I realised I haven’t updated in a week, yet I have. I’m Donncha on the following social webs:
I had completely forgotten about Phoenix, the mission to land a robotic craft at the North Pole of Mars. I was reminded by tehnosailor who twittered about the @marsphoenix Twitter account.
Follow that account to hear the latest news from the team in Nasa! They’ve also linked to related movies and pages about the mission. I’m watching the one about the last 7 minutes now. Exciting stuff. Good luck guys!
2,913 followers right now. I wonder how many more they’ll have by the time of the landing?
I think this must rate as the coolest use of Twitter, ever!
Sorry ifoods.tv, just because you’ve been nominated for best Web 2.0 Start up in Europe is no reason to spam members of the Irish blogosphere.
They didn’t even do it very well, leaving Tom Raftery‘s email address in the To: field and attaching a Word .doc file with the text, “Please Find attached press release” in the body of the text. I mean, come on, Web 2.0 my arse. If you had a clue you’d have built up a following on Twitter just like Pat Phelan or Paul Walsh. You would have got us interested in what you do.
Get thee back to Web 0.1
Edit Michele has blogged about them too. Love this quote,
You may have been nominated for an award, but it obviously wasn’t in marketing or email usage based on the rubbish you sent me today and the way you sent it.
Pat Phelan launched his new service, Twitterfone to much excitement last night.
Techcrunch had the scoop and as Michael Arrington offered a free account to one of the commenters, he got some interesting responses!
In the third grade, a crazy, spooky looking girl chased me with finger paint, and smeared it on my shirt, cackling like the wicked witch. It left emotional scars (at night I still hear the laughing, and I constantly check the back of shirts I’m wearing in the mirror).
The Twitterfone account would help with the healing.
If you haven’t guessed by the title of this post already, Twitterfone allows you to speak your tweets instead of texting them or typing them on a device. You can hear my Hello World voice tweet as well as read it. I have to admit, I found it harder to articulate a short sentence under the pressure of speaking into a phone than to type it, but that’s just me. My next oral masterpiece will be me saying my own name so Charles doesn’t murder it on the WordPress Podcast next time! 😉
The absolutely gorgeous Twitterfone website was created by the talented Sabrina Dent. When Pat first spilled the beans on his newest project he had nothing but good things to say about her!
I’ve always wondered, ‘What really happens behind the scenes at Google when I hit the “Google Search” button?’
(via Scott)
John Pozadzides sent me a Woopra invite several weeks ago and I eventually signed up last week so it’s been collecting stats on this website for a while. John did an interview with Cali Lewis of Geekbrief which goes some way into explaining why Woopra is worth checking out. It was after watching that video that I decided to sign up.
Woopra has a neat Java based desktop interface but initially I only used the web interface. That’s not so bad, but it’s static and doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the desktop app. I have to confess, I was slow to install the desktop client, simply because I have a “Oh no, Java is too much trouble” switch in my brain from long ago when I attempted to install the JRE. This time it was much easier, thanks to Ubuntu’s repositories.
$ sh woopra_unix.sh
No suitable Java Virtual Machine could be found on your system.
The version of the JVM must be at least 1.6.
Please define INSTALL4J_JAVA_HOME to point to a suitable JVM.
You can also try to delete the JVM cache file /home/donncha/.install4j
$ rm -fr .install4j
$ aptitude install sun-java6-jre
$ sh woopra_unix.sh
After installing the Java runtime, installation of Woopra was simple. I’ve been looking at it now for a few hours and it’s nice. The ticker tape stats at the bottom are a neat touch, especially the up and down markers that give an indication of how your traffic compares with the day before.
Unfortunately I don’t obsess about traffic stats any more. If I did, I would absolutely love this application. If I was targeting a particular keyword and honing the SEO aspects of my site then I would find this Woopra invaluable. Like Google Analytics, I’m confident Woopra will become a useful tool I’ll come back to when it’s needed. It doesn’t even use that many resources. I barely see it ping home for new data and the Java app is reasonably light.
Oh yeah, I haven’t obscured any of the stats in the screenshots. This blog gets several thousand hits a day if you’re interested, although none from Turkmenistan apparently. I guess if I had Woopra running when Turkmenbashi died it may have showed a blip or two of traffic from that region!
@wubud (pronounced woo-bud) is where Paul Walsh will reveal his next venture. You may remember Paul from a previous post here about his qik adventures when he missed his flight home because he was talking to people on the Internet. He landed a bed in a penthouse suite so don’t be too sorry for him!
Anyway, he explains on his blog why he’s going down the Twitter route and it’s an interesting experiment. It certainly caught the imagination of several people we both follow and I know others are blogging it too. Nice way to spread the word, eh? I think the incentive to win a Mac Air helps too, don’t you think?
So far only 203 people are following @wubud so it may take a while to get to the 5,000 followers Paul wants.
Paul’s in San Francisco next weekend, so you never know, he might reveal the master plan to you if you ask nicely if he hasn’t done it before then!
What about me? Do I want to win a Mac Air? ‘Course I do! My Macbook died this evening. A cup of tea spilled on it while I was feeding the baby. I quickly dried it off as best I could with paper towels but the screen was black and the thing is dead. Luckily backuppc had done a backup 6 days ago so I doubt I lost much stuff.
I was so very tempted to name this post after Conor’s tweet about the browsing behaviour of kids but I’ll be strong and mature about it. He gave a talk today in a large truck in the car park of Wilton Shopping Centre. That might sound a bit dodgy but it’s actually part of the Lifelong Learning Festival this week in Cork. I was out there doing some shopping so I dropped by and took a few photos.
Thanks Frank for the link. Otherwise I’d never have known anything about it!
Bloody hell that Wilton crowd knew their stuff. Kids browsing pron and phishing questions galore.
I was shocked to see a CAPTCHA this morning when I stumbled a post not yet in the SU database. StumbleUpon to me was and is the one social network where I hadn’t come across reams of spam or annoying behaviour. The overall experience there has been so smooth and enjoyable that I wondered just how they managed to keep the spammers at bay. Obviously they’re attracting the wrong attention now because this morning I was presented with a CAPTCHA twice when I discovered new content.
A slightly more readable StumbleUpon CAPTCHA
Those CAPTCHAs look like the one on Matt Haughey’s post. I guess StumbleUpon were using ReCAPTCHA too? Thankfully they stopped and the last post I stumbled (Matt’s post above) had a big empty space where the CAPTCHA had been. Please SU, don’t bring the CAPTCHA back!
Thanks Mark for the link to Matt’s post.
What would you do for a luxury self catering weekend in the West of Ireland? Would you sell your soul and help launch a Google bomb?
Well, the good people at Glengarrriff Lodge would like you to link to their website with the keywords “Luxury Self Catering” in the link. Do that, and link to someone else who may be interested in the weekend and you’ll be entered in a draw for a weekend at the Lodge worth up to 1175 Euro! Nice eh?
Anyway, now that my blog is squeaky clean, I couldn’t possibly consider subverting Google’s search engine. No sirree, but it looks like a gorgeous location so I decided to give it a plug anyway.
Oh, I’ll be in that part of the country in the next few weeks so I might call in and say hi!