Brent P. Newhall's Blog

Tech – Dec 2008

This is Brent P. Newhall's blog, where I write about my never-ending quest for knowledge and cool experiences. You're looking at tech posts.

More about me:

• Home
• Blog
• Feed (see all)
  Cooking
  Miscellaneous
  Reviews
  Role-playing
  Self-Improvement
  Teaching
  Tech
  Writing
• Jobs
• Portfolio
• Anime
• Links
• Contact
• Personal Manifesto

My projects:

• Your Online Life
  In-depth articles about the latest web tech and trends
• Giant Armors
  A series of fantasy adventure novels for kids
• Gunwave
  A tabletop role-playing system I designed for mecha gaming, in beta
• Otaku, No Video
  Anime reviews, on YouTube, that don't suck
• Heavenly Aromas Bakery
  Fresh-baked, hand-made artisanal bread, hand-delivered
• Cooking with CK
  Easy video recipes in under 10 minutes

17 Dec 08 – How to really use Twitter

Okay, so you've signed up for a Twitter account, and maybe posted a few times. How do you move to the next level?

Here are some suggestions for improving your Twitter experience:

• Go to the Everyone stream. See who's talking, and about what.
• More importantly, see what catches your attention. Observe effective use of 140 characters, so you'll know how to tweet more effectively.
• Look at who's popular on Twitter (via Twitterholic). Read their tweets. You probably won't want to follow all of them, but they are popular for a reason. I follow about half of them, for whatever that's worth.
• Get on Twitter frequently. It's really most effective when you can check it several times a day, at least. Fortunately, this doesn't take long.
• Check your @Replies often. While you're away, someone might reply to you about something you tweeted yesterday, and you may not see it in your regular stream.
• Check your DMs (direct messages) often. See above. Also, DMs function more like email, and they're very easy to miss.
• Post original content. This is a personal peeve; I see folks whose stream consists entirely of "@gozo Yeah, and you know what that means" and "@hiroyuki Oh, I know it!" Little real content. Instead, as you're browsing the web, tweet about the websites you're reading. And as you sit down to your computer and load up Twitter, think about what you've been doing, and tweet about that.
• Look into an aggregator application, like Twhirl, TweetDeck, or PeopleBrowsr. These will show all your feeds (including @Replies and DMs) on one screen, making it much easier to notice important topics.

But above all, don't go too nuts. Twitter's fun and useful, but it's not a place to spend your entire day. It's only Ones and 0s.

Hope this helps.

Posted in Tech - Permalink - comments

11 Dec 08 – PeopleBrowsr

If you like Twitter, you may benefit from a more powerful interface. Some solve this through use of TweetDeck, a desktop application that shows multiple Twitter streams (your stream, replies to you, direct messages, etc.) in columns.

The new service PeopleBrowsr is a web-based application that works like TweetDeck. You enter your Twitter account information, and PeopleBrowsr displays columns of streams. You can easily add more streams, and re-arrange them, right in your browser. The interface is a little busy but highly functional, and provides a lot of information at once. Even better, it's written almost entirely in JavaScript, so it doesn't depend on heavyweight frameworks like Flash.

Why use this instead of TweetDeck? Because you can use PeopleBrowsr from any computer, anywhere. It goes with you; if you have 'net access, you can use PeopleBrowsr and manage a huge array of Twitter conversations.

Very, very handy.

Posted in Tech - Permalink - comments

3 Dec 08 – What Is Glogster?

A lot of educational folks who "get" the new web (Web 2.0, social networking, etc.) are excited about Glogster. Despite the annoying name, it's a neat site: it lets you quickly and easily create a poster as a web page. Essentially.

So when you go to Glogster, you get a blank page, and a simple little menu of neat things you can add to the page: text, images, clipart, video, sound, etc. And, of course, you can add your own.

Imagine a student who has to give a presentation on Benjamin Franklin. She uses Glogster to create a one-page presentation, with images of the man, biographical notes, etc, and presents that in class. Immediate multimedia presentation, without the ugliness or restrictions of a PowerPoint deck.

Or she could assemble her notes in a Glogster page, and work on it while at home, or at school, or wherever.

Of course, once you've created your glog, you can save it to an account, create new glogs, share them, etc. Here's my glog.

And Glogster's not limited to students, of course; anyone can use it. It provides convenient, simplified website development, without the limitations of FTP or wrestling with a web-based HTML editor.

Cool.

Posted in Tech - Permalink - comments