Tweet | Croncast - Life is Show Prep

this is a test - via twitter

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:36:27 -0500

of my emergency twitter broadcast system. not really, just blogging from a tweet.

Tags: twitter blogging tweet broadcast system

Think differently about RSS and its uses

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:18:54 -0400

It's been quite a while since I wrote a blog post and it was time to get down with the reality that some things can't be said in 140 characters or less.

Over the weekend, as some of you may of you noticed, I live photo blogged my Saturday afternoon date with Betsy and our trip to Goodwill. For me it was a time to watch Betsy as she navigated her adopted habitat and to see her operate in a way that is far from the norm in our everyday lives.

I knew this was going to be an interesting experience. Why not share it in as many ways as possible (distribution to: Flickr, Twitter, blog and RSS) with as many people as possible? One input with multiple outputs across the various Croncast audiences.

Making it happen is a lot easier than you think with email and RSS.

First. it is the camera phone that takes decent photos. Second, is the phones ability to send email with photo attachments. Third, is a place to email the photos that has an RSS feed or other API connectivity to other applications. Tons of sites like Flickr, Seesmic and Tumblr offer these and can even do some of the distribution for you. Get these three things in place and sharing your experiences in near real-time has never been easier.

Currently, it does take a little more skill to distribute the photos to Twitter. However, if you get creative you can breathe life into photos that wouldn't normally have existed after it was consumed/viewed in a photo sharing site or through an RSS reader. It is worth the effort to figure this out, it's the next stage of content distribution online.

How do I know? Google Reader shared feeds are the perfect example. Typically once someone reads a post in their reader it has reached the end of the line. But if someone shares it with Google Reader it then gets added to the individual users shared RSS feed and resyndicated. A new life for that content. The same goes for photos that end up in Flickr or a Flickr RSS feed.

In my case, live photo blogging and my ability to cast a wider net wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for the Flickr RSS feed from my account. It is the magic API that feeds (pun intended) the river of resyndication that allows me to give that new life to our content.

Here's how it goes down:

1. Upload photo from phone to Flickr with subject line used as image title
2. In the body under the photo begin with an asterisk (*) if I want the photo, title and description to be a blog post also
3. In the body under the photo begin with a carat (^) if I want the title and a link to be a tweet
4. Add both asterisk and carat (*^) for blog and twitter
5. A PHP script grabs the Flickr RSS feed and reads it for asterisks and carats every two minutes and sends the photo, title and description where it needs to go
6. If it goes to the blog the title and description will be run through a keyword generations script
7. If it goes to Twitter only the title is sent and a shortened url is created to link to the photo

What all of this does is allow me to create multiple channels of distribution that can reach the different audiences that follow us. There is a bit of overlap with multiple audience members subscribed to the same services but quite a few are not. We have the Twitter audience, the blog audience, the flickr audience and the RSS audience. We also have our podcast audience but they are not really a part of this type of delivery

Summary: Look for ways to utilize sites like Flickr as a content management portal, if even from your mobile phone, to cast a wider net across your network. Work to find that one point of contact that has the lowest threshold for allowing you to get your media and thoughts online with the ability to resyndicate your content without having to lift a finger. Well, too many fingers. And make sure that it has an RSS feed!

Tags: flickr live photo blogging RSS as API seesmic tumblr twitter

What I Know About Tweeting Flickr Photos

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 19:55:30 -0400

Most of you know that I am a stats junkie and for those that don't, well, it is now out of the way.

I wanted to share some stats about Twittering Flickr photos. I started tracking these tweets in Nov. 2007 and finally thought I had enough data that it made sense to put the numbers together.

If you don't know what the hell I am talking about check out this blog post.

Here's what I got for you so far:

152 - Photos tweeted
1,979 - Click throughs from Twitter, mobile and web
480 - Unique ip's that clicked through
12.9 - Avg. number of clicks per photo
4.1 - Avg. number of times a unique user clicked through

Highest clicked photos

39 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/croncast/2383614174/
34 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/croncast/2224866756/
29 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/croncast/2352452625/
28 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/croncast/2068538331/
27 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/croncast/2086370317/

180 - followers when I started on Nov 23, 2007
380 - followers as of today April 6, 2008

Top clicker

Bellsouth DSL user in Atlanta metro area with 74 clicks (Is that you?)

