Now, no offense to the famous, cancer-beating cyclist, but ranking number two in a search for ‘twitter’ strikes me as odd.

Lance Armstrong is a twitter heavy hitter (boasting 2,639,690 followers as of this posting) but he’s not the biggest or most well known twitter-er. Actor Ashton Kutcher, an infamous user, has more than double that at 5,669,290 but even he has been publicly knocked off his long-held-throne by pop stars Britney Spears with 5,813,523 and Lady Gaga with 5,995,300 rabid fans. Lance actually ranks 26th in the competition for Most Followers on Twitter! So what is it thats pushing him up so high?

There isn’t anything unusual about the return itself, its the same as what anyone’s profile would be if it showed up on a Google search result-

• The title: “Lance Armstrong (lancearmstong) on Twitter” — Lance uses his full name in the “name” section of his bio so that is reflected here, as well as for his twitter handle. Lance also has whats called a “Verified Account” meaning that the folks at Twitter have manually investigated and confirmed that this is indeed Lance Armstong – not some imposter- so this may help in his prominence, but I’m not sure…
• The description: “Twitter is a rich source of instantly updated information. It’s easy to stay updated on … Love the ‘stache. about 3 hours ago via Twitter for BlackBerry® …” — The description begins with text from twitter (a brief comment on what twitter is) which is located on the home page of Twitter which you see if you are not logged in (as pictured to the right). It then goes into an excerpt from the last tweet from Lance that Google has indexed, tells you he sent it from his Blackberry and that he posted it 3 hours ago (in reality it was 19 hours ago)

So I am left to believe that this ranking must be a result of popularity index and external linking. A lot of people are linking to Lance’s twitter page outside of Twitter, thus boosting it in Google’s ranking. Content on the web linking the two entities together and reliable sources sending traffic to one location is what Google looks for in determining relevance.

For example, check out this June 2010 article from CNN Entertainment - Conan starts Twitter feud with Lance Armstrong. The words “twitter” and “lance armstrong” are both in the title of a heavily trafficked blog as well as in the URL. The article links to Lance’s twitter page, and was spread across the web by readers, thus creating MORE links to Lance in MORE locations.

Also, Lance is well known for his “LIVESTRONG Foundation” and work with cancer research. Google gives more weight to .org .gov, and .edu websites so referral links from www.livestrong.ORG will boost a site more than a link from a .com site.

The team here at Captico ran the URL twitter.com/lancearmstrong through SEOMoz‘s tools and this is what I learned from their Advanced Link Intelligence Report:

• Lance’s Twitter account is linked to 31,506 times. Thats a lot of links!
• 1,938 different root domains (websites) link to his twitter account.

Moral of this story? Build links! Comment on other peoples websites and link back to your site, get yourself listed in directories around the web, post GOOD CONTENT that people want to share and will perpetuate for you, get involved in social media to make it easy for you to disseminate your information, and make sure you are optimizing the content on your website for search engines…

…or win 7 Tour de France’s and start a non-profit.

How can one simple box have so many different names for it? Why can’t the world wide web use one name instead of a range of names? You don’t see the same problem with buttons. A button is a button or should we change the rule of physics and start calling it a knob?

There was a recent poll on Polldaddy.com that asked the question: What do you call these draggable, expandable boxes in WP? For example, “The Publish ___________.” The choices were postbox, metabox, module, widget, area, container, box or other. The results were interesting and didn’t answer as much as the comments below the poll. The top three choices were: box (25% of the votes), widget (18% of the votes) and metabox (17% of the votes). One user posted “ Module because it’s the most international word (at least in French, you can say module).” Interesting – I now know French!

A “widget” is described as the basic building block/interface for a desktop operating system.

A “box” describes the rectangular boxes that are generated for elements on a web page.

A “module” is a term that personalized web pages like iGoogle refer to the multiple components of their pages.

Basically all three definitions are saying the same thing. “(Blank)” is an element on a web page.

In conclusion… well there really isn’t one! Designers will still insist on their modules and developers will rally around widgets. I suppose the best we can hope for is a gentleman’s truce and a unified front when presenting to any befuddled clients!

What do you like to call these containers of content?

“Over the coming weeks, we will be making two important updates that will impact how you interact with Twitter applications. We are sending this notice to all Twitter users to make sure you are aware of these changes.

What are applications?

