Rolling Up ISIS Social Media Weapons

In 2015, I wrote this analysis of ISIS use of social media tools to win their propaganda battles.. I repost it today because it offers lessons about how Russian intelligence is using the same tools effectively to win the information war message about their February 24th 2022 Ukrainian invasion.

ISIS uses social medial tools to take territory, gain power, spread its influence, recruit new fighters, advance its propaganda, and create a myth that it is indomitable. 

They film their butchery using professional film crews and hundreds of thousands of cell phones. They upload these videos by the thousands to intimidate their enemies into submission. 

But their social media weapons can be taken out if we have the will and unleash our experts to do so.
For more resources on how to combat them, see here. 

ISIS Social Media Jihad
ISIS almost immediately uploads their videos to social media when slitting the throats of captives, selling conquered people as slaves, throwing homosexuals off buildings, engaging in battlefield slaughters, shooting prisoners, and conducting victory parades.

They continuously celebrate their depraved lifestyle, ideology, tactics and beliefs on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and other social media. And when some social media companies take down their excesses, ISIS as quickly regroups and posts it on other social media outlets.  Their social media jihad is relentless and operates 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.

The leaders of ISIS know we live in a socially-connected culture and they use it daily to advance their ends. More importantly, they know that a single Tweet generates little action, but a Tweet and a post on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram increase the circulation, and influence of a single Tweet, exponentially.

In 2007, the blogger Robert Scoble identified the social media starfish as a visual way of representing what ISIS does every minute in the Internet: Use various branches of social media to convert the vulnerable to believe their propaganda.

The critical concept in this diagram is “conversions.” Used correctly, a company with a product, a politician with a cause, a now a jihadi with a fanatical ideology can convert others into willing believers.

ISIS leaders know that social media enables them to share larger, deeper, and more extensive relationships. It is why they draw converts from over 70 countries to their expanding caliphate.

Social media tools are so ubiquitous we forget how powerful they are. Mostly, they are fun which is why they are so popular. They create a social story…a human story…not a technology story.

When used together in a Starfish strategy, intelligence services in the West can develop relationships with others to increase trust. ISIS uses this tactic successfully. Our intelligence services were very good at doing this during the Cold War. With the correct use of social media, we can convert social media relationships to fight the scourge of ISIS.

With social media tools we can create, collaborate and share information with others. To compete successfully against ISIS, we must use these social media tools to our advantage to contact, convince, and befriend others through a relationship.

We can use them, as ISIS does, as a force multiplier. Social media aggregator tools like Google+, Instagram and Twitter can be used to defeat ISIS.

These social media tools are more powerful by a factor of millions when used together than when used alone. ISIS and other radical Islamic terrorist organizations know this.

As a force multiplier, ISIS perpetually uploads its combat and recruitment films to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms and reaches hundreds of millions of viewers. They must be stopped.

We need to act on this as well.

ISIS Use of Social Media in an Operational Attack

During terrorist operations, they have demonstrated a professional grasp of messaging and messaging tools. They understand that the optics, as captured in social media, is as important to their victory as any military objectives they achieve on the battlefield.

And, they’ve used the mainstream media, often unfiltered, as an adjunct force multiplier to increase their power. They are very good at the social media war.

Their attack on the Lindt store in Australia is a good example. For unlike decades of practice in prior attacks, the terrorists at the Lindt store in Australia allowed their hostages to keep their cell phones.

Then they ordered some hostages to call news stations to try to get on the air live.  Why the change in tactics? Because now they have seen how ISIS has mastered the tactical advantage of manipulating social media to broadcast their ideology. 

WWII Social Media Redux

This is not the first time we have faced a social media challenge from a murderous organization bent on world domination. When I was a student at the American College (now University) in Paris, France in 1975, I used to go to Nanterre University to research original sources (films, posters, newspapers) to write a paper for a political science class on Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Propaganda Ministry.

I saw remarkable propaganda films Goebbels created in the 1930’s and 1940’s in the original versions. Watching those films for many hours on Saturday’s, I knew immediately that there is no question that, like the ISIS propaganda ministry, Goebbels and the Nazi Propaganda Ministry understood the impact of film and radio, the social media tools of his time, for changing the opinions and feelings of people worldwide. As with ISIS, they used that knowledge, ultimately, to bring about massive death and destruction.

