I feel irritated when I see so many event professionals focusing on “new” event technology while ignoring existing technology that, in many cases, could greatly improve their events at a fraction of the cost.
There, I said it.
Every year there are plenty of conferences where you can go and see the latest and greatest mobile and gamification apps, attendee tracking systems, registrant analytics, mobile networking, video streaming platforms, etc. Vendors are happy to sponsor these events. They use them to showcase their wares and, hopefully, convince attendees that their new technology is worth buying.
Let me be clear—I have nothing against new technology per se. (If I was I’d be a hypocrite, given that I spent twenty-three profitable years as an information technology consultant.) What’s sad is that too much of event professionals’ limited continuing education time is spent investigating shiny new toys and apps while overlooking inexpensive and proven ways to provide effective learning, connection, engagement, and community building at their events.
Why does this happen? Here are two reasons:
We fixate on the new
“Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.”
—Alan Kay, from a Hong Kong press conference in the late 1980s
We are enveloped by so much rapidly changing technology that we fixate on what is new.
What was new quickly becomes taken for granted and largely invisible. As David Weinberger remarks: “Technology sinks below our consciousness like the eye blinks our brain filters out.”
Although technology in the form of human tools has existed for over three million years and we’ve had books for over half a millennium, the first history of technology wasn’t written until 1954. Flip charts, 5×8 cards, comfortable seating, room sets, healthy food and beverage, and hand voting have been around for a long time. They are old-fashioned technology to event professionals, so we don’t pay them much attention (unless they can be reframed in a sexy way, e.g. “brain food”). But that doesn’t mean they’re not important. Far from it.
Technology isn’t just manufactured goods and software
Our definition of what is and isn’t “technology” is far too narrow. We tend to think of technology in terms of products and embedded implementations (e.g. software). But this is an incredibly restrictive viewpoint. Kevin Kelly, in his thought-provoking book What Technology Wants, lists three of the most important human technologies:
Language: A technology that “shifted the burden of evolution in humans away from genetic inheritance…[allowing] our language and culture to carry our species’ aggregate learning as well.”
Writing: A technology that “changed the speed of learning in humans by easing the transmission of ideas across territories and across time.”
Science: “The invention that enables greater invention.”
Once we start thinking about technology with a wider lens like this, all kinds of possibilities arise.
Language, writing, and science are outside our conventional, narrow-scope technology. The conventional technology we use to instantiate the sounds, symbols, etc. that they use is secondary. Language, writing, and science are primarily about human process.
When we expand our perspective on event technology to include process, many unexamined aspects of our events come into view. A few examples:
Why do we open conferences with a keynote?
Why do so few people speak during conference sessions?
How do we know if the sessions we’re providing are what attendees actually want?
Why do we provide entertainment during socials?
Are socials the best way to meet other attendees?
Why do we close conferences with a keynote or dinner?
When you start honestly investigating issues like these, instead of simply repeating things the same “safe” way you’ve previously experienced at conferences you’ll discover all kinds of human process technology that can fundamentally improve your event in ways that a new gizmo or app cannot.
So I urge every event professional to re-envisage event technology to include the process used during your events. Concentrate less on improving logistical processes: registration, decor, A/V, F&B, and so on. These are secondary processes, and we know how to do them well. Instead, focus on improving the human process you use throughout the event venue and duration. How you
How does one move an unlimited AT&T data plan to a new iPad?
[I wrote this post so that others in my situation won’t have to go through what I did. Feel free to skip the introduction and concentrate on the nitty gritty instructions.]
Possibly boring background and introduction
The original Apple iPad shipped on April 30, 2010, and, that very afternoon one arrived at my rural home. It included an unlimited AT&T cellular data access plan for the sum of $29.99/month. I chose this plan because AT&T advertised that I could turn it off for the months I didn’t need it. Within 30 days, AT&T reneged on this promise and discontinued all unlimited data plans.
Perhaps to avoid a class action suit, the company said that people like me could keep their unlimited plans. So far AT&T has done this, despite announcing in June 2012 that they would throttle all remaining “unlimited” plans after 3GB (3G/4G) or 5GB (4G LTE) or more of data in a billing cycle.
I have been happy with my original iPad, and was not planning to upgrade to a “New” (3rd generation) iPad. But in June the good folks at the annual edACCESS business meeting insisted that the organization buy me a new one. I tried to decline, but they were most insistent. Thank you edACCESSians!
