After checking into the lovely Hotel Max in downtown Seattle, I tweeted:

Settling into the Hotel Max in Seattle. Super impressed so far — beautiful hotel. Thx for the tip @targetvacations!

within about two minutes a reply from Hotel Max showed up:

@jaygoldman Hello sir! What room are you in? I’d love to send up some goodies for you for tweeting such nice things!

Sure enough, moments later, a bottle of champagne and some chocolates were delivered to our door, along with an invitation to attend their first ever tweetup in the bar from 5pm – 7pm. We couldn’t make it down, but I have to say that’s some of the best customer service I’ve ever had at a hotel. The hotel was equally great and we loved our stay there. Beautiful design, great art, very friendly staff. Way to go Max!

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The first thing you need to understand: if you don’t make some changes to your existing plan and you just go about using your phone like you do every day, you’re going to come home to a very nasty surprise in the form of a Rogers bill that will have you immediately applying for a government bailout package. I hear those are actually becoming hard to get, so you might want to keep reading.

The second thing you need to understand: there are at least three ways that Rogers is going to get you drunk and take advantage of you. And I don’t mean that in the sort of ha-ha-ha frat party sense. I mean it in the posting videos of you running naked down Yonge Street with indelible ink all of your body sense.

• Phone Calls that Hurt: Calls from the US back to Canada are billed at an astounding rate of $1.70/minute. Don’t answer calls from your friends at home (unless they’re calling to tell you that you won the lottery) since incoming Canadian calls are billed at $1.20/minute. You might think of calling ahead to Iron Works BBQ while you’re in Austin, but you better really want those ribs because that call is going to cost you $0.95/minute (hope you’re not on hold!).
• Text Messages Full of Pain: The good news is that incoming text messages are free. Just don’t reply to them (or even think of — say — trying to make plans with a group of people), since outgoing text messages are charged at the simply mind boggling rate of $0.60/message.
• Data with Very Sharp Edges: Oh sweet 3G data! Nectar of the web gods and very much priced accordingly. You’ll get dinged for $0.03/kb while you’re roaming, which means that you just paid about $10.50 if you’re reading this from my actual site on your Canadian iPhone (~350kb * 0.03 = $10.50). Hope it was worth it!

Is it really any wonder that all of their customers hate them?

There is some good news though, so read on before you abandon all technology and become a tinfoil hat wearing hermit somewhere in the northern reaches of the Great White North.

After a lengthy call to Rogers that involved putting me on hold for at least 3 or 4 minutes to answer every question, and a whole bunch of digging through their obtuse website filled to the brim with pop-up windows and other web browsing novelties from 1996, I’ve been able to catalogue The Ultimate Down South Traveler’s Guide for Rogers Customers. Here’s how to mostly avoid waking up in a gutter with a massive Rogers bill stuffed in a very uncomfortable place:

• Phone Calls that Feel Good: I was completely unable to find info about this on their site, but I’ve now added an option to my account that gives me 120 minutes of calling, over and above my normal plan, anywhere in the US or Canada, for $60/month. All of those calls will be treated as local calls, so there’s no roaming rates applied at all. If you’re a less frequent phone user, there’s a 60 minute option for $40/month. At an average of $1.28/minute for calls without this plan, I’m saving about $94 if I use all of the time.
• Text Messages Still Full of Pain: I have no good news here. I was told that there’s no way to send text messages while in the US for less than $0.60/message.
• Data with Dull Edges: There’s a little good news here. You can add the US Data Roaming Add-On to your account for $10/month, which takes data from $0.03/kb to $0.001/kb. That’s still a little pricey, but at least this page would only cost $0.35 to read instead of $10.50. Another way to look at it: the $10 you pay up front would have bought about 300kb of data without the add-on. Worth it if you think you might do more than look at a single image.

You can apparently have them add the packages for a fixed amount of time and have them automatically come off again. I’m doing quite a bit of US travelling for the rest of March, so I’ve had them add it when I leave for SXSW and take it off when I come back from my final trip at the beginning of April. I trust Rogers to actually have things activate and deactivate about as much as I trusted Halliburton with the reconstruction of Iraq, so I’ll be monitoring my bill like a hawk.

