So, are you using Google Buzz yet?  Are you looking to get your fix of images and interact with some photographers rather than get the typical tech mumbo jumbo?

After Thomas Hawk announced that he would start sharing his favorite photographers on Buzz, I wondered how many photographers were already on AND active on Buzz.

So, I posted that exact question and since, have wasted a good few hours compiling this list in a readable format for everyone to enjoy.  I do apologize if I missed anyone, the thread got a bit out-of-control.  Of coarse, as Google Buzz continues to grow, this list will NEVER be complete, so feel free to leave a comment with a link to your Google profile if you consider yourself an ACTIVE Google Buzz photographer (I will filter the links posted in the comments).

Okay, on to the list!  Names with a * denotes the person either mentions “Photographer” or “Photography” under their name on their Google profile, their Google profile picture is of them taking a picture/holding a camera, or their Google Buzz stream consists of mostly photography or photography related topics at the time I checked it.

Enjoy…

1. Justin Korn *
2. Thomas Hawk *
3. Scott Kivowitz *
4. Brian Sullivan
5. Chris Luckhardt *
6. David Thomas *
7. Calvin Heinly
8. Jeremy Hall *
9. Kol Tregaskes
10. Benjamin Heath *
11. Dan Figueroa *
12. Sam Scott *
13. Tyler Wainright *
14. Anne Petersen *
15. Ignacio Pulido
16. Alexander Couey *
17. Aaron Hockley *
18. Daniel Kreger *
19. Mike Connell *
20. Keshav Khera
21. William Burrard-Lucas *
22. Daniel Peckham *
23. Cliff Johnson *
24. Nathan Smith
25. Ingo Meckmann *
26. nixter retxin
27. Colt Seavers
28. Russ Scheid *
29. Victoria Klum *
30. Squid Vicious *
31. Griffon Walker
32. Glenn Euloth *
33. Heather S
34. Steven Rose
35. Michael Wimmer
36. Gordon Reece
37. Karsten Behrens
38. Bruno Raymond *
39. Brian Auer *
40. Alan McBride
41. Robert Kenney *
42. Mike Baker *
43. Matthew Field *
44. Mark Forman *
45. Christopher Boffoli *
46. Edward Barnieh
47. Sean Davis *
48. Nate Lanier *
49. Jim Kirkpatrick
50. Mike Hellers
51. raf sanchez *
52. Mark Krynsky
53. ghill tochon *
54. Michael Hocter *
55. resiros M
56. Stephen Miller *
57. Ben Staley
58. Vincent Gearhart *
59. Gary Denness *
60. Michael Leggett
61. Paul Segal
62. Matt Penning *
63. Damien Franco *
64. Chris Martino
65. Nan Anastasia
66. Nick Fisher *
67. Pedro José
68. Dane Deasy *
69. Arianys Wilson *
70. Cathy McArthur *
71. Karthick Ramachandran *
72. Tom Harrison *
73. Kim Martin
74. Kenton Smith
75. Vicki Kadow *
76. Sameer Kumbhare
77. Jeff Henderson *
78. Morris Maciver *
79. Todd Heckert *
80. Dave Cohen
81. Stephen Dickson *
82. Mahdi Abdulrazak
83. Damien Pattrick *
84. Daniel Lashua *
85. Vando Nascimento *
86. Gary Thom *
87. Nir Alon *
88. Kevin Trotman *
89. Kim Thibodeaux *
90. Chris Nixon *
91. Henrik Johansson *
92. Jason Castillo
93. Carlos Ayala
94. Håkan Dahlström *
95. Lourens Rolograaf *
96. Jason Kravitz
97. Eric Booth *
98. Randal L. Schwartz
99. José Betancur *
100. Jeremy Brooks

And the list continues to grow HERE.

Till next time…

After doing a little investigation last night, I finally figured out how to get this blog automatically posting to Google Buzz.  For all those that might be struggling with the process, I thought I’d post a little how-to tip.

