The Eyes of Me - documentary on blind teenagers in Texas

"The Eyes of Me presents an extraordinary look at four blind teenagers. The parallel stories of two freshmen and two seniors unfold over the course of one dynamic year at the Texas School for the Blind in Austin."

I know the folks at Stuck on On (http://stuckonon.com) who did some work on this documentary, which I hope I can find a way to watch in Colorado. It premiered at SXSW in Austin in March. The trailer puts you - just for a few minutes - in the shoes of the teenagers who are the subjects of the documentary. The emotions they share are different than I expected - more anger, more determination, mild exasperation at the limits other people place on them that they clearly do not need or want... It's definitely worth a look.

Eleven Twitter tools I like

Okay, to be clear: I am not a Twitter fanatic. I do think Twitter can and should be used in a wonderful and wild variety of ways. Maybe you want to network with thought leaders in your professional niche. Or let friends and family track your cross-country road trip. Maybe you want to know snow and ski conditions in the Rockies. Be the most popular guy at the prom. Maybe you want to find a job. A client. A friend. Who knows. But no matter how extensively or narrowly you want to use Twitter, there are tools to help you.

The list below is for avid readers, information gluttons, people who like to share interesting articles, and the curious. It is *not* for Testy Tweeters -- those who think there is only one correct path to Twitter, and that path is deadly serious. This list may not even be much use for anyone who is systematically trying to build a cohesive brand strategy with trackable, measurable results. It is simply a list of tools and sites I think have improved my own Twitter experience.

1. http://hashtags.org/ See what topics people are following
2. http://tinyurl.com/create.php Create those short URLs to pass on links to articles of interest.
3. search.twitter.com See what people are talking about
4. http://friendfeed.com/ Okay, this one is aspirational for me at the moment. I just set up my FriendFeed account and am musing about whether it is useful for anyone besides, well, me.
5. http://www.wefollow.com/ User-powered Twitter directory and great place to find people you want to follow.
6. http://www.atebits.com/software/tweetie/ Tweetie for iPhone - I love it because it lets me manage multiple accounts and it is easy to use.
7. http://twittercounter.com/pages/100 Top 100 people in your time zone. If you go to twittercounter.com, it gives you the top number of tweets, top number of followers, top number of friends, and so on. It is a fun time sink.
8. http://useqwitter.com/ Twitter tells me who started following me, but does not tell me who stops when people elect not to follow any more. To be honest, at the moment, I don't much care, because most people who start and stop following seem to be direct marketers. But over time, I will want to know. So, I signed up today and will see how it goes.
9. http://twinfluence.com/ Most reach. Most "velocity." Most "social capital." To explain this will take another blog post, but it is really interesting. This site speaks most to what I want to do on Twitter - which is extend my reach and social capital to meet people who do interesting things and exchange ideas.
10. http://tweetgrid.com/ Build a - well, grid - or dashboard of topics you want to follow to see the latest tweets.
11. http://twitter.grader.com/ I like this because it tells me where I rank (in the world) and how I score (I need to figure out what a perfect 100 is and how to get it :-).) It gives me a graph of how my followers and those I follow are trending. It lets me know who ranks highly in my local area of Denver and Castle Rock. Just good solid statistics in a variety of areas.

Interesting tools that are on hold for one reason or another:

http://www.tweetwheel.com/ Who knows whom? The tweetwheel will tell you if someone you're following knows someone else you're following. It builds a wheel of interaction, which is cool, if not obviously useful. Has taken too long to load each time I have tried it - it eventually times out.

http://twitterless.com/ Twitterless tells you who stops following you and graphs your follower history over time, making this info available in a variety of useful views.

Thinking about Twitter?

Lessons in Twitter Hygiene from Clo Willaerts is a handy dandy quick guide to help you avoid initial easy-to-make mistakes. Gotta love the hype cycle concept too.

For example, I did subscribe to a bot (daylife_feed) and, though it initially satisfied my news jones, the original news sources - the journalists, pundits, commentators and bloggers - are on Twitter, so you don't need an aggregator. If you *do* want to isolate a keyword or phrase for, say, your company, daylife_feed is good for that. Of course, so is search.twitter.com.

Something off the wall

Here is a link to "Made Up Words in the Simpsons," cataloguing and explaining such immortal terms as craptacular, Dorkus malorkus, cromulent and crisatunity.

Measuring Online Influence

This is a great article by Micah Baldwin on how you can discern whether someone is viewed as an expert by an online community - and, by extension, how you can develop your personal brand.

"In terms of measuring online influence, the stronger the personal brand, the more influence one wields online. The most important component of online influence is trust. Trust is defined as creating a consistent expectation that a person will always act in your best interest when given information."

Real-time search using Twitter and Google

http://mt-hacks.com/tag/twitter/

This guy at Movable Type Hacks has some intriguing plugins. To search the five most recent tweets on a topic, he created a GreaseMonkey script. YOu have to get the plugin for Firefox. but it's an interesting concept, as is the overarching question of whether Twitter is a threat to Google, and, if so, how.

If the link above does not work, use http://mt-hacks.com.

How to grow your blog to the next level with SEO

How to grow your blog to the next level with SEO
Nice common sense article by Darren Rouse about what to do to promote your blog once you're out of stealth mode. (I'm just bookmarking this for later review.)