Technical support trials and tribulations
I had heard that I could move my unlimited data plan to a new iPad and called Apple to confirm. Apple said I would need to talk to AT&T and patched me through. The first AT&T tech was unable to answer my questions and I asked to talk to a second. The second AT&T tech told me it was a simple matter and gave me directions that subsequently I found were not accurate.
When I received my new iPad I discovered that what AT&T told me (that I could switch the plan on the new iPad itself) did not work. I called them again and was led through an incorrect procedure that wiped out all my work customizing the new iPad. I still could not transfer the plan!
After wasting far too much time, I finally discovered that you need to go to a special AT&T website (which is not documented on AT&T’s website as far as I can see) to transfer an unlimited plan to a new iPad. To avoid my trials and tribulations, follow these steps, which should take about ten minutes:
The nitty gritty: How to move an unlimited AT&T data plan to a new iPad
Turn on your new iPad and go through the setup. Don’t bother to restore from a backup of your old iPad at this point.
Go into Settings->General->About so you can see the IMEI and ICCID fields for your new iPad.
Click on Update Device Information, enter the new iPad’s IMEI and ICCID numbers and click Next. Then click Submit at the bottom of the user & payment information screen. Click Continue and you’ll be logged out and told to login again in a few minutes.
Login again and your Data Plan should now show as “Unlimited MB for 30 days – LTE”. You’ve switched your plan to the new iPad, but you’re not done yet. If you check your email at this point, you’ll see a worrying message from AT&T saying that the automatic renewal of your plan has been canceled! Don’t let this happen!
On the new iPad go to Settings->Cellular Data->View Account and login. Choose Edit User & Payment Information and re-activate automatic plan renewal. You will receive another email from AT&T confirming that your data plan will renew automatically every 30 days. Phew!
Your old iPad will now have no data plan associated with it. If you want to add a new (limited data) plan to your old iPad do not login with your old email and password (the ones now associated with your new iPad). Instead, on the old iPad go to Settings->Cellular Data->View Account and enter User and Login Information for a new account (one that must use a different email address to login than the one now in use on your new iPad). You’ll then have a range of current data plans from which to choose.
Conclusion
I don’t know how many iPads are floating around with an unlimited AT&T data plan, though Apple sold at least a million iPads of all kinds during the time the plan was available. But I would guess that there are still probably a hundred thousand unlimited data plan iPads around. A quick Google search shows that many people in my situation have been looking in vain for clear directions to transfer their plan to a new device.
AT&T, do your customer service reputation and your tech staff a favor by posting clear instructions on how to do this transfer in a prominent place on your website. I suspect many will thank you. I certainly would have.
Here are my favorite WordPress plugins for a small business website.
These days when considering a web presence for your small business, it’s hard to not be impressed with the flexibility and power available from a self-hosted WordPress site. Although WordPress’ roots are in the blog creation world, it’s pretty easy to build a WordPress site where the blog is just another tab in the menu hierarchy. (Example? This site!) And with over 17,000 plugins available that can extend the functionality of your website, you’ll almost certainly be able to add just the special features you want. Perhaps the biggest problem is that there are so many plugins that you could use, and, for performance reasons, you don’t want to have more of them activated than you need.
I’m not the first, and I won’t be the last person to write a post like this. But I hope you’ll find some gems in the following list. Here, in alphabetical order, are my favorite 14 WordPress plugins.
Akismet (free for personal use, $5/month for small business sites)
“Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam” sang the merry men of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (As a schoolboy, I watched the original episode with this song.) I knew that my blog posts were finally gaining traction when the volume of spam comments started to soar. Akismet uses the combined submissions of its users to automatically flag comment and trackback spam. On my site, it has successfully rejected hundreds of thousands of spam messages and only missed a few hundred.
You can see the comments that Akismet flags as spam on an informative screen and quickly delete them, or—rarely needed—reclassify them.
If your blog is getting any kind of decent amount of traffic (this site has had a million page views in the last seven months) you need Akismet. It will save you significant time dealing with the spam comments and backlinks that will otherwise plague your posts.
BackupBuddy ($75 for two licenses + 1 year of updates. Discounts are often available.)
You back up your computer files regularly, right? (If you haven’t yet learned that computers die and data disappears, you will, and it won’t be pleasant.) Imagine your pain if your painstakingly created website became corrupted or vanished one day, a victim of a glitch, a crashed host server, or an evil hacker.
I used to use my hosting company’s free backup service to make complete backups of my website, but they only let me do this once every 30 days! Not frequent enough, and I needed to run through multiple steps to get everything. Although I am still using the same hosting company if I ever decided to move I would have no idea how to transfer my backed-up files onto a new service.
