free | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Free File Sharing Site: Senduit

Today I ran across a simple, elegant free site that’s a great alternative to a complicated ftp site. If you need to share files that are too big to e-mail but less than 100 mb, Senduit is an excellent choice.

Almost all social software utilities like Facebook and YouTube are free, because as Chris Anderson says, there’s a huge psychological difference between $0.00 and $0.01. The price of admission for these sites is usually creating a username and password. Not a huge barrier, and there are benefits that accompany the accounts, but it still creates some hassle in getting started with a service.

Senduit is as effortless a file sharing utility as I can imagine. Check that: I think it’s as effortless as anyone could imagine. Here’s the user interface:

You just choose the file, pick how long you want it to be available, and hit the upload button:

After a few minutes, depending on your file size, you get a screen that looks something like this:

Then, if you send that URL to someone by e-mail, or insert it in a blog post as a clickable link like this:

http://senduit.com/921e87

They can click the link and the download starts automatically.

Note: This link should be working until about June 4, 2008. It’s video I took of some friends and former patients who were back in Rochester to visit last week. You can read their updates here. If you’re reading this post after that date, give Senduit a try with your own file.

At first I wondered how this could possibly be a money-making enterprise, especially given the Senduit privacy policy, which says:

File Privacy
The name, type, contents, and origin of your file are not saved, reviewed, or analyzed. The only monitoring that takes place are our automated tallies of file uploads and our automated cleaning of expired files.

Transfer and Storage Security

Although we take appropriate measures to ensure the privacy of our user’s data, it’s impossible for us to guarantee 100% security. For this reason, we suggest you do not use our service to share sensitive data. Once a file has been uploaded, it is your responsibility to share your file’s address in a secure manner.
File Expiration
All uploaded files are designated to expire at the point in time selected (anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 week). After a file has expired, it becomes inaccessible to the public and is permanently removed from our systems.

But then, when I downloaded my own file, I saw how they work in the advertising. It looks like this:

Unlike the annoying pop-up ads you see on newspaper web sites, this isn’t one you’d click to skip. And when you click the ad it opens in a new window, leaving your download happening in the background.

This seems like a great, user-friendly service, and the only real costs should be bandwidth. Files never stay on their servers for more than a week, so storage costs should be negligible. Like they say, you wouldn’t want to place highly sensitive files on their servers, but it appears that the odds of someone randomly finding your URL are something like 1 in 2,176,782,336.

Give Senduit a try and let me know what you think about it.

“Free” and Higher Education = SMUG

Two recent blog posts that are required reading for SMUG students come from Chris Anderson and Jeff Jarvis. They explain why an institution like Social Media University, Global can exist (and much of what makes the rest of the Web work.)

Anderson (Editor-in-Chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail) has a link to his cover story in the current issue of the magazine. It’s called “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business” and here’s an excerpt:

What does this mean for the notion of free? Well, just take one example. Last year, Yahoo announced that Yahoo Mail, its free webmail service, would provide unlimited storage. Just in case that wasn’t totally clear, that’s “unlimited” as in “infinite.” So the market price of online storage, at least for email, has now fallen to zero (see “Webmail Windfall”). And the stunning thing is that nobody was surprised; many had assumed infinite free storage was already the case.
For good reason: It’s now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned. Storage now joins bandwidth (YouTube: free) and processing power (Google: free) in the race to the bottom. Basic economics tells us that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. There’s never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing.

Anderson’s article explains the proliferation of blogging tools like WordPress.com offering 3 gigabytes of storage, and unlimited bandwidth, for $0.00. As technology prices fall, the marginal cost of adding another user to the server farm becomes so close to zero as to become negligible.

From the consumer’s perspective, though, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business, one of clawing and scratching for every customer. The psychology of “free” is powerful indeed, as any marketer will tell you.

I’ve definitely found that to be the case as I talk to people about blogging, or joining Facebook or trying other social media tools. When I can tell them they can do anything they see on my blog without spending a penny, it takes away their excuses for inaction.

I can’t wait to get Anderson’s book when it’s published next year. I understand he’s working with the publisher on a method to make it available at no charge.

