Jon Bishop highlights 7 Awesome Twitter Plugins for WordPress.
Here’s a look at one of his recommendations:
TweetStats is a nifty little plugin that works alongside the TweetBacks plugin. It ultimately allows you to add a widget to the sidebar of your most recent and most popular tweets. I’m hoping this is the beginning of a new generation of plugins working together to present the best content to it’s readers.
We use several of Jon’s recommendations on our blogs – well worth exploring his post to see if any of these will work for your needs.
In an article published on Friday in Slate, Farhad Manjoo takes a look at the lolcat and failblog industries:
Most surprisingly, lolcats makes money. A few months after they started the site, Nakagawa and Unebasami sold it to Pet Holdings Inc., a Web startup based in Seattle. Pet Holdings markets memes: In addition to I Can Has Cheezburger, the company also runs Failblog, which collects photographic instances of spectacular flops; Engrish Funny, a chronicle of poorly translated signs; GraphJam, in which people try to distill life into PowerPoint-type slides (such as “Relationship Between Money and Problems,” an ascending, 45-degree line graph); and Once Upon a Win, a trove of awesome, faddy things from the past (friendship bracelets, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, videos of Weird Al). Pet Holdings didn’t invent any of these ideas. Instead, it sifted through the daily river of ephemeral Internet buzz and bought or built sites around the few memes that seemed to possess universal, permanent appeal. In the process, the company has managed something that few others online—not even YouTube—have been able to pull off. It turns memes into a profitable business.
An inspiring and interesting startup story with alot of details that I never knew…
A slightly older post from January 2009, but still a good one. Paul Stamatiou writes about 100 Applications and Services that he uses each day:
It took me a while to get used to using something other than simply Twitter.com, but I have fallen in love with TweetDeck. The Adobe AIR-based application does have its obvious performance drawbacks and crashes at least once per day, so there are better alternatives. EventBox is becoming popular but I did not like the RSS aggregator-esque interface when I tried it out.
As you’ll find, it’s not quite 100 services, but it is a pretty good list and interesting insights into how one person successfully uses social media and other development tools within a startup.
Web Designer Depot takes a look at the Workstations behind several popular blogs & websites.
My own workstation can be seen here — it’s been upgraded a bit since the last time I wrote about it – we’ll save that for an upcoming post about my 2009 Problogging Setup.
In a sometimes humorous read, but one that I think is very true, Media Caffeine outlines the 14 Types of Twitter Personalities:
The Clever Purist will answer the question just as stated. The difference between them and The Purist is that they put a spin on their tweets to make their actions more entertaining or interesting than they really are. These users can accumulate a strong following once they are noticed as other users see them as adding value a notch above others in their stream.
That’s just one of the fourteen types – you can read more over at Media Caffeine.
Doug Bowman, Google’s first real in-house designer, has left Google, allegedly to join Twitter, but this is not yet confirmed.
Bowman writes:
Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.
I’ve been in that sort of environment – typically driven by either finance or engineering “experts” within a company – this sort of behavior reflects a less than holistic approach to the business. I wouldn’t enjoy working in that environment either.
In fact, this is the sort of client that I typically “fire” rather than do additional work for in the future.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised – we’ve seen this from Dave Winer before.
In this post, he flames Asa Dotzler, then after getting called on it by Dotzler in this post, he edits the post and removes the flame.
In the flame, mind you, he called Dotzler a “creep”.
In a comment on Dotzler’s blog, he admits to the action:
At the same time I took down the note and the pointer. He objected to being called a creep, and I decided to let him have his way.
I’ll give Dave this – he’s his own man – though I don’t always understand the post-editing of a post after it’s already been posted.