Enter BackupBuddy. This is an expensive plugin but for my peace of mind it’s worth it. Backups are one-click operations from your WordPress Dashboard, or you can schedule them to occur automatically. You can back up just your WordPress database or the entire site (including that massive media library you’ve uploaded). The plugin has the capability to painlessly recreate your site on another host, aka site migration, and comes with two licenses to let you do this.
Bad things happen to good websites and backup is essential. Whether you use BackupBuddy or another solution, back up your website regularly!
As I write this I have 1,501 outbound links scattered around the posts and pages of this website, and 2 of them are broken. How do I know this? Why, thanks to the invaluable Broken Link Checker, of course! Links are always going dark on the web, and some of them could be on your website. This fantastic plugin periodically checks that every link on your website still points to a valid page. Those that break can be easily reviewed and updated, or if they have disappeared for good, unlinked. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to install this plugin to keep a site reliable and broken-link-free.
Let me start by emphasizing that you need to keep your WordPress installation up to date. I learned this the hard way last year when I started seeing ads for cheap drugs that appeared to be linked to pages on my website appearing in Google searches. I was still running an older vulnerable version of WordPress, and the subsequent cleaning of my site took a large amount of time. Trust me, you do not want this to happen to you. Despite being an IT consultant for 25 years, I am so glad these days I do not have to understand and protect against all the nefarious ways that hackers can subvert WordPress websites. That’s BulletProof Security’s job. The plugin guards your crucial WordPress configuration files against attack.
A warning is in order though; I don’t find this plugin particularly easy to set up. It conflicted with my webhost’s statistics reports and figuring out how to make them available again required some configuration changes that I had to get from the author of the program (who responded quickly and accurately I might add). There are many other security conflicts like this that you might run into, and they are documented at exhaustive length in the associated support forums. In addition, plugin updates can lose these custom changes unless you install them just so.
Nevertheless, this plugin supplies peace of mind, albeit in a complex package. This is one plugin you may want someone with technical expertise to install and maintain for you.
This neat little plugin piggybacks onto Akismet to further reduce comment spam. If Akismet identifies a comment as spam, Conditional CAPTCHA will ask the commenter to complete a simple CAPTCHA. If they fail, then the comment will be automatically discarded or trashed, while if they pass, it will be allowed into the spam queue (or approved, if you so choose).
Comments not flagged as spam by Akismet will appear on your site as usual.
I have seen a dramatic decrease in spam displayed in Akismet since adding this plugin. Recommended!
Everyone needs a few user-fillable forms on their website for one thing or another. There are several plugins that supply this functionality; Contact Form 7 is the one I use. Although it’s optional I strongly recommend you turn on the CAPTCHA option supplied by the free Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin to prevent bots from submitting spammy forms. This plugin has been 100% reliable and is easy to set up.
I used the default WordPress comment system for a long time but switched to Disqus about a year ago. (In case you were wondering, it has the capability to import all your existing WordPress comments.) Disqus has more features than the WordPress comment system and I have found it to be reliable. It’s also prettier. One great feature of Disqus is that it is available on many blogging platforms, allowing you to see your own comments across multiple sites.
I maintain an event list on my website that contains information about upcoming peer conferences I’ve been told about and conferences I’m facilitating or at which I’m presenting. The Events plugin allows you to display this list in a sidebar and/or on a page and includes the capability to display separate lists of historic or future events. The plugin has fields for all the usual information you’d want to share about an event and is highly customizable. This plugin does exactly what I want.
You’d probably like to display a collection of testimonials from happy customers about your wonderful products and services, wouldn’t you? The Quotes Collection plugin does just that via a simple interface. You can choose whether the quotes include an author and/or a source, how and when they get refreshed, etc. I display a random testimonial in my sidebar; I now have quite a collection! Don’t miss this easy way to add a little interest and customer-supplied positive sales message to an appropriate place on your website.
Currently, I have 180+ blog posts on my website. Some of them, cough cough, are quite good and still relevant, even if they were written a couple of years ago. How can I expose these old-but-good posts to an internet world that thrives on the new?
Using Tweet Old Post, that’s how.
Although I’m not a fan of excessive automated tweeting, I use Tweet Old Post to tweet two to three randomly chosen old posts every day. As the author explains: “This plugin helps you to keep your old posts alive by tweeting about them and driving more traffic to them from Twitter. It also helps you to promote your content. You can set the time and no of tweets to post to drive more traffic.” I’ll add that you can exclude posts individually (e.g. if they refer to out-of-date information or one-time events) and/or by WordPress Category, and you can supply the hashtags to be added to each tweet. The plugin only supports a single Twitter account, so if you have more than one you’ll need to decide which account to use.