Avoid Charges Without Changes

Here are some steps you can take to avoid additional charges on your iPhone if you don’t want to make a bunch of changes to your account:

• When Your Phone is Not a Phone: Don’t make or receive any phone calls. If someone calls you, check the number in case it really is important enough to pay for and then double-click the Lock/Power button to send them straight to voicemail if it isn’t. Since SXSW provides free wireless to all attendees, install an application like fring and use your iPhone as a Skype handset (including Skype In/Out) or as a SIP client if you have access to an Asterisk box. Note that the wireless often gets completely overloaded, so don’t rely on this one.
• Inbound Text Messages Only: Receive all you want, but don’t send ‘em. Let people txt you and then you either phone them, email them, or Twitter direct message them (since your data will be “cheap” and there’s a good chance they have incoming DMs going to their phone as text messages if they’re in the US).
• Data on the Cheap: Make sure you turn off Data While Roaming so that your iPhone doesn’t run up a massive bill for you (you’ll find it under Settings > General > Network > Data While Roaming). That will switch of EDGE/3G data but not WiFi, so you should still be fine to use wireless networks you stumble across. If you’re staying in a hotel that offers free wireless (or even cheap wireless), consider either bringing a WiFi router to share it out to all your devices (and friends!), or use your Mac to share your Ethernet connection wirelessly.

Did I Miss Anything?

Know any great tips or tricks that my research didn’t uncover? Leave them in the comments so everyone can benefit!

Notes on Rates

• All of the rates quoted above are in effect on March 8th, 2009.
• Rates for calls, text messages, and data from the US are from International GSM/GPRS Roaming. Select “United States” to trigger a pop-up window with all of the sordid details.
• None of the above applies if you’re travelling outside of the US. If you thought the rates were bad below the 49th, be thankful that SXSW doesn’t happen in Europe where calls are at least $2.00/minute.

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Mayor David Miller does it, so does TTC Chair Adam Giambrone, even Toronto Raptors superstar Chris Bosh is on Twitter. So what is this latest social media application and why should you care? Watch News Hour Final tonight as we try and explain twitter madness and we want to hear from you. Send Leslie a tweet @lrobertsglobal.

It was a lot of fun to tape and great working with such a professional crew — I think I was in and out of the building in under half an hour including getting made up and unmade! Thanks to the whole team for the tour of the studio, which included hastily snapped photos of the control and audio rooms:

Global TV Control Room

Global TV Audio Booth

Earlier today I thought I would use Twitter to find out how people defined Twitter, and I got to use a few of their thoughts on the show (although sadly without attribution). I thought I would share my favourite responses here (in no particular order):

• sebchorney: “Like MSN for grownups”; or “Like being in an open-concept office, except you choose the friends &coworkers at the other desks.” Beyond warm & fuzzy, the true key benefit is the tremendously high value of distilled information received from trusted filters.
• targetvacations: connect, learn, meet, develop, engage and share > people, ideas, opinions, facts & thoughts on your own terms.
• Brydon: twitter is a half-suppressed laugh; a fit of laughter partially restrained; a titter; a giggle.
• sulemaan: “It’s like your Facebook status update but also a means to communicate w/ others like an instant messanger.” (For me anyways.)
• dwhelan: Twitter is text messaging between u & the world, a global conversation where you choose the time, place and people to listen to.
• coachkiki: Cross between overheard cell phone conversations/water-cooler/code/broken telephone.Often interesting/useful/informative. Big + great way to become aware and exposed to people, industry happenings/breaking news might not otherwise get.All in 140
• colinbowern: twitter is the public water cooler conversation
• nsedef: Real-time conversations leading to customer & industry insights direct from the source, & gauge of cons/biz news trends & buzz.
• kenseto: Twitter = open sourced conversations
• PalmerstonGroup: Twitter is to facebook what French Fries are to potatoes. Quicker, tastier, more fun, less nutritious.
• jasoneano: Newsfeed for relevant professional, community & breaking global stories & a personal forum to expand the reach of my own purpose
• bwinton: Twitter is like a cross between a chat room and a weblog, with fewer pictures of peoples’ cats, and more interesting thoughts.

If you’d like to see some more definitions, check out the Twitter hashtag #definetwitter (hashtags, a word preceeded by a hash symbol, are a way of organizing tweets around a given topic and making them easier to find later).

Here’s the video (thanks @astroboy!):

Thanks for watching!

