Tweet of the Year Decade Millennium: My Quest for the Ultimate Re-Tweet

Your quest to get re-tweeted by @Alyssa_Milano is the best non-porn thing about the internet.
-- Dave Weigel

She's the ultimate celebrity Tweep, with more than 500,000 followers but, as of noon today, was only following 499 people, whereas I've got about 2,700 followers and am following nearly 1,300 people.

This illustrates an enormous status disparity and ever since October, when Alyssa re-Tweeted a Slate column by Mickey Kaus -- who has about 1,700 followers -- I've been trying to reverse-engineer the Kaus magic: "Why Does Alyssa Milano Hate Me?"

Alyssa is to Twitter what Matt Drudge is to news, and what Professor Glenn Reynolds is to blogging. (On Twitter, Drudge has 46,000 followers and Instapundit has about 6,000 followers.) People tell me that my quest is hopeless, but as Vince Lombardi said, "A quitter never wins, and a winner never quits."

In addition to Lombardi's maxim, there's also the inspiration of my role model, Pepe Le Pew:

The wonderful thing about Pepe is that he cannot conceive that anyone would not love him.

Guys often ask how a homely guy like me got such a beautiful wife like Mrs. Other McCain. It's not just the Speedo-worthy physique, my friends. It's also the Pepe Le Pew persistence, the irresistible ardor of the relentless suitor.

That's how I am when I set my mind on a goal. I'm Pepe Le Pew, and the object of my desire is that cat who accidentally got a white stripe painted on her back. Excuse me if you're creeped-out by that analogy, but that's just how I roll.

Speaking of rolling, I've already booked my flight for Pasadena so I can go cover Alabama winning the national championship next week in the Rose Bowl.

Hit the tip jar! ROLL TIDE! Re-Tweet me, Alyssa!

Using TinyURL for Blog Post Emails

The above screen capture shows how I used the "tinyurl" online utility, to make a second version of this really long blog post URL address:
http://passyworldofict.blogspot.com/2009/07/making-web-pages-at-google-sites.html
as the much shorter alternate address of:
http://tinyurl.com/PwGoogleSites .

It was necessary to do this, because every time that I emailed the original long address link to anyone, the email process split up the link text into separate words. This meant that the link failed when the mail recipient clicked on it.

According to Wikipedia:

The TinyURL homepage at http://tinyurl.com/ has a submission form box that is used to submit a long URL for shortening. For each URL entered, the server adds a new alias in its hashed database and returns a short URL as http://tinyurl.com/xxxxxx in the following page.

If the URL has already been requested, TinyURL will return the existing alias rather than create a duplicate entry. The short URL forwards users to the long URL, without any noticeable time delay.

Short URL aliases are seen as useful because they are easier to write down, remember or pass around, are less error-prone to write, and also fit where space is limited such as IRC channel topics, email signatures, microblogs, certain printed newspapers and magazines, and email clients that impose line breaks on messages at a certain length.

People posting on Twitter make extensive use of shortened URLs to keep their tweets within the service-imposed 140 character limit.

Starting in 2008, TinyURL allowed users to create custom, more meaningful aliases. This means that a user can create descriptive URLs rather than a randomly generated address. For example, http://tinyurl.com/wp-tinyurl.

On the tinyurl homepage, they even supply HTML embed code, that we have modified slightly, so that we can put the tinyurl'er directly onto our web page like this:

Enter a long URL to make tiny:

So if we have a long URL from one of our blog posts to email to people, it is best to make a tinyurl version to send as well. This means that if the email process breaks up the long link, our contacts can always use the short link. The tinyurl link also looks a lot neater and professional than the big "gangly" blog address.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

The World of Web 2.0 TWITTER

Using Twitter For Your Personal Network

View more PDF documents from Mike Romard.

The above Slideshare is about why Twitter is useful to Educators.

To view the above Slideshare in Full Screen mode, simply click the bottom right hand corner "Slide Screen" icon. To get back to normal size and return to this blog, press the Escape key at any time.

For me, I get enough new information each day, simply by “Googling”, belonging to a couple of knowledge-sharing communities, and following various special interest Blogs. My information needs are asynchronous, and I do not need the “up to the moment” information supplied by the likes of Twitter. In fact Twitter would simply be information overload for me: (four different email accounts to check each day is more than enough) !

But for those who want to set up an account and try out Twitter, then the link below to the wiki written by Sue Waters, supplies an excellent and quite comprehensive set of instructions:

http://suewaters.wikispaces.com/twitter

The following Slideshare supplies some possible classroom uses for Twitter.

Twenty Five Interesting Ways To Use Twitter In

View more OpenOffice presentations from guest0b0302b.

To view the above Slideshare in Full Screen mode, simply click the bottom right hand corner "Slide Screen" icon. To get back to normal size and return to this blog, press the Escape key at any time.

Students might be engaged while using Twitter, (since so many of them are “communication junkies”), but my concern would be whether they would stay on-task, or just drift off into the idle gossip and chit chat of "Twitter Land".

Personally I do not have the time or inclination to use Twitter at all, but perhaps the new shorthand version “Flutter” will be better suited to my needs:




- Yes I am definitely a Flutter kind of guy !

And finally, here is a video by the very funny Lisa Nova, for those who do not particularly like the idea of Twitter, (or possibly for anyone with a sense of humour as twisted as mine).

Don’t be alarmed by the title, there is no mention of prostitution, and the two minute clip is fundamentally “child safe”.




Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi