When I wrote about the things I liked and disliked about the Kindle for iPhone app, one thing I hadn’t tried was the Notes function.

It’s the ability to leave a note in the margin, and stick a Post-It Note on the page so that you know where you left the note.

My brief review on Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith is that it’s important for you if you’re trying to use the Internet to advance your business, your career, or your brand. I think the same thing about Gary Vaynerchuk’s book Crush It.

Both have action items, and both will help you – greatly – if you understand how to apply the lessons these folks share to your own situation. These books have action items, but they are not how-to-become-the-next-Chris-Brogan-or-Gary-Vaynerchuk books. If we all tried to be the next Chris Brogan, we’d have a world full of Chris Brogans and nobody to manufacture car parts or make peanut butter.

Lowell D’Souza gives a brief overview of Trust Agents. Go read the section numbered 1-6 (the rest is D’Souza commenting that the book is so-so, but then, he was looking for a how-to), and then come back.

These are the notes I, er, wrote in the margins.

Action item: Build a listening station. This is a step-by-step list on how to keep track of what people are saying about you or your business. This is not just a matter of running an occasional Google search for yourself; Brogan and Smith teach you how to set up a feed reader and get search feeds from various searches sent to you easily.

You don’t have to be born with it. Forget the people who say you have to be born with a talent to be good at something. You get good at something by practice. Sure, chess might come easy to some people, but if the other people work hard at it, they’ll do just as well.

Be good to people. Here’s a direct quote.

In this chapter, we’re talking about taking advantage of systems, not people. People are real, have real feelings, and always deserve respect. Always consider what’s right and wrong when it comes to this stuff.

You Win by Having Goals. This is something that I will be working hard on in 2010. I understand the tools, I just have to set milestones that I want to achieve using the tools.

There’s plenty of room on the Web. You don’t have to directly compete with someone. There is plenty of room out there to work together, or do something similar, or collaborate, but not try to do the exact same thing someone else is doing. Find your niche.

Know which systems are open. Brogan and Smith use Pacman and Ms. Pacman to explain this concept. Pacman is a known system. As boards progress, prizes progress predictably, and a perfect game consists of a set number of points. Ms. Pacman, though, uses a random prize progression – at any given point, you may get a 100-point cherry or a 1,000-point banana (I made up the numbers, don’t trash Brogan and Smith for it if they’re wrong).

In real life, mastering a closed system (Pacman) means you are the best at something. Cal Ripken Jr? Best at playing consecutive baseball games. Barry Bonds? Best at hitting home runs (steroids or not – he has a number to prove it). But who’s best at walking down Main Street in Toledo? It’s an open system. We don’t even know what being the best at walking down Main Street in Toledo looks like – it’s all trial and error, and we’re kind of making the game up as we go along.

Action Item: Affiliate Marketing Brogan and Smith outline some affiliate marketing strategies.

Forge partnerships. I don’t think this needs any expanding. If you want to know what Brogan and Smith have to say, read the book.

Agent zero. We all have our personalities and roles in organizations. Agent Zero is the person who connects the people who need to know each other. I’m glad there’s a name for this.

Maintain relationships. I’m horrible at this. I’ve been getting better, and Brogan and Smith offer good tips (like pay attention to the birthday calendar function in Facebook).

Yes and. I love this concept. The idea is that someone says something, and you not only agree, but build. An improvised story might start with someone saying, “The bear sat on the sofa and read the sports page,” the next person continues by saying, “Yes, and he bemoaned the Giants’ season coming to an end.” The first person picks back up with, “Yes, and…”

And so, too, should go your discussions about collaborative projects. You build on what the other person says, rather than poo-pooing something that you don’t yet see the point of.

Web site and book recommendations. Here are some of the books and sites the authors recommend throughout the book.

• Akoha.com (social media reality game)
• Spinvox.com (voice mail as text)
• Jott.com (speak into your phone, have it transcribed as an email to you)
• Kayak.com (travel help)
• Serious Creativity by Edward de Bono
• How to Be More Interesting by Edward de Bono
• The Long Tail by Chris Anderson
• The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

» Chris Brogan on Twitter
» Julien Smith on Twitter

There were over 20 people at the Syracuse tweetup Thursday at Recess Coffee. There is no science to setting up such an event, and getting people face to face is not brain surgery. Here’s how this one came about.