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• Landing Pages: It’s impossible to do a good job of optimizing your homepage for every possible term people might use to find your site. Think of it as a town fair full of criers who are all yelling their own messages: the end result is a din of roughly equal volume in which nothing stands out. Plan instead to add a page to your site for each search term, heavily optimized for that term using all the tips below, so that page becomes the top organic search result for the term and therefore the page that visitors land on when coming to your site. It’s important to make sure that these pages aren’t islands (i.e.: not linked from any of the site’s main content), because otherwise web crawlers may not find and index them.
• Titles: Some of the most overlooked SEO real estate in the world is staring right at you from the top of this very window. The <title> tag, which sets the text displayed in the title bar of the browser window, is very highly rate by search engines as being indicative of the page’s content. The engines differ in how much of the <title> they index, but the general rule of thumb is that the first 60 or so characters are the most important. This dictates that the search term should come before things like a company name, so it would be better to have “8 SEO Tips and Tricks » JayGoldman.com” rather than “JayGoldman.com: 8 SEO Tips and Tricks”. Luckily, this also tends to be more useful to users when they view their browser history or bookmarks in a narrow window or menu that cuts off the text, since the name of the page they want is more likely to be visible. I use the WordPress SEO Title Tag Plugin to swap the order around on this blog.
• Repetition: The search term should be repeated in an <h1> as close to the top of the <body> as possible. We saw a difference for some of Radiant Core’s clients between having text at the top of the HTML and moving it down for presentation using CSS and just putting it at the bottom (e.g.: the list of SEO links at the bottom of the TargetVacations site actually occurs at the top of the HTML and is moved down through a combination of CSS and JavaScript since the page’s length is variable). The term should be repeated again in a <p> following that <h1>, ideally surrounded by <strong> tags.
• Font Replacement: A necessity if you’re particular to a specific font and want to make sure your text is rendered in it. Since HTML doesn’t yet support embedding fonts (though it’s coming in CSS3 as WebFonts), specifying a font in CSS will only work if the person viewing your site has that font installed on their computer (and could still look strange if they have a different font with the same name). There are two popular routes: image replacement and sIFR for Flash-based replacement. Image replacement is much more limiting in that it requires you to create an image for each piece of text, while sIFR can be really difficult to get working, requires Flash for display, and can really slow down page rendering. I use a mix of the two on the homepage of this blog, rendering the header using image replacement since it never changes and rendering blog titles in sIFR to get Futura without having to manually create images for each post’s title.
  • Doug Bowman of Stopdesign (and now the Visual Design Lead at Google) has a great overview of using background-image to replace text. My preferred method was originally outlined by Mike Rundle and has gone on to be the favourite used widely by web designers (and is even linked to by Doug): Accessible Image Replacement.
  • The concept behind sIFR is really elegant: create a very lightweight Flash movie that has the font embedded and then pull in the text it replaces and render it using that font. The accronym stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, named after Shaun Inman who came up with one of the original CSS-based image replacements. sIFR was originally created by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben but hasn’t been updated by them in a long time. There’s a sIFR Lite available from AllCrunchy.com, though it looks like it hasn’t been updated in a while either.
• Domain  Names: Most of the things search engines look for center around trying to determine the content of a page based on the text it contains and the meta information that surrounds it. The more difficult it is to fake the meta data, the more stake placed in it. Some of the hardest to fake are the domain name and URL of a page, which makes them two of the more important tweaks you can make. It’s harder to optimize the domain name since you only have one for your whole site, but if you sell You Won’t Believe it’s Not Tuna you should grab a domain like tunareplacement.com rather than chickenofthesea.com. The age of your domain name does factor into the calculation, so it’s generally better to renovate a site and keep the old domain than it is to start entirely from scratch. It’s also worth noting that some search engines, particularly Google, treat subdomains as different sites, which means things like blog.jaygoldman.com and www.jaygoldman.com don’t necessarily share PageRank. Unless there’s a stronger-than-SEO reason to go with a subdomain, consider a directory instead (www.jaygoldman.com/blog). You should also consider that www.jaygoldman.com and jaygoldman.com (without the www) aren’t necessarily the same, so you should decide early on which you’re going to use and be consistent in promoting the site (I use jaygoldman.com). You can configure mod_rewite (see below) to remove the www if you choose to go that route.
• URL: The search term should ideally be part of the URL, using -s for spaces (e.g.: www.tunareplacement.com/recipes/tuna-and-marshmellow-salad). This is much, much better than the default URL that your blog sofware or CMS probably produces (www.tunareplacement.com/recipe.aspx?id=23), so you should absolutely switch over if you have that control (WordPress users should take a look in the Permalinks section of the Settings in their WP-Admin). I’ve always prefered avoiding file extensions in URLs entirely (e.g.: .jsp, .php, .asp(x), etc.) since it exposes part of the site’s implementation into the URL and then into people’s bookmarks, web crawlers, and the like. You’ll break all of those if you later rebuild the site on a different technology, so it’s better to abstract to a higher level earlier and just change the rewrite destinations later. Human readable URLs also kick machine generated URLs butt when it comes to things like analytics or emailing links to friends. I much prefer using URL rewriting, which allows the clean and human readable /recipes/tuna-and-marshmellow-salad to get rewritten to /recipe.php?title=tuna-and-marshmellow-salad behind the scenes. If you’re running Apache and don’t mind some server config, take a look at mod_rewrite, but be warned that it’s like black magic, ninjas, and awesomeness mixed together in a very potent but incredibly tricky potion. If you’re running IIS, take a look at IASPI ReWrite, IIS Rewrite, or Mod Rewrite for IIS. I’ve got no experience with any of them so that’s about all I can say on that topic.
• Sitemaps: Way back in the early days of the web, Site Maps were actually a page on your site that showed people where all the other pages were, usually in some sort of graphical flow chart fashion. Most sites have grown considerably beyond being representable on a map, but they’ve found a new lease on life thanks to web crawlers. Submitting a Sitemap XML file to the search engines helps them understand how to crawl and index all of the pages, including the frequency that they change. You really don’t want to have to do this manually since it has to be updated every time a new page is added, so take a look at automated tools that will do it and submit the update (I use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress for this blog). More info at Sitemaps.org.
• Inbound Links: You want to encourage as many inbound links to your site as possible since they are factored into most search engine’s ranking algorithms as essentially counting as votes for the autoritativeness of your site. Almost all inbound links are positive, with the exception of ones from things like known link farms, but you really want to focus on getting other sites to link to your landing pages with the right link text. If we’re trying to optimize the Recipes page of our Tuna Replacement site for the search term “tuna recipes”, it’s much more valuable for outside sites to link to that page with <a href="http://www.tunareplacement.com/recipes">tuna recipes</a> as the link than it is for them to link with <a href="http://www.tunareplacement.com/recipes">recipes</a>. If you have the kind of site where people might want to feature your content elsewhere (with, say, a Tuna Recipes Widget of the Day), consider developing an embeddable form that includes links formatted to match your SEO priorities.
• Meta Tags: These used to be all the rage in that you could define keywords for search engines to use in their indexing. That’s a pretty easy system to game (want to attract attention to your porn site? Try keywords like “free money”), so they’re no longer nearly as valuable as they used to be. There’s a lot of discussion in the SEO community about how valuable they actually are, but the general conclusion is that you can’t go wrong by adding the keyword and description meta fields to your pages, and that they may even be used to display some of the information in search results. I use the Add-Meta-Tags WordPress Plugin to automatically add them to all of the pages and posts on this site.

