I said I’d write a blog post about it, and then never got the post finished.

This morning, after participating in separate conversations started by BarabaraKB and ethnicomm about the same thing, I’m finally sitting down to write the promised post. Sorry it took me so long, Gwen!

In order to write about this, today I’ll start by discussing the elephant in the living room, Plurk Karma.

Let me say first, that there are some aspects of karma that I like.

I like the fact that you have to participate to raise Karma.

I like how karma keeps many of the broadcasters away from Plurk.

I like how karma helps keep spam low.

That said, there are also things that I don’t like about it.

Once I’ve shown that I know how to participate and be friendly, I don’t need karma anymore.

Karma drops if you don’t plurk for a while, even if you respond to others. That is probably my least favorite thing about it.

Because Karma drops for things other than spamming, it is not a good indicator of whether you should follow someone. So outside of a personal number, Karma has no clear value.

Here are my suggestions on how Karma could be improved:

1) End it at 50. Once you’ve reached 50 karma, you’ve shown that you know how to participate.

2) Don’t drop karma from non-participation. There are many reasons for having to be away from Plurk for a while. I know of people who’ve gone overseas on vacation and didn’t have internet access, people who lost power (especially during the hurricanes), and friends who have been in the hospital, unable to Plurk. Losing karma over something like that is ridiculous.

3) Once you’ve reached 50, karma shouldn’t drop for anything less than spamming. Karma could be a great way to keep spammers off of Plurk, it has the potential, but right now that potential is blotted out by all the other ways to lose karma.

So what do you think about Karma? Should the A-team keep it like it is, or could it be improved?

I’ve been thinking about Plurk, and what could be done to improve the site.

One complaint that I have heard quite often is the steep drops in karma that can occur when you away for a while, even for something as simple as sleeping!

This had never really bothered me until recently, because I work from home so much.

This past weekend though I had to travel out of town, and was gone for nearly 24 hours.

The drop was quite significant, although in the context of the rest of my life, it hardly matters.

It could be something for the A – Team to consider though!

If enough people get disillusioned with the drop in karma when they are spending time with family, or working, or, heaven forbid, sleeping, they might just move on to the next big thing!

There’s enough competition out there now, and it’s increasing all the time.

I plurked earlier today asking friends what one thing they would like to see change about Plurk!

There have been some interesting answers.

1. being able to search for friends inside of threads

2. Start with the oldest plurk first, on both updates and responses.

3. Message threading and being able to ‘bookmark’ conversations.

4. Staff responding to “Contact Us” messages.

5. Being able to add a search and any posts that match would come in to my timeline.

Interesting responses from people who enjoy Plurk, and want to continue using it.

What one thing do you think would improve Plurk?

Allan Cockerill

I was the culprit, I’d read the page this morning and found it interesting. I had meant to add a review on StumbleUpon, but got sidetracked. It’s a list of the 50 strongest blog directories, which surprisingly are NOT the first 50 that show up when you do a Google search for “blog directory“.

While we were chatting, bloggeries mentioned that unfortunately the stickiness of stumble traffic is like teflon…it doesn’t stick.

Now, if you know me, you know there are three subjects I can’t keep quiet about. Social media, Plurk, and StumbleUpon. Plus, it’s Digg traffic that’s not sticky.

Stumble traffic can be sticky, if you remember a few things.

First, most Stumblers use Firefox. The vast majority of my traffic even now uses FF, but back when I was only writing about SU, 97% of my visitors were running Firefox.

Why does that matter? Because Firefox has a program called Adblock Plus. I first learned about it on StumbleUpon, but now it’s one of my very favorite FF programs. What it does is blocks any ads that I don’t want to see. I don’t see insta-ads especially, but I can also choose to blog other types. I wrote a blog post about it a while ago, after some friends were complaining that stumblers never clicked any of their ads. End result? If you’re wanting SUers to come to your site and click on your ads, I’d say fergit about it.

But what if you’re just wanting them to explore your site some? Before I started tracking analytics on my blog, I used to hear people fuss about how bad Stumblers were for visiting a page and leaving.

You know what? They’re right. Stumblers like to surf or they wouldn’t be using SU very much. BUT that doesn’t mean you have to let them go gracefully. Make it hard. Make them want to stay!

I’m not a huge fan of bounce rates. Sure, it gives you an idea of how many people visit more than one page on your site, but to me, measuring repeat visitors is a much better measurement. After all, especially if I’m a repeat visitor, I’m not likely to go surfing through your site unless I’m looking for something specific. Most likely, I’ll come read the new page and leave, then come back the next time you make a post.

But, if you are a fan of bounce rates, here’s something to think about. From September 20 (when I started sucomments.com), through June 3 (the day before I started using Plurk), my bounce rate was usually between 30-40% with around a third of my traffic coming from StumbleUpon (Plurk has raised my bounce rate – I think it’s time for some site revising).

