On Facebook this week, the definition of Doppleganger is something like, “change your profile picture on Facebook to the picture of a celebrity you’ve been told you like.”

Fun, simple and really making quite the buzz today according to Google trends.

So I am thinking back on who I’ve been told I most look like and here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

UFC Champ Brock Lesnar

Encino Man

Or, that really cute bird in Up (who just so happens to also be named Kevin)

If none of these work I can always use the celebrity look alikes generator, FaceDouble.

Why I love Youtube soooo much.

Drunk guy tries to wear shorts like a shirt

Why Pro Wrestling in Mexico RULES!

Why science is cool.

I would say more than a sewer “problem” more like sewer chaos

And for tonight only, a super-happy Saturday mega bonus video! My favorite comedian, next to Russell Peters of course

So I bought the Flip.

If you haven’t heard of the Flip, check it out - it’s a very simple, high definition video camera about the size of a cell phone. The best part, and why I thinks it’s a game-changer, is that you can buy one for about $200, making the Flip the cheapest, high quality video camera on the market.

But this isn’t a product review for the Flip. Instead I want to share my thoughts on what I think the Flip means to the internet and our day-to-day lives.

According to Flip-makers, Pure Digital Technologies, their product currently accounts for over 13% of all U.S. camcorder sales. That’s over 1 million of these tiny cameras being carried around in people’s back pockets in the US alone (they’ve recently been launched in the UK and Canada). And that, in turn, means a lot more opportunities for people to capture all that is weird, funny and disturbing in this world - in other words, a lot more video of what we (sadly) consider news. This is very cool and for the internet I think it means a heck of a lot more interesting video being uploaded everyday.

So what does this accelerated proliferation in video uploads mean to the way we live?

To illustrate my point, consider the multitude of police beating videos online or the famous video footage of the man tasered by police at an airport who later died. How many more instances of such things will be caught on tape now that people can carry the Flip with them wherever they go, 24/7?

Now, I know there have been camera phones on the market for a while now, but these usually offer a grainy somewhat unitelligable scene that no matter how newsworthy or disturbing is rarely compelling (remember the Sadam Hussein hanging footage?). The Flip brings it all to the viewer in a very steady, high defintion image.

So I see one of the huge upsides of the Flip is that it puts even more power in the hands of the citizenry to document and report out to the world, in a very compelling way, the injustices that occur everyday.  It’s like “Big Brother” in reverse, we can now watch-the-watchers even easier now.

Random thought: what would happen if we sent 10,000 Flip cameras to citizens caught in the middle of a war? Would this allow us to bear witness to atrocities that to this point we only hear about through the ’sanitized’ reporting of embedded media?

Is there a downside to so much power in the hands of the citizenry?

So far the proliferation of citizen journalism in the form of blogs and video technology has been empowering - shaking the foundation of the world’s power structure. The Flip will definitely accelerate this trend. But at what point does the power shift too far the other way? I don’t know the answer to that, but I’ve always thought that all things are better when balanced, I just don’t know what the proper balance is.

Jeez, all this from a little camera I bought because I thought it would cool for the family trip we’re taking to Disneyland in a few months. All this said, I love The Flip, and you should buy the Flip and join the lo-cost, high definition information revolution.

Why is the Google Pagerank for my Twitter profile the same as Lance Armstrong’s?

So I have a bit of an obsessive personality. One of my latest obsessions is Twitter and another that I’ve for a much longer time is Google Pagerank.

Over the years I’ve found that there are 3 good rules to continuing to see your Pagerank go up:

1. Create good content consistently over time with an eye to using thoughtful keywords
2. Always be on the lookout for new high quality inbound links, and
3. Send Google blogger Matt Cutts a nice bottle of Scotch at Christmas

This is of course a very simple formula and there’s a lot going unsaid in my rules, except for the “Matt Cutts Scotch” rule which is really straightforward.

But here I am with my new Twitter obsession and I’m finding myself at a complete loss as to how Google is determining the ranking score for individual user pages. I’m assuming that the “send Matt Cutts Scotch” rule isn’t applying so I’m looking to the first two and namely the second one, because inbound quality links is a very powerful factor in a page’s Google rank.

So let’s take my Twitter page to begin with at http:www.twitter.com/kgrandia . I have 5 links back to my Twitter account and a Google pagerank of 5 out of 10, I have 1,500 followers and I’m following 1,100 people. I post new “Tweets” on Twitter about 5 or 6 times a day.