Following all of those steps should make a considerable difference in the performance of your organic search engine results. I haven’t touched on the importance of selecting the right keywords and terms, which is a whole topic in and of itself, but these will make a noticeable difference if you’re fairly savvy in that regard.

What’s your favourite SEO Tip? Disagree with what I’ve said here or have one I missed? Add it to the comments!

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For those not in the know: your web browser reports the last page you were on to the next page you visit as the “referrer”, which Analytics uses to track the source of traffic to your site. When someone types your URL (jaygoldman.com) into their browser without coming from another page they will have no referrer and therefore count as a ‘direct’ visitor. This also applies if they click on a link in an external application like TweetDeck and Tweetie (my current choices for desktop and iPhone Twitter clients), since they land in your browser and on your site without coming from another web page. A large portion of Twitter users tweet from third party apps (anyone know the percentage?), which means that a large portion of the people who find your content from Twitter leave no referrer and look like direct traffic. All direct traffic gets lumped into one big pool, so there’s no way to tell if they came through Twitter, a non-web based RSS reader, a link in an email not read through webmail, manually typing in your URL, an iPhone app with your link in it, etc. Let’s call this Analytics Problem #1: the increasing number of specialized apps that run outside of your web-browser all get counted as direct traffic.

That got me thinking about other places that Analytics might fail to provide accurate tracking as we move deeper into the realm of social media. As a data and analytics junkie, I find Conversion Goals are one of the most powerful ways you can track your online presence, particularly if you have an ecommerce site or webapp. The basic idea is that your site converts different types of users into other types of users (e.g.: catalogue browsers into paying customers, casual readers into RSS subscribers, etc.), and that tracking those conversions helps you to optimize for your end goal (e.g.: more ecommerce revenue, more exposure, etc.). Goals are usually measured at the end of a ‘funnel’, which allows you to track a specific path to a goal and then compare different paths to find the most effective (e.g.: clicked on newsletter link, browsed catalogue page(s), checked out vs. landing page from google, add to cart, checkout). See this excellent Conversion Goals four-part tutorial from WorkHappy.net if you’d like to know more about Conversion Goals. I started thinking about how I could measure Conversion Goals for this site, which made me very quickly realize that my dependence on third party services means I don’t control key pages in the funnels and therefore can’t instrument them. A quick example: I’d like to measure the number of people who follow a link to my blog from Twitter and end up becoming RSS subscribers. This falls down in two places: I can’t distinguish them from other direct traffic if they come from third party applications, and I can’t set a Goal on the final page because it happens on FeedBurner. Let’s call this Analytics Problem #2: your ability to track Conversion Goals decreases as the number of non-web-based traffic sources and third party utilities involved in your site increases.

