Postcards From My Life

Dear Reader,

More specifically,

Dear reader thinking that it is a good idea to write a twitter bot that automatically spews tweets without regard to anyone else because everyone obviously wants to know what your bot has to say,

I guess because Oprah is now on twitter, things are exploding. Today alone, I’ve noticed 5-7 new bots on twitter polluting my search time lines spouting drivel and polluting them to the point of almost uselessness.

How I use twitter

I guess first, I should explain how I use twitter since different people use it differently. One of my jobs at Ibuildings is to be a PHP Community Evangelist. It’s the awesome part of my job and I love it. My twitter persona revolves around that aspect of my life. I try to make most of my tweets valuable to at least someone. (ok, my recent rants against #skype were just therapeutic for me.) My general rule of thumb is that most of my tweets need to inform or amuse.

I like finding people asking questions tagged #php and helping by answering them when I can. I like finding new blog posts about #php and helping spread the good ones. The rise of using search and hashtags has really expanded the usefulness of twitter for me…until now.

Rise of the Spewbots

Over the past few months I’ve seen an increasing number of bots tweeting. I have coined the term spewbots because for the most part, these bots spew forth data that I can easily get elsewhere should I want it and they add very little to the conversation. These bots break down into four categories.

Accidental spewbots

Today I got 6 svn check in notices from a spewbot. Now honestly, I’m sure they weren’t trying to pollute anyone’s time line. However, because they use the Zend Framework, I get their notices. I’ll refrain from ranting about the stupidity of tweeting svn check in notices, if that’s your thing and it doesn’t affect me then hey, go for it. Please let me make one request though. Protect your account’s timeline. A simple check of a box on your account’s settings and your tweets won’t go out into the public time line. Anyone who wants can follow your bot and once you approve them, can can partake of your spewy goodness.

Hashtag repeaters

I really don’t understand why some people feel the need to automatically re-tweet things that people tag. @hashwordpress is an excellent example of this. If anyone wants every tweet that has the #wordpress hashtag, all they need to do use search.twitter.com, twitterfall.com or any of a hundred ways to get these tweets; re-tweeting them helps no one.

Can we please just get rid of these? If you are the owner of one of these bots, please either shut it down, protect it’s time line so that you are not a spewbot, or leave me a comment here telling me why I’m wrong and they are really a good thing.

Bot testing spewage

All of a sudden on Friday, my entire twitter time line was replaced by a series of tweets from a single account. Each of them were just random words and the #php hashtag. In my frustration, I tweeted to this bot to please stop polluting my time line. Much to my surprise, I got an email about 20 minutes later from the owner of the bot asking what the problem was. I explained to them that their testing was polluting the #php hashtag. I asked them to replace the # with another character and they wouldn’t be bothering anyone. Much to my surprise, they agreed and I haven’t seen a tweet from them again.

If you are testing, there is no need to tag your tests. You are monitoring them and can tell if your bot is working. If you refuse to protect your bot’s time line during testing at least don’t tag the tweets, please?

…and the rest

There’s not really a way to classify the rest of the spewbots. Most of them that pollute the #php time line are job related. If they only tweeted one or two tweets a day it probably wouldn’t annoy me so much but you get bots like @fresh_projects, @freelance_jobs and @joomlajobs that tweet multiple tweets at a time several times a day.

I really don’t have a good way to handle these. To be honest, they are like like Democrats, they piss me off but they’ve got as much right to be here as I do. I really wish my client of choice, twhirl, would let me right click on an account and tell it to never ever show me a tweet from this account again. That way they are free to pollute, but I am free to ignore them. Actually, this would be an awesome feature to implement in twitter itself but since it takes 30 days to get a response from them on a simple bug report/request these days, the chances of that happening are slim. So for now, I’ll just have to put up with them.

If anyone has a good idea for how to cleanse the #php search timeline of these parasites, I’d love to hear it. I tried building a Y!Pipes filter to filter them out but Pipes won’t check the feed often enough to pickup all the tweets.

Conclusion

Until we find a permanent solution to the problem of spewbots, I’ guess we just have to put up up with them. I filter the most egregious of the spewbots with the -from: option in search.twitter.com but there’s a 140 limit to the search query so I have to constantly have to re-evaluate which ones I filter and which ones I put up with.