The time of day for twittering a photo seems irrelevant but Monday through Friday are the best days to do it.

That's what I have. But what about analysis, Kris? Uh, look for that post tomorrow.

Tags: Twitter Tweet Flickr twittering photos

We leave

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:56:00 -0400

goodwill over. now we can go back to radio silence for a bit.

obsessively photo tweeting is my goodwill coping mechanism.

Tags: goodwill photo tweeting mechanism obsessively

Rant: Strategic blog commenting? Strategic tweeting?

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:23:42 -0400

Listen up Mr. and Mrs. internet marketer, your actions are sour, insincere and totally transparent as to your desire to dupe someone into clicking your link in an attempt to make a buck. You are full of shit and we know it. And, your students suck even worse at it.

Here is one example of "strategic blog commenting" by an idiot following the advice to get Google alerts for keywords related to his/her own site:

"Thank you for providing such useful info about dogs. The picture at this page is beautiful and love to eat one, look delicious." - Internet Marketing Douche Bag (real name hidden to protect the innocent)

The user email was admin@ourdataentry.com and the user URL linked back to a site about dog care. I'd say contextually there is something amiss here since the photo, other comments and title all indicated that the post was about hot dogs.

In this group I am not talking solely about the automated comment spammers that originally made our lives miserable but this new wave of get rich quick, "My internet marketing coach told me to do this" and internet marketing coaches, themselves.

As you and your people strive for authenticity, I believe that is one or your credos, maybe that term is no longer used, but you are about as authentic as a Gucci purse at a swap meet.

The entire reason for this post is because the comment above showed up next to a message from twitter that I was now being followed by 'helpmycashgrow'. Are you kidding me? You people make my head hurt. He also dropped this gem - "At work right now, at least i'm "supposed" to be working". Sir, you give me the confidence to let you help me grow my cash.

So now that people are strategic tweeting as a piece of their better mouse trap I would also like to call out the ass kissers on twitter, those trying to make an impression with someone that they don't know by disparaging another twitter user who comments directly with the person you are trying to kiss up to. Just don't do it. Might turn out that the disparaged and the ass kissee are good friends and the ass kissees other friends read that you are disparaging their friend.

Again we can see you for what you are but when you stoop to a troll level it is even more apparent that you have nothing to add except a desire to, as you perceive it, move up the food chain.

My hope is that you will all go back to infomercials and ripping off the elderly with home improvement scams. But I am guessing your type is here to stay and I just need to get better at filtering you out.

Tags: Internet Marketing Coaches Suck Teach Yourself and Save Your Money

Google Reader shared feeds getting tweaked

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:00:32 -0500

This afternoon I noticed something funny happening with Google Reader shared feeds. It seems that feeds are now mixing namespaces for the main content of the posts.

Previously all content was delivered via the 'summary' namespace but when I did a check after getting some null data fields I took a look at the shared feed and sure enough there was a new namespace, 'content' for the main content. Makes sense. But it is a pain if you are expecting everything to be returned as 'summary'.

My guess is that they are saving time and money by not rewriting the original source feed main content namspace. However, it creates an XML namespace soup that is harder to navigate.

When stuff like this happens it makes me nervous, especially when I am building something on the back of it.

The last time this happened Twitter turned off pagination for getting recent tweets for your friends. Killing a really cool project that I spent more time than I care to recount. I'm hoping that Google will not do the same. Fingers crossed.

Tags: Google shared feeds namespace XML soup shared RSS

Live photo blogging, immediacy and click-throughs

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 15:33:15 -0500

Right now I am really hung up on live photo blogging. Something is changing in the way that we interact online. The dynamic it is a changing.

My previous post is a perfect example of this but I think it has legs for where we are online with real-time micro blogging and subscription media. It is less intrusive for the audience as they have decided to participate by subscribing or friending you in an application. Say, something like Twitter.

