Ever since two friends and I staged a two-week jaunt around the Midwest to attend a great new conference earlier this year, I've been more and more aware of a growing trend: the social media road trip. While on the road this year, I've come upon long-term social media road warriors such as Mark Simonds of the Twitter Road Trip , brand ambassadors such as Sara Lopez and conference-hoppers such as Dave Delaney . I think we've all heard about Tara Hunt's widely publicized karaoke/book promo tour . There's even a SxSWi session about the phenomenon this spring. For folks intent on packing up the hardware and hitting the road, here are ten tips for success. Sponsor These road trips are great for making new connections with interesting people and forming mutually beneficial relationships, as my RoadTwip gang did in Nashville . They're great for finally meeting up with longtime (or not so longtime) online friends in real life, as we did in Toledo . They can give a person some perspective on tech " scenes ," especially in terms of engendering respect for non-Silicon Valley communities. Even better, it's great for brands, as our friend Sara Lopez has learned this year while tripping around for soymilk company 8th Continent. Ford recognized the public's fascination with road trip-related media with its highly successful Fiesta campaign this year, which involved mini-trips and missions documented on YouTube. These trips capture a great audience, both regionally with one-on-one interactions in communities and internationally as curious and amused Internet users stumble upon and share related content. More on that later. As promised, here are ten must-haves for planning and executing a successful social media road trip. 1. Get sponsorship. Remember the part where I told you that social media road trips are great for brands? These days, brands are often more than willing to help a geek out with gas money, hardware, goods and services in exchange for a little light plugging now and then. If there's a good fit between your trip and a brand, from soft drinks to software , don't hesitate to ask for a partnership. 2. Plan for WiFi. This might be your biggest challenge. Whether you're using Bluetooth, a MiFi device, a USB-connected wireless modem or simply tethering to your mobile phone, make sure your preferred method works and that you have a backup. We also recommend downloading WeFi in case your plans fail and you need to find emergency coffee house WiFi in a strange place. 3. Have a mission and destination. One great piece of advice my road team got from NorthStar Manifesto founder Duke Stump was to define our purpose before our itinerary. Another important part of these trips can be a geographical highlight, such as a conference, a hometown or a tech hub. It'll solidify your position and help you focus your content. 4. Meet everyone and go everywhere. Part of the excitement of a social media road trip is accepting unexpected invitations and discovering friends in strangers. Entering into situations with an open mind is the best way to use your trip as a learning experience. While on the road, I met up with just about everyone I could, and I got to see amazing new hardware, apps, innovators and entrepreneurs as a result. 5. Plan for power. Power is up there with WiFi as one of the primary pain points of being on the road. We recommend packing extra battery units and chargers (you lose them at home, and you'll most certainly lose them on the road). Definitely invest in a 12V adapter so you can charge devices while mobile, but know that one adapter may only charge a certain number or type of device. E.g., mine can handle a laptop, an iPod, and a curling iron, but on two laptops, it blows a fuse. And yes, you'll want to pick up a pack of fuses for your 12V adapter, too. More tech and media tips coming right up on page two. 6. Deviate from your plan, map and schedule. Some of the best moments of my own social media road trips were completely unplanned. Get curious, pull over now and then, make a few extra stops and definitely get in touch with new people. Although it's vital to have a timeline for your travels, don't forget to smell the roses; great opportunities will present themselves when you allow for serendipity. 7. Make content creation your job. The biggest difference between a social media road trip and a non-geek vacation is the work you'll put into creating and publishing content. You'll be pumping out pics, videos, tweets, blog posts, live video chats and every kind of app update imaginable while you're on the road. You need to do this well and consistently. Make sure you've got the hardware and software for the job, and since your time on the road is limited, prioritize posting content over lame stuff like eating and sleeping, which isn't really bloggable, anyhow. (Just kidding - but you know what we mean.) 8. Make sure your network works. This section isn't (only) an AT&T slam. Almost any network can let a user down in the uninhabited wilds of Iowa. If you're traveling with buddies, it can help to have a diverse representation of networks in case one person's cell reception fails in a critical moment. Also, not all WiFi devices will work all over the country; for example, Cricket's wireless Internet connection devices only work in certain major metro areas. Check with your provider to make sure your network is going to be reliable for your entire route. 9. Plan for mobile site and server maintenance. If you are the kind of geek who runs one or several websites or your own servers, you'll want to keep an eye on your babies while away from home. For this item, it's all about the SSH . Get a client that jives with your mobile , and as with every other tech solution we've recommended so far, test it before you drive off into the sunset. 10. Use an aggregator to push mobile updates all over the place. Whether you're using a service like PixelPipe or something more like FriendFeed , you're going to want your content to get all over the tubes without your having to duplicate your efforts. Test out some solutions for one-click, cross-site publishing of pics, posts and videos, and be sure it'll be quick and simple from your mobile device. Those are the words of wisdom I can offer right now, and probably what I'll be sharing at SxSW in a few months. If you've got more helpful hints from your own journeys, please let us know in the comments! As an eleventh bonus tip, be prepared for failure . Your car will get a flat tire, you'll argue with your road buddies, you'll miss a meetup due to weather or oversleeping - things will go horrifically wrong. And in the end, it'll be just fine anyhow. Discuss