Now look at some of the alpha users on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/kevinrose
Pagerank: 6
Link backs: 1,390
Followers: 141,302
Following: 148
Updates: 2.055
Average # of tweets: 4 or 5 times a day

http://twitter.com/BarackObama
Pagerank: 7
Link backs: 1,770
Followers: 284,351
Following: 276,346
Updates: 264
Average # of tweets: none since Jan. 15th

http://twitter.com/lancearmstrong
Pagerank: 5
Link backs: 543
Followers: 123,254
Following: 40
Updates: 964
Average # of tweets: 5 or 6 times a day

http://twitter.com/LeoLaporte
Pagerank: 4
Link backs: 566
Followers: 88,441
Following: 687
Updates: 1,870
Average # of tweets: 4 or 5 times a day

http://twitter.com/maddow
Pagerank: 6
Link backs: 557
Followers: 312,217
Following: 554
Updates: 171
Average # of tweets: once every couple of days

And here’s a random sampling of “the rest of us”:

http://twitter.com/markhor
Pagerank: 4
Link backs: 2
Followers: 78
Following: 58
Updates: 36
Average # of tweets: less than one a week

http://twitter.com/marybnolan
Pagerank: 5
Link backs: 1
Followers: 412
Following: 355
Updates: 673
Average # of tweets: twice a day

http://twitter.com/MaryHr
Pagerank: 2
Link backs: 2
Followers: 164
Following: 83
Updates: 663
Average # of tweets: 4 or 5 times a day

http://twitter.com/MaternalSpark
Pagerank: not indexed
Link backs: 0
Followers: 1,052
Following: 809
Updates: 1,996
Average # of tweets: 6 or 7 times a day

http://twitter.com/matthewstoller
Pagerank: 6
Link backs: 1
Followers: 1,344
Following: 123
Updates: 330
Average # of tweets: not posted since Jan. 7th

http://twitter.com/marciamarcia
Pagerank: 4
Link backs: 79
Followers: 1,011
Following: 559
Updates: 1,287
Average # of tweets: more than 10 times a day

http://twitter.com/leeodden
Pagerank: 5
Link backs: 583
Followers: 7,771
Following: 955
Updates: 6,021
Average # of tweets: more than 10 times a day

Do you see what I mean?

Normally, there’s at least somewhat of a rhyme and reason to Google Pagerank scores and understanding this reasoning observing consistent patterns in pageranks is one way (for me at least) to comprehend the Google search gods. When I’m out and about on the web reading blog posts etc., I see a pagerank and I am comforted that it’s what think it should be. It was comforting to know that maybe, just maybe, I understood this massive beast in some way.

But this strange inconsistency in Twitter rankings has me all confused.

Why should I care? Because I’m finding Twitter posts and profiles showing up more and more in Google page results and this trend will no doubt continue as Twitter continues its atmospheric rise in popularity. So its important to understanding how Google sees and indexes Twitter users and their posts, much like it is important to understand how Google understands and indexes a normal blog post.

Any ideas what’s going on? Matt Cutts, can I send you a bottle of Scotch for an answer?

Lots of great questions are bubbling around the internet this week with the recent launch of Latitude for Google Maps.

If you’re not familiar with Latitude, in a nutshell it allows you track your friends whereabouts on Google Maps using the GPS system built in to their mobile device. Your friend has to allow you access to do this of course. You send them a request to track them and they have to accept before you see anything.

You can imagine the “big brother is watching” conversations that have ensued since its launch.

For me, because the service is only available to those you allow to track you, I see some much more practical ramifications of Google Latitude. For instance, what if your boss sends you a request to track your movements on Latitude? After all, it’s the company’s phone and why should you be worried about anything if you are where you say you are?

So do you let your boss follow you? And what does it say about you if you refuse the request?

I posed the question to friends and Twitter followers over the last couple of days and they had some great ideas:

Some said accept the request, and then:

1. Courier your phone around the world
2. Buy another phone and leave the work one on your desk
3. Turn off the GPS function
4. Destroy the GPS function

Someone suggested a very practical approach:

“Ask for what purpose, and if it’s for work hours only? And ask if you can follow him back.” (I think this is the best one)

Others said they would pretty much tell their boss to shove it:

1. “Just say no.”

2. “2 words: hell no. I’m already on your payroll and you want to know what I do in my free time? Forget it.” (my second favorite idea)

And finally there was the poor soul who requested to follow their boss on Latitude and, “my boss refused to let me follow him.”

So what do you think? Latitude could definitely make things awkward around the office.

Now what about when your girlfriend pings you wanting to track your every move on Latitude!?

Thanks to all the people that helped me write this post by offering up their thoughts, including @theJLV - @mkuplens - @exitpass - @illied - @jstoub - @julesjulesjules -

I’ve been on Twitter now for about a year and spent enough time watching the referral traffic to my blog posts to start to nail down some general rules of thumb on how much traffic you can expect from the micro-blogging phenom.

In general, I’ve found that I get about 6 (yes, 6) unique visitors within an hour of posting a short, catchy descriptor along with my URL.

