alt the podcast » social networking

Social Networking for the Internet Parent

linuxchic — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:00:37 +0000

I tend to subscribe to the extreme geek parenting method. All four of my kids mostly use Linux at home (they do have an iBook they share as well) and my three year old daughter has been begging for a stuffed Tux of her own for a while now. While I subscribe to many social networking outlets many of them cater to the general public rather than a select target group and sometimes I just want to geek out with other moms and dads. Below I have compiled a list of social networking sites that are built for parents, families, and some just for kids, so we can get our geek on together.

CafeMom - The largest social network just for moms.
Famiva - A free secure and password-protected social network for local and extended families to connect and collaborate with features such as a family tree, extended family network, photo and story sharing, family events and reminders, family maps, and more.
Famster - A private social network for families with a blog for each member, photo and video sharing, recipes, scrapbooking, calendars, addressbooks and more. Famster costs $9.95 per month.
Maya’s Mom - Social collaboration and community site for parents.
Minti - Advice, friendship and community for parents. Join for free, get your own family page, keep a blog and make friends with other members. Forum like user ranking where advancement can be accomplished by contributing parenting advice, blogging and writing comments.
MothersClick - Connects mothers in the same area or neighborhood and helps them find groups and organize their groups. MothersClick is designed to be a unique parenting resource, helping moms to promote group-building, knowledge-sharing, and community.
Parentography - Parentography is an online community for parents who want advice, tools, tips and ideas for family local or distant excursions. Parents can share stories, photos, excursion ideas, ratings and reviews on all sorts of family-friendly places and activities. They can search for things to do by location, season, children’s age and other important factors or find new places with an interactive map. All parents are given profiles to share and use to find new friends.

Sites just for kids (There are tons more sites for kids but this is a sampling of my families favorites as well as ones we have used and are familiar with):

Club Penguin - Now owned by Disney, this social network allows kids to build their own penguin character and earn money (in their little penguin world) that can be used to purchase things for their homes, their pets, and more. Different levels of activities available depending on how active the use is on the site. Several levels of parental controls allow for no chat, safe chat, or full chat amongst the kids. Premium memberships are available for a monthly fee.
imbee - a social network for kids and teachers. imbee is a teacher endorsed social networking site appropriate for kids and ‘tweens that allows them to create blogs, upload pictures, make trading cardsm and create and join groups. Imbee’s new Teacher Feature enables teachers to extend their classroom onto the Internet and establish class blogs and online interaction. Teacher Feature enables teachers and parents to work together closely to guide children’s foray into social networking while bolstering classroom learning.
Nicktropolis - For kids from Nick.com. The site enables kids to build their own avatars and style their clothes and hair, decorate their rooms, play games, and more. Parental controls enable parents to restrict certain activities.

Alternageek Episode 32: Putting On A Social AIR

techmonkey — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 06:01:39 +0000

In this week’s episode, we talk about our new AlternaGeek OGG feed, PCLinuxOS, Amazon MP3 Downloader for Linux, Adobe AIR (including how to run it on Wine while you wait for Linux support) and the recent influx of social network aggregators like SocialThing, FriendFeed and Spokeo.Links:

Click here to download this episode in OGG formatAlternaGeek.com Podcast, Episode 32 for the week of March 17th, 2008Featuring Linuxchic & TechMonkeyIncluded Podcast Promo: Atlantic Wave Radio

PodCamp MidWest – Highlights

linuxchic — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 15:54:06 +0000

PodCamp MidWest has begun and if you are in the Kansas City area it’s not too late to head over. I am posting photos to Flickr, SnapFoo, and updating Twitter live. Twitter friends lunch meetup today, check out the tweets to find out where. Live blog below – refresh to see latest.

Session HighlightsPodcasting Like Pro with Brady GoodmanA podcast can’t be too short. If the audience wants more, they will be back for the next episode. Don’t force a certain show length, just let it happen.Consider creating a table of contents for long format shows either on your blog (show notes) or creating chapters through iTunes in the actual podcast itself so people can just skip to the topic they are interested in if they want.Show notes help your search engine results, trackback links and more. An audio podcast can’t be crawled by search engines so show notes not only give your audience links to follow and more information about the content of your episode but also gives you traffic from keywords in search engines.Get to the point, don’t spend 5 minutes doing cute unprofessional things like, “Is this thing on?”. Get the listener hooked with some content before the banter. Give your audience a reason to listen.Sell sponsorships: ie Do a cooking show? Get it sponsored by your nitche like recipes.com. Sell packages, banners, audio, links… don’t look for fortune, just sell the ads. You don’t have to go global, pound the pavement and hit up your local merchants and websites. Don’t get hooked on your subscriber numbers and stats – sell to your nitche – tell your potential sponsors their customers are the ones listening so they need their brand on your show.Listen to your own podcast.Commit to improving, commit to being on time with your episodes, commit to being a professional.Social Networking – Life in the fishbowl and beyond – Michael BaileyBreakout Session (Conversational)A great mix of people participated in this break out session facilitated by Michael Bailey of Mobasoft. With introductions came a lot of new Twitter friends. Questions raised by those new to social networking and media was how long does content last on the internet? Responses contributed to a conversation including technical information on webservers, the Way Back Machine, and censoring what you say. It was hard to stop the conversation and move on. =)I didn’t get a change to live blog the next two sessions since TechMonkey and I were giving some of our own. There were several people recording sessions for their own casts and sites and we will include the links to them when we get them. Lane Fournerat live streamed our WordPress for Beginners session as well as recorded it to upload later.Just Press Record with Michael BaileyMichael brought out several mics, headphones, and a mixer and jacked them all into his MacBook so participants could get a hands on demo of podcasting equipment. Lots of learning and sharing went on here.Most people are not aware that the equipment that they can purchase to produce professional sounding podcasts is inexpensive. For $200 or less a podcaster can outfit a home studio with a mixer and a professional microphone. While you don’t need this equipment to record a podcast it helps the quality of the recording and if you have more than one person you can control their levels independently with a mixer. The software Michael demo’ed on his MacBook was Audacity, a powerful and free audio application and runs on Mac, Linux, and Windows.The hands on session seemed to be a big hit and once someone broke the ice many people came up to check out the equipment, ask questions, and share their experiences.Video Podcasting Info with Lane Fournerat Lane has been live streaming from PodCamp Midwest today at Justin.TV and he shares his expertise on how to record video and where you can post it on the net. He showed how you can make money creating internet video with Associated Content and ExpoTV.com. He has posted tutorials on software and video making made with his webcam at Associated Content and created video reviews of products and movies at Expotv.com with each site paying for user contributed content. Lane tells us how easy it is to create video with your computer.Lane likes the Logitec QuickCam webcams for their ease of use. The software (runs on Windows) creates AVI formatted video with a decent compression rate for uploading straight to the web. For converting video formats Lane recommended SUPER, a free , efficient and easy to use video encoder.