David Eaves on coping with difficult comments

by Rob Cottingham | Mar 25, 2009 | Social Signal

Some blog comments are easy to deal with. They praise you to the heavens, share a related story or gently offer a different perspective… that is, they’re a positive part of the conversation. You thank, you respond (or they’re comment spam, in which case you report them to Mollom or Akismet and then delete) and the circle of life continues.

But other comments are hard. They get your back up. They seem to question not just your argument but your integrity. The more you read them, the clearer it becomes that they were written by evil, evil people. And with your fight-or-flight mechanism firmly in gear, you write a blistering reply…

…Maybe there’s a better way. Negotiation ninja and friend of the show David Eaves knows a lot about understanding and resolving conflict. And he brought that insight to bear on the thorny issue of online commenting in a presentation in February at a Northern Voice panel. (Jessi covered the panel here.)

David has lots of great advice and insight to offer, such as this:

[A] key lesson that came to me while developing the presentation is that most blogs, social media projects, and online projects in general, really need a social contract – or as Skirky describes it, a bargain – that the organizer and the community agree to. Often such contracts (or bargains) are strongly implied, but I believe it is occasionally helpful to make them explicit – particularly on blogs or projects that deal with contentious (politics) or complicated (many open source projects) issues.

(I’ve resisted the urge to leave a venomous comment on his blog post just to see how he handles it.)

If you missed his presentation, here’s your chance to glean a little of David’s thinking on the subject: he’s posted it to Slideshare.

Enjoy. And by all means, comment.

Dealing with Difficult Blog Comments

View more presentations from David Eaves.

Veerle Pieters at SXSW on colour and the Social Signal web redesign

by Rob Cottingham | Mar 23, 2009 | Social Signal

For something that has such a huge impact on our emotional response, colour often gets surprisingly short shrift in web projects. People who can argue for hours about the relative merits of “About” over “About Us” will flip a coin to choose between blue, purple or green as the colour for text links.

Maybe that’s because colour, frankly, scares the daylights out of a lot of us. It’s complex and mysterious; we put together a combination of colours that looks hideous, yet a designer tweaks a few values here and there and suddenly it’s a thing of grace and beauty. Or we throw something together that looks great on the monitor, only to find that the printer has turned our oranges into fuschias, blues into tuquoises and smug smiles into devastated frowns.

The cure for a mystery, of course, is information… and that’s what folks at SXSW got earlier this month when one of our favourite people, Veerle Pieters, served on a panel about colour in web design.

Veerle knows what she’s talking about. She’s the world-renowed web designer who redesigned SocialSignal.com; you can see her handiwork all around this post, from her bold rainbow reimagining of our logo to the crimson-to-orange gradient that wraps our content in warmth. (If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, please drop by the site and check out what she’s done – we think it’s jaw-dropping.)

No wonder, then, that the example she used for her case study was this very redesign:

The very bright and wide range of colors for the logo and house-style, makes it rather challenging. It’s a matter of applying them correctly, defining which are primary ones and which ones are only used on occasions to set certain elements of the design apart. The mainly warm color palette reflects the openness and friendliness of this company. In different slides I show and explain to the audience about my color decisions for the creation of their website.

Veerle has a blog post outlining how the panel covered everything from colour theory to cultural differences, accessibility to gadgets for professionals. The post is full of tidbits of information, and it’ll whet your appetite to see the panel itself. (The SXSW panels and presentations have been making their way to YouTube in bits and pieces over the past few days, so we’ll see if this one gets there soon.)

Revenge of the sockpuppets

by Rob Cottingham | Mar 23, 2009 | Social Signal

(person on psychiatrist’s couch) My alts have turned against me.

Handling your identity across many online profiles

by Rob Cottingham | Mar 18, 2009 | Social Signal

According to Microsoft Canada, the average Canuck has seven online profiles out there. A lot of us have a lot more – some active, some abandoned and gathering dust, and still others that are forgotten yet still chug automatically along. (I haven’t opened my FriendFeed page in well over a month, but it includes things I did only a few minutes ago.)

Vancouver Sun reporter Gillian Shaw takes a look at how we’re managing all of those online lenses into our lives, in an article today titled “Cyberhydra” (the source of that Microsoft stat, by the way). She talks to a number of Vancouver social media types, including Jennifer Lowther and Kris Krug, about how closely their readers follow their every movement, and how to handle that attention.

She quotes Kris as saying,

“You could literally reconstitute my life from my digital identity. You would recreate the story of my life from the landmarks I have left out there.”

At one level that’s dazzlingly cool. But at another, the implications for privacy are pretty bracing. I’m in the article too, talking about how social media encourages us to conduct a kind of open surveillance on ourselves, and how aggregating our online information can lead to a remarkably comprehensive portrait.

I went into more detail on privacy in the aggregation era in a blog post a while back, and at the time I suggested approaches people creating online communities could take to start minimizing the privacy risk to their members.

Now let’s look at it from the other direction. Here are five starting points for managing all of that info we’re putting out into the digital world… and asserting some control over the picture that emerges:

• Intention, intention, intention. There are lots of ways to more or less automatically update the world on where you are, what you’re doing and how you’re feeling. Think twice about that approach, and consider instead: what do you want to achieve? Who do you want to reach? Why are you sharing this, and is there a better way to do it?
• Check your settings. Services like Facebook give you surprisingly fine-grained control over how widely your information is shared. Think about what kind of information you want to broadcast to the world, what you want to share only with a few trusted friends, and what falls somewhere in between.
• Think big. Don’t just think about your friends who are following your updates; broaden your horizons. A prospective employer, your parents, your kids, your landlord… depending on how you’re sharing information, they could all be reading about what you’re up to. And if something you do or say goes viral, your audience could be exponentially bigger than you ever thought.
• Think social. Chances are you aren’t just sharing information about yourself, but about the people you interact with. Are you respecting their privacy? “Just met with (name) who’s thinking about leaving her job” might not go over well with their boss, and a photo of last night’s drunken frolicking may cause a friend some major embarassment.
• Think aggregation. This is the hardest skill of all, and it’ll take some getting used to. But we all have to start thinking about the information we put into the world as a whole – even if we’re putting it in a lot of different places. Google, Technorati and other search and aggregation tools can put those pieces together very quickly and easily.

Does this sound scary? Maybe. But there’s a positive side to this, too. It’s easier than ever before to stay in touch with each other, and to quickly know the details of each other’s lives. When we use that information positively, and with a sense of purpose, it can be a powerful way of strengthening ties of community and friendship.

A little intention and attention – and discretion – can go a long way to making that happen.

How to display a Google Form in a particular language

by Rob Cottingham | Mar 17, 2009 | Social Signal

Google Forms are one of the lesser-known and more powerful features of Google Docs. They let you capture data from your users in a Google Spreadsheet, via simple web-based forms that can stand on their own or sit embedded in a web page. Like this:

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Now, suppose you need to create that form in, say, English and French. Not hard: two forms, two spreadsheets, and you’re done. But when you look at the French version, the questions may be in French but all of the interface text is still in English:

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Here’s how you fix that: just change the URL for the form by adding a parameter for the language you want the form to appear in… in our case, “fr” for French.

This is the original embed code that Google creates for the form:


<iframe src="https://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?key=pnY7RN2L8C5h3PQUcS0RKIg"
width="310" height="455" frameborder="0" marginheight="0"
marginwidth="0">Loading...</iframe>


Change that source URL to read http://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?key=pnY7RN2L8C5h3PQUcS0RKIg&hl=fr. Adding &hl=fr is all it takes:

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You can find a list of codes for each of the languages Google supports here, from Afrikaans (af) to Zulu (zu).