Digital Biographer™ » 2008

Sean Connery copies biographer’s photo for his autobiography! August 25, 2008

Posted by David Petherick in : authors, brand, digital biographer, online identity, share, Кибер-биограф , Comments

Sir Sean Connery launched his official biography today at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, a work co-written by our mutual friend, the urbane Murray Grigor.

I just got my first look at the book’s cover. Something seems very familiar about that pose, and the cropping of the photo… now where have I seen that approach before?

Digital Biographer - Familiar Pose?

Do you think I should be asking Sean’s book designers or the photographer to confess their plagiarism, and show the world their web browser histories?

Happy Birthday Sean - we both know how to hide the fact we’ve got less hair than we did when we were younger. The name’s Petherick. David Petherick…

Digital Biographer reaches Russia. And Russian.

Posted by David Petherick in : 2.0, brand, digital biographer, online identity, search marketing, social media, Кибер-биограф , Comments

‘Keeber-biograph‘, meaning Cyber-Biographer. digital-biographer-russian

This is a term I came across today when searching through Yandex, the Russian search engine that’s been in the news recently, and which is rightly proud of the fact that, thanks to them, Russia is one of only four countries where Google is not the significantly dominant search engine.

The term came up in a blog by Maya Kim, in the context of an article by Steve Rubel entitled ‘Three Emerging Digital Careers to Watch‘ and I was interested to see that only one of the three terms Steve had used had been expanded and given further clarification using English terms in the context of a Russian blog.

Steve’s Term of Super Cruncher was unchanged, and Chief Customer Experience Officer was simply translated into Russian as ‘Head of the Department of Quality Service for Clients’. But his term ‘Digital Storytellers’ was translated into Russian as ‘Cyber-Biographer’, and also expanded to include the English terms ‘digital storyteller, cyberspace concierge, blog butler, ghost blogger, digital biographer‘.

I recall the terms ‘Cyber Concierge’, ‘Blog Butler’ and ‘Ghost Blogger’ were used when BBC News 24 wrote about my work over a year ago, but I was surprised, and quite delighted, to find this reference being made. (For those of you who may not be aware of the fact, I speak fairly good Russian.)

I like the term Digital Storyteller - it’s a good description of some elements of my work. But I still think that ‘biographer’ is closer to describing things accurately:

biography

noun ( pl. -phies)
an account of someone’s life written by someone else.
• writing of such a type as a branch of literature.
• a human life in its course : although their individual biographies are different, both are motivated by a similar ambition.

Hot diggidy, here’s Dipity! Great free interactive timeline toolkit. August 20, 2008

Posted by David Petherick in : 2.0, NewsPapers, authors, blonging, digital biographer, microblogging, share, social media, streams , Comments

Sometimes, a name escapes you. This name escaped me when I was referring to an online tool that let you create your own private or public timeline of data, images, or references. Digiddy? Diggedy? Dittley? Bo Diddley? It just did not come to the front of my mind.

The name I was looking for was “Dipity“. Below, you can see how the increasing online-savvy LiverPool Post has made a timeline of 20.08.2008 to celebrate Liverpool’s year as City of Culture.

The service from Dipity is a great way to share images, text and video, and place them into a contextual container which automatically assumes an interactive timeline format. It’s an excellent way to tell a story about an event in a linear patten, but with non-linear input from amny different sources or individual contributors, and it’s worth visiting the site to see some examples of how Dipity is being used.

I’m working on some projects that involve usind Dipity and some of its associated ‘mashup tools‘ to illustrate an individual’s biography and ‘lifestream’ as outlined at British Blogcasting Corporation - and this is, of course, almost made for anything you’d want to call a ‘digital biography‘!

What does this look like on an iPhone? August 7, 2008

Posted by David Petherick in : 2.0, digital biographer, mobile, mobile search , Comments

Do you know how many iPhones are out there? Millions of them.

Do you know what your web site looks like on an iPhone? Really?

Well, this web site looks pretty good, thanks to a great WordPress plugin called WpTouch. It automatically formats this web site’s content with an Apple-inspired, full-featured theme when my visitors are using an iPhone or iPod touch.

iphone-wptouch-plugin

Yellow Pages for Twitter: Where’s your listing?

Posted by David Petherick in : 2.0, brand, commerce, online identity, search marketing, social media , Comments

As someone involved in what I reluctantly term ‘online reputation management’, I carry out a regular search for my own name, and those used by my customers, and I was interested recently to come across my name in relation to twitter, but with the accompanying description of ‘Chef’. *

Now, I use the phrase ‘word chef’ to describe what I do rewriting online profiles, and include the phrase in my Twitter Profile’s brief description, so this was not a huge surprise, but I was surprised to find myself in a ‘Directory of Twitter Chefs‘ when I first came across Twellow.com in July.

Internet Marketing - using Twellow Twitter Directory for Online Visibility

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I claimed my entry by just entering my twitter password, and then could add various social media profiles, add myself to directory categories that fit my activities, and was also able to find other people in twitter with activities and interests like mine (or, importantly, quite unlike mine).

I was placed into the ‘chef’ category because the word appeared in my twitter description and matched the taxonomy of the search categories. I’d advise you to check that you’re in the most appropriate categories - and have a browse for other twitter members in various categories.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

There is also a powerful search facility, which can either be directory-wide, or can focus on a specific ‘vertical’ - so you can find all of the Internet Marketing geeks with Tokyo in their profile, for example. It’s one thing to be able to search for what people are tweeting about, but it’s also very useful to know who the people on twitter are.

Simple and powerful idea

The site is a property of IEntry, known mainly for its advertising sites, but for now, there are few ads appearing on Twellow. I’m sure it doesn’t take too much imagination to see how they might monetize a Twitter Directory, although at present, those with the most followers, default to top of the page, with a filter to swap to showing those with the most recent twitter updates.

So - are you categorised correctly? Go to Twellow now and check your entry! I was amazed to see that in the Geeks Category, Robert Scoble hasn’t yet claimed his profile!

* I will be looking at some tools for monitoring online conversations later this month - make sure you are subscribed to the Digital Biographer RSS feed, or follow me on Twitter.