Picking a date and time. Ask on Twitter. People seemed generally to think Thursday would be a good evening for them, and some mentioned specific dates. You’re not going to please everyone, so you have to just pick a date. Most people get out of work between 4 and 6, so 5:30 seems like a good starting time, figuring that some people will arrive early and some people will arrive late, but nobody has to go home and urge themselves out the door after they’ve kicked off their shoes.

Picking a place. Again, you’re never going to please everybody. But there are things everyone wants in a location: parking, something to eat and/or drink, and – something we learned from the last tweetup – someplace where they don’t have to shout over loud music and loud dinner conversations. Since Recess Coffee is smallish, I called them three weeks ahead of the date and asked if they would mind if something on the order of 20 of us showed up (the worst thing we could do for them would be to scare away anyone who would normally be there, if we were going to show up once). They said sure, and most people bought coffee (or peanut butter hot chocolate), and we’re good to go back, as long as we give them some notice.

Why? We’re already connected on Twitter, why do a tweetup? Personalities and ideas tend to germinate in person, especially when people get to talk for several minutes and exchange business cards. And when great minds get together and create great things, everybody wins.

Who’s in to plan the next one? I’ll help!

If memory serves, the following people were at Thursday night’s Syracuse tweetup. If I missed you (and I likely will miss someone), @ me and I’ll get you on the list post-haste. If you’re on MySpace, friend our hosts, Recess Coffee.

• @beaslee (Nicole)
• @billpfohl (Bill)
• @bradfordmorse (Bradford)
• @bradintheam (Brad)
• @burrito19 (Beth)
• @dagsly (Frank)
• @Gaelen2 (Pat)
• @itsahero (Rachel)
• @JayClewis (Jay)
• @Jill_HW (Jill, with Tom)
• @JoshShear (Josh)
• @kelvinringold (Kelvin)
• @kitschqueen (Susan, with Jason)
• @Mitch_M (Mitch)
• @paddyshaughn (Patrick)
• @philatsun (Phil)
• @samskelton (Sam)
• @tdog4494 (Tim)
• @toddengel (Todd)
• @tracytilly (Tracy)

Microsoft’s Bing is reportedly considering paying for the ability to search paywalled content on the Wall Street Journal’s website. With exclusivity.

Rupert Murdoch, who runs News Corp. (which is the Fox network and its cable spin-offs in the U.S., along with newspapers and TV stations in the U.S., UK and Australia), the Journal’s owner, has made no secret that he is considering blocking Google from searching paid content on the Journal’s site. Google isn’t exactly fighting back – the search engine figures that they make that option available to everyone, and if the Journal doesn’t want the Internet’s most popular search engine finding its content, that’s no skin off Google’s teeth.

But let’s say Bing pays for the privilege of being the only major search engine that can search the Journal for news (the idea being that people will want Journal content included in their searches and as such will turn to Bing instead of Google). Then let’s say a whole chain follows suit – maybe Bing signs up Hearst, or Belo, or both. At some point, Google has to counter.

When that happens, we come to a point where, if you want to include certain news outlets in your searches, you have to know which search engine carries what content. And maybe by now that extends to musical artists – perhaps Bing has paid one studio and Google another for access to search their artists’ pages.

This is where the two search engines cease to be money-making platforms for their respective companies. Why? Because now I’d just go to Bingle, which searches them both. And then Bingle gets lots of competitors, all who search both Bing and Google. And all those search engines make money.

OR:

This exclusivity fight leads someone to develop an entirely new way to search the web. And it becomes the next Google. And then the next Bing follows. And then we do this whole thing again. Vicious cycle, anyone?

(Hat tip to James Bedell for the story link.)

I tend to check Google Trends in the morning. It’s one of the things I do in terms of a morning coffee ritual when I get to work. For those not familiar, it’s a list of the things people are searching for on Google; typically it’s updated every hour or so, but sometimes it goes on for a few hours before it updates. Whatever.

Frequently, it’s people wanting to watch one of last night’s TV episodes. There’s usually something that’s been featured either on The Today Show or Good Morning America. Sometimes there’s sports scores. And sometimes it’s people in a large enough market searching for school closings.

