Bluetooth Audio comes of Age

Being an early adopter most often means being disappointed. You dive in and purchase the latest and greatest gadget and the user experience is often just not great. On this occasion I am glad to announce that I am in love with Jawbones, Jambox Bluetooth speaker. It does exactly what it says on the box with some surprising extras. It will stream music from your phone of choice, you can use it for conference calls and you can update the software as Jawbone releases software upgrades. This is a buy with no regrets.

Flicktion

Flicktion is a new form of creative writing involving taking an online image from Flickr, and writing a fictional story about that image.

While Flicktion will most likely be used as a creative writing educational exercise, its another great example of whole new genres being created in the online world.

With 740,880,729 pictures on Flickr, that is a lot of pictures waiting for a new and fictional story. Have fun.

Example of Flicktion can be found here

Prevention of a Nuisance

Cell Phone Numbers Go Public this month. All cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you will start to receive sales calls..... YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS

To prevent this, call the following number from your cell phone: 888-382-1222.

This is 100% legitimate. I have called and registered my own cell number. Of course you can still call me at any time. It is the National DO NOT CALL list. It takes less than 15 seconds. It blocks your number for five (5) years. You must call from the cell phone number you want to have blocked. You cannot call from a different phone number.

HELP OTHERS BY PASSING THIS ON. Of course you can still call me at any time.

What does the internet think?

Reviews, rants and raves, the Internet is crammed full with opinions on every topic a mind could ever think of. In 2007 I blogged on the value and power of peer reviews, and how studying peer product reviews can help you make smarter purchasing decisions. However, beyond smarter purchasing, how else might a trillion reviews and comments be of interest.? Well I am glad you asked. I have been having some fun with a new website that allows me to aggregate the total universe of global opinions on a given topic and see if there negative, positive or simply indifferent.

what does the internet think.net describes itself as a global enquiry tool that searches the Internet for the global opinion

on your search term. So I picked some topics and started to check global opinion. I started with President Obama and

felt the results seemed believable. 51.5% positive, 47.7% negative and 0.8% who don't care.

So what about Michael Jackson:

I am going to presume that the 90.7% positive is inflated due to the worlds recent loss, I am sure before his death the

negative number may have been higher. I did a lot of searches especially with company names. No surprises that

Apple Computers get 92.3% positive and General Motors is getting 81.5% negative. I work for NECN (New England Cable News),

the largest regional news network in America, and I was delighted to see that the global opinion was 100% positive compared to

CNN at 45% positive and Fox news at only 6.8% positive. So have fun seeing how the company you work for is doing among global opinions.

Fake it, until you make it!

For a generation of guitar and drum players, watching kids and young adults bouncing around with plastic guitars with big colored buttons should be depressing. The future of instrument playing is ruined, right? Well, it turns out that game play actually generates interest in the 'real thing.'

Research from one of Britain's largest music charities, Youth Music, has shown that up to ‘2.5 million children have picked up real guitars and drums after playing music-themed video games like guitar hero.’

The report conducted by Youth Music found that of the 12 million young people aged from 3 to 18, more than half played music games. A fifth of those gamers said that they now played an instrument after catching the musical bug from the games. So it appears that many of us start out faking it and then decide that we should have a go at the real thing.

So what might be the lesson here, when education is mixed with entertainment everyone wins. Capture my imagination and you capture me.

(Source: timesonline.co.uk)

Tweeting, broadcasting your inner voice

Reading tweets can be a little addictive. I am following 1,871 people on Twitter, the majority of whom I have really no idea who they are. I am surprised on a daily basis by the type of thoughts people freely tweet. While I imagine most tweeters use a 'thought filter,' out of the large group I am following there is a crowd who broadcast their inner voice obviously without any 'thought filter.'

At the outset I imagined Twitter as a great new communication service for friends to quickly communicate with each other, no longer any need to log into an email account and compose. Having been on twitter for some months, I am realizing that it seems to be much more of platform for people to express themselves freely. As ideas and thoughts float across people minds, their inner voice now has its own radio station. I am hoping that the same inner voice that manifested a thought might also ask you ' are you sure you want to broadcast this particular thought to the world, we might want to keep this one to ourselves.'

Managing Your Twittering Schedule

I am having fun with Twitter, however with my schedule I have no time available to even consider tweeting at anytime during my workday. So a month or so ago I discovered hootsuite and all my problems have been solved. 

Here is why I love hootsuite and why I think a Tweeter with a hectic schedule might too. 

1. Pre-schedule tweets: I am an early bird and I am typically with coffee in hand a 5am most mornings reading my news and blog feeds from Google Reader.  I am of the belief that pushing multiple tweets out to your base one right after the other is overkill and a little annoying. I select what I wish to tweet about and then schedule to push out those tweets across the day. I like to do at least one per hour. 

2. Tweet Stats: every time you tweet hootsuite will shorten the url with ow.ly allowing you to track how many click each tweet received. I love playing with this and learning what tweets grab peoples attention. So far in the month of March my tweets have been read and clicked on 711 times. It really is  fun to get this feedback. 

3. Most Popular Tweets: While in stats you can check how many clicks each tweet received, hootsuite will also show you your most popular top ten tweets. I really like this one. 

 

4. Clicks by Region: So with lots of people in the twittershpere clicking away on your tweets, you can also see what countries these clicks are coming from as well as the top referring sites.

Its saves time, you can track the success of your twittering, the charts and graphs look great and are easy to understand and it keeps twittering fun. If you have found something better than hootsuite I would love to hear about it. Happy Tweeting. 

 

Whats Your Twitter Rank?

