Texting Tennis anyone?

A BBC Sport reporter, Chris Bevan, is currently texting details of the US Tennis Open. He is also posting his text-back info to solicit interaction with tennis fans around the globe.

1618: Kim Clijsters is warming up right now ahead of her clash with Viktoriya Kutuzova, the world number 79. It's a bit cloudy in New York at the moment, but no rain is forecast.

1613: Murray will play Gulbis, the Latvian world number 95 on Tuesday or Wednesday. But the bad news for British tennis is that the Scot is our only representative in either the men's or women's singles after Laura Robson and Elena Baltacha both lost in the final round of qualifying.

1610:

If you're wondering how Andy Murray's been preparing for his first-round match with Ernests Gulbis, then take a look at the footage from his pre-tournament comedy doubles match featuring American actor Will Ferrell, Andy Roddick and comedian Will Arnett. Murray and Ferrell, who are big fans of each other's work, teamed up together. Ferrell's serve isn't that bad, by the looks of things...

1606: I'm expecting to hear from you lot while all this is going on of course. Drop me a line on 606, via text on 81111 or give me a cheeky little tweet on Twitter. I'll be disappointed if you don't get in touch.

NASA loves Twitter

Judging by the number of astronauts, engineers, pilots and scientists who Tweet, NASA loves Twitter.

You can even find NASA itself Tweeting about missions, like updates on Shuttle launches.


@NASA Shuttle Discovery's countdown resumed from the T-11 hour mark at 8:34 am ET. Launch is targeted for 11:59:37 pm. Weather 60 percent "go."


and updates on metereological events

@NASA Major flooding in India & Bangladesh along the Brahmaputra River; latest view from NASA's Aqua spacecraft. http://tr.im/xfFO


Connect with @NASA and you're bound to run into a bunch of space-industry enthusiasts talking about...the stuff that space-enthusiasts talk about.

Great Use For Twitter

In an ironic twist of fate, someone has combined a software robot with the Twitter service to create a user-friendly star-finder. Check it out:

@lookupastro is the Twitter account assigned to the LookUP service provided free by Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics.

According to the site:

Look up the position and details of astronomical objects by name. LookUP is a simple interface to a variety of astronomical name services that should cover most astronomical objects but not
spacecraft (their apparent position depends on the location of the observer).

LookUP is provided for free and is created by Stuart Lowe.

A very cool service. Just send @lookupastro a message with the name of the astronomical object (I used a single word - Mars) and it will tell you its astronomical position. Nice.

1,400 characters and not one less

CNN is spotlighting a new web site called Woofer.
Unlike on Twitter, posts at Woofer must contain at least 1,400 characters.

Woofer pulls information from Twitter but does not require a password, so most posts, so far, are celebrity impersonations. Other users are posting copied text to reach the 1,400 mark.

Woofer may not serve any purpose at the moment, but I probably would have felt the same way about Twitter back in 2006. Does this anti-Twitter have a future? Or will this parody be gone tomorrow?

Finally, a place for all that Twitter-Fiction...

Biel "Most Dangerous" online

CNN Reports that an online search for Jessica Biel is more likely to damage your computer than stimulate your senses. According to the story:

The company named Biel the "most dangerous celebrity in cyberspace." One in five Internet searches for terms related to "Jessica Biel" leads to a Web page, photo, video or piece of spam that contains a cyber-security threat, the report said.

Dang! Now what am I going to search for?

Chik-Fil-A nets 1 million Friends

Chik-fil-A has broken the one million mark when it comes to Facebook Friends. Although no one has quite figured out what to do with their growing legions of Facebook fans, it's nice to see we're all making progress...


@SocialMedia411Chick-fil-A Is The First Restaurant Chain With 1 Million Facebook Fans (Inside Facebook): http://bit.ly/2Kz81Y

Where's my solar-powered cell phone?

Good news for people living in remote regions of Africa. A new solar powered cell phone is hitting the market--two of them, in fact.

Read the CNN story about them here.

It's nice that people without access to streaming electrical service can have the convenience of self-powered systems. The phones can charge even on cloudy days and during talk-time. And are a real bargain.

Retailing at about $35, the phones were manufactured by Chinese telecommunications company ZTE Corp. Safaricom plans to make an initial supply of 100,000 phones available.


Too bad we don't have access to such modern conveniences here in the United States...

Tweet-Up today at Noon

Bluffton Tweeters will be meeting today at noon, at El Camino.
It's never too late to join the conversation, whether you use Twitter or not. Everyone is welcome to visit, chit-chat or just have some company for lunch.


Drop by--and ask for the Tweet-Up!

Our new intern!

Meet the latest intern to join the News-Banner crew: Katie Mettler of Bluffton High School. (That's her on the chair taking pictures of Principal Steve Baker at this week's Commitment Ceremony for freshman at BHS.)


Mettler, editor of the BHS publications newspaper, The Comet, is also working with me to create a new piece of media for all of B-H Metropolitan School District, a new blog.

Stay tuned for more on that as we move forward with the project. Eventually I hope to add a blog for Northern Wells and Southern Wells. If you know students who might be interested, don't hesitate to point them in my direction!

Tweet heard round the (football) world

It started with a source. A reporter Tweeted what they heard, other reporters picked it up and soon the world was abuzz with news that Brett Favre had once again un-retired.

WCCO breaks Favre story on Twitter: When a source told WCCO-TV’s Mark Rosen that Brett Favre would join the Minnesota Vikings, he sent out a tweet.