Since I started using Tweet Old Post, I’ve seen a measurable increase in visitors to my blog. Use it once you’ve built up a respectable volume of posts—but don’t overdo it!
After my frustrating experience with my website being hacked (see the BulletProof plugin above) I decided to implement a belt-and-suspenders strategy for site security. So, besides BulletProof, I also run this plugin, which simply supplies a warning message when any files in my WordPress directories are added, deleted, or changed. This means that I get warnings when I upload media for posts or install new versions of plugins, which is a little distracting, but I like the knowledge that if something slips past Bulletproof this plugin should catch the attempt to install new stuff on my server. File Monitor can be set to skip user-chosen directories so that backups, captchas, caching, site maps, and other routine processes won’t constantly trigger it.
I sleep a little better each night with this plugin installed.
As you might expect from the name, Popular Posts is a sidebar widget that displays your most popular blog posts. A wide range of options allows you to customize how the posts appear, and the plugin adds a Dashboard panel that shows blog post statistics. Nice! This is a great way to showcase what visitors like on your blog and lure them into exploring your content further.
Every blog post you write and every revision you save while writing is stored in WordPress’s SQL database. Over time this database gets bloated with old post revisions, deleted drafts, spam comments—all kinds of what technical folks call cruft. WP-Optimize allows you to easily slim down your WordPress database back to the core content. This can improve the responsiveness of your website and make it a little quicker to back up. A few clicks to a svelter site, and a satisfying display of the space freed up. What’s not to like?
OK, I admit it, I’m a bit of a cheapskate. The Conferences That Work website uses inexpensive shared hosting, which crams multiple websites onto a single server. As a result, my site used to often take over a second to return a webpage from a click (use a free service like gtmetrix.com to monitor the responsiveness of your site—the results may surprise you). Earlier this year, hosting provider issues that I won’t go into here led me to investigate caching my website using the WP Super Cache plugin. The results were drastic—my average response time is now 1/5 of a second, a very significant and welcome improvement.
Setting up WP Super Cache appears a first sight to be a bit overwhelming, though the process is easier than the installation instructions imply as the plugin includes a number of checks that everything is configured correctly and will tell you what to do if it isn’t. Enough people (over three million downloads!) use this plugin to reassure me that it’s solid, and I can’t argue with the 5x speedup in site performance. Recommended!
Final thoughts
Most of these plugins are donationware. Send the author some money if they make your life easier.
Check that any plugin you install is compatible with the version of WordPress you’re running. Check compatibility before you upgrade WordPress too!
I don’t claim that this list is definitive. In fact, I won’t be surprised to learn of better choices for the functions these plugins supply. That’s one of the best reasons for writing posts like these; I’ll learn new stuff! But I hope this list of my 14 favorite WordPress plugins is useful to you too. Let me know in the comments!
Stimulated by the March 13 #eventprofs Twitter chat, here are some relevant resources to get you started or learn more about using this suddenly-popular tool in the events profession.
I expect much will be written about the problems encountered with communications with the remote pods at Event Camp Twin Cities 2011 (ECTC) last week. Rather than concentrate on what went wrong, I thought I’d share some ideas on hybrid event architecture that grew from my on-site experience and a long conversation with Brandt Krueger, who produced the event, the following morning. Without Brandt’s explanations, I wouldn’t have been able to write this post, but any errors or omissions are mine and mine alone. I am not a production professional, so I write this post in the spirit of provoking discussion and input from those who have far more experience in this area.
Event Camp Twin Cities hybrid event design
Let’s start with a brief description of the set-up at Event Camp Twin Cities. As with many hybrid events, there were three audiences:
The local on-site attendees in Minneapolis
Seven “pods” (small groups of people that gathered in Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Toronto, Vancouver, Silicon Valley, and two corporate headquarters)
Individual remote audience members
Both the pods and the individual remote audience members viewed the activities in Minneapolis via Sonic Foundry’s Mediasite platform. This product provides, via a browser-embedded player, A/V from the event (e.g., a presenter speaking) alongside additional media feeds (e.g., presenter slides). The flexibility of this technology, however, includes a cost that contributed to the problems encountered at Event Camp Twin Cities. The “real-time” feed delivered to remote attendees was delayed approximately twenty seconds.