My favorite thing about StumbleUpon traffic is that for the most part it is directed traffic. When you register on SU, you select topics that you’re interested in. If you click the stumble button and visit a new site, you are taken to a site that fits one of the topics you’ve chosen.

Occasionally there are sites that are mislabeled, though that’s almost always accidental. The bad thing is, a mislabeled page won’t bring the right visitors to your page, so it’s worth your while to make sure that your pages are listed in the right category.

If your page isn’t categorized correctly, fixing it is a simple matter. If you scroll down on the right you’ll see “Something wrong here?” with a dropdown box underneath it. Just choose the correct category from the options to have it changed. If you’re not the discoverer of the page, getting it changed might take a while, but SU is really good about correcting category errors. As a note, blogs are listed as weblogs if you’re trying to change to that category.

So now that you’re getting just the right traffic, how do you make them want to hang out on your site? Why by giving them something to look at, of course! And the nice thing is, you know what they’re interested in…what brought them to your site in the first place.

Remember, people like things to be easy. If it takes much time or is too hard to do, they’ll leave (and I’m talking to myself too, I’ve realized one of the reasons my bounce rate is up, and it has everything to do with a change on my site and nothing to do with Plurk).

So make it easy. Want people to visit a link? Put it where they can see it and click on it. Want them to read past articles about the same subject? Then post a list of similar articles.

I’m reminded of an article that Darren Rowse of Problogger wrote a while back about heat map tracking. What he discovered was that at pause points (where people have to decide what to do next), readers will click on links more than they will anywhere else.

Because SU traffic is targeted, you can guess that most will take the time to at least read over your page. By using pause points to supply relevant links to other pages on your site, you can make it easy for that stumbler (or anyone else) to explore your site instead of stumbling off to the next new thing.

By the way, if you haven’t tried Plurk yet and would like to, here is a link to join. If you’d like to know more about Plurk, here is the 10 Minute Guide and other Plurky stuff.

Now first, I should probably explain that Plurkshops are community workshops that were created by the Plurk community. We have had eleven plurkshops so far, including discussions about social media, marketing, Plurk, and blogging.

Second, let me say I have absolutely no experience with SL (Second Life). I remember when it first came out, but I was already playing 2 massively multiplayer on-line role-playing games (MMORPGs) and figured that was enough. Plus I had a rather old computer at the time, so was concerned that it wouldn’t handle SL very well.

Over the years, I’ve been told multiple times that I needed to get on SL. I don’t know how many times I’ve downloaded the program, ready to start, but for some reason I’ve never once completed the registration to use SL (or if I have, it was so long ago that I’ve forgotten and the system has erased me, it definitely didn’t recognize my e-mail when I checked last night).

In fact, my lack of experience was why I volunteered to write this review of last night’s Plurkshop. In part because there was a lot of information and writing out some of it would help me wrap my brain around it, and because there was a great mix of SL pros and newbies, so there were a lot of great questions asked and answered.

For a few days before the Plurkshop, Connie had a questionaire about SL posted on plurkshops.com, the best place to go if you’re wanting to know about an upcoming Plurkshop or find information about a prior one. Some of the questions really had me thinking. For instance, can you guess how many active users there are on SL (people who have logged on within the last 60 days)? Care to guess how much businesses invested in virtual worlds in 2007? Any idea how much real money people spend on virtual goods? (Here are the answers.)

In addition to Connie, (who is Reece Llewellyn on SL), we were honored to have 2 SL pros, Patricia Anderson and Sarah Hutchinson.

Patricia (Perplexity Pleccable on SL) is an Emerging Technologies Librarian at the University of Michigan and helps with SLUM (Second Life University of Michigan). She is also active on both Plurk and Twitter as pfanderson.

Sarah’s blog, Grid Life, is written by her SL character Kippie Friedkin. Sarah mentioned she has been active in SL for about 2 years and started out working for an interactive developer for a company that offered SL services. She is also a mentor in SL. On Plurk and twitter, she is known as kidmarmite.

Since there were a couple times last night that I wished I had a SL dictionary, I’m going to start by mentioning a few of the terms that came up in conversation.

Second Life – Defined by Connie as a virtual world.

Immersive Experience – Defined by Connie as a way of learning which involves as many of the 5 senses as possible during the learning experience and by pfanderson as meaning you have to be there to understand. Showing isn’t the same thing.

Machinima – Defined by moomoney as movies made in a 3d gaming platform, by pfanderson as machine video and by rickwolff as machine + cinema.

Blingtards – Defined by moomoney as people with big hair, ridiculous bodies, and glowing attachments.

Griefers – Definied by moomoney as people out to cause trouble.

Simulation – Defined by rickwolff as a place with buildings, garden, etc. where avatars gather regularly.

At most plurkshops, there are several threads of discussions running through the conversation, which is at the same time one of my favorite things about Plurkshops and one of the things that can make them difficult to follow.