There are over 250,000 applications built using the Twitter API. To use most applications, you first authorize the application to access your Twitter account, after which you can use it to read and post Tweets, discover new users and more. Applications come in many varieties, including desktop applications like TweetDeck,Seesmic, or EchoFon, websites such as TweetMeme, fflick, or Topsy, or mobile applications such as Twitter for iPhone, Twitter for Blackberry, or Foursquare.

Update 1: New authorization rules for applications

Starting August 31, all applications will be required to use “OAuth” to access your Twitter account.

What’s OAuth?

• OAuth is a technology that enables applications to access Twitter on your behalf with your approval without asking you directly for your password.
• Desktop and mobile applications may still ask for your password once, but after that request, they are required to use OAuth in order to access your timeline or allow you to tweet.

What does this mean for me?

• Applications are no longer allowed to store your password.
• If you change your password, the applications will continue to work.
• Some applications you have been using may require you to reauthorize them or may stop functioning at the time of this change.
• All applications you have authorized will be listed at http://twitter.com/settings/connections.
• You can revoke access to any application at any time from the list.

Update 2: t.co URL wrapping

In the coming weeks, we will be expanding the roll-out of our link wrapping servicet.co, which wraps links in Tweets with a new, simplified link. Wrapped links are displayed in a way that is easier to read, with the actual domain and part of the URL showing, so that you know what you are clicking on. When you click on a wrapped link, your request will pass through the Twitter service to check if the destination site is known to contain malware, and we then will forward you on to the destination URL. All of that should happen in an instant.

You will start seeing these links on certain accounts that have opted-in to the service; we expect to roll this out to all users by the end of the year. When this happens, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL.

What does this mean for me?

• A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped ashttp://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title.
• You will start seeing links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened links and lets you know where each link will take you.
• When you click on these links from Twitter.com or a Twitter application, Twitter will log that click. We hope to use this data to provide better and more relevant content to you over time.

Thanks for reading this important update. Come and check what’s new at http://twitter.com.

Thanks,
The Twitter Team

I found a very cool tutorial on Nettuts that helped me understand and create better sprites. Basically you recreate the navigation for Dragon Interactive, which has a perfect example for the use of sprites.

This is the final product as you can see it is all one large image. There is also a demo so you can see how it interacts when you are finished.

The above image is how your result from the tutorial should look.

Recommended Reading:

What Are CSS Sprites?

CSS Sprites: What They Are, Why They’re Cool, and How To Use Them

The Mystery Of CSS Sprites: Techniques, Tools And Tutorials

…Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to try it out yet as I don’t have a touch device or iPhone – an annoyance when it comes to most of the location based services – like foursquare – which I can text locations to or use through my laptop; gowalla – which only works for iPhone, Andorid, Blackberry, and Palm or through my laptop; and loopt – which actually DOES work on my Verizon supported LG Envy2, but costs $3.99 p/m.) You can theoretically view Facebook Places on http://touch.facebook.com/#home.php which looks like an alternate layout to your standard Facebook page. At this time, the Places application is available to users in the United States with mobile access to the Facebook application for iPhone or touch.facebook.com.

WHAT IS IT

According to Facebook, Places is a Facebook feature that allows you to “see where your friends are and share your location in the real world. When you use Places, you’ll be able to see if any of your friends are currently checked in nearby and connect with them easily. You can check into nearby Places to tell your friends where you are, tag your friends in the Places you visit, and view comments your friends have made about the Places you visit.”

PRIVACY

One of the primary concerns with Facebook’s newest venture is privacy. The social networking giant hasn’t had the best track record lately, and when you get into a geo-location tool with access to 500 million people’s very personal information and whereabouts, the paranoia can run high. Unlike foursquare or similar services where you knowingly choose that application and sign up for it, people did not join Facebook for tracking features. Places allows OTHER PEOPLE to tag you with your location and see your whereabouts if you are nearby. If you are concerned with your privacy, you can change your settings to disable any of these features, or limit them as you see fit. You can also manually remove individual tags if your friends tag you at certain locations.

WHAT SHOULD I DO

If you are able to access the program, you should log in and “Create A Place” for your business. If you don’t, eventually someone else will and it may not properly reflect your brand or information. Even if you don’t plan on taking advantage of this tool, make sure your company is represented correctly. (Like Google, Facebook does have a process for you to “claim” your listing if someone else creates it first.)

