The Twitter Phenomenon and useful Tools

You probably know Twitter. It is a micro blogging and social networking service launched in 2006. Now Twitter has above one million users as reported by Techcrunch. This makes the service interesting for various purposes. Networking at micro blogging services may happen on the web or by mobile messaging. This makes it a converged media between the internet and mobile communications. When Twitter started they had an interface with all messages shown up at their homepage. This interface is still available for members and looks like Twitter Spy. If you were not a member you may have wondered what happens and why people tell the world about what they are doing. This is still a phenomenon. But there is a clearer statement now at the homepage introducing Twitter as a tool to stay connected with people you know. And this is very useful, e.g. for conference updates and any other important things happen. Twitter is very fast. Some information about important occurances like the earthquake in china have been reported at Twitter first. If you want do know further basics, you may read the introduction to Twitter and introduction to micro blogging at Wikipedia.

There are a lot of useful tools available to get the most out of Twitter. To get up to date information there are bots, which do automaticly inform about particular topics. There are a couple of bots and applications available at ReTweet and by Twitter Apps at the official blog. Another way to find up to date information is by real time search like it is offered by Summize and Tweet Scan. Last but not least you may find information by tagging as it is supplied by Twemes.

If you are a member you may look for new friends with similar interests and follow their updates. To find people with particular interests you may use Caboose Twifter or the Calculate the Twitter Quotient tool. To find most active members there is TwitDir or Twitterholic. The Twitter Pack Project is about recommending members by their interests and profiles.

There will be a follow up to this posting related to market research. So keep in touch by the emediablogger newsfeed. Meanwhile you may find further information at the official Twitter Blog and at Twitter Facts.

Personal Broadcasting and Live Video become Hot

Several new live video and personal broadcasting services came up with a couple of new features. Two video services do offer microblogging functions or an integration for live posts. Flixwagon is another live video service enabling broadcasts by using a smartphone. One can stream live video to their website and store it to embed it elsewhere later on. Furthermore they are offering a widget for live video broadcasting to blogs or homepages and a feature for live posts at twitter. A microblogging function, too, has Seesmic. Seesmic is a community for video conversations. They got microblogging with a following functions and near live conversations. Live video again is offered by Seero. They are calling themselves a geo broadcasting community. Videos at Seero are assorted at a map and tagged by gps data. It is a global community to experience locations and places. And there is zaplive.tv, a personal broadcasting community at the web offering channels, which is available in several languages.

Personal broadcasting seems to become a hot issue. This is due by the ease and fun and to the things that one can do with it. One can easily set up an own online show, become a dj or even a live reporter by using some software on a smartphone. It is revolutionary to the expense to set up a broadcasting channel some years ago. And live broadcasting may become a killer application as publishing companies are eager to embrace user generated content to enrich their services and to acquire up to date reports. For user generated content there are already a couple of marketplaces for photos and video content. Last but not least it is advantageous for publishers by covering a broader range of events recorded or live and a general or occasional business opportunity for everyone.

Get Content and Visitors for your Blog

Business Thursday: This is a second business related posting on blogging. Business related postings are a serial that will allways happen on Thursday. You will find these postings at a column at the left side of the blog named Business Thursday.

If you are seriously blogging to make money or just to become popular you will need visitors and good content. One way to get content has already been described at paid postings. Another way to enrich a blog is by content syndication. Content syndication is a particular term describing the exchange or reuse of content from or with other sources. Content syndication in general of course is not only a way to get content but for content distribution, too. For blogs and bloggers there are two ways to participate in content syndication. One way is by syndicating the newsfeed of a blog, which usually is generated automaticly. You may either offer the feed at your homepage and make a hint that the feed is available for syndication or you actively submit the feed to special newsfeed search engines and directories. Of course you may also submit your entire blog to particular weblog search engines and directories.

The second way to syndicate content is something particular to weblogs. It is called blog rolling. By blog rolling you will exchange your content with other blogs, which usually happens by widgets. By submitting your content to a blog rolling service you will get a widget to become installed at your blog. Then, if the content of a syndicated blog appears within the widget on your own weblog, your content will be shown at the other participating blogs in exchange. There are a couple of blog rolling services around.

