P-Books, E-Books, eBooks, web.

Real Time Journal - Day 8

2009-10-16T23:32:19-04:00

On Day 8 of the Real Time Journal, I registered NeuroNow on wefollow, a twitter directory, and also signed NeuroNow up for FaceBook. I'll set up a page in FaceBook tomorrow.

Here's how I set up wefollow:

Being in this registry should bring more follows in. Let's see.

Well, upping the numbers in TweetAdder didn't make much different yet: here's how things look:

422 Following, 165 Followers, 212 Tweets - only added 14 Followers today; I'll tweak TweetAdder tomorrow. The link bugs in TwitterFeeder seem to have disappeared.

Real Time Journal - Day 7

2009-10-15T23:14:07-04:00

I'm going to document the results of the first week of real time work with NeuroNow. Here are the numbers:

In a week of Twittering with NeuroNow, I've gotten the follower count to 164, and have set up a pretty good system of auto-twittering on the subject of neuroscience. Here's the current Twitter page:

As you can see, I fancied up the page a bit. I also added a website after I got a DM asking me why I didn't have one. That only took a few minutes, at least after I decided that it would be easier to set up a blog on Blogger than Word Press. Both are great, or you could use Posterous or another system, but I chose blogger because you can easily set up a blog site that just tweets. Here's the result at neuro-now.blogspot.com:

This provides an additional location for the Neuro Now feed. Being lazy, I removed the blogging area and replaced it with a Twitter gadget. Now the Twitter profile has a website URL and feels more professional.

I didn't make any changes to TwitterFeed today, but I've been getting occasional bad links in tweets that I have to delete. I'll check into that tomorrow.

I was curious to see if Google Search was seeing the NeuroNow activity:

Woohoo! Number 1 with a bullet! Google is taking real time seriously.

Now that the numbers are high enough on Twitter, I'm moving the automation settings for TweetAdder up:

These settings should increase followers more quickly. Let's see how it works.

Real Time Journal - Day 6

2009-10-14T22:28:08-04:00

Moving along, the numbers are: 512 following, 130 followers and 164 tweets.

Again, spent some time cleaning up bad tweets and followers, but things are looking pretty good. I'll start to push harder using TweetAdder tomorrow.

Real Time Journal - Day 5

2009-10-13T20:16:11-04:00

This is the fifth day of our experiment to see how we can build up a Twitter account and make it do interesting things. Here's where we are now:

455 following, 93 followers, 134 tweets.

The following:follower ratio is 4.5:1, which is high, but par for the course at this stage. I spent a few minutes looking at the tweets that twitterfeed is generating for Neuro Now. There were a few tweets that were junk, so I removed them, but the general quality is good enough for now. This setup will continue to send between ten and twenty tweets a day.

NeuroNow shows up in the sixth position in Google search. Google really ranks tweets up there! I used Googles SearchWiki to push NeuroNow to the top for me. Google seems to take SearchWiki changes seriously - lets see what happens.

There's some kind of Neuro Now group at Johns Hopkins, which is normally #1. We'll check back next week.

Have received 25 direct messages so far - sometimes but not always a sign of Twitter spam. Reviewed these Twitter followers and removed a few egregious spammers, but the rest weren't bad.

I reviewed the settings for TweetAdder; no changes today, but I'll probably make TweetAdder a little more aggressive once we get comfortably over 100 followers.

Real Time Journal - Days 3/4

2009-10-12T23:39:22-04:00

I took a screenshot of the Twitter page for NeuroNow yesterday around midnight. Here it is:

All the numbers are looking good. I left TweetAdder running yesterday while I was out of WIFI and EVDO contact - who knew that was possible :-) - and look at the numbers today:

The tools I set up yesterday to tweet, follow people that followed me, and add new followers that might be interested in NeuroNow seem to be doing a good job. I'm also getting a bunch of Direct Messages (DMs), which can mean that I've picked up some spammy followers. TweetAdder will allow you to automatically send new followers a DM; I'm not planning to use that feature for NeuroNow.

I'm not going to change any of the settings for TweetAdder for the moment, but I am going to go back and add some more neuroscience blogs that I have been following for awhile. AllTop.com is a great way to get started, but I want to put a little more personality into the tweets.

This time I'm going to use Google Alerts to add tweets to NeuroNow. Start by going to Google.Com/Alerts and log in using your new google email account info. I'm going to make a search for "cognitive enhancers" and see what Google can do.

Your page should look like this:

When you accept that info, you will now get a dialog something like this:

...And now, all you need to do is click on the feed link and put it on TwitterFeed.com. It will look something like this:

So, now I'll get some tweets about a particular kind of query used by Google users - and I can post them to my Twitter feed automatically! Let's see how is works tomorrow.

Real Time Journal - Day 2

2009-10-10T23:36:51-04:00

OK! Let's return to our Real Time Journal. Yesterday we created the NeuroNow Twitter account and created some relevant neuroscience tweets.

Here's what NeuroNow looks like on Twitter today (go see it yourself at twitter.com/neuronow)

The 37 tweets were generated from the RSS to tweet tool that I used yesterday (I cheated a little and added a few more neuroscience blogs that I like). We got 11 followers the first day (I'll explain the "61 following" a little later).

Also added a cool new picture of a neuron to NeuroNow. Got it from www.iStockPhoto.com for $2. Keep in mind that Twitter doesn't like pictures with a file size bigger than 700K.

As you tweet, you'll attract some followers, but you need to follow back people that follow you, and follow additional people that you think would be interested in your tweets. You can do this by hand in Twitter, but I'm going to Use TweetAdder, a tool that automates most of that work. You can pick up TweetAdder at www.tweetadder.com for $50.

