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.

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.

SHARED TRAVEL PLANNING: Both Tripit and Dopplr are fantastic tools for keeping track of itineraries and sharing travel plans with friends. Meanwhile Gliider is a great tool for saving large blocks of trip-related text and syncing them to offline folders.

gliider from jared richardson on Vimeo.

DIRECTIONS: TeleNav provides GPS services for a number of mobile devices including the iPhone. The tool offers voice driving directions, spoken address recognition, rerouting for accidents and traffic jams, and locates wireless hotspots, the lowest gas prices, parking lots and ATMs. TomTom for iPhone is also expected to be a great tool as the docking station doubles as a charger.

FOOD: Many of us are familiar finding food with the Yelp and Urbanspoon iPhone apps; however, if you want an authentic road trip experience you might want to consult Roadfood. This site lays claim to the "most memorable local eateries along the highways and back roads of America." We get heart palpitations just looking at the heaping plates of pulled pork, burgers and ribs. Meanwhile, if you're looking to picnic with something more healthy and sustainable, Local Harvest's farmer's market finder coupled with the Locavore iPhone app offer users the chance to find local in-season produce. Locallectual offers a similar tool with their iLocavore app.

VIDEOS & PHOTOS: One way to get images up quickly is to stream them directly from your camera. Eye-Fi uses a wireless connection to upload photos and videos directly to your Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Picassa accounts. If you want to live stream sans touch ups or editing, Eye-Fi is an extremely useful cordless solution. Other mobile streaming video and image options include Qik, Flixwagon, Stickam, Justin.tv and Kyte Producer.

GEO-TAGGING: AroundShare is a mobile application that allows users to publish photos to Google Maps. Meanwhile, Flickr's users can also organize their videos and photos on a map via the site's geo-tagging features. As for geo-based discovery, Flickr mobile utilizes the locational features of the Android and iPhone and allows members to explore public photos from nearby sites.

TRACKING:Google Latitude lets users share their location on a map in real time from their phones or computers. Maps can be embedded in public websites and road trippers appear as moving dots on the map. Imagine your best friend surprising you with Thai food just as you pull up to your hotel. Services like Brightkite and Loopt also broadcast your location; however, these services are based on push notifications rather than real time tracking.

TELLING THE STORY: The Whuffaoke group is using Dipity to aggregate their media. The service allows users to upload their Tweets, blog posts and photo sets to a map, time line and flip book interface. The nice thing about this tool is that it can either be embedded (as seen here) or shared via Facebook, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit or Digg. Other tools to aggregate road trip-related media include JS-Kit's Echo, Disqus or an embedded hashtag feed.

According to FriendFeed's Bret Taylor, the problem was caused by an malfunctioning API client. At the time, he didn't know whether the problem was accidental or intentional, so they disabled the API client and researched the IP address to determine where these messages were coming from. They then got in touch with the developer to let him know what was going on.

As it turned out, the service at fault was Gridjit, a social portal service still in alpha that uses both Twitter's and FriendFeed's APIs to allow you to view and interact with both services from Gridjit's web site.

As soon as FriendFeed got in touch with Gridjit, Gridjit's founder, Ray Grieselhuber, disabled the service's ability to post statuses, comments, and likes from within Gridjit and shut off access to the account management screens. After a day's worth of research, the problem was discovered - it wasn't a security issue, just a bug in the code. The issues is being addressed now and the affected users who had comments posted under their name were contacted via an email that read:

I'm sending this to let you know about a bug in Gridjit's code that caused a comment to be posted to FriendFeed in your name.

I spent the day reviewing the system and performing security audits to ensure that that this was not a security violation - it was not.

Rather, it was a bug in the system that caused the extra comments to be posted based on some obscure query patterns. I'm taking steps to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.