This one was no exception. With topics covering everything from companies using SL to healthcare to getting started, there was a LOT going on during the 1.5 hours that it lasted.

Pfanderson started the discussion off by asking about the value of immersive experience. Moomoney suggested that the value is directly proportionate to what you put into SL. Pfanderson mentioned that she was surprised to find SL so useful and engaging since she hadn’t come into it from a gaming background.

Bethharte wondered what the easiest way would be for someone to immerse themselves in SL after they get registered and are ready to play. In addition to stories about griefers targeting new people, some good ideas were made for getting started from a suggestion by girlfromkansas to look on YouTube for orientation videos, to Connie’s offer to run a plurkshop IN SL, to many of the experienced SLers offering to help those of us who are just getting started.

Connie said that a good way to get introduced to the best aspects of SL is to attend events there such as BlogHer, Relay for Life, and Nonprofit Commons. Pfanderson added that just giving SL 15 minutes a day can make learning it a lot easier.

I found it surprising how many businesses are using SL. Large companies like Dell, may have a special last name for their employees to use. Some, like Cisco and Sun require employees to create SL accounts as part of employee orientation according to kidmarmite. Connie pointed out that B2C (business to consumer) companies such as Coke, Toyota, etc. are more likely to be there than B2B (business to business) companies.

Even non-profit companies are using SL for events and meetings. As kidmarmite pointed out, holding meetings and events in SL saves time and money.

Pfanderson also pointed out that metrics on SL don’t look like you’d probably expect. Although most avatars are created by people under 30, it’s people over age 45 who actually spend the most hours in SL. Connie added that the median age of users is actually in the early 30s and in regards to the nonprofits companies on SL, the age is actually much older.

To me, one of the neatest uses of SL was as an educational platform, from Italian professors who us SL for language immersion experiences, to truck drivers learning to parallel park, to a pandemic response simulation and crisis response. Pfanderson mentioned other educational options, from Genomics training labs to historical immersion experiences.

Of course, this is only a small part of the chat that went on last night. You can read the rest here.

I have to admit, I’m really looking forward to registering and trying out SL now!

Resources:

www.kippiefriedkin.com – Grid Life: Life in SL according to Kippie Friedkin

slum.wetpaint.com – Second Life at the University of Michigan

mblog.lib.umich.edu/slum/ – Includes the slideshare Getting Started in Second Life among other interesting posts.

http://www.kippiefriedkin.com/2008/07/25/second-life-viewer-cheatsheet/ – kidmarmite’s Second life Viewer Cheatsheet. Wow!

slfreestyle.blogspot.com/ – How to look stylist in SL for free!

www.slconvention.org/register/ – Second Life Community Convention registration

slhealthy.wetpaint.com – a wiki collecting health groups in SL

http://del.icio.us/tag/education+slurl – A list of SL educational resources on del.icio.us

fleeep.net/blog/sl-calendar/ – Fleep’s SL Events Calendar

http://writersinthesky.blogspot.com/ – Books, writers, and SL

I’m not sure I’m entirely sane trying to write today’s Plurk Guide. You see, last year while we were on a trip, my little one removed my phone from my pocket book and lost it somewhere between NC and NY.

The loss wasn’t discovered until we arrived home that night, and by then of course, it was too late. When you travel with children you have to make several stops along the way, so there was no telling where it disappeared.

Since I’m home most of the time anyway, we put off getting me a phone. Of course NOW it would make things so much easier, but then, I mainly used it for calling Ken (aka Plurkified) in the store whenever we’d gotten separated to figure out where we were supposed to be meeting.

Since I don’t have a mobile phone, I posted on Plurk for help. It wasn’t long before I knew what the address was for the mobile page, how to get there, and even received a picture of a Plurk phone, made for me by TacticalSniper after I threatened to paste a Plurk picture on Ken’s phone and take a picture of it.

So, how does mobile Plurk or mplurking work.

Back a couple weeks ago, when I first asked for Plurk questions, julep67 answered with:

I can’t figure how to text to plurk from my phone. It says in the terms that I can, but I can’t figure it out. Any help would be great.

It wasn’t long after that, that Plurk added a mobile button to the toolbar.

This made it very easy to find your mobile page, just click the button.

A couple updates later though, Plurk changed things again. Now you might see either the mobile plurk button or the button to embed a widget on your plurk page.

If you do get the Embed button instead, you can simply refresh your page until you get the mobile plurk button or go to http://www.plurk.com/m/.

Every time I see the page, I’m reminded a line at the beginning of While You Were Sleeping, “There are a lot of things I remember about my childhood. I just don’t remember it being so orange.

Using this big, orange page is a little different from normal plurking. For one thing, there’s no timeline. Plurks are shown in a normal, slightly boring, up and down mode.

I’m not sure why the numbers are on the bar. Only the first 9 plurks on each page are numbered, and to date I haven’t heard of any real purpose for them.