And then sometimes it’s dead celebrities. The Internet loves to kill people. Failing that, maybe the Internet is retiring athletes mid-season.

Tuesday morning, there were two. The top search was justin bieber dead; the second hottest search was casey johnson dead.

Being a pop-culture-ophobe (OK, not really, but I’m pretty dim when it comes to this stuff), I’d never heard of either of these people. Which means that I had to wade through the search results to figure out who they were, never mind if they were actually dead.

Bieber, it turns out, is a 15-year-old kid who is some sort of pop sensation or something. He appears to be living and breathing and making teenage girls cry with his sensitivity instead of in mourning. This, apparently was not the first time the Internet killed Justin Beiber (via WikiAnswers:

Casey Johnson is the great-great-granddaughter of one of the founders of the Johnson & Johnson Company (if you’ve ever read a label on anything in a bathroom, you’ve heard of them). She’s also the daughter of Robert Wood “Woody” Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets.

Casey Johnson is, in fact, dead. She died this week at the age of 30, and at this writing, we’re not sure why.

So, what did we learn from this? That Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes was correct: Newspapers (and other traditional news outlets) are going to turn into truth filters.

While we’ll get most of our news from places like Twitter or Facebook (not necessarily those places, but places like them), where we select who we get the news from so the news will be relevant to us, we’ll still need places like The New York Times to tell us whether the news we got is actually true.

The lesson: If you’re not sure, check with someone you trust. Don’t freak out over something you heard from someone who heard from somewhere that something may or may not have happened, which means it absolutely did.

Just like in many aspects of your life, you need to actually use your brain to use the Internet effectively.

I rang in 2010 with a great crowd of people: Mike, Frank, Nicole, Mel, Joe, Geoff and Rochelle.

Every one of those names up there is linked to a Twitter account. I met all of those people thanks to Twitter (either connecting on Twitter or having them connected to someone I had connected to on Twitter), and all of them in 2009. I know there are still nay-sayers – people who think that Twitter is just a bunch of nerds chatting online who couldn’t hold a conversation in real life so they’re hiding behind a utility – but as I mentioned last month, Twitter leads to more in-person interaction, not less.

I’m not the only one who made this observation about our new year’s eve gathering.

I know the other question on your mind is: Were we talking or tweeting all night? I just went through all of our Twitter streams. Frank tweeted 3 times while we were out; one of those was a photo from our night out. Rochelle tweeted once; it was a photo of our night out. I posted once; it was a scheduled happy new year tweet I had created two days prior.

So, we were either talking to each other, or we were standing around in awkward silence. And there was no awkward silence.

I mentioned last week that I use Twitter more than other social media platforms. There’s a reason.

Throughout this year, I’ve met a whole bunch of locals I never would have met. At our first Twitter social, I met this guy and this guy, and this woman, who does this, this woman, who does this, and this guy, who does this.

I then met this guy, this guy, this woman and this guy, and I met this woman, who does this, really well. She led me to this woman, who is awesome at this – and I finally managed to meet her yesterday.

And then I left dinner and met this woman and this woman.

I’ve also met this guy, who asked me to speak to a bunch of journalists (alongside this woman and this woman), and I met this guy and this guy while doing that.

Twitter has also introduced me to this guy, who had me speak to these folks, where I met this guy, this woman, this woman and this guy.

On Thursday, the local Twitter community will meet again, this time here (at 5:30 p.m., if you’d like to join us) – I’m hoping to, at the very least meet this woman and this guy, and possibly this woman. I’m also expecting I’ll meet this guy at some point in the not-too-distant future. Oh, and this guy, too.

For those of you who are worried that spending too much time on a network like Twitter is going to cut down on your face-to-face time with people, you need to re-think that. Would I have met these folks if not for Twitter? Possibly. But it’s a pretty simple tool that costs exactly nothing to expand both your social and professional networks. Seriously.

Catch me on Twitter or LinkedIn and let’s chat if you want help getting started.

Or, why I didn’t follow you back or accept your friend request.

Something social media networks can learn from libraries: browsing. When you’re In the same way you might accidentally stumble across a good book while you were looking for another one entirely, you can stumble across interesting people serendipitously.

