CC Pearce

The Cleaning Fairy [TSOU]

2012-12-04T10:45:00.001-08:00

Susan Warren AKA "The Cleaning Fairy" joins The State of Us to explain her reasons for breaking into houses to clean them.

Fast Food Face-off - The State of Us

2012-10-23T09:22:00.001-07:00

Mila Kunis, Boxcar Children, and Mitt Romney - The State of Us

2012-10-21T12:37:00.001-07:00

Mitt Romney debates himself

2012-10-08T11:23:00.001-07:00

Learn Some Internet Friday: If This Then That

2012-08-31T09:38:00.000-07:00

"Put the Internet to work for you" is the motto of IFTTT.com, a site that lets you automate many processes from various other sites. When you create a task that you want to automate, it is known as a "recipe" on the site. Here's a handful of the many recipes you can create with IFTTT.com:

Download photos to Dropbox that you post to Instagram
When you update your Facebook profile picture, update your Twitter profile with the same picture
Email a weather update to yourself if it's expected to rain the next day
Archive your tweets to Google Calendar (or Evernote, Buffer, Tumblr, Posterous, etc)
Post your YouTube "favorites" to a social network
Text your phone when a Craigslist post matches your search criteria

Dozens of sites are compatible and the list has been growing steadily all year. There is an incredible variety of triggers and outcomes that you can create.

One of the ways that I utilize IFTTT.com is to streamline some social media activity. If I have a picture that I want to post on all my networks, I have created a folder in Dropbox that I named "To Social Networks." When I put a picture in this folder, I have triggers that are set up to post it to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Tumblr.

If you want a new blog post on Blogger or WordPress to be distributed across your networks, you can set up a similar trigger and avoid the tedium of notifying all the sites individually.

Other clever recipes:

Add new movie releases to Google Calendar

Record a voice memo and have the mp3 and transcription emailed to you

Get a text when there is an earthquake in Southern California

Learn Some Internet Friday: Password Managers

2012-06-01T07:07:00.000-07:00

From my experience so far, it seems like almost everyone reuses a few of the same passwords to log in to everything they use across the internet. And that's a bad idea. If any website you use is compromised, it is very likely that your login information will be tried again on another site. Not to mention if LulzSec happens to find your password, they will likely publish it.

The solution is to use a password manager like LastPass or 1Password. They're both fantastic. I use 1Password as it is optimized for the Mac experience (although now it is also available on Windows), but it sounds like LastPass has become just as polished (not to mention that it's free).

A password manager is a program that allow you to securely save all your passwords using one master password. While having a master password may seem like it defeats the purpose of having multiple passwords, think about the alternative. If your Facebook account gets hacked and you have one password for all your logins, you will have to change your password for everything. If you have a long password as your master password and hopefully change it occasionally, it is highly unlikely to be cracked with "brute force" where a computer randomly generates words and letters until it cracks the code.

Password managers can sync across browsers and computers so no matter where you're trying to log in to a site, your passwords will all be handy. They also have extensions that make password managers really quick to access from your toolbar and autofill your login information.

It's really worth the little bit of extra time it takes to set it up... rather than a full tutorial, just let me know if you want any help with this.

Learn Some Internet Friday: MyPermissions.org

2012-05-25T07:03:00.000-07:00

With all the social media emphasis that we've all been doing and will continue to do, I wanted to share a quick shortcut to make sure you've got your permissions and privacy under control.

Visit mypermissions.org. You can click each of the icons to take you to the permission controls of that network.

Basically if you've connected your Facebook account to a lot of services over the last few years and you don't necessarily still want to keep your account connected to those older sites any more, you can revoke access to that site. The same goes for Twitter, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Instagram, Flickr, Foursquare, AOL, and Microsoft Live.

It's a good idea to check over your permissions every couple of months, especially if you're concerned about any sites that are accessing too much information or even sharing it.

Learn Some Internet Friday: Buffer

2012-05-18T07:37:00.000-07:00

This Friday I want to make sure you're all aware of an incredible timesaver for social media postings called Buffer.

Buffer allows you to post to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn at the same time, or at scheduled intervals. Say you have three things that are all urgent for you to post (Little Women Big Cars on AOL, Fetching on AOL, and you favorite episode of Sam Has 7 Friends on YouTube), you can add them all to Buffer. Not only will it space out your posts, but you can set it to post at peak social interaction times for each network.

