djByron [Dan Byron]husband, father, christian, musician & technophile ( but not a dj )

Every so often I’ll remember that all my Google searches are saved at google.com/history and be curious to see what I’ve searched for in times past.

So far: Total Google searches: 11,310 since 9/29/2005. Granted quite a few of these have been work related but still…

My first recorded search was September 29th, 2005: “old borego”.  I remember searching for this because Switchfoot has a Christmas song named such and I was looking for lyrics.

My first image search was December 6th, 2005: “beethoven’s last night” I remember looking for cover art to this Trans-Siberian Orchestra album.

If you have a gmail/google account, login and tell us of your first text and/or image search in the comments below.

Based on other search stats, I discovered that I search the most on Mondays in August between 10 AM and Noon.

So how many songs can you listen to in two years? Apparently 100,000 according to my Last.fm profile. I joined on August 10th, 2006 and hit the 100K mark on July 22nd. Head over there to see complete stats but to summarize, here are the top 10 artists over the past two years.

1. Switchfoot
2. Hillsong United
3. Delirious? disbanding in 2009
4. Mae
5. David Crowder Band
6. Anberlin
7. U2
8. Relient K
9. Lifehouse
10. PFR

Granted this is a snapshot of two years of ever evolving musical taste so this isn’t entirely accurate to-date.  This list is also partially skewed to the fact that these artists have more albums/tracks than other artists in my iTunes library… But I still do like all of these bands.

If you’re already on Last.fm and haven’t added me as a friend do so now! The rest of you, what are you waiting for?

Mashable just made me aware that it’s RSS awareness day. For those of you who don’t know what RSS is, watch this and learn! (Granted that most of you reading got to this post via RSS but use the “Send This Page” link below to forward this page to a friend who doesn’t)

RSSday.org

Ran accross Twerp Scan today and wanted to pass it along to all those using Twitter.  Everyone using Twitter knows that “spwitter” or twitter spam is becoming an issue.  Not a day goes past that I don’t get at least a couple messages in my inbox letting me know that somebody is now following me.  Ok, cool… Or not… Turns out that the person now following me is following 10K but only 10 follow in return. So what’s up with that?  Spwitter is a relatively new way of spamming where a user will follow as many as possible hoping for a few “courtesy follows” in return.  That user can then send their spam messages and/or links out to those who are now following them.

Enter Twerp Scan… Now granted from the start this is not a tool that you’ll use every day due to the limitations of the Twitter web site, but it is useful none-the-less.  Basically what it does is scan the list of people following you and allows you to filter by a few different criteria.  The two most important, and telling criteria are 1) the number of people they are following and 2) the followers-to-following ratio.  Once you go to the site and check it out it’s pretty self-explanitory.  Here’s a very brief walk-through.

1. Filter Criteria:
   First, set the basic filter criteria of who you would consider a spammer.  This includes the minimum number of people they are following (begins at 500 and goes up from there.)  There’s also a drop down list to select the followers-to-following ratio. 

   

1. Login:
   Next sign in using your twitter username and password. NOTE THAT this is a login prompt coming directly from Twitter and not from Twerp Scan. This is a really cool feature because it means that you’re not giving your login information to a third party site but rather to Twitter.  Really nice. 

   

2. Seek and Destroy:
   Probably first thing to do is click the “verdict” column header and see what is considered spam and handle those accordingly. I simlply drag the link to another FireFox tab and “block” the user if they are indeed spam.  Another column worth sorting by is the “~R” (or ratio) column.  Usually spammers wil have a hign followers-to-following ratio (meaning that they follow many but few reciprocate). 

   

So go check out Twerp Scan and see just how many of your followers are legitimatly interested in your conversation.

Note:  I started this post earlier this evening but I had a chance to post it, Chris posted almost the same thing! Great minds eh.

If you’re a seasoned Twitterer this probably won’t come as anything new, but after a couple months of experimenting I wanted to share what I finally settled on with regards to my current configuration.

FIrst of all, what app do I use? Currently I bounce back and forth between two apps, Twitterific and Twhirl. Twhirl is a little more feature laden probably due to the fact that it’s built on Adobe’s multi OS AIR platform.  This allows Twhirl to be installed on both Mac and PC and also means it is probably in development more than Twitterific.  Twitterific on the other hand is a Mac only app and is nice due to the fact that it has a really small GUI footprint (can be docked in menu bar vs main dock) and it has Growl support which means pop up notifications of new tweets.  Unfortunately these minor but very useful options are not available in Twhirl due to current Adobe AIR limitations.

So what does my Twtter “configuration” look like?  As of today I follow over 130 and  I can break those I follow into two different categories.

1. Regular “Friends”:
   Tweets from this group are streamed in via Twhirl or Twitterific. Each program is configurable to automatically get new tweets at specified interval (I have mine set to get new tweets ever 4 minutes).
   
    
2. Local / close “Friends”:
   I have a few local and close friends that I want to follow 24/7 so I follow them via “device” updates, in my case I have these updates sent via SMS to my cell phone. You can also set up your IM to get these device updates as well.
   
    
3. BUT WAIT!!!
   What about tweets that are directed to me ( @djbyron ) or include me in the body, but were sent from someone who I do NOT follow with device updates (see number one above). These are tweets I will might want to respond to right away.  This is where Twitter’s “track” feature comes into play.  I simply send the phrase “track djbyron” from my device (cell phone or IM) and now i won’t miss a tweet that contains my username.  Below is a screenshot of sending the command via IM but you can do the same thing using SMS/Text Messaging. (You would obviously substitute “djbyron” with your own username.)   

