Twitter lists are a great way to group people into various categories, filter conversations, keep up with experts within a specific field and track a topic without needing to follow all of the relevant users — and can even be used as an RSS reader replacement. Despite being such a new feature, people are already using lists as a measure of influence.
I’ve spent the last few years working with online communities and collaboration technologies, and have come to expect to be able to collaborate with people when using online social tools. As a result, I wish that Twitter lists were more collaborative. Right now, Twitter lists and accounts have a one-to-one relationship. I create a list, and I’m the only person who can edit it. I started thinking about this limitation when Rael Dornfest created his Portland Food Cart list. I’m a huge fan of the Portland food cart scene, so I decided to follow his list instead of creating yet another one. The downside was that as there were some food carts missing from his list, I needed to send @replies to Rael to get him to add them — I couldn’t just add them myself. Read the rest of this entry »
Do you know how people feel about you on Twitter? Are the tweets about you or your product mostly positive, negative or neutral? While things like feelings and sentiment can seem fuzzy and “touchy-feely,” there are sentiment analysis tools available for Twitter that attempt to classify tweets into either positive, negative or neutral categories automatically using algorithms and lists of keywords. For example, using words like “sucks,” “sad” and “hate” would be classified as negative, while “awesome,” “great” and “love” would be positive, with a neutral rating given to anything not falling into one of the other two categories. Read the rest of this entry »
Last Friday, I was attending Portland’s weekly Beer and Blog event, and I stumbled across what later turned out to be an interesting trend. I had two separate, unrelated conversations about an hour apart with people working in the technology industry who once used RSS readers but had mostly abandoned them in favor of using Twitter to find news and interesting blog posts. I talked to a couple of other friends and posted the question on Twitter, which confirmed that many people are using Twitter as an RSS reader replacement. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve talked about the importance of fitness for web workers many times before. A side effect of spending our days working online is that most of our working hours are spent sitting in front of a computer, so we should make a special effort to fit some type of physical activity into our daily habits. Having software to track my progress makes a big difference in my motivation to work out. I like being able to see that I ran faster or further today than I did yesterday, which helps me to always try to work a little harder everyday to keep the trend lines moving in the right direction.
This week, I’ve been playing with the RunKeeper iPhone app to track my workouts. I wanted to play with something different to track my runs, and some friends have been using RunKeeper, so I thought that I would give it a try. RunKeeper has been around for a while, so it is only new to me, but I like it way better than I thought I would. Read the rest of this entry »
I am a big fan of the latest generation of smart phones. The variety of applications that make them so much more useful than the previous models, which were mostly focused on email usage with a little web browsing on the side. I have an iPhone, but I spent the last weekend helping my significant other get his Android phone set up. Once we got the basics up and running, the first thing we did was start exploring the Android Market and installing applications.
Playing with applications on an Android phone got me thinking about how I use applications on my iPhone. I’m always interested in seeing what applications my friends are using on their phones, so I thought people might be interested in reading about the iPhone applications that I use. Read the rest of this entry »
This weekend I was on an “SEO Smackdown” panel at our local WordCamp Portland. Two of us were from the content side, while the other two panelists were SEO experts. My take on SEO is that writing compelling, interesting blog content that people will want to talk about and link to will get you around 95 percent of the way to good search engine rankings. If you don’t have great content, SEO is not going to be very useful for you. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m a bit of a data nut, and I enjoy looking for new and interesting ways to find and visualize information. This is especially true for finding new ways to monitor the various conversations happening across social media web sites. There are new monitoring tools appearing every day, more than I could ever hope to have time to evaluate. I’ve written about monitoring solutions many times on this blog with posts about monitoring online conversations, monitoring dashboards, monitoring real-time information on Twitter, and more. I thought that it would be a good time for another post to highlight a few more tools for monitoring online conversations. I recently found Ken Burbary’s Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions, which has almost 100 social media monitoring tools listed, so I thought that I would evaluate a few of the solutions on his list to find a couple that provide interesting information. Most of the tools available do a pretty good job of finding the posts that match your search terms, so I focused on a couple of the solutions that provide some additional value or analysis of the results.
We recently made a couple of announcements about an upcoming event called Ignite Portland, so I decided to use it as my test case for these monitoring solutions. It’s a good test case because we’ve been doing the event for a couple of years, so it has plenty of history and the recent announcement generated some buzz this week, but the volume is fairly manageable. Read the rest of this entry »
Lately, I’ve been focused on arranging my schedule and splitting my work into chunks so that I can be productive for longer periods of time, while still having some flexibility in my schedule for the other things that I enjoy doing. One of the big benefits of being a consultant is that I can rearrange my schedule to do something fun, or to accomplish an activity by taking advantage of off-times. Working out is a good example. By scheduling my workouts during off-times, when the gym isn’t as crowded, I can get them done more more quickly. This week, my Mom is in town, and I have been able to arrange my work into some defined chunks so that I can spend more time with her while still getting my work completed.
I have a couple of specific techniques that have been working really well for me. Read the rest of this entry »
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
