chrisduran.eu

I’ve come across a number of cool sites and projects over the last week, as well as read a number of really thought provoking articles so I figured that I would filter for the best (in my mind) and put them up here.

1. Hexagon.cc

A torrent search engine / tracker site that has a definite social media feel and focus – which is pretty trendy at the moment.

Apparently the site is foundered by, amongst others, one of the admins of the large torrent search engine IsoHunt. Hexagon.cc looks really interesting as it will allow people to start up their own social-sharing networks for torrents and videos. The site is really cleanly designed and seems to be focusing on the convenient sharing of torrent information for legitimate material. Looks really promising!

http://hexagon.cc

2. OS FLV (and FlowPlayer)

The open source, embeddable FLV player.

This player is great for embedding your own video content on your site or blog, without hosting your video material on a third-party website such as YouTube or Vimeo. Whilst I have no problem with either of those services (I use both quite regularly) sometimes it is nice to have your video hosted locally, and have more control over how it is played back (you can have videos start automatically, loop and even customise the ’static image’).

Another player that looks great (maybe even better) is FlowPlayer, but I’ve not played around with it too much yet.

http://www.osflv.com
http://www.flowplayer.org

3. Zero-S Electric Motorcycle

Fully-electric street legal motorcycle.

Fairly-decent max speed (90kph) and mid-range ‘mileage’ (~80km) makes this look like a really promising green motorcycle solution. At that range and top speed it would be a pretty decent bike for intra-city riding, not so good for inter-city, given that most highways in Australia have a limit of about 100-110kph). Give it a few years and I imagine we’ll see bikes with highway compatible top speeds and a longer range. It takes about 4 hours to recharge – what I would like to see is ‘battery exchange programs’ at fuel stations for electric bikes.

http://www.zeromotorcycles.com/zero-s-specs.php

4. Stargate Worlds

Being a big Stargate fan I was stoked to find out recently that their was an MMORPG being made for the Stargate universe! It looks as though it is in beta too, with a tabled release of 2009. I might even consider getting a Windows box up and running to play this game, reviews pending.

http://www.stargateworlds.com/

Aaand some interesting articles (ripped from Twitter)

• Not every cloud has a silver lining: the real attraction behind cloud computing (@doctorow in The Guardian) http://bit.ly/19qSGI
• RT @slashdot: MPAA Pushes Once Again To Close the Analog Hole http://bit.ly/3wTZ6O

Filed under: internet by Chris

I wrote in this article about using Twitter Tools with tweetburner (the twurl.nl URL shortener). I was pretty happy with this solution as it allowed me to measure (to a degree) the traffic interest in various blog posts I put up, be it for WiAU, Cognicology or this blog. It wasn’t the perfect solution however, as the version of Twitter Tools the modified update used was a little old and I always have that little nagging feeling that doesn’t go away when using modded or hacked software.

The deal-breaker for me came when I read an article reviewing the large number of URL shortener services out there. It turns out that tweetburner uses 303 redirection as opposed to 301, which is not ideal for many reasons (see this article for the reasons why, thanks to @problogger).

In the time between my first article and this discovery about the redirection, I had read in the Twitter Tools readme that the developer had created a hook in the code to allow the plugging in of a URL shortening service – the appropriate plugin for wordpress simply needed to be developed, packaged and installed.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a decent package for a URL shortening service using the API calls required to work with Twitter Tools on the wordpress site. After a bit of a search, I found this code snippet that implemented the bit.ly shortening service. This got me excited, because the bit.ly service was on the shortlist of services that I wanted a plugin for. It is one of the shorter URLs generated (14 chars), has some impressive usage tracking and can link multiple twitter accounts to the one bit.ly account. Ace!

I’ve taken the code snippet and packaged it into a ZIP file for upload into the Wordpress plugin manager. You can download it here.

Installing is relatively simple.

1. install and activate the Twitter Tools plugin.

2. install the Bit.ly plugin from this site.