The first and most important thing you need to do is have a link somewhere on your blog to your Google profile with a relationship attribute (“rel”) equal to “me”.  For example, you can add a link to your Google Profile page like:

<a href="http://www.google.com/profiles/your.username" rel="me">My Google Profile</a>

or, like so within the head:

<link rel="me" type="text/html" href="http://www.google.com/profiles/your.username"/>

Once you have this relationship between your Google Profile and your blog, you are ready to add your blog to your Google Profile.  If you don’t already have your blog associated with your Google Profile, now is a good time to do that:

1. Go to your Google profile page:  http://www.google.com/profiles/USERNAME  replacing USERNAME with your Google ID.  Mine is: http://www.google.com/profiles/justin.korn If you are not logged into Google, log in with the “Sign In” link in the upper right corner
2. Once logged in and viewing your profile, click on the link in the upper right corner titled “Edit Profile”
3. Scroll down to the section titled “Links”
4. If your blog is not listed already in the “Add Links” section, right below it you can add it manually with the URL and name.  Click the “Add” button and your blog should now be listed on the right side under “My Links”
5. Once added, make sure the “This is a profile page about me.” check box is checked.  You can double check by clicking on the “Edit” link next to your new link.
6. Don’t forget to scroll to the bottom of the page and click the “Save Changes” button.  If you don’t, these changes will not be saved.

Alright, with your Google Profile now all linked up to your blog, all you need to do is get Google Buzz to recognize it.  You have two choices, wait for Google to re-crawl your site, or force Google to re-crawl your site.  Did you even consider option one?  I didn’t think so.  So, to force it:

1. Check out the Social Graph API
2. Once logged in, you should see all of the links you’ve designated as “profile pages” in your Google Profile
3. Find the link to your blog and click the associated “Recrawl” button

Finally, it’s time to hook up your blog to Google Buzz:

1. Bring up Google Buzz (within Gmail)
2. On the main page, at the top, next to your name, you should see “X connected sites” where X is the number of sites you have connected to Buzz.  Click on that link.
3. You should now see your blog as an available site to connect.  Go ahead, click the “Add” button and then the “Save” button at the bottom.

That should do it!  Good luck!

Till next time…

[UPDATE] Just discovered the Google “How-To” page that explains this MUCH better than me.

What I DO want to do is remind those using all of these networks (or even only 2 or 3 of them) that those following you pay the price when you do not pay attention to how you manage your social network flow.  Feeding all of your networks into each other is NOT a good idea.  You end up with duplicate data all over the place and sometimes in formats that don’t make sense for the platform displaying it.

At this point, if you connect Twitter and/or FriendFeed into Buzz you’ve probably either lost followers or pissed them off.  Twitter feeding into Buzz is not currently real-time and if you post to Twitter often, it causes a flood of tweets to flow into your Buzz feed at once, overwhelming your followers.  FriendFeed feeing into Buzz is ugly and redundant to say the least.  Don’t even get me started on those feeding Twitter to FriendFeed to Buzz.  It’s a mess.

(This post/image is not aimed at anyone particular.  This is just what I had up at the time of taking the snapshot.)

So, if you don’t want to lose your followers, here is my simple suggestion for you, manage your social network flow NOW!  Here is how I am attempting to manage my flow (keeping track of comments is an entirely different ball game):

1. Setup a Ping.fm account posting to your Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook accounts (others as you wish).
2. Within Ping.fm, make sure email is enabled and take note of your special email address.
3. Within Buzz, disable your FriendFeed and Twitter accounts from flowing in.  Yes, remove them!
4. Within FriendFeed, remove Twitter.
5. Now, when you want to post something that goes to all of these services, send an email to buzz@gmail.com and your special ping.fm email address.  That’s it!
   1. For posting an image or other media, you can send an email with the media attachment to the appropriate email:
      • FriendFeeed: share@friendfeed.com
      • Buzz: buzz@gmail.com
      • Twitter: Use your personalized TwitPic email
      • Facebook: Use your personalized Facebook email

Remember, this is specific for sharing updates and other information across all networks in one shot.  If you feel the need to share something directly to any given network, it should be tailored to that network and will not propagate to the others.  I realize this is not perfect, however, at this point, it’s the best I have come up with for the time being.  If you have other thoughts or ideas, I’d love to hear them.