Like other geo-location tools, Places will eventually enable companies to target users near them, advertise directly, and offer promotions to users who are in their vicinity. Restaurants and bars in particular should look into early adapting- offering discounts and special offers to customers who “check-in” is a great way to spread your brand virally through the user’s network. Be sure to reward those who do visit as well. Some businesses offer a special standing deal on foursquare to the most loyal of users, “the mayor” (the user who has checked in the most times at that particular location).

If you want a laugh, Facebook has actually released an absolutely ridiculous video talking about Places as if it is some groundbreaking, world saving, phenomenon.

Related Reading:

Three Ways Business Can Take Advantage of Facebook Places

Facebook Places iPhone App, Check-Ins with Friends Tagging

Facebook Places Shares Where You Are

How To DISABLE Facebook Places

Google: Hey, We’ve Got Places Too

1. Twitter Search - Yes, by entering a search term + a happy or frowny face [ ☺ ☹ ] you can search for mentions of that word or name along with the facial sentiment included in the message. Not super sophisticated or all-encompassing by any means, but interesting none-the-less. You can even add a question mark [ ? ] to find tweets where people may have questions about your brand/topic.
2. Twitter Sentiment - Pretty simple- you type in a word/brand, etc and get charts showing sentiment and all the tweets listed out. What I like here is the ability to reclassify a tweet as negative, positive, or neutral.
3. Social Mention – “Is built into a social tracking tool that lots of people already use. It gives you a meaty look across ALL online media at how specific terms are being used in social media, tracking: Strength: The likelihood that your brand is being spoken about in social media. Sentiment: The ratio to positive vs negative tweets. Passion: Percentage that the people talking about your brand will continue to do so. Reach: Measure of the range of influence.  You’ll also be able to see the hashtags most often associated with the term (which can often be interesting), the top users who mention you (great intel), keywords most often used and lots of other great info. Social Mention also makes it really easy to export this data so you can mash it up however you’d like.” (Lisa Barone)
4. Sysomos - They track EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, but relating to sentiment specifically:  “Sysomos automatically evaluates conversations based on sentiment (e.g. positive, negative or neutral) – to deliver feedback about your products and brands. By automating the process, we can significantly reduce the time needed to analyze conversations. Using leading-edge machine learning and advanced language processing technologies, Sysomos identifies context within each conversation, offering the ability to assess sentences within the same article or blog post.”
5. Tweetzi - I used BP as a search example. This site is not user friendly- in its attempt to be simple, it makes it hard to understand what buttons do, but by entering a search term, (in this case: BP) it then returns all results. Then, by clicking buttons above like ☺ or ☹ or # you can filter results by mood or hashatg use, etc.  
6. TWENDZ - “Twendz is still in beta and uses a combination of keywords and symbols to compare and cross reference against a dictionary to make an educated guess on the sentiment of the posts. Once you enter in your search term, the tool will measure tweets as positive, neutral or negative and give you a look at the keywords most often used alongside your term. As a user, I find Twendz a bit cumbersome, but it does offer SMB a nice visual-friendly way to monitor sentiment.  You’ll also get a rotating view of the tweets mentioning your term in case you want to respond to any. There’s a fee-based PRO service for Twendz which will give you a bit more functionality, like the ability to identify key Twitter influencers, top trends and heightened emotions that provide actionable insight.” (Lisa Barone)  
7. Next Stage Evolution – Sentiment Analysis - “NextStage Sentiment Analytics (NSSA) is a format recognizing text-analysis tool based on Nextstage’s patented Evolution Technology, the only patent (as far as we know) granted by the USPO that “allows machines to understand and respond to human thought”. Why format-recognizing? Because people respond to DOC files, web pages, emails, straight text, etc., differently even when the same information is contained in each item.   NSSA is designed to analyze blog posts, Twitter streams, FaceBook pages, … Basically any web-based social media.”  You login, either upload a file or enter an URL, click on submit and get your result.
8. StatsIt – Supposedly they are amazing, but their website is useless when it comes to finding really hard information. BUT, based on this review of it by (Avinash Kaushik):  “It started off as a differentiated web analytics tool, but morphed into a social media monitoring tool. It’s approach is to index blogs, tweets, delicious, twitter, youtube, etc and analyze that data to find actionable insights about your social media presence / activity. It has indexed a ton of content from all the social web activity. When you tell it your brand terms (or just your brand name) it churns through that social web data to provide you with a tag cloud. To create the cloud, they have taken 1,000 words from the English language that are connected to emotion. Good emotion, bad emotion, ugly emotion. They look at their social web data and in that they look at the words around your brand mention and finally identify the emotional words people are using in context of.”  
9. Twitrratr – “Is a site dedicated to tracking opinions on Twitter and does a pretty good job doing so. To accomplish this they built a list of positive keywords and a list of negative keywords that they cross-reference against whatever term you search for. Based on that, they’ll populate three columns to help you see tweets labeled as positive, negative or neutral. I’m actually a fan of this service. I think the layout is really smooth and they do a pretty good job matching up sentiment.” (Lisa Barone)  
10. Evri - “The sentiment API does much more than most Twitter sentiment trackers – it allows you deeper insight into the “who’s,” and “what’s,” and “why’s” associated with the particular expression or feeling.”  
11. Analyze Words – This program allows you to enter a twitter name and then it analyzes attributes of that persons tweets. An interesting take on the whole idea… I like that it gives you a more actionable feedback than just “positive or negative”.
12. MoodViews – While not for Twitter, it is still an interesting application in that it tries to tie the data it collects into the “real” world… Its a collection of tools for tracking the stream of mood-annotated text made available by LiveJournal (blog site). MoodViews updates every 10 minutes based on LiveJournal posts.  Moodsignals looks at unusual peaks in the levels of mood annotations. It identifies peaks, and then tries to explain the peaks found by searching news archives.