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10 Things You Need for Your Social Media Road Trip

At the beginning of this year, analyst firm Gartner released a report that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they've identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! The eight technologies identified include the following: Bluetooth 3.0 This is one of the no-brainers on the list. The Bluetooth 3.0 specification will be released this year and devices will start to hit the shelves by 2010. At this point, it's expected that the 3.0 spec will include faster speeds, reportedly transferring files at 480 megabits per second in close proximity and 100 megabits per second at 10 meters. It will also feature an ultra-low-power mode that Gartner predicts will enable new peripherals, sensors, and applications, such as health monitoring. The technology will be backwards compatible, allowing old devices to communicate with new ones, so there's no reason for it not take off in the upcoming years. Mobile User Interfaces + Mobile Web/Widgets Mobile user interfaces and mobile web/widgets were listed separately, accounting for two items on the list, but we think they can be lumped together. They all point to how mobile computing is rapidly becoming a new platform for everything from consumer mobile apps to B2E (business-to-employee) and B2C (business-to-customer). (Gartner did not include B2B on their list.) Modern day smartphones like the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, the upcoming Pre, and others deliver better interfaces for browsing the web, thus making it accessible to more people. Widget-like applications, including those that replicate thin client technology, will become more common especially in B2C strategies. Yet the mobile web still has challenges ahead. For example, there are no standards for browser access to handset services like the camera or GPS, the report notes. Location Awareness Location sensing, powered by GPS as well as Wi-Fi and triangulation, opens up new possibilities for mobile social networking and presence applications. Technology's earliest adopters are already familiar with social networks like Brightkite and Loopt which let you reveal your location to a network of friends. But we're still on the tip of this iceberg. Take for example, the iPhone IM client Palringo , they're just now adding location services to their application. This allows users to see how far away their contacts are, introducing a whole new dimension to mobile communication. Over the next year or two, this sort of technology is expected to become more commonplace, but it will also raise questions about privacy. Will you want your network of online friends and acquaintances to really know your exact location? Will turning off location awareness signal that you're up to something sneaky ( so asks the suspicious wife, husband, boss, etc.) ? As a society, we will have to answer these questions and more in the near future. Near Field Communication (NFC) NFC is a technology that provides a way for consumers to use their mobile phones for making payments, among other things. It's something that has taken off in many countries worldwide, but certainly not all, and definitely not in the United States just yet. Unfortunately, Gartner predicts that the move towards mobile payment systems will still not occur this year or the next in mature markets like the U.S. and Western Europe. Instead, NFC is more likely to take off in emerging markets. Other uses of the technology, such as the ability to transfer photos from phone to digital photo frames, will also remain elusive to more developed markets. 802.11n & Cellular Broadband 802.11n, a specification for wireless local area networks (WLANs), initially gave us pause. Although not ratified as an official standard yet, the technology is already commonplace. However, until it "goes gold" so to speak, it won't really infiltrate the mobile world. Even the ubiquitous iPhone only supports 802.11 b/g at the moment.