If you would like to see the comments and delete them, the FriendFeed links can be found here:

http://friendfeed.com/e/6def167a-f3d2-4711-aebd-6f8171919178/http-www-geeky-gadgets-com/

http://friendfeed.com/e/8be20617-8d57-478c-a367-98da5d02a8a0/Not-a-complete-list-of-top-diggers/

I sincerely apologize for this. The quality of your experience with Gridjit is very important to me.

Additional details and updates will be posted on the Gridjit blog (http://blog.gridjit.com).

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Ray Grieselhuber

Write APIs - A Cause For Concern?

While in this particular case, the issue was relatively minor and more of a strange occurrence than anything, it was only through FriendFeed's quick action that the entire service was not affected by this programming bug. Of course, it was also helpful that Gridjit is still in private alpha testing at the moment, so there aren't a lot of users currently using their service.

But what if this bug had come from another service that was heavily used? And what if it had been a web app that's far more mission-critical than FriendFeed?

The problem with providing an open API (that is, a write API) is that all it takes is one programmer to have a big impact on a service. Like in the case of Gridjit, it may be an accidental bug in their code, but it could have just as easily been someone with a more malicious intent.

So instead, via the BONDI initiative, OMTP will define what interfaces developers need to access when writing apps that tap into more sensitive functions on the mobile device. BONDI will expose those handset features to the developers while also protecting the users from any fraudulent or malicious activity.

In addition, the web services that result from the BONDI initiative will incorporate the various open and proprietary work currently in progress in this area of mobile development so as not to cause more fragmentation.

As today's mobile phones become more like mini-computers, the need for standards and security is paramount. The members of OMTP agree. Having standards will "encourage more developers to create unique, exciting applications for mobile web 2.0," says Arnd Gallmann SVP Terminal Technology at T-Mobile.

We couldn't agree more and are now eagerly awaiting the plethora of services that are sure to result from this move.

But email faces increasing competition. Chat, text messages, Twitter, social networks and even lifestreaming tools are chipping away at email usage. In this post we take a look at what's happening and assess if email is in danger.

Twitter was invented because there was a gap in public broadcast communication. Doing Twitter over email would be clunky, if not impossible. The ability to post your personal statuses, decoupled from the ability to subscribe to people you're interested in, put Twitter on the map. People are sending direct messages via Twitter instead of sending an email.

Email is perceived as work, while Twitter is still thought of as fun. Twitter messages are short, use is casual, and Twitter is a cute piece of technology loved by the earlier adopter crowd. People send Tweets complaining their Inbox is full.

The Twitter experience is lighter because of the user interface. With Twitter, we're presented with a scrollable list of messages.

With email we need to select the message and drill into it. Traditionally email clients show only the subject line, so even if the message is short, the user needs to click. And all these clicks add up.

The Outlook Problem

Email is a workhorse. Microsoft realised that business people want one tool to do it all, so email was enhanced with calendar, to do lists and other features.

The problem: all this was slammed on top of email, which became the entry point into a black hole known as My Inbox. Short and long messages, business and personal emails, tasks, events - all stacked on top of each other.

Outlook is a powerful piece of software that lets you organise and sort, but you have to drive it. For many, email is hard work and a mess that needs to be dealt with.

Simpler email clients, like Gmail, focus on how to be a better email client instead of being a hammer for all problems. An innovation like aggregating conversations has huge impact on productivity.

In the years Microsoft was adding more buttons to the toolbar, they should have invested more on the core innovation around email and productivity. Wiring in NLP and semantics to extract things like People, Events and Places would be a good start. Designing emails around use cases like "this is a meeting, this is a project, this is a friend" would go a long way towards helping avoid the Inbox clutter.

Breaking Down Email

Since email was the first killer app for the web, it's used for everything. We're now observing a fragmentation cycle where we're discovering better ways of passing around information and getting things done.

Email is fundamentally great at substantial person-to-person communication. The following diagram illustrates why email is facing competition. It cannot effectively support broadcast (except for spam) and it's still poor at helping with tasks and projects.