Sometime during the week of August 23rd, those changes will be going into effect.

Officially, Facebook says, “These updates are designed to simplify navigation for users, reduce complexity for developers, and enable us to build the next generation of tools for growing your business with Facebook.  ….Based on feedback from developers, we have committed to the following plans to ensure a smooth transition:

• Boxes. We will notify users via messaging in profile boxes and in the Help Center that the “Boxes” tab, boxes on profiles and Pages, and application info sections will be going away.
• Application Tabs. Next week, we will give Page admins the ability to preview their custom tabs in the new 520 pixel width so they can modify their layouts as needed. All profile and Page tabs will be resized automatically beginning the week of August 23.”

You also probably have a nice little warning at the top of your page like this one:

But what does this mean for you, the average Facebook Fan Page admin?

1. That “Boxes” tab in your top navigation will be gone- as will its content. (but did anyone REALLY use that stuff anyway?)
2. You better resize any custom tabs, graphics, and landing pages! Next week, Facebook will give Page admins the ability to preview their custom tabs in the new 520 pixel width so that you can modify your layouts as needed – otherwise it will automatically get re-sized and will either break, look awful, or miraculously work (probably only if it looks awful now).

So heads up! You’ve been warned!

(…of course if you’re a Captico client, we’ll take care of all of this for you )

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “but all those websites and blogs already HAVE magical retweet buttons conveniently placed next to articles to make sharing with my friends an easy and encouraged process” — to which I would say, “why yes, you are correct! …And I hope you retweet all of ours!” (…Go on, do it… you know you want to…)

What Twitter appears to be offering is a single source button with one line of code that counts ALL instances of retweets and shares across its vast network or users. Yeah. Pretty awesome.

According to Mashable, “There are three versions of the button (110×20, 55×20, 55×63) with five different settings for customization.”

I strongly recommend going to the Mashable article Twitter Launching Official Tweet Buttons This Week [EXCLUSIVE] and check out the pictures as well as documentation on how to embed the new Tweet button on your website.

…and then come back…. hey, We’ve got lots of articles for you to read!

….RETWEET!

Twitter was making suggestions on who I should follow (rather than suggesting related Twitter links, applications and definitions like it had done in this space before.)

Both of the recommendations were fairly accurate – being that they were film industry related and that is primarily who I follow and who follows me and what I tweet about.

Interesting move Twitter… have any of you experienced this on your account yet?

You can also browse users by “Interests” now. Though results are HEAVILY weighted towards celebrities and “verified” accounts. (see below)

While I didn’t actually end up completing the process, I thought I would share the images of my test walk through with you in order to give you a rough idea of the INITIAL process.

(Keep in mind that Captico can handle all of this as a part of our campaign/packages for our clients.)