But as good as Joseph Goebbels was at using the social media tools of his time to conquer tens of millions, he never had Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Twitter and the other social media tools ISIS has appropriated and used so successfully  to spread its ideology through visual depictions of its hyper-violence.

The fight against ISIS will take place on many fronts. The social media front is one we created and mostly dominate. There is no reason we cannot win this one. All we need to do is to unleash our social media professionals and companies. Even if we are already several years late to the fight, working together with our intelligence professionals, they can roll back the ISIS and other terrorist organization’s cyberspace battlefield wins. 

Robert Scoble Blog How To

Naked Conversations: The Book

NOTE: I wrote this blog post about how to write blogs in 2006. Now it is 2023. As this post still gets many hits each day, I moved it to the top of Poetslife. Enjoy, all you new bloggers. As blogs have stood the test of time, it is good to review the  fundamentals of creating one.

What is a blog? 

What do they do? 

Who has one and how do they use it? 

Why do they matter? 

How will they change the world? Business? America? Europe? Asia? Africa? Latin America? 

Should you have a blog?

Find the answers to these and other questions in naked conversations: how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers...and everyone else for that matter.
Robert Scoble (left) and Shel Israel (right) have given us a gift: naked conversations: how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers. Kudos to both for trying to describe, analyze, and provide a handbook about blogs and the blogosphere.

Successful Blog Traits...Scoble and Israel give five tips for blogs that succeed:

• Talk...don't sell
• Post often...and be interesting
• Write about issues you know...and care about
• Blogging saves money...but costs time
• You get smarter by listening to what people tell you

Since the book was published in 2006, corporate blogs have multiplied. Oracle's blog shows a corporate example and JoHo blog demonstrates a brilliant tech blog.

The Blogs

For a list of the blogs noted in naked conversations, see: NC blogs, which is the blog where they wrote the book before they wrote the book. The collective wisdom of the blogosphere made this a much better book...which illustrates a central tenet of their book. And the circle...

Techcrunch Tracking Web 2.0 by Michael Arrington gave a naked conversations (NC) book-signing party for 400 on February 17, 2006. Here are some blogs that discuss the event:
Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Scott Beale, Dave McClure, Tracy Sheridan, Alex Moskalyuk, Robert Anderson, Dan Farber Pictures, Nik Cubrilovic, Jeremiah Owyang, Mark Jen, Rafe Needleman, Renee Blodgett, Chris Mullins, Mike Davidson, Brian Oberkirch, Joseph A. di Paolantonio, Jeff Clavier #2, James Gross, Alexander Muse, Oliver Starr, Rick Segal, Podtech, Max Kiesler, Dion Hinchcliffe, Narendra Rocherolle, George Nimeh, Om Malik, Dan Farber , Susan Mernit, The Conversation, 
The Post Money Value, Like it Matters, Jeff Clavier's Software Only, tech crunch, gapingvoid, ZDnet, pod-serve, nik, TechCrunch5, Crunchnotes, Diva Marketing Blog, weblogs work, stoweboyd, down the avenue, TwistImage, James (Australia), No Soap, Radio!, Monkey Notions, Conscious Connections, Werblog, Digestivo Cultural (Brazil), ValleyWag - (very funny photo captions), Rocketboom (the show), Rocketboom (TechCrunch5 NC party video), Grigo's Blog (China), Teachers Lounge, Church of the Customer, Bernd, Hebig, Shel, and on and on and....

Washington Post NC Book Blog Interview 2/24/2006

Robert Scoble's list of blogs to visit each day includes: engadet, gapingvoid, instapundit, buzzmachine, and daringfireball

Shel Israel's list of blogs to visit each day includes: whatsnextblog, mcgeesmusings, newmediamusings, hyperorg, englishcut

That the book received the imprimatur of John Wiley & Sons, the working technical writer's continual education graduate school, makes it credible for me. 

Blogging has certainly come a long way from the early years. 

With over 27 million out there, here are the New York Magazine blessed top 50. 

Although you may not go from blogs to riches, Scoble and Israel give you a strategy for how to create a blog that may not make the top 50, but will have value for you, your business, and others...nonetheless.

Chock-Full-A-Blogs

Naked Conversations is chock-full-a-blogsyou can use. 