I’m open to ideas on how to combat the problem of spewbots, especially the last group of them. For now though, I’m out of ideas.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Sometime recently I was surfing around and came across a blog post where a user wrote a PHP script – fully OO, it was very pretty – that would pop the top line off of a file and tweet it, that struck me as odd. Actually, first it struck me as stupid since all twitter.com needs is another mindless bot spewing lines from a file at regular intervals, once I got past stupid it struck me as odd.
Update: ‘tweetFromFile’ PHP Class is the original blog post.

I used to have a friend named Michael Chaney. (I’m pretty sure he and I are friends but we’ve not spoken since June.) Michael once posted in an email that one of his hobbies/quirks was that he would try and find ways to condense complex tasks into a single line of bash script. (I’m paraphrasing) I thought of that email when I read the “Tweet a line from a file” post. It just strikes me that it’s a bit overkill to fire up PHP for a simple task like this.

Before you ask, no, I’m not falling out of love with PHP but it’s a “right tool for the job” issue. PHP can be used to do this, but it’s not really necessary. So, if we are going to ignore the web’s all-purpose sledge hammer, what can we use? How about the tools that come with Linux?

Source Material

First, you are going to need a file to tweet. Now if you are using this to do something stupid like tweet UTC every minute or the status changes of your dorm room lamp then stop right now. I do not want the powers I’m going to teach you used for evil. However, if you are planning something like tweeting the “Dead Parrot” skit one line at a time, read on my friend and make sure you ping me so I can follow you. Either way you will need a file full of single lines less than 140 characters each. For my testing, I started with a Unix fortune file “bofh-excuses”

If you are on CentOS?

yum install fortune-bofh-excuses

If you are not on CentOS, figure it out on your own.

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the user to figure out how to strip out the cruft from the file or just create your own file of wit ready for tweeting. Whatever you do, name the file tweets.txt and put it in your working directory.

Twitter Account

Yes Sparky, you will need a twitter account to play with this code. No Sparky, you can’t borrow mine. If you don’t have one or you don’t want to bother your followers with inane test messages, I suggest registering a new one. Grab one nobody would want. (Not that I did, my test account is @elePHPant)

The Command

Here it is in all its glory for those too anxious to wait for my explanation.

head -n 1 tweets.txt | xargs -r -s 140 -I {} curl -s -d "status={}" -u twitterAcct:p.ass.word  http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json > /dev/null ;sed -i '1d' tweets.txt

For those of you who see line noise from an old modem, let’s go through this line by line. Note: broken up like this is will not work, if you are copying and pasting, use the one above.

1
2
3
4

head -n 1 tweets.txt
xargs -r -s 140 -I {} 
curl -s -d "status={}" -u twitterAcct:p.ass.word  http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json > /dev/null
sed -i '1d' tweets.txt

1. This command returns the first line from the tweets.txt file.
2. This command helps us build a command to execute using the output form line #1. The -I {} is critical here as it’s what tells xargs to take the input – in this case coming from stdin – and replace every instance of {} with it. For safety’s sake, the -s 140 makes sure we don’t send twitter anything over 140 characters. Finally, the -r makes sure that it doesn’t call curl if there is no line to pass in.
3. This is the heart of the command, a call to curl.
   • -s, tells curl to run silent. This does not prevent output but it suppresses curl’s normal output. Anything coming from twitter will still be output.
   • The next option, -d specifies the string of data to be POSTed. Since we need this to be POST instead of GET, we have to specify the data string this way. The string following the -d command is the data to be sent. This is normal HTML name=value pairs separated by ampersands.
   • -u allows us to specify the username:password pair. Twitter uses basic authentication so it’s easy to authenticate simple tools like this. It is also highly insecure since you have to actually type your username and password into the cron script. This is one of these don’t try this at home things.
   • The next parameter is the url to call. If you have questions about how to call twitter’s API, check out the twitter API page for details.
   • Finally, because this command will return data, the final portion of this command will dump anything twitter sends back, in our case, JSON, to /dev/null. There is no error checking on this command, it either works and you see the tweet, or it fails and you don’t.
4. This command pops the first line off the file using sed, the Serial EDitor. The -i command tells sed to edit the file in place. the ’1d’ says delete the first line. The final parameter to the sed command is the name of the file.