Step 1: Design Your Ad

You can have your Facebook Ad link to any website you wish. In this example I chose to link to the Captico Facebook page as opposed to the Captico website because the goal of my fake ad is to get people to connect with us on Facebook as opposed to drive traffic to our website.

Next, I enter my title. I want to catch the eye of people who are interested in Social Media as our Captico Facebook page provides information specifically related to social media and Facebook news. The Body text I enter tells the reader exactly that.

I chose the Captico logo for the image, but you can choose anything you want.

Step 2: Targeting

This is where we choose to whom the ad will appear. In my example I have selected DC, MD, and VA because those are the primary locations where are clients come from (though Captico does serve clients alla cross the country). If you are a small brick and mortar store in Cleveland that sells radioactive puppies, you may only what to target to Cleveland and cities that surround it. You can be as specific or as broad as you wish.

Demographics will further refine who your ads appear to. I have specified users who are 21+, of either gender, who have “Social media” listed as an interest in their profile and who graduated college. You can get very specific here targeting hobbies, ages, gender, and even companies or schools!

Step 3: Campaigns, Pricing, and Scheduling

This final step will be familiar to those of you who work with Google AdWords and Keywords. Here you specify how much you are willing to spend per day (you are charged each time your ad is clicked) and how much per click you wish to “bid”.

You can also choose the dates and frequency with which your ad will appear.

Well, I hope this brief walk through helped lift some of the veil around Facebook Ads! Please feel free to contact us with any questions or to help get YOU started with a Facebook campaign!

______________________________

You may also be interested in:

How to add Facebook Like and Share Buttons to Your Website

Facebook: Like

Facebook Ditches Fans in Favor of Likes

But is it spam when you talk about how much you like that new pair of “insert brand name here” shoes or how much butt your smart phone kicks? People like to share what they are interested in and research continues to show that people trust the opinions of their peers more than traditional advertising.

The “Pay With a Tweet” site says this: “In today’s world the value of people talking about your product is sometimes higher than the money you would get for it. ‘Pay with a Tweet’ is the first social payment system, where people pay with the value of their social network. It’s simple, every time somebody pays with a tweet, he or she tells all their friends about the product. Boom.” (And its not just Twitter, you can pay with a Facebook status update as well.)

The “Pay With a Tweet” site conveniently (and smartly on several levels) provides an easy way to test out their service. You can download a copy of their book “Oh My God What Happened and What Should I Do?” for free – if you pay with a tweet. I set about testing the service out and I must say, it was easy and painless. I clicked on the “Pay With Twitter” button below the book (as seen in the picture to the right) and a window popped up enabling me to connect to my Twitter account. Once signed in, another window popped up with a prewritten tweet and the accompanying URL that would go out to my feed. The URL is not editable, but the text of the tweet itself is. (Which could be dangerous for advertisers, but I found it convenient to be able to reflect my voice and explain what it was I was doing by tweeting this book link out.)

Next, another window popped up with what I had written in it to make sure that this is indeed something I wanted to do and say. I approved it, out it went to the Twittersphere, and a new window came up with a simple button to download the book- free and clear.

Now, on the surface, this seems like a great idea – especially for consumers. If you are prone to downloading whitepapers and research articles like me, then you know that most sites give this material away for free but you have to first navigate a “sign up” labyrinth where I have to give far more information that I care to take the time to share and then must subject myself to weekly or monthly spammy emails just so I could read one paper. I also almost never share this resource with others because then THEY would have to do the same thing. With “Pay With a Tweet”, it is a super simple process that takes almost no time and I would be happy to share with my followers and colleagues so a tweet is something I am happy to do.

On the advertiser side, using a Tweet as opposed to a sign up process means they are not collecting user data- one of the reasons behind giving away intellectual material like a whitepaper. Without contact info on people who are interested, they cannot hope to follow up or track demographics as well. (Except of course through Twitter.) And when it comes to physical products, like samples or t-shirts or CDs, one simply has to think about all of the spam followers they get or encounter on Twitter to see the potential ramifications of people setting up hundreds of twitter accounts and abusing the system. (Perhaps in this case giving a coupon code for online purchases would be a better offer than a physical product.)

In summary, I applaud Behrendt and Abraham for getting creative and putting new applications out into the space. As a consumer, I love the idea and will be interested to see if it gains traction.

