The Facebook Book

I did write in the past about a business idea that allowed people to have their Facebook profiles turned in to a book…well it seems that someone has beaten me to it!

Jason Dunn at DigitialHomeThoughts.com had one printed, and to be honest, it looks pretty tacky. It is such a great idea, however it do think it needs a little work. I suppose I could do Twitter instead, although that doesn’t have the same collage of images in it – however it would mean that it wouldn’t allow someone to give access to their account so you could do it as a gift.

theSpoke Archive: Sorting Out All Those Feeds

I have spent this past week trawling through archives of RSS feeds, posts, website Favorites of articles, images, promotions, and everything else this week that I have amassed over the past few years.

Articles have ranged from posts on advice to run a business, tech articles, DVDs to watch, music to listen to, image to retain for future inspiration to name a few. With close to five years worth of information, I have successfully culled a lot of it by either retaining the information or storing it to blog about later or Amazon Wish Lists. The rest was either now irrelevant, or of no longer any interest. Some of which, I wish I did read at the time. Such house cleaning lead me to a theSpoke archive post of mine from the past:

Sorting Out All Those Feeds (18/11/2005)

I have finally managed to get on top of sorting out Newsgator in my Outlook, downloading all the feeds I actually want to read and cleared out all the junk that I kind of subscribed to purely that one post looked interesting and the rest were just rubbish really…but who am I to judge: one man’s rubbish is another mans treasure.

I have found the new theSpoke to be a lot slower loading up (even with a 2Mbps connection – although connecting wirelessly to the network), so I have decided to download all the feeds I subscribed to straight into one folder instead of one individual folder for each person – my screen resolution is big but not that big!

I have 39 blogs in Newsgator with about 5-6 website blogs that use RSS 1.0 and are just easier to read on the website than just download the small snippets of the blog. I really do struggle at times to try and keep on top of reading them all. I have one folder that is the Microsoft Communities which feeds all the blogs by Microsoft into one folder instead of trying to search through the individual blogs – although I think I will use this method to search out the blogs I really want from Microsoft then delete the major blog if that makes any sense!

One thing that does seem to irritate me about blogging is the somewhat laziness of it. I susbscribed to this one blog as the guy wrote about his blogging and trying to explain it to his mother.  That blog alone convinced me it was worth further reading. The rest of his blogs were just one liners pointing to other blogs that pointed to other blogs about a topic. Blogging seems to contain alot of pointless cross-referencing. The reason I like the idea of blogging is that people discuss their own personal views on a topic of any type and its this that makes the reading interesting to see how others think. Yet a one line blog to say what someone wrote about something is altogether pointless and the person might as well have saved that time to write interesting blog other than multiple one lines on nothing.

Interestingly enough, the rant in the last paragraph is pretty much what Twitter has become. If I only I acted upon it…

Discover Your World on Twitter

I am a late-Twitter convert, although I am still not 100% convinced in to using as a primary communication tool. I did however discover this inspiring Twitter-produced video, highlighting how the platform is used around the world.

Why I Use Twitter

I have been very staunch against the use of Twitter, and could never really understand why people would use it. Some of the people in my previous job used to go on about it and even mock those who didn’t use it – I think they helped put a downer on the whole concept of Twitter as I think a lot of users don’t understand it, or don’t use it properly. Then again, is there a way to “use it properly”. Twitter hardly comes with an instruction manual.

When Twitter was first released, it was promoted as a SMS-replacement, but offering a much more interactive, feature-rich and more widening method of communication with others. It was also promoted as a micro-blogging platform. I couldn’t understand what you could blog in 140 charachters. I also didn’t have data usage on my phone, so the SMS replacement service seemed null and void to me.

When I started this blog, I did install the WordPress plugin WP to Twitter, to broadcast my latest posts and widen the scope of advertising my posts to the world. Even then, I didn’t follow anyone and didn’t really see the need to.

The other day, I installed TweetDeck to see what it was all about and I did get slightly “hooked” as to the ease of it and it has caused a U-turn in my thinking. When I started the blog, I started becoming more aware of one-liners, brain-farts and short sentences of ingenuity that were just too short to make into a useful blog post – or at least the effort to turn in to a blog post.

So, I have decided that this is what I am going to use Twitter for. I am going to keep my blog to my views and activities and use Twitter for all the short stints and phases that I want to keep – I think this is probably an approach a lot of bloggers use an dI have just been very slow to the party.

I did make my first Tweet-dump just before writing this post:

Slug 1: Hi-Five? Slug 2: Epic. Fail.

Slugs don’t have hands, if you didn’t get it! You will agree though, its a quote too good to be lost.

I do still think that a lot of people don’t make maximum use of Twitter or use it for what it’s for – but as I said in the beginning, it is a very versatile tool that can everyone else’s own personal preference on how to use it.

</stick-in-the-mud>

I have watched this very cool video on The Heavy Chef Project, where Rich Mulholland talks about the differences and uses of Twitter alongside. Smart man, and I think we share a lot of the same ideologies.

You have to go in 3:29 minutes to get the line:

Blogging creates content…
…Twitter distributes it.