3. BEFORE you activate the Bit.ly plugin, use the inbuilt plugin code editor for wordpress, and change the $login and $api_key values to your bit.ly account login and API key. It is in the first section of code and looks like this (change the bits in red):

function tweet_track($long_url) {
	$login = 'YOUR_LOGIN';
	$api_key = 'YOUR_API_KEY';

4. Activate the plugin.

If all is well, you should now be able to to have post submitting to Twitter, but using the bit.ly service as the URL shortener.

DISCLAIMER: This post itself is also doubling as my testing post for this method. I may or may not be embarrassed by the results.

——

UPDATE (20/4/09 ; 2.5 minutes later): It seems the plugin installation was a success!
Below is the text from my twitter status update:
New blog post: Using bit.ly (trackable URL shortener) with Twitter Tools in Wordpress http://bit.ly/bRa58

Filed under: social media by Chris

The Wifi-in-Australia project has had its first major external development. Earlier in the week, I was contacted by Josh Liebmann, who has been generous enough to donate some of his time to start up a Sydney wireless hotspot map for WiFi in Australia.

Josh is a twitter user, and found out about the project by the wifi-in-australia twitter page.

I’ve been pretty amazed by how this project has really taken off using twitter and I think really shows how powerful twitter currently is as a social media marketing tool. I’ve been actively maintaining both a Facebook Group for the project, and a twitter page. I started pushing the facebook group about 3 weeks ago, and pushing the Twitter page about 2 weeks ago.

The facebook group has a little less then 100 members, whilst the WiFi in Australia now has around 150 followers on Twitter (and this number is very literally growing DAILY, averaging an extra 10 followers a DAY). Interestingly though, 30% of the traffic comes from facebook, compared to around 20% of the traffic coming from twitter. Despite this, most of the community activity on Wifi in Australia has originated from the Twitter followers.

There are a few possible reasons for this. The most likely (to me at least) is that I believe the twitter followers of WiFi in Australia represent a slice of the online community that have a greater interest in Wireless internet (and computing culture in general) then their facebook cousins. This is in no small part due to many of the Twitter followers coming from the follower list of freeAusWireless.

Any other ideas of why this might be the case? Throw your theories at me!

Filed under: IT, social media by Chris

I’ve been reading up a fair bit on social media advertising. I’ve been using twitter as a way to promote my WiFi Mapping project, WiFi in Australia. WiFi in Australia has been up for a little over two weeks now. I started a facebook group at the start of the project, and actively sent invites to people that I knew. I also started a Twitter account (wifi_australia). I only started actively started sending invites to people on Monday.

It is now Wednesday, and already 40% of my total traffic to my site has originated from Twitter and the number of people following my wifi twitter account increase everyday. What I wanted to know is which linking posts were attracting users to my site.

The use of URL-shortening services is popular on micro-blogging sites such as twitter, where character-efficiency is important. There are many services that do this, but some are starting to provide link-through statistics.

TweetBurner allows users to track the number of clicks for a given shortened URL, and users can display a summary of shortened URLs and their clickthrough count when logged in to their service.

TweetBurner is also supported by popular twitter apps such as TweetDeck (twurl). I have also found a modified version of Twitter Tools by Rebelic.com that supports TweetBurner URL-shortening. Twitter Tools is a popular plugin for Wordpress, that will notify a configured Twitter account of new blog posts, and link to the permalink. Now, with a mixture of TweetBurner and Twitter Tools (TweetBurner edition), I can track the clickthrough count for my blog posts!

A promising new URL-shortener and conversion tracker is Twitclicks. Twitclicks give a much deeper analysis of the click-through events. For a given link, it will show you the total number of clicks, the percentage of your followers that have clicked and a breakdown of stats on the user including browser, OS, geographic location, click source (website or external app) and even screen resolution.

Twitclicks is by far the most comprehensive click-through service I have seen. Unfortunately it is not yet supported by many apps (read: my favourite twitter app, TweetDeck) and I am yet to find a Wordpress plugin for it.. but I am sure these will come soon!

TweetBurner: http://tweetburner.com/

TweetClicks: http://www.twitclicks.com/

Twitter Tools (TweetBurner.com edition): http://rebelic.nl/tweetburnercom-plugin/

Filed under: social media by Chris