Getting Started:

1) Go to http://bufferapp.com/

2) Sign up with Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn

3) A post will pre-populate for you, but just ignore it.

4) Click "settings" at the top

5) Click "connect account" at the bottom of the new page

6) Add another account, and repeat until you have all three accounts linked.

7) Click back to "dashboard"

8) Write a status message (if you include a link, it will preview what it looks like on FB and LI).

9) "Post Now" to immediately post to all networks or "Add to Buffer" to queue it up

Advanced (see screen shots below for reference):

You can choose your link shortener if you prefer bit.ly (which I prefer). You can also use your bit.ly account by connecting it.
Change the scheduled times for your postings for each network. Maybe you only post twice a day on Facebook, but you post four times a day on Twitter (make sure your timezone matches or the status will post at the right times in the wrong time zones).
Add the Buffer for Chrome extension by clicking here while in Google Chrome. Now any time your find something interesting, you can immediately blast it out.

Very Advanced:

Go to SocialBro and have your Twitter account analyzed. It will take a little while, but SocialBro can export the data straight to Buffer so that your tweets are published at the times when your followers are most active.

The Avengers $1 Billion Box Office [Mask & Cape]

2012-05-15T07:32:00.000-07:00

What can I say? I'm a fan of these guys!

Learn Some Internet Friday: StumbleUpon

2012-05-11T07:34:00.000-07:00

This Friday I invite you to waste some time with a social media site known as StumbleUpon. You may know it as fun distraction, but it is also an incredibly powerful driver of Internet traffic. Unlike most social sites, when something goes viral on StumbleUpon, it tends to spread the traffic out over a much longer time rather than the traditional spike from hitting the front page of Reddit or Digg.

Seeing how video is also one of the most popular tag categories on this site, we would be well-served to use this for referral traffic to both Vuguru and World of Heroes shows.

GETTING STARTED:

1. Go to http://stumbleupon.com

2. Click "Join for free"

3. Fill in information or click "sign up with Facebook" on the right side of the page. I'd recommend the Facebook option due to their new socialization features and the fact that you won't have to remember another password..

4. A page will ask "What do you want to explore?" and you can choose whatever you like. Be sure to include "Television" and "Movies" among others and click "Save Interests." You'll be able to refine these categories later and choose more specific subsets.

5. Click the icon with the orange circle next to "Stumble" in the upper left corner.

6. When you get to a page give it a thumbs up or thumbs down and then hit "Stumble" again.

The more you use this site, the more authority you have in the complex algorithms that weigh people's opinions to see what is worth suggesting to other stumblers. Submitting items to StumbleUpon is a different beast altogether, so just focus on enjoying the site and exploring.

And don't forget to follow my stumbles!

Mask & Cape [Stan Lee's World of Heroes]

2012-05-03T16:45:00.001-07:00

Another new show coming to Stan Lee's World of Heroes!

Random Comic - Slumber Party Court

2012-05-01T11:15:00.000-07:00

Experiences from SXSW Interactive

2012-03-15T07:35:00.000-07:00

New Technologies

Samsung's new Smart TV platform is really solid. Voice commands and gesture controls are in a primitive but still impressive stage. A curious new feature is the face recognition ability. If it doesn't creep you out too much, the ability for the TV to recognize its watcher could allow for very customizable experiences by automatically logging into favorite services like Hulu, Netflix, Twitter, etc. and even start by jumping to your favorite channel.

Pepsi is promoting adaptive advertising, which feels a little creepy at first but makes targeting demographics in real-time possible. A computer judges your age and sex with a constantly scanning camera and then will display the advertisement it thinks is most relevant for you.

Creeped out yet?

Isis will be prominently in the news soon as it competes against Google Wallet (and others) to handle your virtual wallets (which you will all have by next year). Near-field communications (NFC) will be standard in the upcoming generation of smart phones and will provide a new form of quick payments that are supposedly more secure than using a credit card. Too much to discuss in a synopsis, but check out PayWithIsis.com for a taste. If you want to go nuts in the world of future currency, check out Bitcoin.org.

Trends

While not the newest news, pretty much every media producer is adding layers of social media integration into their shows. In a panel, Bravo brought up their "social addition" layer for repeat shows -- a process that shows the social media engagement (tweets and Facebook comments) burnt in to show when it re-airs and their numbers for re-airing shows have gone up substantially. I'm not sure if that's proof of the social media engagement working or if it's providing viewers with a new content experience.