Till next time…

I am extremely excited to announce my first attempt at providing some of my fine art images for sale.  I have integrated FotoMoto into the blog portion of the site (Korn on the Blog) so that with only a few clicks, anyone can be a proud owner of one or more of my photographs.  I am pretty sure FotoMoto will not be my only source for providing prints, but since it was so easy to get up and get running, I thought I would give it shot.  Please note that prints through FotoMoto will not be signed and are open editions (unlimited prints).  I do have plans to provide some Special Editions on select prints with my signature of approval in the near future.

So, without further ado, here is what the new links look like:

If you are viewing this post directly on the website (not via RSS reader or Email), you should see a “Buy Print” and “Buy Card” link as well as an option to “Send as E-card”.  Almost all of the images within the Photo Share Category should now be available and ready for printing.

And, as a special offer, I have setup a discount code for 10% off, but the code is only available to the first 10 people that use it.  So, what are you waiting for?!?!

Discount Code: 1DBD7D

Till next time…

“When you are young, your years seem to last longer and you can’t wait to grow up.  As you get older, your years fly by and you start dragging your feet to slow them down.”

Well, I’m not quite dragging my feet yet, but it really is amazing how quickly the years go by these days.

Okay, enough rambling, what happened this year?  Well, for starters, I’ve been much less active online (on FriendFeed, Twitter, Flickr, etc.) as well as less active in my personal photography.  Why?  In January, I was swiftly promoted at work to Technology Manager.  From there, my workload quadrupled almost instantaneously and my social life, online life, and photography life all took a decent hit.  Over the past year, I’ve managed to control my workload and delegate properly.  It’s been a rough year for the economy, the company I work for included, but we are still alive and kicking strong!

At the beginning of the year, I started the 52 Weeks: My Surrounding Neighborhoods project.  I was quite impressed with some of the other people that joined in with me and stuck with it.  Unfortunately, I only made it to Week 8 of the project.  In February, I managed to get published in Special Events Magazine, and at the end of March, I was asked to display some of my photos at Papyrus.  Then, in April, one of my images was used as an advertisement on BART.  Come July, I made a claim I’d offer some of my prints for sale, however, that plan has yet to come to fruition.  I’m making it a goal for 2010.

In all, it was a good year for my photography, but I seemed to have neglected some personal projects.  For 2010, I am hoping to continue to find the perfect balance, posting to this blog, continuing to check-in with Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and Flickr, get out with my camera more on a personal level, all while thriving and improving upon myself at work, with my photography and in my social life.

Have a happy and safe New Year and I’ll see you in 2010!

Till next time…

The Situation

I am hosting my companies new blog with DomainsMadeEasy (identical to GoDaddy — I have not investigated if the two companies are related, but at first site, you’d assume they are since all of the tools used for domain registration, management, hosting, etc. are identical) on a Windows server (need it for some ASP.NET development we are doing).

In any case, I am hosting www.mydomain.com and the WordPress blog is using the subdomain, blog.mydomain.com. After everything was setup and ready to go, I wanted to ensure the 404 page setup within WordPress was working properly. So, I typed in a bogus address, http://blog.mydomain.com/dsifsdf, to see what I got. Sure enough, I received the ugly default 404 page. In other words, WordPress wasn’t picking up the 404.