It's one thing to have resolutions for the new year. I, for example, plan to lose weight, learn Python and design the perfect handbag. But since nothing satisfies like the quick achievement of a short-term goal, here are eight things every good nerd needs to to before the ball drops later this week. These tasks comprise a quick to-do list that will leave you feeling competent and prepared for the decade that approaches. Also, you can play the condescension chip and start chiding friends who haven't checked off these items yet. Sponsor 1. Edit your privacy settings and friendships. Facebook's maelstrom-causing privacy changes have given quite a few of us a head-scratching good time trying to figure out just how much of our private lives are to be made public. Before the new year begins, take a look at your settings on sites such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LiveJournal and any other places you might be sharing personal content to make sure what you display is consistent with the public image you want to project. As more recruiters and employers hit the web in search of info on individuals, it's becoming ever more important to monitor and control our own identities. If you look back to the origin dates of some of your accounts, you might be surprised at what you thought was appropriate to share online in 2005. Also, while considering what's private and public, take time to evaluate what a "friend," "contact" or "follower" means to you and what types of information you share with different groups. 2. Change your passwords. Safety first, friends. Social web security threats in 2009 were sweeping and surprised more than a few users with spam DMs, hacked accounts and malware of all kinds. Check out the password management tools recommended by a recently high-profile hacker (scroll to the last few paragraphs); for free or cheap, they'll help you generate strong, random passwords and manage them from your computer. 3. Own your name. I've conducted many a web search on many a professional geek this year, and I've been disappointed by how few of us have staked a meaningful claim to our online identities. If you haven't already, buy a URL - preferably one that relates to the name you use professionally - and make friends with Google. If you don't show up in the first results when you search for your name, get a crash course in SEO and ask friends to link to you. It's good for your social life and your career if you seize the opportunity to tell the searching world about yourself rather than relegating that responsibility to LinkedIn, Facebook or some weirdo with the same name as you. 4. Prune your feeds. When going through your RSS feeds, do you find yourself impatiently scrolling more than you're intently skimming? Is your list of unread items becoming unmanagable? The end of the year is a perfect time to get rid of the content you're not reading and group the stuff you are. Take some time this week to organize, delete and add feeds, thereby optimizing your feed-reading experience. Try tools such as NetNewsWire's "dinosaurs" and "least attenion" features that weed out unread or dormant feeds, and consider implementing tools such as Lazyfeed or Guzzle.it that can bring relevant results from fresh sources. And make sure the feeds you own are easy for others to find, too. 5. Find a better mobile. If you don't have a smartphone already, chances are you'll desperately need one next year. And if you already have one, think long and hard about whether you're happy with your service, network and interface. While you might not be able to run out and buy your dream device before 2010 rolls around, visit a few retailers, read some reviews and have your eye on a good mobile to purchase next year. Mobile tech keeps on booming, and you'll want to ensure a frustration-free year as new apps and OSes roll out. 6. Update copyright notices on your website. Here's a simple, obvious and necessary reminder. Does your website currently claim a copyright year of 2007? While it doesn't put you on the foul side of the law, it does look a bit silly as we head into a new decade. The Next Web has a good bit of dynamic code for site owners. 7. Revisit your blog. That poor, neglected old beast might be long overdue for a design facelift, a blogroll refresh or even just a few new posts. While you're at it, why not set automatic reminders to periodically bug you about posting in the new year? On a more mission-critical note, you'll also want to make sure you're using the most updated version of your CMS; not doing so can can lead to problems from broken plugins to getting hacked . And while you're at it, the year's end might also be a good time to consider switching up your CMS service altogether. 8. Back up your data. Hacks and hardware failures happen. Before 2010, make sure as much of your data as possible is protected. From calendars and contacts to blog posts and work projects, more and more of us are relying on networks of servers and startups to keep us running. So, now might be a good time to download and back up files of LinkedIn contacts and WordPress posts - anything that's valuable to you and portable. Think of it this way: You - or at least parts of you - live in the Internet. If the Internet caught on fire, what would you grab to carry with you out of the blaze? We hope this list helps you all get a few housekeeping items squared away in time for a great New Year's Eve filled with peace of mind and a smug sense of superiority over your fellow nerds. If you can think of any must-do year-end tasks, please let us know in the comments! Discuss