Tools like Basecamp and Highrise from 37Signals are showing there's a way to better project management and CRM while leveraging information in emails. If the Twitter service stabilises it's likely to win over people permanently because of its simplicity and playfulness.

Social networks incorporate direct messaging and chats, making it easy for people to talk directly, bypassing email. These communications are easier than email; they're integrated into the flow and more accessible. To be fair, they're aimed for brief messages.

The increasing speed of our lives and global connectivity reduces the need for lengthy emails. If we're in touch more often, then we reveal less every time we talk. Shorter, more frequent exchanges are replacing the lengthier communication of the past.

Corporate Safe Haven?

Even if consumers shift away from email, it is difficult to see how enterprises could. Microsoft has done a wonderful job winning that market and ensuring companies would not function without an Exchange server. A typical proprietary bloatware, Exchange and Outlook handle it all. It doesn't seem feasible for companies to shift away from email anytime soon.

Likely we will see two trends. Google will continue to champion its solution, which, if successful, will bring much needed simplicity to email.

The second trend is simpler project management tools to reduce the functions needing to be done with email. The challenge is that they need to be seamlessly integrated with the email, ideally leveraging its content and automatically generating tasks, events, contacts, etc.

Conclusion

Email has been the blockbuster and the Internet killer app for the past few decades, but it doesn't have a monopoly. New more contextual ways to communicate are emerging and slicing pieces of the email pie, particularly in the consumer market.

We're likely to see a consumer shift from email towards more compact forms of communication, but in the enterprise the email hold is strong and unlikely to be replaced any time soon.

What do you think about the future of email? How have your communication patterns been evolving? What communication tools do you prefer to email?

Anton Talks About The Digg Recommendation Engine from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

Not all the users have these features enabled yet, but those of you who do can check by going to upcoming and checking for a red BETA label. The new upcoming system has three ways to sort it and the third option in the list, Most Diggs, is the one you're used to seeing, where all stories are presented in order of decreasing Diggs.

The first new option, Most Matches, looks at your history of Digging, compares it with other community members, and shows the stories in order of number of matches. In the case of the first story, you see the expanded view of the 'Recommendations via' list, and in the case of the second story, you see it in the compact version, not showing the user names and percentages, rather only the total number. For example:

The second new option, Most Recent, shows you the stories recommended by community members compatible with you, in reverse chronological order. You can also see why a story was recommended to you (via user name and percentage of compatibility with that user).

A new section in the sidebar, entitled 'Diggers Like You' shows you Diggers that are most like you in their Digging and submitting habits.

And finally, you can click on a user and compare exactly how much you overlap. In the screenshot you see below you can see the overlap between my profile and thediggboss's profile. In total we had 3864 overlapping Diggs in the past 30 days, which means our compatibility score over all our Digg activity is 38%.

Overall the design is great and there is a decent feature set. As far as what it is designed to do, it seems to function well. At the same time however, whether the engine will help content submitted by a fairly obscure user, remains to be seen. In the beginning, all your compatibilities are going to be with the people that you have been Digging and the people that have been Digging you back, i.e. your friends. It will require widespread use of the feature 'Diggers Like You' to help more obscure submissions travel to a lot of people.

It is also important to note that the recommendation engine will be a boon to advertisers as well (and of course Digg). By sending the most relevant links to the most relevant people, you can also send the most relevant advertisements to the right people (and ensure high-quality clickthroughs). Users get good content and related, hopefully non-intrusive ads, advertisers get the right potential customers, and Digg gets the money.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

Special thanks to thediggboss for providing the images.

So far, none of the larger search engines have been able to capitalize on the promises of semantic search. Most of the innovations in the space so far have come from small start-ups and even those never made any real inroads in terms of market share when compared to the keyword driven search engines of Google, Ask, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Powerset's technology might just give Microsoft the ability to differentiate its Live Search product from the competition.