Edited to add: DarinRMcClure shared with me that “the numbers on the left 1-9 are for mobile navigation via keypad.” Thanks so much, Darin! Feeling silly for not figuring that one out now.

About a week ago, when I asked for comments about mobile Plurk, both shadeofmelon and Angela told me they really wish they could see the plurks which have new responses.

I did some exploring with the mobile timeline today, and unfortunately, the items are still listed in the order received, and not by most frequent comments, which means that you’ll have to jump around the mobile pages to find which all of the new responses.

In order to post, you’ll have to type in the orange box at the top of the screen.

Unlike regular plurks, in mobile plurk you have to set the starting verb if you want to use one. You set it in the small box beside your name. Otherwise, the verb won’t be colored, even if it’s a verb on the list.

Another difference is that there is no number count when you’re typing a plurk. At the end of the bar there is only the Plurk button.

If you go over, you are given an error message when the page tries to load. Unfortunately, I don’t know for sure whether you will keep the plurk you typed in…I suspect that you will, but it would be nice to know.

One really nice thing about mobile plurks is that you can still embed pictures and videos, complete with a mini shot of the posted item.

In order to comment on a mobile plurk, you click the response link, which takes you to a new page:

To respond, once again, write your comment in the orange box, being careful not to exceed 140 letters.

Plurkers Thoughts:

When I sent out a request on Plurk asking people what they like or don’t like about mobile plurking, the answers were interesting.

Both Topsurf and TheNerd mentioned that sometimes in mobile Plurk you can’t send responses, although you can read the original Plurk.

Rammi and miketempleton added an issue I’d heard others mention on other posts:

Sometimes when I click on responses they don’t show up.

Robdubya brought up something interesting that I hadn’t heard mentioned before:

I use iPhone and don’t like that I can’t see the pictures.

Now that made me curious, so to clarify, I asked if smileys show up on the iPhone.

Topsurf responded that moving ones don’t always, while plain ones do, and miketempleton expounded:

It looks like the smileys embedded into plurk show up on my iPhone, but not the custom ones people post.

Now that makes a LOT of sense, since even on regular plurk there’s an issue with some of the renegade smileys either appearing too big or too small.

Evandoyle shared:

Well it’s easy if you have an iPhone or an iPod touch, really easy.

Topsurf and Desertnut agreed and miketempleton added:

I use the iPhone as well, which makes scrolling easy….

Bikeman threw a wrench in the spokes though when he adds:

Here it is a no go on my cell, but can update from my Palm T/X.

Guess when I start looking for a cell phone, I’ll need to test out different ones to see which ones will let me Plurk.

Zsafwan mentioned that he “hates the fact that you can’t add a friend on the Mobile Plurk.”

Miketempleton returned to add:

If you use an @ username in your plurk and click on it, it takes you to the web profile instead of the mobile one.

The more I use the mobile interface, the more I see how decent it really is. It’s no iPhone app, but it works well.

Finally, Ronno971 added “I like to use it to stay connected. It could use more features though.”

If you’d like to see the discussion or compare a mobile discussion to a regular one, here is a normal threaded plurk, and here is the mobile one.

One last note:

You may notice that Mobile Plurk doesn’t offer a list of emoticons. In mobile, you have to type in the emoticon code, ie (s_dance) for . Plurk Guide 3a has a complete, printable list of available emoticons codes and pictures, but please note that using the code without the requirement to unlock it (whether it’s karma or inviting people) will put the word in your plurk instead of the picture, ie. (p_yupi) will show instead of .

So have you used mobile Plurk yet? What are your thoughts on it?

I guess I did okay, since Markus signed up for Plurk AND I was asked to be on Mike Corso’s Cool Site broadcast. Mike’s show starts a short while after Markus’ show ends, so I was actually on 2 shows on Thursday. Here’s the link to listen to Mike’s show.

Thanks so much for having me guys!

Although I talked a little about StumbleUpon on StumpMarkus, the majority of my talk was actually about Plurk. If you haven’t been reading for the past couple weeks, Plurk is my new favorite hangout.

During Mike’s broadcast, he asked why I hadn’t responded to a Plurk he’d sent me. You see, on Plurk, although you can use the @ symbol to link to someone’s page, there’s no way of tracking to see who has sent you messages. I had been away working on a blog post at the time, so unfortunately, I had no idea that Mike had tried to reach me.

I started thinking then that we really needed a way to know someone else has referenced us. Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about coding, so can’t write a program to do it. I do know about hacks though, tricks you can use to enhance your experience with a program or site. I love the Hacks series of books. It’s always fun to learn little tricks you can use to make things work better.

When I was told two more times over the past two days that I had missed posts directed towards me, I knew it was time for a solution.

Yesterday evening, I finally came up with an idea, after reading a post that a good friend, LindaZ, the Purpose Connector, wrote.