That’s 6 unique visitors from a single post on my Twitter feed and I have 1,500 followers right now and have had over 1,000 for about 6 months.

So, I would say a good rule of thumb would be 1,000 followers = 6 unique visitors. I have also found that the same rule can apply for re-tweets (when one of my followers, reposts the URL on their own Twitter feed).

So 1,000 followers = 6 unique visitors + 6 more for every Re-Tweet. It just so happens that a quick look at my most active followers, shows that most have around the same number of followers as me, so this Re-Tweet factor makes sense. This multiplier effect can actually be pretty significant if you start with 6 and then get 40 Re-Tweets that’s 6 + (6 x 40) = 246 unique visitors. Not bad, when you consider that it takes about 15 seconds to compose the twitter post and hit submit.

An interesting thing that I also noticed over time is that posts that are directly related to Twitter on average get about 10 unique visitors, versus the usual 6.

For example, this post on my Twitter feed - “My top ten tweeters not on Twitter, what do you think? http://reque.st/1687″ - referred 10 unique visitors to my blog. I haven’t written too much on Twitter, so this one is still in the “strong hunch” phase.

These numbers might sound a little depressing, I’m sure you spent a lot of time building a great Twitter profile in the hopes (at least in part) that it might end up driving some nice traffic to your site. 6 for every 1,000 followers doesn’t sound like much, but it actually is a lot.

As I mentioned, drafting a submitting post on your Twitter feed takes about 15 seconds. Those 6 visitors take a micro-second to get. Compare this to the hours it takes to work on the perfect Digg-bait post, only to see it shrivel and die on the general submission page and zero traffic back to your site.

With the way follows are set up on Twitter those 6 visitors are also the types of people who are genuinely interested in your blog post and for me at least many of my followers are fellow bloggers. So if one of those 6 write a post on their own site, that’s a HUGE pay-off for very little time investment.

And finally, remember the rule of 6 is per one thousand followers, so if you have 10,000 followers, plus 100 Re-Tweets that’s a good bit of of highly targeted traffic for doing very little. I would also assume that the 6 per thousand rule would also increase as you become more influential on Twitter and followers in that range.

Now you can imagine the nice bit of traffic Top Twitter users like Robert Scoble are generating for their posts.

But, hey this is just my rule of thumb based on a year of observing traffic referral behavior. I haven’t had the time to do any actually data analysis, so if these numbers seem way off I would stand to be corrected.

What have your observations been? Do you have any Twitter traffic rules-of-thumb?

Oh, and please follow me on Twitter if you’re interested in this type of information, I would love to get to that 10,000 mark someday!

There’s been a lot of stories lately about failing newspapers. In fact, in late December, 2008 the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that the internet is now used as a news source by more Americans than newspapers.

In order to survive newspapers are re-doubling their efforts to gain presence online and remain relevant.

And, apart from a few standouts, most newspapers are not doing a very good job of it. I want to share a brief, but very enlightening experience I had with one newspaper outlet that is just not getting it, The Syndey Morning Herald. Now it might seem that I’m picking on the Herald, and I kind of am, but there’s a huge number of other newspaper websites that are making the same mistakes.

So let me set up the situation.

A leaked Australian Defense Department report  was obtained by some intrepid reporters at the Sydney Morning Herald.

It was a very juicy story. So one of the bloggers on DeSmogBlog, a site I manage, wrote up a quick post based on the Herald story. So far so good. But I thought that the post would be a lot better if I could get a copy of the actual secret military report. The report was nowhere to be found on the Herald website.

So now you know the background and based on this and my attempts to get a copy of the Defense report I’ll share with you what I think are some very good reasons newspapers are failing online.

The internet is infinite, newspapers aren’t

The Herald could have easily laid out the contents of the Defense report and also made available a copy of the report for download for those interested in writing their own story. It seems to me that newspapers are still stuck in thinking that they’re constrained by the size of the broadsheet. They’re forgetting that the internet offers all the space they could ever want to broaden the story past what was printed in the newspaper to provide extra content. In the case of the Herald article, they did nothing more than cut the story and paste it online. The Herald could have done so much more to engage their readership, keeping them longer on their site, clicking around to related material, which has an obvious impact on their online ad revenue.

Not to mention the fact that if I would have found a copy of the report on their site I would have flogged it all over the internet with full credit to the Herald including lots of linkbacks.

The Web demands people

Online media today is very different than traditional media in that there is an interactive global conversation online. In fact, in my new media seminars I am talking more and more about looking at the internet as a conversation instead of an information source. This is very different then what newspapers are used to. For the most part newspapers have only “interacted” with readers through the odd phone call and letters-to-the-editor.

