Monthly Archive for March, 2007

How can we capitalise on Twitter’s addictiveness?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 13/3/2007
in Blogging
. 15 Comments

This blog has been a little neglected in the last few days because I have been off playing around with researching Twitter.

I’m not sure what Twitter is - it is like a micro-blogging tool. You can access it through IM, RSS, the web or your mobile (via SMS). Because of the SMS part you are limited to 140 characters per posting! This limitation quickly becomes part of the attraction of using it. Instead of having to think about and compose longer blog posts, you simply quickly type in what you are doing at any particular time (i.e. “Starting work on presentation for Eventsnet“).

It has taken off hugely amongst early adopters and is grabbing everyone’s interest. Steve Rubel has an interesting piece written about how this has implications for the Attention Economy and he goes on to posit:

If Twitter continues its meteoric rise, then we may well be witnessing a changing of the guard. That doesn’t mean blogging as we know it will go away. But it will surely morph in Twitter’s wake if a big shift is underway.

I think Steve is correct in this, just judging from my own experience. Since I started looking into Twitter, my own reading/blogging output has diminished.

Now, if Twitter is grabbing all this attention, how can we capitalise on Twitter’s addictiveness? By that I mean, I can see a business case for blogs, but what is the business case for Twitter?

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We have lost faith in advertising (if we ever had any)

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 9/3/2007
in advertising and social media
. 20 Comments

We have, by and large, stopped believing in advertising. Why is that?

It is because we are sick of being lied to by advertisers. Shampoos which ‘nourish’ our hair? Now with added ‘citrus technology’? Hair is composed of dead cells. You can’t nourish dead cells.

We are being bombarded by lie-vertising and we have learned to tune it out.

I was in Seville over the Christmas break and one day, while walking down the Carretera Carmona, I saw the following ad on the side of a building site advertising the apartments being built, for sale:
Apartments for sale!

Notice the “Calidades de Primera” screaming out in ALL CAPS! Loosely that translates as Premium Quality. Yeah, right. You see that on a sign and immediately you become suspicious.

What made it all the more obvious was that not 10m away was another sign on an adjacent building site. This time though, I would be prepared to believe that these apartments are of a reasonable quality. Why? Because they don’t feel the need to say so!

More Apartments for sale

One of the big advantages of Social Media is that they are extremely transparent. You simply cannot get away with lying in a blog or podcast. You will be found out and your reputation will suffer.

Advertisers are looking enviously at the trust afforded bloggers wondering “How can I get some of that credibility?”

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My desk

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 9/3/2007
in Personal
. 6 Comments

Pat tagged me to put up a photo of my desk.

I had to do a lot of tidying up before taking this photo (just out of sight is a large mound of papers/cables/etc which had to be swept off the desk :-)  ) - here it is in all its glory!

My Desk

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WordPress.com becomes an OpenID provider

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 7/3/2007
in Technology
. 0 Comments

WordPress.com, the WordPress powered, hosted, free blogging platform has just announced support for OpenID. What this means is that if you have a WordPress.com account, you now automatically have an OpenID!

What is OpenID? From the faq:

OpenID is an open standard that lets you sign in to other sites on the Web using your WordPress.com account. This means less usernames and passwords to remember and less time spent signing up for new sites.

WordPress hasn’t yet enabled OpenID sign in to WordPress.com (!) so for now this is one way but the plan is to make it two way I understand.

As Richard MacManus noted:

37Signals support is nigh. These two organizations join Digg, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, LiveJournal, MediaWiki, and others in their support of OpenID

Support for OpenID is growing in leaps and bounds. Hopefully the days of having hundreds of usernames and passwords to log into different sites is coming to a close.

WordPress.com supports OpenID

Via Conor’s Twitter stream

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Off to WebCamp

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 7/3/2007
in Technology
. 3 Comments

Off to WebCamp in Galway - looks like an interesting line-up!

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Skitch

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 6/3/2007
in Technology
. 7 Comments

I was sent an invite to try Skitch. Skitch is a downloadable Mac app for taking pictures (via screen grab or from web cam) or adding pictures to via drag and drop; then annotating or doodling on the pictures, before sharing the resultant image via web service or simply dragging to email or desktop.

The application’s interface is incredibly slick and it is easily one of the most straightforward UI’s I have ever come across.

There is a video demo of it here

Look what it enabled me to do to this unfortunate photo taken at the recent Irish Blog Awards

Skitch

Skitch is in private beta at the moment but you can register your interest here.

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