A "Future of Media" talk largely discussed the conversations that were happening on GetGlue and GroupMe. People are probably familiar with the GetGlue check-in system, but GroupMe has a more personal platform where the conversations typically involve fewer people but much more active dialogue. The main idea of this trend is to figure out how to convert a passive consumer of media to an active user - someone who is discussing and thus promoting the show.

Gamification is a buzzword that is going to be as big as the very idea of social media. Gamification is a powerful concept of motivation through rewards, even if those rewards are completely intangible. FourSquare started its platform with the idea of rewarding checkins with badges and developed a monetizable system from that effort. Now GetGlue and a thousand other start-ups are leveraging the same psychological triggers that reinforce behavior with a set system to gain regular users. Everyone should truly be on the lookout for more efforts from large companies to begin to control your behavior with the ideas of gamification. Imagine if Wells Fargo started awarding badges if you open a new account with them to get an idea of where this could take a dark turn. Take a look at Badgeville.com for an example of how a startup is leveraging their gamification expertise.

Independent support for artists is becoming more and more popular. Music, film, cartoonists, etc. all have new opportunities to manage themselves in more inventive ways. ArtistGrowth had a fairly robust system for managing the entire life of a musician from managing merchandise and sales to travel plans and social media connections from a single app interface. IndieFilmz.com seems to be one of the first places where you can actually sell short films - a fantastic solution for filmmakers who haven't yet been able to raise funds for a full-length feature.

Other Discoveries

WeVideo - collaborative, cloud-based video editing
Geospike - geoblogging network intended for world travelers
SonicBids - social music marketing to help bands, venues, promoters, and brands connect
JuntoBox Films - network for finding and funding independent films
Hashtag Art - creates mosaics from Twitter followers
SavvyCard - online business cards

What I thought about the Oscars this year

2012-02-27T01:19:00.001-08:00

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:S Tremaine Ave,Los Angeles,United States

The Best Chrome Extensions Right Now

2012-02-19T14:13:00.000-08:00

Inspired by LifeHacker's "What We Use" series, I wanted to share some of my favorite productivity tools and tricks starting with Chrome extensions.

Xmarks Bookmark Sync - This is absolutely essential for keeping my bookmarks synced across multiple browsers and computers. I adore this extension.

1Password - I know a lot of people prefer to use LastPass (which certainly has many advantages), but I use mainly Mac computers and have found 1Password to be a lot more comfortable for myself. Not only does it store your passwords, but you can set up different profiles and multiple credit cards to autofill. And the password generator is very elegant with easy customization tools. If you're concerned about keeping your passwords in sync on your mobile devices as well (I'm not), definitely give LastPass a look instead.

A Bit Better RTM, Remember the Milk for Gmail, and TaskMilk - I have tested dozens of task manager applications (Wunderkit, Things, and Producteev are some other favorites), but I keep coming back to Remember the Milk. A Bit Better RTM makes the actual RTM site look cleaner while the Gmail plug in has become a convenient replacement for Gtasks, which still lacks too many features for it to be my primary task manager. TaskMilk gives you a quick drop-down look at your RTM tasks.

Boomerang for Gmail - You can send emails at specified later time or "boomerang" them if you want an email to appear back in your inbox if no one has responded after a certain length of time.

BTC Guild - This one definitely isn't for everyone. If you're into Bitcoin as much as I am and you mine for BTC with BTC Guild, this extension has a nice little drop-down menu that displays all your workers with their hashrates and some other data like hourly rewards and 24 hour earnings.

Buffer for Chrome - Many times I will sit down and read several fascinating stories that I have to share with everyone, but since I don't want to clog my Facebook and Twitter feeds at one time I use Buffer to schedule the updates to be spaced out and at peak times for social activity.

Facebook for Chrome - When I can't resist a peek at my feed...

goo.gl URL Shortener - My preferred URL shortener. It creates a link and goes ahead and copies it for you. Also gives quick access to details and a QR code generator.

Google Voice (by Google) - Check voicemails and texts quickly with the drop-down menu. Plus, it's great for typing quick texts. I haven't ported my Google Voice number yet so I also use MightyText which fulling integrates text messaging from my cell phone.

InvisibleHand - You're right about to buy a product when BAM! InvisibleHand pops up to tell you that you can get your Blue Yeti microphone for $20 cheaper from another website. Incredibly useful extension that automatically searches a wide variety of sites for better prices.