What’s a poor data hungry blog writer to do? I can think of a few things that might work, though none are particularly awesomesauce:

• Inbound Interstitials. Part of the solution could lie in the use of interstitial pages that are inserted in the flow between the first click and the target. For Analytics Problem #1, third party app developers could direct all traffic to a page on their own server that could then send users to their ultimate destination with a referrer in place. This isn’t ideal because… it will annoy users, there are definite privacy concerns, some browsers may not track the referrer if a page auto-redirects rather than following a clicked-on link, and it will be inconsistently implemented by third parties. Verdict: no dice.
• Browser Tracking. It should be possible for the browser itself to receive a request to open a URL and track the referring application. When you click (or tap) on a link or button in one application that ultimately opens a page in your browser, the operating system steps in to handle the communication between them. The inbound request to your browser might have the name of the app that sent it included, so browsers could start using it as the referrer. It wouldn’t follow a standard URI scheme, but they could cheat and make it look like one (e.g.: macos://tweetdeck or something similar). This isn’t ideal because… it requires a change in browser behaviour across the board (or, at least, by Mozilla and Microsoft) and that’s a full time lobbying job. It also may not be possible on some platforms if the requesting app’s name isn’t included in the request. Verdict: iffy. Might be testable with a Firefox extension.
• Unique URLs. If you’re particularly concerned with tracking those direct visitors, you could borrow a page from an old junk mail handling play book and use a different inbound URL for every source of traffic you list your posts on. I used to sign up for things like Columbia House CD club with a slightly different spelling of my name (or a fake middle initial) so that I could track who they sold my mailing address to when the junk started pouring in (and it sure did). You could take a URL like http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/15/follow-back-how-i-choose-who-to-follow-on-twitter/ and turn it into http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/15/follow-back-how-i-choose-who-to-follow-on-twitter/source/twitter, and then use something like mod_rewrite on your server to strip out the source bit and still serve the right page. Analytics will record the pageview on the pre-strip-out URL so you can still track it in your reports. This isn’t ideal because… the requests wouldn’t get tracked as referrers so you’d have to count each of the pages in the Content section to get a total count. You would have to remember to use a different source every time you linked to the post (e.g.: “source/twitter” when you tweet about it, “source/rss” in your RSS feed, etc.). Your stats will be off if other people link to your post (yay!) but strip out the source or use the wrong one (boo!). Verdict: answer unclear, try again later. This would work but the logistics are almost more effort than the payoff.
• Outbound Interstitials. The second problem is a little easier to solve — at least on the tail end of the funnel — by either calling Analytic’s _trackPageView() method in the onclick handler for outbound links, or by adding a redirector page to your site that loads up the Analytics JavaScript and then forwards to FeedBurner without displaying any content. The former is great for places where you have an actual RSS link on a page that people click on, and the latter is ideal for things like your <link rel="alternate"> tag that gets handled by the browser without a click. This should be almost entirely invisible to your readers and you’ll be to still track your funnel as long as you use it everywhere you would have just linked to FeedBurner. This isn’t ideal because… you have an interstitial of your own to maintain, but it should be almost unnoticeable. Verdict: should work well for outbound links from your site, provided the funnel ends there and doesn’t require tracking beyond the first link.
• Your Chocolate in their Peanut Butter. Twitter (and other services) could give you the ability to insert your analytics tracking code into their page. This is a bit of an unorthodox idea (in that I’ve never seen it done), but since Analytics supports tracking across multiple domains, it should be possible for Twitter to insert the modified tracking code listed there into your profile page and record a pageview in your analytics. This isn’t ideal because… service providers need to jump through (small) hoops to get it working. The reports in Analytics don’t show the domain on requests by default, so you would need to follow the instructions listed on that page to setup an advanced filter or Twitter would need to log the request as being something obvious (e.g.: /twitter.com/profile). Verdict: this would actually be pretty great if it worked, since you could track how many people are viewing your profile in addition to using it as the start of a conversion goal.

There are many smarter people than your humble scribe who read this blog. How can we solve the Terrible Twosome of Analytics Problems and restore order to the world? Maybe I’m missing something obvious?

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I will pay unlimited $ to the person who figures out how to round my day up to 30 hours. Seriously. Unlimited $.

Posted to Twitter on January 19th 2009 at 12:18am

The replies started rolling in right away and they were so great that I decided I had to document them here. Keep ‘em coming! Some of the best:

Moving to Another Planet

OK, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to move to another planet. Now pay up!
ebacon

Simplest way to to get 30 hours in a day is to move to another planet with a different rotational length.
hexsprite

Borrowed Time

I’ll give you 6 of my hours in exchange for unlimited $. Seems like a fair hourly rate you’re offering.
alexknowshtml

you can have all of mine and i’ll just chill.
drew

Changing Schedules

28 hours is the best i could do: XKCD 28 Hour Day
Affan

I’m your man! (The method involves an over-clocked wristwatch and Dexedrine.)
sabbatical

Facebookers Speak!

