Library clips

vemail - In my last round up I mentioned vemail, and a comment was left about another vemail.
Receive email, reply by voice audio, this voice email is sent as an email that contains a link and a phone number
Recipients can either click the link or call the number to actually hear your voice.

WinArranger - various ways of arranging windows on your desktop

Civil Netizen - file transfer, see more

outside.in - kind of like a citizen version of Citysearch, see similar.

PhotoCrank - take a photo on your phone and SMS it, it will be SMS’d back pimped up.

signbot - create a marquee for your blog, great idea if you are on holidays and temporarily not blogging, just add a rolling headline sticky on your blog…or do in HTML code.

What is Ozmozr?

- it seems to be an identity network as you can re-syndicate all your profiles (also see Lijit, Ziki, ProfileLinker, SocialNetwork.In)

- it seems to be a social network as you can discover people (pity you can’t tag yourself so you can find people by tag) and add friends and view friends profiles, and see friends who follow you

- it seems to be an RSS Reader (also read posts by author tags), these user added feeds are aggregated into social feed directory

- it seems to be a social bookmarks service (with bookmarklet), as you can save/share links (you can even share, tag and comment on posts from the RSS reader module…choose to share posts with group, friends)

NOTE: you can’t view your shared links by tag, and you can tag a link without sharing it (if you click on a tag in your tags section it will show all links with this tag in Ozmozr)
NOTE: you can’t see an RSS Reader in another user profile, so it is not quite a social RSS Read network like Spokeo (which also lets you to subscribe to a user, not just add them as a friend…also see the similar NEooWS

- it seems to be a group based memedigger…see the web2.0 group

All it is missing in inhouse blogging.

See here, and here.

This weekend was all about citizen journalism (News 2.0) at our house.

It all started off when my wife Abby took photo’s of the McNaught comet (we drove around the coast looking for a clear spot and came upon a car park full of people with cameras, binoculars, telescopes, it was fun). We didn’t have a tripod so Abby rested the camera on a wooden pillar and took a 20 second exposure, it seemed to do the trick.

When we got home we uploaded the photo’s to our PC, and zoomed in on a few, in one photo the comet seemed to have the form of a human being, it was uncanny.

Abby said how can I get this on to the net so people can see it…I said “thanks for asking”

Firstly we uploaded it to a photo hosting service.

She didn’t want to start a blog, just for one post, and bookmarking it to a social bookmark service only goes so far for exposure.

So the next choice was citizen journalism, what a perfect use case, she wanted to let people know of this photo in the context of news, and local news at that.

The perfect choice was PerthNorg, a local news 2.0 citizen journalism site for the city of Perth.

Abby joined and posted some content and pointed to the URL her photo’s are hosted on, then she chose a news topic category and submit.

There it was from out on the field to a news story on the web for all local people to see.

Local is the key, if she blogged this on her own blog the audience is random and there is no context, since she posted it on a local news site the audience is already present, and the context is local and of a news-based nature.

The only problem we found was that for friends to comment or vote for the post they had to register…my brother lives in Melbourne, what is his incentive to register in order to comment or vote, that’s all he wants to do, he doesn’t live in Perth, even if he did he doesn’t neccessarily want to post content. So we found that registering to interact at a minimal level was affecting comments and votes on Abby’s post.

Besides that I am so impressed by PerthNorg, news 2.0 right in my city…if your city doesn’t have one make something kind of similar with OnMyCity, also see Backfence.

Then she wanted to go beyond local news and posted the story on NewsVine, NewsCloud (formerly CommonTimes), WikiNews (very hard to use by the way), Topix (as a topic forum post), and I also posted it to Digg, to generate some exposure.

Another choice would be to find a news 2.0 service dedicated to a topic eg. Citizen Journalism on Space.
The best we found were a few Astronomy, Space type forums where she posted to.

Does anyone have any suggestions on any other sites we could of posted to?

Here is Abby’s post on PerthNorg - Comet or Being?
UPDATE: this post has been removed, see the photo at Scoopt.

More

Other sites we could of considered (not really news based):

clipmarks - kind of like Newsvine, but not based around news content, it is for any type of content.

Gather - kind of like NewsVine, and more a blogging format than clipmarks, but again this is just general content, not specifically for news.

CommonGate - Again like Gather as it is a generic blog network, but then similar to PerthNorg in that you choose a category to post to, then you can look at your user profile to see all your posts. So all your posts can be seen in your public profile page, and they also can be seen within a news category. In CommonGate, you rove around posting on different topic blogs, but you can also see all your posts on your profile.

Sponit - a generic blog network, kind of inbetween clipmarks and Gather. Gather is more normal blogging, only within a network, and clipmarks it more about clipping, Sponit is blogging posts with a blog network, but your blog doesn’t look like a regular blog, it’s more a text space.

