Some of the tshirts that have been inspired by Twitter are only mildly amusing. Others, like this one from Despair, are genuinely funny:
I ordered one for myself this morning!
I ordered one for myself this morning!Recently in twitter Category
The concept behind Outvesting is very simple.
A small cash injection for a small startup can make a significant difference - I know this as I've been there. I've watched our company grow from having a turnover per year in 5 figures, to having the same level of turnover per week!
You can read more about the entire thing on their site, but basically the idea was that by "crowdsourcing" small sums of investment you could cut through redtape and give a startup a helping hand.
Since the sum overall is small - €5000 and the investment per head is only €50 the entire thing should be quite painless and fun to watch (you'd easily spend more on Lottery tickets or having a flutter on the Derby .. )
Over 60 submissions were received, but there could be only one - why does that conjure up images of Highlander?
It was decided that the voting would be done via Twitter, with each investor having 50 votes to distribute as they saw fit. I initially had issues with this public voting concept, as I was worried that my choices would be judged in the light of my day job. However I decided that if people can't deal with me as an individual and "get over with it" then I'm probably better off not dealing with them at all.
The submissions are available as a spreadsheet here. Some of them are truly terrible. Terrible on more than one level. If you're looking for €5000 from someone who does not have a vested interest in your success you need to do several things:
Others seemed to think that playing buzzword bingo would win them money ...
While others obviously either don't need the money or simply think that the amount had an extra zero or two ...
In the end I voted on three projects that I liked for a variety of reasons. Since 50 does not divide evenly by three I ended up distributing my votes as follows:
Let's see who wins!
UPDATE - forgot to link to the spreadsheet - sorry!
A small cash injection for a small startup can make a significant difference - I know this as I've been there. I've watched our company grow from having a turnover per year in 5 figures, to having the same level of turnover per week!
You can read more about the entire thing on their site, but basically the idea was that by "crowdsourcing" small sums of investment you could cut through redtape and give a startup a helping hand.
Since the sum overall is small - €5000 and the investment per head is only €50 the entire thing should be quite painless and fun to watch (you'd easily spend more on Lottery tickets or having a flutter on the Derby .. )
Over 60 submissions were received, but there could be only one - why does that conjure up images of Highlander?
It was decided that the voting would be done via Twitter, with each investor having 50 votes to distribute as they saw fit. I initially had issues with this public voting concept, as I was worried that my choices would be judged in the light of my day job. However I decided that if people can't deal with me as an individual and "get over with it" then I'm probably better off not dealing with them at all.
The submissions are available as a spreadsheet here. Some of them are truly terrible. Terrible on more than one level. If you're looking for €5000 from someone who does not have a vested interest in your success you need to do several things:
- capture their attention
- win them over
- show them that you will make good use of the investment
- show that you understand what the investment can't do
Others seemed to think that playing buzzword bingo would win them money ...
While others obviously either don't need the money or simply think that the amount had an extra zero or two ...
In the end I voted on three projects that I liked for a variety of reasons. Since 50 does not divide evenly by three I ended up distributing my votes as follows:
- 20 to KildareStreet. Why? It's a very cool and useful service already, so it's gone past being just some "crazy idea". They also have a number of sane and reasonable ways of making money from it, so it's not one of these "fluffy" idea with no actual business model to back it
- 15 to getdigs.ie - The idea appealed to me and I could see how it would be relatively easy to give them a push in the right direction.
- 15 to PhotoIreland - While this may not make any money directly it would indirectly as it would bring people into the country. Besides I like photos. They also had one of the best and clearest explanations of what they wanted to do and how they'd spend the money
Let's see who wins!
UPDATE - forgot to link to the spreadsheet - sorry!
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Image via CrunchBase
I currently have three or four clients installed, but I keep coming back to Tweetdeck.
In many respects it's because I like uniformity. I like being able to use the same software on my various desktops, laptops and mobile devices. That might seem a bit boring, but it helps me maintain some semblance of sanity!
The latest update to the Tweetdeck iPhone client introduces several new features and improves some existing ones. One of the ones that I really really like is the new "update in background" option. If you're on a flaky mobile internet connection, like I am this weekend, waiting for your device to send an update can take several seconds, during which time your device is unresponsive. Pushing the update into the background means you don't lose access to your device while the update is being sent.
Other features include access to "recent people", "recent hashtags" and a bunch of other handy tweaks that they've somehow managed to squeeze into a handheld UI.
All in all the latest tweaks have made the user experience that little bit better and I honestly doubt if I'll bother using any of the other Twitter apps on the iPhone in the future
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Bing is the "new kid" when it comes to search engines. I'll be the first to admit that I haven't used it much, partially because I'm happy enough with Google and partially because Bing keeps getting confused about my location. (Some of the time it think I'm in the UK, other times it knows I'm in Ireland)
In any case Bing (Microsoft) have done some kind of deal with Twitter to offer more of a "realtime" search experience.
The new Twitter service on Bing was launched in the last couple of hours, so it's brand new.
What's cool about it is that gives you tweets + links.
So a search for "ireland" will give you the latest "tweets" (messages posted on Twitter) followed by the most recent links associated with the keyword. So if you post a link to something cool on Twitter it should be picked up almost instantly and "ranked" against the rest of the community.