Since DomainsMadeEasy does not delegate the “Error Handler” setting on Windows servers, I was unable to work with the web.config file and as I mentioned earlier, moving to Linux to use the .htaccess file was not an option. After hours of searching, a few calls to support and being told it is “impossible,” I finally took a break. When I returned to the issue, the answer dawned on me…

The Solution

In short, it kind of IS impossible to use custom 404 pages for each subdomain and therefore need to trick the server. You can only have one 404 page under the main domain. This also means, if you have an account that allows hosting multiple domains, whatever domain you setup as the primary will be forced to host the 404 page. Example: mydomain.com is the primary, but I’m also hosting thisdomain.com under the same account. If a 404 is served for thisdomain.com, the 404 page for mydomain.com will actually be served…not cool.

Well, the answer ended up being quite simple, though, not perfect). With a little PHP coding, you can create a 404 page that actually redirects to the 404 page of the domain you wish.

First, you need to setup your custom 404 pages for each domain and subdomain you want a custom 404 page for. If you are using WordPress, you can setup a new page from your admin tools to serve this purpose. Note: with the below solution, WordPress will not know this is a 404 error coming through.

Next, you need to create a 404.php page to use under the primary domain. This page will filter the incoming request and forward it on to the appropriate custom 404 page you just setup. My PHP code within this page, looks something like…

$ref = $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];
if(strpos($ref, "otherdomain.com"))
{
header( 'Location: http://otherdomain.com/errorpage' ) ;
}
elseif(strpos($ref, "blog.mydomain.com"))
{
header( 'Location: http://blog.mydomain.com/errorpage' ) ;
}
else
{
header( 'Location: http://www.mydomain.com/error/' ) ;
}


After your 404.php page is set, upload it to your host. I put mine right in the root of mydomain.com. Once your 404.php page is uploaded and in place, login to your hosting account. Once logged in, navigate to the 404 page settings. For GoDaddy and DomainsMadeEasy, this is under Settings, 404 Error Behavior. From there, select the “Use custom page” option. Set the option to point to your 404.php file: http://www.mydomain.com/404.php (note, the http://www.mydomain.com/ part of the entry can not be altered. You should only be typing 404.php into the text box, unless you placed the 404.php file into a subfolder). Once you think the setting looks correct, click on “Continue” and save your changes.

After 10 – 30 minutes, your settings should update and you should now have a custom 404 page for every domain you have hosted under your account.

That’s all there is to it. I hope this helps someone out there.

Till next time…

In Facebook, even before the new privacy policy took place, all users were able to create list to organize their friends.  But, beyond organization, they also allowed you to control which friends saw what within your Facebook account.  For example, I have a list for Family, Work, Social Networks, and No Idea (people I have never interacted with).

After all these list are setup, I can then go to Facebook’s privacy settings within my account and alter what each list has access to.  With the new privacy update Facebook just rolled out, I can even control which list can view particular updates (assuming I am updating directly from Facebook).  At the very least, even if you don’t setup list, you should take some time and checkout your privacy settings to ensure Facebook isn’t sharing private information with the public.

So, let’s walk through setting up a list and then giving that list access to specific parts of your Facebook account.

First, if it wasn’t obvious, you must be logged into Facebook.  Once logged in, go to your Friends page by clicking on Friends, All Friends from the top navigation.

From this page, you should see an option at the top of the list to “Create New List,” click on that button.

Clicking this button will bring a “Create New List” pop-up box into view.  At the top, enter the name of the list you’d like to create.  For this demo, I’m going to create a list of people I know from FriendFeed so I’m going to name the list “FriendFeed”.

Before I click on “Create List” at the bottom of the box, I’m going to go through and find my FriendFeed related friends.  You can do this by typing their names into the search box…

Or, you can scroll through the list, selecting those friends that belong to the list you are creating.

Once you have selected all the friends you want to add to this list (you can add/remove friends from list at anytime), go ahead and click “Create List.”

Sweet, you now have a new list created.  Now you can apply specific privacy policies to this list.  To do so, from the top navigation, click on Settings, Privacy Settings.

On the next screen, you will have 5 options to choose from all of which have several settings.  For this demo, I am going to select “Profile Information.”

On the Profile Information settings page, you will see quite a few options.  In order to change anything, you will first need to click “Change Settings” near the top of the list.