Whenever there are too many plurks to read, Linda sends out a note to her friends asking what she’s missed that’s important. People reshare the important plurk links with her in one post, so she has a great summary of the day’s main events.

The more I thought about her idea, the more I thought why couldn’t I adapt it?

So what I did is to create a plurk asking people to post if they are referencing me, so I’ll know to come read it. I then linked to the plurk on my user page, so it’s easy to find…and added it to my RSS reader so I can see anything new quickly.

For an example, let’s say you want to know what I’m doing for dinner tomorrow night. You plurk:

Teeg, what are your plans for dinner tomorrow?

Now, unless I’m watching the timeline right then, there’s a good chance I’ll miss that plurk. But, if you click your plurk and look in the bottom right corner, you’ll see “plurk page.”

IF you click that, it will open the plurk on it’s own page, with each remark on a line by itself. But you can also simply right click where it says “plurk page” and select “copy link location” and paste the link without having to open it first. Note: This might be worded a little different depending on which browser you use.

Now, if you come to my user page, underneath the About Me part, you’ll see “Please note @ reply links here so I’ll see them.” Click where it says “here” and it will take you to my @ reply plurk.

If you’re curious what happens on my end, once you add your @ reply as a comment, the link will be bolded in my RSS reader and will tell me how many unread replies I have. Since I check my RSS reader a few times a day, it shouldn’t be long before I see the message.

The nice thing about this is that it will work no matter how many of us use it, but it will work even better as more people start doing it. If I want to write about Tamar’s latest blog post and how much I liked it, I can go to her reply plurk and leave a message directing her to what I just wrote:

@Tamar, check out this plurk

By using this method, if someone has a reply plurk set up, I won’t have to wait until I know that they’re on to make a post I want them to see, and then hope it goes by when they’re actually looking at the screen.

So what do you think? Will this idea work until Plurk decides to add a response page? It still doesn’t answer the question of marking pages that you comment on, but I’m working on that one as well.

Do you remember all the groups there were in school? There were the computer geeks, the rednecks (No, not the Jeff Foxworthy type, I mean the real rednecks…the ones who fit this profile). There were the cheerleaders, of course, and the jocks…and the other jocks, who were into sports, but not THOSE sports, and there were the…

You get the idea.

Because of our school memories, cliques have a bad reputation. Having cliques automatically means that someone is left out.

Using cliques on Plurk is probably one of the biggest reasons so many people keep thinking of it as a teenage site. A LOT of people don’t like the idea of cliques, regardless of what they’re actually used for.

Especially on Plurk, which I can honestly say is the friendliest site I’ve ever been on online, the idea of being left out doesn’t feel good.

Still, I think Plurk Cliques are an absolutely awesome idea, if you can get around the name.

When I asked people what questions they’ve had about Plurk, two people mentioned cliques. Kirako said, “Cliques! It says we’re supposed to be able to filter plurks by clique but I guess that doesn’t work yet. Still would like some answers on it.” and RogueTess said, “Still never made a clique. Everyone can see all friends. Is it the clique feature that makes them different? Hmmm.”

It does say we should be able to filter our timeline, but I’ve tried everything I can think of to get it to work, and nothing happens. I’m guessing that ability hasn’t actually been turned on yet. I have writen the devs, otherwise known as the A-team, to ask how to use this feature and when we’ll be able to do it. As soon as I hear back from them, I will let you know.

So, since they can’t filter the timeline yet, what is their purpose and how do you use them?

Did you know you’ve actually used Cliques before? Oh, they weren’t called that, possibly because most applications we use aren’t written expecting their primary market to be teens.

So, the last time you used them, they may have had the boring name of folders. If you use Gmail, you’ll know them as groups. But by any name, it’s still the same thing:

A selection of people that you can send a message to quickly and easily.

I have one on Gmail for people who don’t mind reading the original version of a story I’ve been working on for a year or so. Typos and all, they get to see it, and let me know what they think. I’m betting that in your e-mail you have a way of separating certain people also.

Skype is the only other chat program that I know that allows you to separate people into groups, but in Skype you have to open a new window to communicate with them.

In Plurk, I just set up a clique using whatever criteria I want, write the clique’s name the same as I would send a private message, and hit Plurk.

If you look at the upper left corner of your plurk screen, you’ll see the options shown above. Each of these will open a pop-up window that you can interact with. To create or edit your cliques, you need to click on “My Friends.”

In the orange box that pops up, you will see a row of tabs. Cliques is the second one. By the way, if you haven’t looked under “Blocked users” yet, you might want to. I know when they added it a few days ago, several users found people blocked that they hadn’t added there.

To create a clique, simply use the “Add new clique” button and type in the name of the group you want to make.

Now you’re ready to start adding members.

If you already know the names of the people you want in your group, this part is easy. Start typing the name of the person you want to add, and Plurk brings up a suggestion box to complete the name for you.

But what if you want to create a list and DON’T know everyone’s name?