To see a “Pay With A Tweet” campaign in action, check out the band The Teenagers who are offering their new song as a free download if you pay with a tweet.

RaphaëlJS is a powerful cross browser library for rendering Vector Graphics in either native SVG or native VML depending on the capabilities made available to the browser.   For example, IE6 even had VML.  More recently Gecko, Webkit, and Opera have support for SVG.    Both markup languages are very capable – SVG being the clear winner as now IE9 will be providing SVG support.    RaphaëlJS provides a very simple and intuitive interface for dealing with Vector Graphics.   The advantage of vector graphics to other the DOM box model is that it can animate complex shapes without multiple raster graphics.

In the simplest form, you can render basic shapes like a circle or rectangle.   More complex shapes are also supported via SVG paths.   The benefit of the path parser in RaphaëlJS is that you can create complex shapes using well established tools like Adobe Illustrator, but there are also many free SVG tools as well – even web based ones.   This makes it easy to generate paths and export them to the browser as SVG files.   Adding a little code to RaphaëlJS you can easily have it parse your SVG files allowing you to render basic SVG files to probably every browser in use today, including most mobile phone browsers, (Android, and iPhone).    For example, this library has a good start on SVG parsing with RaphaëlJS as the renderer.

Kind of a long video, but shows you how to use Illustrator and RaphaëlJS to create neat animations with Vector Graphics.

Using Adobe Illustrator to create an SVG file is easy, just “save as” SVG.   There are a few things to keep in mind however, you want to make sure to limit the type of shapes you use as it is easiest to work with SVG paths directly.   For example, the code below demonstrates animating a sequence of paths.

    $(document).ready(function() {
      var paths = ["M117.567,97.5c36.999,21,18.354,75-21.645,72s23.578-126-63.422-14",
                   "M191.5,108c-24.165,35.015-55.578,64.5-95.578,61.5s23.578-126-63.422-14",
                   "M191.5,108c-24.165,35.015-48.472-2.921-79.5,22.5c-41.5,34,7.5-87-79.5,25",
                   "M191.5,108c-37-83.5-34.972,43.079-66,68.5c-41.5,34-15-220-102-108",
                   "M200.5,108c23-108-48.972-68.921-80-43.5 c-24.942,20.435-45.803-144.374-104,26",
                   "M216,80.5c-58.5-87-64.472-41.421-95.5-16c-24.942,20.435,9-52.027-104,26",
                   "M216,80.5c-58.5-87-127.5-50.849-95.5-16 c21.809,23.75,69.149,171.346-65,142",
                   "M27.5,136.5c-58.5-87,76-129.849,108-95 C180.87,90.908,92.5,252.5,27.5,136.5",
                   "M25.25,102.5c36-48,70-65,85-27s80,49,14,73s-99,36-99-5",
                   "M20.25,95.5c36-48,70-65,85-27s80,49,14,73S20.25,136.5,20.25,95.5"];
      var paper = Raphael("icon",500,500);
      var cur=0;
      var path = paper.path(paths[cur++]).attr({stroke:"#F3AA1D",'stroke-width': 6});

      var animate = function() {
        if (cur < paths.length) {
          path.animate({path:paths[cur++]},500,"<>",animate);
        }
      }

      setTimeout(animate,500);

    });

The possibilities RaphaëlJS brings to web development is huge. With now much faster browsers we can expect to see much more interactive user interfaces using entirely native browser technology. If you’re on an iphone check this page out. The animation above works.

When I did a search for basketball phenom “Lebron James” the new hero of Miami and villain of Cleveland, it returns a link to his personal site @KingJames (which is verified), a fake/funny site @LeBronsElbow, and a very stupid fake site @LeBronJamesdunk (which according to Twitter’s Terms of Service, needs to state somewhere in its description that it is NOT the real LeBron). Below the “featured” users, you see the customary real-time results for occurrences of your search term (in this case “Lebron James”) across twitter – with your term bolded. 

One of the things I find very interesting is the URL that comes up as a result of clicking on a “featured” user. The URL is not just the regular “twitter.com/KingJames” but includes where it came from “twitter.com/KingJames?source=onebox” — definitely an indicator of Twitter’s future plans to develop this feature further, with analytics to prove ROI and monetization.

Conducting a traditional name search through the “Find People” tab at the top right of your Twitter page, still yields the usual results (as seen here) with no “featured” listing… yet.