Loopnote - similar to Sponit but more focused on posting alerts

IT Toolbox - a topic based blog network

GigaOM - a topic based closed blog network

Corante Web Hub - a topic based RSS feed network (content is re-syndicated)

[ADDED 24/01/07: Also check out Wikio - become a Cit J just like Newsvine and post stories, choose a category for your story, give it tags, people can then vote for it…you can also view posts by popularity]

[ADDED 10/02/07: NowPublic is another Cit J service like Newsvine, NewsCloud and Wikio]

[ADDED 10/02/07: Also see Change.Org for a topic based Cit J site on social activism]

[ADDED 28/02/07: Sweeble, Outside.in, Smalltown, insiderPages, Yelp]

Twitter Tips

Twitter enables you to post updates to your presence stream via SMS, IM, or the web form.

I use IM updates, if you leave it on, you can get lots of updates, it depends on how many friends you have, this is what I do:

- I open my IM in the morning and post on
- then I post get
- then I post off, but still keep my IM window open

What I’m, doing is posting on to receive updates as they happen, but I want to see what I’ve missed out on while I was asleep, so I post get to receive the latest updates from all my friends.
I could choose to do nothing else and just wait for the updates as they happen, but if you have a lot of friends that post frequently you will have IM popping up all the time, so I just turn it off, by posting off.

In an hour’s time I will post on, and then post get, and then post off again.

LINGO
on - enable twitter updates
get - get recent updates from all your friends
off - disable twitter updates

If you want to get the last update from just one user instead of all your friends you can post on, then post get username instead of posting get.

LINGO
get username - get this person’s last update

You may decide not to post off in this instance as you won’t mind updates if they are just coming from one friend, but this isn’t so…you can’t keep it fixed to just keep getting updates limited to this person, because you posted on earlier, sooner or later you will get live updates from any of your friends.

The way around this is to post on, then leave all, then follow username.

LINGO
leave all - turns off updates of your entire friends list
follow username - you will get updates from this person

In contrast if you want updates from all your friends except one, you could post on, then post follow all, then post leave username…then you might post off, otherwise you will get heaps of live updates.

LINGO
follow all - turns on updates for your entire friends list
leave username - disables updates from this person

MORE LINGO
nudge username - encourages this peron to update
stats - a few statistics about your Twitter account
help - sends back a list of Twitter lingo commands
invite 415-555-1212 username - sends a text to invite a someone (the number is this person’s actual phone number)…but this commanr doesn’t work with IM.
Add 415-555-1212 username - to add a friend
accept - accept friend invitation
deny - deny friend invitation
delete username - works from the web only, bit sure about IM

On your web settings there is an auto-nudge to remind yourself to update, there is also a Sleep option to auto turn your updates on and off.

Chat

Twitter is more about presence, stream of consciousness, rather than chat. Reason being if someone replies to anothers Twitter post how do others know the context, it is a kind of spam to everyone else.

Person A posts, Person B follows Person A (Person B has added Person A as a friend), Person B sends a reply type post, Person A receives this as they follow Person B (Person A has added Person B as a friend) .
Person C follows Person B (Person C has added Person B as a friend), but doesn’t not follow Person A (Person C has not added Person A as a friend), this means Person C did not receive the inital post from Person A.

So when Person B sends a reply type post to Person A, Person C will receive it as they follow Person B, but will not understand the context (they won’t know what this post is replying to as they did not see the initial post by Person A since they don’t follow them).

Some people seem to be using Twitter in this way, but at least when they do they are using a greeting command so others know just to ignore it eg. @username - yeah 2pm sounds fine.

A way around this is to post the “reply” as a Direct Message (private) to a friend, by posting D username [insert message here]

eg. D Paul yeah 2pm sounds fine.

Then the original person can reply by sending a direct message back.

I wonder if you can send a direct message to multiple people
eg. D Paul + Peter yeah 2pm sounds fine.

LINGO
D username - send a direct (private) message

On your web settings you can set to get just Direct Messages only (I don’t think there is a phone command for this)

Here is the post by Eirepreneur about this chatting issue:

“I’m beginning to see more and more people using Twitter like IRC or a chat room, with messages like this -

Username: @Whoever: Agreed, I thought the same thing

Now unless I’m also following ‘Whoever’ I don’t have a clue what ‘Username’ is talking about and even if I did this isn’t a chat room….. it’s not for conversation… it’s for stream of consciousness thoughts or status reports. Yes, I could of course just stop following the people who do that but better to first try instilling an appropriate netiquette for the new medium.”

Tom Morris has an answer that goes beyond Direct Messages:

“…I wish Twitter would introduce a way to send a “public direct” message - meaning that it would be sent direct to the person but also could be seen by anyone who is a friend of both you and them. That way, people who are just friends of one participant in a conversation don’t get bothered with the updates….”