In his post from this afternoon, Google U, Jarvis explains the essence of Social Media University, Global:

Once you put all this together, students can self-organize with teachers and fellow students to learn what they want how and where they want. My hope is that this could finally lead to the lifelong education we keep nattering about but do little to actually support. And why don’t we? Because it doesn’t fit into the degree structure. And because self-organizing classes and education could cut academic institutions out of the their exclusive role in education.

So what if the degree structure is outmoded? What does a bachelor’s of arts really say you’re ready to do? Once you get a medical degree, if you practice, you’re required to take refreshers as the science changes. Shouldn’t we be offering journalists updates as new tools and opportunities emerge in their craft? (Short answer: yes.) And while on the example of journalists, what if it were easy for them to take a course in, say, accounting when they get assigned to the business section, or science when given the environmental beat? So rather than signing on for a one-time degree, what if I subscribe to education for life? Or what if the culture simply expects me to bone up because it’s so damned easy to (and I don’t have to go through tests and admissions and all that)?

This sounds a lot like what I said in my Message from the Chancellor. Credentialed learning certainly has its place. But SMUG is an institution for lifelong learners to get this refresher education Jarvis describes. He is focused on journalism, but I believe this kind of training being available on-line is absolutely essential for professionals working in communications, PR or marketing to keep their skills relevant.

As Anderson says, what makes this all possible is that the marginal cost for each additional user (or student) is practically zero. We’re up to 50 SMUG students now; if you’re interested in hands-on, practical training in social media, why not audit a few classes?

Social Media 103: Intro to Wikis

Note: This course is part of the general education requirements for Social Media University, Global (SMUG).

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A wiki is a great tool that enables groups of contributors to work together to quickly create and edit documents that pool their collective knowledge.

You’ve no doubt heard of Wikipedia, which is (to paraphrase the former Iraqi dictator) “the mother of all wikis.” The richness of this resource, produced entirely by collective voluntary effort, is truly amazing. Check out its entries on the Virginia Tech massacre and the 35W bridge collapse, and you’ll get a sense for the power of wikis to facilitate collaboration.

And these are only two of the more than 2.2 million articles in the English version of Wikipedia. So just how is Encylopaedia Britannica supposed to compete with that?

You’re no doubt already using Wikipedia. In fact, if you Google almost any relatively prominent proper noun, it’s highly like the Wikipedia entry will show up on the first page of results. So that’s one wiki already making your life easier (unless you work for an encyclopedia publisher.)

But how can wikis help you complete your projects?

If you have a work team, you can use a wiki to produce documents much more quickly and easily than you can with a Word document via email.

For example, say you have a 10-member team and you need to produce a two-page document. In the old way (or maybe what you’re doing today), you would produce a first draft and send it as an email attachment to your team members: Ann, Bob, Cindy, Doug, Eunice, Frank, Gail, Hal, Irene and Joe. You play it smart and turn on the track-changes mode, so edits are apparent.

Ann adds to the document, hits “reply all” to the email, and sends her revision to the whole group.
Bob bounces your original directly back to you with some modifications, but doesn’t copy the rest of the team.
Cindy changes Ann’s version and hits reply all.
Doug deletes Ann’s additions and inserts his own, and likewise sends to everyone.
Eunice edits your original and sends it on to Frank for his thoughts on one particular section.
Frank fails to respond, so Eunice’s edits are lost to the team.
Gail groans at Cindy’s changes, adds her own ideas, and copies the whole team on her changes.

So at this point in this illustration you have 52 Word files in various team members’ email inboxes, and figuring out which is the latest version is, well…problematic at least. And even if you can track down the various versions, it’s a hassle to compare modifications in separate documents.

Feeling cross-eyed yet?

That’s why wikis are wonderful. Instead of sending an attachment, you send a link to a special Web site. You and your teammates make your edits in one common place, and each version is saved in the document history. So you capture all of the information, and you as the editor can compare the various versions.

Homework Assignments:

1. Watch a Wiki Video. Honorary doctorate candidates Sachi and Lee LeFever again have an honorable contribution, with their Wikis in Plain English video. See it below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY]

2. Participate in our Class Wiki Demonstration. Visit the SMUG Curriculum wiki, and add your course ideas. This gives you hands-on experience with a wiki, and it also will help strengthen our curriculum.

3. Set up a wiki for your team or some other group. You have options to get these for free, like everything else in the SMUG curriculum. The one I picked for our class project is wikispaces. Using wiki technology to accomplish a practical project takes your experience to the next level.

