Thatedeguy

Reflections on Twitter

Thatedeguy — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:38:32 +0000

Not too very long ago, I began using twitter. At the time, I didn’t think that I would be using it much and that it wouldn’t hold much value for me.

I anticipate having issues with keeping updated with it. I don’t use SMS much, so updates via cell are pretty much out. I may have it open in a tab from time to time, but my fault there would be that I have a horrible memory for things like opening that tab to begin with.

A couple of things have happened that have mostly proven that wrong. I still don’t use SMS much and I still don’t update much by cell. For the most part, that is because I hate having to use the phone pad to type messages. It takes me way too long and ends up annoying me. But Twitter has also made me wish I had a blackberry or similar on several occasions over the last few weeks.

I must say though, that I have found myself using twitter much more than I expected. I’m up over 100 twits (twitters?) now. I added a little plugin called twitterfox to my firefox install and that has made it much easier to keep updated and use the service. I’m aware that there are some desktop applications available to use twitter with, but about 80% of the time that I’ll be using twitter, I’ll be at work, so I don’t want to install any extraneous programs. I may give a few of them a try at home however. Twitterfox does right well with it and makes it fairly easy to keep updated as long as firefox is open, which it usually is.

Twitter is somewhat addictive. It’s way more conversational than a blog or any other website. It’s the closest thing to a IM client that there is currently available. The nice thing is that you can “follow” several conversations at once without a separate window open for each and also, without the clutter that having all those conversations would be in one place. They are still in one “stream” but, with the @ reply function, it makes it much easier to find the twits that are aimed at you and those that belong to a different conversation.

I also see the potential for using twitter (in fact it’s suggested by many of the pros) to grow your blog audience. Twitter is a much more personal conversation than the blog because of it’s IM properties. Because of that, readers and other bloggers can grow a relationship much quicker and also have that relationship be much stronger through the interation that they get on Twitter.

So far, I’m impressed with Twitter and will be looking for some more ways to make it even more useful to me and you.

If you’d like to have a conversation with me, you can follow me on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/thatedeguy

HP Magic Giveaways Week 1

Thatedeguy — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:00:43 +0000

Rather than make a post each day this week with the contests that are springing up as part of the HP Magic Giveaway, I thought I would just do one mega post of all of them happening this week. That way you don’t get a flood of posts in your readers and you still get informed of the contests. Bookmark this page so you can come back and make sure you enter all the giveaways.

Today:

Monday December 1

Hack College

Tuesday December 2

Wednesday December 3

Thursday December 4

Friday December 5

One Day, One Job

Saturday December 6th

I’ll post another list on Sunday and possibly a couple of smaller ones throughout the week if I find some of these contests interesting.

HP Magic Giveaway Day 2

Thatedeguy — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 21:17:51 +0000

Well, it’s day 2 of the great HP Magic Giveaway. There’s two contests kicking off today. They’ve got a little more stringent entry rules than yesterdays giveaways, but are still well worth the effort.

Morningside Mom: Send an email with description of what you’ll do with the package. People who promise to share get better odds. Multimedia is encouraged. Ends December 5th.
Thoughs on Poetics and Tech: Comment, Link back and email links to both. Again, sharing is encouraged.

As you may have noticed, most of these giveaways are encouraging sharing the prize. It’s got 4 computers in it, so that really shouldn’t be a problem. And besides, it’s the giving season. Now, off with you to enter the giveaways today!

HP Magic Giveaways Day 1

Thatedeguy — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:45:25 +0000

So, today starts the giveaways for the HP Magic giveaway spectacular. (They should be paying me for doing all this advertising, but they aren’t) There are three sites that are starting their giveaways today. There’s a calendar for when all 50 are going live if you’re interested.

The three going live today are:

Bleeping Computer. Relatively easy to enter. Register for forums, fill out a form and agree to their rules. Easy rules, basically saying you won’t sell items and you have to give away some of the items.
Gear Live. Pretty simple, sign up on the site, use twitter to send a message then leave comment on post. A couple chances to get bonus entries as well. Gotta be signed in to get to the post it seems, so you might have to go to gearlive.com and start there by registering.
Windows Connected. Also relatively easy to enter. Send a really short email to them explaining what you’ll do with it all and agree not to sell it and also agree to share some of it.

Thus far, I’ve only entered the Bleeping Computer giveaway. Mostly because it really was that easy. It also looks like if you win one of these prizes, you automatically become ineligible for any of the rest of them. Not a big deal really since one should be enough. Here’s hoping I have to worry about that rule…

HP Giving Away Thousands in Hardware

Thatedeguy — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 07:42:19 +0000

Let’s see John Chow top these contest prizes. HP, in collaboration with Windows Live and 50 bloggers, has come up with one of the largest blog contest events I’ve ever seen. All told, the prizes total in at $300,000! Yes, a 3 followed by 5 zeros.

50 bloggers will be giving away 50 prize packages worth $6000 each. Here’s the full list of participating bloggers at HP. I would love to pick up one of these packages and I really would have loved to be one of the participating bloggers. Think of the traffic and link love they’ll be hauling in!

Here’s the details on the prize package as well. I count four computers in that package. A printer and a pretty nice software package as well!

Each of the 50 blogs will be holding their own individual contest with their own individual rules so you’ll have to visit each one and catch up on the rules. I’ll see if I can’t throw in a few updates as we go along too. It doesn’t look like they’ll be starting the contests until Friday, but you might want to just add them all to your feedreader now so you get the contest update post right away.