Twitter 101

Everything you need to know about Twitter in as short of a post as possible.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. - From Wikipedia

Commoncraft also has a pretty good explanation of what twitter is on youtube.

Here are some Twinterviews about what people love about twitter.

Who do I follow?

First thing you can do is invite all of your friends through Twitters Find & Follow page. Once that is done you can move on to websites like Who Should I Follow, Twittersearch and Twubble. (More Twitter Search Engines)

There are also lists you can scan through at TwitterPack and Twitterholic as well as some Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter.

It is probably a good idea to view a users Twitter page before you follow them to be sure they aren't spam.

How do i update?

There are A LOT of ways to update your twitter status. The most obvious (and sometimes most reliable) is the Twitter site itself.

There is also an array of third-party apps to help feed your twitter hunger:

• TwitterFox
• Twhirl
• Twitterrific
• Snitter
• Twitkit

Or you can automate the process with TwitterFeed.

Where else can i put my twitter feed?

You can view your feed in any feed aggregator (Google Reader, FriendFeed, Outlook, etc). Your feed can be accessed at

• http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/username.rss - Your Feed
• http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/username.rss - Your Friends Feed

as well as by clicking the RSS button at the bottom of your Twitter page.

Another popular thing to do is add your Twitter feed to facebook. Twitter has its own Facebok App or you can just sync your facebook satus with Twitter. I personally chose to use FriendFeed because it was the least intrusive.

What are some cool apps I can use?

Check out the Twitter Fan Wiki Apps Page.

I hope someone found this informative. Please feel free to follow me: @spazcer

Interactive Video How-To and Examples

I talked awhile back about personalized video and how it could be (is) the next big marketing medium. The benefits of personalized video are obvious, you'll get better quality personal information and it is very viral.

The key here is personalization and interactivity. The internet took a turn a few years back with the rise of social and interactive networks. From that point on, the user was given control, and thats the way it going to be from now on. I showed in my previous post how successful personalized video is and now, I want to show you how easy it is to pull off.

Here are two videos i made when first experimenting with how flash could be used to manipulate video:

The best part is that i made each of those videos in under 15 minutes.


All you need to do it upload your video in flash:

1) File -> Import -> Import Video




(Note: I had to rerecord my video as a wmv because i could not get avi to work properly)


2) Then choose:





"Embed video in SWF and play in timeline" is what allows you to manipulate movieclips on top of your video. Now what you could do with this is map certain items to sync with the video and possibly even change those items at run time. You could insert personalized images, text, etc.

Affiliate Marketing is Tarnishing Our Social Media

As more and more people look for the "easy solution to making money", they find themselves exploiting affiliate links on their favorite social networking sites. Unfortunately these social networking sites are also yours and my favorite social networking sites. It's sad to see the fruit of the web rotting in front of my eyes and, unfortunately, there is little I can do about it. CAN-SPAMM laws only protect us from e-mail spam (or try to), but will there be a move to protect your favorite social media site? One can only hope. If the educational fiber of sites like Plaxo, Facebook, etc gets permanently tarnished to the point where you can't weed out the legitimate from illegitimate posts, then i might have to resort back to books :0 (god forbid).

What kills me is that affiliate marketers that exploit social networks don't believe they are spammers. Well, I would let that slide if I wasn't getting links shoved in my face for "Air Conditioners" inside a "Help Zimbabwe" group. Others try and say that the community "will benefit from these products". Well, honestly, I think the marketer is the only one that benefits from these products and I guarantee you I could find a cheaper, better quality product than whatever your getting paid to promote.

So please keep your spam *cough* I mean affiliate links on your own websites and out of my networks. And, to all of the innocent, none the wiser, social media participants who DO want to purify they're network groups, don't be afraid to speak up.

*Note: For all the Plaxo members who have fallen victim to these links all you need to do is click the 'hide' button under the users link which you believe to be spam. Hopefully over time the spam will go down and we can clean up our community.

Favorite Social Media Sites

Below is a list of all the social networks I use and what I think about them. At the end I will list my personal favorites and i invite you all to publish links to your own profiles below.

Ziki.com - I like this because it gives me free personal advertising. I think they spend like 10 bucks a month per person. Free being my favorite part

Twitter - This one is cool because by following certain people i keep up to date on trends in the marketplace

BlogCatalog - I use for getting people to both my blog and my company's blog. Its also a cool place to meet other bloggers,

Digg - I use as my general news service and i follow 1 friend at the moment, hopefully more will develop

LinkedIn - A great professional network. Bad thing about it is there are not alot of communication opportunities between networkers besides a Q&A section

YouTube - Video Uploading site. Could be great for viral marketing but theres so much competition out there its hard

Jyte - Fun community full of free thinking OpenID enabled humans where you make claims about things. Not so good for advertising i guess but i think its addicting

gooruze.com - This site is good for Internet Marketers looking to give back to the community and actually learn. The site is spam free and I would appreciate it if it stayed that way :)

Wink - this is an interesting site in that it collects all of your social networking profiles into one page and users can search a master database to find all of your pages.

ning - here you can create your own social networks. this could be great for establishing your brand or company is leaders within your industry if you can develop a large enough following.