During ECTC, individual remote audience members viewed the Mediasite feed and interacted with the proceedings via Twitter as a backchannel, ably assisted by remote audience host (aka virtual emcee) Emilie Barta. From the accounts I’ve heard, this channel worked well.
The pods also viewed the Mediasite feed and could interact via Twitter. To provide additional interactivity for the pods, Event Camp Twin Cities set up live Skype calls to the pods. Several pods clustered on one Skype call. When local participants wanted to have a real-time conversation, they switched to Skype, turning off the Mediasite feed. This is like the way a radio show caller turns off their time-delayed broadcast radio once on the phone.
How it worked out
For reasons that are not clear to me, this switchover process did not work well at ECTC. Rather than concentrate on what happened and why, I’d like to suggest another architectural approach for the pods’ experience that may prevent similar problems in the future.
Instead of switching between delayed and real-time channels for the pods, I think that pod <—> local communications should be set up only via real-time channels. One reason that the pods at ECTC use the (delayed) Mediasite feed is that it provides a convenient aggregation of the two broadcast sources needed for any event these days—A/V of what is going on at the venue plus a channel for slides or other supporting materials. That works for the individual remote audience, which only interacts with the event via Twitter. But when you want to have significant real-time, two-way communication between pods and the main event, you have to handle the complexity involved in switching between delayed and real-time channels on the fly.
Possible improvements
Here’s how my approach would work. All the pods would receive a single real-time broadcast channel for supporting materials (slides, movies, etc.) created at the event. You can easily do this using one of the “screen-sharing” solutions in wide use today. The A/V from a “master” computer would broadcast to each pod. And the event would link to each pod via its own two-way channel. This could be a Skype or other videoconference call.
With this architecture, the pods would not receive a delayed feed (i.e., no Mediasite feed), so no switching between delayed and live would be necessary. (Individual remote audience members would continue to receive the delayed feed, as before.) The main event site would need to produce the audio feed, to avoid distracting sound from the pods. But this approach would eliminate the complexities of switching between two channels on the fly.
I think that this approach might be an improvement over the Event Camp Twin Cities 2011 design. It would allow easier spontaneous real-time interaction with the pods while eliminating one potential source of problems during the event. I await with interest any comments from those who understand the issues better than I do.
Hybrid event production professionals, hybrid event attendees, in fact, all event professionals: what do you think?
Thanks, Ruud Janssen, for the photo of the production studio at Event Camp Twin Cities 2011!
How do you recognize someone for their service to an organization when they can’t be present in person?
I faced this problem recently with a retiring founder who couldn’t attend our annual conference. So I thought it would be useful to share how I handled it.
I’ve often mentioned edACCESS, the non-profit for information technology staff at small schools, on this blog, because the organization’s annual conference has been a long-suffering test-bed for my peer conference ideas and experiments. Nancy, Mike & I started edACCESS back in 1991, and although Mike soon left for other pursuits, Nancy & I have been running the edACCESS conference for twenty years.
So I felt sad when Nancy called to tell me she was retiring as Director of Administrative Computing of her school this fall and would be retiring from edACCESS too. We had worked to create a wonderful community together, and now she was leaving us. At least, I thought, we’ll be able to thank her at this year’s conference for her twenty years of service. And then I remembered that she wasn’t going to be able to attend. What were we going to do?
How do you recognize someone for their service to an organization when they can’t be present in person?
What we did
Here’s what we did to recognize Nancy’s contributions to edACCESS, even though she couldn’t be with us in person:
I arranged with Nancy to Skype her from her office at the start of the “morning meeting” group session on the last day of the conference. This was a time when all attendees would be together.
A week before the event
A week before the event, Nancy and I set up a test call with me calling from the laptop I would be using at the conference. It was good we did this because it took a while to get Nancy’s camera working. We arranged for her to start Skype when she arrived at work, thirty minutes before we would start the recognition ceremony.
An hour before we were due to start
An hour before we were due to start, we set up arcs of chairs facing the large screen at the front of the room. I set up my laptop video to project onto the screen. Then I patched the laptop audio and the feeds from my wireless lavalier mike and audience mike into the room’s sound system. Next, I positioned my laptop so that when the screen was upright, the webcam would show the audience. Finally, I angled the lid of my laptop backward so that its webcam would only show me when I stood in front of it.
About twenty minutes before the call
About twenty minutes before the call, Nancy was not showing up as connected on Skype. I called her from my cell and she assured me Skype was running. I restarted Skype on my machine & this time she appeared. Phew! During the next few minutes, I muted our audio while the audience assembled.
Showtime!
