The is a lot of fodder flying around the blogosphere after Neilson’s report on Twitter Retention.  I think the study was a bit flawed and needed a bit more foundation on real people not just numbers.

My chime in on the conversation as posted on Linkedin.com Twitter Group:

As with any new from of communication there will always be those that dont get it. This was true, of email, pagers, cellphones and blogs. All of the aforementioned are very pervasive now and are just common vernacular today.

Twitter has bot the power and the buzz to be the next household communications word.

You may not get it now but than you may not be trying to get it because there is no immediate upside for you business today, don’t let this get you out of the conversation.  Todays memetic behaviors of consumers often spread faster than the swine flu when the right catalyst hits.  Twitter is just waiting one of these catalyst. ie: @AplusK and @CNN battle and @oprah

My advise hang in there, just start communicating with people, network, look around but don’t try to sell yet, when the damn burst you’ll be there.  Keep the big white Motorola Cellphone in the back of your mind thinking of the days when we all said who the heck needs to be that ready to use a phone… my god that thing is huge… cellphones “I don’t get it…

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The uber code designers at Arc90.com have just blessed us with yet another url based link sharer for Twitter.  The DiggBar, HootSuite, TwitPwr and Tweetie all have this feature but this one is different.  Arc90 is famous for their successful app Readability , which added the end all be all feature of removing the clutter from what we like to read online.  Completely outdoing InstaPaper, Readability just got it right.

Well I’m here to tell you that for now there is no better link sharer for twitter than TBUZZ.

TBUZZ offers the same basic features but also allows you to see who else is trending what you are sharing.  Sounds funny but watch the video and you’ll get it.

You can install TBUZZ in just a few seconds by visiting:

http://tbuzz.arc90.com

If you have not tried Readability then please try this one too. You’ll be much happier.

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I love Evernote for both my MacBook Pro and My iPhone.  I started using Evernote when they first came out and am now trying to find ways to superuser this damn thing. It already rock so much it is actually hard to find a way to hack out any cooler features. especially when they keep updating it so fast. Thanks Evernote Crew for an awesome app.  Below are some details from http://blog.evernote.com about the latest features of Evernote.app for the Macintosh

UPDATE: Today they just dropped Evernote for the BlackBerry:
DOWNLOAD Evernote for BlackBerry http://blog.evernote.com/2009/05/11/evernote-for-blackberry/

The latest Evernote for Mac update introduces some great user interface enhancements, as well as a number of behind-the-scenes fixes and improvements.

Get the latest Evernote for Mac: DOWNLOAD NOW

Best thumbnails ever

We designed Evernote for Mac to be a visual memory aide, and easy-to-scan thumbnails are a big part of the fun. We’ve completely redesigned the thumbnails in this release to make them easier to use and prettier to look at. The thumbnails now have different shapes based on the content of your notes; adding a new dimension to your visual memory. They now also sport badges to quickly indicate and identify file attachments. These new thumbnails are available in both Thumbnail and Mixed views.

Other visual enhancements

• Visual update to left-hand navigation
• Improved the search explanation menu alignment
• Improved Mixed View thumbnails and text layout
• Updated look for the Monthly Usage meter

There are also a bunch of bug fixes, as well as support for the “audio/amr” file type for both free and premium accounts. If you already have Evernote for Mac installed, just check for updates and grab the new version. You can also download it from here.

For all of you Evernote for Windows users out there, do not fear. There are some exciting updates coming your way soon.

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Business cards are essential, but the form factor — and the business practices based on it — are stuck in the 20th century in their form. They take up room, are inherently difficult to organize, and come in all manners of shapes and sizes. At the same time, who has gone to a meeting, a conference, or even a PTA meeting, and not walked away with a dozen or more cards with names, email addresses, phone numbers, titles … information that later on, down the road, you may want or need to use.

If you are like me, you have no time to fool with keying in all this hypothetically useful information, and since I have no assistant just waiting to demonstrate 60 word per minute keyboard skills, the cards simply have been piling up over the past years. [In fact, in my case, I have been amassing cards on both coasts, since I have San Francisco and DC offices.]

I am aware that there may be services that will take this off your hands for a fee, and various applications that theoretically handle scanning and OCR of business cards, automatically putting contacts in your address book. I haven’t tried the former, but if it involves me mailing stuff to India or something, it’s just too much work. I have tried the scanner applications in the past, like Scanr, but I have never gotten anything like the OCR quality that would allow me to rely on them.