This makes things a little harder. Plurk doesn’t give you a list of people to choose from, you have to add names to the box instead, which means you need to know who you’re going to add.

After a bit of experimenting, I found that using the two window method was easiest.

It’s rather hard to tell, but on the left, I have the clique I’m working on creating, and on the right, I have a list of friends. In this screen I’m making a Girls Night Out list (sorry guys, you’re not allowed in this one).

Another easy way to know who to add is to ask. I created four or five cliques just from asking questions such as:

How many plurkers are work (or stay) at home parents?

How many do work with Social Media?

and any other groups I could think of that I might want to send specific messages to at some time or another.

Okay, let’s send a message out to one of our groups.

If you look down at the Plurk bar (where you write your messages), you’ll see a choice that says “Private plurks, languages, & options.”

If you click on it, the area underneath will expand to offer you more choices. The area on the left defines who you’ll send this plurk out to:

To send a message to a clique, make sure you select the bottom option. It’s not selected automatically, so I messed up a couple test plurks by forgetting to select it.

A quick note here. You can actually send a plurk to a clique and other individual friends who might be interested. Just include all the names on the line where I wrote Marketing.

Now, type in your message on the message bar, click the big red Plurk button, and viola, you’ve sent a message to your clique!

One last thought for today. When you send a message to a clique, it goes as a private message. Although private messages do show up on your main plurk screen, often that screen is so busy that they get missed.

You can look to see if you have any private messages (or look at the messages that you’ve sent if you want to check for replies or count how many you’ve sent for the day) by clicking the blue box in the bottom right corner of the scrollbar and choosing which view you want.

Wow, it’s hard to believe we’ve almost finished discussing Plurk. Still to come, mobile plurking and a cheat sheet with plurk hints and resources. If you’re not a friend on Plurk yet, use this link to join and add me (please, send a friend request, Plurk only adds as a fan). Plus, you can still leave any questions I haven’t answered yet, either here or on Plurk.

Why is this part 3a? Because the real part 3 will be along tomorrow. A sinus infection on my end and some problems with Plurk on their end kept me from getting everything done today that I wanted to. So instead I’m going to tell you a story:

A couple days ago, BarbaraKB was off on an adventure. Now, as it is with all real life adventures, there were a few slow times and to help speed those up, Barbara decided to test out plurking from her phone.

It might be bearable, she decided, except for one thing. There was no list of emoticons for her to use. If she had a list, she could have fun on her phone, but as it stood, she was stuck with the plebeian and which can get rather boring after a while.

Thus, the idea for this list was born. Hope you enjoy it.

This one will print on an 8.5×11 sheet of paper

Welcome to part 2 of the Guide to Plurk. If you missed part 1, you can find it here.

It didn’t take me long once I started using Plurk to realize that I needed karma. Okay, maybe I could actually live without it, but I definitely wanted some, I needed emoticons!

There are a few ways to gain karma on Plurk. One is to write plurks that others respond to (just remember to write 30 or less per day).

Another is to respond to others’ plurks. Inviting friends also adds karma (have I shared my link with you yet? ) as does making new friends who are already on Plurk.

The first thing I tried was transferring all my friends from Twitter. “This will be easy,” I thought as filled in my Twitter information, rubbing my hands with glee at thought of oodles of karma I’d get from adding friends.

Transferring friends from Twitter DOES NOT make you friends on Plurk, I discovered to my dismay. It doesn’t even send your friend a note asking them to confirm your friendship. Instead it adds you as a fan of theirs.

Now I mentioned yesterday how confusing Plurk can be about adding fans and friends. Here’s where the issue gets even murkier. Let’s say I look at my fan list and see Connie as a fan. Well, I know and like Connie, so I want to add her as a friend instead. She’s already a fan, so it’s a simple matter of just adding her, right?

I wish! Unlike every other social site I know of, we can actually be fans of each other…without being friends. Even if Connie is a fan, I have to ask to be her friend and she has to confirm our friendship. Clear as mud, right?

It’s actually not as bad as it sounds, once you start using it. Consider it a double opt in friendship, very similar to the ones you get whenever you sign up on a new mailing list.

After I finally figured out the whole twitter friends/fans thing and added a few real friends, I was ready to start writing some original Plurks and replying to other people’s Plurks. And in the process, make some new friends.

Ready to hear from some other Plurkers?

Felix118 said “I missed the tip on how to link names using the @ command….” If you’ve used twitter, this will be habit for you anyway. Which is actually how I discovered it. I made a twitter post on Plurk, and the @ in front of the name disappeared, but the name turned into a like to that person’s page.

If I Plurked:

says to @butterflylitgirl, How are you today? Hope your day has been wonderful!

What will appear is:

Teeg says to butterflylitgirl, How are you today? Hope your day has been wonderful!

Green_homemaker asked “is there a way to private message on Plurk? That’s my burning Question!”

