Social Media Sanity

A new social network, chime.in, might eventually pay you for your activity .. initial look

2011-10-21T09:35:00.001-07:00

Do we really need another online social network? Between twitter, reddit, Facebook, linkedin, etc, aren't we all social-networked to the gills already? A new entrant on the scene, Chime.in, has a familiar feeling to reddit, and apparently will offer members the opportunity to be paid for their activity. That last bit got me interested enough to take a look and try out the features. (my page:

Can online social networks ever satisfy the need for real interaction?

2011-10-19T16:50:00.000-07:00

Does a poke on facebook, or instant messages, or chat sessions, or any other online social network interaction satisfy the real need for real interaction? Humans are social animals and have a real need to interact with others. An example of this is a Fast Company article linked below is a trend in Japan for "cat cafe's". These cafe's give patrons time to interact with animals. The cafe's cite

Egypt's facebook revolution 2.0 is real democracy, versus the fake democracy imposed by Western powers?

2011-03-28T20:05:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year Egypt had a revolution and overthrew their dictator of 30+ years, Mubarak. Remember that? I know this nuclear reactor thing kinda got our attention, but this wave of revolution sweeping the Middle East is pretty cool. It's a lot more real than the fake democracies the U.S. has imposed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Recently the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco held a panel

Technorati seems to be totally futzed, no longer relavent, or at least horrible on-site navigation degrades its usefulness

2009-12-13T11:44:00.000-08:00

Back in the day Technorati was the place to be ranked as an important or unimportant blogger. Today it seems to be to have lost its way, and the services it used to offer now seem totally useless. The straw which broke open this rant I'm writing is the ranking widget I used to display on another of my blog sites that has now been removed. Back in the day the

Taking a fresh look at del.icio.us (a.k.a. delicious.com)

2009-10-16T17:31:00.000-07:00

Del.icio.us is one of the earlier social media websites which had its own 15 minutes of fame several years ago. It's fading into relative obscurity may (or may not) be a warning to upstarts like Twitter but I digress. It seems that del.icio.us has had a facelift of sorts with a bit of modernization or at least the incorporation of some (ahem) twitter support.

Drupal as social media platform, what's needed next?

2009-10-07T18:32:00.000-07:00

I came to the Drupal community with (to the best of my recollection) Drupal 4.6. That makes me a sort of old timer though really there was a lot of Drupal releases before my time. In the 4.6 days most extension of Drupal meant writing modules whereas you youngsters today don't know how easy you have it with Views and CCK ... What drew me to Drupal was the tagline

Customized tweeting of RSS feed's with feed-aggregation-tools

2009-09-10T15:07:00.000-07:00

There are many web applications that offer different takes on what a "power user" does with Twitter. For example feedtweet takes an RSS feed and tweets the latest entries. But what if you want to tweet the feed entries in a manner other than feedtweet's designers thought you should do? What if you do not want to hand your twitter account credentials to a third

Twitterfail: Nambu (and other twitter clients) trap social connections data

2009-08-21T10:01:00.000-07:00

My previous entry I talked about some problems with Nambu. Twitterfail: twitter.com website, alternative clients, Nambu crashing At the end of that I came to a core problem with Nambu and other social networking applications. They entrap you into using their app by trapping the social connections data you've entered into that application. In my case I'd spent a

Twitterfail: twitter.com website, alternative clients, Nambu crashing

2009-08-21T09:46:00.000-07:00

I've been happily using the Nambu twitter client for Mac OS X. After following a few people, and setting up a few accounts, it seemed clear using the twitter website was not very usable. It may be usable if you have one account but as soon as you set up multiple accounts it becomes very hard very quick. Why set up multiple accounts? In my case my interests

Twitterfail: multiple accounts, same message

2009-08-08T15:28:00.000-07:00

The latest observed twitterfail was a blatant form of multiple accounts posting the same message. There are many ways to do this, I just happen to be unlucky enough to be following two accounts engaging in this practice. NOTE: Rather than use twitter.com I use a twitter client (Nambu) which means the messages are shown as they would on twitter.com. In any case

Twitterfail: @usedcarsuk

2009-07-22T13:35:00.000-07:00

A new twitter account began following one of my twitter accounts, and the presentation is so amusing it's causing me to launch a series of blog posts: Twitterfail The first entrant for everyones perusement is: @usedcarsuk First off, did they not run this through a pronunciation test? Or did they simply do SEO analysis and find that Used Cars UK is a frequently

Give a hoot on twitterville - A look at hootsuite

2009-06-30T22:15:00.000-07:00

Hootsuite is the home of the ow.ly links and the little linkbar that goes with them. It's a web application which adds useful functions to the twitter user experience. It's not so strong however on automation like auto-follow. You start by registering an email address with hootsuite. This is instead of registering a twitter ID with them, as you do with other

Looking at Tweetscript (tweetspinner.com)

2009-06-20T09:30:00.000-07:00

I saw this tweet "How cool is tweetscript??" and decided to take a look. I've done a bit with a Groovy script to automatically tweet contents of an RSS feed, and I've been thinking it would be useful to have a more comprehensive twitter toolset. Unfortunately tweetscript isn't what I was thinking about but it may be useful as it is. It offers you tools to manage

To tweet or not to tweet, let's help the tweeters do their magic

2009-02-06T20:37:00.000-08:00

Twitter is this up and coming social platform which I still don't quite grok the usefulness. However it can draw some traffic to your site and I have managed to learn a few interesting things through twitter. It's growing on me. In any case since there's a lotta twitterers tweeting away it is helpful for website promotion purposes to assist them in any way to

Review: We the Media, about Blogging and the brave new world

2005-04-17T16:15:00.000-07:00

Dan Gillmor is a longtime professional journalist whose beat for a long time was Silicon Valley. This beat gave him a ground-level view of the .COM explosion and burst, and every other doing in Silicon Valley for many years. However he recently left his comfy job with the San Jose Mercury News, heading off to launch a startup aimed to assist citizen journalists. He released this book several