Peter D. Marshall, a veteran filmmaker, asked on Twitter whether anyone had links for social media tips for a talk he's preparing. The talk is aimed at theater people and how to promote themselves using social media.

Now, I see a lot of musicians on MySpace, but I've so far only come across one on Twitter: Henry Rollins. (Not that I've actively searched, mind you.) He's not very active, and only follows 21 other Twitter accounts. Still, he establishes a presence and indicates when he'll be play somewhere next. He also divulges little tidbits that give a glimpse into his life. This has garnered him over 6,500 followers on Twitter.

Yeah, So?

Well it's like having a sort of subscription list if you are a performer, because then you can equate "follower" with 'fan" (most of the time). Now had you started to build these followers from scratch by asking the same 6,500 people to sign up for an official newsletter, you might not have the same response. But now that you have these followers, you can offer something, and because they feel they know you, it's possible that you'll get a much better response. (Just speculating.)

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At BusinessWeek, Stephen Baker has written his look at why Twitter matters - and he used to Twitter to do it. He asked several questions and got back over 250 replies.

I suppose it helps that he has over 700 followers. So far, none of the questions I've asked on Twitter have received a direct response. But I'm thinking there's probably a "critical mass" point in the number of people following you, after which you can ask pretty much anything and get a response. Which just reinforces why Twitter is a great resource.

Yeah, I'm drinking the Twitter koolaid now. Twhirl made me do it. And while it's still like tapping into a stream of multiple free-associations (not quite a hive mind), Twitter via Twhirl has actually increased my productivity and kept me updated on breaking events. Forget robot agents programmed to find stuff on the web. Use Twitter and follow the active blogger/ twitterers. All will be revealed on Twitter.

So how do you use Twitter? Do you just put info "out there", or do you use Twitter as a lead generator for your blog posts?

(If you want to follow me, I generally try to add people as soon as I have a chance - though I won't guarantee that I'll add everyone. You are welcome to drop your Twitter links in the comments as well.)

With so many ways online to tell people what you're up to/ what you've done, lifestream filtering is becoming a popular way to package all those personal-feed items. A lifestream is an aggregation of your social media feeds. A lifestream filter helps you to filter out the noise and create a custom stream of information. For example, you might want one lifestream that shows your Twitter tweets, your images and what you're listening to on Last.fm. Then you might want a separate stream that just shows your blog posts from multiple sites and any YouTube videos you've created.

Lifestream Filtering in Dipity Timeline

There are a growing number of tools for lifestream filtering out there, but I like to see a visual representation of information whenever possible. After reading Markus Merz's take on the Dipity Timeline web service, I signed up for an account (free).

Dipity makes it very easy to your  filter your personal lifestream feeds. While you are signing up for your account, you're presented with an easy-to-use form for entering a variety of social media details (usernames, email addresses, profile links, RSS feed URLs, etc.). At present, this is what you have to choose from:

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• Follow-Up for Another Timeline Tool: Dipity TimeTube
• UGC = User Generated Content
• CGC = Company Generated Content

I'll show you a great live example for a product timeline

Out of fun (because I am a fan) I have added a nice product timeline for Gorillapod mini-tripods using a mashup of UGC and CGC. As I have not the rights to post script code I can only recommend to follow the link at the bottom of this article. Search performancing.com for Gorillapod to see about which product I am talking about.

Check the live example and you can see how you can add great dynamic content for your content niche or to (company) websites...

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Last month, I wrote about various timeline tools and how they're a great way to present temporally-based information. I've been using SIMILE Timeline and MyTimeline for a number of projects. (MyTimeline is built on SIMILE Timeline.) Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to embed videos into the timeline events in SIMILE Timeline.

Now there's TimeTube from Dipity [via NewTeeVee], which is all about presenting videos on a timeline. Enter in keywords, click the Build TubeLine button, and you'll get back an interactive timeline, aka a TubeLine, of YouTube videos tagged with your keywords.

TimeTube TubeLines have a very interesting presentation, which you can embed on a page, but there's no refined control over it. For example, here's a TubeLine for Saturday Night Live videos on YouTube:

You can actually link to specific events in the timeline - something you can't do with SIMILE Timeline. However, what I'm really looking to do is to present a timeline of all the SNL cast members since 1975, with a select video - if available - of each member. So for getting finer control, I'm sticking with SIMILE Timeline. I just wish I could figure out how to embed videos in its events.