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8 Things Every Geek Needs to Do Before 2010

While 2009 has been the year of the API, it's the codeless creative experiences that drive mainstream adoption. Every December ReadWriteWeb's writers collect up their thoughts from 2009 and make predictions for the year ahead. My

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Augmented Reality: Passive Consumers versus Creative Contributors

This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the five biggest, most cutting-edge Web trends to come out of 2009. We're posting one trend analysis per day. Then at the end of the week we'll publish a major update to our standard presentation about web technology trends. Our opening post was about Structured Data . In this article we look at probably the most hyped trend of 2009: the Real-Time Web . It has become a core part of many Internet products this year: Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Google, Delicious, WordPress, and many others. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! What is the Real-Time Web? Ken Fromm wrote an insightful primer to the Real-Time Web for ReadWriteWeb. In it he explained that the Real-Time Web is a new form of communication, it creates a new body of content, it's immediate, it's public and has an explicit social graph associated with it, and it carries an implicit model of federation. One of the early leaders in the Real-Time Web was FriendFeed , a lifestreaming service that became popular with early adopters. Co-founder Paul Buchheit (who also built the first version of Gmail, during his time at Google) told ReadWriteWeb in May that "the open, real-time discussions that occur on FriendFeed are going to become a major new communication medium on the same level as email, IM and blogging." Everything is Real-Time Now We must of course begin our product overview with Twitter . In March this year the super-trendy microblogging service marked its 3rd birthday. As Marshall Kirkpatrick explained at the time, it's really the story of Twitter as a platform that is most exciting. However the Real-Time Web is much more than Twitter. It has changed the products and strategies of almost every major Internet company in 2009 . Google may have missed the early action , but by May 2009 co-founder Larry Page was proclaiming that Google had to do a better job of being real-time. It's started that process. For example Google is behind a project called PubSubHubbub , which delivers RSS feeds much faster (near real-time). PubSubHubbub is already making Google Reader faster . But while you're waiting for Google search to become truly real-time, you can at least add Twitter results to it with this plug-in . In March, Facebook launched a site redesign emphasizing a real-time stream of updates on users' homepages. Although this was unpopular with users , Facebook continued to dabble in Real-Time. In June, Facebook announced a new search interface allowing users to search for content from people, organizations, and other public figures as soon as they share it on Facebook. This was described as "up-to-the-minute" search results - in other words a real-time search engine. Meanwhile in April, FriendFeed introduced a revamped user interface that focused much more on real-time updates than previously. The most impressive change was the new advanced filters, which made it a lot easier for users to create streams based on keywords, groups, sets of friends and more. FriendFeed's filters added something powerful to the Real-Time Web. In August, Facebook further strengthened its Real-Time chops by acquiring FriendFeed . This immediately brought more real-time sophistication into the Facebook family - we're yet to see how Facebook will use it though. In August Yahoo's influential social bookmarking service Delicious was re-born as a real-time news tracker . It launched a new home page, combining recent tagging activity and cross-referenced links on Twitter. The real-time updates continue... earlier today, all blogs on the WordPress.com platform and any WordPress.org blogs that opt-in will now make instant updates available to any RSS readers subscribed to a new feature called RSSCloud . Conclusion In May, Marshall Kirkpatrick identified three forms of value from the Real-Time Web : ambiance, automation and emergence. In August, Bernard Lunn compared it to the real-time world of the trader . The Real-Time Web is all of those things and more. 2009 has in many ways been the Year of the Real-Time Web . But it's early days yet, because we - collectively - are still looking for ways to use all of that extra real-time data. We've made a lot of data real-time and surfaced it in search and our filters. But what new applications and intelligence can we build off this data? That question will be answered over the coming few years. ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data The Real-Time Web Personalization Mobile Web & Augmented Reality Internet of Things Discuss

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Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: The Real-Time Web

