March 20, 2009

being five

I'm subscribed to this fairly new online comic strip called Being Five because that's my approximate age. Here's me today:

Check out the daily strip: http://beingfive.blogspot.com/

Enjoy!

March 18, 2009

it's all about the bird for me these days

I'm blogging about twittering:
http://kate-is-pre.posterous.com/tag/twitter
http://pinkflamingoresources.blogspot.com/search/label/twitter

And I've begun a new page on my Educators' Resources site (Direct to my twitter content page >>> http://ibritt.com/resources/tr_twitter.htm where I'll be building up a list of articles, tips, n tricks all about twitter in/for education.)

Please let me know if you find any sites you think I should add to that page! Thanks in advance.

March 12, 2009

the Twitter global mind

I thought this was interesting, thoughtful, exciting....

Ever thought of using Twitter as a search for information you need-to-know-RealTime-Right-Now ?

March 8, 2009

I did it before Facebook did it!

I joined Twitter a couple of weeks ago. (LOL, you may have noticed, if you're reading this blog.)

Anyhooo... Facebook's now going to try to "join" Twitter. Their upcoming new design interface (they keep posting "this is happening soon") is facing up to their serious competition with Twitter, not just for us regular users, but also for business people doing their marketing. According to this March 4/09 article:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/04/facebooks-response-to-twitter/
"If Facebook cannot buy Twitter, it will try to beat it instead."

One comment on the same page as that article: "...this may be THE epic battle between uber-startups."

Tweet me @skyhome!

March 7, 2009

my personal twitter primer

This may seem like a crazy long post. Sorry. Twitter-brain, that's me.

I'm posting the list below mainly to have an online handy-dandy set of my own bookmarks for Twitter things I like to use often. If you're new to Twitter, maybe you will find it helpful too! Bookmark it, and please post a comment if it helps you.

.......................................................

START HERE:

Twitter unveils a whole new world	Article in Leader-Post, Feb 21/09, covers all the basic info, lingo, etc.
10 Top Twitter Tips for Beginners	Ready to jump into Twitter, but don't know how to get started? Follow these 10 tips and you'll fit right in.
A Few Twitter Tips	Article in Leader-Post, Feb 21/09
7 Habits of Highly Effective Twitterers	Article by Kris Colvin on the twitter-blog

SEARCH for Tweeps (people to follow)

Mr. Tweet Personal Networking Assistant http://mrtweet.net/ @MrTweet	Excellent as a way to start finding people to follow. Mr. Tweet will analyze the kind of folks you already follow, and the kinds of folks those people follow, and outputs a report of who else you might like to follow.
Nearby Tweets http://nearbytweets.com/	Another way to find people to follow. Enter your address, or a city name, whatever. It will output a list of twitterers who live near that location.
Twellow http://www.twellow.com/	Helps find people to follow. Big list of categories; organizes Twitter into hundreds of niches to make searching easier.

HELP SITES

Ask a question http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/	Ask a question; wait for a real person to post the answer. "Get help from employees and tens of thousands of customers."
Glossary http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Twitter-Glossary	If you need to know about a twitter term, try this wiki.
Network Status http://status.twitter.com/	Trouble with twitter? Check this status report first to see if it's a network issue.

READ: waste spend time, find things to read, thinks your Tweeps recommend

TwitScoop http://www.twitscoop.com/ @twitscoop	A big word cloud for what's hot on twitter right now. You can link to their page or follow. Their website has a feature where you can enter an ID and see what that person is saying. They also have a cloud widget for your website.
Twitter Search http://search.twitter.com/	What if you need to find out what's happening in the world beyond your personal timeline? Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information happening right now on Twitter. TIP: When you get there, click 'Advanced Search' right away. I find that more useful.
tweetmeme http://www.tweetmeme.com/	Tweetmeme tracks the most popular links on twitter every 5 minutes. (Like TwURLed News, below)
TwURLed News http://www.twurlednews.com/ @TwURLedNews	Kind of like a twitterFeed collector. A news robot constantly updated list of links to explore what people are talking about right NOW. You can subscribe by RSS and/or follow. (Like TweetMeme, above)
Twitter Games (that's a link to the article about the games)	Two Twitter Games That Help Make Your Day Less Boring @TwitBrain Get served calculations on a regular basis (like 3 per hour). If you're the first person to reply with the correct answer, you'll earn one point and hopefully make your way to Internet fame (well, not really) by getting on the top 10 lists. @BeatMyTweetDo the same thing, but this time with word scrambles. Warning: it's ridiculously easy so be fast if you want to be one of the first 10 to reply with the correct answer.