I’ll admit, I had to ask this one too. Private messaging isn’t intuitive on Plurk (okay most things aren’t intuitive on Plurk).

Thankfully, when I asked how, Dalydose took pity on me, and explained how to do it. “Just click the down arrow next to someone’s username and the option will present itself.”

Sure enough, when I moused over a username, there was a small down arrow. Clicking it gave me some information about the person (in case I hadn’t visited their plurk page), the option to visit their profile, or see their list of friends. And, since yesterday, if you click the arrow on someone’s name, you also have the option to block that person.

Amie mentioned that she wasn’t sure “how to hyperlink text instead of posting urls.”

I can’t remember who it was that taught me how to do this. Wish I could remember so I could give them credit. On Plurk, if you want to link a url, first post your url, then add your link in parenthesis, like this:

I hope no one is disappointed. I just finished part 1 of the http://www.sucomments.com/2008/06/19/10-minute-guide-to-plurk-part-1/ (10 Minute Guide to Plurk). More tomorrow.

Which appears like this:

A nice thing about Plurk, and another huge difference between it and twitter, is that you’re not stuck plurking text. In fact, this is one of the most fun things about Plurk.

On Plurk, I can send a picture or YouTube video and you can see a tiny picture right there on the timeline! And if I use the parenthesis trick above, when you mouse over the picture, you’ll see the title I typed.

Even better, when you click on the picture, it doesn’t take you to another page. Instead, a window opens up and you can view the picture or video right on the page.

On Plurk, more than any other social site I’ve seen since sixdegrees, the saying, “the friend of my friend is my friend” is actually true.

The other day, Dr. Mani (whose blog I thoroughly recommend), joined Plurk. Wanting to help him get started, I introduced him, and within 5 minutes, 9 people had stopped by to say hi, most going on to add him as a friend!

Lest you think this was a special occasion, let me say I’ve introduced several others, every time with similar results. Everyone I’ve met on Plurk so far has been great!

Two more things and then the rest I’ll save for the next post.

RogueTess added the suggestion, “Use MUTE liberally.” Kirako seconded with “Ooh, another [suggestion] would be the muting ability. Not many people see that.”

With so many friendly people on Plurk, and so many from different time zones, it sometimes seems like a third of the plurks say “Good morning” or “Good night.” After repeating myself a couple times on one of these posts, I discovered a perfect use for the mute feature.

When you click on a plurk to reply, if you look to the right, underneath the original plurk, you’ll see a small pink “mute.” (Unfortunately (for this blog post) you can’t mute yourself though.)

I’m jealous! We don’t have Chick-fil-A here, so perfect mute example.

Clicking on this does not affect the status of the poster at all, it doesn’t even affect whether you can respond to the plurk. What it does is stops that plurk from notifying you when it updates. You can still read the updates if you want, but you won’t receive any notification of new responses. Which means if you mute after you greet someone, you won’t accidently repeat your greeting when you’re looking at new updates later.

I guess I should stop here and mention a little cream colored box that you’ll often see on the left side of the page, at the bottom of the scroll bar. Right now, the box is telling me that there are 2 new plurks I haven’t read yet, and 262 new responses. I can click either option in the box to view that option. New plurks will add to the timeline, but if you view responses instead, it will only show the plurks with new responses (ie none of the muted plurks).

Finally tonight, Natashcha suggests I mention “permalinking a plurk. I totally missed the link on the bottom for a long time.”

I did the same thing, Natashcha. And even after I saw it, I wasn’t quite sure what would happened when I clicked “plurk page” so hesitated to use it.

What happens is that the whole conversation goes to a new page with its own url.

You can share that url with friends, refer other plurkers to the conversation (thus allowing more than just your own friends list to reply to a post), bookmark it, and even add it to your RSS reader, which is what I do with plurks I want to save.

Believe it or not, there’s still a lot more about Plurk to discuss. Using cliques (which isn’t as high schoolish as the name implies), using Plurk with your cell phone, and tricks to make it easier to find something on the timeline, plus more Plurkers with questions or suggestions.

By the way, if you have a question about Plurk, feel free to ask it here in the comments or add me as a friend on Plurk and ask there, just make sure to let me know where the question is if I don’t happen to see it.

My first Nintendo system did, my first DS did. Sixdegrees.com, the first online social network did, StumbleUpon did, and now Plurk has.

Don’t get me wrong, there are other products that I enjoy using, and quite a few I’ll brag about, but these are the ones that exceeded my expectations enough to turn me into a fan.

When I first started using Plurk, I figured it was another Twitter clone. Like Twitter, you can only use 140 characters each time, like Twitter, you can get messages over your cell phone, like Twitter you can receive messages over IM…and kind of like Twitter, their IM program is down.

I can’t remember what convinced me to go back and take a second look at Plurk, but I do know that when I did, I was hooked.

Twitter is a great work site. There are a lot of people there who won’t “get” Plurk. It’s scrolling timeline and raging chats will throw them off. To them I say, “You’re missing out. Don’t judge before you get your feet wet.”