Enter The Cell Phone Camera

Not too long ago, I started an experiment. Since I have a five megapixel camera in my cell phone, why couldn’t I simply take pictures of business cards and then throw the cards away? That failed as an experiment, simply because there were still too many intermediate steps:

• Take the pictures.
• Transfer pictures from the cell phone to my Mac.
• Move the business card pictures to an appropriate folder on the Mac, or upload to a web service, like Flickr, and in either case, name the file the name of the person on it.

This is significantly less than the headaches involved with keying in all the data, but still too much work.

Enter Evernote

A few weeks ago, I bumped into a new application called Evernote that is the answer to my business card prayers. Evernote is both a desktop application for the Mac and a hosted website service, where users’ notes and images are synchronized between the two.

Not only does Evernote allow me to organize both text notes and pictures of all sorts of things into folders, it also has very sophisticated OCR capabilities, able to find words on pictures of oddly shaped objects — like pictures of wine bottles. This capability works handily with relatively flat things, like, no surprise, business cards.

I tested it by moving in all the business card images in that I had captured, and found an extremely high capability to find cards based on name, company name, zipcodes, and nearly anything else in the text. There are some glitches, but the success rate is very high.

The beauty of this approach is its ease. It’s so easy that I actually take pictures of people’s business cards when they hand them to me, and hand them back! After an event — like the recent Web 2.0 conference — I simply move the pictures to my Mac, and then drag any business card images into the Evernote Mac application. If I revert to actually bringing back cards from an event, I can either snap them with my cell phone, or use the Evernote Snapshot tool, which relies on the iSight webcam in my Mac to take pictures. These are not as high quality as I get with my phone, however, and as a result the search capabilities on these images is less reliable. I was recently advised that I could email images from my phone directly to the Evernote application, which I have yet to try.

I have boxes and boxes of business cards stockpiled, and I may never actually work through those. In fact, I recently just tossed several hundred cards that stretch back to the beginning of the Pleistocene. I did fish out a few, and snapped them, but mostly they went into the recycle bin. After all, people change phones and addresses frequently enough that a three-year-old business card is probably at least 50 percent wrong.

Note that I also can use this to take pictures of whatever I find of interest, or of critical importance, on the web. I could use it to take a screenshot of a LinkedIn profile, for example, in lieu of a person’s business card. As another example, today I screenshot a travel itinerary (via Skitch) and dragged it into Evernote, and I brought it back up by searching for ‘oakland’ and ‘friday’. I am also moving my loyalty cards into Evernote — like my Jetblue, KLM, and Expedia Elite cards — so I don’t have to schlep those around with me, either.

Next?

So don’t be too surprised when colleagues begin taking cell snapshots of your business card at the next mixer you attend, and then hand it back to you. They’ve probably gotten wise to Evernote.

1. Good blogs have a voice. Who wrote this? What is their name? What can I figure out about who they are that they have never overtly told me? What’s their personality like and what do they have to contribute — even when it’s “just” curation. What tics and foibles fascinate make me about this blog and the person who makes it? Most importantly: what obsesses this person?
2. Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?
3. Good blogs are the product of “Attention times Interest.” A blog shows me where someone’s attention tends to go. Then, on some level, they encourage me to follow the evolution of their interest through a day or a year. There’s a story here. Ethical “via” links make it easy for me to follow their specific trail of attention, then join them for a walk made out of words.
4. Good blog posts are made of paragraphs. Blog posts are written, not defecated. They show some level of craft, thinking, and continuity beyond the word count mandated by the Owner of Your Plantation. If a blog has fixed limits on post minimums and maximums? It’s not a blog: it’s a website that hires writers. Which is fine. But, it’s not really a blog.
5. Good “non-post” blogs have style and curation. Some of the best blogs use unusual formats, employ only photos and video, or utilize the list format to artistic effect. I regret there are not more blogs that see format as the container for creativity — rather than an excuse to write less or link without context more.
6. Good blogs are weird. Blogs make fart noises and occasionally vex readers with the degree to which the blogger’s obsession will inevitably diverge from the reader’s. If this isn’t happening every few weeks, the blogger is either bored, half-assing, or taking new medication.
7. Good blogs make you want to start your own blog. At some point, everyone wants to kill the Buddha and make their own obsessions the focus. This is good. It means you care.
8. Good blogs try. I’ve come to believe that creative life in the first-world comes down to those who try just a little bit harder. Then, there’s the other 98%. They’re still eating the free continental breakfast over at FriendFeed. A good blog is written by a blogger who thinks longer, works harder, and obsesses more. Ultimately, a good blogger tries. That’s why “good” is getting rare.
9. Good blogs know when to break their own rules. Duh. I made a list, didn’t I? Yes. I did. Big fan.

And, yeah, you should disagree with potentially all of this. It’s because I have an opinion, and so do you. It’s why you probably have a blog. See? The system works.