MISCELLANEOUS LINKS TO BOOKMARK & keep handy (alpha order)

6 Ways to Make Twitter Useful	Twitter's usefulness goes far beyond finding out what strangers ate for lunch. Read breaking news, get customer service, or even chat with your favorite celebrities.
TwitSnip Bookmarklet http://twitter.grader.com/twitsnip	Save their bookmark to Favorites. It becomes your tool for easily posting stuff from webpages to Twitter. It lets you "quote" text on any web page. It does nifty things like looking up the @user for the website and linking back to the source. It shortens the URL too. It even tries to shorten the length of the tweet (when needed) using a twitabulary of short words.
Twitter Blog http://blog.twitter.com/	Keep up with what the Twitter-makers want to tell us. Subscribe in your feed reader.
Twitter Counter http://twittercounter.com/	Enter your twitter ID and instantly get stats on your twitter experience -- # of tweets, # of followers, etc.
Twitter Grader http://twitter.grader.com/	Enter your ID and they give you a grade for your twittering! Plus some stats, your profile summary, and a TweetCloud of your twitter history. Just fun.
Widgets for your own site Twitter.com http://twitter.com/widgets/ TwitScoop http://www.twitscoop.com/ Twitter Remote http://twittercounter.com/	Get a customized widget for your web page to display your own latest tweets. Let visitors to your blog or profile page on the web know what you're up to at the moment: TwitScoop has a cloud widget for your website. Get code to put a remote twitter display on your blog, website, etc.

GROUPS of tweeps

TwittGroups
http://twittgroups.com/

Brings people together to form groups with common interests. Read all the tweets from your group on the one page. (Also see hashmarks, above)

Hashtags.org
http://www.hashtags.org/

my twitter analogy: twarbucks

What's twitter like? It's like you're sitting by yourself in a coffee shop, surrounded by a community of people.

"The role of 17th century coffee shops in creating a civic space and a commensurate sense of 'public opinion', and the importance of that for the growth of democracy, has been discussed by historians..." [1]

Twitter is the virtual coffee shop.

all around you, conversations
snippets reach your ears
you can sip slowly or drink it all in quickly
sometimes you focus your listening on an interesting snippet
sometimes you lean over and add a comment
sometimes the noise is too much and you tune out
sometimes you make new friends because you contributed to the verbal comm
though you may be sitting there "alone" with your laptop getting work done, you're not alone
being there is refreshing, a buzz, a lift in your day
if you say something interesting, it will get passed on for the enjoyment of others there
you can linger and enjoy the social networking, or you can leave
you can be productive while still catching snippets
you can stay aloof or participate
you're in touch with familiar strangers
you can be & feel anonymous or introduce yourself to any/all
you can trust and be trusted, respect and be respected, support and be supported
the longer you visit, the more at home you feel
the more you participate, the more you become part of the community
it quickly becomes part of your daily routine
it can get addictive
if you're too busy to go there, it will wait for you. Patiently, too. Absences don't count; presence is all that's recorded.

Substitute "twitter" for "coffee shops" in the following (and in any description of a coffee shop).

"Coffee shops, as meeting places, foster the spread of information. This occurs informally, as an inevitable result of gossip and socialising. ...As information passes through a social network, which no individual has a complete map of, so coffee shops become part of a system of distributed cognition..." [1]

"Because of its great acceptance in English society, by 1670 there was hardly a street in London without a coffee house. ...it became a popular social gathering spot, many of the intellectuals and literati of that era gathered in coffee houses." [2]
"...coffee houses...served as places for vital communication....Those more interested in radical politics would gather at the Cromwell coffee house and talk of revolution. ...Not all talk in the coffee houses were political. ...London merchants often spent the day there conducting their business and exchanging news about commerce". [2]

.....

