Nous Media

We have another blog at YouSaidIt called the Nous Media. It will focus on the changing shape of media as it continue to morph from the once authorative voice of the journalist/editor/publisher to what appears to be shaping up as something of a joint venture – or perhaps adventure – between the “professionals, prosumers and conversationalists. It continues to be an interesting ride and we’ve only just begun.

Some of the content crosses both blogs so I apologize for the repetition in advance. You might be interested in the post: old media, new media, nous media. Check it out if you get a chance.

Question of the week: Email Interviews?

This week I’ll be asking about email interviewing. How many of you do it, like it, how you do it, etc.

Just click on “This Question is for YOU” on the right or go directly to the Q&A.

Thanks for your participation.

Google Moderator… but with answers

Google released Moderator as a tool to help solicit questions from an audience: participants can suggest a questions and/or vote on previously suggested questions. The results are ranked and presumably the questions are then used for whatever the purpose was in asking them. It’s a great idea. But it’s missing one thing… answers.

With YouSaidIt you can ask the audience for questions, allow them to be ranked, and when that process is complete change your settings such that the questions can be answered. Answers can be provided in a variety of ways: by the author/host, by one or more selected guest experts or by the audience themselves.

Try it it out: YouSaidIt

Start an interview, change the setting to allow audience questions (you can choose to moderate or not), set answers to interviewees only for now (you can change it later if you want the audience to answer).

Ask your financial questions: Q&A with Dr. Hans Baskett

You are probably familiar with Hans from previous interviews either here or in the many places he has appeared. He will be making himself available on Thursday to answer you questions. Please ask them now and rate the ones that have already been asked – that way we can make sure he answers the ones most critical to you. I’m looking forward to hearing his perspective on these uncertain times and hope to get some clear direction on what we should be doing to get through them.

Note: Dr. Hans Baskett is a pseudonym.

What Feature Do You Want?

If you could only choose one feature for us to add for the next release what would it be. You can suggest a feature and/or vote for the ones already suggested. We appreciate all your suggestions and will add them to our list of enhancements regardless of whether they make it in the next release.

This Question is for YOU

When you are curious what your readers have to say you have a couple of choices: you could do a survey or you could use a poll. But those methods all really depend on you knowing what their possible answers are and then just getting them to choose. They don’t really encourage open-ended questions/answers and discussion.

For the times when you really just want to pose questions to your readers and let them answer, we have introduced: This Question is for YOU. You can try it out on this blog by clicking the badge on the right, or just go straight to the topic of the week: What’s the best way to interview online.

Office Hours

If you are a teacher or manager who has regular office hours, you know that there should be an online alternative or supplement. After all some students or staff can’t make it during your office hours and others are uncomfortable with the face-to-face meeting. It is also a general rule that if one person has a question, a large number of others have exactly the same question. Wouldn’t it be easier to answer it once for everyone to see?

You can use YouSaidIt for for online office hours. Just start a new interview/Q&A with yourself as the guest/interviewee. You can do one a month, or one for every office hours session – just depends on the volume of questions you get and how topic specific the sessions are. Whatever works for you. Share the interview with your class the first time and after that they’ll just come on their own.

Let me know how it works for you. If you have any questions you can just click the Ask Me Anything badge in the top right of the home page of the blog.

Ask Me Anything

Adding comments to your blog or article suddenly changes the one-way world of publishing into an interactive two-way communication. Very cool. But sometimes your readers just want to be able to ask you a question either because they need help on a topic or because they want to get to know you a little better.

We’ve made this possible by letting your readers “interview” you through our Ask Me Anything application. You can see it and try on this blog. The link is on the right. Just click YOU – Ask Me Anything and you can see other questions I was asked and then ask your own.

Note: You can reject question you don’t want to answer.

Panel Q&A

The panel of experts is a staple of most conferences but an online rarity because it’s just too much of a pain in the neck to interview multiple people at once and then publish their side-by-side answers. Even harder when you need to accept audience questions.

Well, it might not come as a shock to you that the next words out of my keyboard are going to be that we solved that problem. You can check out an example of an expert panel here.