This makes sense - Person A could send a public direct message to Person B, and whoever follows both Person A and Person B will receive the message. That way when Person B replies, it can be done the same way, whoever follows both of them will get the reply.

eg. if Person C follows Person B, but not Person A, then they will not get the initial public direct message post from Person A…this is nothing different so far. BUT, when Person B replies with a public direct message to Person A, Person C will not see this even though they follow Person B. The reason they don’t see this is that it is not a normal post, but a public direct message post.

To re-iterate to get the initial message or reply Person C has to follow both Person A and Person B (both of the people have to be added as a friend in Person C’s profile)

Hmmm…Twitter is not meant to be used for chat, and perhaps this would induce more chatting…but at least it won’t be shown on the public page, since it’s not confusing anyone, I don’t see the harm, it is just extending the direct message option.

If this was implemented this would be the closest thing to a “group”, even though it is not a formal group.

Update by mobile email hack

As I explained in my last post I don’t want to pay to receive updates by SMS (not sure if you have to anyway, as you are receiving).

Since I can receive emails for free on my phone I could get Twitter updates for free, all I have to do is get the RSS feed of my friends timeline (available from my user page or my admin page):

eg. http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/10120.rss

Then use an RSS to email service like Rmail…done, now I will receive an email any time one of my friends updates.

This is a lot of emails, so may instead I could choose 3 or 4 friends I want to follow. To do this I just go to their user page and grab their feed.

eg. of mine http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/10120.rss

Then I would go to Rmail and set up 4 separate RSS to email updates.

You could splice the 4 feeds into one feed (using Feed Digest or others), but this isn’t really going to make a difference in the frequency of delivery.

For each RSS feed or the spliced feed maybe you could choose some sort of digest delivery (this means you don’t want the email as it happens, you’d rather get an email every 3 hours with the accumulated updates all in the one email).

But what I want to do the most is be able to post by email (as it only costs me $3 a month to send unlimited emails).

Is there a way I could send an email to my IM, which would then automatically send the post to the Twitter contact…this seems impossible?

[ADDED 26/01/07: Just realised my phone provider lets you use MSN or Yahoo! IM for $5 a month, this is great news, maybe I can post (and receive) to Twitter via IM on my phone]

[ADDED 07/02/07: Whois Command - whois - profile of a person (includes: last update, location, bio, and website)
eg. whois johnt]

[ADDED 15/03/07: Twitter : what are the possibilities]

[ADDED 15/03/07: Twitter comments or conversations]

[ADDED 16/03/07: Twittermaps mashup]

[ADDED 26/03/07: TwitterVision : realtime maps]

[ADDED 26/03/07: Twitterholic]

[ADDED 26/03/07: TwitThis and TwitterBuzz]

[ADDED 27/03/07: Mail2Twitter and RSS2Twitter]

[ADDED 28/03/07: TriGGr, Autotwit]

[ADDED 3/04/07: EmailTwitter.com now has email updates on demand and direct messages]

[ADDED 4/04/07: Twapper does Twitter groups]

[ADDED 4/04/07: Pluggd mashup that will post to Twitter the current podcast you are listening to]

[ADDED 10/04/07: Twitter Earth]

[ADDED 10/04/07: Twitterverse word bursts]

[ADDED 12/04/07: Twitter word bursts: Twitterverse, Twitterzone, TwitterSearch, ZoomCloud]

[ADDED 12/04/07: FeedBlitz enabling to subscribe to blogs with Twitter]

[ADDED 12/04/07: Twitterment : search and trends for Twitter]

[ADDED 27/04/07: Twitterviz, urlTea, Phonetag]

[ADDED 2/05/07 : TweetTweet, Twazr]

[ADDED 8/5/07: TwitBin, Tweetbar]

[ADDED 11/5/07: FeedBlitz Direct To You, Tweetr]

[ADDED 16/05/07: Monitwitter]

[ADDED 22/05/07: Twittervision 3D]

[ADDED 23/05/07: Tweetvolume]

[ADDED 13/06/07: DIY mashup of Twitter friends tweets on a map]

[ADDED 18/06/07: Roundup : Twittermosaic, Twit Dir, TweetAhead, twitter timer, Twitigg, Egorcast, brabblr, Twitter replies]

[ADDED 12/07/07: Twitter in real life]

[ADDED 19/07/07: Roundup: Flotzam, Twitt.icio.us, Twitterfaces, Tw3t, Twittermail]

[ADDED 3/08/07: Groups : Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku]

[ADDED 3/08/07: Roundup: Satisfaction, Nouncer, Yappd, Twitku, Grazr Twitter Reader]

[ADDED 08/09/07: Groups : Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku]

[ADDED 27/09/07: Terraminds Twitter search channel hack]

[ADDED 27/09/07: Twitter channel hack for real]

[ADDED 30/09/07: Tracking Twitter is almost a channel]