1: Tom Stafford. Psychology in the coffee shop. July 2003. Retrieved March 4/09 from http://www.idiolect.org.uk/docs/jan04/coffee.pdf

2: P. J. Gladnick. Defining intellectual ferment in coffee house culture. 2002. Retrieved on March 4/09 from http://www.essortment.com/all/defineintellec_rybo.htm

March 3, 2009

why I'm a fan after 1 week trial of twitter

I avoided Twitter. Already updated status on Facebook, why bother. But last week I signed up; needed to know why it's "the fastest growing social network...." blahblah

Twitter is so NOT just about social networking. It's my new learning medium. Twitter is a microcosm of the wider virtual world, only everything's condensed, from message to URLs to writing style. Cleverness and word-creativity abounds with the 140 character limit.

I have learned a huge variety of things on my flights around the twitter world, starting with, of course, how to have fun and learn in the world of twitter. How huge it is. How it's being used and by whom, from high end business execs to higher education instructors as part of their communication in courses to marketing people (including twitterspam) to governments and politicians to artists and writers and....and on and on.

A large number of software applications surround Twitter. The best are my desktop applications (twhirl and tweetdeck). There are ways to join groups, have group discussions, post photos, audio, video. Adopt a seasoned user as a mentor to help your learning-about-twitter curve.

At first it's about the art of selecting people to "follow". (Mr. Tweet is a great help for this.) Then it's about actually "following": reading their tweets and going where they link you. If you follow where they lead, you discover a range of new things. Like:

How else would I have learned that one can be buried as part of a coral reef. http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/17/dying.green/index.html.
Finding educators resources to post to my Educators' Resources blog.
Found some fun stuff to think about.
Linked to a new artists' collective blog.
Read some posts in a writers' discussion page.

OK, you have an idea now.

Join me on twitter @skyhome because tweets enrich my day & open up my home-based freelancing world to the water cooler part of the workplace.

January 28, 2009

Social Networking: see how YOU fit in the data

Do you have a profile on FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Yahoo, YouTube, Classmates?

I fall into an "older" demographic, so I found it interesting to read the results of a very recent (Dec.2008) "tracking survey" on adults using social networking sites. (Hey, guyz, who are you callin' an adult!?)

"The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years -- from 8% in 2005 to 35% now."

PEW/Internet report on Adults and Social Network Websites:
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Adult_social_networking_data_memo_FINAL.pdf
For a quick-look, I'm attaching a copy of their table of data from page 5 of that report.

For my age, I fit in a relatively small 10% group. Yay for me!

...........

(Brian M, sorry, they don't have stats on addictive behavior at these sites. But they do say that "more than one third (37%) visit their profile daily.")
...........

47 Awesome Twitter Tools http://ow.ly/xIg	Top Twitter Sites & Services
Top 21 Twitter Clients
Tweetburner http://tweetburner.com/	If you like the idea of tracking the URLs you share, check this out. The site will shorten your URL for you post it in a tweet track its use from there by your tweeps
TweetDeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/ How to Use TweetDeck http://edgehopper.com/how-to-use-tweetdeck-the-ultimate-twitter-client/	Currently the #1 application. Good for people who have lots of tweets coming in, because you can organize them into columns, groups, etc. Helpful article for the beginner.
Twhirl http://twhirl.org/	My personal favorite desktop client (use it full time; hardly ever open my TweetDeck)
SHORTEN THOSE URLs when you post links in your tweets	Only 140 characters in a tweet, so you need to shorted the URLs you're linking to. Try these (in order of my preference): Best of all: Use a twitter client; they have URL shortening built in. Twhirl, the one I use, results in is.gd URLs. is.gd -- Very short URLs. But even if you have it bookmarked, you have to first copy the URL you want to link to, then go to is.gd, then paste the URL to get the shortened version. TinyURL -- I've used this for years. I like it because of the toolbar bookmark. When reading a page, I can click the bookmark and TinyURL automatically grabs the URL, shortens it, and gives you the link, all in one click. BUT: for twitter, the URLs are maybe not short enough for you. snipURL -- They too have an auto bookmark. URLs are longer than is.gd's results. Here's a comparison chart of 11 Best URL Shortening Services (according to Online Marketing blog, Jan8/09)