The media and internet chatter surrounding Twitter has reached a new height in the last two weeks. This is in large part due to the charity event Twestival, an international party that occurred in almost 200 cities around the world. Twitter users, who found out about, signed up for, and shared the party using social networking tool Twitter, were charged a $5 entry fee for their local event and raised, at last count, over $250,000 for Charity: Water. While this is, as some journalists have been quick to point out, is a far cry below the $1 million organisers had set as a reach target, the unbelievable magnitude of the event, coordinated entirely through short bursts of information no more than 140 characters long and organised in less than one month is a thrilling indication of the power of social media tools to channel a collective consciousness towards good works. I attended the small but enthusiastic group at Twestival Mountain View on 12 February and saw the event in action.
However there are some other Twitter tales that have become part of today’s Twitter talk and these ones aren’t so kindly towards human nature. As with any open communication channel, there is the potential for what should be a private conversation to make its way into the public sphere. What may begin as a misguided attempt at transparency can soon deteriorate into personal attacks viewed by thousands of other Twitter users and eternally cataloged on the net.
Twitter has been extolled for it’s potential professional benefit, particularly when it relates to PR professionals and journalists. It allows instantaneous exchange of information and immediate feedback for ideas, and the opportunity to make or read a pitch short enough to absorb is appealing to many. I’m sure as time goes by I will begin to understand how to interact with other Twitterers in an effective professional capacity but at the moment I find the tool most exciting with regards to online entertainment. I’ve discovered business ideas, new blogs, movie trailers, new software and web apps, heard jokes, found intelligent people sharing their views, and receive updates when my favourite blogs make new posts. As an entertainment tool, Twitter makes it easy for me to learn about and share the web. As a professional tool, I may have to stick to charity events until everyone learns to think before tweeting.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a couple of people get in touch with questions about how to get a job in London, particularly summer jobs for college students. Although my experience is fairly different than that of most short-term travelers looking for jobs or internships, I thought I’d make a post to share some tips.
If you’re interested in a job, unfortunately you’ll need to sort out a visa before you leave the States - there is no other legal way to get paid. The best (and as far as I know, only) way for a short term student working visa is through a program called BUNAC which is the one that I used. They give you a visa and then help you as little or as much as you need finding job and housing once you get to the UK. This is a 6 month visa and the BUNAC program typically recommends using the full time available on the visa. Of course you can leave after less time, and you can also do the program twice while still enrolled in college if you decide you want to go back but it is a bit costly if you’re only going to be there 8-10 weeks.
The other option is trying to find an unpaid internship (in fact there are very VERY few paid internships in the UK and they usually go to college grads). Many US students might be surprised by how common unpaid internships are in all industries but if you are expecting them, it’s less of a shock. You can look at www.gumtree.com which is the London version of Craigslist. International students often work in pubs or restaurants - and in many cases these jobs provide accomodation as well. Other professional industries offer internships but these tend to be competitive.
I have loved working in the UK and the BUNAC program makes it easy for students to do so. If you have the funds to travel and work in an unpaid internship, that would be an amazing experience as well. Good luck in the UK!
I’ve had a trying last few weeks when it comes to my computer to say the least.
I mentioned in a previous post how during a motherboard replacement operation, the technician removed a giant dust bunny from my computer. I figured, new internal hardware, dust free insides? I’m good to go.
Unfortunately my problems we just beginning. Things began to go downhill when I noticed that I was getting a ton of popups, my computer was running slowly and, most unnerving, whenever I did a Google search and clicked on one of the search results, I would be taken to a squeeze page for an affiliate product (in other words, an online advertisement for various products). I was well and truly virus infected and my virus scanners agreed. I have to believe that some update or upgrade I had made in the past was lost with the new motherboard as I hadn’t changed any browsing habits, and still had the same virus protection as before the operation but now had an effectively worthless computer. In addition to all that, my main virus software couldn’t even finish a scan to remove the virus as about halfway through I would receive the message:
This system is shutting down. Please save all work in progress and log off. Any unsaved changes will be lost. This shutdown initiated by NT Authority\System.
—————–
Windows must now restart because the DCOM Server Process Launcher Service terminated unexpectedly.
I finally learned that to stop the shutdown, I had to type [or copy and paste ] in to “Run” “shutdown -a” but that only allowed me to run the full virus scan, which informed me I was out of luck when it came to removing the thing, apparently a malware/trojan calling itself Virtum-gen.
Several more restarts and new malware removal tools later, I was getting a clean bill of computer health but had been warned that, as with most malware and Trojans, there was no way to ensure the virus hadn’t left backdoors for other viruses to enter, keyloggers to steal my passwords and financial details, and other nasty stuff. This was confirmed as, despite the clean virus scan, I was still seeing the wrong page when I clicked on Google search results.