Such blog addresses are conveniently found as footers at the bottom of many pages. You might want to read the book seated at your computer so you can check out the myriad of blogs they thought good enough to include from the millions that are now out there. 

Here are a few they mention by chapter.

In Chapter 4: Direct Access:  

http://www.corporateblogging.info/, www.whatsnextblog.com

In Chapter 5: 

Little Companies, Long Reach: http://www.gapingvoid.com/, http://www.englishcut.com/, http://www.parmet.net/, doc.weblogs.com, buzzmodo.typepad.com, wethemedia.oreilly.com, http://www.darknet.com/, buzzmodo.typepad.com/buzznovation, amywohl.weblogger.com, http://www.leaveitbehind.com/, http://www.terrystorch.com/, blog.treonauts.com, texturadesign.com, clip-n-seal.com, http://www.stonyfield.com/, hihowaya.blogs.com/weblog

In Chapter 6: Consultants Who Get It: 

http://www.ernietheattorney.net/, http://betweenlawyers.corante.com/, http://www.lessig.org/blog/, http://nip.blogs.com/, http://www.okpatents.com/phosita/, http://www.promotetheprogress.com/, www.rethinkip.com, sethgodin.typepad.com, customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog, designsponge.blogspot.com, http://www.alyson.ca/, http://www.whatsnextblog.com/, http://www.bloombergmarketing.blogs.com/, http://www.allmarketersareliars.com/

On page 172 under Tip #2: Read a bunch of blogs before you start, they list: www.pubsub.com, www.bloglines.com/citations, www.feedster.com, www.icerocket.com, www.technorati.com; and under Tip #3: Keep it simple. Keet it focused, they list blogsearch.google.com and www.larkware.com/index.html. Also, they talked to hundreds of bloggers to write the book and in Acknowledgements the list even more, such as: radio.weblogs.com/0108035, whatsnextonline.com, www.collaborativemarketing.com, and www.bizdrivenlife.net.
Blogs are even listed with the book inside cover blurbs: chris.pirillo.com, www.micropersuasion.com, www.whatsnextblog.com, www.gapingvoid.com, blog.softtechvc.com, www.guidewiregroup.com, nevon.typepad.com/nevon, randyh.wordpress.com/, technosight.com/blog, and www.cameronreilly.com

[See Crisis Blogging: risks, rewards and the rapidly changing world of best practices at Global PR Blog Week 2.0 for a first-rate analysis of how blogs now affect how a business or government successfully deals with or botches (read Katrina) any given crisis.]

N.B. busy executives...to my eye, this book includes an even rarer gift...a Subject Index created by a human, not a word search, so what you are looking for is clearly listed and easy to find. For example, under blogging it lists: advantages 44-45, culture 150-152, employment dangers 188-190, findable 28, Google and 28-29, linkable 28, publishable 28, six pillars 28, social 28, syndicatable 28, trends 112, viral 28.

What Are Blogs 

Naked Conversations explores why blogs exist, namely, to help people, many of whom own or work for a business, to talk, to learn from each other, and to connect for mutual advantage. Like the ancient white oak, we are all connected. Some are in the roots, others in the branches, and others in the leaves. 

I am a poet and I like metaphors. 

For me, the blog is the trunk that allows those who are leaves to connect to those in the roots and branches who would never have known of each other in the past...and to grow together by that knowing.
In the Philadelphia neighborhood where I grew up, there was one mother who connected everyone and who knew how to connect you with anyone. 

The guy who owned the corner grocery or hardware store 

or the postmaster at the post office performed a similar role. They were the people who took the time and learned the skills to keep everyone connected. That world is gone, but blogs can do the same on a scale unimaginable just a few years ago. And for business, your blog (or lack of one) can determine if you succeed or fail. 
naked conversations willgive you the blog tools to connect your product or service to people who will then connect you to more people than you can ever reach through traditn't like the tree metaphor you have to concede the point: blogs allow a kind of communication ional marketing, sales, advertising.

Even if you dothat is fun, gile, intellectually stimulating, and rewarding...if done correctly and successfully.
For a company, you can add thaat blogs can add to your profits if they are done honestly and capably. As well, they can result in a severe loss of profits if they are done dishonestly, incompetently, or poorly. 

The choice is yours. For how to build, maintain and promote a business blog successfully, read naked conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel.

