Great idea!
Nick Clegg’s crowd sourcing site has caused quite a stir in this Web 2.0 world.
“We’ve had an excellent response so far, with over 2,205 ideas, 7,419 comments and 18,000 votes in our first day.”
Would like to have found it in the search results instead of mining it through news articles so am doing my bit for SEO – Your Freedom!
Get on it and help make a change!
Last year I wrote about the Mix Online Archivist. A desktop app, it was one of the only quick solutions to download and archive tweets or hashtag info from Twitter.
Well yesterday the guys released a turbo version on the web.
The Archivist will let you save tweets on the go and provide some fab analysis in a quick and easy to read format.
Along with your profile you can save 3 archives right now and say whether they’re private or public.
Drilling in it’ll show tweets over time, top users, tweets v retweets, top associate words with the tweets, top urls thta have been clicks on and the sources of the tweets.
Drill in again and you can see great visualizations of who’s been most prolific or influential with those words.
Everything is downloadable to excel for easy data manipulation too!
Check it out here: The Archivist
When the Windows Phone launched a couple of weeks ago, so did a new service from Microsoft called My Phone.
I’d been using it for a while in Beta but the update has really got my attention because of some very cool features.
How about if you’ve misplaced your phone at home or left it on a train? Bloody annoying isn’t it!
The way My Phone works is to synch all your photos, docs, texts etc etc with the cloud under your Windows Live ID AND your phone’s last known location:
Here’s what the website looks like now I’m signed in. On the left is a self-explanatory menus of all your phones bits and pieces that have been backed up.
You can see my phone was last backed up last night – you can set it to synch automatically.
Click to find your lost phone and you’re presented with a “See map” option:
Up pops a Bing map with where my phone was when I synched last!
You’ll also notice some premium features being trialled to:
You can have the system ring your phone and it’ll work even if the phone is set to silent so no worries there!
Locking the phone is easy but obviously be careful with Erasing – last resort for that one.
To sign up go to: http://myphone.microsoft.com
More on other features next week!
Check out the new TV ad for the Microsoft Windows Phone I wrote about on the Microsoft Advertising Blog last week.
The phone is positioned as having an operating system which can cope with the demands of both work tasks and play stuff like social networking, web and music.
Not sure how Mark Zuckerberg’s lawyers will like this “aligned” branding effort from Hawaii, but while on honeymoon on Waikiki we spotted a guy doing portraits in the street using a tablet PC to draw digital portraits of willing sitters.
A refreshing change from the charcoal-mongers we’re used to:
Ashley and I splashed out a whole $15 on the above which we had done in Pike Place Market in Seattle……and no he didn’t get a tip for helping me lose 30lbs!
Picked up this canny little piece of kit from Steve Clayton.
Aaron Zinman’s philosophy with personas is:
In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant.
Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name.
It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.
Luckily “online” is represented accurately and the “sport” bit must be my incessant talking about cricket.
Did I say I had tickets for the day at The Oval where we regained The Ashes from Australia but couldn’t go becaue I was on honeymoon!?
Check it our for yourself at: http://personas.media.mit.edu
You’ve read the reviews and watched the videos, now you have a chance to pre-order a copy of Windows 7 from £49.99 at the Microsoft Store from midnight tonight!
Remember if you are replacing an older version of Windows with Windows 7 once it arrives on 22 October, a clean install of the operating system and the installation of an internet browser will be required.
Check out http://www.microsoft.com/windows for more info!
Amazed that rail ticket machines in this country don’t have QWERTY layouts for typing in required information.
Might sound silly, but the brain takes a while to engage with the above letter formation when trying to buy a ticket.
Add up thousands of people having similar difficulties and you have 1000s of minutes wasted and I bet a lot of lost revenue and missed trains.
I like this approach. Waitrose has always been seen as a more up-market brand of supermarket and some would say more expensive.
So in a recession when you’re trying to attract people that are saving their pennies, why not just stick your products and prices up on a bill board?
People are looking for value for money and this advertising of their “essential range” demonstrates that they’re not all the expensive after all!
Any online marketer should be using Twitter to data mine for what’s being said about their brand, product, service or even their competition.
It’s a given!
Twitter Search is great for finding out what’s being said out there and they’ve now integrated the functionality into the tool to make it easier to search and check out trending topics.
Now however, the guys from Mix Online have come up with the Archivist which is a very cool tool for mining for Tweets, saving them and exporting them to Microsoft Excel for reporting purposes!
They point out that Twitter will not keep these nuggets of insight for ever, so it’s crucial you save them somewhere.
As an example – Microsoft adCenter upgraded over the weekend, so I did a search on that found 328 tweets for that keyword.
There are a couple of “views” – the actual Tweets and avatars like above, or a trend line like below where you can see the spike in activity because of the new release.
A simple click of “Export To Excel” and you have a .TXT file you can open in Excel and play around with till your heart’s content!
Nice huh!?
Check out the documentation and download it here!
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