Who Should I Follow? (Twitter)
More and more people are beginning to venture into social media and twitter is a great place to start. Inevitably there is a need to figure out whom to follow. Here are the methods I’ve used to create my twitter network.
First you should follow me!
Get recommendations from whoshouldifollow.com
Use Twitter Search to find people talking about topics that interest you.
Let MrTweet help you easily build meaningful relationships by looking through your network and tweets.
For Seattlelites you can find local organizations on Who’s on Twitter in Seattle? The big (working) index.
The Social Brand Index tracks organizations by category.
Look at the followers of someone you already follow.
See you on Twitter.
If you don’t know it and know you don’t know it; you need to ask questions!
There is an old proverb that goes something like:
He who knows and knows he knows he is a wise man; seek him.
He who knows and knows not he knows he is asleep; wake him.
He who knows not and knows he knows not, he is a child; teach him.
He who knows not and knows not he knows not, he is a fool; shun him!
- Various
With a little spin, we can easily relate this to the task of gathering and defining technical and functional requirements for projects.
If you know it and know you know it; it is fact document it, it may be a requirement.
If you know it and don’t realize you know it; then it is fact or information by experience.
If you don’t know it and don’t know you don’t know it; ignorance is bliss and it’s in fate’s hand.
If you don’t know it and know you don’t know it; you need to ask questions!
Asking question can be challenging for a number of reasons. The first is most likely the genesis for statement four in the original proverb. People do not ask questions because they do not want to expose their lack of knowledge to a peer, client or manager. Where this can lead is a separate blog entry. Asking clients questions that result in information, which can be distilled into ‘fact’, and documented as a requirement is an art that develops over time. Follow these quick tips to get the conversation rolling.
• Ask questions that cannot be answered with yes or no.
• Keeps the conversation going with simple follow on questions.
• Change your tone and language to seem curious rather than confrontational.
• Ask as many people as you can the same questions and collaborate.
How I Keep Track of it All
If you’re at all like me you have a few email accounts and belong to various social network sites. I monitor and maintain the following.
GMail
Yahoo Mail
AIM
Yahoo Messenger
GTalk
Yammer
Fortunately I have Digsby to help aggregate all the updates into one client application. It is the only tool I’ve found that allows me to track and manage all the incoming messages and information in an acceptable way.
Once downloaded and installed setting up the Digsby client is rather straight forward. It supports all the major IM, email, and Social Networks. It does not support Yammer directly but here is the trick. In my Yammer settings I allowed updates from IM (GTalk) which Digsby does support. Winner!
Here is a view of my client application.
When there is an update a small bubble pops open at the bottom of my screen with the new message. This can be turned off during presentations or when it becomes annoying.
If I mouse over any of the Social Networks a message drawer (see twitter below) opens allowing me to review and reply to any recent posts.
It is not perfect. You do lose some of the underlying application capability like attaching a file in Yammer or re-tweet as Twitter post. Not a big trade off when you’re trying to manage screen real estate.
Gizmo5 - Make free internet calls from your mobile phone and computer
One of the benefits of being a consultant is the ability to save some commute time and work from home. Shower if you want, fresh coffee when you want, walk the dog at lunch. The one challenge I have is attending conference calls from the home office. I certainly don’t want to use up mobile minutes listening to status reports and the chief of house does not like to loose phone access for extended periods. I’d used Gizmo while in the UK to talk to family in the states years ago, so I downloaded the new version to try it as a VOIP option. Works great, and the best part is you can call 8XX numbers without a charge.
Gizmo5 is a Free Phone For Your Computer
That makes calling as easy as instant messenging
Learn more
Reading & Review: Tribal Leadership
I’m just finishing this book and recommend it to anyone who is a leader of a group or large organization. You will find it easy to read with great chapter summaries of concepts and actions. If you are dealing with current organizational challenges, the authors guide you to specific chapters so you can take action.
The web 2.0 back story. I follow @zappos (Tony, Zappos CEO) on twitter and he mentioned it in a post.. When I looked on amazon it had 22 five star ratings. Seemed like something worth reading.
Since the dawn of civilization people have formed tribes, and research demonstrates that humans are genetically programmed to form into groups. Within every company there are tribes, often several, consisting of 20 to 150 people who know each other and work together. But while everyone tribes, the culture of each tribe is different, as is its effectiveness. Improving a tribe’s culture—and its chances for greater success—requires a tribal leader who not only understands the tribe but can leverage its collective assets to build a greater team.
@Computer: Simple Tools
Sometimes its nice to find tool that do one simple thing well. Your not going to use these every day but having them in your bag-o-tricks can save the day.
When is Good, makes coordinating meeting times amount individuals a breeze. And best of all you do not need to join anything.
Tiny Paste, when you need to get a large document to someone with draconian email limits or limited bandwidth. No account or password and there is a firefox plugin.
@Blog: ScribeFire Puts It all in the browser
I’m using ScribeFire, an extension to Firefox, to create this post. At first glance there seems to be some efficiencies that come from using the tool. In one place you can take notes, write and publish a post, access your del.icio.us account, share it using 9 supported services (Digg, Facebook, SU etc.)
It did take a few tries to add my wordpress account to my ScribeFire tool, but most of that was user related not the technology. Now that it’s all configured, all systems are go.
ScribeFire currently supports the following services:
- WordPress.com (http://www.wordpress.com)
- LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com)
- Windows Live Spaces (http://spaces.msn.com)
- Performancing (http://www.performancing.com)
- Jeeran (http://www.jeeran.com)
- Tumblr (http://www.tumblr.com/)
- MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/)
- b2Evolution (http://b2evolution.net)
- Splinder (http://www.splinder.com/)
In addition to the hosted services mentioned above, ScribeFire also supports custom blogging platforms which are usually blogging software hosted on your own server.
The currently supported blogging platforms are:
- WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org/)
- Movable Type (http://www.movabletype.org/)
- Drupal (http://www.drupal.org)
- Textpattern (http://www.textpattern.com/)
- Roller (http://www.rollerweblogger.org)
- Blogger (http://www.blogger.com)
- MetaWeblog API (Any blogging software that implements this API)
Visualize any text as a word cloud
<nostrathomas>
They say pictures are worth a thousand words. Well, Jonathan Feinberg has created an awesome application, Wordle, that allows you to create a word cloud from any text or del.icio.us tags.
These images created using my CV are much more interesting and engaging than reading the actual text. You get to pick font, layout, and color the application uses word counts to create the visualization.
It’s like a free, contextually relevant, source of artwork. You might also use to ensure a document is sending the right message.
</nostrathomas>
What Sports car are you?
<nostrathomas>
This is a fun little quiz. What’s really amazing is this single page application has been passed around everyone’s social network resulting in over 8.1 million hits.
</nostrathomas>
I’m a Ford Mustang!
You’re an American classic — fast, strong, and bold. You’re not snobby or pretentious, but you have what it takes to give anyone a run for their money.
“Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.