43 Folders® is a registered trademark of Merlin Mann. All posts and comments © their original owners.  This post is not to seen as evidence of endorsement and is purely for your knowledge in case you missed it on 43 Folders.com

Source [Merlin Mann of 43Folders]

Full write up coming soon as i play some more!

for now got see it yourself:

Tweetie for Mac 1.0 is now available. http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac/

Freshly made bread crumbs are the key to achieving a crisp, golden crust, the hallmark of perfect macaroni and cheese. You can make bread crumbs from slices of stale or fresh bread. Arrange the slices in a single layer on a baking sheet, place in a 300ºF oven, and bake until they are completely dried and lightly toasted, 20 to 35 minutes. In a food processor, pulse the bread until the crumbs reach the desired consistency, then season with salt and pepper. You can also flavor them with butter or extra-virgin olive oil and fresh herbs or minced garlic.

Feel free to substitute another cheese for the cheddar. Gruyère, Fontina and Emmentaler are good choices.

Ingredients:
4 cups milk
4 Tbs. (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 whole clove
1 bay leaf
1 white onion, peeled
2 cups shredded sharp white cheddar cheese
Salt and freshly ground white pepper, to taste
Freshly grated nutmeg, to taste
2 tsp. dry sherry
1 lb. dried macaroni
1 cup bread crumbs

Directions:
Position a rack in the upper third of an oven and preheat to 375°F. Butter a shallow 2-quart baking dish.

In a saucepan over medium heat, warm the milk until bubbles begin to form around the edges of the pan. Keep warm.

To make the roux, in another medium saucepan over medium heat, melt the butter. When the foaming subsides, add the flour and cook, stirring constantly with a whisk or wooden spoon, until the flour and butter thicken into a paste and smell fragrant, about 1 minute. Do not let the roux brown. Slowly whisk in the milk until smooth and blended. Bring the sauce to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly and scraping the bottom and sides of the pan to prevent lumping and scorching, then reduce the heat to low.

Using the clove, attach the bay leaf to the onion and add it to the sauce. Cook, stirring occasionally, until thickened, about 30 minutes. Remove and discard the onion, add 1 cup of the cheese and stir until blended. Season with salt, white pepper and nutmeg, add the sherry and stir until blended.

Meanwhile, bring a large pot three-fourths full of water to a boil over high heat. Add 1 Tbs. salt and the macaroni and cook according to the package instructions until al dente (tender but firm to the bite). Drain well.

Transfer the macaroni to the prepared dish. Spoon the sauce over the macaroni, scatter the remaining 1 cup cheese over the top and sprinkle the bread crumbs over the cheese. Bake, uncovered, until lightly browned and bubbling, 35 to 40 minutes. Serve immediately.

Serves 4 to 6.

What we know about ads: they are annoying and are everywhere, only few websites are not showing ads. From ads point of view, the websites are divided in 2 categories: websites showing ads near content, and websites showing content near ads. From both categories we will get content and ads.

What happens if a website owner from the first category earns a lot of money by displaying ads? He can quit his day job and can focus on writing good content. motivated by the fact that more content means more money.

What happens if a website owner from the second category earns a lot of money by displaying ads ? He will understand that good content will generate good money, and he will try to add more good content.

What happens with a webmaster who owns a website from the second category if he will not get any money from ads, even if his website provides good content ? He will stop writing and he will find something else to work for money.

What happens wih a webmaster who owns a website from the first category if he will not get any money from ads ? He will lose his interest to post good content and he will end posting once per month, or he will forget about his blog.

Now, the connection with adblocker. What will happen if 80% of internet users will use adblocker software to block ads on any website ? Bloggers will lose interest in posting good content, experts will find posting their thoughts and experiments useless, they will prefer to concentrate everything in paid books. Some webmasters are already considering the option to prevent displaying the website for users with software that block ads. Currently i don’t see this as an option, but if 80% of internet users will use adblocker, i will do this too.

Are ads really annoy you ? You can’t read the content from a website with ads on it ? You don’t need to read ads, but you should know that there are ads. In the same way the television works: when commercials appear, you switch the program until they finish.

But, how a new website or product can be promoted if not on commercials or ads ? It is not a bad thing if you don’t read ads, but you can at least let your browser to display.

The percent of adblock users is rising quickly, I will come back with explanations about techniques used by webmaster to block adblocker users.

Did You Know?

This is a presentation stolen and updated to be more broad as it was originally made by two teachers who are upset at the current lack of car our government gives to education.

It is worth your full attention for 5 mins. you may want to watch a second time or more and stop on the slides that hurt to watch the most. This is why we need to start paying more attention to what is going on around us and not be such a me generation.

Please pass this along to as many people as you can.