[ADDED 30/09/07: Roundup : Twitter Digest, OutTwit, Twiddeo, TwitBacker, TwitterNotes]

[ADDED 11/11/07: Roundup : Eventtrack, Tweet Scan, Inner Twitter, TwitterPoster, Loud Twitter, Twibble]

[ADDED 14/11/07: Roundup : TwitterWhere, Twype, tweetafile, PingTwitter, Twit Like Me, TwitterSync]

[ADDED 14/11/07: Roundup : Twittercal, Twitter-a-day, Twitstat, Twitteria, TwitDB]

[ADDED 11/12/07: Roundup : TweetChannel, PlusPlusBot, Tweetl, @locals, Twitter @replies update]

[ADDED 24/01/08: Roundup : Ideajam, SHOULD do THIS , digFoot , digfoot, Tweeterboard, Gridjit]

[ADDED 30/01/08: Roundup : Roundup : Tweetmeme, Shouting Mat.ch, Twitter100, Hellotxt, Heysan]

[ADDED 31/01/08: Roundup : twit.io, TwitterWhere, vcasmo, kwout, ControlC]

[ADDED 5/03/08: Roundup : TweetSpeak, Twitter Packs, Twittershare, Tweet What You Eat, Twixtr]

[ADDED 5/03/08: Roundup : ReaderBurner, Strawpoll Twitter, Twittermeter, Twimblr, Qik]

[ADDED 25/03/08: Roundup : Quotably, Twemes, Twitzer, Twitsig, serendipiTwitterous]

[ADDED 9/04/08: Roundup : Twitter Teams, Twitter Treats, Twitter Lights, Twitter Soap, Twitter Friends Network Browser]

[ADDED 9/04/08: Roundup : Comtwit, TweetPeek, Twitpic, TweetBurner, TweetClouds]

[ADDED10/04/08: Roundup : Twubble, GroupTweet, Ambient Avatars, Twitterfox, Twitterlocal]

[ADDED 15/04/08: Roundup : TwitterWho, TwitsLikeMe, SnapTweet, TwittNot, TweetDumpr]

[ADDED 15/04/08: Roundup : twaction, Twhither, Tipr, TwitLinks, Twitter Troll]

[ADDED 16/04/08: Roundup : DailyTwitter, ReporTwitters, gtFtr, ili.st, RetweetMe]

[ADDED 19/04/08: Roundup : Summize, Twitterspy, Twitter Presenter, Twit Plus, 24 o’clocks]

[ADDED 4/06/08: Roundup : Twitter PollDaddy, TwitResponse, TwitterReply, TwitEarth, Twitimonials]

[ADDED 4/06/08: Roundup : YouTwit, Twist, Twistory, Twerp Scan, Twitternothing]

[ADDED 4/06/08: Roundup : TweetWheel, Twitter Blacklist, Twitt(url)y, TweetSpeech, Twitterfone]

[ADDED 4/06/08: Slandr takes on Twitter mobile]

[ADDED 10/06/08: Roundup : Crowdstatus, Twistori, Tweetcube, Twanslate, Twiddict]

[ADDED 12/06/08: Roundup : MyTweeple, TwitterSnooze, Who Should I Follow, Twit 2 SMS, Twisky]

[ADDED 16/06/08: Roundup : Tweet 2 Tweet, Does Follow, TwitTag, TwitterCounter, Twitter Ratio]

[ADDED 16/06/08: Roundup : TwitterPark, TweetAnswers, TweetLists, Twellow, TwitterCard]

[ADDED 19/06/08: Roundup : Tweet Boards, Twitscoop, My Tweet Map, Tweet Later, Tweeqs]

[ADDED 17/07/08: Roundup : Twitabit, Twannabe, Tweet Thread, TwitterBash, TweetMarks]

[ADDED 17/07/08: Roundup : Tweetshots, TweetPaste, Matt, Chirrup, Twebinar]

[ADDED 25/07/08: Roundup : Twiffid, TwitterFresh, Twitter StreamGraphs, Easy Tweets, Replize]

[ADDED 25/07/08: Roundup : Twadl , AnswerMe, Tweenky, TweetMyPage, TweetParty]

[ADDED 14/08/08: Roundup : Monittor, Phweet, TwitStamp, Roomatic, TwitHire]

[ADDED 19/08/08: Roundup : Tweetake, Twitly, FLOATwitter, ToAnswer, Twit-it]

[ADDED 22/09/08: Roundup : Twitter Grader, Tweetrush, Lazytweet, Twittad, tweetSMS]

[ADDED 22/09/08: Roundup : Twitgraph, Tweetbeep, Twitbuzz, Tweeple Twak, TwitterSafe]

[ADDED 16/01/08: Roundup : excla.im, Twitterkeys, Dwigger, Social Tops, Tweader]