Since my Twitter status also updates my Facebook status, a few people jumped in from over there:

Simple. Use the metric day system I invented. 50 hours = one demidecaday 10 of these your get a full decaweek.
Pete Mosley

You would have to travel close to the speed of light for the time dilation to kick in.
Jawad Shuaib

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That, of course, raises the question of how I choose who to follow. I generally get introduced to people from four sources:

1. I have Twitter send me new follow notifications. This quickly stops scaling and I find my inbox generally has about 30 notices in it that I need to read and catch up on. I also get a daily report from SocialToo.com, but I don’t find it helps me much more than Twitter’s individual notices and I tend to use it more for the Unfollows.
2. I use TweetDeck and always have one column open with my Replies (i.e.: any Tweet from the public stream that contains “@jaygoldman”). If you’re not using TweetDeck, do yourself a favour and go try it. It’s a little overwhelming at first — Steve Rubel refered to it as the “Web 2.0’s Bloomberg Terminal” which I thought was pretty apt — but if you’re serious about participating and being involved, you need a constant view of the world. I do my best to reply to people who ask me questions or respond to my tweets and will often check out their profile.
3. I use services like Mr. Tweet, which can be really helpful for turning up people you might like based on other people who are following them. I must be turning up in Mr. Tweet suggestion lists because I’m finding more and more that the most recent tweet from new followers is the notice that they’re checking out their Mr. Tweet report. This does tend to err on the side of “Twitter celebrities”, so don’t take it as your sole source (although they are working to keep the algorithm balanced).
4. Lastly, I look for @names of people I don’t know in the tweets from people I do know as a form of personal recommendation.

When I’m looking at a profile of someone I’m thinking of following, here’s what I’m looking for. I don’t hold firm to any one of these as the deciding factor, but they all play into whether I click “follow” or not.

• How many followers do they have? Twitter is very much a meritocracy, and it tends to be the case that people with lots of followers are adding lots of value. That isn’t always true, and it’s not a great heuristic in that it misses out on people who have recently joined and haven’t yet built their community. Since my view of their profile is a snapshot, they could be on their way from 2 followers to 2,000 and I wouldn’t know.
• What’s their friend to follower ratio? Maybe a better way to look at it is their Friend to Follower ratio. Many of the Twitter users I see approach a symmetric network (i.e.: a ratio of 1:1), and most of the ones who aren’t in balance are following more people than are following them (i.e.: 2x:x or even 10x:x). Users with more followers than friends (i.e.: x:2x) tend to be adding more value and therefore attract my attention.
• Are they still following me? That may sound like a tit-for-tat exchange, but there’s actually some logic behind it. If your aim is to build up as many followers as possible, you can game the system by following and then immediately unfollowing people. Everyone who has auto-follow (but not auto-unfollow) enabled will stay on your list, as will the people who see you in their Twitter new follower emails and like your profile. You win by keeping your signal to noise ratio down but still (artificially) getting credibility. New followers are almost always still following me, and I’ve followed a few who weren’t, so this one doesn’t get as much weight in the overall decision.
• What’s their bio? Don’t underestimate the importance of those 160 characters! Sometimes I follow people just based on what they chose to say they do, and sometimes I immediately close the tab and leave. Mine says “Technologist, designer, speaker, O’Reilly and HBR author, generally swell guy.”, which is the same tagline from my blog with the addition of O’Reilly and HBR as qualifications. I’m much more likely to follow you if your bio says you have an amazing job or you deserve merit based on your past experiences than I am if it says you like cats and underwater basket weaving (not that there’s anything wrong with that, especially if you take the cats under water with you). I tend to strongly stay away from people whose profile is all about “helping other people to make money on the Internet!!!!!”, who specialize in “SEO and Interweb Marketing”, or who are professional life and business coaches. No offence to any of them and I’m sure they’re lovely people, but that’s not my cup of tea.
  
• Do they have a website? Don’t use this as a hard and fast rule as there are many interesting people who don’t have a site. That said, if you’re a blogger and there’s somewhere I can go to see what you sound like when you’re not speaking in sound bites, definitely put it in. I love, for example, that @pistachio has created a page on her blog called “Who is Pistachio” to send people to. I used to have the main page of my blog listed but then I made a fancy Twitter background with the URL in it, so now I point people to my more informative About page.
  
