I’m been looking over a new media aggregation site called Mediagazer.  My initial thought was, “great…another aggregator that will simply clutter up a lot of content and put it in a needle-in-the-haystack format”, but those thoughts were dismissed as soon as I really started looking at it closely.

Mediagazer is a new effort from the uber-popular tech sharing community Techmeme, and is their first news vertical in almost four years. It bills itself as a site, “which will focus on the content production and distribution business, organizing topics as wide as journalism, blogging, video production, e-books, and digital distribution technologies”, and sure enough it does all of that.  There are a lot of good content assimilation sites, but I think Mediagazer will stand out as a leader if it can get enough good press early to build momentum.

I really like it’s easy-to-share buttons, with the ability to send information linked to either Mediagazer directly, or the original source of the story.  I think that is a brave and noble feature, most aggregators are trying their very best to drive as much traffic as possible directly to their own site (increase in traffic = increase in ad revenue), so the ability to link directly out is a fairly cool and risky idea. They do have sponsored news aggregation prominently displayed in the right column and halfway down the main page with no signs of traditional banner and display ads…yet. I also like the sharing simplicity, obviously aimed at social networks as the only two options are Twitter and Facebook.  Honestly, those are the only two places I ever share news anyway. Naturally, Mediagazer is also on Twitter, although thus far it appears to simply be a feed from their headlines as opposed to an interactive, engaging account.

I like the navigation and sharing potential from this site, so I’ll give it a try as a news source for a couple of weeks to see if it makes it into my regular lineup.  If you try it out, let me know what you think: is Mediagazer just another news aggregator, or a useful service for finding and sharing information?

I’ve been thinking about the ever-increasing blurry line between public and private lives now that social media is mainstream.  I’ve personally been opening myself up to the world for about a decade; I started blogging by developing my own (very basic) blogging platform before the term “blog” was popular…and I haven’t looked back since then.

There have been a couple of times that I was alarmed by what people are capable of thinking or doing.  A few years ago I started getting anonymous comments on various videos of my children, asking me to pose them in certain ways or have them do certain things.  Naturally I deleted all traces of the videos online (yes it is possible) and became very aware of what I was posting after that.  Although I was always careful to never name them or reveal the location of my children even before this incident, I became very protective after that and have been quite conscious of what I would and would not publish.  Over the years I have become more widely known because of my marketing and social media work, and although I’m certainly a small fish in a big pond, I do have a lot of connections with people that I’ve never met face to face.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade my social media life.  I’ve turned so many of my digital-first relationships into real-life relationships, and I love social media and the way it connects the world. But, and there is always a but…

Those of you that have been following my adventures for a while know that I put my heart, soul and mind into social media.  Since writing my own blogging platform a decade ago (the billion dollar idea that I never capitalized on…) to my almost-obsessive fascination with brand interaction on channels like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, I am constantly observing and strategizing ways to make the interaction and engagement between companies and customers better through social media. I have spent quite a bit of time over the last couple of years consulting businesses of all types and sizes regarding their engagement (or lack thereof) within these online communities.  From Fortune 100 companies that distribute hardware all around the world to non-profit agencies that are doing their best to make a difference in the world, I have worked with groups to lend insight, support, ideas and action to social media programs. Given all of that, I’m quite pleased to announce that I have taken a new role within the industry.

UPDATE: Of course I grabbed my URL (http://www.facebook.com/mattsingley) in the interest of keeping my name every place I can get it, but I still will use the following information to direct people to the page.

A little later today the great URL grab of 2009 will be upon us…Facebook is releasing “vanity” URLs and they’re going to go quickly.  What this means is that instead of having to go to http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=682259362 to find me you will be able to type http://www.facebook.com/mattsingley and get to the same place.  Nifty?  Perhaps, but not really necessary.

I like to keep everything in one place, and feel very strongly that this is a best practice for brand management.  With that said, my solution for complicated (or even not so complicated) URLs like Facebook has been to create pages within my own domain that forward to the site in question.  If we have ever met at a trade show or convention and we have traded cards, you will notice that mine do list a link to my Facebook page: http://mattsingley.com/fb

You can do the same, and it’s relatively simple.  I think the easiest way is to add a bit of HTML code to a page that you create, here are the steps.

Earlier today I received a private message on Facebook from a personal friend of mine asking me to “Check 151.im”.  Knowing her and knowing the type of message, I immediately recognized it as a phishing scheme…that is, an attempt for me to voluntarily hand over personal information to a site that I think is something I regularly use.  Very often phishing schemes involve bank information, but in this case the website in question looks like the login page for Facebook.  Understand that it is not Facebook, it is an attempt to get your username and password!

Easy integration with other social networks is new for FriendFeed

I’ve recently been getting a lot of emails from FriendFeed letting me know that somebody new is now following me over there.  I have started receiving so many that I decided it needed to look into it…was I suddenly interesting whereas I was not before, or was there some change at FriendFeed that I needed to know about?  Turns out I’m still not interesting, but there are some exciting changes at the social media aggregator FriendFeed, including the ability to import all of you Twitter friends’ feeds.

I’ve just installed the newest beta release of Tweetdeck version 0.24b, and the change from previous releases is perhaps the most significant since I started using this Adobe Air Twitter platform.  Tweetdeck now offers the ability to connect directly to your Facebook account and show your friends’ status updates. When I click on their Facebook update in Tweetdeck, it takes me directly to their Facebook profile page. Also, I can click on the status update within Tweetdeck and “retweet” it.  It shows up as “FB RT @username”…genius!

Always thinking ahead, Tweetdeck has also done something to ensure a broadening of their user base.  There are now two small check boxed next to the update bar at the top of the program, one for Twitter and one for Facebook.  I have tested both of these buttons, and I can now update to only Twitter, only Facebook or both!  I LOVE this…and I will immediately stop sending all of my Twitter updates over to Facebook.