That’s it, drop all of those into a cron job that runs every 10 minutes, place 100 lines tweets.txt that advertise your blog, weight loss, male enhancement or a porn site and you too can reduce your followers to just the other bots who are following you in hopes that you will follow them so they can spam you.

I really don’t expect anyone to find this useful but it was an interesting exercise in bash, a tool I don’t get to use nearly as much as I would like to.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

p.s. If you don’t follow me on twitter and want to, I’m a real person, not a bot. Follow me at @calevans.

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Dear Reader,

Ok, you are lost on a desert island and you can only follow 5 people on twitter. (Don’t think about it too hard, it’s just a freakin’ game) Who do you choose and why?

Here are my 5.

5: @andigutmans
Ok, so I work for Andi. (Actually, I work for @markdevisser) Andi is new to twitter but has already begun to see the potential. He’s started monitoring Zend’s footprint on twitter and I’ve seen him answer people’s questions or gripes about Zend, even when they are not addressed to him.

4: @lizziekeiper
I only met Lizzy a few month ago but she’s fun and every few days she asks her “Question of the day”. I like people that make me stop and think for a minute during my day.

3: @weierophinney
I work with Matthew and we usually talk every day or so. Matthew only tweets when he has something to say. (and that’s rare on twitter) so if Matthew says something, I stop and read it and if he posts a URL, I almost always visit it.

2: @mtabini
Marco is a good friend and a really bright guy. I follow him because his posts are almost always funny or insightful.

1: @everysandwich
Fred Leo is the funniest man I’ve never met. (No offense @SoupySales) We’ve been on-line friends for about 3 years now. I help him with his blogs from time to time and in return he makes me laugh almost every day. Before twitter, Fred and I would talk on AIM every day. Talking with Fred on AIM is difficult, not because he’s hard to understand but because I hated to just blather. Since the things he said made me laugh out loud, I felt I had to be funny too. Which was fine, we had some awesome discussions but it’s taxing on my brain. With twitter now, I can get my Fredisms without feeing the pressure to be funny back. (We still talk on AIM though, just not as much) If you’ve got time, go visit his blog and listen to PETA Girl or root around till you find the story of Aunt Mary. It’s worth it, I promise.

Until Next Time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Over at the Small Business Idea Forum, Staci asked about twitter and I replied. This, along with a couple of other things today are pointing me towards a blog post and possible a podcast this weekend.

Twitter has gone from WTH to ZOMG to “Hey, I can use this for my benefit!” I like any tool that hits that last stage.

Three things have come together today to prompt me to write this post.

First, my friend and editor Elizabeth Naramore tweeted today:

someone explain to me the reasoning behind a company “following me” on twitter; are they just hoping I follow them too?

She’s not the first person that has noticed this trend, just the latest. The trend of following everyone on twitter because a lot of people automatically follow you back is growing. The obvious benefit is if you follow 10,000 people on twitter and 10% follow you back because they don’t know any better, when you post, 1,000 people see your post. So as a side note to this blog let me jsut advise any twitter user out there, don’t auto-follow. When you get a twitter “follow” notice, check out who it is. If it’s not someone you know then it’s twitter spam. Don’t bother to follow them. (You don’t have to block them though, let them artificially inflate your follower number.)

Then I saw this post from Michal Arrington. (Whom I do not follow because I do not know and usually don’t care to hear what he has to say outside of techcrunch.com.) It was an A-Ha! moment for me. I do a lot of scanning with Google Alerts but his point is very important.

Twitter is the place where conversations are exploding well before they even make it to mainstream blogs.

It’s not enough these days to just monitor the web via Google alerts or some paid clipping service. Blogs are a trailing indicator these days. To be on top of your brand you have got to take it to the next level. tweetscan.com lets you do just that.

Finally, a forum post over at the Small Business Idea Forum again mentioned twitter and my reply there got me thinking.

Twitter started as a way to connect friends but is fast becoming a powerful marketing and business intelligence tool. I cover the former briefly in my forum post and on Sixty Second Tech but it’s the latter that I really want to talk about.

tweetscan.com

tweetscan.com is just what you think it is, a search engine for twitter. Yes, Google indexes twitter but these days that just not fast enough. Thankfully the guys and gals behind tweetscan solve that problem for us. It looks like they database and index the public feed. I don’t know where they get their resources but I hope to god they stay alive because this is something that twitter really needs.

