Writer’s block comes eventually to all bloggers. You know you want to write a “7 ways to …” style article and you can only come up with 5 ways to do anything. What do you do? Like the song says, I get by with a little help from my friends. In this case my friends were my twitter followers.

The article I was writing yesterday was “7 Things You Should Pack/Bring When You Travel To San Francisco“. Once you have mentioned to take warm clothing and a camera, what’s left? So I sent out a tweat:

I am writing a blog post on “7 things you should pack when you travel to San Francisco”. I am a few short. Ideas?

Within about a half an hour I had five good responses from slightly over 1000 followers. That is about a .5% response rate, but I only needed two ideas and I had at least one I would not have thought of.

MikeTRose @chris2x Allergy medications. For some reason, East Coasters like me get the sniffles in SF.

That made perfect sense to me with the dampness of San Francisco, but it was outside my experience so it would not have occurred to me.

I think there are takeaways from this experience:

• I might do this in the future even if I can come up with 7 things on my own. Why not write a list of 9 things instead.
• People helped me out so I gave them credit because fair is fair.
• I had a 3rd takeaway a minute ago, what am I missing?

Paul Colligan’s latest post “Would Somebody Please Let Me PAY For Service – Twitter, GrandCentral.Com, Ustream.Tv, Mogulus, Bueller, Anyone …” reminded me of an idea I had for Twitter. Twitter are you listening?

Like many people I love twitter but would love it even more if it worked on a consistent and predictable basis. My company runs large community sites and I understand how hard this can be but I also know we would be out of business… sorry, that’s a different post.

A popular business model that has been talked about for twitter is advertising mixed in with the feed. This leads many users to cringe. But it is clear that twitter has value so someone should be willing to pay for it. Who values twitter? Companies, bloggers, podcasters (like me), presidential candidates and Tv personalities all use twitter. They use twitter for:

• PR – getting or keeping their name in front of people
• Advertising – a twitter link to an audience who is interested in what you have to say is hundreds of times more efficient than an advertising campaign in my experience. A banner ad shown to thousands of strangers might get one click. A twitter post with a link to hundreds of followers can easily get a dozen click thrus because you are talking to people who already care about what you have to say.

The more followers I have the more valuable twitter is to my business or to my ego. So why not charge $1 per 100 followers per month or some similar charge. My monthly bill would be around $6 a month. Barack Obama’s would be between $400-500. If you don’t want to be charged, you could limit your followers.

Or what if it cost you something to put a link in a twitter post?

Alternatively, you could also have a charge for following more than a certain number of people per day or per week. Some people use following as a way to put their name in front of a group of people. They are not really following what all those people are saying, they are advertising. I think most people understand that advertising costs money. Maybe an interface that let companies at least be more honest about it. You would get an email that says “John Doe wants you to follow him”.

What are your ideas? What would you be willing to pay if it meant a more stable long term twitter?

It was a hard week for hardware in my house. My trusted TiVo and my MacBook Pro both broke in the same week. The Mac was quickly fixed (a $1700 repair including new logic board for free under AppleCare) and I actually had a new TiVo in the closet. In both cases the real loss (even if temporarily) was not the hardware but the data. This got me thinking about where is my data stored and the advantage of online data storage.

del.icio.us

The first change I have made is a return to del.icio.us. del.icio.us is a popular bookmarking tool that you are probably already using as was I but not for my main bookmarks. I use Safari on the Mac as my main browser in large part because of the hundreds of bookmarks that I have in the browser. I am experimenting with adding all me newest bookmarks to del.icio.us instead.

Advantages of del.icio.us :

• My bookmarks are now backed up on someone else’s hardware
• My bookmarks are now shareable
• My bookmarks become browser independent
• There are plugins for both Safari and Firefox to let me use my bookmarks in an integrated fashion
• I can now tag and describe my bookmarks

Disadvantages of using del.icio.us :

• When I am offline I no long have access to my bookmarks
• I have to decide what information is public. When you watch my bookmarks you get insite to what I am thinking these days. That can be a good thing or a bad thing.

Evernote

Chris Brogan had twittered about Evernote recently which made me look again at this service. It is a difficult to describe service that allows you to put your notes (including pictures of hand written notes or any other pictures) into a database. The database is automatically mirrored onto the Evernote servers on the Internet. The idea then is that you could collect scraps of info on your computer or even from your cell phone. You can then organize or view them from anywhere you can open a browser including your cell phone. The service even has built in OCR functionality so that pictures of a sticky note, for instance, can be searched via a text search. I have just started using the service but could easily see it replacing my current solution (SOHO Notes) for those little bits of information you want to find again.