This is one of those rare manuals...a clear, concise, consistent and lucid manual....a "how to create a useful blog" manual that is beautifully written, easy to understand, intelligent, and well organized...the handbook that will give home office and corporate office workers the tools to create, communicate and illucidate.naked conversations contains a cornacopia of suggestions for how to do it right and many examples of how to do it wrong. 

They skip the "Theory of Operation" by referring you to the Cluetrain Manefesto and customers, it's sellers and buyers, to the people inside and outside...quickly deliver the meat and potatoes of how a business can talk with its employees efficiently, through a blog. 

What a newspaper, telephone, TV and the old media did in centuries past, the blog is doing now...but with many more digital hyperspace features in nanotime and with you doing the talking rather than being talked at.

Chapters
Chapters and subjects covered in naked conversations include:
Forward by Tom Peters
Introduction: Of Bloggers and Blacksmiths
What's Happening
Souls of the Borg
Everything Never Changes
Word of Mouth on Steroids
Direct Access
Little Companies, Long Reach
Consultants Who Get It
Survival of the PublicistsBlogs and National Cultures
Thorns in the Roses

Blogging Wrong & Right
Doing It Wrong
Doing It Right
How to Not Get Dooced
Blogging in a Crisis

The Big Picture
Emerging Technology
The Conversational Era
Acknowledgements [very useful...many cutting edge blogs listed...innovative]
Name Index [crisp and lean]
Subject Index [brief and clean]

The Authors

Shel Isreal has developed launch strategies for Sound Blaster PowerPoint, FileMaker, dBase, Paradox, Mapinfo and counseled HP, MCI, Price Waterhouse. Robert Scobel helps run Microsoft's Channel 9, which is worth a visit. 

It is one of the few places you can get an inside view of how programmers, developers designers, geeks...and others who must work together in a corporate world to create a brave, new world and for insights for why and how they create it.

[When I worked on a very complex semiconductor manufacturing clean-room plasma tool, I suggested that we video the development process for the service technicians to help them service and maintain the tool. 

The idea never got past the director because he was not a fan of knowledge sharing with others, even the engineers on his staff. 

My hat is off to Microsoft for creating this tool for their workers and for the wider world.]

Shel Isreal and Robert Scobel have illuminated many of the mysteries and the promise of blogs in naked conversatations. Take it out to your front porch, sit a spell, take a few hours and just read for the pure joy of reading a well-written book. This is a book to enjoy with a pen to mark up what you will need to remember and refer to again and again as you work on your own blog. 

If I had this book when I started this blog...only two months ago...I would have used it as a primer and made fewer false starts and pages I later eliminated.

You may not think blogs matter. 

Many more think poetry does not matter. 

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood said T.S. Eliot, Dante, 1920. 

So, too, blogs.

Blogs are On-Line Meetings 24/7
Let Isreal and Scobel show you how with this very readable guidebook. Blogs are the riparian area between the river and the land where you can plant a few trees and watch them grow over the years. They are growing and meeting all day and all night, like trees.

Meeting

Here, ideas float mid-air
as open targets of word,
Cryptic and terse, that fire
machine-gun rapid
To take them out...one...
two...three...four...
Until at 5, an idea stays,
deflects all shots,
Floats higher and higher
and settles back
Approved, accepted, accurate
and written down
By consensus and commitment
and nods of heads
As certain as a hundred
thousand years ago
The light of electricity replaces
the light of the sun.
Remember: the idea for fire
started as humbly.

Wikiopedia's Blogosphere Defined
Wikiopedia defines the term Blogosphere as: The notion of a blogosphere is an important concept for understanding blogs. Blogs themselves are just instances of a particular formatting choice, whereas the blogosphere is a social phenomenon. What differentiates blogs from webpages or forums is that blogs can be part of a shifting Internet-wide social network formed by two-way links between different blogs. You link to my articles and I'll link to your articles, and we will both seem to be more interesting.The Subject Index

Shifts Happen and a Story 

Be prepared for some blog links moving on to another server, being abandonded, or not available when you look for them. 

Shifts happen...and so your the blog listed in the book may not display. Page 74 states "...Target the number-two retail chain..." and on page 133 "When Scoble spoke with Target executives, they told him that blogging was unlikely to start up inside America's fourth [-] largest retailer..." This was the only inconsistency I could find in the book (and who knows and who really cares if Target's is two or four). 

