Web Worker Daily

In earlier posts, I provided some tips for improving your Twitter efficiency and mining Twitter for information. While both of these provide useful ways to utilize Twitter, you also need to be prepared to respond to other people quickly. Twitter is a short-attention-span medium, where tweets that are minutes old may already be obsolete. You don’t want to skip over any important information or miss the chance to respond. Here are my top three real-time monitoring tools for Twitter.

Don’t Underestimate Twitter Search

For simple monitoring, this is the way to go. If you only want to monitor a single keyword or a small number of keywords, you can easily use the built-in Twitter search in your web browser. You can even use a fairly complex set of search operators to construct great searches. It updates frequently and lets you know how many new items have arrived since your last refresh. It also displays the number of new items right in the browser tab to make it easy to notice without paying much attention to the page.  Sometimes you just can’t beat simple and unobtrusive. Read the rest of this entry »

I hate learning curves. I hate having to futz and fiddle with my apps to figure them out. I want the functionality to be intuitive, and if it is not, I throw up my hands and move on to something else. I attribute this impatience to information overload and don’t want to have to use a crowbar to insert complex instructions for an app into my brain when it is supposed to make my life easier.

That said, I am so glad that I took the time to seek out a demo of Filtrbox. As someone who is a major consumer of information from the Web as part of my Web work, Filtrbox is going to be my new best friend. Initially, I misunderstood its purpose and saw it as another feed reader. But with some hand-holding from the company, I realize that their term “media monitor” truly is a better fit. And I’d add “little miracle worker” and “fire hose diffuser” to the description.

Read the rest of this entry »