18 tips for Twitter mastery

Advice to people not on Twitter:
JOIN then learn how to get the most out of it.

Advice to people already on Twitter.

1. Pick a topic to Tweet on and stick to that topic for that Twitter account


2. Consider having more than one account, maybe a busy one and a not-so-busy one


3. Complete the details in your profile to clearly show your interest in your topic


4. Choose very carefully who you follow


5. Unfollow anyone who is too noisy


6. Don't give away your religious or political preferences without reflecting on whether to show these things by who you follow


7. Don't follow noisy famous peole - look them up from time to time instead


8. Avoid following people who don't complete their profile or people who don't have web addresses


9. Follow people for a while then reconsider them.
   Maybe you would be better to follow one or two of their followers


10. Decide whether a person's followers are a better list to check


11. Decide each time whether to block any new followers


12. Block anyone who only ever has one message and keeps repeating it


13. Block any followers that follow lots of people and have few followers


14. Do not follow the links of people who follow lots of people and have few followers


15. Try to have more followers than people you follow


16. Try to have less updates than the people that you follow


17. Have a rule about time between updates - one per night?


18. Search a topic keyword before you post - what is known already?


19. Look at your own profile. Is it all retweets (RT) or responses? Try to vary between these and new postings.


20. Delete any of your updates that were a good idea at the time but that look out of place in your profile


21. Don't just plug your business.


22. Discuss articles on topics related to what you know. Only when people respect your opinion should you recommend product.


23. Think of the tweet as the ad for your blog posts


24. Hundreds of the right sort of followers are much better than thousands of rude video makers and spammers


25. Get the mood right. Start with a review of your profile.

Finally note that followers are listed in the order they followed. More recent ones are more likely to follow you back.
Winhelp.com.au as such is not on Twitter. We service two accounts on unrelated topics. From time to time we search for Help3 and related topics to keep abreast of changes in the industry.

Project Xanadu

Ted Nelson is the founder of Project Xanadu
Ted's thinking is in multiple contexts.
He has tried for years to introduce something better than a web full of broken links.

For example a xanadoc is represented as two lists: a list of content and a list of overlays
xanadu.com/xanasimp

Ted describes himself as a "Systems Humanist", thinking of the tapestry of information.

Quote from the TWIT TV interview: "Good UI; make some choices obvious, hide the other less common ones."

Triangulation interview 164:
More about Ted Nelson

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson

Web Standard Design

TWIT TV Triangulation 63

Leo Laporte interviews Jeffrey Zeldman.
One of the first web designers, and pioneer of web standard design structure and behavior.

Don't feed the aggregators

Make your own business website. "Aggregators" make directories of similar businesses and give you a "page". This page is no substitute for your own site. Your own business site would not have a ready link to a competing business. So why are businesses feeding the aggregators?

Q Macro

Let's face it you can write a lot of MSWord macros and then forget where you put them, what you called them and too often they are not quite right the next time you want to do something.
The solution is to write the same macro each time, I call it the Q macro. It typically finds and corrects each instance of something or starts with a selection (from a previous search) takes a series of actions and then does that search again and leaves you with the next instance of that search selected. You then make the decision whether to run the macro over that next instance.

Q Macro logic
The macro always follows the same logic.
Use a keyboard shortcut to run a macro to perform a task (on selected text)
The macro includes a move to a next instance using "find"
It also makes whatever movements are necessary to select the exact text to perform the task (above)
To write the macro
Select the text
Tool > Macro > Record New Macro
Macro name is always the same* and keyboard shortcut is always the same Alt+Q
Perform the task (use the keyboard in preference to the mouse)
Ctrl+F to open the Find dialog
Enter the text to find
Select the exact text to perform the task (use the keyboard)
End Macro
To run the macro
Select the text and press Alt+Q to perform the task. The task will be performed and another instance will be found and selected.
If you do not want to perform the task on the selected text then press the MSWord search buttons on the scroll bar (or Ctrl+Page down) to find the next instance.
Then select the text needed for the start of the macro.

Always the Same
Always make the macro name the same - you can find it easily if I need to edit it. Alt+F8 > Q
Overwrite any old instances because each macro is in some way different from the previous macro.
Always make the keyboard shortcut the same - Alt+Q is a very easy key combination with the left hand.

This item also appears in the xdk_hdk users group FAQ pages:
groups.google.com/group/xdk_hdk

Marketing to the Neighbours

BakerTweet.
I had thought that this was a good idea before I saw that someone had automated it:
feed://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/21645839.rss

Baker Tweet
BakerTweet is a way for busy bakers to tell the world that something hot and fresh has just come out of the oven. It's as simple as turning the dial and ...
www.bakertweet.com

Story of Stuff

This is a 21-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. It is a great use of a combination of animation and live video to explain a number of complex ideas.
It does teach you, it makes you laugh, and it may influence the opinions of the 7 million people who have viewed it.