One services is Blogrolling, which enables manual editing and adding other blogs to a linklist. Blogrush is a service enabling the exchange of related content with other blog by a widget. Feevy is rather a service to get related content by your favorite blogs. Link2Blogs.com is a content and link exchange to become visible at other blogs. And there is MyBlogLog, a popular service supplied by Yahoo showing images of your visitors, too..

Last but not least the concept of rolling content has become adopted by other services like video sharing services and the like. If you look for a rolling service for something particular you may try a search for link exchange or building a link roll.

Web Applications and the Impact on Future Browsers and IT

This is a brief posting referring to an article with an overview of trends in application and software development reasoned by the impact of up to date and innovative applications on the web like social networking and rich internet applications. Several industry experts are cited with notations about needs for future capabilities of browser technologies to represent applications and the need for enterprises to be prepared for the adoption and integration of such future applications.

Article: Beyond Ajax: Software Development, Two Years from Now

A further Mobile Live Broadcasting Application

Next2Friends is another personal live video broadcasting application for smartphones as described at
Live Broadcasting from a Mobile Phone. Videos become streamed live to the Next2Friends community and are stored at own community blogs. The Next2Friends mobile broadcasting service works by a software, which has to be installed at a smartphone. To use the service one needs to join the community by the website to get a blog for the videos. After installing the software and joining the community you are ready to stream live broadcasts from your mobile phone. The video streams may be watched live by at the community and by friends. Streamed videos are stored and ready to become embedded at websites or shared by links.

And there are a couple of further features at the community. It is also a video sharing site to upload videos and with ratings. It is a social network to get in touch with like minded people. The service is photo enabled, too, for photo sharing and there is a function to ask friends or community members for their opinion about a subject you made a photo about. There is also a function called proximity tagging, which means that you can go in touch with other users nearby you in real life by bluetooth. Last but not least they are offering an online video editing software to work out stored videos. Visit Next2Friends here.

Watching Films together online with Friends and at a Digital Film Festival

Online video showrooms are places where one can watch videos together with friends. This may happen by special software and actually there even happens an online film festival in a 3d virtual reality environment, where people can watch films together like being in a cinema.

At first there is SeeToo, a service offering simultaneous video viewing for friends. To show and watch a film SeeToo offers an application, which works by a plugin. The one who wants to show something chooses a video similar like it happens at a file sharing service. After this a link will be generated. The link has to be sent to a friend. By this the video can be watched together and chat may happen by using an instant messaging program. You can watch a video introduction at the SeeToo homepage.

Actually simultaneous video viewing too happens at a film festival online. The Bitfilm Festival is dedicated to digital films and film making. The festival is arranged by the Bitfilm Network, a community for film and media professionals. For the festival they have opened up the Bitropolis Room at Twinity, a virtual reality world and commmunity. Unfortunately the sign up process is a bit complicated as the Twinity community is in beta. To get to the festival at its best you follow the instructions at the Bitfilm Festival Homepage. Will we meet there?

Blog Business: What about Paid Postings?

Business Thursday: Blogging has become most popular with millions of blogs around. Some bloggers are blogging for fun and others do run a serious business. The latter is due even for established publishing companies, which do add blogs to their networks as a new publishing format or to get readers involved. There are also new and independent publishing companies arising by establishing whole networks of blogs. So professional weblogs have become a medium for independents and established media alike. Bloggers even have become a journalist status in the US. Some popular blogs are rated with some million dollars.

If you are serious with blogging, you will need good content and as a company you probably are eager to become involved with the blogoshere and product related weblogs. To get good content in regular terms might not be easy. You may report about own experiences or read press releases. Another way is to get topics delivered by companies and to write about products. There are several markets connecting bloggers and companies to get connected for postings. At these markets companies are paying to become featured. By this it is called paid postings.

But before you may go down to business be aware that there are some regulations for commercial posts. Commercial posts must be indicated as commercial. This is not much, but this needs to be happen by law. Usually this happens by a sponsoring message or the like. To get further information you may visit DisclosurePolicy.org and the The WOMMA Ethics Code.