Danny Sullivan has posted in more detail over on SearchEngineLand. Hopefully Bing / Twitter won't be swamped by the spammy junk that can get sent onto Twitter by automated scripts...
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In any case Bing (Microsoft) have done some kind of deal with Twitter to offer more of a "realtime" search experience.
The new Twitter service on Bing was launched in the last couple of hours, so it's brand new.
What's cool about it is that gives you tweets + links.
So a search for "ireland" will give you the latest "tweets" (messages posted on Twitter) followed by the most recent links associated with the keyword. So if you post a link to something cool on Twitter it should be picked up almost instantly and "ranked" against the rest of the community.
Danny Sullivan has posted in more detail over on SearchEngineLand. Hopefully Bing / Twitter won't be swamped by the spammy junk that can get sent onto Twitter by automated scripts...
I love the tshirts from these guys and this one is so "subtle" (like a sledgehammer!)
I'm ordering two!
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I'm ordering two!
I have odd ideas during the middle of the night...
The other night while chatting with a couple of people about social media "experts" and other snake oil types I went checking domains ... SocialMediaExpert.ie was available (as were a few other extensions), so I grabbed it.
James from Forbairt Media did a wonderful job on the design and layout (if you don't like it blame my taste, not his skills!)
And the first couple of posts went up yesterday.
What's it all about?
My first post explains some of it
The Irish Green Party have now deleted the tweet I mentioned the other day:
If it was inappropriate and you recognise it as such, why was it put out there in the first place?
Or is it more a case of throwing inane comments out into cyberspace in the hope that nobody will call you on them?
And of course the tweet isn't "gone", as you can easily find it via twitter search:
Expect much fumbling vagueness from Eamon Ryan on RTE's Morning Ireland. Or maybe they'll actually surprise us all?
"Eamon Ryan will be on Morning Ireland to discuss, amongst other things, the Bill Cullen tweet. It's gone now, as the tone was inappropriate." (source Twitter)
If it was inappropriate and you recognise it as such, why was it put out there in the first place?
Or is it more a case of throwing inane comments out into cyberspace in the hope that nobody will call you on them?
And of course the tweet isn't "gone", as you can easily find it via twitter search:
Expect much fumbling vagueness from Eamon Ryan on RTE's Morning Ireland. Or maybe they'll actually surprise us all?
A few months ago Stewart mentioned Sweetcron as a "lifestream" solution (You can see his here). A "lifestream" basically acts as an aggregator of all your online activities, as many of the online services that people use, such as Twitter, Flickr etc., publish your activity via RSS.
I'd already been experimenting with Movable Type's Motion, which is a pretty cool addition to an existing MT powered site, however having a separate, standalone, solution was not without its attractions. I registered michele.ie a few months ago, but apart from using it to test our Exchange mail hosting I hadn't really done anything with it.
So last night (and very early this morning) I decided to setup Sweetcron on one of our shared hosting plans. Our hosting system allows you to split your domain up across multiple hosting plans and platforms, so while the main site is now on a Linux web server the email is still on Microsoft Exchange.
I chose to setup the webspace to use PHP5, since PHP4 is defunct. In terms of the database I opted for MySQL5, since it's also the more recent version.
I'll have to admit that I hadn't used FTP for a long time. I have a habit of just doing things from the command line, but once I'd got over that it was easy enough to setup.
The documentation for Sweetcron is a bit sparse, but the basic install is easy enough. On our system you just need to remember that the MySQL database server is NOT "localhost", as the basic configuration file assumes that you're running everything on a single server.
The one step that isn't documented clearly is how to setup a simple cronjob to automate it for you. Fortunately someone else had done that already, so adding the cronjob via the hosting control panel was fine.
You just need to execute the following command every few minutes (or hours):
curl http://your/true-cron/urlYou can find the actual URL in the Sweetcron admin panel. So just set that command to run via the cronjob manager and off you go.
The basic install ships with two themes, but there are several other themes available which range from the very simple to the incredibly complex. I still haven't settled on which one I actually want to use, as they all handle parts of your "stream" differently. In order to avoid duplication issues I think I'll stick with a theme that doesn't pull in the full content from blog posts and just provides a link to the original source.
So if you're bored and want to know what I'm up to you can head over to my new personal space and see!
Irish political parties are trying to use online media. Unfortunately they're more "trying" than anything else.
Remember the Green Party spamming bloggers?
How about Fine Gael ripping off the BBC website?
Well it looks like the Green Party are definitely outdoing their competitors when it comes to online idiocy. Their official Twitter account posted this charming message earlier this evening:
Here's a screenshot in case they remove it:
I'm not a legal expert, but isn't that libellous?
If it's not actually libel, is it the sort of message a political party's official twitter account should be sending out?
Wouldn't their time be better spent doing something useful?
Remember the Green Party spamming bloggers?
How about Fine Gael ripping off the BBC website?
Well it looks like the Green Party are definitely outdoing their competitors when it comes to online idiocy. Their official Twitter account posted this charming message earlier this evening:
"If a permatanned, snake-oil selling charlatan like Bill Cullen thinks we're doing the wrong thing, we must be doing the right thing, right?"
Here's a screenshot in case they remove it:
I'm not a legal expert, but isn't that libellous?If it's not actually libel, is it the sort of message a political party's official twitter account should be sending out?
Wouldn't their time be better spent doing something useful?
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