   

Oh did I mention that I LOVE Skitch!  Makes doing screenshots like this so easy.

Fellow Twitterer from Seattle Twittered this today and I just wanted to second his motion.

“Ain’t Twitter great? meeting so many cool people from all over the world, i love it” - dustindk

I joined twitter in August of 2007 but didn’t actually start using it until this month.  I’m not sure what inspired me, or how I found my first “friend” on there but once I found one, it was easy to find many more with similar interests.

For those of you not familiar with Twitter take a minute to watch the video.  Some of you may ask, “why do I want another social website, I already have a Facebook account, a Myspace, etc?” For me Twitter fills in the gaps where those sites leave off.  Plus it’s really easy to use.  You don’t have to go to Twitter.com to use the service if you don’t want to.  There are numerous third party  apps in addition to the native IM and SMS support.  For me I do a couple things.  I have Twhirl running all the time which is a small desktop app for Windows and Mac that allows you to receive and post updates, respond, direct message and pretty much every other aspect of the service without having to touch a browser.  Occasionally, I’ll use Google Talk or Gmails built-in chat to follow in real-time as well. When I’m out and about I can post status updates via SMS (text message) and even follow other’s updates all from my cell phone (just make sure you have a text plan to support it

So what do you post?  Anything and everything from simple “what are you doings,” to questions a friend may be able to answer for you, pictures, blog update notifications… Yea basically anything. Well…. Maybe not anything.

I posted a few weeks back about a mashup website that allows you to update multiple micro-blogging services by using a single service (hellotxt.com). Having used the site for a few weeks now I can still say that there’s currently no other service out there like it.  An amazing website that allows you to update your status on the following sites:

Jaiku, Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo, Pownce, Tumblr, Meemi, Beemood, Gozub, Frazr

More new stuff I discovered today…  Registered HelloTxt users have access to a “timeline” feature that allows you to see posts, responses and respond to posts directly on the HelloTxt website.  This means that you could pretty much manage all your posts and responses to the above services on one web site!

Another sweet new option that will soon be available to registered users is a mobile version of the site!  I got a coupon code to preview this feature and it’s awesome! This will make updating all of these services really nice from your iPhone or any web enabled phone. I have a few coupon codes to give a way so email me if you’d like to preview this amazing feature!

[ UPDATE: Wed, March 5th 2008.  I no longer have any mobile coupon codes to give away.  Sorry. ]

So I’m sort of a micro-blogging “enthusiast”…  So much so that I developed my own micro blog for personal use.  Maybe someday I’ll open it up to some friends to use but for now it’s just a place that I can post some micro “journal” entries for monumental and every day family events.

So the question was…  “How can I post an entry to all these sites without having to go to each one separately?”  If you’re looking to only post to Twitter and Jaiku one option is to use IMified. They have an “app” so-to-speak that will allow you to post to both Twitter and Jaiku via the IM of your choice.  This was nice for a while, the only problem with this service is that the IMified bot was down quite a bit and posting to Twitter was sporadic.  That lead me to start searching again…  I recently discovered HelloTxt.com.  The beauty of HelloTxt is that it can post to even more services and it is very reliable.  The one down side is that you have to post via browser (no IM option yet).  Having an iPhone this really isn’t a problem but might be if you’re looking to post via IM or SMS.  Another downside for Facebook users is that you can’t update your status with HelloTxt directly.  However, I did find a round about way to do it using Twitters Facebook app!  Simply add the Twitter app in Facebook, give it access to update your status and now you can update all your micro-blogging sites as well as your Facebook status in one place using HelloTxt!  Really sweet…

[UPDATE 1-27-08] A developer from HelloTxt.com just emailed me letting me know that they’ve added direct updating of one’s Facebook status from the site.  No need to use the Twitter’s Facebook app to update the status!!  Awesome!

It’s a know fact that Firefox is a memory hog, but over a gig!!

I kept reading articles today trumpeting the fact that the Warner Music Group library had been added to Amazon’s DRM free mp3 download library.  The news here is due to the fact that iTunes is lagging behind by only having 2 million DRM free tracks to Amazon’s 2.9 million.

That being said I decided to give it a whirl and buy an album to try the process out.  Seeing as I’m a pretty avid Amazon aficionado I signed in, downloaded their tiny “Amazon MP3 Downloader” application and bought the album using their 1-click method.  And that was the hard part!  From there I was prompted to open using the Amazon Downloader and everything else was taken care of, INCLUDING importing the album into iTunes once it had downloaded!

Given that the market share belongs to iTunes I won’t go into pros of iTunes.  We all know it’s a great all-in-one user experience and super easy to use, so why would one choose to go over to Amazon?  Here are a few reasons in my opinion.

1. As of today there are almost one million more DRM free tracks on Amazon than iTunes
2. Tracks purchased through Amazon are in mp3 format as opposed to Apple’s DRM free AAC format.  This gives you more future options when it comes to device compatibility.
3. While tracks on Amazon are the same price, if you purchase as an album the price is relatively cheaper.  In some cases you may save a dollar or more per album!

 So head on over and let me know what you think!

http://www.amazon.com/mp3