Category: Twitter

Useful links: Twitter Revolution, AirAmericaMedia on Twitter,

How Twitter is Revolutioninzing Business at Entrepreneur details the rise to success of Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) as the twitter-for-business consultant to go to. If you read this success story on Web Teacher,  you may be reminded of the conclusion I offered there:  Keep up with what’s changing and learn how to use those changes to achieve your own goals.

Using Twitter for business is indeed important these days. I went to the Air America site to vote for @PunditMom to win a spot on a cruise with Air America’s celebrities, including Rachel Maddow (@Maddow). The Air America site uses Silverlight. Alerts about Silverlight popped up immediately when I reached the voting page. I’m a Mac person, and I consider Silverlight irritating. So after I voted, I tweeted this complaint.  Air America responded on Twitter almost immediately. Ah, I thought, these people are Twitter smart. So I responded with this additional complaint. Then to give them credit for being savvy about Twitter, I also gave them a high five.  @AirAmericaMedia, of course, immediately retweeted my good words.

I don’t know if Air America has been reading and learning from Laura Fitton, but this story is exactly the kind of thing she teaches business to do to make the most of social media in a changing world. It’s a good example of  how business can use Twitter to communicate with its community of users.

Greetings to the folks from Air America Media who are now following me on Twitter. 🙂

Useful Links: Intro to HTML5, Univ. Web survey, paid to tweet

Introduction to HTML5, microformats and CSS3 is a screencast showing the building of a web page in HTML5.

State of the University Web Department Survey results are available at eduGuru. The survey included all sorts of interesting questions such as university size, CMS used, technology used, department size, decision makers, frequency of redesign and more.

What do you think of A Friend’s Tweet Could be an Ad? I find the idea offensive and have started to unfollow people who use their twitter stream to collect ad revenue. You may have ads on your blog, which is fine: the choice whether to read the ads is mine. But when an ad comes through your twitter stream like it’s normal content it’s no longer my choice. Web users have developed visual skills to filter past ads on web pages. There’s no visual cue on Twitter that would let you scan past a paid tweet. It’s deceptive.

Useful links: Color Contrast Checker, Zeldman interview, retweet

The WebAIM Color Contrast Checker is a great tool. Using it should be listed as a must do early in the planning and design of any web site. Within seconds you know if your color choices will pass or fail color contrast accessibility standards.

Peachpit’s Author Interview program with Jeffrey Zeldman about the latest edition of Designing with Web Standards is worth your time. It’s about 40 minutes long.

Twitter is rolling out a retweet function, and it needs some explaining. Demo Girl explains it, and so does Evan Williams.

Useful Links: CSS Selectors, Twitter clients, Amazon’s PayPhrase, Learning

CSS Nuggets in Scrunchup features several interesting CSS selectors such as :first-of-type, :last-of-type, :nth-of-type.

Seesmic Desktop: First Major Twitter Client with Lists from Louis Gray explains how to use all those Twitter lists you spent the weekend making in a desktop client. So far just one uses lists, but step back, because the onslaught of upgrades is coming.

Amazon’s New PayPhrase: Will you or won’t you? is my own article at BlogHer. I mention it here because I think the implications of the technology are interesting across the Internet-connected world. What’s your opinion of the new technology?

You Can Get There from Here: Websites for Learners is must reading for educators and people like me who provide content for learning. Therefore, I must go read it.

Useful Links: Twitter acronyms, Twitter lists

Accessibility Allies Against A11y by The Pickards exactly expresses my opinion about the use of #a11y rather than #accessibility or another more accessible acronym on Twitter.

Everybody is all wound up about Twitter Lists. Now you can take a short cut to finding the best lists to follow using Five Must-Follow Twitter Lists at Think Vitamin. I love Think Vitamin, but as with all Carsonified lists, these are heavily male oriented. Just sayin’.

Making Twitter Lists more useful with filtering at contentious.com is very helpful if you don’t care about Carsonified recommendations but want to make your own Twitter lists. Also take a look at Learning Social Media: How to Create and Share Your Twitter Lists at SheGeeks.net.

Summary of eHow articles for October

Santa Fe Style

I spent some time in Santa Fe in October. My friend Patrica got married there. Woohoo! The ceremony was at the beautiful Pecos National Historical Park outside Santa Fe in the mountains. This photo of typical Santa Fe architecture is the Inn at Loretto near the state capital in Santa Fe.

On eHow, I posted these articles:

Useful Links: Tech blogs, the backchannel

Several Tech Blogs Worth Exploring. Oh Yeah, All by Women at JavaWorld is a good source of information for those looking for female tech bloggers, female conference speakers, and inspiration.

Web Teacher has posted about using the backchannel in the past. An event at HighEdWeb in Milwaukee earlier this month resulted in a backchannel revolt that made news in educational circles and serves as a morality tale for speakers and educators in the future. A few reports about the incident:

In my mind, no one should get in front of an audience these days without someone at their side monitoring the backchannel. If you start to bomb, you need to know it immediately and take steps to salvage the situation. If this presenter had realized what was going on, he could have turned off the projector and engaged the audience in a dialog about the topic. Or something. Anything. But instead, he’s now notorious for being a plodding dinosaur in a fast-paced world.