I guess what makes this so poignant for me, using Twitter as an example are the links that I create for the tweets are done with the source code for turo.us, a url shortening site that Mike Marusin developed, that allows me to count click-throughs. From what I can tell from these counts and photo views at flickr, they are disproportionally higher than the number that I would normally receive from the same links in my sites.

I'm not sure why this is but I can guess that the immediacy of the interaction in Twitter and the fact that people made the effort to subscribe to me has something to do with it. Friends and even strangers subscribe to me, just like they would as part of any social network to be updated with anything that I share. They trust me. A trust not provided by an RSS feed but a more personal connection

In this context of immediacy and real-time interaction I think that trust matters most to raising the number of click-throughs. These links are more successful because they aren't passive links buried in a blog post. They are right up front and time sensitive. Maybe these links act as a call to action?

Set me straight if you think I am crazy.

Tags: Mike Marusin turo.us twitter links immediacy click-throughs live photo blogging

Think differently about RSS and its uses

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 10:39:03 -0500

Over the weekend, as some of you may of you noticed, I live photo blogged my Saturday afternoon date with Betsy and our trip to Goodwill. For me it was a time to watch Betsy as she navigated her adopted habitat and to see her operate in a way that is far from the norm in our everyday lives.

I knew this was going to be an interesting experience. Why not share it in as many ways as possible (distribution to: Flickr, Twitter, blog and RSS) with as many people as possible? One input with multiple outputs across the various Croncast audiences.

Making it happen is a lot easier than you think with email and RSS.

First. it is the camera phone that takes decent photos. Second, is the phones ability to send email with photo attachments. Third, is a place to email the photos that has an RSS feed or other API connectivity to other applications. Tons of sites like Flickr, Seesmic and Tumblr offer these and can even do some of the distribution for you. Get these three things in place and sharing your experiences in near real-time has never been easier.

Currently, it does take a little more skill to distribute the photos to Twitter. However, if you get creative you can breathe life into photos that wouldn't normally have existed after it was consumed/viewed in a photo sharing site or through an RSS reader. It is worth the effort to figure this out, it's the next stage of content distribution online.

How do I know? Google Reader shared feeds are the perfect example. Typically once someone reads a post in their reader it has reached the end of the line. But if someone shares it with Google Reader it then gets added to the individual users shared RSS feed and resyndicated. A new life for that content. The same goes for photos that end up in Flickr or a Flickr RSS feed.

In my case, live photo blogging and my ability to cast a wider net wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for the Flickr RSS feed from my account. It is the magic API that feeds (pun intended) the river of resyndication that allows me to give that new life to our content.

Here's how it goes down:

1. Upload photo from phone to Flickr with subject line used as image title
2. In the body under the photo begin with an asterisk (*) if I want the photo, title and description to be a blog post also
3. In the body under the photo begin with a carat (^) if I want the title and a link to be a tweet
4. Add both asterisk and carat (*^) for blog and twitter
5. A PHP script grabs the Flickr RSS feed and reads it for asterisks and carats every two minutes and sends the photo, title and description where it needs to go
6. If it goes to the blog the title and description will be run through a keyword generations script
7. If it goes to Twitter only the title is sent and a shortened url is created to link to the photo

What all of this does is allow me to create multiple channels of distribution that can reach the different audiences that follow us. There is a bit of overlap with multiple audience members subscribed to the same services but quite a few are not. We have the Twitter audience, the blog audience, the flickr audience and the RSS audience. We also have our podcast audience but they are not really a part of this type of delivery

Summary: Look for ways to utilize sites like Flickr as a content management portal, if even from your mobile phone, to cast a wider net across your network. Work to find that one point of contact that has the lowest threshold for allowing you to get your media and thoughts online with the ability to resyndicate your content without having to lift a finger. Well, too many fingers. And make sure that it has an RSS feed!

Tags: live photo blogging RSS as API flickr twitter seesmic tumblr

Status of Tweetair

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 08:49:24 -0500

For those of you that were following my project, tweetair, it might appear that not much progress has been made. Unfortunately, there has been progress but not of the type that is conducive to bringing tweetair online.

