But the content I’m most interested in reading is how (and what) he’s doing in our social media world. I can see that he’s doing it, but I’m curious about how he’s doing it, how it’s working for him, what’s working, what’s not, and how we can learn from it.

Laurie King over at Travel Writers News is also interested as she mentions Lee’s article in her own commentary on apps and the future of journalism. She’s also interested, for her travel writing readers, about how a pro in the industry is doing things. What’s especially interesting about Lee’s write up is that he gives real numbers, real percentages of commissions so we can see first hand what’s going on behind the scenes.

I’ll be curious to see if these posts by both Laurie and Lee get more traffic than a post about, well, travel itself. Stay tuned.

Wordpress 3.0 MU Merge Settings To Create Network Blogs

Was talking with someone just yesterday about WP MU and how it might be a solution for her. Thought to myself, “Hmm, guess I should become more familiar with MU … ” but maybe I should just wait for 3.0.

• User Access Manager: we can create categories that are only accessible to certain users. Works well, but then are posts sent to RSS? Also are posts then visible by title, but then restricted/closed? Are they listed in the Recent Posts? (I don’t want them to be.) I think I’d rather have these private/back room discussions less prominent.
• bbPress: forum software built by Automattic (the same people who run WordPress), so of course there’s seamless integration. Full-blown forum software so it has all of the bells and whistles.
• WP Forum: a WP plugin that’s been around a while, but hasn’t been updated in since Sep 2008.
• Forum Server: they modestly promote, “This is a much more advanced and better than the WP-Forum plugin … ” but hey, worth looking at.

Thoughts?

How smart are your tags?

• WP Table plugin
• Last resort: Paste from Word
• Google spreadsheet embed
• Something else?

Do you have experience with this?

• Categories (Spanish / English and then subcategories for each; sidebar content (posts/pages) based on which category we’re in)
• Pages: similar to categories: pages with sub-pages for each language
• Google Translate: some sort of on-the-fly translation tool … ?
• Duplicate WP install: a whole separate WP install for the Spanish site?

What have you done?

So I get this question quite a bit:

“I have photos on my Facebook page, but I want them on my website, too. Can I import them or something?”

I’m not a heavy Facebook user so I didn’t know the WordPress or Flickr plugins off the top of my head, but a quick look at the WordPress plugin directory and there were plenty to choose from. But that’s assuming they’re using Facebook and WordPress. Sure, my clients are, but if you’re not, I’d suggest using a photo-sharing site like Flickr and then integrating those images into Facebook. Why? Because Flickr (or Picasa or others) do a great job at one simple task: photos. Because they’re so popular, usually they’ll have friendly export/import/integration/plugins to help you get your photos elsewhere.

So then you could integrate your Flickr photos into your Facebook page, your MySpace page, your website (with WordPress or something else) or even just use Flickr on its own for photos.

How do you get your peanut butter in your chocolate?

(Noah and Michael (new guys), this is a group of small business owners who have been meeting over the past few months to, well, talk shop. We’re meeting tomorrow (Wed., 12/9) from 9:30 to 12:00 at the SF Main Library, 4^th floor, maybe we’ll get a conference room. You’re welcome to just show up or drop in anytime. Despite the name, it’s not really just about WordPress anymore.)

I’ve been trying to think of topics for our WordPress Wednesday tomorrow and I actually have too many topics rather than too few.

I stumbled on this guy’s blog recently and almost every post he writes is relevant to us. Here’s one I thought was great:

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/if-you-have-an-extra-half-hour/

My favorite is #7 and I should do more of that. Of course, I should/could put those posts onto our www.creativestorefront.com. Can I challenge you all to post something by tomorrow? (I just took a 10-minute pause from this email and wrote this: http://creativestorefront.com/you-got-flickr-in-my-facebook/). Let me know if you don’t have a login.

I also talked with Michael McDonald last week (http://www.kelek.com) and we were talking about outsourcing. I was talking about job/project tasks and finding help via www.elance.com or www.odesk.com but he brought this up:

http://getreplacemyself.com

I’d love to talk a bit more about that tomorrow. Because if I’m busy writing posts about Reese’s (“reaching out to thousands and not the single email response”), who’s going to take care of the 148-strong-to-do-list-that-is-my-inbox?

Other topics? Please add them as comments here:

http://creativestorefront.com/wpw-20091209/

(Yes, I posted it openly to the site, maybe we can find a nice/good way to post these kinds of topics on the site.)

What AM I doing up so early? My 3-year old woke me up at 5:00 for milk and then HE happily fell back into la-la-land …

See you all tomorrow.