Due to injury and illness, blogging is taking a back seat at the moment…

Apologies and normal service will be resumed as soon as possible…

This Twitter crowdsourcing experiment was set up by regular 140char.com contributor Lauren Fisher over on her agency site at SimplyZesty, so here’s an explanation from Lauren herself:

Using Twitter to crowdsource the world in 72 hours.

Well not exactly the world, but England, America and Ireland at least. That’s the challenge we’ve set ourselves and we’re relying on word of mouth to make the experiment work. The project started just under 48 hours ago and was originally intended just for Ireland. It soon gained traction and buzz so we decided to roll it out to England and the US. We’ve set a limit of 72 hours on each project, to see just how quickly word can spread.

We trialled the experiment as a new way of using lists and so we could see which counties/states were the most active. We’ll be publishing links to all the lists and also producing a map showing which areas are the most active. The first results for Ireland, will be out tomorrow.

The project works through crowd-sourcing and to take part and help spread the word we’re just asking for one tweet (replacing the place name with your county/state)

Ireland “I want to get listed #TwitterCork add yourself here http://bit.ly/2C70pP

England “I want to get listed #TwitterEssex add yourself here http://bit.ly/44DRZ5

America “I want to get listed #TwitterCalifornia add yourself here http://bit.ly/40ZL4M

There’s also more info on all of the projects on our site : www.simplyzesty.com

We’re interested to see how far this project can go in 72 hours and hope that it proves the power of Twitter to any doubters out there. We also want to provide lists that will be useful to people, for example if you’ve just moved to a new area. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that the project works and we’re certainly putting the new lists through their paces!

And I’ll be asking Lauren nicely for a follow-up post to find out exactly how successful the project has been…

If you want to find the most popular brands on Twitter in terms of mentions, you could spend some time setting up various monitoring systems. Or you can just go to TweetedBrands and see which 50 companies are getting the most mentions in any one day.

It’s simple and effective for a quick overview, and each mention number links to the appropriate Twitter search.

TweetedBrands

And that’s about it, other than to say it was produced as part of the 24 hour business camp.

I may have already written about Twitter lists, but certainly the interest in them hasn’t started to wane yet.

In addition to everyone and their blogging dog creating posts on the lists you really, definitely, absolutely should follow,  Mark Drapeau has an interesting post on O’Reilly Radar, in which he puts forward the idea that Twitter lists are a more organic metric than the number of followers/RTs an individual has.

Meanwhile the two rivals for most comprehensive Twitter client, Tweetdeck and Seesmic, have both revealed the imminent inclusion of list functionality:

‘While we’re not saying exactly how we’re integrating lists just yet – hey, we all need a few secrets! – be happy in the knowledge that we are integrating lists into TweetDeck. And as you would expect, we’re not just planning any old run-of-the mill integration…oh no. We think you’ll find that what we have planned for Lists is going to take your social media experience with TweetDeck to new heights.’ - Tweetdeck blog.

‘OF COURSE Seesmic will have user lists very soon. I have them on my Seesmic Desktop already testing.’ – Seesmic founder @Loic on Twitter.

I’m convinced Twitter lists will remain a highly important change for Twitter, both for users, and for monetisizing the business.

With about half of Twitter users able to access Twitter Lists as they’re rolled out to everyone, independant Twitter list directory Listorious has been quick to launch and offer curated lists on a range of topics.

It’s interesting to see whether the relatively peer-led recommendation of Twitter lists will displace directories of individual users grouped by category such as WeFollow and Twellow. Obviously there are concerns about both the follower-inflation that everyone has seen from the Suggested User List presented to new users, as well as individuals worried about being pigeon-holed and lists becoming reciprocal favours rather than recommendations.

It’s also likely to diminish the value of the longstanding Twitter tradition of #followfriday.

From a business point of view it makes utter sense for Twitter to have some input/control of listing users – all the examples above have been relatively successful. What’s the betting that an option to promote a specific list could be in the monetisation plans? Spend some cash and your list could be promoted to everyone, or possibly replace the Suggested User List for a period of time?

