Ashton Kutcher's Twitter page, with over 1.3MM followers
With all the recent hubbub around Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN in the race to a million Twitter followers, a lot of people are getting self-conscious about follower numbers. We've been using Twitter since Fall 2006, when only a handful of our friends were active on it. Over the years, and especially in the last six months, we have seen an explosion of Twitter users, to the point where I think we can safely say that Twitter has gone completely mainstream. If the Ashton vs. CNN thing wasn't it, then Oprah joining up a day later certainly sealed the deal.
Typealyzer scans and recognizes the text on your blog to figure out your personality type. The EPIC FU blog turned out to be the active and playful type. What type are you?
[ Via: urbanredneck ]
Keep these mini sites bookmarked for when real-life circumstances call for real-life sound effects. If you know of any other single-serving sound effect sites, share them in the comments!
The first wave of voter registration deadlines sweeps a bunch of states on October 6th, so you might only have a few days left. Make sure you take a look at the election calendar here. In today's episode, Zadi mentioned a couple of online resources to make registration a relatively quick & painless process.
Declare Yourself produced an interesting set of PSA's called Only You Can Silence Yourself, featuring Jessica Alba, Christina Aguilera, and other celebs. It's also a good resource for election info and absentee ballot requests. They are big proponents of early voting, which many states offer without requiring a valid excuse. I like this option, because it will protect you against any... umm "voting machine malfunctions."
About 8 months ago I blogged about a Twitter mashup called Politweets that tracked pre-nomination candidates across the twittersphere. Nowadays there are a couple of newer, better tools that I wanted to spotlight.
The first is Twitter's own Election page at http://election.twitter.com. It's a real-time stream of every tweet in the public timeline that mentions any of the candidates. It also has a brief collection of popular election tags (e.g. Tina Fey, Bailout) at the top of the page. You can also filter by candidate, so you can monitor the tweets only about Obama, McCain, or either of the VP candidates.
It's almost September, time for me to finish up my EPIC summer and head back to school. Unfortunately, that means it's back to the dreary world of research papers, blech. Today on the show we featured DarkCopy and Think, two apps to help you stay distraction free while working on your computer. Check below for even more student resources that help you with more than just writing papers.
I get very overwhelmed when I look at my daily "TO DO" list, even if it's a very short one-- so many things to do, all those action items staring back at me, screaming for my attention. Which one do I do first?!
Here's a site that I totally dig! I learned about it from popSiren. Bgpatterns.com allows you to create cool tiled backgrounds that you can download. You choose an image then adjust the size and opacity. You can also play around with the colors and canvas.
The @ symbol was an option so I couldn't resist using it for my Twitter account.
I found this design that someone else had made and put it as my desktop.
Go get to create'n and show me a picture of your design!
Pretty much every picture has the potential to be nom'd. It's actually skewing my view of the world. Get your fill of nomness over at omnomnomnom.com. If you create a Zadi nom'd image like the one I made above, send us a link and we'll post it here or feature it on a future episode.
Video on Flickr has only been active for a day, and already a subset of the Flickr community has banded together against it. The We Say NO to Videos on Flickr group has 20,000 members and has submitted over 1,200 photos to the group's photo pool -- most of which carry an anti-video sentiment like the one above.
The introduction of 90-second video clips has many members worried that their beloved photo site will turn into a YouTube clone.
Personally, I like the idea of videos on Flickr -- especially considering the ultra-short nature of the clips. But I wonder if they should have a better way of distinguishing between the 2 types of media (e.g. video clips still have the word "photos" in their URL's).
What do you guys think? Will Flickr be forever changed?
I recently started using the Firefox add-on Shareaholic, and it's truly quite awesome in a mega-useful way. It lets you quickly submit the page you're browsing to a bunch of different bookmark/sharing websites, including del.icio.us, Digg, Tumblr, Twitter, and a lot more. It's a must-have for all you hot and sweaty social web lovers.
This week Zadi talked about a few of the personal aggregators out there that let you pull your feeds from services like Twitter and Pownce so all your updates show up in one centralized location. If you use an aggregator like FriendFeed, Socialthing, or iminta it doesn't matter which networks you use and which ones I use -- we can keep up with each other on the same website.
An alternative approach sort of accomplishes the same thing by doing the exact opposite -- instead of pulling from multiple places, it lets you send to multiple places, and it's causing a bit of controversy in the social space. I'm talking about "status blasting" services like HelloTxt, which let you to ping multiple services with the same message simultaneously.
Forget Hulu and their private beta shenanigans. CBS is now streaming all 3 seasons of the original Star Trek series (and a few other classics, including Twilight Zone) on their TV Classics destination. No sign-ups. No international restrictions. Just pure unadulterated Trek madness.
Zadi will get a kick out of this, because I know she's a big fan of TOS. I'm more of a TNG guy. Sadly, no full-screen or embedding options, but the 15-second ads are very bearable.
EDIT: Seems like some of our international commenters aren't able to view the videos after all. Sorry, guys!
Can't. Stop. Reloading. HALP!!
A dog with fresh beats? What more can you ask for?
This made me laugh pretty hard. Play around and record your own mix.
Explore the music video for Arcade Fire's Black Mirror at rorrimkcalb.com while deconstructing its tracks while you listen. Press the numbers shown underneath the video to enable/disable the tracks. A very haunting experience.
Check out the web trends map for 2008 by Information Architects. They've taken about 300 of the most influential web sites and mashed them up with the Tokyo train map. Check out the clickable online version. You can get a large poster size PDF for your home or office and they're coming out with the desktop wallpaper soon.
[Via informationarchitects.jp]
Here's a cool site I discovered recently for keeping up with real-time conversations about the presidential candidates. It's called Politweets and it's a Twitter-mashup that tracks mentions of the candidates' names and organizes the discussions into columns for Republicans and Democrats. It's not perfect, especially for Ron Paul -- whose last name is pretty common so only his full name tracked, but it's still useful for keeping up with what's going on in campaign-land.
Definitely check it out tonight during the South Carolina Democratic debate on CNN.
It's faster.
Leechers are the scourge of the peer-to-peer community. They disable uploads during their download sessions and slow down the network for everyone else. Leechers run rampant on public trackers where there's no accountability.
Because private trackers enforce ratios, leechers are spotted quickly and their accounts are disabled. Ratios work like this -- if you upload as much data as you download, you have a 1:1 ratio. Better trackers have higher ratio requirements, but generally speaking 1:1 is considered good.