If you have looked at their page by now and can’t figure out how to use it, please turn in your Internet secret decoder ring and shut off your modem. If you did figure it out, bully for you, you are as smart as a fifth grader! A couple of notes. If you read their blog and wiki (these people are on the web 2.0 ball!) then you know that they support OR and “-” operators. This makes life ever so much more interesting. GO ahead, play with a few queries like cats OR dogs. Hopefully they will add AND and NOT in there soon.

So, you can scan for topics. That’s kind of cool but other than replacing google egosurfing with twitter egosurfing what’s the pint, right? Here’s the point. Search for your brand! In my case I have searches for “Cal Evans”, Zend and ZF. All fine and good, as Arrington points out, I can now see things before they happen as twitter is a leading indicator. But who wants to go visit their page every so often and execute a series of searches?

FEED ME!

Thankfully, the people behind tweetscan are fully Web 2.0 compliant and they provide me with a custom feed for each search I execute. This means I can plug the RSS feed of the above search for “Cal Evans”, into ANY feed reader and voila, instant ego surfing!

Now, I use Google Reader as my primary feed reader and it does a wonderful job. However, these feeds (I’ve got 8 now) are much more important to me than anything I have in Google Reader. I almost need them to be push. The next best thing to push is pull in a program I already use. I did NOT want to have to install yet another piece of software to make this whole thing work. (Que Attensa to enter stage right) I used to use this Outlook plugin back when I was at Jupiter Hosting. It’s a great way to add RSS feeds into Outlook. It’s made some progress since 2005 and now is very unobtrusive.

Wrap It Up

So, to summarize; tweetsearch.com + Attensa’s outlook plugin = quick and easy business intelligence. Don’t forget to add feeds for your major competitors brands as well!

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=
So,

Dear Reader,

I was talking to a friend of mine recently and mentioned that I have a podcast (yes, I routinely try and convert my friends to podcast listeners.) His response to me was “Yes, I have an iPod but I’m just not a member of the podcast generation”. His problem is that he is suffering from information overload. Others that I have talked to complain that they just don’t know where to start. No matter what your excuse, if you are not listening to podcasts on a regular basis then you are missing out on a lot (I mean a LOT) of good information, tips and entertainment that is there for the taking.

So, I’m going to make it my mission to try and convert people to be podcast listeners. I hope, along the way, I’ll pick up a few listeners to my podcasts but honestly, a rising tide floats all boats. So, if you don’t currently listen to podcasts on a regular basis, keep reading. If you are already a member of the podcast generation(you subscribe to at least one podcast), I want you to send the URL to this article to at least 5 friends that don’t. If you’ve got a twitter account, tweet it. Let’s see if we can’t increase the number of podcast listeners significantly in the next month.

Editors Note: If you are in a hurry, just skim the bullet points and visit the URLs.

Cal’s 4 Step Program to joining the Podcast Generation:

1: Figure out how you are going to listen.
If you don’t have an mp3 player, you are not out in the cold, it means you will most likely have to listen to them on your computer. I have 2 iPods myself and a total of 8 in the family and I still listen to about 25% of my podcasts on my computer. So don’t fret if you don’t have an mp3 player.

Most podcast sites these days have an embedded flash player. If you are going to be listening via your computer, take advantage of these. The only downside here is that you have to go check each podcasts site on a regular basis. The embedded players are great for testing out a podcast to see if you want to subscribe though.

If you don’t want to have to check each site regularly, You will however, want a “Podcatcher”. A podcatcher is a program similar to an RSS feed reader that gathers all the feeds from all the podcasts you want to subscribe to and puts them in one place. Your podcatcher checks each feed on a regular basis to make sure that when you are ready to listen, you have the content downloaded and ready to go.

By far, the most popular podcatcher on earth is iTunes. iTunes is free from apple and comes with every iPod. It works on Windows and on OSX. You don’t have to have an iPod to use iTunes but if you have one it makes life so easy.

There are a lot of other podcatchers and originally I was going to list all I could find. However, in researching the list I found that someone else has already done the research. If you don’t want to use iTunes, visit PodCatcherMatrix.org and find the podcatcher that is right for you.

I know that Microsoft packages software with the Zune but I do not yet have one so I can’t comment on it. If you have a Zune and the software, please leave a comment telling us what you like/don’t like about it.

