Social Links. This plug-in is a widget that allows the blog owner to identify which social networks they belong to and provides a graphical icon in the blog sidebar that will link to the user account.

The networks that Social Links recognizes is just a subset of all the social networks currently in existence but does include most of the major ones such as Digg, Facebook, Flicker, LinkedIn, My Space, Plurk, Twitter, and YouTube.

The plug-in is installed using the standard installation procedure through the Administration Dashboard. Once it is installed, Social Links will appear in the list of Widgets under the Appearance tab of the Administration Dashboard.

The widget can be installed in the sidebar and you are allowed to change the name that will appear on the heading. This of course means that the plug-in does require that your WordPress theme be widget-aware.

Under the Tools section of the Administration Dashboard the plug-in installs a Social Links menu item. Here you are able to select the social network in which you have a user ID. You are then asked for user or profile information that will allow your blog user to find your account on the specific social network.

The plug-in includes icons for each of the social networks it supports. I have to be honest; I was less than impressed with the included icons. They seemed too small and did not offer enough detail. I was able to modify the plug-in to use the icon set that I created for my Joomla My Social Network Plug-in so that I had consistency between the two systems.

Overall the Social Links plug-in was a good starting point to provide blog readers with access to my social network profiles. It was not a perfect fit for my needs but the plug-in was well written to allow for easy modification to make it a better fit.

We have now lived in Arizona over 14 years. A lot of our family still lives in Idaho and Utah. As a result we find ourselves making the trek from Arizona to Idaho quite often (more often than I would like that’s for sure). We have gotten to where we have a fairly well mapped out path from point A to point B and back. This path is the result of trying just about every different roadway that goes between these three states. And what I have learned from all of this is that there really is no good way to get from Arizona to Idaho without subjecting yourself to a lot of small highways or back roads. I don’t so much mind driving the back country but it does have its drawbacks. For example there are large stretches of road that have absolutely nothing on them. Driving from Flagstaff Arizona northward for example takes you across Indian Reservations that barely have phone service let alone rest stops or places to get something to eat or drink. Even cellular service is spotty. Digital phone service is impossible and analog roaming is even questionable. This situation remains in effect through part of southern Utah as well at least until you can get near the Interstate when there are at least some cellular towers to give you adequate phone service.

This lack of communications choices has a couple of effects. First it is a little nerve wracking to think that if you had car troubles or were running behind you may not be able to get help via your phone and would instead have to rely on the friendly intentions of others on the road. Given today’s society that is not the most comforting thought I have ever had going into a vacation. The other less drastic problem is the fact that if you happen to be travelling to meet someone it is difficult to make sure and let them know if something comes up. This is further complicated when there are multiple parties involved with wanting status on your trip or where you are at. In times past we almost were required to create a phone tree where one person would call someone else who would in turn call someone else. This is akin to the old telephone game where you started out with a message and passed it from person to person. By the end the message was completely different than what it started. I was determined that this trip was going to be different.
I had recently written an entry on micro-blogging services and thought they may hold merit for this particular problem I was trying to solve. Rather than calling everyone I knew or setting up a complicated calling tree to notify everyone of our current location I would instead update the micro-blogging services and those who were interested could subscribe to my timelines to see where we were. Using Ping FM would make this especially easy since this allowed me to update most of the more popular social network sites with my status. That way people could chose whatever network they were most comfortable; whether it be Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, Facebook, or any of the other countless services there were. Since I first wrote the post on micro-blogging I have since gotten a lot more interested in this technology. I have especially become enamored with Plurk. This service has become much better and continues to evolve. It so far seems to have been immune to the scalability issues that have plagued Twitter and does provide with a more intuitive way of managing conversations. Periodically through the trip I would send an email or text message to Ping FM and it would in turn post my whereabouts and whatever I happened to mention I was doing. What I had not anticipated was that complete strangers would see these status posts and comment upon them. It has been a fun and interesting experience as I try to explain the various points of our vacation. It was almost like sharing “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” while I was still on the trip. I plan to continue posting updates each day for the remainder of our trip. It has been helpful to family members wanting to know where we are but it has also allowed me to meet some new people and make friends I might not have otherwise done. I have gotten a new appreciation for social networking.