Web sites are rubbish. Social media rules. The conversation is where it’s at. Welcome to 2010. Whether you’re a freelancer or working for a large multi-national, if you’re working anywhere in the online space you should be considering the social aspect of everything you do. With that in mind, I thought I’d gather together the notes I’ve been making on creating a social media strategy. This is a work in progress, feel free to contribute via the comments.
So the time has come for you to get started with jQuery. If you’re reading this, I doubt you need an introduction. Here’s what you need to get on the fast-track to jQuery happiness…
<script type="text/javascript" src="/scripts/jquery-1.3.2.js"></script>
When I’m at home in the evenings, I’m rarely sat looking at my MacBook Pro. Usually it’s idle on the dining room table – playing music through iTunes, or streaming a movie to the TV in the lounge. I thought it would be handy if when a new email arrives, it could read out the sender’s name and the subject of the email, so I could decide whether to go and look at it – instead of just hearing the new email notification sound.
Luckily, I found an AppleScript that did much of the hard work for me, I just customized it slightly. This is my first foray into the world of AppleScript – so coders go easy on me! There’s a couple of interesting features -
Being a script, you can change the settings as you please, and modifying it to use Apple Mail instead of Microsoft Entourage should be a doddle.
Speak new email.zip (16KB)
Once downloaded, all you need to do is create a rule to run the script when a new email arrives in Entourage…
Several friends and colleagues have recently been asking how to get started with Twitter. Twitter is one of those apps that’s best learned by using it. The most important thing you can do is get started. You really can’t make that many mistakes. Just remember to have fun and enjoy the people you meet online.
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
Tweeting requires very little time. For starters, you can only enter 140 characters at a time. This means that you must post very short, direct-to-the-point messages. In practice, this means that, as a tweeter, you update several times a day, but it takes almost no time at all. (You don’t have to visit Twitter.com to post your tweets, there’s a variety of ways to post via your iPhone, Blackberry or straight from your desktop – see below).
@jamesward I thought that website you posted was great!
Everyone who is following me will see the message, but I am specifically directing it to James Ward.
You can also use the Reply function to refer to someone by name. For example:
Meeting @NTCeline and @jamesward for a pint in the Fenton. Anyone else coming?
The thing about replies is that they are clickable links. If someone who is following me, clicks on one of the names, they will automatically go to that person’s Twitter page. This will give them the opportunity to follow that person, too.
Direct Messages
Continuing with the metaphor of a conversation with a room full of people, you can also use the “direct message” function. This is like whispering in one person’s ear. They can hear you, but no one else can. You are directing the message to them and only them. For example:
d jamesward shall we sneak off for a pint now?
Hashtags (#example)
Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr or YouTube, and were developed as a means to create ”groupings” on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. They’re not really necessary while you’re getting it started, and only really mentioned here for completeness. If you’d like to know more about Hashtags, there’s plenty of info here.
You can find answers to almost every other Twitter question on the FAQ page.
No one probably wants to hear the blow-by-blow of your life. However, some color commentary is good. However, this is definitely art not science, so there are no hard, fast rules. But you should consider every Twitter update as a branding impression. You are developing a reputation with your online friends, so make sure you are adding something to the conversation.
This is really no different than a face-to-face conversation. You want to say something that is interesting, helpful, or just plain entertaining. I don’t think you should over-think it, but I don’t think you should just text the first thing that pops in your mind.
You should consider reading this How to really use Twitter (and not annoy your followers) guide.
Twitter for Facebook application. This application automatically syncs all your Twitter updates with Facebook. Once you set this up, you won’t ever have to make another Facebook update. (If you have trouble, you can find a brief tutorial here.)
Twhirl (free). My favorite Twitter client for Windows.
TweetDeck (free). Another great Windows client. Often described as “Twitter on steroids” so perhaps overkill for your average new user, but definitely one for power users. Available for both Windows and Mac.
TwitterFon (free). Arguably the best iPhone (and iPod Touch) Twitter client (and I’ve tried quite a few!)
Now you’re all set, you can find me at @Davenicoll 
Need professional help or have a team who need to get up to speed with social media? James Ward is your man! He’s a professional digital coach, very friendly, and what he doesn’t know about social media isn’t worth knowing.
Disclaimer: I don’t download copyrighted material, unless I already own the movie/album/application.
Frequently, the things I download most from The Pirate Bay appear on the Total Top 100 page. There’s no RSS feed, but with a handy shell script and GeekTool for the Mac, I can slap the latest updates straight onto my desktop – where I can keep an eye on it…
Here’s how…
First up, download and install GeekTool.
Next, download and unzip this script to your /Users/YOURNAME/Library/Scripts folder.
TPB Top Items.sh.zip (1KB)
Open GeekTool in the System Preferences and create a Shell entry. The command should look like…
sh "/Users/YOURNAME/Library/Scripts/TPB Top Items.sh" -12
If you want to show more items from the list, just change the “-12″ part to the number of items you want. And if you want to scrape a different page on TPB site, open up the script and change the URL. For example, to grab a list of the latest Mac applications submitted, you would use this URL: https://thepiratebay.org/browse/302/0/3
IMPORTANT! You should change the GeekTool refresh value to over 600 (I’d recommend 1200 – 20 minutes), otherwise TPB may ban you for constantly hitting the website, and you’ll probably get me into hot water too.
Here’s a quick tip on how to remove the ads from Facebook. If you’ve not installed Adblock yet, you’re in for a treat. It’s a fantastic little plugin for Firefox (get it here) or Safari (get it here) which removes ads from websites (not just Facebook).
Once you’ve installed it and restarted your browser, open Adblock’s preferences and look at the filters. If you’ve just installed Adblock, you may want to choose a filter subscription (free) – I use the EasyList (USA) filter.
Add a new filter, and enter:
facebook.com#div(class*=sponsor)
Once applied, the Facebook ads should be gone and you can let out an evil cackle!
For those of you who don’t know what TechCrunch is, it’s an editorial website that reports on new technology (primarily Internet startups, and computer-related geekery) over in the U.S. In the past, it’s got a lot of attention and has built a good name for itself by reporting honestly and being fairly successful with their predictions.
So, TechCrunch50 has just been and gone. 52 startups got up on stage and pitched their ideas for $50k, and there were some great ideas – but two things struck me. Firstly, the amount of crap being developed and being pitched as innovative (as a senior developer, I’ve been around the block a few times, and this stuff is NOT innovative), and secondly the need for these startups – their products have such small niches or fill a void only temporarily until a bigger player comes along and wipes them off the face of the net. Ok, ok, so that may be a bit harsh but I’m being realistic!
As for Yammer winning the $50k, I’m stunned. Nothing new, nothing revolutionary (lots “borrowed” from twitter and facebook) and not even that difficult to knock up from a tech perspective.
What do you think? Watch the presentations here: http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/
I was speaking to Magnus last night and he was asking if I had a W3C cheat sheet. While I do have a couple of cheat sheets for things like Script.aculo.us and Regular Expressions, I thought a W3C cheat would be a good addition, so I set out along the path of Google. It wasn’t long before I’d stumbled across several other useful cheat sheets – no substitute for knowing your stuff, of course – but handy as a quick reminder…
Don’t see a cheatsheet you’re looking for? Try here, there are lots more…
The internet is hoooj, so I use Update Scanner for Firefox and RSS feeds to keep track of what’s going on around the web. In my subscriptions are a couple of sites you might not have heard of, so I thought I’d post them up…
(Most visited sites in my subscriptions are the ones you’ll undoubtedly heard of – digg.com, theregister.co.uk, iGoogle, BBC iPlayer)