2: Figure out what you are going to listen to.
This may sound simplistic but you really don’t want to listen to everything out there. (Actually, you probably couldn’t but that’s beside the point) To get started, pick one topic that you like and find a single podcast you like on that topic. This could be more difficult than you think. First, there are several good podcast directories out there. If you use iTunes, by far the most popular is the iTunes store. It is, however, not the only source.

• podiobooks.com
• podshow.com
• Yahoo’s Audio Search

Find one show that you like and subscribe. Then as you have time, find a second, a third, etc. Since most shows release every week or every other week, if you are using podcasts to fill time on your commute, you will eventually find how many you need to fill the void. Resist the urge to type in a keyword into iTunes and then subscribe to every one of them. Podcasts vary in quality of content an production values. Not all the high quality content podcasts have high production values and that’s ok. However, you will want to be selective in who you subscribe to. Also, don’t be afraid to drop a podcast that is not filling a need.Speaking as a podcaster I want “listeners” not “subscribers”.

3: For the first month, commit time each week to look for new podcasts
If you do this for a month, it will become as natural as checking your email. Just check the directories for new podcasts that match your keywords. If there is a new one and the description looks interesting, either subscribe to it in your podcatcher or give it a listen on-line if you’ve got the time.

4: Participate
This is where most of the podcast generation fail. Podcasters want feedback, we want lots of it. So if you like a podcast, take the time to tell the podcaster you do.

• If they have a blog, comment.
• If they are listed in iTunes, rate them.
• If they are on one of the directories, rate them.
• If they have a forum, post.

Participation is one of the things that sets podcasting apart from traditional “broadcast” media and it’s an important part of being part of the podcast generation. While most podcasts resemble radio shows in that the host talks to you, almost all podcasts have some way for you to communicate back to the host and we really want to hear from you. Regardless of the topic, most podcsts are one side of a conversation, you are the other half. Make sure you hold up your end of the conversation.

Many podcasts these days have “listener call-in lines” They actively encourage you to call in and pe a part of the conversation. You don’t have to have any special equipment or even a “radio voice” to have your voice heard. If your favorite podcast has a listener call-in line, put it on your speed dial and when listening, pause the podcast and call in. Let the host know if you agree, disagree, or just have more information.

Podcasts I listen To

That’s my four points. Now, I’m going to share with you the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis. Not because I have some deep insight as to what you should be listening to but mainly as a small way of saying thank you to the people that produce these shows. Consider my listing them here as an endorsement, if they fall in your area of interest, I would highly recommend them to you. (These are in alphabetical order, not in any order of preference.)

• Technology
  • Sixty Second Tech (I produce this one)
• New Marketing/New Media/Social Media
  • Jaffee Juice
  • Managing The Gray
  • Marketing Over Coffee
  • The New Mediology
  • Podcasting Underground
  • Six Pixels of Separation
• Fiction
  • EscapePod
  • PsuedoPod
  • Scott Sigler Audio Books
• Programming
  • P3
  • PHP Abstract (I host this one)
• Entrepreneurship
  • HBR IdeaCast
  • Killer Innovations

So, there you have it, a primer on joining the podcast nation. As I told my friend, our dues are cheap and our benefits are plentiful. No more excuses, get out there and participate!

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

My breakfast buddy Bill Seaver posted a real interesting post on his blog titled “Blogs Will Kill The Web Design Star”. I started a comment to it but it quickly grew into a post by itself. So before you read this, go visit Bill’s blog and read it. (and while you are surfing, don’t forget to drop by his podcast, The New Mediology and give it a listen.

My response:

Hi Bill!

I couldn’t agree with you more. The days of paying someone big bucks for a simple site are gone. I actually covered this on Sixty Second Tech a few weeks ago in the episode The Secret to Cheap and Easy Websites. WordPress makes a great simple blog and with the explosion of good, cheap/free skins, there’s really no reason for people to pay for simple web needs. I did get some flack over on iTunes on that episode because a listener considered my approach to the subject denigrating to web designers. :)

If your needs are more than WordPress can provide, Joomla is a great next step. It’s several order of magnitude larger and more complex than WordPress but it has a great plugin structure and like WordPress it has an active community.

BTW, my favorite WordPress theme site is www.wpthemesfree.com. I’ve used several of their themes as starting points for my projects.