The great thing about social media is we all get to use it differently. Sure, various social networks have various target uses, and not every network is for everybody. And, as Buckminster Fuller alluded to, we can’t be all things to everyone, and when we try, we end up being very little to pretty much nobody.

For those who are thinking of jumping into a new network – or for those who have jumped and aren’t real comfortable – here is how I use various social networks. The way I use these networks may not be right for you, but at least I can put some ideas in your head.

Twitter. I use Twitter the most of any social network. While I don’t tweet every time I get up for another cup of coffee, I definitely mix the personal and mundane with the professional and awesome. I’ve made good connections with great people, spoken to a couple of groups, made new (real-life) friends, found a massage therapist and more on Twitter.

It can be overwhelming, but so can a river. And I wouldn’t avoid looking at a river just because it’s big and fast moving. If I miss something on Twitter, I miss it. But by and large, I’ve been happy with Twitter. Here’s how I set it up.

I use TweetDeck, which allows me to divide my Twitter stream into columns. On the left, I have the column that shows people responding to me – that way I catch them early, and can talk back. I have other columns for my inner circle of people I want to make sure I catch everything from (or as close as I can get), people who are local to me, people who tweet about social media, and people who tweet about journalism – and then one column with everybody.

As I find another group to break down into, I will create another column (at this rate, it looks like it will be cancer-related topics, since I’m starting to follow people who people might be good to know for the fundraising project I’m working on.

Facebook. I’ve become particular about who I friend on Facebook. If we’re friends in real life (not associates, not co-workers), I will certainly accept a friend request. If it’s possible that we could have a friendship or at least a friendly working relationship, I’ll probably friend you, and if that doesn’t develop, you’ll probably fall off during some purge or other.

Facebook has been great for connecting with people from high school. Thanks anyway. If we weren’t actually friends in high school, and your name kinda sounds vaguely familiar, why would I want to be your cyber-friend now? For some people, Facebook is about how many “friends” they can amass – I tend to keep it to people I don’t mind sharing with, and who I’m interested in hearing from and about.

So don’t be offended if you cold call me and I ignore your Facebook request. Get to know me in real life first.

LinkedIn. I use LinkedIn purely for professional connections. If we are currently colleagues, I absolutely will not connect with you on LinkedIn – you don’t need to know what I’m doing on the job front, and I don’t need to know what you’re doing.

On the other hand, if we’re in the same industry, I’ll accept your LinkedIn connection in hopes that we may be able to someday have a mutually beneficial professional relationship. It’s not a place for me to be social; it’s truly a professional networking space for me.

Flickr. I barely use Flickr. I’ve turned to Twitpic, which integrates with Twitter.

What do you do if someone doesn’t respond to you, doesn’t accept your connection request, or doesn’t follow you?

Nothing. I’m confident in what I’m putting out there. If someone has no interest in what I do, that’s OK. Other people do.

The one rule I do have, though, is if you Direct Message me on Twitter (which you can only do if the party you’re sending the message to is following you), you better be following me back, otherwise, I’m going to unfollow you. Don’t try to reach me through a channel I’m not able to reach you through.

Yesterday, I did sort of an entrepreneur-focused piece on Chris Hughes’ visit to Syracuse. I went into the office (I work for syracuse.com, so the “we” and “our” refers to what we do there) and wound up re-writing from more of a company perspective, and I think everything’s still relevant, so I wanted to share it here. Some of it is repeated, some of it is new, all of it is reworded in a different voice. I think these messages are relevant to many businesses, even bricks-and-mortar shops getting into social media for the first time.

Chris Hughes, one of Facebook’s 3 4 founders and one of the brains behind my.BarackObama.com, spoke in Syracuse last night, and he had some good take-away messages.

A little background on Chris and Facebook

Facebook was founded in 2004 by three Harvard sophomores. They wanted a way to share essentially what they were doing with their friends in a more passive way – they didn’t want to have to pick up the phone or email people or find them in the dining hall to see what they were doing that night or that weekend. So they wrote some code and they were able to set their statuses and in three weeks, 6,000 people on campus had started accounts.

They opened up the platform to a few more schools, and found lots of interest, so they opened it more and more and now they have 325 million active users. Active users.