Showtime! With the audience quiet I welcomed Nancy and recounted her contributions to edACCESS. Then I asked her to share her recollections of how the organization had started, twenty years earlier. The two of us spent a few minutes recalling our memories of the early days, which we had not done publicly before.
I emphasized that edACCESS would not have existed had it not been for Nancy’s contributions. I removed from a gift bag the present we were giving her: a Kindle (a great gift for someone who’s moving and may not appreciate receiving a bulky plaque). Then I asked the attendees to acknowledge Nancy. Simultaneously, I adjusted the webcam so that she could see the assembled audience for the first time. The attendees rose to their feet and clapped and cheered. Nancy beamed. When the applause finally died down, she talked about the pleasure she’d received seeing edACCESS prosper and thanked everyone who made it possible.
I thanked Nancy one more time, and we brought our Skype ceremony to a close.
Have you used videoconferencing to recognize someone for their service to your organization? If so, how did it work out? Do you have any tips to share?
With the recent demise of the wthashtag service, it has become increasingly difficult to create a text archive of Twitter chats. As the organizer of the popular twice-weekly #eventprofs chats, I have been looking for a replacement. Tweetreports offers a free pdf report, but other output formats cost $9+/month.
So here are step-by-step instructions for using the two-year old TwapperKeeper service, together with a copy of Excel, to create a text archive of your Twitter chat.
Note: Please don’t use TwapperKeeper excessively. Twitter’s Terms Of Service and rate limiting can affect their ability to offer their service for free. Such issues caused wthashtag to shut down. Let’s not inflict the same fate on TwapperKeeper.
To create a #hashtag archive before your first chat (one-time only)
Click on the “search for an archive” button to see if there’s already an archive for your chat. (Enter the hashtag for your chat without the hashmark.) If there isn’t, click on the “create #hashtag archive” button to create one.
Once you’ve created a #hashtag archive for your chat, TwapperKeeper will maintain the archive for future use. Bookmark the link for future reference: here’s the link for the #eventprofs archive.
Go to the archive link bookmark you created above (it will have the form “http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/xxxxxxxx” where “xxxxxxxx” is the hashtag for your archive).
You’ll need to enter the start and end time for your chat in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). You can use TimeZone Converter to convert the local start and finish times for your chat into GMT. Enter start & end date and times, change the “View Limit” to a number larger than the number of tweets in your chat, and click on “query”.
Select all of the report that is relevant to the chat, then copy (Ctrl + C).
Open a blank spreadsheet in Excel, with the A1 cell selected.
Choose Paste Special… from the Edit menu and select “Text”. Click OK.
Select all the cells in Column A that contain data. You should be looking at something like this:
Note the first few characters of the rows containing the dates (in the above example, they would be “Thu “).
Now we’re going to delete any rows that contain “tweet details”, the date of the tweet, or blanks by using Excel’s filter command. First, select Filter from the Data menu and then AutoFilter. A checkmark will appear next to AutoFilter in the menu, and you’ll see a small double-arrow scrollbar appear in the A1 cell, like this:
Click on the double arrows and choose (Custom filter…). From the first drop down, choose “begins with” and type “tweet details” into the text box, like this:
Click OK. Now select all the rows shown that start with “tweet details”. Make sure row 1 is not selected. Choose Delete Row from the Edit menu.
Click on the double arrows again and choose (Custom filter…). From the first drop down, choose “begins with” and type the first few characters of the date you noted in step 8 into the text box. Click OK.
Select all the rows that start with the date. Make sure row 1 is not selected. Choose Delete Row from the Edit menu.
Click on the double arrows and choose (Custom filter…). From the first drop down, choose “does not contain” and type a “?” into the text box. Click OK.
Select all the highlighted empty rows. Make sure row 1 is not selected. Choose Delete Row from the Edit menu.
Finally, click on the double arrows for the last time and choose (Show All). Success! Each row contains one tweet from the chat.
If you wish, scan the rows and delete any that contain non-chat tweets.
Select the remaining rows and copy (Ctrl + C).
Congratulations! A text archive of your Twitter chat is now stored on your Clipboard, ready to be pasted into the web page or document of your choice. (Final tip: You may need to use Paste Special to transfer the information so it formats correctly.)
Is there a better way of archiving Twitter chats? Please let us know when you find one—but test it first to make sure that it 1) reliably includes all the tweets and 2) can produce text output.
