blog till you drop!
A cocktail of advertising, social media, and technology
Don’t you just love…
Aug 22nd
… The Fail Whale? This HAS to be the icon of 2008 
In fact I just wanted to make sure I had a Fail Whale on my blog as Twitter’s service seems to be improving.
Saying that, Plurk’s timeline can be used a fantastic conversational tool…
1 question, 8 answers: the social media meme
Jul 1st
My blog friend C.B Whittemore recently tagged me in 8 more things, the social media meme with one question – what are 8 ways in which you’ve used social media?
1. My blog is my most important and exciting tool to date. I have not only met some wonderful people offline (Chris Brown, Reshma Anand, Organic Frog, Sandrine, Cedric, Steve, Annie Mole… apologies if I have forgotten anyone!) but blogging has also recently changed my life as I am just about to start my new role as a Social Media strategist.
2. Blogging has drastically changed my social media consumption – I created a web 2.0 lanscape last year and it’s very interesting to see how my social media consumption has evolved:
- I no longer use Myspace but I am still a huge fan of Facebook and found a few old friends from university on there
- I use bloglines a lot more than I did last year
- I have at last got round to updating my Linkedin profile and will be using it a lot more in the near future
- I am now using Twitter and Plurk which were not even on my radar last year…
3. Everyone is blogging about Twitter vs. Plurk but I still don’t know which one is the best for me. I love the look and feel of Twitter and follow an exciting community of Twitter friends but I get terribly annoyed by the outages. I do not particularly like the look and feel of Plurk but love the Plurk timeline… To be continued
4. Blogline is my fav tool to keep on top of my reading but I also recently discovered snackr, a cool widget that pulls random items from your feeds and scrolls them across your desktop
5. When it comes to my creative side, I use Flickr and Youtube. Although my interaction on both sites is limited, I enjoy posting photos and videos for everyone’s viewing pleasure.
6. Aggregators are currently missing in my tool box! Webjam, Friendfeed (don’t really like the look of it!), Netvibes – which do you recommend and why?
7. Facebook and French website Copains d’avant are a great way to easily keep in touch with your friends and even find lost friends and acquaintances. I recently hooked up with one of my friends from school in France that I hadn’t seen in 13 years!
8. What’s next? Seesmic, dubbed the Twitter of micro-blogging is the next thing on my list…
Now I’d like to tag: Chris Brown, Reshma Anand, Organic Frog, Sandrine, Cedric, Steve, and Willem
And whilst we may be playing with some or maybe all of the above, consumers are, on the other hand playing with the sites shown below!
From what are you doing to what are they saying?
Jun 27th
I have just discovered that Plurk have now added a search feature allowing Plurkers to search for keywords in the Plurk-sphere. There is a little magnifying glass icon on the right hand-side corner of the timeline, click on it and you can search for whatever tickles your fancy!
I think the search engine represents a fantastic opportunity for brands [data mining] to see what people think about them, and could help with innovation, NPD or product improvements.
I also really liked the fact that Plurk seems to be available in different languages – this reminds me of the good old adage, think global, act local! Saying that, I am still struggling with Plurk’s design…
If you’re more of a Twitter fan, you can go to an external site called Twisky that also allows you to search Tweets from the Twittersphere. I would give these guys a job if I were Biz Stone…
Are you Twittering, Plurking or Jaiku-ing?
Jun 22nd
Micro-blogging seems to be the new trendy thing to do – everyone seems to be Twittering, Plurking or Jaiku-ing… and by everyone, I mean bloggers or people with a strong interest in digital which makes me think that these applications are not quite mainstream yet, and may well never be.
Twitter is currently the most popular micro-blogging application out there. The graphics look good, and you can easily customise your page. Saying that, the Twitter outages are no secret to anyone and the picture of the whale being carried across the sea by small birds when Twitter has reached maximum capacity says it all… and users are getting frustrated as a result. I also find it very difficult to keep up with conversations on Twitter… have you ever missed a Tweet from one of your followers because it got lost in the message timeline? I have!
Here comes Plurk, another micro-blogging application that has been getting a lot of attention in recent weeks. Plurk certainly has one thing going for it – a sense of humour albeit an odd one. I am not a Plurk user (yet) but recently followed a Plurk conversation – Plurk’s strength can be summed up in two words – streamlined conversations. And that’s what differentiates it from Twitter. Quite a few bloggers seem to prefer Plurk to Twitter and I will probably sign up in the near future.
Enter Jaiku, recently acquired by Google (wink wink to Biz Stone co-founder of Twitter, who used to work for Google). Upon signing up the first thing anyone will notice is the abundance of features Jaiku has over Twitter – most notably the ability to import rss feeds from various sources such as your blog, LastFM , Flickr , YouTube , and yes – even Twitter . The beauty of this is that outside of ‘micro-blogging’ your updates, the traffic you’re generating elsewhere on the web is presented in one neat package.
I’d be curious to know how you differentiate each of these apps? Does your community differ on each? Which one is your favourite?