• Are they part of the conversation? I do a quick scan down their list of tweets to see how many are replies vs. status updates. People who just update their status might be following the letter but not spirit of Twitter (”What are you doing?” vs. “What are you thinking?”), but they’re basically keeping a cheese sandwich micro-blog. For those not familiar with the term it comes from a 2002 Wired article in which Dave Linabury is quoted as saying:
  

  “One of the things I don’t like is the blog where someone says something like, ‘Today I had a cheese sandwich.’ That’s the kind of thing you see in most of these blogs. You know, fascinating. I don’t give a flying … whatever what you ate. Don’t tell me you have a flat tire. And if this is how boring their writing is, I can’t imagine how boring they must be to talk to in general.”

  A little more extreme than I might put it, but basically accurate. I make exceptions here for people whose cheese sandwiches I actually care about (e.g.: friends, family, my wife), but this is a pretty firm rule if you’re not in one of them.

• Are their tweets interesting? It may seem funny that this is last on the list, but there’s a good reason for it. This step takes the longest since there’s a lot more text to read, so I tend to do it last in case anything above answers the question first. If you’re a Firefox user (and you really should be), I highly recommend the Power Twitter add-on that gives you some really useful features whenever you’re looking at a profile page on the Twitter site. High-level features include search, search scoped to a specific user, status history peeking on mouseover (great for browsing follower lists), Facebook status updates (though you can use the Twitter Facebook app for this), inline YouTube, Flickr, and TwitPic videos and photos, and URL expansion and translation to page titles. The last two are the most useful here as they save you from having to click on a bunch of shortened URLs (from Twurl, TinyURL, IsGd, etc.) by showing you the title of the linked page, and from having to click through to lots of YouTube links (or being rickrolled).

I haven’t calculated any kind of weighted algorithm that could do this automatically (though I certainly encourage you to do so and post it in the comments and then build me a tool to do this automatically while I sip mojitos in the shade), but I do stick to this list pretty closely. I’m curious to know how this compares to other people’s lists: what makes you follow someone?

And now, since you haven’t built me my Twitter Follow Diagnoser 2000 yet, please excuse me while I go empty my inbox.

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My assumption is that Palm (PALM) would try to take market share by coming in significantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that theory by Palm CEO Ed Colligan, he looked at me liked I’d peed on his rug. “Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product,” he asked, then walked away.

– Peter Kafka, Media Memo, allthingsD.com

I’d say it’s a little early for Ed and crew to be counting their hatched iPhone killers. These are, of course, the same people who tried to foist the Foleo onto an unsuspecting public (and showed the wisdom to cancel it a few months later when no one appeared interested in being foisted upon). Video and music capabilities or corporate email support also weren’t disclosed, leaving the iPhone and Blackberry with at least two potential raison d’êtres (worth noting that the screenshots of the Launcher show “Music” and “Videos” apps). At least we can watch pretty videos of touch screens and gestural input until we know more about what’s in or out and how many precious golden angels will need to be sacrificed:

I’m curious about the gesture area below the screen. The device is fairly small as it is and it looks like they’ve dedicated the bottom strip to being for gestures when it could have been available for more screen real estate. I do like the way it lights up when you touch it, but would it have been more useful if the whole screen was for gestures and display? Guess we’ll find out.

I spent a little while going through the gallery of screenshots on the graphic-heavy but info-light (and slightly odd) Pre website. I can’t give you a link to it directly due to the way it was built, so go to the main Pre page, scroll down past the fold where it doesn’t look like there will be anything, then click on “See gallery” in the Connected calendars and contacts section to get started. You can then keep clicking the faint and hard to see right arrow at the extreme right edge of the page to move to the next set of screenshots. (Also weird? Scroll your browser window up or down after you open the gallery).

A few things I like the look of:

Palm Pre Calendar

I like the crunched up free time indicator that lets the calendar show more info on the screen while still giving you an at-a-glance call on whether you have time to hit Starbucks.

Palm Pre Card View

Being able to ‘background’ an application and do other things while it keeps running is one of the things sorely missing from the iPhone. The Pre has a notion of ‘cards’ which contain running apps and supports a few different gestural mechanisms to get into ‘card view’ where you can swipe left/right to move through the deck. You obviously can’t see it here, but the cards are live views in to the app and will continue to show animation or (presumably) playing video when you move into card view. It’s a clever way to support multitasking with minimal input and maintains that at-a-glance intuitive understanding that’s so key in mobile devices.

Palm Pre Integrated Calendars and Email

These are the best screenshots I could find to illustrate the “web” in “Palm WebOS”. Everything the device does is about connectivity, shown here in the form of Google and Palm calendars (top) and Gmail and regular mail (bottom) automatically integrated into a single view.

As with all things of this nature, I’ll only know how well it works when I’ve had a chance to play with it. The devil is in the details of the interactions, not in the pretty icons and design (nice as it may be). I’m going to try to get one in for Mr. Mobile, so stay tuned for a more in-depth look.