[UPDATED] Sure the weather's great right now, but just in case you feel like staying in and reading, here are some links for you for the weekend. You can also listen to a podcast version:

1. Version 2.0 of MindMeister, a web-based mindmapping and brainstorming tool, has just been released. (They also released MindMeister Offline, based on Google Gears, in Nov 2007.) Note: I received an email msg about V2.0, but the MindMeister blog does not mention it yet. MindMeister is collaborative, so it has an advantage over desktop-based mindmapping software.
2. I love it when people talk about the value of small daily incremental improvements - as Aaron Wall at SEOBook has. This approach is sometimes called Kaizen. I sometimes refer to it as "improvement by slow degrees," which doesn't overwhelm you. The small successes along the way motivate you.
3. A must read: Aaron Wall writes, Google thinks you are a black hat SEO.
4. Loren Baker discusses Alexa's new web page ranking system, which doesn't rely as much on the Alexa toolbar. Unfortunately, that means a lot of sites are seeing big changes in their Alexa rankings.
5. Jason at WP Elements has released yet another free WordPress theme, Charred. It's based on the previous incarnation of his site's theme and has magazine-style elements, including two sizes of post thumbnails.
6. Barry Schwartz wrote at Search Engine Land that Google Mail servers are having trouble supporting IMAP accounts, possibly to the point of removing it as an option. Although I haven't tried in a long time, I can't remember ever being able to get my IMAP accounts integrated into GMail.
7. Want to run a contest on your blog but not sure where to get prizes? Jennifer Chait at Network Blogging Tips has some suggestions.
8. Zoe Marlowe at Devlounge has an indepth review of photo storage sites.
9. It's spring time, and a young person's thoughts might just turn to... podcasting. But what do you podcast about? Stiff offers five ideas for podcasts, over at Audival. If you plan on experimenting with podcasting, here's an important tip: warm up your body before recording more than a few minutes of voice. I like to wear a hoodie because of throat problems. When your body is warm, there's less stress on the vocal chords.
10. If podcasting is so Q1 2008 to you, maybe you're into vodcasting or general web video production. If so, check out TubeMogul. They bill themselves as "a free service that acts as a single point for deploying" video to the top video sharing sites. That means you upload once and they get your video out to other sites. They also collect stats from each site and present the aggregation from their panel.

Happy reading. Or you could go outside and play.

In the quest to build comprehensive content for blogs and websites in general, I've been looking at ways that I can present mass amounts of information and still make it all accessible online for the average reader. One such way is to use a timeline tool, if your information/ data has a time component. This is something I mentioned in 28 Ways to Use WordPress Custom Fields, where one example mentioned SIMILE Timeline, an AJAX-y web tool for showing historical information/ temporal data.

This is not one of my WordPress Hacks examples. Timelines can be used on any website CMS or blog platform. A quick search on Google will show you that timeline tools are increasing in supply, though they are probably quite underused except by serious researchers.

Why Use Timeline Tools?

Here are some benefits of using web-based timeline tools to present temporal data:

1. Visually accessible means of presenting historically-related information.
2. Present multiple timelines/ event clusters simultaneously.
3. Present text, links, images and digital media per event (depending on the tool used).
4. User interactivity with events.

Uses of Timeline Tools

These are just a few generic and specific uses of timelines.

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A professional blogger tends to use a vast amount of words. A great vocabulary can create a better experience for the reader. Therefore, increasing vocabulary is something vital to personal development as a professional blogger. You should consider putting in an effort to learning new words as well, and while it might not be to the extremes that I go to, it certainly can't hurt. Normally someone would just go to Thesaurus.com to find related words, but I have been evaluating an application for the past month that makes the experience a whole lot more interesting.

Visual Thesaurus 3 Desktop Edition by Thinkmap, Inc. provides a new perspective of finding related words. Surprisingly, it makes this task a visually pleasing and fun experience. Type in a word and you will be treated to a graphical map of related verbs, adverbs, nouns, and adjectives. It is a powerful application, but most might under-estimate it.

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Keyword research is very important in the SEO game. Two of the most important search ranking factors are title tags and anchor text. However, these factors are useless unless you have relevant keywords. Relevant keywords should be in your title tags and anchor text so that you can rank highly and get more search traffic.

One benefit that I've noticed recently about keyword research is how it can make your blog more comprehensive. Oftentimes I find bloggers including myself getting into rut with about blog topics. We write about the same stuff without delving into other areas in our niche.

If I don't do market research (which is what keyword research is), I find myself writing about what I like instead of what my market is searching for. It's okay to write about our favorite topics. However, we should balance our blogs by also writing about the things our niche audience is thinking about. By doing this, we become a valuable resource and our monetization opportunities increase.

The key to good marketing is giving your audience what they want. Through keyword research, we can find out topics of interest within our niche that we've neglected.

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If you're a problogger and you travel more than once every 3 months, you need some sort of 'living on the road' solution to keep you plugging in and functioning (work-wise, of course). It may be a romantic (and healthy) notion that you should ditch all things work and Net when taking a break, but that's for those rare once or twice an year vacations.

If, like, me, you're on the road for a week a month (even car accidents don't stop me anymore), you don't only need the right setup (read gadgets and software) but also the right routine - simply put, nothing fracks up your work like an uncertain, unplanned work schedule.