SocialBro - My favorite new social network analytics tool.

Reddit Companion - If you spend a lot of time on Reddit, this is a nice tool that lets you vote, save, and view comments on reddit posts from a small info bar.

Send Using Gmail - Gmail is my default mail client and I prefer to have mailto links open a gmail window rather than a desktop client, thus this extension is a handy shortcut.

TabCloud - Thought I don't find myself using it very often, this theoretically a very nifty extension for saving and reopening sessions if you change to another computer.

Music Plus for Google Music and Turntable.fm Extended - Spotify has become my primary music player, but when I want to go back to Google Music or Turntable.fm (and recently Earbits.com), I love all the extra utility you get from these extensions.

A few others I didn't mention include the following:

After the Deadline
Chrome Remote Desktop BETA
Google Chrome to Phone Extension
Hangout Canopy
Proxy Switchy!
SEO for Chrome
What's the font?

So what am I missing? What are some other extensions that you can't live without?

How ATT is Being a Grinch

2011-12-25T20:04:00.000-08:00

This story is a rant against the injustice of AT&T in my recent bill and the way they have proceeded to waste my time in trying to fix their mistakes.

My normal bill is $190/mo. for cable + internet + phone, which I know is already expensive, but I've been a fan of the U-Verse features as opposed to Time Warner Cable's offerings. Let me keep these details brief as everyone knows the trouble that these kinds of companies give you.

The internet was slow for a while and eventually became almost entirely unusable. I called to have some come out and repair it and there was no mention of a charge. When the repairman arrived he told me it would be $55 if he entered the house and I said no thank you since I was not told of such a charge on the phone.

About a week later the TV had stopped working as well and the internet was nonexistent so I called back and was told that there would not be a charge for a technician if the problems were AT&T's fault so another technician arrived and replaced FAULTY EQUIPMENT. Of course I'm leaving out the details of how long these stupid phone calls and the hours that the technician works at the house (mainly waiting on the phone himself).

During these talks on the phone AT&T continued to say they would make adjustments on my bill once the problem was resolved... and for some reason I believed them. Only when my bill arrived it was for $310. They charged me for BOTH technician visits even though I specifically declined the first one to avoid the charge.

When I called to have my bill adjusted, I thought this is just an obnoxious mistake and this company will surely rectify their error. Turns out it is not the case. I spent 55 minutes (I am now tracking my time with every call with AT&T) reviewing the details of my case. Apparently, there weren't "notes" on my case and the most AT&T was willing to offer me was $5.

For one month of bad/no internet and one week of no television, AT&T charged me for two service visits and offered a $5 refund.

I told them that does not even reimburse me for the time they wasted for that single phone call. I can't help it if that company doesn't keep records about the problems I'm having. It's obvious that if you want to challenge a company like this you have to record every single phone call, track all your time and problems... whatever it is, it's not worth it.

This story is to be continued... but after 5-6 phone calls and several hours of frustration on top of weeks of bad service and overcharging me, I certainly expect this last month free. Anything less at this point is utterly insulting.

Furthermore, does anyone know what else I can do to fight this? It seems that cable companies have you by the balls, but I have been repeatedly lied to and abused and at this point I'm fighting on principle.

I will continue to update if AT&T responds further. Friends and readers, please help me spread the word by tweeting this to @ATTCustomerCare.

AT&T, you can contact me at cc5alive@gmail.com

EDIT 1: AT&T has contacted me via Twitter and given me someone to DM. I just sent a message with my info and a link to this article.

EDIT 2: Well I have to hand it to the people running AT&T's customer service branch on Twitter. They are about 50 times more helpful and faster than the phone side. AT&T appears to have credited my last month of service and their ridiculous service fees. We'll see if I'm hit with some kind of related fee next month, but for now, I am satisfied and think that the social media team for AT&T did a pretty good job responding. Thank you, guys.

Claire and Titus: Psychics!

2011-11-13T17:59:00.000-08:00

This is one of my favorite projects when working with The Outside Joke.

Don't Ask Don't Tell by Marc Wolf

2011-09-13T07:35:00.000-07:00

My new company Vuguru finished making this spectacular one man show about the controversial Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. Chapter 1 is available to watch on SnagFilms today!

