WiredPen

I’m in the market for a new “birthday greeting” application for Facebook, because the one I have right now sets my teeth on edge due to interface cluelessness.
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When Twitter’s up, check out Twemes for Twitter memes based upon hashtags (#). The home page highlights recent memes. For example, see recent tweets from the National Conference on Media Reform; subscribe to the RSS feed.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that some black-hat advertisers are using automated tools to fool Craigslist into thinking that multiple site visitors are complaining about “offensive” or “false ads”…. as a way to drum the competition out of the free space.

Tommy DeCarlo, a 43 year old North Carolina father of two, lucked out when his daughter posted his mp3s of Boston songs to MySpace … and then when Boston founder Tom Scholz’s wife decided to listen to them. That caught Scholz’s ear, and he invited DeCarlo to a tribute performance (YouTube clip) for lead singer Brad Delp, who committed suicide last year.

The rest, as they say, is history. DeCarlo debuts with the band’s summer tour on 6 June in Thunder Bay, Ontario. They play Seattle’s Marymoor Park on 10 July. (tip)

I suppose I should start reading Digg more often, but I found out about this free book from Eric Rice (via Twitter, of course), who was pointing to an article at the Read-Write-Web about how crowds can be dumb.

Here’s the deal: that 99designs is officially sponsoring a 30 day giveaway of SitePoint’s Photoshop Anthology (for another 17 days!). Sitepoint decided (intelligently) to add a “Digg” button to the landing page (the promo page). But someone killed the ride to the “top” of Digg with this comment (which is totally bogus): Read the rest of this entry »

Business Week explains the power of Google Juice and tells us that they have updated their 2005 story on blogs in business. They then explore other social media tools/spaces, like Twitter and Facebook. (tip via Twitter).

He gets some of the verbs (”to tweet” not “to twitter”) and nouns (we’re “twits” not “twitter-ers”!) wrong, but give Stephan Baker credit for jumping into Twitter-space to write his 15 May article, Why Twitter Matters. (tip)

The screen capture (right) is from the slideshow accompanying the story. What happened in March?

I joined Twitter last year at MindCamp, the day after the iPhone was released. I started playing with it again … when? In the fall (this seems to be my first post). And I got a request to sit on a master’s committee (Museology - the study of museums) where Twitter is the focus (how are early adopter museums using the tool? what are best practices?)

In February, Reuters added a “share with Twitter” link on some stories. Then in April, perhaps pushed by that unknown forced reflected in the graph, I published a resources page and a draft framework to analyze Twitter genres

PCWorld.ca extolls the benefits of Twitter in this brief post. Example, Dell offers discounts, for example. Via Guy Kawasaki (on Twitter).

How are social networks and social network sites being used by researchers? Guest lecture in Hanson’s COM529 class. [Two addenda!]

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Marketing exec Chris Winfield (Let’s Get Social @ SearchEngineLand) explains how Twitter can help marketers … and he did his research by conducting a Twitter poll.

I, on the other hand, wrote this post after commenting on Chris’ column! In the process, I learned a little about Sphinn (not much, need to dig some more).

Like polls on LinkedIn (or any other social media site), the odds of getting responses increase with the size of your social network. However, there are ways that you can increase the probability of a reply. You can add the hashtag #poll or #twitterpoll to a post; the hash groups tweets, makes them easy for people to find. Or you can turn to an external aide; for example, PollDaddy has a Twitter poll feature.

More good stuff if you’re still trying to figure out how to use Twitter: Paul Bradshaw just wrote a post about how journalists are using (can use) Twitter. Of course, as I wrote earlier this month, I’m working on Twitter genres (another way to analyze how people are using the tool).