I have blogged about my experiences with Twitter before. I realized recently that these posts document my journey from a twitter skeptic to a twitter addict.

• Twittervision – People I don’t know telling me things I don’t care about
• Microblogging with Twitter and Jaiku
• My Favorite Quotes – Confessions of a Twitter Lurker
• Notes from the 2007 PNME (Podcast and New Media Expo)
• Twitter and TwitterPod
• Living with CPA (Continuous Partial Attention)
• Hope vs What?

There are a number of different ways that people use the microblogging service that is Twitter.com and there is some contention about what is the “correct” way to use it. Merlin Mann (who made my list of favorite twitter posters in: My Favorite Quotes – Confessions of a Twitter Lurker) has argued that twitter is poetry. The 140 character updates that one is limited to in twitter are a form of haiku.

But I find more and more form me personally twitter is more like digg.com. It is a place where I learn interesting stories from interesting people. I notice that I gravitate to some of the people I follow who have an interesting story to tell me. I still use RSS feeds to track interesting blogs but I find that I only check my RSS reader every other day or so now, because I have already read the best stories via twitter.

Follow Chris Christensen at http://twitter.com/chris2x

I had sent out a twitter message this morning saying:

“Is it cynical of me to characterize the election as choosing between hope (with no specifics) over fear (with no answers)?”

It looks like other’s had that a similar thought today. From Seth Godin’s blog:

It’s too easy to criticize hope

And in the end, cynicism is a lousy strategy.

As I write this blog post I am also watching a movie. It is not that the movie is so bad, in fact it is a movie I like, but I suffer from CPA (Continuous Partial Attention).

CPA has struck the nation with the fervor of an epidemic. We talk on cell phones while driving, surf the web while watching TV, instant message in meetings, text while shopping, and talk in movies. People who live with CPA are never quite present where they are present. There is not a whole lot of there when we are there. It is an affliction that more and more American’s live with. We live with the constant distraction by shiny objects. There is no known cure for those afflicted with CPA. So here are some guidelines for living with the malady.

• Spaces – Create some spaces where there are less distractions. I used to think that I could work in front of the television. I was convinced that I could multi-task. Those who suffer from CPA call it “multi-tasking”. We can do two things at once and do it well we tell ourselves. All my podcasting takes place in a room in the second story of our house away from the TV in the family room.
• Times – Create some times where you can focus. In my house, Saturday mornings are quiet enough to podcast without distractions. Mornings are always quiet when everyone else in the house is a night owl. Limit some activities to certain hours. I try to not check my (500) RSS feeds between 9am and 6pm, if I don’t get to them before “work hours” they can wait.
• Limits – Yes, the web is calling out to you. But make a plan what websites you will check how often. Create a daily folder for web sites you want to check once a day. Only check them once a day. Create another folder for websites that you only need to check once a week. Only check them once a week. Yes, your email is urgent, but you don’t have to check your email every 5 minutes, change your email program to only check once an hour, less often if you can get away with it. Check your RSS feeds daily, but no more.
• Breaks – I have learned that I can’t work 7 days a week without burning out. Pick a day, my day is Saturday, when the work email can stay unopened.
• Edit – I subscribe to about 100 podcasts (yes it is an addiction, but remember people with CPA like to “multi-task”) but finally learned to give myself permission to skip through episodes that don’t grab my attention. If a show sits on my Tivo for 3 weeks before I watch it, maybe I can just delete it. I am still learning that trick.
• Timeouts – If I need to concentrate on a particular project then I know I need to stop the podcasts i am listening to, shut off twitter, quit my email program and maybe even shut down my instance message client.

There is is no known cure for CPA but with help you can learn to live with the… what’s that… ooooo shiny.

If like me, you have become addicted to Twitter, then you should check out the TwitterPod application for the Mac.

If you have been living in a cave, twitter is a web based server that allows people to “micro blog”. You can enter any text that will fit in a 140 character limit. Twitter updates (or tweets) can also be delivered to your cell phone if you so desire. People twitter about blog articles they have written, what they have had for breakfast or words of wisdom as long as it fits in 140 characters. Many podcasters and bloggers have started to use twitter because you can send updates to a set of people who follow you but follow the updates, potentially, of a completely different set of people. I (my podcast is the Amateur Traveler) twitter at chris2x.