The Tools

If you're expecting a Internet Tablet / Pocket PC a la Nick and Chris, you'll be disappointed. I'm packing the Nokia E61i which is light-weight but remarkably effective for blogging on the move (I was sold after this comparison, although to be honest the iPhone and W950 aren't serious competitors to the E61i).

Thanks to cheap (but annoyingly slow) cellular data plans here, Internet access is rarely a problem. Combine that with the E61i's WiFi capabilities, you've got a working laptop replacement for your travels.

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No doubt with the new Google PR rollout, there'll be some laughing and some crying. If you fall into the latter category because your ranking dropped, it might be because you didn't maintain your site. Thing is, it's tough to come up with fresh content all the time. Even the most prolific of us can't always maintain the productivity. Sure, you can fire off a bit of content every day, but if it doesn't inspire you, it's probably not your best work. However, there are numerous web tools - many of them free - that you can use to add a bit of life to your website or weblog, almost regardless of topic.

The one I'm focusing on lately is SplashCast, which I think is brilliant. It's skinless, so it fits in very nicely on any web page. You can use any of the dozen or so size configurations or specify your own. Each slide or frame of a SplashCast can have documents, images or video. How's that for versatility? I've been using the tool like mad, and now you can too. I've set up a new splashcasting tutorial at Tubetorial on how to create your own Internet music TV channel, and have also given an example Pearl Jam Splashcast (embedded below). Of course, you can use the same method to produce any kind of SplashCast on pretty much any topic. And word from SplashCast Media is that new features are being rolled out very soon.

So get to it. Don't let your blog stagnate. Create a SplashCast or something similar. Most humans are visually stimulated. While there are still purists who want the web to only have text, the rest of us like visual content. It's now easier than ever, and getting involved like this might just spark your interest back into writing. And if you don't have any of your own content, you can always borrow some from Flickr or YouTube until you do.

RSS feeds have dramatically changed the way we consume content online. Over the course of time, I have come to subscribe to 90+ feeds of which I manage to read about 20 of them completely.

If there's one debate that keeps raging across the blogosphere, off and on, it has to be about RSS feeds. Even now, I hear occasional raves and rants about how partial text feeds are irritating and nonsensical, and all that.

What if (this may be a very silly what-if) the choice were left to the user?

What if I as a reader could decide whether I wanted a Partial-Text, Full-Text or Headlines only feed for a given site?

For instance, I'd prefer to have a Headline-only feed for heavy output websites like Slashdot and ZDNet while I'd prefer a full-text feed for sporadically updating sites, like friend blogs.

Alternatively, this can be achieved from the client-side itself, i.e. within the RSS reader. To me, it makes sense to open the feed in three stages:

Headlines >> Partial Text (Excerpt*) >> Full Text

In either of the cases, the publisher must provide a full-text feed.

Of the few readers that I have tried and tested, Google Reader comes close, offering Expanded and Reading views. Combined with keyboard shortcuts, these make for an amazing experience.

At the end of the day, reading RSS feeds is nothing but consuming content, and right now, there are only so many ways to do it.

I have a sneaky suspicion, things will be different soon.

(*caveat: I would define an excerpt as a paragraph or two, having a total of about 5-7 lines at least)

powered by performancing firefox

A couple of days ago I asked "why do you use Google Reader", I've been hearing that it's improved for a long time now, and we get many referals from it here. After getting some damn good reasons for using it in that thread, i turned off Liferea, my Ubuntu/Gnome reader of chioce and decided to climb the learning curve of GReader.

Im very, very glad I did. Thankyou to all who helped get me on track in that thread.

Google Reader is without doubt, the fastest, most useful hosted RSS reader for the professional blogger in existence. It makes Bloglines look rather kludgy and dated.

If you've not tried it recently, i highly recommend you do so!

Welcome Digg readers, you can grab this sites RSS Feed here.

Snap's preview anywhere gizmo is ruining the reading experience for millions of people. Its intrusive, obstructive and unuseful in almost every respect and use case. The fact that so many big blogs are using it, big well respected blogs, does not mean that it's useful, it just means that they, like most bloggers, have all the self restraint of a magpie in a sparkly things factory.

That's not to say im any better, but it is true. As a group , most bloggers are only a small step away from the flashing, rotating logos of 1997 or the neon pink backgrounds and blaring teen pop auto play bollocks of your average 17yr old MySpace user -- and I include myself, though i dont use SPA, im as guilty as the next blogger of "bling envy".

Let me point out a few truths about Snap Preview Anywhere, in the vain hope that this misguided 'helper application' will die a quick death as we all start to see the sense of a usable website as opposed to a trinket magnet for the design challenged.

read on.....

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I've been reading a lot of comments in the last couple of months raving about how good Google Reader is, and how it just beats Bloglines hands down.

From a professional bloggers point of view, what's all the fuss about?