Suddenly they’d have a route for grabbing sums like the $250,000 offered earlier this year by Jason Calacanis, without it being flagged up as obvious in a list of just 20 or so people.

And obviously list pages themselves offer individual sponsorship/promotional oppportunities…

As a user of Twitter, I’m undecided whether lists will be a positive thing on balance, but as a Twitter observer it’s one of the biggest steps they’ve made in a long time towards making money.

I’m really intrigued to find out what other people are using Posterous for. The ease with which you can post by email, and send images and video which are automatically resized means I keep toying with it for various things but haven’t found something which has got me using in regularly (I’ve already got two self-hosted Wordpress blogs including this one, and a pretty active Twitter account etc).

I know that Steve Rubel is using it as his main place to post in a lifestreaming style.

And the Austin American Stateman newspaper used it to crowdsource images from readers.

Plus more visually-creative people seem to be embracing it – e.g. Christian Payne.

But I need more inspiration – are you using Posterous, and if so, how are you using it? Alternatively have you seen particularly good or bad examples of people using it for a specific purpose or reason?

Although Ashton Kutcher has people following him on Twitter than the entire UK news industry, in terms of online readership, the UK news industry has pretty good reach, with The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Daily Mail all attracting over 30 million unique users in September 2009.

So I thought it would be interesting to see exactly which ones were mentioning Twitter the most – and to keep it simple and relevant for everyone, I decided to only use their search functionality to work it out:

So which newspapers have mentioned Twitter the most?

• The Telegraph: 5180 results.
• The Guardian: 3779 results.
• The Financial Times: 1887 results.
• The Times: 1033 results.
• The Daily Mail: 825 results.
• The Sun: 579 results (inc: The Scottish Sun)
• The Mirror: 100 results (Search total limited – site:themirror.co.uk twitter = 82,000 results)
• The Daily Star: 87 results.
• The Daily Express: 78 results.
• The Independent: 56 results (Note – their Google-powered site search is limited in some way! A general google ‘site:theindependent.com twitter‘ reveals 1400 results)

Key thoughts from this simple experiment:

• Most people would probably have put The Guardian top if asked.
• The fact Twitter search returns and ABCe results are closely linked suggests the effectiveness of site structure and search functionality, rather than Twitter mentions being integral to driving readers! (I’m sure Martin has much more in-depth information on this as part of the team at The Guardian).
• At least a couple of sites have seriously wonky search functionality, despite being two of many with search powered or ‘enhanced by’ Google.
• It’s definitely skewed towards the ‘middle-class’ broadsheets regardless of political leaning, which is what most people would expect.
• There’s a power law in full effect, with two/three sites providing most of the coverage.

This is the first post by new contributor Lauren Fisher, who specialises in online PR and social media at Simply Zesty – and can be found on Twitter at @laurenfisher.

If you’re looking to publish any RSS feeds to a Twitter account, then apparently you wouldn’t be alone in picking Twitterfeed, as it’s apparently used by nearly 350,000 publishers.

Not only was it around the first default choice, but there are a host of changes now going live to improve the service.

If you publish on a system that offers PubSubHubbub feeds (e.g. Blogger or Typepad), your new posts should be live on Twitter in a matter of moments.

It now also features the option to publish to Facebook, which makes life a little easier.

And you get better analytics – there’s now integration with both url shortner Bit.ly, and Google Analytics.

And behind the scenes there’s an improved queue management system for greater reliability.

In fact, my only complain from a personal note is that the new design and system gives a variety of methods to log-in, and for some reason I’m struggling with mine!

One of the most popular Twitter clients, Tweetdeck, has added new features in the latest release,  version 0.31. It’s pushing forward as one of only two Twitter clients with a share of over 10%, as measured by Twitstats.

Included in the latest release is a new notification system which can be applied to certain groups. Plus it also has inline reply, retweets and direct messages inside the notification menu.

A major feature you might not notice is that Tweetdeck has now been optimised to consume less memory, which is good for everyone – plus there’s also the time-saving option of keyboard shortcuts, and a Heads-Up Display.

And depending on how popular you are, you might find the feature to view your newest 100 followers comes in useful as you can directly follow, block or add to a group.

Check oout the video below for the official walk-through: