Twitter offers some widgets to display information on your blog, but the widgets for wordpress blogs are pretty limited. Here are some other tools that I have tried out on this blog and others to help you connect your blog and twitter (by the way you can follow blogtelling on twitter here):
TwitterCounter offers some widgets that you can add to your sidebar. I believe that TwitterCounter is still in beta but I found it very easy to set up – just enter your twitter name and go.
a box that displays the number of people following you on twitter
a box that shows your most recent followers, you can customize the number of people that are displayed and the colors
TwitterCounter also offers a nice page of stats about how many people are following you over time.
This is a wordpress plugin that adds an extra field to the comments section where people can leave their twitter ID when they leave a comment. It is pretty easy to install and you can customize how you want the commenters Twitter Id to display next to their comment. I have installed the WP-Twitip-Id plugin on this blog so you can leave you Twitter Id when you leave a comment.
This is a helpful tool that creates a tweet from your RSS feed. It is a great way to automatically post a tweet when you write a new blog post. TwitterFeed is easy to set up – just enter your RSS feed and your twitter account info and you are good to go. The most difficult part of TwitterFeed is logging in with OpenID – I just set up an account with MyOpenID which made the process much easier. TwitterFeed lets you customize how often your tweets are updated and how many tweets you want to post.
I was also going to include TweetSnap, which displayes your most recent tweet in a pretty image, in this list but I can’t find a quick way to change the size of the image so I don’t think it is as helpful as the others listed above.
I recieved an email from Mission Control, a firm that specializes in mailings for political campaigns, about their March Madness tournament. I participated in a friends bracket pool last year – he did the entire pool by hand and I think it was quite a bit of work to calculate the scores from each person in the pool.
I noticed that the Mission Control tournament was powered by tourneytopia.com. Which got me thinking about the idea of March Madness as a community building opportunity – a great way to engage others in your website. I did a quick look at what websites exist to make it possible to set up your own bracket pool – here is what I found – some are free and some charge a fee.
Google Docs – CNET has a post on using google docs to manage your tournament
I set up a quick pool for IheartPGH and announced the pool on twitter and facebook – the response has been great – over 25 people have submitted brackets.
Are there websites out there for managing bracket pools? Which one do you like best? Continue Reading »
I have been playing around with the website BackType today and I think that this could be a really useful tool for doing more “listening” to what others are saying about a topic. One of the most useful things about social media is to use the tools to “listen” to what other people are saying about your brand, organization, group, issue. Check out Chris Brogan‘s post – 5 Tools I Use for Listening for some other examples of using social media for listening.
Here is how BackType can help you listen to more:
You can set up BackType to send you an alert when someone mentions your url or a key word in a comments – this takes you a step beyond just searching blogs, now you can see when your url/keywords are in the comments – which is often where more conversation takes places
BackType has just launched a feature called BackType Connect- which lets you see all of the conversation around a particular article or post from different platforms like digg, reddit and other social media on one page. They also have a browswer bookmarklet avaialble that you can add to your browser – so you can quickly click and see the conversations around a particular topic from multiple platforms.
The blog Library Clips has a nice post on BackType and compares BackType to YackTrack with some examples of searches from each website.
Do you use a comment tracking service? or comment trackign service? What do you think about the idea of connecting coversations across websites?
With Christmas just 2.5 weeks away it is time to get serious about holiday shopping. What do you get for the people that have everything and ask for nothing? I have been thinking about the photo books for a few months now. I saw one of the Apple Iphoto books over the summer and I was pretty impressed. I am on the email list for MyPublisher and I was about to start there to create a book but I thought I would see who else is out there. Here are some of the websites and reviews that I have found. I hope that this post will not only help you find a photo book printer but also demonstrate how you can use searching and blogs to further research a topic.
Coincidentally the December issue of Ready Made that I was flipping through has a little round up of photo book printers. This issue isn’t online yet but here are the sites they suggest…
But who has the best quality for the price? My first couple of google searches turned up a bunch of reviews from the past few years. PhotobookStory.com has some detailed info but they don’t offer reviews on all of the photo book sites, plus it looks like this site was created a few years ago because they still have a guestbook.
Make-Your-Own-Photobooks.com has lots of info but it looks like it is more about ad revenue than photo book reviews – there is no info about a person behind it and the site name is very generic.
My next thought was to check to see if Lifehacker had any posts on photo books but there were only a few posts that were over 2 years old. This post was recommended by another blog, but it is from 2006 – some of the sites mentioned here don’t even have the same name today. This website has a review does a great job of comparing Lulu, Blurb and MyPublisher with some nice pictures of the print quality. But it is dated December 2007. I know that the technology on this printing changes quite quickly so I wanted to find some posts from this year.
I then found a review for a site called Albelli on the blog Photodoto. While there are some ads on Photodoto, I could tell from the other posts that this blog was one persons opinions (he also has a great about page) – I also liked the catchy name and the tag line “Photography is for everyone.” The review of Albelli was helpful – I learned that no one was happy with their books. But it was the comments section that was the most helpful – I learned about 3 other photo books sites I had not seen before.
Each of these sites were recommended by someone that had already used the site. I then followed up on a few of these. I wanted to see if anyone was comparing Viovio or Colormailer to some of the more popular sites. Continue Reading »
This is a great question, and one that wasn’t easy to answer. When I first tried to understand Twitter last year there was very little information on Twitter.com about what it does. Fortunately they good folks at Common Craft have put together one of their great little videos to explain Twitter.
What I say is immensely important than who I am. Let the search be for the meaning and substance in my words rather than the intricacies of my existence.
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