With no other real choice, I took the plunge to reformat my computer, literarlly wipe the entire operating system and all files off my computer and start over. I was NOT a happy camper as all of my nice, expensive programs for which I no longer have the installation software (Microsoft Office Suite, Adobe Suite, pro virus protection, countless video games… ok, those are probably less important) were gone for good, as well as all my old settings. Turned out, that was the least of my problems as, without the original installation CDs which are back in London, even with the help of the Dell service reps who walked me through the entire process on the phone, things seemed to have gone badly.
After the reformat, my effectively brand new computer just didn’t want to run properly. The images were completely distorted (after a few minutes on, and looking at few different windows, it would look as if someone had used a paintbrush to smear everything across the screen). Then, as if that weren’t enough, the computer would give up entirely, changing to the Blue Screen of Death with the note that the issue was caused by nv4_disp.dll stuck in an infinite loop.
Back on the phone with Dell (who have probably logged over 20 working hours with me amongst all of their employees in the last two and a half weeks) to establish it was a driver problem and install new drivers, old drivers, drivers I’d already installed and had to reinstall. In the end, one Dell rep decided that all I needed was the new BIOS 14 driver to solve all my problems.
He was about half right. The computer is… functional. However I still have the occational distorted graphics, which do tend to disappear after a few moments; and when I type online text boxes (such as forums, blog posts, comment boxes, etc.) the window will hang briefly, during which time the text doesn’t appear when I type and that particular window is frozen.
I’m going to assume this is improved over where I was three weeks ago with a burnt out graphics card on my mother board, but to be honest, I’m pretty sure by this point it would have been cheaper for Dell to just send me a new computer given how much of their employee time has been wasted as they are unable to help me again and again.
SocialVibe is an interesting new web app that allows anyone with a web page - either on MySpace, Facebook, blog or otherwise - to embed an advertisement (illustrated below). You choose the company they would like to be the sponsor (Jones Soda in my case) and the charity and every time the ad is viewed, you earn points for your charity, which turn into donation money from the sponsors.
Bloggers, and other web site owners, often struggle with monitizing their site. The easiest way is through advertising programs, provided by third party ad resellers, such as Google and Yahoo, or affiliate programs created by sites such as Amazon or Ebay. However the pennies in earnings that most site owners see do nothing to offset site running costs, much less generate income. For recreational web developers and bloggers, an option to turn visits to their site into money for a favorite charity might be a welcome alternative. Instead of becoming frustrated over the inconsequential earnings provided by a huge ad reseller, sites can generate substansial donations for a charity by working as part of a larger, charitable network.
Take a look at SocialVibe to see the charities and sponsors available - and consider adding a SocialVibe application to your Facebook, MySpace, Blog or webpage.
This past weekend I had a chance to see the new Tim Burton film Coraline in theatres. The ticket for the movie, made in the increasingly popular 3D, came along with my very own set of 3D glasses and I must say they were definitely a step from the paper eyewear we had picked up for the Superbowl.
The movie was really fantastic, although what else might you expect from the amazing Tim Burton working in collaboration with one of my favourite authors, Neil Gaiman who wrote the original novella Coraline. It definitely contained the right amount of creepy to be thoroughly enjoyable but much more fun than your typical run-of-the-mill horror story. Of course it also helped a wimp like me that it was made for kids.
What I find interesting is the new excitement surrounding 3D movies and television programs. The recent NBC Superbowl ad and 3D episode of the TV show Chuck may have introduced a lot more people to 3D entertainment, but the popularity of the medium has been growing for a while. I remember seeing my first 3D film at Disney World almost a decade ago.
And now it’s the ‘it thing.’ After the Superbowl ad and Chuck, there’s Coraline as well as the upcoming Aliens Vs. Monsters by Dreamworks and a new addition to the Ice Age series that will also be released in 3D later this year.
As with all new technology, but especially in entertainment, there will most likely be a ramp up time when the novelty is exciting enough to encourage others to mimic the style but not common enough to know whether or not it will be successful throughout the market. The one major drawback of 3D entertainment is the required glasses – which may be uncomfortable, a poor fit or difficult to use over other eyewear but without which the screen is blurry and the experience is ruined. HD television may have experienced a similar phase, during which television networks attempted to add their own HD programming but only a small portion of the population had HDTV sets. With the new television broadcast laws, HDTV is now the norm rather than the exception but there won’t be any similar breaks for 3D entertainment.
Will the new 3D movies and shows be interesting enough to engage the whole market? Will the novelty hold the public despite the silly glasses? Will we someday carry 3D glasses in our cars and bags for movies out, lose them as easily as the remote in our living rooms and expect to have them provided during teen slumber parties? It seems unlikely but perhaps the beginning of the 3D revolution will bring additional entertainment technology that we can’t even imagine.
I wrote a post earlier about SEO and the English Langauge that described the ways text can influance search engine placement and I want to talk briefly about one of the other factors that can affect search engine optimization and that is backlinking. A backlink is a link from any other website to your own. If I were, for example, to link to Spoonfed that would be considered a backlink to the Spoonfed site, an external link from my own. The more backlinks a website receives, from more reputible sources, the higher Google ranks them in the search results, and the higher page rank (PR) they are awarded. PR is an artificial indicator, created by the search engines, that indicates how important a page is perceived on the web. PR can go from unranked, which is lower than 0, to 10 which is the highest.