Point is, with such attention to detail, they did an exceptional job of creating a work that will help create a blogging civilization.
After finding this one minor inconsistency in their work, and given the cogent analysis, cherry picking of useful blogs, definitions of blog policies, plans, procedures and practices, I think Scoble and Israel well demonstrate in their tome the very requirements they list as required of a good blog: authenticity, usefulness, integrity, connectivity to other blogs, passion, authority,simplicity, focus, accessibility, storytelling, link...link...link, reflect the real world and maintain a referrers log.

In essence, they followed their own advice about how to create blogs when creating this book, and the work is easier to use and use again because of that. It will be assigned reading in business courses by next semester...see The Applied Blogging Workshop for how this is already happening.

When I could not find an introductory blog book at the Barnes & NobleComplete Idiot's Guide to Creating a Web Page & Blog" or "Naked Conversations" in the business section, my immediate response was, "The latter." (And I write manuals for a living and often counter an engineers comments that "No one reads manuals anymore!" with the reply, "What about the Complete Idiot's Guide's? They're manuals and they sell in the millions. Someone's reading them.)

When they guy took the time to walk me to where the book was in the business section, selected it, and handed it to me, besides being impressed that he demonstrated the rare courtesy of customer service, I knew in a few seconds this was the definitive book on blogs I had been searching for. 

If you want to know what blogs are and how to create one, may you discover this paper blog book that will enrich your digital blog experience.

Reading this work was like the experience I had when a Lockheed Martin Vice President of Corporate Communications in Bethesda, MD in 1997 was too busy to review a software disc a new company called Netscape sent him and tossed it to me (a temp) to analyze. I spent three days jumping from website to website without having to type in five lines of very dense code as with the Sailor system I was using then to get to the Internet.

I can still remember how I received a graduate-school level introduction to the possibilities of the Internet in those three days. It felt good to finally get the first clear understanding of what this internet buzz was all about. 

Unfortunately, I could not get the stock end of what Netscape washttps://inside.com/campaigns/inside-security-2017-06-08-2176https://inside.com/campaigns/inside-security-2017-06-08-2176 all about because, as the Brown & Co. investment banker who was one of those selling the initial public offering told me curtly, I was not a "serious" investor because I could not raise at least $50,000 in five minutes in order to bid on the stock.

My thanks to Scoble and Isreal for providing the wellspring for future blogs.

Common Sense Corporate Business Blogging Policy 

Here is an IBM corporate blogging policy link to a .pdf that lists blogging guideliness as dependable, useful, and worthwhile as the old IBM Selectric. You might find these IBM blogging guideliness useful in creating your own corporate blogging guidelines. (Ah...the IBM Selectric...now there was a poet and writer's typewriter.) 

Here is a sample:
Guidelines for IBM Bloggers: Executive Summary
1. Know and follow IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines.
2. Blogs, wikis and other forms of online discourse are individual interactions, not corporate communications. IBMers are personally responsible for their posts. Be mindful that what you write will be public for a long time protect your privacy.
3. Identify yourself name and, when relevant, role at IBM when you blog about IBM or IBM-related matters. And write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of IBM.
4. If you publish a blog or post to a blog and it has something to do with work you do or subjects associated with IBM, use a disclaimer such as this: The postings on this site are my own and dont necessarily represent IBMs positions, strategies or opinions. 
5. Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.
6. Don't provide IBMs or another's confidential or other proprietary information.
7. Don't cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their approval.8. Respect your audience. Don't use ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, etc., and show proper consideration for others' privacy and for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory such as politics and religion.
9. Find out who else is blogging on the topic, and cite them.
10. Don't pick fights, be the first to correct your own mistakes, and don't alter previous posts without indicating that you have done so.
11. Try to add value. Provide worthwhile information and perspective.

Shel Israel's Reply to an e-mail I sent him: February 17, 2006 The Poet Understands what Our Book is About
Bruce Curley, a senior technical writer, has reviewed our book on his blog, poetslife. It's favorable but that is not why I'm writing about him. He sent me an email yesterday that moved me. It read in part:

Just yesterday, my wife sent me for paint swatch samples to the new Benjamin Moore paint store in Mt. Airy, MD where I live. I told the owner about your book, my review, and how her business might benefit if she read about the englishcut blog you describe. She said she was going to read my review and look up the book. I also told a tailor at English-American in Westminster, MD where they still make suits by hand, about englishcut.
I relay this brief story to say your book spreads by wordofmouthosphere as well as by the blogosphere, proving one of the main points you make in naked conversations.

