I’ll be at the Mashable Summer Tour’s Seattle stop! Will you? July 9, 2010
Posted by Wade Rockett in Events, Social Media.1 comment so far
Weber Shandwick is a national sponsor of the Mashable Summer Tour 2010, and Weber Shandwick Seattle will be there on Saturday representing!
If you’re going, I hope you’ll stop by our table on Saturday and say hello. We’ll be giving away a sweet Summer Tour prize package including two round-trip domestic coach-class tickets from American Airlines, a Sirrush laptop bag from NokHoo, a Powermat wireless charging mat and an LG Ally Android Phone.
Twitter launches Promoted Trends for advertisers June 17, 2010
Posted by Wade Rockett in Twitter.Tags: linkedin
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Last night, Twitter began testing an extension of its Promoted Tweets platform: Promoted Trends.
Twitter’s Trending Topics section in the sidebar has traditionally reflected the most-talked-about topics on Twitter. With Promoted Trends, Twitter’s advertising partners can sponsor currently-trending topics that have not made their way onto the Trending Topics list. A Promoted Trend will initially appear at the bottom of the Trending Topics list on Twitter and will be marked “Promoted.” As conversations about the topic increase, Promoted Trends may move up the list.
When users click on Promoted Trends, they can follow Twitter conversations on that topic, with a persistent Promoted Tweet from the advertiser appearing at the top of the search results page.
What determines whether Promoted Trends move up (and presumably down) the list is not yet clear. Peter Kafka at All Things Digital reports hearing from advertisers that the service may charge “tens of thousands of dollars” a day for exclusive placement rights.
I expect some controversy over this: as GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram points out, a trend that only gets onto the list because someone paid Twitter is not really a trend. That being said, I think the idea of enabling companies to highlight conversations that are relevant to their business is a good one.
Twitter tip: Count your characters, think about it, then count again. June 4, 2010
Posted by Wade Rockett in Social Media, Twitter, Writing.Tags: linkedin
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Sure, go ahead, laugh. Writing what’s essentially a status message seems like it would be the easiest thing in the world. But as anyone who writes headlines will tell you, it can be very challenging if you’re trying to convey information and meaning within a very small space. And Twitter, with its 140-character limit, is one of the smallest spaces around.
You will be so dope at counting characters, they will call you Count Floyd.
If you’re drafting a Tweet that’s important to you — an announcement, for example — you’ll want to take into account some factors that can really put the squeeze on your prose.
Spaces count
Remember that the spaces in your message count as characters.
Retweets (may) count
Do you want others to retweet you? Consider cutting your Tweet by 16 characters to allow for an @ sign and a username. (The retweet button on Twitter creates a message that doesn’t shoehorn the original Twitterer’s username into the message, but not everyone likes to use that feature.)
Links count
Will your Tweet contain a link? Check the length of the URLs that the service you’re using creates (bit.ly, ow.ly, Posterous, Tumblr, YouTube, etc.) and make room in your message for it. If you’re drafting a Tweet before whatever you’re linking to exists, leave a placeholder for the URL — ideally one of equal length.
A little Birdhouse in your soul
If you use an iPod Touch or iPhone, you might want to check out a Tweet-drafting app called Birdhouse. I haven’t yet used it myself, but I have it on good authority that it’s a handy way to draft, review, revise, rate, save, backup, publish and unpublish Tweets.
Of course, counting characters is only the beginning. There’s also the small matter of writing well in such a confined space. That’s another post.
Hello! I’ve moved. March 18, 2010
Posted by Wade Rockett in Hedgehog.add a comment
I’m now writing about geek culture over at waderockett.com.
Why the switch, you ask? It’s probably something to do with being a military brat as a kid, moving to a different town every two or three years. I just get an itch for change after a while.
It also has to do with my being an excitable nerd. I like to try new online platforms and services when they become available.
I used to feel bad about jumping ship like this every so often, from LiveJournal to Blogger to WordPress to Posterous to whatever the Shiny Next Thing will be, making readers follow me from place to place. But y’know what, I don’t feel bad about moving in the physical world, so why should I feel bad about moving blogs? And it’s silly to think that I should be doing the same thing in the same venue forever. Plus, it’s not as if YOU particularly care which blogging service I use. You only care whether I’m sharing things that are worth your time and attention.
So, yeah. Enjoy what’s here, and I hope you’ll come see me there.
OK Go frontman explains why music labels block video embedding January 21, 2010
Posted by Wade Rockett in Miscellaneous.Tags: linkedin
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OK Go frontman Damian Kulash clears up something I’ve wondered about for a long time: why major music labels often restrict fans from embedding artists’ YouTube videos on other sites. Don’t they want awareness of these artists to spread? Don’t they earn revenue from YouTube’s advertising?
According to Kulash, the answer to the first question is “Yes, but not as much as they want revenue from those videos,” and the answer to the second question is, “They do, but it only works if you watch it on YouTube.com.” It turns out that video rightsholders don’t see any ad revenue from embedded videos, which is new information to me. I sincerely hope that YouTube is able to remedy that situation.
Something else Kulash says touches on something I deal with a lot at my job: the issue of whether to drive people to one site for content, or make that content available on as many sites as possible. There are pros and cons to both, and the option you choose depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. From OK Gos’ perspective, Kulash says “it is better for us to have 40 million hits on one site than one million hits on 40 sites. It makes it easier to advertise ourselves to potential sponsors, or it makes it easier for us to explain to a promoter in Albania why they actually do want us to come to their country.”
Pepsi Throwback January 9, 2010
Posted by Wade Rockett in Miscellaneous.2 comments
Products such as this will help me with my resolution to spend the year pretending it’s 1980. Iran constantly being in the news helps too.
Hurrah for Contextual Ads: Adam Ant Edition December 29, 2009
Posted by Wade Rockett in Miscellaneous.Tags: linkedin
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Gifts carry a dangerous glamour December 29, 2009
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Gifts carry a dangerous glamour. They encourage us to dream of being lavished with the things we wish for but can’t have (or are too practical to indulge in) and—the emotionally fraught part—to dream of having those who love us discern our longings without our having to confess them. Beneath the gift wrapping we imagine something that demonstrates how well the giver truly knows and cares about us, something that affirms the person we wish to be. So we’re hurt when the gift seems either perfunctory (Strayed’s 12-pack of Diet Cokes) or completely inappropriate—a present for someone else. (In some cases, that someone else is literally the gift giver, who wants in on the present.) Saying “he’s hard to buy for” is, unless he’s ascetic or impossibly wealthy, usually a way of saying, “I don’t really know him that well.” The sad truth is that most of us don’t really know each other that well.
The Treachery of Images, Star Trek Augmented Reality Edition December 22, 2009
Posted by Wade Rockett in Star Trek.Tags: linkedin
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Okay, so…your computer recognizes the DVD box as an object that it can act upon. And the box becomes a controller for moving the 3D virtual ship, like a mouse or a joystick. But the box also becomes a screen on which information is displayed. A screen within the screen. And you are also on the screen, holding the screen-within-a-screen. However, the DVD box that you — the physical you sitting in front of the computer– are holding isn't actually doing anything. It's just a box. But the box that the "you" on the screen is holding is doing all sorts of magical things. At this point, the illusion that you're looking at yourself is dispelled. It's as if you gazed at yourself in a mirror, and suddenly noticed that your reflection was wearing different socks.