Also, I’ve been saying for a few weeks now that the job title to have for the next five years is “App Skinner”. Wife 1.24, The Lovely and Talented Kathy who is a web designer has been able to successfully deploy several complex sites including an e-commerce site, without having to employ a programmer. This opens up new doors for the company she works for because instead of having to hire a programmer to write yet another shopping cart, she can deploy Joomla and spend her time concentrating on developing a look and feel that will set it apart from the competition.

Bill, thanks for the post, it was great.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Did I miss a memo? Scott Sigler, the author who has replaced Steven King as “guy I don’t want in my dreams” has started a marketing blog, “Does It Sell Stuff“??? Wait, that’s not the punch-line; the punch-line is that it’s GOOD! While Scott posts on his new venture infrequently (6 posts since August of 2007) the posts are always well written, insightful and always cover the burning question all of us trying to make money with Social Networking are dying to know, “Does It Sell Stuff?”. Here’s an excerpt from the first post.

This blog will not talk about the latest and greatest social media tool. For that, you just can’t beat Robert Scoble and TechCrunch. It won’t talk about manifestos, paradigm shifts or up-and-coming strategies. If you’ve got that kind of time, go check out people like Solis and Brian Oberkirch.

Me? I’m boring. I just want to know what works. Stay tuned to this blog, and I’ll share that information with you.

Dammit Scott, seriously, you have a full-time job, best selling books and great podcasts; leave some room for the rest of us, ok?

Seriously, if you are into “new media”, “social media” or what we used to just call “trying to make money on the web” Scott’s new venture is a must read. Thankfully, there are no chicken sheers involved.

Until Next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

I was playing around with bitstrips.com today and this is what I came up with. Props to Liz Smith for the content.

Not sure how I feel about bitstrips.com. Like a lot of Web 2.0 projects, …it’s cute but what’s the point? (I wasn’t aware that the web needed a youtube for comics)

Until Next Time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

DISCLAIMER: I have 2 Lifetime Tivo subscriptions and have been a member of LinkedIn since it was in beta.

I know a lot of you out there right now are scratching their heads and wondering what a Networking site and a PVR/DVR have in common. Here is what they have in common, ranks of upper management with closed minds.

Tivo

I was out at tivo.com yesterday and the first thing they did when I hit the page was ask if I would answer a survey after I finished my business. I of course agreed (I’m just that kind of guy) and so when I finished, I filled out the survey.

I gave them the usual answers anyone visiting tivo.com would.

• 30 seconds is too long to wait for a page to load
• Your site navigation is goofy
• Your documentation is incomplete

However, the question they did NOT ask me is “What could we do to make your Tivo more useful to you?” See that’s a question I could write a book on. However, I won’t here, I’ll boil it down into a single concept. “Open it up and let me discover new ways to use it.”

I’m a programmer, when I look at a box like that (or my XBox 360) where the mfgr has obviously gone to great lengths to make sure that I can never run “unapproved” code on it, it just makes me sad. Open it up a bit. Let me build services that can interact with my Tivo. I understand your issues with copyright and I’m not trying to steal content. but hell, it’s a Linux box. Let me write a service that feeds a widget on my blog that shows what I’m watching at the moment. Let me suck down the data on what it’s recording and slice it and dice it myself. Who knows, maybe I’ll find a better way to recommend new shows.

There are hundreds of thousands of ideas for product enhancements that you don’t have to write, we, the hordes of hobbyist programmers and 21 Century tinkerers will make the Tivo an indispensable piece of equipment if you quit locking us out and realize that the Tivo can be so much more than an appliance, it can be a platform.

Oh and it’s ok if you don’t make any money off of each and every service written…make your money on the stuff you do and don’t try to charge me for the privileged of making your device better. Get it together Tivo, if you open up and let us help you, then Hollywood can’t stop you. You can either be the big dog, or stay a whipped puppy.

LinkedIn

These guys still don’t get it. (This is getting to be a regular topic for me.) I’m on LinkedIn and FaceBook both for very different reasons. However, I’m on facebook 3-4 times a day and linkedin 1-2 times a week. See the difference LinkedIn? Pictures in my profile aren’t enough, I want to actually DO SOMETHING with the data I’ve been giving you all these years. We’ve had this discussion before, “Why LinkedIn Sucks (and why I’ll keep using it)”, “LinkedIn Rant – Part II” and you’ve even promised progress but so far…nothing. Open up, let me do what I want with my data and all of a sudden you are useful enough for me to start paying for your service. Have you ever stopped and wondered why you aren’t growing as fast as facebook? It’s not the teens and tweens on facebook, it’s the fact that on facebook, people have freedom to experiment. On LinkedIn, I still can’t write a program that allows me to simply figure out which of my friends know each other…hell on facebook it’s a game!