For paid postings there are a couple of services around, which all do have some minimum requirements for participating bloggers. At all of them there is a minimum amount of 10 to 12 common blog postings and there might be a minimum amount of traffic, too. The first of them is PayPerPost.com. Their service is dedicated to general topics like websites or products. ReviewMe is a more specialized service dedicated to product reviews and promoting them. Last but not least there is SponsoredReviews.com, which again is for products and services in general. SponsoredReviews.com may become recommended, as by brief terms they got the easiest sign up procedure.

A global Social Network by WiFi Access

WeFi is a social network and community of WiFi access points and users, which is a high speed wireless standard used in home networking and for internet access mostly at notebooks and by particular mobile phones. The WeFi network now has reached over 1 million access points as communicated lately. Founded just about two years ago it has already become a global network, which is enabled by a free software. The software is a wifi finder, which locates the fastest hotspots around and does automaticly connect to it. To find a hotspot around there is a map feature to locate the nearest and suitable location offering wifi internet access. The network is growing by the users as participants of the network are encouraged to gather information about wifi access points. Also owners and suppliers of internet access points are welcome to add own hotspots to the listing. Actually there are about 10 new access points added every minute.

And it is also a global community with chat and a social network with information sharing features. The software enables a location based network to get connected and to find new friends nearby by location sharing. Connecting and location sharing may even happen by a map. Last but not least there are APIs and widgets to integrate with other social networks like facebook and twitter.

This service for sure is useful for travellers and it will be interesting to see what happens in the future. Location based information would be a nice feature.

Flimp.net - a new Video Marketing System

Flimp Media has entered the market with a new video marketing system. The system is especially designed for events and event marketing ranging from concerts and conferences to seminars and webcasts. The video platform delivers branded video sites without programing by a WYSIWIG editor and got advanced analytics. There are tracking capabilities for email, response rates and user engagement in real time. The Flimp Rich Media Platform is available as software as a service and by installation.

Find further solutions for conferencing, iptv and streaming media.

Top 10 File Hosting and File Sharing Services for Social Networking

File sharing is a hot issue now as sharing of large multimedia files becomes possible by broadband internet connections. There are two variations, p2p file sharing using software to share files located at computers of participants and file sharing services that allow uploads, host the files and offer links for download. The latter may be used to send large files by email or to offer downloads at homepages and weblogs by links. Most of these file sharing services got different features and some of these services are going a step further now by offering web 2.0 interfaces with download and upload functions available for blogging and social networks or by offering mobile interfaces. Others combine file sharing with collaboration and backup services.

If you need it large either for your files or storage there are the following two file hosting services. File Dropper is a free service enabling uploads of real large files. They got a simple interface and allow file uploads up to 5 GB. After uploading one get a link to send it by email or a html link for website integration. Last but not least there are premium offers to manage uploaded files. Different to this is 4shared.com by offering 5 GB free storage. Here one gets a free account with file management, but the maximum file size for uploads is 100 MB. The premium services do allow larger file uploads, too. At 4shared.com there is also community featuring files at the homepage.

For blogging and social media there are the following services. DivShare offers multimedia file hosting and plugins to upload files from within particular social media services. For developers there is an api for the creation of own applications and widgets. EatLime is specialized in video sharing. They do offers widgets for the integration of videos at various social media services. Then there is MyDataBus.com enabling the upload of large files up to 1.5 GB and offering widgets for web 2.0 integration, too. Oosah got similar networking features. Furthermore they got functions to create mashups across several pages and to integrate files from the web.

Something in particular is offered by TinyLoad.com and Twittershare. TinyLoad.com is a meta upload tool with a choice of file hosting services to choose from. Uploaded media can be shared anywhere. Twittershare of course is for sharing files at Twitter.

With mobile access there are two most comfortable services, humyo.com and FilesAnywhere. Both have mobile interfaces for file access and a lot of features like security and data synchronization. For music, photo and video there are special streaming features at both. humyo.com is even offering mobile streaming, FilesAnywhere enables guests to upload files.

Find further file hosting and file sharing services.