Robert and I wrote Naked Conversations with that paint store in mind, as well as that international corporations. We get a steady flow of bloggers telling us that the stories we covered are, for the most part, old hat to them. 

Of course, they are. We see blogging veterans as our collaborators, not our target audience. 

We hope that we have given blogging enthusiasts everywhere a tool to spread the word. 

We hope you bloggers serve as word-of-mouth champions to those businesses who don't yet understand the power of social media.

Bruce, yesterday was a tough day for me for a lot of reasons. 

Thanks. You made it a lot better.

And yours mine, Shel. Thanks for all the hard work.

This red-tailed hawk was doing circles out out in my yard as I finished this blog book review...a good sign. 

As the French poet Valery reminded us, "A poem is never completed...it is only abandoned." 

So, too, with this naked conversations book and blog. It continues in other blogs, on iPods, in foreign lands. But the majesty of that bird is so incredible it becomes this blogs watermark...as this work takes flight to create good blogs and blogging relationships.

Life360 Keep Your Family Safe

Life360 phone app is a good tool to use to keep your family safe before, during and after an emergency. Protect your fledglings from the dangers out there (see, for example, the red tail hawk on the oak fence in my back yard that often threatens our blue birds).
It does many things, but here are the most important:

• Push the panic button and you can contact your family IMMEDIATELY if you have an emergency.
• The GPS map shows you EXACTLY WHERE your loved ones are so you can find them IMMEDIATELY.

From my emergency management experience, I know that when an event hits, so too does tunnel vision, a racing heart, and delay from trying to process too much information in too short a span of time.
By pre-programming the phone number and email addresses of your loved ones, you can immediately contact and communicate with your loved ones.
Be it a jihadi attack, a tornado, a terrible storm of any other daily event that hits somewhere and eventually picks you...be ready BEFORE it strikes. Download it and keep it handy on your cell phone for when you need it. It is disaster insurance of the first kind.
Robert Scoble's blog post is where I first heard of the Life360 phone app. Scoble's Life360 blog link.

Robert Scoble  -  Mar 3, 2012 (edited)  -  Public

Yesterday we saw horrid scenes of tornado and storm damage from the Midwest in the United States.
But is there a way for you to get warned that one of those is coming? And is there a quick way to let your family know you're OK? Here I sit down with the founders of Life360.
An app that might help you survive a family disasterhttp://www.life360.com/
Here is a good comment on Scoble's original blog post (above) that explains how it works in a very practical way in a tornado.

Rich Dailey Quick comment from the Life360 team (I'm one of the co founders). We definitely don't work 100% of the time...if your phone doesn't get a data connection, our app won't work. 

Our app is built for the 99.9% of time where nothing is wrong, and in those rare emergency instances, we have empirical data to show that we do indeed generally do our job (see this blog post with stats from usage in this recent tornado http://www.life360.com/blog/families-safe-and-in-sync-during-midwest-tornadoes/). 

We aren't a replacement for 911...we are a supplement for the majority of instances when a user can still connect to the web. I'd also add our focus is not just on emergencies but daily value, when connectivity issues are not a problem at all.

Mar 6, 2012   
#disaster #safety #mobile #app #family

An app for disaster preparedness for your family

Poetslife Named Top Social Marketing Blog

Serendipity still creates fun on the web.
 For example, to keep up with the world of technical communication, I maintain a list of links for Websites, blogs, and other digital information I have gathered over the years.

Recently, while reviewing links from five years ago, I ran across this one: http://www.icerocket.com/

Icerocket used to have very funny videos and news segments five years ago. Now, it seems to be mostly a search engine, so I entered the search word "poetslife" in the icerocket's search engine, and I ran across this gem:

Top 142 Social Marketing Blogs on the Web

138 days ago by re:think your strategy

http://www.dailyblogtips.com/ Poetslife A Z-List Blog:

hmmm...I clicked the link and discovered a blog called re:think your strategy, snack size pears of marketing wisdom with a list of the Top 142 Social Marketing Blogs on the Web created on April 11, 2010. What I found especially funny about the listing is that I have tried to keep my blog noncommercial...for years.

