Archive for March, 2009

Analysis of demographics is what people like me eat like candy corn. Give me a new tool with charts, pies and bar-graphs and I can go into a statistical trance trying different combinations. Well, the folks at Socialistics got me hooked on Facebook. If I can find the developers perhaps we’ll have them as guests on JCKC’s Twitter Tuesday Radio Show.

Here is a screen shot of home town demographics on my Facebook friends. You can add Socialistics to your Facebook account, too:

There is much talk about what is good and bad Twitter etiquette. Partly that is up to your followers and friends to determine. For example you may be in a group that wants to tweet about nothing but the hottest celebrities – have at it. On the other hand you may want to tweet about nothing but how good God is – have at it. This is not bad etiquette.

Follow me on Twitter @theKenCook

Don’t forget to listen in at http://budurl.com/jckc every Tuesday at Noon for Twitter Tuesday Radio on JCKC with my co-host @jasoncrouch and our special guests. This week’s guest James Shiner of @zipvojames with his new tool http://mytweeple.com – oh, and follow me, too @thekencook

Yes, Ashton Kutcher is http://twitter.com/aplusk and he’s a fairly prolific tweeter. With 465,000 followers and 1000 updates as he’s a more participating celeb than many. Of course you know Mrs. Kutcher, Demi Moore, is going to be everywhere her little feller is http://twitter.com/mrskutcher

Kelly Ripa is http://twitter.com/kellyripa with nothing yet approaching Ashton’s input. (This was a bogus account found in early 2009.)

Yes, Kelly Ripa is on Twitter, somewhere. I find it amazing how many people actually search for her! This, however, was a spoofed account and is not her account. You can try http://twitter.com/Regis_and_Kelly which is obviously the show and neither Kelly Rippa nor Regis Filbin. I did find another apparently bogus Kelly Ripa Twitterer at http://twitter.com/markshoes70 but only a couple of really bad tweets.

Maria Shriver, the governatoress, is http://twitter.com/mariashriver and she will, evidently, follow you back. She also has a Flickr account and you can digg in at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mariashriver

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And of course you can always listen to Twitter Tuesday Radio every Tuesday at Noon Eastern at http://budurl.com/jckc for useless and useful information about Twitter, Facebook and hundreds of other social media sites, tools, tips and tricks.

Many years ago when I first started blogging (we actually called it “posting to the boards” back then) I wished I had a way to import content into my posts. Legally, of course. In fact a couple of decades ago I wrote a program to go to the weather service and pick up on forecasts and news alerts to post them to my BBS (UWDO). It became quite popular and then along came the Web. We hardly even use the term “world wide web” anymore – now we just say Internet. But it’s not important to know I’m an antique

We still want content for our blogs. In fact some of my blogs post content from some of my other blogs based on keywords. For example if I post an article on one blog that contains the keywords “georgia” and “mortgage” one of my blogs picks it up and posts the first few lines. But what if I could pull news headlines and posts them to my blog? Well, I can!

One simple to use tool is call Feedzilla – http://www.feedzilla.com/ and setting up an account is very simple. Let me walk you through my setup. First I chose a main category which was “business”. From the subcategory I chose “money”. For this example I chose JavaScript because I knew it would be simply pasting some code but you can also choose from Flash and WordPress widgets. And it was almost too simple.

I opened my business blog at http://ken.novationmortgage.com and started a new page called “Money News”. I switched to the HTML tab and pasted the code I copied from Feedzilla, published, and read my news page.

At five minutes and six seconds after 4 AM on the 8th of July this year, the time and date will be 04:05:06 07/08/09.? This will not happen again for a thousand years.

I just love that last line … duh? Of course next year it will be 05:06:07 08/09/10

Since I am feeling like the king of useless info check this out:

In Australian Summer the continent has both vertical and horizontal time zones.
Kiribati and Hawaii, which are almost on the same longitude, are 1 day apart on the calendar.
China has only one time zone.

Have you noticed a new link bar in the upper right corner of your Twitter screen? Don’t worry if you have not because all accounts do not have them. The @RealNowRadio has it but @thekencook does not. What am I talking about? Here is a screen shot:

You will notice the link bar now has a search form as well as a trends link. The trends are also displayed in the sidebar below the profile information.

Are you seeing this new link bar?

If not are you seeing something other than the standard link bar?

Twitter is morphing, changing, growing, and maturing.

Here is a standard link bar like we have all been used to for many months:

The differences are obvious and the addition of the search and trending, to me at least, is a very welcome change. Sure enough we will have people starting a hash tag with something like #BringBackTheOldTwitterBar … people, as much as they don’t like to admit it, resist change.

As I am prone to do I was just reading an article about follow, unfollow, twitter etiquette, and what drives each to affect the other. That was when I came across the one quote that pretty much sums is up for me:

Instead of getting all worried about what other people might think or how they might react, do what you want, and if I don’t like you I’ll unfollow you.

http://twitter.com/djackmanson

@djackmanson also lead me to http://claimid.com/kencook because I needed just one more place to type my name and endless list of links!

So I read about this “great” new service promising the members 10,000 followers (sort of) for a fee of only $8.95 per month. Of course the first 1000 members get to sign up for free.? My very first thought was “slimeball” but I thought for a second and decided just to give them the benefit of doubt. So I visit the site:

Then I come back to Twitter to check them out and:

Cool http://www.housingmaps.com/ pulls housing listings from craigslist and puts it on a Google map. There is almost zero information about the site or the creator available yet anyone who have ever done anything on the web should be able to easily navigate and use the site.