Basing the main functionality of tweetair on the twitter API seemed to be a safe bet until I began working with it extensively. When I put the project down for about 3 weeks and came back to it some of the core functionality that tweetair requires had been removed. Not removed from the documentation but the API itself.

I found this out after a couple days. I thought it was my code that was causing the problem but after a message exchange with Alex at twitter he let me know that the feature had been turned off. He let me know that it should return, however, he doesn't know when. That's why they left my desired feature, pagination, in the API help docs. Turns out that I'm not crazy, I just didn't know.

The reason that pagination is so important is that it can return more than minimum of 20 results per API query. With pagination I could do multiple queries across 2-3 pages and get 40-60 results. A useful number that means fewer dropped tweets on an active channel. But the high number of results, as Alex stated, are the reason that pagination has been turned off.

It sucks, but I understand why. Twitter offers access to this API for free. And not just that but the impact that the API and extensive calls can have a major impact on Twitter's overall performance like locking up databases.

For what it's worth, if pagination comes back or new features are added to the API that make it possible to get more results then I will get back on tweetair full force. But until then I will move on to another small project and come back to it with the mind set of removing the Twitter connected piece and make it a standalone app.

Tags: Twitter API pages Tweetair API pagination

Saturday code goodness means flickr, flafoo and twitter

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 16:31:21 -0400

So far I've got a new flickr + twitter script done and need to move on to flafoo while I have some daylight to burn.

The flickr + twitter code is why all of the pics have been showing up as posts and why all the people following me on twitter got blasted with 20 messages at once . . . sorry for that. I promptly setup a twitter account to test with.

For the last two months I have been sending photos from my phone to flickr and having them inserted as blog posts. Which has been pretty awesome and a ton of fun. But what I was missing was the twitter connection. Not anymore.

Now, thanks to this post from Dave Winer and code that I had already written for @tweetair (coming very soon, I swear), flafoo and Croncast, it took about ten minutes to get it up and running.

Dave's post was important because it turned the light for me. The "Ahaa" moment was when I realized I was already parsing my flickr feed every two minutes anyway looking for photos that I had marked to be blog posts. All I needed to do was differentiate what was to be a blog post from that of a twitter update.

It took about two seconds.

I make blog posts from flickr by starting a description of a photo with an asterisk, like so "*", and adding my content after that. For twitter I use "^" to tell the script to send a tweet. If I use them together "*^" then I get both.

Dave's setup with TwitterGram is much cleaner, using only the tag portion to note that a flickr upload is meant to be a tweet, simple and clean. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to tweet their flickr photos with ease. My code is custom and considerably more messy for a guy that wants to have control over blog posts, blog posts and tweets or just tweets by uploading photos to flickr.

API's + the RSS 2.0 + curl + simplexml_load_file = ridiculously low threshold for a mediocre coder to join the integration party.

Speaking of API's, I will be updating flafoo today and possibly tomorrow with new categories that will henceforth be known as "flafoogeries" and the ability for anyone to add a "flafoogery" from the site.

Tags: TwitterGram Dave Winer twitter flickr flafoo

Twitter meet Castlock, Castlock meet Twitter

Tue, 08 May 2007 08:48:17 -0400

Yesterday was a crazy day so I didn't get to make a post about hacking together a script to dump my twitter posts into castlock (the underpinnings of this site).

The entire reason for doing it was to have the ability to blog on the run from my phone by sending a text message to twitter and getting it into the blog without having to open the castlock control panel.

The fun part was thinking up a format for the tweets that when the script reads them it can distinguish between a tweet for blog and a tweet for tweets sake. The format looks like this:

title*blog body for post.*keyword1-keyword2-keyword3

The php script splits the tweet at the *'s and then at the -'s to format it for the castlock insert.

There were a couple small bugs that took a while to iron out. The first was that the timestamp from twitter is 5 hours ahead of my servers time zone (not very conducive to keeping posts in order) and getting the cron to run right on the script.

But it's all good now and every 5 minutes the script runs looking for little tweets to put in it the Croncast belly.

Tags: tweet twitter integration castlock Croncast twitter keywords for seo