Sample the Web

This is ridiculous:

5. Set up Tweetlater to automate a welcome response to new followers

I love receiving news that I have a new follower and usually visit their Twitter profile, check out their Website and/or interests, read their recent update stream, and send a hello or welcome DM. That can take a lot of time if you get a lot of new followers. So I created this message that is sent via Tweetlater to my new followers: “Wooohooo, we’re Twitter friends! Check out this video I made for you: http://budurl.com/niknik.”

via Make a Tweet Plan to Get the Most from Twitter.

Here’s why it’s horrible: a lot of people, myself included, have DMs set to go straight to their cellphones via SMS. SMS costs anywhere between $0.05 and $0.20 depending upon your rate / plan. Since I do pay as you go via AT&T on my iPhone, it costs me $0.20 each time I get a DM. If you DM me right after I followed you and all you are saying is “Hey, you’re following me! Thanks!” guess what? I already know that I follow you and I already knew that you followed me already, because I got that notification from Twitter via email and that little bit of redundant nothingness of information cost me $0.20.  If you do that and include a video link that I cannot check from my iPhone, I’m doubly irritated.

Also, this is a common tactic that I’ve noticed amongst marketers / spammers on Twitter. They follow you, you follow them back, they DM you to say thanks for following, and then they unfollow you.

Here’s some good Twitter advice: follow people you find interesting and with whom you are interested in communicating. Don’t direct spam them with nothingness. If you send them a DM make it really meaningful. If someone sends me a DM asking a question / answering a question they have seen me ask, then that’s value added and cool. If you’re just DMing me to say “hey I’m DMing you” save it, please. I will unfollow people for this. I have unfollowed people for this.

HOWEVER, I think it’s great advice to say publicly @cksthree thanks for the follow back! or after you’ve just followed me, say @cksthree I followed you because of XYZ. That both tells me what I’m doing right in terms of twittering and tells others why I may be of interest to follow, and it doesn’t cost me $0.20.

Replying openly with @cksthree is 100% better than DMing in 99.99% of the cases, because if it’s not private / confidential information, sharing it openly means that others can see it and benefit from it and you may just get a few more followers out of the deal when they see what you’ve said.

Twitter’s ability to virally spread ideas has given rise to many fads. The latest to set Twitter abuzz: gauging your “Twitemperature“, a mysterious measure of your engagement in the community. Who then, is the world’s hottest Twitter user?

via My Twitemperature Reveals World’s Hottest Twitter User.

We’ve seen an uptick in people checking out Twitemperature over the holidays. Pretty cool. We still need to add more pictures, more sayings, and tweak it all a bit. It’s fun that something that took one weekend of me and Ryan tinkering has continued to live on like this. I wonder if it would actually get more traction if we put more effort into it. In any case, for anyone wanting to know: it’s very dynamic. Your Twitemperature can change quickly based on both what you’re saying and what is currently trending. I think that may be the one thing that we need to fix. Establish a core twitemperature for each user that gets pulled one way or another over time. We’ll see. I’d love to hear what people think in the comments.

I haven’t written a blog post since last year on Sample The Web, although I’ve written several over at Obsessable. I’ve also, of course, been posting a lot to Twitter, which syndicates in the sidebar of this site and into my lifestream, along with all the replies I get on Twitter. Thus, I avoid the “oh noes I’m devoting all my energy into a platform where I don’t own my own words and the history of what I’ve said” dilemma that Scoble muses about from time to time and which Arrington rags on him for in their little dance of drawing attention to one another. More on that in some later post, maybe.

In any case, over on Twitter, I attempted to start a #sincelastyear meme with only a few people chiming in so far. That’s why I have #sincelastyear in the title of this post, because it will be posted to my Twitter stream, show up in my lifestream, and appear in that meme thread. I also registered http://sincelastyear.com, although I haven’t done anything with it yet. It was the first domain name I’d registered since last year, though. I think it would be interesting to set up a site that tracks all the “since last year” tweets alongside statistics released throughout the year, and then organize that information into a timeline that people can browse through for random facts that vary in interestingness from “that’s the first time I gave my dog a bath since last year” (uninteresting) all the way to “XXXX people have died from exposure to chemical X since last year” (where XXXX is an actual number and chemical X is actually some sort of new substance and the entire bit is interesting because it’s all over the news).