If you want to help Mozilla to make Firefox better but you are not a developer, here is your chance. Earlier this year, Mozilla announced the launch of Test Pilot , the organization's new distributed usability lab. Test pilots will be enlisted in various usability tests and will be some of the first to see some of Mozilla's ideas for new user interfaces and Mozilla Labs products. We first wrote about Test Pilot when it was just a "still-in concept platform." Now, however, you can download the Test Pilot add-on for Firefox 3.5 here and begin to help Mozilla make Firefox even better. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! First Tests Are Coming Soon For now, Mozilla will start the program with a survey that aims to get a better understanding of who is joining the Test Pilot community. The first actual tests should arrive soon after this first survey is complete. Mozilla stresses that it will take its users' privacy seriously. Participants have to opt-in and data will be stored in anonymous form. Only aggregate test data will be made available to the public. Overall, this looks like a great project. Usability studies tend to be slow and costly, yet with Test Pilot, Mozilla will be able to quickly enlist feedback about new design ideas from its large community of users. Discuss

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Become a Test Pilot: Mozilla Wants Your Help To Make Firefox Better

This week ReadWriteWeb will run a series of posts detailing what we think are the five biggest, most cutting-edge Web trends to come out of 2009. We'll be posting one trend analysis per day. Then at the end of the week we'll publish a major update to our standard presentation about web technology trends. The first major Web trend we're looking at is Structured Data . In prior presentations , this has sometimes been referred to under the umbrella term of 'Semantic Web'. However the way 2009 has panned out so far, it's become clear that this trend is much more than the Semantic Web. In this post, we'll analyze the developments in Structured Data this year and provide you with 3 product examples: OpenCalais, Google, Wolfram Alpha. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Web of Data, Not Documents Tim Berners-Lee said in February this year that we're now in a Web of Data , rather than a Web of Documents. The organization that Berners-Lee heads, the W3C, has heavily promoted two key initiatives that are helping to build this Web of Data: the Semantic Web and more recently Linked Data . However over the past few years, we've seen that there are many other ways to structure data and enable others to build off it. The best current example is surely Twitter , whose API has historically been responsible for around 90% of Twitter's activity - via third party apps. The basic principle of the Web of Data is still the same as what Alex Iskold articulated on ReadWriteWeb back in March 2007: "unstructured information will give way to structured information - paving the road to more intelligent computing." Example 1: OpenCalais Our first example product, OpenCalais , is probably the best current example of Linked Data (which is a type of structured data endorsed by W3C). Thomson Reuters, the international business and financial news giant, launched an API called OpenCalais in Feb '08 . In a nutshell, OpenCalais turns unstructured HTML into semantically marked up data. It orders data into groups such as 'people,' 'places,' 'companies' and more. This way, third party applications and sites can build interesting new things from that data - one of the defining principles of Linked Data. For a full explanation of Linked Data, read Alexander Korth's technical introduction The Web of Data: Creating Machine-Accessible Information from April 2009. I also explained the background and benefits of Linked Data in a May '09 post entitled Linked Data is Blooming: Why You Should Care . Example 2: Google Rich Snippets In May this year, Google added structured data to its core search, in the form of a feature called 'Rich snippets.' Essentially this feature extracts and shows useful information from web pages, by way of structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa. On launch in May, Google invited publishers to mark up their HTML. While it will take a while for this markup to become widespread, the fact that a huge company like Google implemented it shows the increasing importance of structured data on the Web. Other big companies are also heading in this direction - in particular, Yahoo was an early leader . Example 3: Wolfram Alpha Ever since Wolfram|Alpha 's much hyped launch in May , we've been tracking this innovative product closely. It's a self-described "computational knowledge engine" and while it's not quite the Google killer some predicted, it has many potential uses . Wolfram|Alpha has a search engine-like interface, allowing you to type natural language statements into it. But the main part of the product is the computations you can do on data. The product is premised on using and computing data . If Web 2.0 was about creating data (a.k.a. user generated content), then the next generation of the Web is all about using that data. Conclusion We can see from the above three examples that structured data is rapidly becoming a feature of today's Web. Companies like Thomson Reuters and Google are enabling data to be structured, and new types of products (like Wolfram|Alpha) will make use of structured data in ways we perhaps can't imagine right now. ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data The Real-Time Web Personalization Mobile Web & Augmented Reality Internet of Things Discuss

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Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data