And guess what was listed as 139? Me.

Poetslife A Z-List Blog (now just poetslife http://poetslife.blogspot.com/

Olivia, who writes the blog, describes the Top 145 Social Marketing Blogs thus:

Below is the most complete list I’ve ever seen of the top social marketing blogs.We created it because it is a list that is much needed by marketers who want to get great news, opinions, and insights by credible, popular bloggers and experts in social marketing.

If you could put a dollar value on the information shared across all these sites it would impossible for most people to afford. Luckily, you can access all these sites and keep up on social marketing trends and news for free.The sites are not ranked in any particular order, nor did I come up with a complicated algorithm to sort and sift them into any order of importance.

They all have something to share and they are all popular sites with their own following, large and small.Enjoy this big resource!Social Marketing Blogs Looking for a social marketing blog? The following is a list of 142 of the top social marketing blogs on the web right now.

Consider this a digital library of social media, marketing how-to, social news sites, and communities.

Thanks for including me in the Top 145 Social Marketing Blogs on the Web, Olivia. Scoble may not still get a rush from being included in such a list, but I do!

Free Web 2.0 Tools for Emergency Workers

The Journal of Civil Defense, published by The American Civil Defense Association, just published an article I sent them two years ago, Free Web Safety & Emergency Tools. Highlights follow:

What is not addressed in the current discussion of the new “social media” (Twitter, qik Modulus, and dozens of others) is how useful they can be for preparing for, responding to, recovering from, and mitigating emergencies. Here I present four I use that may also be useful to you.

Twitter – www.twitter.com

Twitter is quick way to update others about your current situation. It is a free, social network (known as ‘micro-blogging”) service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application (such as Twitterrific).updates are displayed on the user's profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery of each post.
You can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application. For SMS, four gateway numbers are currently available: short codes for the USA, Canada, and India, as well as a UK number for international use

Mogulus – www.mogulus.com 

Broadcast live via your own TV station twenty-four hours a day…free. You register with Mogulus and they give you software that allows you to create a television show. You are the producer. You can load in existing emergency management videos and you and your staff can watch them at any time. Or, you create your own videos with a digital camera, load them onto your Mogulus TV channel, and create a TV show. 

Most useful to emergency managers is that you can video a table top exercise or a disaster scene and watch it over and over to learn from it. Anytime you want…anywhere you want…as long as a computer is available. You can watch it from home, on the road, at work, while traveling, or in your boss’s office. It is a very powerful tool that is easy to learn and use. Imagine…you can collaborate with your co-workers, your manager, or another in your profession who is 3,000 miles away or even in another country. 

Qik - www.qik.com 

Their tag line is “from your phone to the world” and they mean it. Basically, you download their software and use it to go live with your life by using your phone camera to broadcast video. Think about it. You are at a fire, a chemical spill, or a flood and you use your cell phone camera like a camcorder to stream it live for many hours without using the storage capacity of your cell phone. 

Currently, qik supports video streaming on Nokia S60 phones: N71, N73, N75, N76, N77, N80, N91, N92, N93i, N95, E50, E51, E61i, E65, E70m E90 Communicator, 3250, 5500, 5700 Xpress Music, 6110 Navigator, 6120 Classic, 6121 Classic, and 6290. Qik is currently developing support for other cell phones. 

Emergency Email and Wireless Network - http://emergencyemail.org/ 

The Emergency Email and Wireless Network provides free email, cell phone and pager emergency notification. Local, regional and national government agencies will update you on breaking weather, disaster or emergency information. 

Registration is simple:

1. Go to their website.
2. Click your state from a list.
3. Add your email address.
4. Repeat for other states (if desired). 

Emergencyemail also provides radar maps, airport closings and delays, and other notification services. They have been providing these services since 1999. I have been getting notifications from them for several years. They are always ahead of the media and the local weather channel by at least a few hours. All these social media tools are even more powerful when used together. Robert Scoble has coined a term, “Social Media Starfish” to explain how. His link below explains it. 

http://www.fastcompany.com/multimedia/2007/12/building-a-political-starfish.html 

Even though Scoble explains how the social media starfish applies to political and business organizations, the same principals apply to emergency management organizations. The new social media will revolutionize your work world. If you don’t see it yet, talk to your younger members.