If Facebook ever wises up and decided that it wants to be the big dog in your yard, you are so toast. Don’t wait for OpenSocial, give me an API and give it to me now. Anything I can do via a web page should be doable from an API. Do that and do it NOW and it’s a good start…it’s only a start but it is a start.

To both tivo and linkedin, I write this post, not because I’m a disgruntled user but because I really like both of you. Both of you however, need a swift kick in the ass to get you moving before you are relegated to the pile of other services I liked once but are now gone. (anyone remember GEnie? I LOVED GEnie!) Come on guys, closed is so last century, open up, let us into the playground and I guarantee that what we create will do more for your bottom line than any overpriced CEO will ever do.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Ok, yes, I’m a twitterhead, thanks to the magic of programs like flock and Spaz I tweet daily now. However, Twitter, like any good web 2.0 application, is finding new uses like ioubeer and other innovative ideas.  At DevZone we are starting to experiment with using twitter as a reply mechanism for our podcast PHP Abstract and I know others are starting to work in this area.  Basically to me, twitter is an API to instantly contact, by whatever means they want, anyone who wants to share their attention with me.

Using PHP Abstract as an example, right now, to get people’s attention that we have posted a new episode on DevZone, I post on dzone.com, digg.com, and facebook.com. Now however, for the past 3 episodes, I’ve also been posting on the PHP Abstract twitter account. So if you want to know that there is a new episode, all you have to do is follow phpabstract. While that is cool, one of the problems we seem to be having is that people don’t listen to PHP Abstract siggint at their computer, while on the DevZone page.  This means that people can’t easily reply to a podcast.  However, now, thanks to twitter, starting next week (doesn’t work yet, don’t bother) people will be able to tweet @phpabstract and the comment will go back to DevZone and be posted. So we now have a two-way API to talk with our listeners.

I think that going forward we will see more and more uses come forward for twitter. it reminds me of the recent Cisco commercial where the producers of a movie want to contact everybody about a sequel. (oh yea, my heart skips a beat because the producer of a movie has figured out how to rehash all the jokes in the first movie and re-package it as “fresh” content)  The producer enters the message into his phone and it calls one person, emails one and TXT messages one.  Well, we don’t need Cisco or an expensive phone system to do that now, we’ve got twitter. I can enter a message into twitter, everyone who is interested in what I have to say can follow me and respond. Instant API into my attention sphere.

Now what would be cool is twitter groups…

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Of late I’ve noticed a disturbing trend, people talking about “Web 3.0″. I’ve received IMs, Facebook questions, and most recently, this blog on what Web 3.0 really is. Enough!

Someone ask me the other day why the term Web 2.0 took off where “Semantic Web” faltered. The answer is easy. Web 2.0 is nothing more than a marketing term. marketers love terms that can mean just about anything because then no one can hold them to their product promises. “Semantic Web” is an easily definable term, it actually means something. By definition, this means it can’t be a buzz word.

So if Web 2.0 is the fart out of a marketers mouth, guess which end Web 3.0 comes out of. Cm’on people, if you want to talk about the current web phenomenon, use terms with concrete definitions, semantic web. Don’t use terms like “Social Networking”, “Web x.y” or any of their relatives. If we all agree to speak in concrete, definable terms, the the marketeers will just disappear. (and take the hair stylists and phone sanitizers with them)

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

I’m in a discussion over at johnon.com about SEO. The owner of that blog, John, took issue with my review of this book. Even after asking him and receiving his response, I was still not sure why he insisted on talking about the Zend Framework in a post that was obviously about my book review. (Not event loosely related to the Zend Framework) That is till I was explaining the conversation to wife 1.23, the lovely and talented Kathy. She is trained in the black arts of SEO but refuses on moral grounds to call herself a SEO professional. She explained to me that the reason was, he wanted anyone looking for Zend Framework and SEO help to find that article. Hmmmm…..