After downloading TweetAdder and registering it, you need to add the Twitter name that you're going to work with. I use TweetAdder with a bunch of Twitter names, so you may see more than one Twitter name in the screenshots:

This shows that NeuroNow is following 1 person, is being followed by 11 people and tweeting 37 times.

Logging into NeuroNow Twitter account through Tweet Adder, I can now start to automate some of the tasks necessary to make NeuroNow more popular. The first thing I'll do is search for people to follow:

I enter the keyword "neuroscience" and find the following tweets:

TweetAdder finds 572 people to start following. I add them all into TweeterAdder's database:

Now I need to start following them, as well as the 11 people that are already following me. Clicking on the Follow tap, I choose the default settings and click the "Start" buttons.

Then I set up the UnFollow tab. This ensures that the follow to followed proportion doesn't get out of whack. There's some controversy about this - for now I'll just use the default settings:

The Automation tab allows you to automatically run all these tasks. I run TweetAdder in the background ever day:

Tomorrow, we'll fine tune the tweets that we're sending, and see how our followers and followings have worked out.

A Real Time Journal

2009-10-09T11:15:01-04:00

As part of presentation that I'm preparing for NFAIS (the National Federation of Science Abstracting and Indexing Services, AKA the Federation) on mobile delivery of content (see here for details), I'm planning to discuss the importance of real time tools for authors, publishers and resellers. Real time tools provide a way to update consumers about your content. More importantly, they provide feedback that ensures that the content stays relevant.

I thought it would be fun to set up a Twitter account to provide an example of how it can add value to existing content and media. The focus of this test will be the area of neuroscience. Let's see how far I can get!

The rules:

I won't spend more than 10 minutes a day on this project;
I won't use any expensive services to move things along faster;
I'll report on the results every day for the next two weeks.

Ready, Set ... Go!

I need to set up a gmail account so that I can point Twitter and other web service tools to it. I also want to create a Twitter account with a catchy name. I try a couple variations of "neuro" and find a combination that is available on Twitter: "neuronow". I create the gmail account first and then use the new gmail address to create the Twitter account. When I create the account, I skip all the parts that relate to following friends, or celebrities on Twitter's Suggested Users List.

Next, I need to start sending tweets that are interesting to potential neuroscience readers. I'm not a neuroscientist, so I'm going to start with an already curated list of information about the subject. If you're an expert on a topic, you'd probably use your own blogroll of websites that talk about the aspects of your subject that you're interested in.

I'll use Guy Kawasaki's curated information site Alltop for this experiment. Going to www.alltop.com, I search for "neuroscience" and get this page:

I'll use this combined feed of relevant neuroscience information at http://neuroscience.alltop.com/rss. The next step is to get it into Twitter.

I've used Twitterfeed before, so I'll use it today. Twitterfeed is a website that converts RSS feeds into Twitter tweets. I go to Twitterfeed.com and set up an account. During the setup, I sync my "neuronow" Twitter account to Twitterfeed. Then I paste in the RSS link for the neuroscience feed from Alltop.

I set the settings to get a lot of tweets on the account right away.

I'm ready to go (oops, took about thirty minutes this time, I'll work on that). I'll review how the twitters are going and start to follow people in Twitter tomorrow.

"Like nothing the industry has ever seen before" - Steve Jobs

2009-07-28T14:57:58-04:00

Jobs was talking about the App Store when he said that.

At 1.5 billion purchases, 65K Apps and 100K developers, the App Store represents the largest ecommerce opportunity on the web since Google's AdWords and AdSense.

At the same time, Apple's Web App Page shows 4067 web apps, along with an invitation to the moneymaking App Store.

Some notes on the Amazon Kindle app on the iPhone

2009-03-04T08:19:30-05:00

I've been twittering with a dash of friendfeed instead of blogging over the last few months, but I'd like to add more than 140 characters to the discussion on the release of the Amazon Kindle app to the iPhone. I've put up a quick Flickr review of the app here.

In particular:

1. The Amazon Kindle app is a pretty nice ebook reader. It has a similar feature set to eReader and Stanza, and it does a good job of displaying and downloading existing titles purchased at Amazon for the Kindle reader.

2. It doesn't seem to be hamstrung to make it a less attractive reading experience, although the Amazon spokesperson slammed the iPhone experience in this WSJ article:

"Mr. Freed says he expects that users of the iPhone application would read their books for 20 to 30 minutes at most, after which eye strain or battery life might become a problem."

The primary downsides are that it (a) only allows you to transfer ebooks that are in your Kindle, not newspapers, blogs and (presumably) other content that you've sent to the Kindle; (b) doesn't have the ability for you to buy new content within the application, as can be done with eReader and Stanza; (c) doesn't appear to have the text-to-speech capability of the Kindle 2 (although Amazon has backed off on offering this feature on all ebooks).

3. The ability to autosync your bookmarks for your ebooks between devices is a great feature and appears to be working between my iPhone and Kindle 1 in preliminary testing.

The WSJ article alludes to supporting other devices in the near term.

Cloud applications and Microsoft Office

2008-09-19T07:59:32-04:00

One of the big changes when your startup gets acquired is that the software and hardware that a big company standardizes on is rarely the software and hardware that you would pick for a startup. Startup solutions are low cost, easy to use and easy to maintain – Google Docs, Google Apps, AIM and Netsuite did just about everything for us – we were close to 100% in the cloud.

Ingram, on the other hand, is a Microsoft Exchange shop, so after dragging my feet for awhile, I’ve finally moved to Microsoft Entourage on my MacBook and use Exchange on my iPhone 3G for intracompany communications. Although I’d forgotten the sense of security that you get when you use a software email application, I find that I am missing all my cloud applications - especially Gmail.

The big change is speed. Exchange and Microsoft Office have far more features, and are more compatible with the millions of docs out there, but you have to wait. for. everything!