I’ll be interested in seeing what else Twitter comes up with to better serve users and advertisers while trying to turn a profit.

TIP TO GO: Be sure to claim your company’s name NOW on all social networking sites- even if you aren’t ready to be active yet. Be sure you list relevant names in your profile/bio as well.

@DisneyPictures is offering 2-for-1 tickets to their new movie “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice“. By clicking on a link and entering a code at checkout, followers of @earlybird (and @disneypictures) can save some cash at the theatre (though I think we all know Nicolas Cage could use that $$).

While brands and companies often use Twitter and other social media sites to issue discounts and coupons, Earlybird may eventually offer a broader demographic base than advertisers don’t have already as well as attract purchases from users who may not be a “fan”.

We developed this tool because we needed a good solution for reducing the file size of our kml files while keeping as close to the original polygon as possible.  A few of the interesting features we developed along the way is a graph showing the point reduction for each polygon thanks to Raphaël this was fairly easy.

Here’s the map we generated for a small KML representing a portion of the NY electoral districts.

I would show the before but because the before point count was too high I couldn’t load it into maps.   However this reduced one is not as high a resolution as the original it still looks pretty good.  Also, we can get pretty close to the original by fine tuning the tolerance.

Along with the map it’s nice to see a graph showing the reduced point count.  Check this out:

The green and blue lines represent the polygon segment count before (green) and after (blue) compression. This graph represents an approximate reduction in size/complexity.

Keynote by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine with introduction by Allyson Kapin and moderated by Shireen Mitchell.

Beth Kanter and Allison Fine co-authored the book “The Networked Nonprofit” and answered audience questions related to it’s themes.

Nonprofit-20-Unconference-Kanter-Fine-Part-1

Nonprofit-20-Unconference-Keynote-Kanter-Fine-Part-2

Keynote by Wendy Harman with introduction by the Case Foundation.

Wendy shared her experiences with social media strategy at The American Red Cross, particularly as it related to the disaster in Haiti, before answering questions from the audience.

Nonprofit-20-Unconference-Keynote-Wendy-Harman-Part-1

Nonprofit-20-Unconference-Keynote-Wendy-Harman-Part-2-QandA

To view video interviews from Washington DC’s Nonprofit 2.0 Unconference, visit Captico’s Youtube channel here.

Geoff Livingston of Zoetica at the Nonprofit 2.0 Unconference

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Captico is a sponsor of the Nonprofit 2.0 Un-Conference

Captico’s New Media Coordinator Corrie Davidson will be on hand to snag informal on-the-spot interviews with event attendees. You can also follow the conference through Captico’s Twitter account.

The unConference Format*

Following the keynote sessions, we start with a blank wall and, in less than an hour, with a facilitator guiding the process attendees create a full day, multi-track conference agenda that is relevant and inspiring to everyone in the room. All are welcome to put forward presentations or propose conversations that you would like to have with others and:

• questions you want answered
• information you want to share/present
• a project you would like help on
• any number of forms

What happens During Sessions?*

• As sessions happen people volunteer to document the outcomes on a wiki (The notes of what was said is even better). Photos of any whiteboards are also important along with any slides that were presented.
• At the end of the day everyone gathers in one place to share highlights of the day.

*Adapted from Kaliya’s Halmlin’s blog on Unconferences

Sponsors include: Rad Campaign, Zoetica, Digital Sistas, SEIU, Case Foundation, A Brand New Way, Network Solutions, Care2, IStrategy Labs, Free Range Studios, Abraham and Harrison, i3 Strategies, Captico, JumpStart Labs, NextGenWeb, and Margot Friedman of Dupont Circle Communications.

If you don’t have a ticket, join others like you for the social good keynotes on U-Stream via the NextGenWeb site.

Nonprofit 2.0 Unconference Agenda, June 25, 2010

8:45: Breakfast

9:00: Welcome

9:15: Wendy Harman Keynote

10:00 Keynote conversation with Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, moderated by Shireen Mitchell

10:45 Brainstorm Breakout Sessions

11:30: Breakout Session 1

12:30: Lunch

1:15: Breakout Session 2

2:15: Breakout Session 3

3:15: Breakout Session 4

4:15: Closing

5:PM: After Party at the Science Club with complementary drinks and appetizers. 1136 19th Street, NW – just blocks from SEIU.