www.nickhodge.com

I am quoted in a UK art­icle Face­book and Twit­ter broke quake news in Metro.co.uk

My state­ment on twit­ter ‘one day, on the BBC: “reports from twit­ter are stat­ing an earth­quake…” one day’

OK, ali­ens are invad­ing my twit­ter feed

Or, after reach­ing 5000 tweets ran­ging in top­ics from Eurovision’07 to Neil Finn Revival Meet­ings, my post­ings are swal­lowed by the great twit­ter engine. Does Ms Gale have a restrain­ing order out on me? More likely Paul Foster’s mobile phone cost centre owner in the UK.

Maybe it’s the lolcat speak that con­fuses some, for­cing them to reach out to the Urban Dic­tion­ary for translation.

Is it the weird 3^rd circle of hell that is Ruby on Rail’s Act­iveRecord outer and inner joins with time’d out quer­ies so as to unbur­den the backend? Or are tel­cos put­ting lim­its on the twit­ter +44 mobile SMS gate­way in Australia?

Who knows. It’s the Ber­muda Tri­angle of Twit­ter. Con­spir­acy The­or­ies abound.

(Thanks to @cait for the inspir­a­tion on this post)

Thanks to Uncle Dave Wal­lace (to the left), I now feel prop­erly attired in SecondLife:

Hanging out on the The Pod­cast Net­work island, where the Aus­tralian Twit­ter­arti drop in and out. Donated some money to Cameron so he’s not tak­ing food from his family’s mouth to cre­ate a place to visit.

Duncan Riley from Tech­crunch pos­ted his thoughts on meet­ing in Second­Life, espe­cially the new voice/talk inter­face and the inter­sec­tion of meth­ods of inter­act­ing with each other.

As I stated recently, I was wrong about Second­Life. It’s a social environment.

More exper­i­ments to come.

Last night, a bunch of Aus­sies met up in Second­Life at the home of Cameron Reilly. Cam owns The Pod­cast Net­work, and is always good for a chat.

As a Second­Life n00b, I really hadn’t any­where to “call home”, and the con­stant typ­ing of con­ver­sa­tion left me cold. Heck, I can type and con­verse in Twitter.

As Second­Life have the voice-chat enabled, sud­denly the concept changed. You could sit and con­verse (or in my case listen, then crash out) with people.

The rebirth of 3D worlds as an immers­ive social engine might be just around the corner?

Scott-Bradley Pearce inter­views the crowd that atten­ded last week’s Sydney Twit­ter meetup.

What is the Web 2.0 World Say­ing about you, now?

I strongly recom­mend any Marketing/PR per­son just start­ing out to down­load and install Particls: http://particls.com/. You can use Particls to watch the inter­net for you. Enter the phrases and words that are your products and brands, and watch the con­ver­sa­tion that ensues.

It is wise to start your online jour­ney by enga­ging the exist­ing con­ver­sa­tions and exist­ing com­munit­ies, rather than attempt­ing to start your own lonely blog and talk to noone.

Social Net­work­ing use by Marketing/PR

Social net­work using MySpace/Face­book/MSN Live/Linkedin/Bebo etc etc etc is a per­fect mech­an­ism for cre­at­ing a com­munity; and more import­antly: stay­ing connected.

Note that people are largely engaged in these com­munit­ies for per­sonal social reas­ons, not to have a product shoved down their throat. The rule of authen­tic voice applies.

Second­Life use by Marketing/PR:

Know who and where of your audi­ence. Des­pite heavy hype in the tra­di­tional media, the num­ber of people logged in to Second­Life always seems low. (25000 to 40000)

There is some­thing enti­cing about a com­pletely immers­ive 3D world, where in a dream-like state you can fly any­where and build any­thing. It demos well, and the allure of “instant mil­lions” attrac­ted a cer­tain “type” of ini­tial user.

The web was like this in 1994/5. Not much out there, much hype and a lim­ited few had the hard­ware and ‘band­width’ to par­ti­cip­ate. I would highly recom­mend doing deep research prior to sig­ni­fic­ant investment.

Fully immers­ive worlds such as World-of-Warcraft (note: you prob­ably can­not mar­ket here) are very suc­cess­ful; and the future of end-user gen­er­ated immers­ive worlds is large.

Twit­ter use by Marketing/PR:

http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2007/08/23/gday-world-281-melbourne-twitter-lunch/

@Froosh expressed it best: Twit­ter is micro-blogging: thoughts in 140 char­ac­ters. It is also more instant. What is hap­pen­ing now.  An organisation’s exist­ing blog strategy should also cover Twitter.

Run­ning 2 bots (http://twitter.com/NeilFinn and http://twitter.com/Elv15) and an event alias (http://twitter.com/auremix07) my assess­ment is that Twit­ter­ers are look­ing for real people, not chat bots at the other end of the line. Twit­ter­spam such as “go visit this link” and the like causes mass unsub­scribes. “Our product x is now ship­ping” the same.

What the Twitter-verse is look­ing for is the instant human reac­tion and feel­ing from events that pre­cedes the formal cycle.

