Greg Stereo

Not a bad read from another website…it’s a business-focused article but the tips are useful for newbie twitter users in general:

First 4 Things to do for a new Twitter Account

Many businesses have already tried Twitter. Some have yet to test the waters. For those who plan to create a new Twitter account for their business, there are 4 things you will want to do first when you get started.

Completely fill out your profile

This sound simple, but some folks fly through this step. This is your opportunity to quickly summarize yourself (and business if applicable) and highlight your website.

Put some thought into your bio. Pick your most important details and highlight them here. Think about how you want to project yourself and with what audience you will most likely be in front of.

Include your location and url. Adding your location will help localize your profile. The url is nofollow, but still from a well known site and you’ll get a little SEO credit for the link.

Upload a recognizable avatar

Your avatar will be associated with every tweet. This is your opportunity to create branding for your profile. Your followers will visually remember you by your avatar. Keep the size in mind when choosing your image. You will want it to be legible and recognizable even when the image is shrunk.

Add a custom background

Nothing spells “noob” like a basic Twitter background. You’ll want to add a custom background before you begin networking on Twitter. This is a solid opportunity for branding and sneaking in a little more information about you and your business.

If you do not have the resources to create one yourself, there are many services out there that will build you a decent looking template for free (you’ll have their logo plug in your background) or you can have one designed for you (the fees are reasonable and worth it). Just keep in mind the size of the background image you use. You will want it to look right on all types and sizes of monitors.

Include information such as picture of yourself or company logo, additional summary and url’s to other social profiles and websites. Depending on how you set it up, links in your background will most likely not be clickable; so use marketing friendly urls. For example, try to use clean urls like yourbusiness.com or facebook.com/yourbusiness.

Listen, update and get involved

After branding your profile you’ll be ready to get involved. Think about who you want to target and communicate with. Begin following those who you want to connect with. Read their tweets for a while to learn what they are interested in.

Share links and information that you think your target audience and followers would be interested in. Pay attention to what they tweet, listen, respond and get involved in the conversation.

Wow it’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years since the Hubble Space Telescope was launched on the back of the space shuttle STS-31.

I remember at first all the jokes about its technical problems, it had poor eyesight, and needed many repairs.

HST was not going to give up the fight easily, though, and went on to capture some of the most beautiful and awesome images from deep space imaginable.

NASA is releasing today a brand new Hubble photo of a small portion of one of the largest seen star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. Towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula.

The scene is reminiscent of Hubble’s classic “Pillars of Creation” photo from 1995, but is even more striking in appearance. The image captures the top of a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being pushed apart from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks like arrows sailing through the air.

Hubble fans worldwide are being invited to share the ways the telescope has affected them. They can send an e-mail, post a Facebook message, use the Twitter hashtag #hst20, or send a cell phone text message. Or, they can visit the “Messages to Hubble” page on http://hubblesite.org, type in their entry, and read selections from other messages that have been received. Fan messages will be stored in the Hubble data archive along with the telescope’s many terabytes of science data. Someday, future researchers will be able to read these messages and understand how Hubble had such an impact on the world.

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I’ve been listening to all this talk of “The Cloud”, which to me is the new Web 2.0, which replaced the dot-com boom, which used to be the new black. And I think it’s interesting, while also being a load of crap.

Users are encouraged to think they can rely on the cloud to offload their machines’ data processing needs, to backup their valuable data, and to share information. Used properly, the cloud can probably play a partial role in these and other laudable goals. But just ask any user of the Sidekick smartphone how they felt when either Microsoft or T-Mobile or some invisible gnomes managed to fuck up one of the most basic server upgrades and lose all of their data…oh and render their devices largely inoperable for a couple days (the advisory at the time was that Sidekick owners not turn their devices off, as whatever little of their precious data was still stored on the client phones would be deleted when the phones restarted and reattached to the cloud). Many users numbly and obediently left their Sidekicks on in the vain and desperate hope that the powers that be (or the invisible gnomes) would be able to restore the cloud data…until their batteries ran down and buh-bye last desperate hope.

I’m sure these victims enjoyed their gift certificates to buy more smartphone services from the parties involved. If anything like that happens to Blackberry users, their will be geektards armed with pitchforks and torches in the streets of every metropolis in the U.S.

The cloud can fail. Hardware can fail. Software can and regularly does fail. These machines are just hunks of interconnected microprocessors pushing around a bunch of one’s and zero’s. And as usual the most common source of problems is, as HAL 9000 put it in 2001:A Space Odyssey, “human error.”

The Sidekick failure? Human screwup. Most cases of identity theft? Not malicious hackers, but often an employee leaving a laptop with sensitive data about customers or clients on it unsecured in public. Humans are the weakest link more often than people realize.

And the internet can be a very strong link. To understand that this is not just a misanthropic point of view, let me give you a bit of history in the form of a quiz.

Are “The Internet” and “The World Wide Web” the same thing?

Too many people with computers say yes. The internet and the web are not the same thing. The internet, as everyone who has been on youtube in the last few years knows, is a series of tubes. The tubes are connected together, kind of like the old version of “telephones” you made when you were young with two tin cans and a long measure of string.

The web, of course, is a layer on top of the series of tubes. It’s like frosting on a cake, except most of the frosting in this case is kind of hard, and discolored, but it’s plenty sugary. It’s a graphical layer on top of the tubes, and of course so many people like picture books and whatnot. No wonder it caught on.

The internet was invented by DARPA (a government agency) to provide a highly-redundant communications method in the invent of a Russian nuclear attack that disabled phones and the like (think Cuban Missile Crisis days, or when Reagan was president and the Russkies nuking us or us nuking them seemed like the big threat we faced).

The internet holds up very well under stress. The Web doesn’t. On 9/11, the internet backbones (for the most part) stayed up. A lot of telecom companies had hubs in or around the World Trade Center, which caused some spotty outages, but overall the highly-redundant system of networked computers that makes up the internet held up.

The web, on the other hand, did not. Web sites like CNN, all the other news sites, Drudge (I assume – I don’t go to Drudge even under the worst of circumstances) were crushed under the load. The Web can be worse for a person than TV. No matter how many people tune into a TV station, the signal strength and availability are unaltered. But if a web site gets a massive spike in traffic, it can go down. And God forbid we can’t get to our precious Twitter account, or login to Facebook, or surf for more porn.

And really, isn’t that what too much of the Web has become? There’s Too Much Information out there. Most of it is porn, online scams, or fear-mongering, sensationalism and distortions. Oh and spyware, I forgot spyware, much of which is so badly written it doesn’t end up doing anything malicious other than making your homepage something weird like www.hickoryfarms.com and slowing your computer down. Don’t get me wrong, malware scanning and prevention is important, and there are botnets out there harvesting thousands of computers, but in the end most of the applets like this are poorly-written pieces of crap.

So do yourself a favor or two. Get off the damned cloud and the social networking and the online gaming and whatever other “addictive” crap you’re spending too much time on. Fire up a full anti-virus scan and then a full malware scan. While that’s running, watch TV for a bit. Flip between MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News. Then think on what you’ve seen and find a way to help the victims of the Haitian earthquake. The equivalent of one month worth of your internet access costs would go a long way there.

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