Twitip

I love getting tips and links submitted to us for Twitter related stories, tools, and so on. Here’s a roundup of what’s come into my inbox over the past few weeks… feel free to send in your discoveries or new Twitter tools to us via the contact form.

• 24 Free Sets of Twitter Icons in “pixel” style by Eren Emre Kanal.
• TwtMaps – a nifty new web app that allows you to enter your Twitter name and get a map that shows all your friends locations, as well as a little bit of info about each Twitter friend. (It’s cute, but it only shows a small fraction of people. Mine only showed me 59 of the 879 people that I’m following who are following me. I currently have 1665 followers and am following 1115… but it’s cute for a “sample geographic” idea.)
• proxifeed – Per the proxifeed site, “Proxifeed’s fully automated service creates relevant postings and broadcasts them into your Twitter feeds. Lean back and see your follower base grow!” Seems that basically they set you up with automatic tweets in your niche pulled from other feeds determined by keywords or manually added by you. They freely admit that it’s a test bed for contextual advertising on Twitter, however I think there’s some merit in this if it’s used properly. (If you’re using proxifeed, or have tried it, and are willing to write up a full review for TwiTip, please contact us.)
• Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem – Still not sure if the Twitter connection here is intentional or not, but it’s pretty funny none the less! (hat tip – David Halpert of SciFi Watch)

The following is Part 2 of a series of posts by Crystal N. Woods, from
Conscious Evolution, Success and Self Esteem (Follow Crystal @CrystalsQuest) You can read Part 1 of Lessons From The Evolution of Blogging here.

Since my last post, I hope you’ve had fun playing around with your storyline.  This time, we’re going to look at how blogs shifted away from journaling, and started becoming lists of links.

Initially blogs were few and far between so, having shared themselves by journaling in this new medium, there was a sense of being part of a small community.  Bloggers weren’t all that common still, so when a new blog was found other bloggers would link back to it, providing a way to follow other blogs for people who’d discovered (and liked) reading blogs.

These list posts over time evolved to include linking to other sites the blogger found interesting – creating a kind of filter for all the information on the web, through the lens of someone’s interests.  If you shared those interests, you had a quick way to find things you’d probably like, without having to hunt them all down yourself.  That meant people that weren’t bloggers, friends or family, started coming to visit these blogs, and their popularity grew. (more…)

Interesting short-list of links and tools today – Every week we get a whole bunch sent in, along with all our guest post submissions (which I’ll be happy to take more of the latter if you’ve got a post idea brewing) so I try to include a few each week here.

• Looking for podcasts about Twitter so you can get your run on while keeping up to date on the latest? Check out Twooting for “The Daily Podcast All About Twitter”!
• Want to be a “smarter, better, twitterer”? Check out 100 tips by Computer Colleges.
• Are you a celebrity stalker? Check out these celebrity first tweets by Net News Daily. (Is it horrible that I don’t know who half these people are?)
• I think I’d probably have laughed myself silly had I seen this Twitter graffiti. It’s a little political in terms of Twitter if you read the comments, but the pic is funny none the less!
• BLVD Status tracks which sites are sending people to your twitter page. You can track conversions to see who subscribes, even! They’ve got a WordPress plugin, some neat reporting tools, and a helpful blog to walk you through using the tool.

Today Grant Griffiths (@GrantGriffiths) from Blog for Profit writes about using Twitter to find links to read (and how to share links with others).

Like many who publish a blog or read blogs, twitter has become a part of the morning routine. We jump on twitter sometimes before we even open our email programs. What are people talking about and what are the hot conversations taking place is usually what we are looking for.

For me and others, twitter has become a major source of what we read throughout the day. I have actually discovered recently, not only do I go to twitter some days before I open my email program. Twitter is scrolled through before I open my RSS reader, NetNewsWire.

Collecting Links to Read on Twitter

Over the last few weeks, I have found a large chunk of what I read being provided by the links of those I am following on twitter. Many of those I follow tweet links to blog post or articles they are reading. And most are sending their own blog’s RSS feed to twitter.
(more…)