Wikis for Business

One tool available to businesses for enabling teamwork and collaboration is the wiki.
You stay in the flow of your work by clicking “Edit This Page” where you see something that needs to be written or re-written.
[more]

Descriptions of US Federal datasets

Data.gov claims to increase the ability of the public to find, download, and use datasets that are generated and held by the US Federal Government.
It provides descriptions of the datasets (metadata), information about how to access these datasets, and tools that leverage government datasets.
Further data catalogs will be added. Federal, Executive Branch data are included in the first version.
More: The access point:
www.data.gov
A commentary:
scienceforseo.com/../shiny-new-dataset

Public Relations Research on Social Media

Coming soon from Public Relations Online - Thoughts & Theory: Special Issue of Journal of Public Relations Research on Social Media
Further to the previous post:
winhelp.com.au/labels/web2.htm

Social network and Web2 apps

Popular social networks and Web2 applications:
Twitter - Flavour of the month.
Best for keeping up-to-date your idols, a particular topic (eg. #surfing) and/or members of your team.

Linkedin - How timely.
If you think that there is a chance that you might be unemployed soon; hop on this network (don't look too desperate). Then if the crunch comes you might be able to use your presence here to get a job or at least to use it as a reference.

Blogger / MySpace / Multiply - DIY websites or a scrapbook.
All those people you call friends are by definition interested in what you do. Put a collection of your stuff somewhere where they can see it. I prefer Multiply for this purpose.

Facebook - "Friend collecting"
As an older person I use it to keep tabs (in a nice way) on my relatives in that Facebook age group. It helps that I am not the slightest bit judgemental.

It is by playing with tools that you learn how to use them.

Before you forward

Have you ever felt tempted to forward an email to everyone in your contact list?
OR to just your best 20 or so friends?

Before you mass-forward email consider this:
They might each be suitably impressed and forward that email to their hundreds of friends.

Remember the game where you placed a grain of sand on the first square of a chess board and doubled the number in each square after that?
If you don't then try it and see what happens.

With that email is not just a case of doubling, it may be multiplied by 20 or a hundred at each step.

That email you are about to forward has as its main purpose getting you to forward it!

I expect that there are systemic ways that it can be prevented from bringing the internet to a halt. But the main way that you can contribute is to not forward it.

You may know employees that have a little more time on their hands at the moment, so this may happen more often than when they were busy.

To immunise yourself against the temptation to mass-forward email visit:
http://www.hoax-slayer.com/
The people on that site have seen it all before..

3rd party advertising

We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you.
[more]

Debategraph

Question: What is a an argument map with aspects of a wiki, a forum, a blog, instant messaging and social bookmarking?
Answer: Debategraph
Debategraph gives a visual representation of the intricate arguments and issues in a debate and participants can input their views to it.
http://debategraph.org
See a detailed description of an example:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7827112.stm

Keep Track of Formatting

Office 2007
Something to be aware of for those of you using track changes and fussy about your formatting (and new to Word 2007)
From the Office button select Word Options then Advanced and you will see "Keep track of formatting".
For details see C Kent's page:
How to turn Keep Track of Formatting on and off

Customise the NEWS

Wotnews allows you to personalise your news from Australia. You set it up to tell you about specific companies or people. Set up a share portfolio or for any interest in a particular industry or sector. Wotnews will find the news on these topics as soon as it breaks. It is delivered to you as an email alert or an RSS feed.
See
wotnews.com.au/tour
OR
Look for a similar facility with your favourite and trusted news source.

Tagging documents

Structured document formats like DITA, DocBook, and Solbook are characterized by deeply nested tags and a multitude of schema constraints.
Unstructured tagging languages like HTML, on the other hand, are wide open.
Some people think that it is a contest between the two types:
Read the summary [more..]
OR the full article:
blogs.sun.com/.../do_we_really_need_structured.
The answer may lie in the correct choice of tagging for particular information. More uses information should mean more structure to that information (and more tags). More information and more users of the information should also mean more structure.

Backup Traps

During a full backup some backup software look like they are backing up your directories but they are not. When you point the program to the folder it then writes a list of the files and only backs these up.
Similarly CD burning jobs in some programs work from a file list not a folder list. There is a big difference because each file added to a directory is often more valuable than one of the existing files.
Now that you know, test your "backup and burn" assumptions. Especially if you backup using a full, not an incremental backup.

RSS introduction

RSS, Really Simple Syndication or "Atom" is a way to read and write information on the web. When reading you can keep track of more sites in less time and when writing you can share your words and ideas more quickly.
It is a method of publishing to the web. You write using blogs or other RSS writers. You read using an RSS reader of some sort. Examples include Outlook add-in to make emails from RSS to Google's home page that makes lines of links from each entry grouped under the heading for that feed. It probably should have been called a Really Flexible Syndication Tool.
Created by people who are service providers, tool vendors and independent developers, it is designed to be a universal publishing standard for personal content and weblogs. [more...]

Download WinHlp32

Starting with the Windows Vista operating system release, the Windows Help program does not ship as a component of the Windows operating system.
Also, third-party programs that include .hlp files are prohibited from redistributing the Windows Help program together with their products.
Users who want to view 32-bit .hlp files must download the program from the Microsoft Download Center, and then install it on their computers.
To download WinHlp32.exe, visit the following Microsoft Web site:
go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=82148
Users who have not installed this program on their computer are directed to a help topic in the Windows Vista Help and Support application.