You will be prompted for your password.  Once you’ve entered your password, you will now be able to edit the settings.  Due to lack of time, I am only going to walk through one setting.  All the rest are exactly the same.  Please be sure you take the time to walk through each setting.

For this demo, let’s look at the “About Me” privacy settings.  On the right side of the page, there should be a drop down menu with 4 options, select “Custom” (the most important thing is that NONE of these options are set to EVERYONE, unless, of coarse, you want that information available to everyone)

In the “Custom Privacy” box that pops-up, you can now have a few more options.  You can make “About Me” information visible to certain people or hidden from certain people.  For the purposes of this demo, let’s assume I want all of my friends to see this information, EXCEPT for the people I just added to the list I just created.  To do this, I would set the “Make this visible to” option to “Only Friends” and set the “Hide this from” option to the list I just created.

Once you are satisfied with the settings, click “Save Settings.”  That should do it for the “About Me” section of your profile.  Now you’ve got to run through all the other settings and pages to ensure your privacy is setup to your needs.

Curious to see if your settings took affect?  From the Profile Information Page (or any of the other settings pages), click on “Preview My Profile”

From here, you can test out exactly what your profile looks like to other people.  At the top, just type in the name of one of your friends, select them as they appear in the drop down, and sure enough, you’ll see your profile, exactly how it appears to them.

I hope this tutorial helps someone keep their data a little more private on Facebook.  I strongly encourage everyone to visit their privacy settings and ensure you are not sharing anything you don’t want to be sharing with the general public.

Till next time…

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I managed to finally migrate my WordPress installation off of my home server.  I’m now officially hosting with an external service.  If time permits, I may make further changes to the site, but for now, everything will continue to remain the same.

For those interested, I decided to move off my home server for the following reasons:

1. The physical hard drive which housed the website was returning errors in the event logs.  It is only a matter of time before the drive died completely.
2. Due to #1 (or possibly other reasons), my website had been loading extremely slow over the past few weeks.
3. Despite #2, it was time to upgrade to a location with higher upload bandwidth.

Through all of my testing so far, I have not found any glitches or issues, however, that does not mean they do not exist.  If you come across any, please let me know in the comments or by contacting me directly.

Thank you for your continued support!

Till next time…

After reviewing what the consultant had already done and what my mother’s expectations of what was supposed to happen next, I realized there was a HUGE disconnect.  I am not sure if the disconnect is due to my mother’s lack of knowledge in the online social-sphere,  or a lack of direction and information from the consultant she has hired.  I’m starting to think it is a little of both.  The consultant had setup over a dozen accounts across the web.  They included an account on LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Wordpress, etc.  When I looked deeper, I found that my mother’s FriendFeed account was riddled with duplicate post coming in from Twitter, Facebook and her new blog on Wordpress.  Furthermore, some of the other accounts setup by the consultant didn’t even have links back to the business website.  To top it off, there is no consistency across the board.   I couldn’t believe it.

So, I thought it would be beneficial to my mother as well as anyone else in her position to share a few points of interest I have picked up along the way.  I am certainly not an expert, but I listen and interact with some very smart people online.  From what I have learned and gathered, below is a small list of things (the basic Who, What, Where, How) to think about for those starting or thinking about branding themselves or their business with the social web:

1. What is your goal?
2. Who is your audience?
3. Where is your audience listening?
4. How much time do you have to interact with that audience?

This list is by no means complete, but I believe with these core questions answered, you can begin to investigate and learn what your options are.  After that, once you figure out where you are going to interact, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, or FriendFeed, keep your focus narrow to start.  I would not recommend trying to master Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed all at the same time.  Spend a month or two really understanding Facebook before moving on to the rest.  You can then begin to slowly add other services into the mix as you begin to feel more comfortable with the dynamics and flow of the process.  Lastly, make sure your website is solid and ready for the traffic you are looking to generate.  Broken links, misspellings, wrong phone numbers, etc. will hurt your reputation.  First impressions are key.

