Uncarved

It’s like this: Google+ is a hydra. Google has clearly tried to combine everything about one’s GMail account into a cohesive single identity, but what on earth is this about?!!

The pic in which I’m smoking a Davidoff cigar is the one Google seems to consider my profile photo, as it’s the one I see in all the settings management screens, and yet that silly cactus shows up all throughout my activity streams.

If anyone has any sort of clue on this one, please do advise.

Check it out Google, wtf

I recently discovered a neat little “trick” on my iPad (and iPhone): I’ve stumbled upon a way to listen to music streaming from Internet radio stations while I do “other things,” like check my email, take photos, or write text messages.

While iPhone OS 4.0 — due out this summer — will finally deliver the long-requested ability to allow users to listen to their Pandora or Last.fm radio streams in the “background” by virtue of its new “multi-tasking” capabilities, the solution I’ve stumbled upon works (in slight variations) today with any device running iPhone OS 3.x.

Although this little trick won’t work with Pandora, since you must be using a Pandora client to stream their music, you can use it with any radio station which exposes its MP3 or AAC music stream via a multimedia playlist file URL (which will typically end in .pls); basically any radio station you’ll find on Live 365, Soma FM, and more.

I’m a fan of Soma FM’s Secret Agent radio station, so we’ll use that for our example; feel free to try this out for any station you like.

The process is super easy, but slightly different between the handheld iPhone OS devices (eg, iPhone and iPod Touch) and iPads (for which it’s actually a bit spiffier), so I’ll take you through the steps for doing it on each one.

iPhone / iPod Touch

Launch Mobile Safari, and head to the following URL:

http://somafm.com/secretagent48.pls

You’ll see the following:

Safari fetches the PLS file URL

Once the playlist file is loaded, Safari will find the URL of the music stream, and start playing the music, and you’ll see this:

Safari has started playing the audio stream

Now — click the Home button and, say, check in on your email. Note that the music continues to play.

Isn’t that fantastic?

Just one caveat, though: you won’t be able to browse other websites in Safari until you click the “Done” button (top left), which — as you might expect — causes the music to stop playing.

One workaround is to use an alternative browser, like iCab, Opera Mini, or any of a number of other web browsers (some paid, some free) available in the App Store.

iPad

Things get a little cooler on the iPad. The steps to get you listening to the music stream are the same, but we can do a few more things once the music starts playing on the iPad.

Once the music starts to play, you’ll see this:

Safari playing the audio stream

Note one key difference to note, however: unlike the iPhone’s Mobile Safari app, the iPad’s Mobile Safari continues to show you the browser chrome up top.

For starters, this means that you may continue browsing other websites in Safari on the iPad by simply tapping the tabs icon at the top:

Change tabs or create new ones.

What’s more you can actually create a bookmark for the radio station, so you can quickly listen any time:

Create bookmarks for your favorite stations

But — and this is where I started to get a little verklempt — it gets just slightly more fantastic: you can bookmark it to your Home Screen.

Now I can fire up Secret Agent FM from my Home Screen, just like Pandora or Last.fm.

Looks like the folks at Soma FM went the extra mile to specify a Home Screen icon for their website. Your mileage will vary with the availability of your favorite station’s dedicated icon for your Home Screen, however, depending on the site publisher.

Meanwhile, go forth and enjoy streaming some music while you’re sending those texts or reading the Times.

Check it out, Tutorials iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, multi-tasking, music, tips

Take this sucker with huge grains of salt.

Not sure how I’d feel about each app having its own keyboard, but who’s to say which details would make it into the shipping version, and which not?

Check it out Apple, rumor, video

Tim O’Reilly, of O’Reilly Media, Inc., discussing the idea of government as a platform vs. government as a vending machine at OSCON 2009 (20 mins):

Tim’s thoughts here echo, add flesh around, and enhance some concepts that will be discussed in the piece that I’d been writing throughout parts of my recent vacation to Greece.

A more concise summary of these ideas is also available for those with time constraints (4 mins):

Check it out, Government 2.0 government, Government 2.0, Tim O'Reilly, video

A summary from Web Worker Daily’s 10 Golden Rules of Social Media:

1. Respect the Spirit of the ‘Net: communication and connection to people and information.

2. Listen.

3. Add value. Before posting a message as a new participant in a forum, ask yourself: How is this providing value to the conversation? To the community?

4. Respond.

5. Do Good Things. This goes beyond adding value online. It means fundamentally changing your business model from a single bottom line — profit — to a triple bottom line — people, planet, profit — and then perpetuating this social responsibility to all you do in business, including online marketing and selling.

6. Share the Wealth. In social media, sharing is the fuel of the conversation engine.

7. Give Kudos. Social media works when you are generous. There is nothing wrong with self-promotion, but things really take off when you give others praise or a moment in the spotlight. The rise of retweeting — real retweeting, not spammy retweeting — shows how far giving credit to others can go in social spaces.

8. Don’t Spam.

9. Be Real. Authenticity is the secret ingredient behind any good and valuable social media marketing campaign.

10. Collaborate. Before you dive into social media for marketing and selling, take a look at who is out there and who is doing it well. How can you work with them, instead of trying to muscle your way into the space with all of your dollars?
    

The author of the article largely organized it to speak to larger commercial organizations, but the basic points are valuable advice for developing the identity any type of brand on the social Internet.

Check out the full article for a fuller take.

Check it out howto, social media