Surprisingly, many conference venues do not provide floor plans with room measurements for meeting planners. On a recent round of site visits, only one of the seven facilities visited had this information readily available. Four of the venues had floor plans but supplemented them with infuriating capacity charts showing the number of seats available for classroom, theater, banquet, boardroom, hollow square, etc. sets. (Please, venue sales managers, read Paul Radde’s refreshing book “Seating Matters” and realize that these room sets are not optimum for most circumstances.)
For event designs such as Conferences That Work, where room sets include large circles, horseshoes, table-less small group rounds, and other configurations, I must have the basic room dimensions in order to plan what can happen where.
As a result, a twenty-five-foot tape measure has been part of my site visit kit for many years. This tool, while cheap, is awkward to use. Ideally, you need two people, holding each end, stretching out the tape, and moving multiple times to measure a large room.
A favorite site visit tool
So I was delighted to discover a modern tool that’s ideally suited to rapidly measure room dimensions, the Bosch DLR130K Distance Measurer, as shown above [Update May 6, 2017: The DLR130 model has been discontinued; the newer Bosch GLM 35 looks great too!]. The DLR130 unit uses a laser to measure distance. The DLR130K is a kit that includes the unit, a belt pouch, and four AAA batteries.
This little gem is smaller and lighter than my 25′ tape measure. In about a second, it measures distances up to 130′ [40 m.] within 1/16″, not that I need anything that accurate. By standing in the middle of a really large room and measuring the distances to the opposite walls, you can handle room dimensions up to 260′. The unit will calculate area and volume too if, for some reason, you need to. The batteries are claimed to last for 30,000 measurements.
The DLR130K costs around $90 [Update May 6, 2017: The newer GLM 35 sells for $70 without a case]. A high-quality 25′ tape measure costs around $20, so this is a more expensive tool. I think it’s worth it.
Perhaps one day, every venue sales manager will supply room dimensions (I can dream). Until then, I’m bringing my new favorite site visit tool with me on every site visit.
Taking part in a traditional conference call is rarely much fun. Here are some irritations that you’ve probably experienced:
Poor call quality. Some callers are faint and/or there’s noise on the line. Any noise at any caller’s location, like someone yelling in the background or answering another call, is picked up and broadcast to everyone on the call.
There’s no way to know when someone is about to speak; awkwardness abounds as people start to talk simultaneously.
Only one person can speak at a time, and they have to address the whole group.
There’s no way to know who wants to speak, to ask or answer questions.
So my expectations were not high a couple of days ago, when I joined 77 people (!) on an “NCDD confab” on online engagement. NCDD is the nonprofit National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, a network of over 1,200 members working on conflict resolution and public engagement practice.
What a contrast! Instead of the usual conference call hell you’d expect on a call with nearly 80 people, our two hours together were surprisingly enjoyable, in large part because we used Maestro, a conference call / online tool that combines traditional conference call features with the ability to create small group conversations amongst the participants on the same call.
Maestro Conference worked well
Here’s why using the Maestro Conference system worked so well for this large group:
The Maestro system allows the call organizers to easily create small breakout groups at any time during the call. During our call, we split into small groups of 3-5 people to introduce ourselves and discuss a given question. Chimes and messages informed us when were halfway through our allotted time, and when we had a minute left to go. When the small group discussion was finished, we were smoothly reunited with the entire group. In addition, organizers can join any small group and ask or answer questions at any time.
The Maestro system can selectively mute individual telephones, so we heard no distracting sounds from participants’ phones. When the event organizers were speaking, all phones except theirs were muted. If they asked someone to speak, just that phone would be un-muted. The resulting call quality was excellent. In addition, the system’s call quality was uniformly high throughout our two-hour call. I heard no pops, hissing, or other annoying noises.
Maestro includes a simple but effective backchannel method for call participants to signal conference organizers by pressing numbers on their phone keypad. (There’s no annoying sound heard when people do this.) You can use this to quickly poll participants, ask the organizers for help, opt in or out of a topic or choice, or indicate that the participant has something to say to the whole group. We used all these options during our call, including answering a four yes/no question poll of the entire group in a minute, queuing up individual participants to speak about their experiences, and opting in or out of having our emails available to other group members.
Other information
From the organizers’ perspective, Maestro Connect uses a web interface, which seems to offer an easy way to control these capabilities.
Pricing seems reasonable; and a free 30-day trial is available, as well as discounts for non-profit and solo practitioners. If you’re into such things, Maestro Conference has an affiliate program, (and I am not an affiliate).