They were college sophomores in 2004, so at 19, that makes them in their early teens when the dot-coms when bust – they didn’t experience it the way other entrepreneurs and investors who are venturing into online did, so they look at the business model a lot differently than someone even five or ten years older than they are.

A side note: “Unfriend” is the word of the year. Chris said he and his friends have primarily used the term “defriend.” Also “unfriend” appears in literature during the 17th century, but seems to have faded from vernacular use around 1659.

Focus on your product

One of the most important things a business can do is focus on its product. What do you do? What are you good at? Why do people come to you? Once you have that figured out, you need to make sure that for everything that comes in front of you, ask, “How does this affect my product?”

Our product is current, local, relevant information – news, entertainment, sports, classifieds, etc. – so Chris’s suggestion would be, for every partnership opportunity, for every chance to build a new page, figure out how it enhances our core product. If the answer is, “it probably doesn’t,” don’t do it.

Build a little bit at a time

A lot of companies spend a lot of time – and money – building something huge. They bring in advisers and investors even before anybody knows what they do, and then when they launch, they hope people come. If they don’t, the companies then turn around and spend a lot more time and money. On marketing.

Try it the other way. Build something small. If nobody comes or if it’s not as good as you thought it was, you’ve lost a few weeks and a little money, and you can scrap it. If it catches on, great. Then build the next little piece, and eventually it will grow into something big and great. It may be entirely different from what you initially planned, but your customers will have bought in at every level along the way.

We’re not starting companies here, but we do roll out a lot of projects, some big, some small, and sometimes, we build too much at once. This is a good lesson.

What’s next online: Participatory Web, transparency, crowdsourcing and filters

We’re entering a new era of participation, that’s for sure, and Web users are only going to get more participatory. Before Facebook and Twitter, there were other ways to participate – blogging platforms, Flickr, Geocities – and that’s going to continue. Heck, our forums have been around since the stone age in Internet terms.

We’re going to see that grow, and tools like Facebook Connect and OpenID are going to help. Any schmo with a domain will be able to implement a couple of lines of code and have people post stuff in a community format and have the fact that they’re posting to schmowithadomain.com appear on their Facebook pages.

And while we’re going to get more participatory, things aren’t going to get chaotic.

“Transparency is good,” Chris said, but you have to be careful with what you’re transparent about and who you’re transparent to. That shouldn’t be news to any of you, but it’s not just about people being transparent, it’s about companies being transparent. Let people know what’s going on – to some extent, of course. Don’t give away your secrets, but don’t hide in a dark corner away from the world.

He also cited an example from his work on the Obama campaign. Some people were using the platform created for support to oppose the candidate on some issues, but rather than shut them down, Obama addressed them, saying he disagreed, and the campaign let them keep using the platform. They let the people know they were hearing the dissent, but didn’t just turn it off. [There might be a lesson there for our comments.]

Crowds tend to be right, eventually. Facebook is available in over 70 languages, and has never hired a professional translator. They asked users to have at it, and users who knew both English and the other language voted for the best ones, and eventually those wound up “winning.”

Chris didn’t mention this, but earlier this year someone did a study and found that Encyclopedia Britannica Online and Wikipedia have roughly the same error rate. He also didn’t mention James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds – essentially, if you get 50 people together and have them all guess the weight of a particular cow, some are going to be way high, some are going to be way low, but if you average all the guesses, 19 times out of 20 you wind up within a couple of pounds.

Filtering of information is one of the things we’re starting to see, and that’s going to get deeper. Your friends and the people you’re interested in professionally are filtering information for you – you’re going to increasingly get your news from social networks. This is going to increase the relevancy of information you get, but it’s going to decrease the diversity of the information you get.

The mainstream media model is going to change, but it’s still going to act as a truth filter. If you want to find out if Kanye West is indeed dead (the Internet definitely killed him a few weeks ago), you’re going to check in with The New York Times, or some other trusted news outlet.

Some commentary on filtering

I think this last bit on filtering is important for us. We are a truth and information filter, and if we also put on some personality, we’re going to become not only that truth filter, but also a friendly, relevant filter for people as well. Our staffs – whether we’re out in the community evangelizing the product or not – are the face and personality of the company, and if we all bring a little something to what people see, they’re going to like us.