Likely-related posts:

• Mr. Mobile – #36 – A look at the Palm Pre software Several years in the making, the latest from Palm,...
• Mr. Mobile – #35 – A hardware tour of the Palm Pre In the first part of Mr. Mobile's in-depth video...
• Mr. Mobile – #37 – Apps on the Palm Pre The refrain "there's an app for that" is an...

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OK, here’s the favor. It’s a big one. For big hearts. Please help. » link to Logic+Emotion: Pleas Help Us Help Daniela’s Family Please retweet.

– http://twitter.com/Armano/status/1101001664

I actually missed the first tweet but I saw a few retweets, so I scrolled back to find it. Daniela’s story is — very tragically — not a unique or even particularly original one. She’s a Romanian immigrant and now single mom with three kids, the youngest of which has Downs Syndrome, who recently divorced her husband after suffering years of physical abuse. The family is now homeless after her ex-husband started drinking heavily and lost his job, and David and his wife Belinda have taken them in temporarily.

David’s request was simple: use ChipIn (and PayPal) to ask everyone he knew to contribute. The goal was to reach $5,000 to help Daniela get an apartment and start a new life. That would be a fairly audacious goal in the traditional offline world, especially in the midst of a recession and surrounded by so much online scamming, but it’s no match for the power of trust.

I’ve never met David in person. Other than following him through Twitter and having a few mutual contacts through Critical Mass, I don’t know him from Adam (as the saying goes). But I trust him far more than other virtual strangers because of the social proprioception created by Twitter and his blog and this crazy world of social media. There was no doubt in my mind that the story of Daniela was legitimate and that the money was really going directly to help someone in need. Maybe we shouldn’t be as trusting of people we don’t know — and maybe that’s part of what makes the Twitter community so vulnerable to phishing attacks — but a handful of retweets later and we raised over $7,000 in less than two hours for a family none of us knew personally.

I’ll repeat that for emphasis: we raised $7,000 in less than two hours for a family none of us knew personally.

Coming on the heels of the incredible #HoHoTO event that raised $25,000 for the Daily Bread Food Bank, I’m blown away by the generosity and willingness to help those less fortunate. Thank you to everyone who donated and listened to me tweet about it for hours, and to @armano, of course, for giving us a chance to shine. He snuck away from watching the donations to briefly record a heartfelt video thanks:

UPDATE: as of 2:10am, we’ve raised $9,422.17, which is 188% of the target. Joey talks about the spirit in his Help Daniela! post.

UPDATE: as of 3:19pm the next day, we’ve raised an incredible $12,883.60, which is 257% of the target. David has a great post up about Neighbors + Neighborhoods (or Neighbours + Neighbourhoods as I would spell it , as well as some coverage from Beth’s Blog (the best source of info for non-profits and social media on the web), Content Matters, Laurel Papworth, Servant of Chaos,  and others. Here’s the ChipIn widget that should always show an updated total:

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1. Tapping in the bottom left and right corner of the pages of your home screen will page left/right without needing to drag across.
2. Tapping the ’status’ bar at the top of the screen, which usually has the clock in it, will scroll back to the top of really long pages. Try it in Safari next time you’re browsing a really long page and want to get back to the top.
3. Holding down the Home button and pressing the Power/Lock button on the top of the phone will take a screenshot of whatever is on the screen right now, saving it into your Photos app.
4. Everyone knows you can zoom in on Maps by double-tapping, but few people know you can zoom back out by tapping with two fingers.
5. You can hold your finger on a link in Safari to see where it goes before you decide you want to follow it. Great for saving bandwidth!
6. Hold your finger on keyboard buttons for 2 seconds to get a pop-up with accented versions of that character. Try it on the . key in Mail to get a pop-up with .net/.edu/.org/.com.
7. Send callers straight to voicemail by clicking the Power/Lock button twice.
8. Sometimes you have music playing in the iPod app and need to pause it or skip a track but you’re off in Safari browsing pages. Instead of going back to the Home screen to change it, double-click the Home button to get an overlay of iPod controls.
9. Speaking of the Home screen, double-clicking the button while you’re on another page in the Home app will take you back to the first screen.
10. You can customize the apps in the tab bar at the bottom of the iPod app by tapping More, then Edit, and then dragging new icons to the bar.

Have any great tips I’ve missed? Leave them below…

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• Mr. Mobile – #54 – Two sweet iFrogz iPhone cases In among the ill fitting, boring and otherwise useless...
• Mr. Mobile – #66 – An iPad love in Jay Goldman, AKA Mr. Mobile, manages to get his...
• Mr. Mobile – #53 – FoxPop AKA Spot 411 brings DVD bonuses to your iPhone FoxPop is an interesting idea: it uses the microphone...

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