In any case, if any developers read this and want to build such a site for me, shoot me an email: ck at sampletheweb dot com. I can pay you absolutely nothing for it, but if it gets any traction, you can be a co-founder and we can work out a percentage of ownership based on your involvement.

My little travel bag that held my toothbrush, my dental floss, and a small travel bottle of Pert shampoo and conditioner was filled with Pert when I got home on Sunday and unpacked. Fortunately, the Pert was kept inside the bag and didn’t leak on to anything else. Even after thorough bathing in water, I still detect a faint Pert taste on my toothbrush and dental floss.

Then again, what if they both always slightly tasted of Pert and I just never noticed until now?

Alternate title for this post: But, man, check out the full-bodied shine on my gums…

…they *really* hate my articles. Check out this ridiculous email I just received from Dave McElhaney:

Ive never read your articles before and I probably will never again after the first paragraph. Macs are hackable as well except no one cares about macs enough to make a virus or hack them. Also it would affect a total of 50 people who have macs but i think its up to 60 now because stupid kids going green love macs for some reason.

Wow, that’s a whole heap of unnecessary rudeness and stupidity. Really? 60 total Mac users in the world? Those things must be *really* expensive for Apple and Steve Jobs to maintain profitability. I guess that’s why Jobs only takes a $1 salary per year.

I suspect it was in reply to this O’Reilly article. I mean, look at the passion I was able to ignite in this moron with my mere words. Awesome.

My brother gave me a Korg KO-1 Koassilator for Christmas. Here’s a quick MP3 tune (Disclaimer: it’s little more than a loop looped a lot; ie, it sucks) that I recorded while in Jackson International Airport awaiting my flight to Dallas where we grabbed our flight back to New York yesterday. I basically recorded two different variants of the same 8 beat loop and recorded each to GarageBand on my laptop and lined them up with no other editing. This is evident upon listening to it. In any case, this is a good example of what an untalented, untrained individual can do in about 15 minutes while sitting in an airport balancing a laptop on his knee.

This video (note: not me / by me) gives a much better look at what’s possible with this little fun music machine:

I also received a Korg DS-10 Synthesizer for the Nintendo DS from Curt and Marian which is also cool, but the learning curve on it is a bit more intense than on the Kaossilator, so I don’t have any good samples to present yet. Soon though…. DJ C.K. ;-)

Step 1: Take pictures of yourself with Photobooth. Pose until you naturally distorted look like a caricature of yourself.

Step 2: Trace those pictures quickly in different layers in Photoshop Elements using a drawing tablet.

Step 3: Turn off the photo layers and adjust, change slightly, etc.

Next steps, color these and do some more. Work up some crazy simplified versions of them. I think this may be a good way to develop characters. The above is roughly 2 hours of work. More to come…

Hey! Evan’s in a video:

He’s the one who fantasizes about the older woman at work.

Congrats on the video! If you’re in LA, make sure you check out Shaimus. They rock.

hippie on Flickr - Photo Sharing!.

Pretty cool…. Here’s my profile.

UPDATE: Doodled another one:

kungfu on Flickr - Photo Sharing!.

Just upgraded my site to WordPress 2.7 and checking out the new Dashboard. Posting now from the QuickPress widget. Interesting. I guess it just goes to default general category…

… people who design and build things are rarely the same people who know how best to use those things. Factory workers assembled the computer I’m using to write this; I wonder how many of them use this same computer.

Web 2.0 suffers from this more than most. The great companies wait and listen for their audience to best design their use.

There’s more to the post I was going to write. Perhaps I’ll write it later. Or perhaps you’d like to tell me what I should have written in the comments…

I’m going to write a first impressions post for Obsessable about the Wacom Cintiq 12WX, but I thought I’d tease that piece a bit with these pictures, as they’re more about me cartooning than about the 12WX itself.

These sketches were done in ArtRage 2.5. Here’s the first sketch:

… and here’s the same sketch after coloring:

I’m still getting used to this device, but in short: I love it.

UPDATE: I whipped the sketch above into a only mildly amusing comic over at Screaming Tongue:

UPDATE AGAIN: My first impressions review of the Wacom Cintiq 12WX is now up and live over at Obsessable.