Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

How do you get your picture or avatar to come up automatically when you comment on a blog or another social media site?

Getting an Avatar

This is how you do it. Go to http://en.gravatar.com. Fill in your profile, add your picture and the email address you’d like your picture to appear with and you’re done.

then, every time you comment on a blog and leave your email address (the address won’t appear in public), your picture will appear.

Try it!

After evesdropping into the conversation Doctors were having about their use of social media, I came back to thoughts in a previous post on how a busy clinician would use social media – and speculated that there are two ways it can be used – in actual clinical practice and as an information source.  It’s all very well to theorise, but is it actually the case?

This from Vegard Ølstørn, a manual therapist in Norway:

I started blogging as a manual therapist in February 2010. I wanted to do this because of mainly three things. I thought that was a way of keeping myself professionally updated. My thought was to write down a summary of interested things I read, write down how I am working, what I am thinking about my work and maybe present exercises I give etc. This way I put some pressure on myself to think twice why I do what I do.

My blogging is also done as information to my patients before or after they see me. Google listings for advertisement is important, and if patients read how I work before they come to see me, I think that is a positive start. I am also planning to use the blog as a resource for patients, where they can read about exercises and things I have presented after treatments.

Lastly, blogging also builds my professional brand amongst my peers. Other clinicians can comment on my way of doing things and interesting discussions hopefully comes out. I find it interesting to read how other clinicians solve their daily challenges, so it is nice to share my view on things.

Status today is that traffic to my site is increasing and I have got both new patients as well as interested clinicians from my blogging. For the word ‘manuellterapi’ I am scoring 4th in the Norwegian google search, so the traffic is increasing. I like it.

I really liked the quote by Dr Mike (@sandnsurf):

“Blogging can be lonely. Especially lonely if we constantly rely on viewer stats, page rank and comment counts to justify the time we take to document our cogitations …but I am surfing the blogging wave to taste the salt water; feel the rush of wind in my face; and brush up against dolphins…not to observe from the beach, ice cream in hand, blistered by the rays of apathy and indifference.”

Thanks Vegard, and if you have a case study that you would like to have included contact me.

Meet Sarah, an avatar that learns from you, a virtual assistant using artificial intelligence, or as she says:

“I’ve a human personality, trained to think through complex tasks and my advanced brain learns and adapts from experience, as I chat to a person I build their profile, answering questions while responding to each person individually.

This is a revolution in how people interact with technology and business interacts with customers”

MyCybertwin was founded by John Zakos and Liesl Capper in 2005.  Their mission:

to give every person and every company the ability to easily create an advanced artificial intelligence, which knows what they know, and functions on their behalf.

We want CyberTwin AI’s to live all over the web, making things easier for people, by talking to others and doing things for their owners. We want CyberTwins to breathe life into the relationship humans have with machines, and inside technology-mediated virtual worlds and mirror worlds.

Applications of Cybertwin in health?

Liesl will also be talking about cybertwin and applications in aged care at the Information Technology in Aged Care ITAC conference in Melbourne in July. An avatar could be put to use answering questions that carers have about putting someone into an aged care facility.

The potential is enormous and if you’ve got any questions, just ask Sarah CyberTwin.  It’s a whole new world …..

What’s page ranking?  It’s one of a number of measures on how easily you can be found on the web, to be taken with a pinch of salt because it depends on what the measurement criteria are (a closely guarded Google secret). But, if you do have a site, a blog, a something on the web, it is nice to know how you’re doing.  Here is one of the Google team, Matt Cutts, on what form part of the 200 signals of measurement.

Google will change their algorithms in order to improve the quality of search we as users experience and to prevent spammers ranking high in search results. This can, however, have an impact on your site because all of a sudden the algorithm changes and your site or post is no longer found so easily.  Again, here is Google’s Matt Cutts on a change in their algorithm in May that resulted in a change to long-tailed searches for sites.

(a long tailed search being a search with a lot of words eg ‘Exceptionally good coffee in Sydney’ versus a short tail: ‘Sydney coffee’)

For more on this one read Timberline Interactive’s post.

Feedly have made some changes to their interface and having been asked about how to use it recently here are some of the things I do. It is one of the most useful tools on the web as far as I’m concerned.

Tips on how to use feedly

I divide my RSS feeds into categories, and either read the digest or by category and if it’s good tweet direct from feedly.  I’ll also post occasionally to google buzz from there.

Changing feedly preferences

To change your preferences on sharing options go to the preferences page (the preferences link can be in different places depending on which browser you are using) here’s the direct link

http://www.feedly.com/home#preferences

If you tweet using feedly and don’t want the automatically added /cc @feedly to be included, you can get rid of it in the Feedly postfix box which is also in the screen shot above.

Now my feedly options look like this when I click the grey round button on the right, the blue diigo bookmarking tool has been added, and when I press the twitter icon, the title and url of the post I want to share are automatically added (and the cc/ @feedly is not included)

If you’ve got a question you can also ask @feedly on twitter – and to see feedly in action, this is a post done a while ago on how I use feedly using the older interface

Here’s the question:

How do you add tabs from posterous and blog in Facebook. Cannot figure it out even after googling it…

Prof Google didn’t come up with an answer, so here’s mine.

First off Facebook is a tricky beast and I’m still at facebook 101 (that’s for encouragement in case you feel like you’re the only one in the world who doesn’t know how to work it)

It’s all about facebook applications

Posterous facebook application

If you’ve got a posterous blog go to the posterous facebook application: http://apps.facebook.com/posterous/facebook

and add it to your page (if you want a posterous blog here’s a post on what posterous is and how to set one up)

Network blogs facebook application

for other blogs (like this one) I use the network blog application: http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/

and add a blog. I like this application, and you can follow other blogs there as well.

When you’ve added whatever you want to go to your application settings and see if they offer you to add a tab (application settings are top right, under account) – each application has different settings you can change.

Try that and see what happens, and any other tips gratefully received