Twitter continues to prove it's much more than a collection of "babble." For journalists it just might be the most effective tool to come along since the pen...

News to No-One

According to a recent study, 40% of all Twitter babble is...well, babble.


This will only come as a surprise to someone unfamiliar to Twitter. Those of us who use it regularly already knew this. In fact, we constantly fight the urge to Un-Follow friends who Tweet too much or Retweet even more than that.
But that is the beauty of Twitter. There is a sense that one can become lost in the Twitter crowd, or rise to the top of the conversation, depending on your mood.
In order for this to happen, not everything tweeted will be enlightening. In fact, most of it will not be enlightening. Most of it will be babble.

So in this sense the Twitterverse is not creating enough babble. Just a mere 40% is useless, meaning 60% could be providing some enlightenment. If we honestly wish to maintain the anonymity created by having a plethora of useless Tweets, we should all immediately go Retweet the news that Michael Jackson has died....

Studios want share of Redbox receipts

In a move seemingly ripped from a WWII script, film studios honchos have declared war on the owners of the ultra-convenient, and ultra-cheap Redbox movie rental kiosks.
New movie DVDs can be rented overnight from Redbox for just $1, compared to $5 at a Blockbuster store.

The difference: Blockbuster gives a cut of their dough to movie studios and Redbox does not.

You can read the CNN story for more details.

Can Twitter sell soda pop?

That's the $64,000 question. In fact, can Twitter sell anything at all? Everyone currently investing their time in a Twitter account, whether they use it to post their own thoughts, or merely to read others, is still waiting to see if their investment will be rewarded.

What form that reward will take remains to be seen. Perhaps businesses will find a way to market instant sales, or news organizations will use it to keep the masses well-informed.

As we wait to see, CNN offers their insight...

Twitter Goes Down, Few Complain

Due to the widely publicized Denial of Service attack on Twitter which spilled over to Facebook and LiveJournal, some users were without the micro-blogging site for days...DAYS.

Interestingly enough, few complaints were heard beyond the occasional "what happened?" from those still unaware of what had happened.

Here's a piece of a New Scientist post on the fall-out (or lack thereof):

Delays of a second or more when using software (whether on- or offline) cause users to become frustrated and lose their mental connection to what they're doing. After ten seconds, they start switching to other activities. If this continues, they defect to competing services, with grave consequences for the operators' financial performance.

On the basis of that research, you might think Twitter (and to a lesser degree, Facebook) would be suffering. But reading the blogs, news reports and tweets over the past few days suggests otherwise. Even heavy Twitter users seem to have been remarkably unfazed by the service's protracted disappearance.

First Amendment Online and In-Force

Interesting post from Citizen Media Law Project concerning the ability of the government (or some small extensions of it) to pry further into our private lives. This time going so far as to request passwords and account log-in information from potential applicants for employment.
For some reason, many people seem to be of the opinion the Constitution ceases to exist in cyber-space. Not true...

What did you do yesterday?

Check out this great Wall Street Journal story on "What I Did w/o Twitter."

Sound familiar?

I picked up the link from:

@BillSeitzler http://bit.ly/BX6YR Cute article in WSJ called What I did without Twitter. It's in Twitter Post style.

Denial of Service Attack Shutters Twitter

I don't know about the rest of you but I have been unable to access my Twitter account all day via my desktop Mac.

CNN is reporting Twitter executives have acknowledged they were the victim of a DOS attack which began around 9:30 a.m. (EDT) and ended around 11:30 a.m. (EDT) however, as I have already stated, it still ain't working right for me...

Augmented Reality all the rage

CNN story spotlights augmented reality for cell phone apps:

• Story Highlights
• "Augmented reality," a merger of the digital and virtual worlds, is coming to phones
  
• "AR" apps put info -- like Twitter posts -- on top of live video captured by phone
  
• Smartphone GPS and compass systems paved the way for the advance
  
• Some say AR is in its infancy; others question its usefulness

Interestingly enough augmented reality is not new. Think VH1 and their "Pop-up Videos." Only instead of on your television, it's on your cell phone: You watch the world through your cell phone video camera and different Internet connections- maybe a Wikepedia entry, or a classified listing, attached to a certain object being viewed- will pop-up.

Sounds cool. Would be a great tool. However, it remains to be seen if it can be integrated into a version within reach of the everyday consumer any time soon...

Tweet to fight Breast cancer

CNN has a great story on the impact of Social networking on Social causes. My only complain is it seems the writer has no idea how Twitter actually works and is just phoning it in. (I mean, who is Tweeting about what they had for breakfast? I had a No Fear and a Slim Jim-jb)


...Laurie Brosius, 31, isn’t buying it. Brosius, a business analyst in Dallas, used Twitter to raise $6,000 for a walk for breast cancer research in 2008. “Fifty percent of that came from online strangers,” she says. She was able to reach those people in part because her Twitter followers re-tweeted her messages.
...(Anyone can see breast cancer–related tweets by typing #breastcancer into Twitter’s search field.)

'Iron Man 2' director on Twitter

Check out this Washington Post story on Jon Favreau and his insight into the use of Twitter from an artists perspective:


One Hollywood geek who especially seems to "get" it is actor-director JON FAVREAU. Sure, Favreau's Twitter account has lots of intra-celeb chatter. But there are also the "Iron Man 2" responses that he says allow him pure, unfettered access to fans's thoughts and opinions.

Read the entire story here.