The best twitter updates I received (or wrote) the day before I wrote this article (which orriginally appeared on MacCast.com:

acedtect Happy Arbitrary Roman-derived change of annual enumeration.

leolaporte Turkish coffee and a flight to Aswan where we meet the Sun Boat IV. Sarkozy and Blair are in town, snarling the traffic.

chris2x just a thought, when Clark Kent gets new frames, does anyone recognize him?

scottsimpson For the record, a certain part of my anatomy has also been compared to a baby’s arm: my arm.

hotdogsladies GoDaddy’s checkout is like a hallway of Marines trying to hit you with a sock full of pennies. “Ow! Quit it! Don’t need ‘WebSite Tonight!!’”

CaliLewis “When we honor the potato, we honor ourselves.” Just heard it on NPR.

Ihnatko The fonts I bought from Comicraft for $20.08 each (with one freebie plus a $16 discount…details in post): http://tinyurl.com/3d36aq

And if those literary gems make you more interested in Twitter than as a Mac user one program that I would recommend is TwitterPod which has a clean interface and growl notification. It also highlights the last post you read (you can read URLs posted in a pop out panel) so it makes it easy to tell what posts are new.

Let the tweats begin.

I got back last Sunday from the PNME conference in Ontario, Californa. This is the biggest conference of the year for podcasters and it is a wonderful combination of smoozing, presentations, hobnobbing, and networking with other people who are also obsessed with podcasting. Tim and Emile Bourquin (The Podcast Brothers) did another wonderful job on the conference.

Some of my thoughts…

Read the rest of this entry »

I have been watching friends, famous people and famous friends on both Twitter and Jaiku recently. Both are micro-blogs that allow you to answer the question “what are you doing right now”. I rarely post myself as either:

a) what i am doing is boring even to me

b) I am working on something interesting at work but can’t talk about it

Most of what gets posted is the banality of every day life, but amidst the “I am going to bed” and “I am eating pizza” notifications I spotted these memorable quotes:

notstevenwright In school they told me “practice makes perfect.” Then they told me “nobody’s perfect.” So then I stopped practicing

GordonWSmythe Bush says we’ll leave Iraq if they ask us. In unrelated news, White House cuts off communication with Iraq.

hotdogsladies Talking to smart people throughout your day helps mitigate the corrosive effects of dealing with the unapologetically dim-witted remainder.

GordonWSmytheScientists discover the origins of deja-vu. Is it just me or have I heard this story before?

notstevenwright A friend of mine has a trophy wife, but apparently it wasn’t first place.

As well as these that offer an interesting insight into the human condition (and make you want to support those fundraisers that are trying to address it):

hotdogsladies I’m with scottsimpson; Facebook is a lot more fun if you imply you’ve had sex with every person on your friends list.

Veronica Some dude is standing outside my apartment Tasering his friends. He got one guy in the butt. Wow.

hotdogsladies Let’s make a deal: you keep saying “user-generated content” all you want, but I get to punch you in the throat every time you say it. Fair?

I have been experimenting more recently with both Twitter and Jaiku which are both micro blogging solutions. If you aren’t familiar with these two solutions they are basically software that let you say what you are doing right now to a set of people who have expressed an interest in hearing about your daily goings on.

Twitter

Twitter is the first of these two systems and the more popular one. You can twitter from your cell phone via email or SMS or from a web browser. Among the 56 people that I currently follow a message may range from a recent blog post, a breaking news story to what they are having for dinner. Twitter is a one way conversation so some messages are of the form “@chris2x: I agree” which is a message being broadcast to all of the users followers but targeted to a comment made by the users chris2x. This is a bit silly and points out the need for comments. You can also get twitter messages through IM so this is a very timely system.

Jaiku

Jaiku has, in my opinion, a better interface than twitter with the addition of comments and the ability to have Jaiku monitor your blog, podcast, flickr, etc RSS feeds. So when you post something to your blog it automatically shows up on Jaiku. Since Twitter can produce an RSS feed some people update Jaiku by posting to twitter which is oddly circular.

Two deficiencies in Jaiku are that unlike Twitter you follow everyone who follows you. Twitters with large entourages have already learned on Twitter not to do that if you want any minute in your life without interruptions. It also lacks the IM updates that Twitter provides.