On another note, if you do plan on hiring a consultant, make sure they know what they are doing.  As Steven Hodson recently posted:

Right now companies are smart to take whatever the hot social media guru that they hired says with a grain of salt. Just because some-one calls themselves an expert doesn’t make them one and you could do more damage to your company than you might think by heeding their great viral idea.

This post is just the tip of the iceberg.  I’m curious to hear what others think, if this post was at all helpful, and what other questions might be lingering.  Let me know in the comments or on FriendFeed and perhaps I can expand on certain topics of interest in the future.

Till next time…

Networked Teacher Diagram – Update credit courosa

FriendFeed has become more and more integrated into my life lately.  Not because they launched real-time, updated their UI, or even because they improved their search capabilities (though this is part of it).  It’s because FriendFeed has given me the ability to track any topic I want, on anything, from anywhere and be notified about it instantly via Email, IM or their nifty desktop notifier.  By using FriendFeed in the way I am about to describe, I have eliminated the need for other services (or almost eliminated them) by funneling a few different searches and services into FriendFeed directly.

As a quick example, TweepBeep is a great service to keep on top of topics being discussed on Twitter.  They send you an email when keywords are mentioned in any tweet throughout Twitter world.  You can increase your notifications to every hour if you choose.  Their service works very well and I’ve used it for about a year to track mentions of ‘photography’ and other topics of interest to me.  However, this is very limited and only pertains to Twitter.  I rely on Google Alerts for pretty much everything else.

Well, guess what, you can create an RSS feed for twitter searches, Google blog searches, as well as many others.  So why not search for everything under one roof?  And better yet, get notified about those topics instantly.  Sound good?

Since FriendFeed seems to be moving away from imaginary friends (though I’ve seen hints that imaginary friends might make a come back), I am going to explain how to set this up as a group.  The beauty of using a group is that you can decide to make your searches private or public.  If you decide to make your group private, it’s pretty much the same as an imaginary friend.  (If you are curious, I wrote up a post about using imaginary friends as an RSS Reader awhile back.  The same logic can be carried over into groups.)

Alright, here is the juice…let’s setup a FriendFeed Group to track any mentions of ‘photography’ anywhere on the web.  Obviously, you can replace the term ‘photography’ with any other topic.

First, you need to create a new group on FriendFeed.  You can do this by going to the Groups Page and clicking on the “Create a group” link near the top of the page and fill in the appropriate information.  If you are going to make this group public, I suggest giving the room an appropriate name and URL

Okay, now we need to feed this group so information.  First, let’s feed it all mentions of ‘photography’ from Twitter.  Go to Twitter Search and type in just that, photography.  After you get your results, on the right side of the page, there is a link to “Feed for this query.”  Click on that link and copy that URL.

Now, go back to your newly created FriendFeed group, click on “Edit settings” (at the top, next to the group name) and then “Import a service.”  From here, click on “Custom RSS/Atom” and paste the URL you copied from Twitter Search into the ‘Custom RSS/Atom URL’ text box.  Here you have a few options.  I suggest leaving the “Display entries as messages (no link)” option unchecked and checking the “Include entry description as a comment” option.

When you are all set, click on the “Import Custom RSS/Atom” button and you should see all of the tweets mentioning your topic flow into the FriendFeeed Group.

From here, following the same steps, you can add any Custom RSS feed into this group.  For example, you could add a search term from Google Blog Search or any other service that provides an RSS feed from the search.  Unfortunatly, the only search you can not feed into this group is a FriendFeed search.  Kind of ironic, but that is just the way it goes.

The final peice of the puzzle is to setup notifications for this group.  Back on the main page of the group, near the top, there is a link for “Email/IM.”  If you click there, you’ll be given options on what you want notifications for and how you want to receive them.

After you select your desired options, click on “Save changes” and you should be good to go.  If you are interested, this group is public: Photography Mentions.

I hope you found this post useful.  If you have anything to add, please do so in the comments.

Till next time…