So, just Twit­ter­ing to get a “mes­sage through” or hype a product/event does not work. What is needed is an authen­tic, hon­est voice of a real per­son. It is part of your Word-of-mouth, viral strategy.

In a Write/ReWrite/Read Web, People mat­ter. Not Messages

Blue Day means a clear day. I could see the sky. After leav­ing a dark and rainy Sydney, 4degC Mel­bourne was a rude surprise.

Up at 4:00am. A cat wandered out, stretched and looked at me quiz­zically seem­ingly ask­ing : “WTF?”

After check­ing the online world, my new res­id­ence, drive off to the air­port. Megan’s bat­tery is stuffed. Oh well, time to jump in the other MINI (Scar­lett) and off.

Vir­gin Blue to Mel­bourne left only 10 minutes late due to Mel­bourne being fogged in. The in-flight magazine “Voyeur” has a one-page art­icle on Social Net­work­ing. LOL. It’s main­stream now.

There are two reas­ons for being in Mel­bourne: PR Sum­mit run by Fro­comm. I am a pan­el­ist along with Mar­ilyn Chalkley, Man­ager, CSIRO Media Liaison and Andrew Par­sons, Dir­ector, Pro­duc­tion and Digital Com­mu­nic­a­tions, Depart­ment of Immig­ra­tion and Cit­izen­ship. My title merely said “Pro­fes­sional Geek”

(for those watch­ing my Twit­ter: here is the real Air gui­tar You­tube: Dr Richard Helmer’s Every wanna be rocker’s dream come true)

The ses­sion prior to the panel was by Abi­gail Thomas from the ABC. Abi­gail talked about ABC’s Second­Life island.

So, the panel was inter­est­ing. There is a big gap of exper­i­ence and under­stand­ing of the “online nat­ive” world. Just pod­cast­ing a Press Release will not cut it for Pod­casters and Blog­gers. Cre­at­ing a Second­Life island will cost, and attract 3 dogs and maybe a man (as much as I tech­nic­ally love Second­Life, we have yet to see the future)

My opin­ion on this in a forth­com­ing post.

Inter­est­ingly, the recent exper­i­ence of Cameron Reilly, Twit­ter­arti (includ­ing myself, I admit) and Tel­stra was men­tioned in almost passing. Dr Hugh Brad­low from Telstra’s response is an excel­lent step into the conversation.

Had a break-chat with Gab­ri­ella Stern, Senior Editor from Dow Jones News­wires Singa­pore. Chat was about Journ­al­ism in this new online world we find ourselves. Enron, Stock Option Repri­cing and all sorts of dis­cus­sion around blog­ging and journ­al­ists. After watch­ing the PBS doc­u­ment­ary, News­war, it was enlight­en­ing. One part of our dis­cus­sion related to the “main­stream media” and blog­gers work­ing together.

On the sub­ject of the fam­ous (The Bul­letin fam­ous) Cameron.

So, I have a few hours to kill. Twitter-friend Andrew Barnett was in the Mel­bourne CBD. After con­sult­ing a map of Mel­bourne streets, I nav­ig­ated my way to Star­bucks on the corner of Bourke and Queen street. Twitter’d to all that I was there, ready for anything.

Any­thing happened. Cameron Reilly popped in for a few moments. Later, Froosh and Andrew Barnett popped in for a chat on life, uni­verse, wed­dings, parties and anything.

Upon return­ing to the impromptu Twit­ter meetup, Cameron derided me for my choice of corporate-coffee and insisted we move to Nick’s on Little Bourke Street. Let me say, it’s my new Mel­bourne food joint of choice. We are joined by new Twitter-friend, Garth.

So, off we trot to Nick’s.

Cameron inter­views us all on Twit­ter: ques­tions related to how it has changed our blog­ging; gen­eral Twit­ter stor­ies and if cor­por­a­tions should “adopt” Twitter.

My opin­ion on this in a forth­com­ing post. Same post as above as the topic inter-connects.

Taxi, Jet­star, Sydney, Home. Cat looks at me com­pletely refreshed. I write this blog with the cat asleep. Oh for the cat’s life.

Mel­bourne was beau­ti­fally blue today. Cat missed that.

All tagged Flickr pho­tos here: http://flickr.com/search/?q=stub+twitter&m=text

Thanks to http://twitter.com/cathye for organ­ising us twitter-erz to actu­ally get off our keypads/keyboards and have a meat­space meetup. Sub­scribe to http://twitter.com/stub for more info.

So, http://twitter.com/jjprojects http://twitter.com/funkycoda and myself now have the respons­ib­il­ity to organ­ise the next meetup. 3 blokes doing it is dangerous.

Also, thanks to our spon­sors for sponsoring.

OK, twitter.com is the rage of the first half of 2007. Maybe Facebook.com hits the same growth rate for the second half of 2007. Who knows with this fickle world of social networking.

The “@”-sign is used to respond to people on twit­ter, and is com­pletely user-invented:

That is, if you write “@nick­hodge blah blah blah”, there is a magic URL added to nickhodge.

Now, this mes­sage is sent to the pub­lic, but only friends of @nickhodge and you see the response. That is, if person-y is your friend and not nick­hodge, they will not see your @nickhodge response.

Tech­nor­ati Tags: twit­ter