Watch more free documentaries

Conversation with My Little Buddy

2011-05-19T15:07:00.000-07:00

I recently found a conversation that I had transcribed with my little buddy from the "Big Buddy" Program when I was at UNC and wanted to share it here:

Martez: I don’t know anyone’s phone number.
Me: Me neither.
Martez: I do.
Me: Whose?
Martez: That guy.
Me: What’s his number?
Martez: (slowly, obviously making it up) 714-8579
Me: Tell me again.
Martez: I can’t tell you because he made me promise not to tell you.
Me: Oh, OK.
Martez: And bad people hit you.

Comprehensive Beginner's Guide to Social Media

2011-04-13T06:25:00.000-07:00

If you want to get started in the world of social media, there are plenty of ways to go about it. I'm going to show you what I did and tell you what is working and what isn't.

The social media sites that I will cover include Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Yahoo Buzz, Kirtsy, Twitter, and Facebook.

In a nutshell, the best way to get started is to be exceedingly kind and participate in the communities. Offer your help to people and see who returns the favors. People who reciprocate will be your long-term social media friends and those who are selfish and demanding may need to be ignored so that you can continue to work with your mutually beneficial friends.

Create your Social Media Identity

Your friends in social media may be demanding or overwhelming at times with their requests and you will want to separate your social media inquiries from your personal inbox.

The essential sites to sign up for are Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Yahoo Buzz, Twitter (see below), and Facebook. I will address each of these in more detail and also talk about the advantages of other sites like Kirtsy.

Try to use the same username across all your social sites. It is not absolutely necessary, but it will help people to recognize you across various sources. My Digg username was ccpearce5, but I quit using it so that I could use cc5alive because my StumbleUpon and Reddit usernames are cc5alive.

Download a Chat Client

Chatting and Twitter are my two main ways of communicating a need for votes in social media spheres. Chatting is important for building relationships with influencers in the social media world. Chat has a couple advantages over Twitter in communicating because you usually have more of a sense if someone is online or not and it’s easier to send multiple links to someone via chat than via tweet. You're also more likely to confirm that you voted for someone else's links which can help build trust in your mutually beneficial relationships.

You’ll have to build your chat list in a similar way to building your Twitter list - explore those curated lists and see who publically shares their chat information. Some people put their screen names in their profile description, and some put it in the background of their Twitter page.

Another way to find people to share links with on chat clients is through Digg. When you click on links to individual profiles, there is an “about” section on the right-hand side (as of Digg v4) that often includes a screen name, usually for the purpose of mutual link exchange.

If you’re on a Mac, I recommend Adium because you can manage multiple chat clients in one window. If you’re on Windows, download Digsby. I’ve never used it, but that’s what people say is the best. These clients works with MSN, AOL, Yahoo, GTalk, and many more, but pretty much everyone in the world is on one of those first four.

Download Adium (http://adium.im/)
Download Digsby (http://www.digsby.com/download.php)

Again, don’t bombard people with links to all your stuff. Meet the individuals, tell them that you’re involved with social media, and see if they have anything for you to vote for. THEN, after you’ve established a relationship, see if they wouldn’t mind giving you a quick Digg on your link. Not everyone will be nice, but there are enough kind people in social media where you will likely have a good experience if you initiate a conversation respectfully.

One thing that I like to do with Adium is set an auto-reply away message to something like this: “Leave me your links and I’ll get to it when I’m back at my computer. If you’ve got a second, mind grabbing this link? http://SomeRandomLink.com”

This method isn’t particularly effective, but people who you have an established relationship will usually vote for the link when they leave their request for you.

Make a Twitter Account for Social Media

I have a primary account that I use (@cc5alive), but I keep it separate from my social media account (Social_CC). Create a name for it that suggests what your Twitter account is about (like DiggMaster or Sarah_Stumbler) and be sure to clarify in your profile description.

I first created the account @Diggccpearce5 but I realized that I use many more services than Digg alone, so I have recently replaced it with @Social_CC.

Some people make fancy backgrounds for their Twitter profiles, but I think most people are using clients like TweetDeck and mobile apps, so I've just skipped that part for now.

You need to start building up a list of Twitter friends. Go ahead and search for people using hashtags like #StumbleUpon #Reddit or #Digg to find people in those communities.

If you tweet directly from the Digg page, it will look something like this:
Is Gay Marriage in Every State Simply Inevitable? http://t.co/ESQwVLP via @Digg
So another search you could do is for people sending @replies to Digg.

