This is a post to see how TweetSuite plugin works on our blog. Install plugin, fill in Twitter details, click check boxes… and post on blog.
Result? This should appear as a tweet. Leaves me wondering what happens to everything above 160 characters. Truncated, I presume?
OK – test shows just title and TinyUrl to blog post. So – it’s all in the title, guys. Still – neat functionality.
Just reading Canadian communication consultant & podcaster Donna Papacosta tweeting about the White House press conference on Swine Flu – or as I think I’ll prefer to call it, ‘Schwein Flu’ (pronounced with a heavy Clouseau accent).
Made me wonder: um, do we have any of the vaccine here in the UK?
A quick web search turns up only a few distinctly unpromising three year old news items reporting that the UK might possibly get round to inviting the pharmaceuticals to tender. At some point. Probably.
Three years later, what am I bet that we never got round to it?
So it looks like we’re going to watch the first Twitter-tracked pandemic in human history. #swine flu
I’ve noticed that the old-fashioned idea about a store being some kind of assurance of quality no longer seems to apply online – if it ever did.
Browse the iTunes store for iPhone apps and you find an extraordinary amount of rubbish. This only a day after an app called something like ‘BabyShaker’ (yes, a ‘game’ where you shake a baby to stop it crying) came to media attention and was – reluctanctly no doubt – removed.
Check out ‘Football Shootout Lite’ – a game that averaged 1/2 a star out of 5 from over 8000 disgusted ratings and was utterly slated by reviewers. And that was after it’s ‘major re-architecture’. What a absolute turd. But, like all apps, no names, no people, no tangible companies behind them. A Google search for ‘TapTapMedia LLC’ turns up nothing credible or useful.
Since when did it make sense for Apple to showcase such crap for their flagship iPhone / iPod products?
Quality, as we used to know it, takes human intervention and editorial evaluation. That really messes up the ‘hands-off’ monetisation model that’s the internet’s ‘holy grail’ so it’s history.
On the plus side, the ‘ wisdom of the crowd’ prounces a pretty damning verdict on trash like ‘Football ShootOut Lite’.
What do you think?
Sadly, the web is full of people ripping off other peoples’ content in order to spam the search engines. They harvest content from your website, and post it on their own site to draw traffic to it. There are a number of reasons for this but the most common is to try and create ad revenue.
The result is that eventually there will be more sites containing cobbled together bullshit than sites containing real content written for real readers – if there isn’t already.
There’s very little you can do when someone (or some ‘bot’) steals your content. You can find out about it, however, by using Google Alerts. This free Google service lets you set up daily alerts on any terms you wish and get email summaries when those terms are posted online. I have a Google alert running for ‘mukaumedia’ resulting in the following email:
Knowing that this wasn’t a post I’d made, I clicked on the link.
It took me to a Windows Live blog featuring a badly-rewritten version of some shownotes for our podcast dealing with online reputation management (including our voicemail line number and email address!)
What did I do? I reported abuse with Windows Live. I then created an account and replied to their blog.
And I blogged here using the same keywords they’ve posted with (‘online repute direction’) so that this post will come up next to theirs in the unlikely event that anyone ever searches for that phrase in Google.
Oh, and used All In One SEO pack in Wordpress to create a summary for this post that says “Hey, that spammer at Windows Live stole my content! Look at this. Find out what YOU can do when someone steals your content for blog spam” 
US reality TV ‘czar’ talks about his search for a ‘Susan Boyle’ moment to swell the revenues of America’s Got Talent. The search includes plans to have Susan Boyle on the show reports this feature in TVWeek.com. Just look at the way these people are talking about Susan Boyle.
The panel on Britain’s Got Talent may have declared they were forced to re-think their prejudices (from ‘fat, ugly people are useless’ to ‘fat ugly people CAN be talented’) but the industry is still hell-bent on treating them all as commodities to be exploited – whatever they look like.