For those who are brave enough to spend a few days exploring, hopefully this guide will help ease the transition.

In order to not miss anything, I asked my friends on Plurk to share some of the questions they’ve had. When I mention a question, I’ll also link to that person’s plurk page.

First is registering. Plurk is still in beta, so you need a code in order to try it. By using this code, you’ll also be added to my fans list, so you can see what I post. Feel free to add me as a friend as well if you’d like. (I’ll discuss the difference between friends and fans in a minute.)

Please, once you register, add an avatar. I know, I discuss this every time, but seriously this is one of the best ways to get known from site to site. You can’t always manage to keep the same username (there are sites where I have to register as Teegers instead of Teeg because they don’t allow 4 letter names, for instance), but you can always be recognized by your avatar. Especially if you’re doing marketing or serious networking, this is very important.

Okay, now you’re ready to plurk, right? Uh, not really. Like Twitter, the first thing you need is someone to talk to.

You’re already used to the friend/fan system, so this is all old hat. Except that Plurk decided to take it a step further. On Plurk, you can actually be both a friend AND a fan. Or you can be a friend who doesn’t follow plurks. Confused yet?

DoshDosh asked today, “what’s the difference between adding someone ‘as a friend’ and ‘adding as a fan’?” and LindaZ asked “I now see that you can choose not to follow a friend’s plurks, does that change them into a fan?”

The answer is a matter of how you can contact people, but I think LindaZ put it best when she rephrased my answer, “so basically you can friend everyone and if it gets too noisy, just don’t follow their plurks/timelines….You can private message and clique an [unfollowed] friend, but not a fan.“

Once you get used to the system, this is very nice. Let’s say you have a friend who’s getting married. All her plurks (original messages on Plurk) lately seem directed to her soon-to-be husband and you’re getting tired of all the mushy stuff. Instead of removing her as a friend and possibly hurting her feelings, you can simply unfollow her plurks and they won’t show up on your timeline anymore. She’s still a friend, you can still send messages to her, but you won’t have to deal with all the sweet nothings showing up on your bar. Then, once the wedding is over and reality kicks in, you can go back and follow as she’s getting used to all the changes of married life (just don’t tell her, “I told you so”.

LiamVictor (who also has a wonderful page on StumbleUpon) said that he didn’t “understand why you’d want to add yourself as a fan of someone instead of a friend.” I suspect this has to do in part with the karma system (more in a minute) and if you’re unsure that someone wants you as a friend, it might be safer to add yourself as a fan first, and respond to some of their plurks so they get to know you. RogueTess added that she’s “added as a fan cuz I’m shy! … I prefer to fly under the radar.”

I should probably discuss the Plurk timeline now. With everything about Plurk, this is the thing that seems to take everyone the longest to get used to. We’re used to pages going up and down, not sideways. Truejerseygirl says “the most confusing thing was the horizontal format for plurks….its SO overwhelming.”

But Plurk’s timeline is great for seeing when a post was started. Plus, it gives them an easy way to differentiate responses from the rest of the messages, since you only see responses by clicking on the orginal plurk, and the replies
are in the more standard up and down format.

One of the things that it took me a bit to truly understand on Plurk, is how the chat system works. If I chat, only friends and fans will see it, and unlike twitter, I can’t @ anyone to have the message brought to their attention. So, I wondered, how do I make friends?

The simple answer is you make friends by replying to other people’s posts. When I reply to a post made by Huna, all of her friends who read that post see my answer. After a while, they start recognizing me, and before long, we’ve become friends as well. So, the more replies you make on Plurk, the more friends you’ll make.

And Plurk encourages this. In fact, they suggest you don’t make more than 30 original plurks in a day, but reply to posts instead. In order to help encourage people to follow this, Plurk uses a Karma system.

Each time you earn a little Karma, you get a new ability, whether it’s adding a note to the top of your Plurk homepage, getting new emoticons such as a dancing banana , or being able to change your background colors, or even put a new Plurk creature in the corner of your page.

Unfortunately, it’s rather easy to lose Karma too. Not responding for a while, adding someone as a friend and having them not accept, or even losing a friend will all drop your karma. Unless you are on a mission to have one of the top karma scores and be listed on the “Interesting plurkers” page, I really don’t see much use for karma once you’ve gotten the emoticons. Personally, I’d love to see a way to share karma so that if someone is sick or has to be away for a while, they don’t come back to find the dancing banana has gone to find a new home.

One more question, and then I’ll leave the rest for tomorrow. Shadeofmelon said, “this is silly, but I have no idea how to post my response after I typed it up.” It doesn’t sound silly at all, especially if you’ve just come from Twitter. When you are writing an original message, you can hit the big red Plurk button, but for a response, you HAVE to hit enter (this also works on original plurks, so don’t hit enter until you’re ready for it to be posted).