During the call, I spoke to the entire group once, met and conversed with people in two small discussion groups, World Café style, and voted on questions. Sandy Heierbacher of NCDD and Amy Lenzo of World Café expertly facilitated the call, with a couple of assistants helping out as needed. The time flew by, very enjoyably.
In conclusion, this service, when appropriately used, can turn the normal broadcast-mode experience of a conference call into a much-more participatory and interactive time for callers. I don’t have experience in managing a Maestro Conference. But, as a participant, it seemed to be a straightforward process with no glitches. If you have a need for a superior kind of conference call, this service is well worth checking out.
“Dear Valued AT&T Customer”. I received this email from “AT&T Chief Privacy Officer” <[email protected]>. It’s a good example of a weasel apology.
The letter
Dear Valued AT&T Customer,
Recently there was an issue that affected some of our customers with AT&T 3G service for iPad resulting in the release of their customer email addresses. I am writing to let you know that we didn’t expose any other information and have resolved the matter. We apologize for the incident and any inconvenience it may have caused. Rest assured, you can continue to use your AT&T 3G service on your iPad with confidence.
Here’s some additional detail:
On June 7 we learned that unauthorized computer “hackers” maliciously exploited a function designed to make your iPad log-in process faster by pre-populating an AT&T authentication page with the email address you used to register your iPad for 3G service. The self-described hackers wrote software code to randomly generate numbers that mimicked serial numbers of the AT&T SIM card for iPad – called the integrated circuit card identification (ICC-ID) – and repeatedly queried an AT&T web address. When a number generated by the hackers matched an actual ICC-ID, the authentication page log-in screen was returned to the hackers with the email address associated with the ICC-ID already populated on the log-in screen.
The hackers deliberately went to great efforts with a random program to extract possible ICC-IDs and capture customer email addresses. They then put together a list of these emails and distributed it for their own publicity.
As soon as we became aware of this situation, we took swift action to prevent any further unauthorized exposure of customer email addresses. Within hours, AT&T disabled the mechanism that automatically populated the email address. Now, the authentication page log-in screen requires the user to enter both their email address and their password.
I want to assure you that the email address and ICC-ID were the only information that was accessible. Your password, account information, the contents of your email, and any other personal information were never at risk. The hackers never had access to AT&T communications or data networks, or your iPad. AT&T 3G service for other mobile devices was not affected.
While the attack was limited to email address and ICC-ID data, we encourage you to be alert to scams that could attempt to use this information to obtain other data or send you unwanted email. You can learn more about phishing by visiting the AT&T website.
AT&T takes your privacy seriously and does not tolerate unauthorized access to its customers’ information or company websites. We will cooperate with law enforcement in any investigation of unauthorized system access and to prosecute violators to the fullest extent of the law.
AT&T acted quickly to protect your information – and we promise to keep working around the clock to keep your information safe. Thank you very much for your understanding, and for being an AT&T customer.
Sincerely,
Dorothy Attwood Senior Vice President, Public Policy and Chief Privacy Officer for AT&T
Has AT&T invented mind-reading software that can determine peoples’ intent?
The email asserts that the people who obtained the email addresses and ICC-ID “maliciously exploited” AT&T’s failure to secure private information, “deliberately went to great efforts”, and “distributed it for their own publicity”. Smearing people by assigning them ulterior motives for which you have no evidence is an old propaganda trick. It helps to deflect attention from your own culpability.
“Culpability”
Speaking of culpability, AT&T apologizes “for the incident and any inconvenience it may have caused ” but not for their negligence in setting up a system that allowed public access to private information in the first place. Come on now, AT&T, you can do better than that. How about: “AT&T apologizes for the lapse in our security that allowed this information to be obtained”? That’s what a proper apology looks like.
What are the consequences?
AT&T provides no explanation as to the consequences of publicizing my ICC-ID. I don’t care about my exposed email address, since anyone can easily find it on the internet. (Though I imagine that some people are not pleased that AT&T exposed their email address.) But I have no idea what the ramifications are of exposing my ICC-ID to all and sundry. What should I look out for? Telling me to “be alert to scams that could attempt to use this information to obtain other data” is useless pap.
Breaking trust
We should judge people and organizations by what they do, not what they say. Those who say things at odds with actual actions, break trust. I don’t expect perfection, but the fact that AT&T avoids admitting that they screwed up makes me skeptical that “AT&T takes your privacy seriously.” Or that I can “Rest assured, you can continue to use your AT&T 3G service on your iPad with confidence.” Well, AT&T, I’m not assured.
Frankly, receiving this email reduced my trust and opinion of AT&T. It would have been better for them if they had never sent it.
