1. What IS Twitter?
2. View your Twitter heartbeat visually (you are sleeping, right?)
3. Crowd Status (organize your twitter peeps into groups)
4. Tempo (tracking time with Twitter - now that’s productive)
5. TwitterSnooze (for that brother or sister you really love, but just need a break from)
6. TwitPic (sharing photos with the help of Google Maps)
7. twistori (love, hate, think, believe, feel wish)
8. twittervision (like TwitPic on roids)
9. (awesome flash visualization of your network)
10. snitter (Adobe AIR desktop app)
11. Color Wars 2008 (nothing like a friendly competition
12. twhirl (another AIR-powered app)
13. “quotably” (your conversations, threaderized)
14. StrawPoll (answering the important questions, like who’s funnier? Dave Chappelle or Dane Cook?)
15. CUNY Graduate School of Journalism (shameless plug)
16. There are lots of news organizations using Twitter
17. Twitteriffic (for Mac OS X)
18. MoodBlast (nifty desktop alerts that fade away - integrates nicely with Twitteriffic)
19. Foamee (don’t you owe me a drink?)
20. HelloTxt (update Twitter, Facebook, Pownce, MySpace, bebo, Jaiku and more in one fell swoop)

I’m sure I’ve left out a ton of stuff, including how Twitter is used to cover breaking news events. If you have something to add, send me a note: @coolgates and I’ll put it up.

Doing 1 thing great > 2 things good > 3 things average…etc.

But how do you do one thing really great as a business? Start by listening.

Provide a space, physical or digital, for your customers to ask you questions, ask each other questions, make suggestions, complain or praise.

Then:

• Answer questions
• Thank people for their suggestions and look at implementing those ideas
• Apologize for mistakes or defects and fix promptly
• Humbly accept compliments
• Be quick
• Be human

Interact with a customer on their terms. That’s the beauty of the web. It is live and asynchronous all at once.

Be aware, when you do open up, you’re going to see some criticism. Some of it is probably going to be harsh and that’s OK. Take a deep breath. Respond politely and try to ease their pain. Imagine if you convert someone who really hates you. They’ll probably give you twice the respect and be a outspoken advocate.

So, what are some online tools to get you started?

Twitter (in practice with JetBlue)

Get Satisfaction (in practice with PBwiki)

I’m about to find out using my hometown Marshall, Minn., as my test subject. Using my personal contacts (my family) and some grassroots efforts online I want to create a vibrant user-powered community center. I dub thee “The Shall.”

For at least 6 months I plan to:
- Log in and post something relevant to the community daily
- Document the process (challenges, successes, humorous anecdotes)
- Try and have some fun connecting with the prairie town I grew up in

Residents get their local news and gossip (they hosted who for dinner?) from two primary places: The Marshall Independent (a hard-working and award-winning paper where I did a summer internship) and gomarshall.net (oh, Lord have mercy…that is a marquee).

And while both sites have some sort of social networking/communication going on, it’s no where near something like mnspeak.com.

The Shall is going to aggregate everything related to Marshall (on YouTube, Flickr, news stories, events) and allow citizens to publish their own content (news, questions, garage sales, video from the basketball game).

I was inspired to try this after I saw the Boulder Daily Camera move their community site to Ning.

I’m starting with a loose framework and an open mind. Let’s see what happens!

Netflix is doing a great job of opening up lines of communication with its customers. It’s simple and it needs to be a standard for all businesses.

They’ve set up a community using Ning.

They’ve also got a blog. Oh, and did I mention their Facebook page?

Why every business doesn’t have a blog and community (and sometimes wiki) set up is lamebrained. You could literally have all two or three up and running in under an hour using Blogger, Wordpress, PBWiki, Ning or a host of other free/cheap service providers.

It’s especially useful when customers have a complaint or question about your product. In the case of Netflix, it’s been especially useful during the past year in explaining to customers the stopping block for instant viewing on Macs and on Firefox.

It won’t necessarily make the problem go away, but as a customer, knowing someone is listening and working to fix the problem is more than half the battle.

We live in a culture of change and the fast flow of information. The worst thing you can do is forget to lay the plumbing down.

You certainly don’t want to end up here.

It was recently announced he will be taking an indefinite leave of absence.

He has the abilities and insights to work at any major news organization in the world. They all would be lucky to have him. But, Dana chose to dedicate his skills to the community, because it’s where he grew up and what he cared about the most.

In his stories and editorials, he addressed the most important questions we, as journalists, strive to answer. What does it mean? Why does it matter? How will it affect my readers?

For Dana, it was never about himself or winning awards or impressing anyone. The man has no ego.

He’s always had you and your family in mind when putting out the paper.

Now, it’s time to return the favor. The Independent’s readers owe Dana a standing ovation. I hope we should all be so lucky to get an encore someday soon.