Curated lists are another great source to find active users of different sites. Social media mavens tend to group people in lists so that they can be sorted and contacted easily. Here is an example of my "Digg Users" list.

[caption id="attachment_333" align="aligncenter" width="1065" caption="A screen capture of my Digg-Users list."][/caption]

You can go through different people's public lists and add Digg users to your Digg list and StumbleUpon users to your StumbleUpon list, etc. This should be used as a STARTING POINT to meet some people and make connections. DO NOT START SENDING @REPLIES TO EVERYONE because people hate that and they will block you immediately. Instead, follow the people that look interesting, retweet some of their links, vote for some of the articles on different sites, and leave comments. People read the comments and appreciate them (when ththe comments are relevant). Once you've been doing that for a little while, try sending an @reply telling them that you've been reading their tweets and voting for their and see if they are interested in connecting.

URL Shorteners

Everybody uses URL shorteners for Twitter because 1) they are shorter so you can include more text in a tweet and 2) you can use them to track the amount of clicks on the link. My favorite is goo.gl but the biggest and most popular is bit.ly. If you need help deciding on which URL shortener to use, All Twitter has an article on the top 5 URL shorteners.

[caption id="attachment_334" align="aligncenter" width="942" caption="goo.gl is my favorite URL shortener."][/caption]

Click to Tweet

Another place to send your friends (via email, IM, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) is to ClickToTweet.com. Here you can compose a tweet to say whatever you want and then generate a link. When your friend clicks the link, if they are logged into twitter, your tweet is appears as you wrote it and your friend simply has to click "tweet."

Here’s an example that will let you tweet how much you’re enjoying this article! Click here to test Click to Tweet.

Although more controversial, you can also experiment with automated Twitter software. I'm not going to endorse any of them in this post, but there are a lot out there that will automatically follow and unfollow people according to a number of criteria (what they tweet about, their profile, who they follow, etc.) and can automate the process of sending out updates, @replies, and direct messages.

Facebook Options

I don’t send out a lot of links on Facebook. To me, this is a more personal space. You can basically use 1) your real Facebook account, 2) fake Facebook accounts, or 3) a Facebook page designed to share links. If you have a second Facebook account for social media or a Facebook Page for your brand, I think that is the best way to send updates. Only use your personal account for the best of the best that you want to share. This is just my personal point of view.

I have experimented and created alternate accounts on Facebook as well, but these have gotten much more difficult to create successfully since Facebook has gotten wise to the fact that this happens. If you decide to go this route, I recommend creating the account and friending a few of your real friends and then using Facebook’s suggestions to add mutual friends. Continue to add mutual friends of your friends at a slow pace (maybe 10 a day). If you do it this way, people are more likely to accept your friendship because they see a number of mutual friends even if they don’t know you. Make sure the person seems like a real person early on, and you can be more experimental with the account once you have some friend connections.

In my experience, engagement with real friends is very high and engagement with fake friends on alternate accounts is very low. It took me several months to create a Facebook account and acquire 2,000 friends in an organic way. It is nice to have an account to go ahead and get your FShare counter ticking up, but it's really probably not worth the effort to build up a following on a fake account.

Let me just suggest that you don’t try to play any games with Reddit. This is a well-curated, smart community that will figure out if you’re sending spam links. They will vote your articles down if they are bad and they will ban your account if you violate the rules.

To do well on Reddit, you need to spend time actively looking through their site, familiarizing yourself with the way things works (i.e. the style of posts in categories like “AMA” or “TIL”), and commenting with thoughtful, relevant ideas. Basically, you can become an active member of the community or you can leave.

Only submit things that are actually cool or interesting or whatever the category is, and submit them to the correct section. Then let the community decide how good it is. It’s fine to share the link with a few friends, but it’s a bad idea to try to collect votes for your Reddit link.

StumbleUpon

Log in and start stumbling! Add the toolbar for whatever browser you’re on -- you’ll find it very helpful. Vote things up and down as you stumble on to them and just enjoy it for a little while. If you find something really interesting, see who submitted it and consider following them. You need to have a little street cred on the site before you can really be effective, so spend some time gathering favorites, leaving reviews, and following some interesting people.

Once you’ve spent some time on the site, sign up for Su.pr. It is essentially a URL shortener that tracks how many clicks you’re getting, organic stumble traffic, retweets, and reviews. You can post to Twitter or Facebook from the page and you’ll get an idea for what things you’re submitting are appreciated by the StumbleUpon community.