Ok, this brings up two points that I feel need to be aired.

1) In Google’s history, I’m not sure if there is a search phrase that is less likely to be searched for. It’s not that programmers don’t want to “SEOify” (I’m coining a word here, help me out) their pages. The problem is that there are very few things you can do at the framework level to affect a page’s SEO. You can do SEO friendly URLs but really, at the framework level, that’s about it.

2) My biggest problem with SEO Professionals is that they exist only to gum up the works. For instance, if you happen to be interested in learning what you can do with the Zend Framework and SEO, you can search Google for those terms. Up until John wrote his post about my book review, the top hit was this article about how to build SEO Friendly URLS using the Zend Framework. Now however, the top his is John’s article. An article that does NOT discuss how to do anything SEOish using the Zend Framework and does nothing to increase a reader’s knowledge on the subject.

John’s main bone of contention with my book review seems to be my low opinion of SEO professionals. I’m sure it was not his intent but by using SEO techniques to push an irrelevant article to the top of that search, he has simply validated my opinion. SEO Professionals exist solely to separate web site owners from their money. Their actions reduce the value of search engines like Google and cause Google to have to expend resources combating them.

Web site owners, here’s an important money saving tip.

If you want to rank high, write relevant copy. There’s no real secret in that and any good marketing copywriter can help you with that.

That’s what the search engines want. They want to put to in the search that you are relevant for. It does no one any good for people searching for Zend Framework and SEO to read a negative review of my book review. (Mind you I’m not upset that he doesn’t like the book review, to each his own)

I know this little post won’t do much to change the world but I felt it needed to be said. Who knows, if enough people get interested, I’ll print up some bumperstickers and maybe have a WebAid concert to raise awareness. Since Al invented the web, maybe I can get him on board.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

p.s. The opinions expressed in this post are mine and mine alone. Go get your own.

Dear Reader,

I’ve been working on a project for a while now and it’s finally ready for testing. Queuebuddy.com started life as a way to help me keep track of movies I want to see but don’t feel like paying to see in the theater. (If you are really curious, email me, I’ll give you what Wife 1.23 refers to as “The Hollywood Speech”) Anyhow, you can register, login and grab the bookmarklet. Then when you are surfing imdb.com you can click on the bookmarklet when you are on a page of a movie you want to see on DVD> When it comes out on DVD.

There’s no fee, there’s no commitment and other than an email when the DVD comes out, we won’t even bug you. So if your interested, drop by and try it out.

Two notes:

• Since it relies on a bookmarklet, it’s only really usable in FireFox. Apologies to all my Microsoft friends.
• I’m currently only tracking Region 1 release dates. Since the MPAA and it’s friends deem it necessary to screw over the rest of the world with this stupid region encoding scheme, I will too. (I did have high hopes that Austrailia was going to pass a law a few years ago that made region encoding illegal but I guess too many people decided they couldn’t live unless Hollywood craps in their living rooms because the law failed to pass.)

Oh yeah, as with every web 2.0 property, this is a BETA. There will be bugs and I’m a programmer, not a designer, so it’s pretty ugly right now.

One final note, it”s written using the newly released Zend Framework 1.0. I’m working on a tutorial for DevZone that shows some of the things I learned.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)

=C=

Dear reader,

A while back, I built a cute little toy that let you track UPS packages on a Google map. My original title for this was “Where the hell is my stuff?” but since I wanted it to be more family friendly, I titled it “My First Mashup“.

Since then, I’ve presented this talk 3 times and each time it gets more fun. However, I feel that this talk is nearing the end of it’s life. So I’ve packaged everything up and put it on the web for all to see. myfirstmashup.com has all the code you need to build your own copy of this. My slides from the most recent version are there as well as working examples should you just want to track a package. (Which, from the database cache I keep of cities, I see some of you are doing.)

If you saw the presentation but wanted the most recent version of the code, it’s there. If you didn’t get a chance to see the presentation, consider this a DIY kit, everything you need is there, just put all the pieces together.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)

=C=

Dear Reader,

At Web 2.0 Expo, I finally got around to setting up a twitter account. (http://twitter.com/calevans) I’ll be honest, I think it’s a fad. I don’t see it as becoming a serious Internet tool/toy. but I’m going to play with it while I’m on the road. I do see some interesting things you might could do with it, none of them commercially viable.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)

=C=