This year’s tournament has provided a lot of competitive and exciting basketball, prompting me to look at where some of the games are happening next year. Luckily enough, first and second-round action returns to my home state of Minnesota in 2009.

I found information on gophersports.com saying the NCAA would start selling tickets Monday morning. “Cool,” I thought, as I ran across this article on Sunday evening. I’ll wake up tomorrow, keep an eye on the Web site and snatch up a pair of tickets as soon as they become available.

Monday rolls around and I roll into work, checking out their Web site to see if tickets are available yet. Still nothing. I check a few more times over the next several hours but nothing changes on the page where ticket information is supposed to be listed.

What’s worse, there’s no communication from the NCAA or the host sites on the delay. A few people call the local university hosts (in Minneapolis and Portland) and log onto the NCAA message board to share what little information they received.

The University of Minnesota sends me a pretty vague e-mail response to my inquiry about what’s the dealeo:

The NCAA website is currently updating the link to purchase tickets for the 2009 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tourney. Please check back to their website periodically to further purchase your order. Thank you for your patience.
- Goldy [Gopher]

At least eight hours later, they must still be updating that link? Come on Goldy, you’re better than that (Spin your head! Spin your head!).

Is it the end of the world? Certainly not. All I’m asking for is a simple update to your Web site to let people know what’s going on.

It could go a little something like this: “Hey, we apologize to fans looking for 2009 NCAA First and Second-round tickets. Our hamster died. You can expect ticket information to be posted Wednesday after we’ve had a proper ceremony for Fuzzy.”

Not only is there no mention of what’s going on with the ticket information, but there isn’t much in the way of contact information over at ncaa.com.

Maybe it’s all just part of “March Madness.”

It’s all about pushing Gmail to play a little nicer with CSS so us designers can deliver a consistent experience across multiple platforms. I think they’ll listen.

Kudos to the Yahoo Mail team for doing such a great job supporting e-mail standards.

Also of note:
Check out this cool little explainer on parallax scrolling as implemented on Clearleft’s Silverback app.

Why? There’s certainly no shortage on the number of web templates out there, but it’s hard to track down a professional-grade design.

I’ve created Stride for the thousands of small to medium-sized businesses who can not afford to hire out an agency, but want a web presence that is clean and professional.

The idea is that more businesses can have an attractive Web site that adheres to web standards. Since most of the design work is already completed, a business is able to make a few customizations and launch very quickly.

The Stride Template (a homepage and sub-page design) costs $50 and comes with a money-back guarantee. If you’re not happy with the template you can return it for a full refund.

Implementation/customization is available at $50/hour. A basic setup of a 2-10 page site with small changes to the design (color, photos, logo, etc.) will take approximately 2-5 hours. Keep in mind this is an estimate.

Please inquire for a more specific cost range.

I’ve never had formal lessons and usually don’t venture too much up the fret board. But, I do enjoy fumbling my way through some Jim Croce, Bob Dylan and Jimmy Buffett.

My parents got me a left-handed* guitar for my birthday years ago (you know, something constructive) and it still stands as one of my most beloved and highly-used gifts of all time.

Not long ago, my great power-chording abilities were threatened by worn frets after years of (what I like to think of as) rocking. I’d carved some pretty deep grooves and once-clean notes now echoed with a metallic buzz.

What next? I could retire from guitar and focus all of my energy on mastering the harmonica and unicycle, or find a quality guitar tech to replace the frets. At 25, I figured I had a lot of rocking ahead of me.

A quick Google search of “new york guitar repair” ironically yielded newyorkguitarrepair.com, the Web site of a talented guitar tech named Evan.

I called and set up a time to drop off my guitar at his home on the Upper-West side of Manhattan (he’s got a cool little shop set up next to his living room). Evan was extremely friendly and promised to have my six-string back to its old self soon. True to his word I was playing again in just a couple days and my guitar sounded great. Quality work at a reasonable price with great customer service. That’s how you run a business.

*I’m right-handed so to me it makes sense to strum with my left hand and manipulate the strings with my most dexterous hand, my right hand. Doesn’t this make sense to anyone else?

Inspirational Sites Using Wordpress
• Eleven3
• WebDesignerWall
• NYCity News Service
• Carsonified
• Echo Magazine

Theming It Up
• Mimbo (magazine-style)
• Revolution Themes ($80)
• 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes
• Prologue
• K2
• Hemingway

Mission-Critical Plugins
• flickrRSS
• Alex King (Twitter, Popularity Contest, ShareThis)
• Podcasting
• Yet Another Photoblog
• Related Posts
• SimplePie RSS
• Wordpress Plugins Directory

Good Resources
• Justin Tadlock
• WPCandy
• Wordpress Codex

Measure!
• Google Analtyics
• Mint ($30)

HTML/CSS Resources
• HTML Dog