It is also recommended to leave reviews for popular articles and to submit sites from popular sources that have a good chance of going viral before you start submitting links to your own sites.

To find out more of the in’s and out’s of how to get a lot of traffic through StumbleUpon, check this link out.

Here's a good link about how to become a "power stumbler."

Delicious

In general you pretty much want to write good headlines and descriptions for the bookmarks, then choose some relevant keywords for your tags (think of search terms), and then make friends with Delicious users and share your bookmarks with them.

I like to see which bookmarks are on the homepage and then save some from there. Then I look to see who submitted it and sometimes add those people to my network.

I could definitely use some more advice on how to do Delicious right.

Yahoo! Buzz

EDIT: Yahoo Buzz is no longer active.

I still haven’t figure out very much about Yahoo Buzz. I recommend using your chat client and Twitter to send out links to get votes and comments from other Yahoo Buzz users, but I haven’t found this to be a particularly effective source of traffic. I have heard that it can help with SEO, but I have yet to find strong evidence of this.

I have also experimented with paying people who have IM'ed me. It should be obvious that this is a bad idea. Even when I have used them to successfully garner 150+ votes, I see almost no traffic because the tactics these people use are largely only to create the image of something being popular, and the algorithms are smart enough to see the exploitation and prevent it from popping on the front page.

I know Yahoo Buzz has a purpose, but I have not been able to harness any benefits from it.

Kirtsy

Kirsy is a relatively new player in the social media game, but it has a key advantage over many of the others: you don’t have to log in to vote. Since people don’t have to create an account or log in, it is easier to send the link to people and just tell them to click the headline. Kirtsy keeps track of how many people are clicking through the links and uses that as its voting metric.

Again, I think Kirtsy may be more helpful in the SEO game than it is in garnering direct traffic.

Other Networks

Plenty of other spaces are out there that are great for social media promotion -- Mixx, eBaumsWorld, Google Buzz, and Tumblr are some of the best ones that were not covered in this story. They all have quirks to learn about the communities, but no matter which route you go, if you spend time to learn how the communities work and build friends in it, you’ll be able to use social media effectively.

If you found this to be helpful, please submit it to any of the social media sources that you use! Also, feel free to send @replies to my Twitter account whenever you would like to share links! If you have any other insights, please let me know and I will amend this article.

Face Experiment

2011-04-12T22:16:00.000-07:00

Just did a little experiment with Photo Booth and Photoshop to see what my face would look like if it were complete symmetrical. The first picture is what my picture (with bad lighting) in Photo Booth looked like.

Next, I altered it by duplicating the left side of my face and flipping the image as close to the center of my face as possible. I think two left sides makes me a more handsome dude.

And then I did the same experiment with the right side of my face, which makes me look a lot like an alien. A noseless alien. We'll blame that on the lighting.

So isn't all that neat, huh?

Mental Disorder Posters

2011-04-08T08:24:00.000-07:00

Found this great link courtesy of Design Milk. It's a series of posters about mental disorders... very imaginative, simple, and clever.

Here's one example:

Bacon Air?

2011-04-04T23:02:00.000-07:00

I just read a little article about Bacon Air over at Trend Hunter. According to them Bacon Air is "an inhaler that allows you to enjoy the taste of bacon sans the fats, calories and greasy hands. This inhaler is composed of Himalayan oxygen, which means the bacon taste will enter your circulation system. Why Himalayan oxygen exactly? No one knows, but according to J&D, it does wonders for your health. This inhaler is a great idea for those who eat breakfast on the go, or whenever you just need a bacon fix."

This reminded me of that episode of Wife Swap where that little bratty kid Curtis kept telling his surrogate mom that bacon was good for him. Here's a meme mash-up!

Best Internet Comics

2011-04-04T22:32:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of great humor, art, and inspiration on the interwebs, but here are a few of the best internet comic strips that I have come across.

XKCD

Penny Arcade

Gaping Void

Exploding Dog

Amazing Super Powers

A Softer World

Here are a couple others that I've been told are worth checking out (I haven't yet).

Little Gamers
Garfield Minus Garfield

Rebecca Black's "Friday" Lyric Chart

2011-04-01T22:51:00.000-07:00

It is my opinion that Rebecca Black's hit single "Friday" is a little repetitive. To prove this point without making anyone watch the entire music video, I've compiled a graph that shows what percentage of each word makes up her entire song. This is pretty accurate.