The online conversation demands one-on-one interaction, we want to talk to people or at least we want the feeling that when we’re interacting with a website, we’re interacting with people on some level. When I didn’t find a copy of the Defense report on the Herald’s site I started looking around for the email address for the reporter who wrote the story. Couldn’t find it anywhere. So I went looking for someone, anyone I could email and all I could find on the page was a generic offer for me to email them news tips if I come across any. The only thing personable I could find was the name of the reporter who wrote the story. Finally I conceded and used the dreaded info@ email address.

The Dreaded auto-email

So after finally finding an email address, I drafted a nice note saying that I manage an influential blog on the subject of climate change and we would be very happy to promote the Herald’s great investigative work further if they could kindly post the leaked report on their website. Heck, I was even going to write an article on Huffington Post (the largest Blog in the world) about this. I mean what are they going to do with the report now that they’ve written a story about it?

In return for my kind offer to drive thousands of people to their site, boosting their ad revenue and probably generating some pretty nice links, I get this:

(click to enlarge)

And that was the last time I heard from them.

Share and share alike

This is my final point.

If the internet is one big conversation and Web 2.0 is social, then that’s what newspaper outlets like the Sydney Morning Herald have to realize. They need to get social. If the editor of the newspaper is an old curmudgeon with a disdain for the unwashed masses, then put him in a room and let someone else interact with the audience. Now I’m not saying that every single comment and every single email has to be personally addressed, I know these newspaper sites get a lot of traffic. But they’re not going to continue to get that traffic in the long run if they don’t start to appear to be interested and willing participants in the online conversation.

As for my experience, I would suggest that ignoring bloggers who want to promote a newspaper’s work is a death knell in the long run. All I was asking was for them to share a report with me that’s probably in the recycling bin now and in return I would sing their praises all over the internet. But instead of spending the time promoting their content, I’m spending the time deconstructing their online short-comings. If newspapers want people to promote their content on blogs or Facebook, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Twitter etc., they need to figure out that its a two way street - you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours. Reciprocity is the very basis of our social structure and I’ll only get suckered into scratching your back so many times.

This post isn’t one of those “traditional media is dead” stories. Honestly, it really isn’t. I truly hope newspapers figure it out and start to run profitable online outlets and its in this spirit that I am writing this post.

A lot of the information I use online starts with great investigative work like the Syndey Morning Herald showed with their Defense report story. If it wasn’t for them the story would have never seen the light of day. But in not fully taking advantage of the new media opprotunities the Herald (and a lot of other newspapers) is missing out on an amazing opportunity to seriously amplify their work and at the same time make huge online ad revenue with their original content. And if  newspapers don’t figure this out very soon, we all lose.

(Photo credit: Lost Art of Blogging)

While I think all the people on Twitter that I follow are awesome, here’s the ten people that I think would be the coolest tweeters (with the help of my twitter friend @uncleweed):

1 to 5 are literary giants. Who else is more capable of saying amazing and profound things in 140 characters or less?

1. Haruki Murakami, Japanese writer of multiple international bestsellers, including Kafka on the Beach and the Wind Up Bird Chronicles.

2. Salman Rushdie, needs no introduction.

3. Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipau ( V. S. Naipaul), the 2001 Nobel Laureate for Literature.

4. Douglas Coupland, famous author and chronicler of Canadian culture.

5. Stephen King, think about it, those would some seriously messed up tweets!

The next five don’t really fit any single category.

6. Robert S. Mueller, the head of the FBI, tweeting about undercover spy-ops (yes, I know they wouldn’t be very undercover if he was tweeting them).

7. Robin Williams, just tweeting spontaneous random funny things all day.

8. Neil Patrick Harris, but only if his life is exactly how it was in Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.

9. J.J. Abrams, maybe the Executive Producer of Lost would slip up an tweet the ending!

And last but not least:

10. Martha Stewart, just dropping tips on how to clean the hot sauce stain out of my t-shirt and a new recipe for pistachio crusted white fish.

So those are mine (and @uncleweed’s), who would you suggest? Either leave a comment or tweet at @kgrandia.

Ya know that litte strap on the Nintendo Wii control? Use it:

Ah,ah,ah,ah Dude looks like a lady:

Um, yah funny:

Now I know 18 million of you have watched Spider on Drugs on Youtube, but it’s definitely worth a double-take:

And yet another reason for me to think a monkey is smarter than Ann Coulter:

ADDED Bonus 6th video!
Why can’t we all just dance like this once in a while. World would be a better place I bet.

I don’t know about you, but I’m on Google pretty much 24/7. So I am wondering what you think about Google’s new favicon?

According to Google the backstory is that it was inspired by a design submitted to them by a computer science student named André Resende, at the University of Campinas in Brazil. If that’s the case, then I think it’s a great new design and I’m happy to look at it. Now if it was in fact designed by a bunch of social psychologists to make me click on more Google ads, then…

Thoughts? Like it? Hate it? Don’t care? Leave a comment telling me what you think.