Facebook - one of the first biggens. It started off for colleges and now can be used by anyone.

Myspace - other than friendster this was probably the first biggen. In my opinion it is too loaded with spam.

MyBlogLog - youll see the widget for this site on a lot of blogs. This site is very similar to BlogCatalog however i don't think it has as much activity

Orkut - Google's version of a social network

FriendFeed - this site brings all of your feeds across multiple networks together.

Plaxo - This is an excellent resource to network and share. The site allows you to share links, messages, pics and more. It also displays all of your feeds as a "pulse".

* My favorites are currently gooruze.com, plaxo, and twitter.

Please comment and add your own favorite networks and/or your profile links

Gooruze.com

So this site looks interesting. Its a niche specific social networking site where people can ask questions and provide answers to other users posts. If all works accordingly this could be a very resourceful community. If anyone else is one here please check me out at jonbish.gooruze.com.

Desktop Takeover - April fools joke using Flash

This is a little trick I've pulled on some family members in the past and most recently on my boss for April Fools. All you need for this is a working version of Adobe Flash.

If you cant see whats happening, basically the effect is that the desktop looks like its moving back and forth.

So all I am doing here is tweening 2 instances of the desktop (which i Print Screened) over a static instance. Then all you do is full screen the SWF on your targets desktop. You can do a lot with this little gag including; hiding the users mouse, popping up text and moving icons at will.

Back when GMail did their YouTube contest, i used this gag to simulate the envelope moving across multiple screens.

A few things to remember when doing this are:
Make sure your stage width and height are the same as the target monitor
I use PNG's of the desktop so there is no quality loss
Make sure you do View -> Full Screen and not just maximize the SWF

* Update: Here are the source files of an example

Anatomy of a Blog - Scripting for Social Media

There's a small back story to this entry. Ive been working with an open source content management system for my company Magicomm and it eventually came time when we decided we were going to start our own blog. My goal was to use the preexisting framework of the CMS to smoothly integrate the blogging software into the back end of the system. It turns out this was the easy part....

So now the goal of this entry. When it came time to output the data into your common blog format I found that their were some small things that helped my blog get indexed by popular blog directories as well as other assorted social media aggregations.

So ultimately I'm assuming you understand the general format and benefits of a blog. You've got your title, author, timestamp, and a post of some sort. Other optional features include keywords, permalinks, comments, and an RSS feed.
Now I want to go into a little more detail about the code side of this and show you where some simple HTML syntax separates the blog from the..um... not-blog.

Rel-tag

First I'll talk a little about my favorite blogging feature, the 'rel-tag'. Rel-tag is basically a keyword that physically sits on your screen as apposed to META keywords which hide in your page's header. Now when you're displaying 'rel-tag' that relate to a specific post you use the relationship attribute of the anchor tag to define the hypertext as a 'tag'.

<a href='http://www.magicomm.biz/tags/great+blog rel='tag'>great blog</a>

As you can see it it pretty simple to establish a tag. Basically rel-tag is a MicroFormat and what you are doing is declaring that this link is an author-designated keyword for this post. Also note that in the URL of the link I've separated the two words with a + sign instead of a space (You could also use %20). You want to try and be sure that your tags relate and are appropriate for your post. Alot of social media aggregators use this information along with specific information in your RSS feed to categorize your post and you can often see your tags displayed on sites such as technorati.com and mybloglog.com.

Permalinks

The second thing I would like to talk about are permalinks which are also often called bookmarks. Permalinks are basically links back to a specific entry that will never change. This makes them ideal for bookmarking which is why it comes as no surprise that the following helps you establish a permalink/bookmark.

<a href='http://www.magicomm.biz/blog/cross_media_is_now_our_life' rel='bookmark'>Cross Media is now our life!</a>

As you can see we once again use the relationship tag to define the Permalink. This is not always necessary however Ive found that certain social media sites use the bookmark relationship to determine if this link is a permalink or not.

RSS

Now last but not least there is the RSS feed. I could go on forever about the different formats and everything you can stuff into a solid feed, but i wont. The only thing i want to mention here is how to make your feed available to social media sites (seems to be the theme here). Basically what you do is use a combination of rel="alternate" and type="application/rss+xml" to define a META link to an RSS file.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="MagiBlog - RSS" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Magiblog" />

Thats pretty much it. I hope that between the 3 things I've showed you and some of the resources ive presented you should have a social media friendly blog thats ready for the masses.

Realistic Fog/Smoke Effect

Here's another effect using AS3 to make fog with source files below.


View: http://bishport.com/fog.html

Source: zip

Realistic Flame Effect

This is my first attempt at creating a realistic flame effect in Actionscript 3.0 so be gentle.


View: http://bishport.com/flame3.html

Source: zip

Your Company on Google Maps

Google Maps is one of the most widely used online direction services on the web. That being said, have you checked your company's listing on Google maps recently. In Google Maps' Local Business Center you can manage your company's address, services, image and much more. It also boosted my company's site up on the local listings. It did take 2 weeks to verify the changes but it was definitely worth it.