4. Discussion: Please share your thoughts or questions about wikis, or what you’ve learned through your experiences with them, in the comments section below.

Extra Credit for Honors Students: Read this review of Wikinomics for broader background on the new ways of working made possible by technology like wikis.

SMUG Tuition and Financial Aid

At the risk of seriously undermining the incentive for potential participants in the design-the-logo contest for Social Media University, Global (which offered at 50 percent tuition discount to the winner), I want to clarify two important points:

SMUG students are not eligible for any state or federal financial aid programs to assist with their tuition payments, because
Tuition and fees for SMUG are $34,998 less than those for Harvard.

In other words, SMUG tuition is Free. You are responsible for your own room & board, though.

Still, even though we receive no federal funds, SMUG does not discriminate based on race, gender, socioeconomic status, religion or any other factor. We are fully Title IX compliant, with opportunities to play open to both women and men.

Many prominent organizations advocate Universal Basic and Secondary Education, and other programs like One Laptop Per Child are aimed at giving youngsters in developing countries access to technology. SMUG’s focus is different: we offer free, universal post-secondary education in social media not primarily to kids, but to the non-traditional student; the lifetime learner.

Yet hopefully the curriculum will be valuable even to the digital natives who’ve grown up with this stuff, because it offers a more structured framework for understanding. They may even find out that what they’ve learned about social media will be valuable to potential employers who are looking for more effective ways to engage key stakeholders, because they will see practical examples of social media being used to meet real business goals.

SMUG is no “Ivory Tower” institution for pointy-headed intellectuals. You’ll get hands-on, real-world experience in social media…with no student loans to repay.

I’m looking for stories of people who’ve used blogging or other social media to generate bottom-line business results. I’d like to profile you in a future post, or even have you be an adjunct faculty member. Leave a comment below, or send me an email in Gmail (see address in the upper right) or a message in Facebook.

WordPress.com Increases Free Storage 6,000 Percent

As TechCrunch notes, my free blogging platform of choice, WordPress.com, has increased the amount of free storage it provides its users from 50 Mb to 3 Gb. Here’s what I see when I upload graphics or other documents to my blog:

Note that a few days ago that 3GB figure in the lower left was only 50 MB. I formerly used Flickr as a storage space for my photos and other graphics (since it offered 100 MB a month vs. 50 MB a year with WordPress.com) and just pulled the graphics from Flickr into my blog posts, but now it seems I should be able to upload graphics indiscriminately without even coming close to exceeding my WordPress limits. Especially if I’m uploading mostly 72 dpi screen captures.

As Erick Schonfeld says, this is a huge advance that puts significant pressure on competing platforms. WordPress.com has had the advantage of Akismet protection against comment spam (which has saved me over 34,000 spam comments.) By offering triple the free storage of Blogger, WordPress.com takes another big leap.

When I started this blog, I made it my goal to never spend a penny on any of the services. My purpose was more than miserliness; I wanted to encourage others (particularly those in the PR field) that they can have blogs without spending any money and without support from their IT department. As I say in my “It’s All Free” section, if you see something on my blog that you like, you can rest assured that it was completely free.

Why is free such a big deal? Because it helps to drive home the ridiculousness of spending several hundred to a few thousand dollars to attend a communications conference in which you learn about social media if you fail to take the next step and actually get hands-on experience. And it’s why I developed my 12-step Social Media Program.

Barriers to entry in blogging and other social media aren’t just low. They are non-existent. Zero. Get started with your WordPress.com blog today. When you do, please leave a comment below to let me know how it’s working for you. You also can subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog, which will provide you with regular updates and pointers on issues you may find interesting and helpful. (If you don’t know what RSS is, see steps 4 and 5 in my 12-step program.)

You really should check out Facebook, too. It’s also free. Friend me if you’d like to stay in touch and learn more about social media.

If your work involves any communications, or marketing, or sales, or management responsibilities you owe it to yourself to begin to understand social media. And if you paid anything for college, or attend any career enrichment seminars for which you or your company pay admission fees, you’re seriously missing out on a great educational value if you don’t take advantage of the free hands-on education you can get through WordPress.com, Facebook, Twitter (you can follow me here), Flickr, YouTube and related services.

What’s holding you back?