At first you were a joke, Susan. Then you were suddenly a very talented… er..person. Now you’ve become a ‘moment’ for a media mogul to recreate. Shudder.
API Key madness is enough to put me off Wordpress foreverDefinition of insanity: trying to work out WTF is going on with Wordpress and the API key needed to run stats on a blog.
Problem. Two kinds of Wordpress. Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org. To run the Wordpress stats plugin on your self-hosted blog (built with Wordpress software from Wordpress.org) you need a Wordpress.com API key. Got it? No? Join the club.
The problem comes when you create a new self-hosted Wordpress blog and try to set up the stats for that blog. Let’s say it’s a clients blog. If you’re not careful, you put in your own wordpress.com API key to get it working.
The problem you’ve then got is that your client’s site reads stats via your wordpress.com dashboard and requires your wordpress.com login and password to see his stats. Not good.
So you want to..er..do something about it. Like..er..presumably disconnect his blog from your wordpress.com dashboard. But how?
You log out of your wordpress.com dashboard and create a new wordpress.com account (in the hope of creating a new API key to attach to his blog) but it asks you for an email address. Ah. Ideally you want to give your client’s email address but you can’t because you know it will demand you validate it. So you use another of your own.
The validating email comes through, you rush off to try to set up Wordpress stats plugin on your client’s site using his new wordpress.com account and it’s shiny new API key which you hopefully cut and paste… and..
PHUT!
“Error from last API Key attempt: Missing API Key”
What follows is then a 2 hour crawl through a maze of complete and utter fucking gobbledegook splattered across both wordpress.com’s ’support forums’ and wordpress.org’s unintelligible ‘Codex’ with your heart and soul dying by the second. You jump from one nonsensical ‘fix’ to another until you’ve got about 30 browser tabs open, each saying the same pile of meaningless shite.
If you’ve read this far it’s because, like me, you’ve been on this life-sapping journey to nowhere and ended up at 1.30am wondering what the hell you’re doing wasting your life like this.
My advice to you (myself, actually) is deactivate the stupid plugin, shove some Google analytics code into your template and tell your client it’s a far more sophisticated way to monitor his traffic and forget you ever heard of the stupid wordpress.com API key.
wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.
I’ve seen this a few times in lo-res quality. Here it is at its best. Awesome. Leaves me wondering if the skis are biodegradable though..?
How cool is that? The eagle-eyed among you will notice that this was one hell of a bike ride. Ok, so it was in the car. But you get the point. Just press ’start’ and the iPhone does the rest with its clever GPS trickery.
Get home, upload your journey to the site and share. Not bad for free. All you need now is an invisible ‘permanently on in background’ version and – presto! – know where your kids are 24/7. Shudder.
Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging
If the last few minutes are anything to go by’ bloody hard. Why? Because the Wordpress iPhone App doesn’t work with self-hosted blogs, for starters – forcing you to use the iPhone’s built-in Safari browser and the dinky touch screen keyboard.
Oh – and you have to write using the HTML editor
It’s a labour of love for sure. But if you’re blogging in response to breaking news and looking to pull in that traffic, then you’ll probably be grateful that it can be done at all.
Mind you, I’ve not pressed the ‘publish’ button yet 
Now I’m not hugely technical but what I notice is that Viddler videos don’t show on the iPhone whereas YouTube ones do.
Something to do with one using Flash and the other not? Hey – I don’t know. What I do know is the difference this will make to the average punter.
Trying to view a Viddler video on the iPhone results in a message telling you your browser doesn’t have Flash installed.
The problem is that your iPhone browser is just that – an iPhone version of Safari. You can’t install regular Flash player for it.
At this point most people will give up or worse, get sucked into the endless FAQ hell of the ‘why doesn’t iPhone work with Flash’ debate.
Looks like I’ll be recommending to clients that they take the YouTube fork in the road. Add to that the fact that YouTube is now the second most widely-used search engine and it starts to look like a no-brainer.
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