Of course, the trick becomes finding ways to get sites with high PR to give a backlink to your site. Of course, you can create content that other sites find interesting, causing them to link to your interesting information; you can contact them directly and ask them to place a link on your site, especially if you think they might find your content valuable - this is what I am currently working on for Spoonfed; you can purchase high quality backlinks OR you can find places where you can actually post your own link on someone else’s website. That might sound counterintitive - why would someone allow you to change their page to add a link? - but it’s actually more common that you might imagine. Blogs have comment fields where you can enter your own comments, forums as well allow visitors to take part in a conversation. By placing your link in comments or forum posts, you can manually increase the number of backlinks to your site.
Things become a bit more complicated, however, with something called the Follow tag. When you typically create a link in HTML code, it looks like this:
<a href=”http://www.name-of-website.com”>Name of Website</a>
However in that code, you can add special tags that cause the link to open in a new window, to open in a new tab, or even a tag that tells Google robots (discussed in the previous post) not to visit that page at all. Most blogs (including mine) include “no-follow” tags as a default setting in comments, so spammers can’t take advantage of the exact manual backlinking strategy I described above. However many forums and blogs have “do-follow” tags that allow Google robots to explore your site after you manually create the link, thus passing the high PR from their blog or forum to your page.
There are many directory listings of forums and blogs that are do-follow, so I won’t go into those lists here. What I want to discuss is how to find high PR pages within the forum or blog where you can post your link. Because each page on a domain has an individual rank (for example, this blog post alone is unranked while the homepage at www.thetopfloorflat.com has a PR of 3), sometimes it can be tricky to find high PR places to link even within do-follow domains.
The first step is to download the Firefox addon, SEO for Firefox, a fantastic tool that will show you, directly in your search results list, valuable SEO information about the pages your search has returned. This information includes PR, the number of backlinks that page itself has, and age of the site. Once the addon has been installed, you’re ready to find some high PR target pages to add your backlinks.
Pick one of your favorite do-follow forums or blogs - if you don’t know of any you can start with my favorite web developer’s forum, Digital Point. Go to the Google search engine and make sure your SEO for Firefox addon is turned on. Then, do a search for the phrase “site:forums.digitalpoint.com” of course replacing the URL forums.digitalpoint.com with whatever forum or blog you plan on using. As your search loads, the SEO for Firefox addon will show you the PR of each page indexed on the site, while the Google results will show you how many forums posts are on the page. A quick scan through the results can indicate some valuable results, such as this one here:
This image shows a result with a PR of 3, a fairly high PR, and only six other posts on the page. This is an excellent target - I can go to the page, add a post to the forum thread, and instantly have a PR3 backlink to my site. Then, I can return to the search results to find more easy targets and high PR backlinks. Once you’ve exhausted one site, there are thousands of other do-follow blogs and forums to explore.
One note - Google does not allow you to run limitless searches on their cached site pages, so it may be useful to do a few searches under one domain, then another, switching between them as you look for high PR backlink options.
This is a departure from my usual, less technical posts, and I do hope to start including more of my tech experiences in the blog here. If you have any questions about this information, feel free to leave a comment below. Didn’t understand a word? Don’t worry, the usual fluff will return to a blog near you soon :).
My computer, as much as I love it, has been acting up for a while now. It’s less than two years old so I thought maybe it was the equivalent of computer teenage rebellion - “You’re always telling me what to do! I don’t care what you think, I’m going to run my fan all day if I want.” Next thing I knew, I’d be waking up to a computer covered in neon decals.
But while I was busy over-personifying my computer, I didn’t really consider the possibility that something was actually wrong with it. Such miscalculations in the past have often resulted in the loss of important data and hair I tear out of my head but for once I’ve kept up with my backups, avoided any potential viruses and, as far as I know, kept from dropping the computer from any great heights. None of that was much help when the screen decided to stop turning on.
A phone call with Dell technical support (joy of joys) and several nerve-wracking restarts later, we established the whole thing was shot and needed a new motherboard. Thankfully my warentee was still in tact and they’d send someone over to fix it the next day.
This afternoon, my friendly neighborhood computer-repairman arrived, ready to discet my computer and replace its innards. About halfway through the procedure on my computer which he, to my great amusement insisted on calling “the patient” the whole time, he asked me to come over and see something.
From inside my computer, he had withdrawn a plastic sticker that should have been removed by the orginal manufacturer and a dust bunny, I kid you not, the size of my thumb. The combination of the two had been seriously overheating the guts of my poor computer which had, in the last few days, given up completely while I continued to unknowingly fry its chips.
All’s well now and the computer is running better than before - certainly more quietly at any rate, without the fan running all the time. After surviving the proceedure I’m feeling a lot more cheerful towards my computer. I might even get it a neon decal as a reward.
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