While my worldwide Twitter rank is 10,250th, I was pleasantly surprised that I was geographically ranked 4th by followers in 'Providence, RI. I feel special. 4th is good right? 

So if you have not already checked out your twitter rank, go to Twitterholic enter you twitter name and have fun checking where you are.

Flush, Grow and Reciprocate.

So how many followers is enough on Twitter? Do you mind following more people than follow you? Well, n0 matter what your feelings on this, here is a great way to manage to your twitter following/followers expectations. 

Managing your Twitter following/followers is all about flushing, growing and reciprocating. 

Flushing refers to unfollowing those who you have followed but have not followed you back. There seems to be a 'twitter code of ethics' that if you follow someone they should follow you back. It’s the polite thing to do right?

Growing is just what it says, adding the people you know who already have twitter accounts including adding as many complete strangers to those who follow you in order to project a sense of the masses that wait on your every drop of wisdom. 

Reciprocating is all about keeping your end of the 'twitter code of ethics.' When someone has followed you, you need to do the right thing and follow them back.  I didn’t make this up it just seems to have become the accepted polite behavior. 

So this all sounds like a lot of work, tweeting, flushing, growing and reciprocating. Well thanks to InRev Twitin  the whole process of flushing, growing and reciprocating has been automated for you. At the click of a button (three buttons to be more precise) you can automatically:

Flush - 50 people you have followed but have not followed you back (They will never know)

Grow - 25 complete strangers will be added to the loyal masses who follow you

Reciprocate - 50 people who have followed you but you have not followed will now be justly rewarded.

You can give repetitive commands for each action so you can go crazy flushing, growing and reciprocating. 

 

 

 

 

 

Twittering: Catching up or leading the way?

While I have known about Twitter for some time, its only in the last 90 days that I have joined the 'band wagon'. So I am trying to figure out how early or late I am arriving to the party. I know I am not an innovator here, maybe an early adopter or could I just be part of the early majority. So I did a little research to find out how many people are on Twitter and heres where my arrival fits in. 

A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third largest social network (MySpace would be second and Facebook would be the largest in the world^[3]), and puts the number of users at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visitors at 55 million.^[3] I am going to take the 6 million users number and think only about the 300 million people in the U.S., that will alllow me to fairly assume that 0.2% of the U.S. are Twitter users. When a technological innovation is introduced, not everyone adopts it at the same moment.  Rather, there will be innovators and there will also be laggards.  Based upon the examination of a large number of studies in innovation diffusion, there is a proposed a method of adopter categorization.  

• the first 2.5% of the adopters are the "innovators"

• the next 13.5% of the adopters are the "early adopters"

• the next 34% of the adopters are the "early majority"

• the next 34% of the adopters are the "late majority"

• the last 16% of the adopters are the "laggards"

So while I feel I have come late to the Twitter party, I do feel good knowing that I am probably somehwhere in between an innovator and an early adopter. 

P.P.P. (Peer to Peer Purchasing)

I trust my peers more than my friends, although I have never met my peers or even know their names. For some months I had been trying to decide which GPS system I should purchase, being an Irish native in the U.S. I find myself getting lost a little too often. Some of my friends and work colleagues have already purchased GPS units, but somehow their recommendations never quite convinced me that the unit they had was the one I should get.

You can't truly trust your friends advice after they have made the purchase. Have you ever noticed that whatever you friend owns, is the best thing since the 'Sliced Pan'. Even if he were unhappy with it, there is a good chance he won't let on. The friend wants to appear smart to his friends. My nameless peers however have no such psychological baggage connected with their good or bad purchasing experiences. My Peers make their purchase, use the GPS and then give you the good and the bad. Even among my Peers there are some cranks but there are enough peers out there to get a review thatÂ’s completely on the level.

So after several months of shaky reviews from friends and colleagueses, I jumped online and in under an hour of reading my peers reviews, I went to Costco and purchased my NUVI 6060. So there is no more lost for me. Having had my NUVI 660 for several weeks now this Peer of your can tell you that its expensive, but if you can afford the cash its worth every dollar. So I am keeping up with the next generation by making them my Peers in Purchasing.

How do we get from X to i?

There was never any doubt about how cool we were, after all we are generation X. Having been born in '76 I just slipped into the MTV generation. I have still got to be cool right....RIGHT?

As I turn 30 this year I have just figured out that while I was looking the other way 5 other generations slipped in front of me and have started blocking my view of the future.

Generation X
1965-1981
MTV Generation
1975-1985
Culture Wars
1984-2005
Boomerang Generation
1981-1986
Generation Y
1982-2003
iGeneration
1986-2000
New Silent Generation
2001-

I find this out at a time when I have also realized that I am having to work at keeping up with the latest gadgets, consumer technology and the new best websites. Its does not seem to long ago when I was the one introducing people to the cool gadget and the for now unknown, but soon to be 'next big website.' We all take great pride in finding 'stuff' long before it becomes popular. I much prefer to be refered to by marketers as an innovator or early adopter, I simlpy refuse to become one of those laggards. The one buying an apple newton at a Walmart sale in 2005 and getting excited by the technology.

In the past each generation did not necessarily try and change society they arrived in but went about building their own society with new music, clothes etc. iGeneration however seems to have started something completely new....It's not about clothes or music, it's all about the technology. What was the geek for GenX is the Guru for iGeneration. Once you were cool if you could speak 'Gansta' now your sad if you cant speak HTML.

I have my Xbox, Media Centre PC, Treo 650 Phone, 60g Video Ipod, a myspace website and now a blog. Am I, representing GenX, keeping pace with iGen and what am i missing.