Wonder How To » Show & Tell for Creators & Doers How To Optimize Twitter: Be Real, Profiles, RT, Hashtags & More Twitter loves me, Twitter loves me not. Getting found and heard on Twitter isn’t as easy as the early days. Back then you could hang out and easily meet people at what was referred to as the largest online cocktail party. Today you can still mix and mingle with top influencers, but the party is getting bigger and the saturation level is getting murkier. Twopchart’s latest figures, and countdown chart, show Twitter growing at a rate of around 11 accounts per second and reaching 500 million registered users this month. Why is Twitter winning the social media race as the “go to” platform for breaking news and influencing others whether you are a top tier journalist, celebrity, brand or personality? Simplicity and Visibility Twitter’s popularity rose out of its simplicity. Twitter is also winning in visibility. How can a brand best optimize with the times and stay in the tweet game without losing time and money? Keep it Real Optimizing the Twitter Profile Tweet Structure Example: Hashtag Tips
Gapminder: Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view. The Future of News How to Make a Paper Plate Speaker That Actually Works for Under $1 How to Make a Paper Plate Speaker That Actually Works for Under $1 Back in 2007, YouTube user HouseholdHacker posted a parody video on how to make a high-def speaker for under a buck. MythBusters took on the challenge and busted it. Although that particular method doesn't seem to work, that doesn't mean you can't make your own speaker for less than $1.00. To understand how a speaker works, I took one apart. In it's simplest form, a speaker is just a coil of wire glued to a piece of paper, and placed near a permanent magnet. The audio signal from your stereo is a form of alternating current. If this coiled wire is attached to a diaphragm, the vibrations will push a larger volume of air and generate sound waves that we can hear. In the pictures above, you can see a paper speaker cone, the yellow spider (which holds the voice coil in place over the magnet), the voice coil with wrappings of magnet wire around it, and a strong permanent magnet at the bottom of the assembly. Troubleshooting
How do you build local engagement on Twitter? A Journal Register Co. editor mentioned a common challenge in a newsroom trying to master social media. How do you build an engaged audience on Twitter? My answer to the editor (expanded some as I’ve thought more about it): Engaging followers is largely a result of two factors: following people who care about your community and conversing with them. How many people follow you (and how many you follow) are not as important as identifying the people who share your interests and engaging meaningfully with them. I know of three tools that would be useful for building an engaged Twitter following. You can also use Advanced Twitter search to look for tweets by location (here’s the tweets within 15 miles of Yardley, Pa., where JRC is headquartered). I would not make these sites a one-time visit either. In any of these cases, if you follow people in your community (or people who show their interest in your community by tweeting about it), you will get quite a few who will follow you back.
FREE MAGNETIC ENERGY - OPEN SOURCE. A journalist’s guide to SEO Last week the BBC announced it was to start optimising its headlines in an attempt to gain greater visibility in the search engine results pages, so I thought I’d take a look at journalism and the web. Over recent years, many online news providers have had to adopt search engine optimisation (SEO) best practice into their articles in order to maintain their audience figures. Yet I often see journalists and even some bloggers bemoaning the need to optimise their work, as though it means all the quality has been drained out of the article and replaced with Google-appeasing nonsense. FM Telephone Bug Posted Apr 24, 2013 at 8:26 am Here is a simple transmitter that when connected to a phone line, will transmit anything on that line (execpt the dial tone) to any FM radio. The frequency can be tuned from 88 to about 94Mhz and the range is about 200 feet. Circuit diagram Parts R1 180 Ohm 1/4 W Resistor R2 12K 1/4 W Resistor C1 330pF Capacitor C2 12pF Capacitor C3 471pF Capacitor C4 22pF Capacitor Q1 2SA933 Transistor D1, D2, D3, D4 1SS119 Silicon Diode D5 Red LED S1 SPDT Switch L1 Tuning CoilMISC Wire, Circuit Board Notes L1 is 7 turns of 22 AWG wire wound on a 9/64 drill bit. Tags: FM Transmitter, phone, Bug Surveillance,
Hiring in the Digital Age - Technology Even for twentysomethings, the job description is clear: Everyone is an editor in chief. Wired.com Not so long ago, magazine and newspaper editors knew exactly what they were looking for when hiring young journalists. Certain jobs called for certain skills: Reporters had to report, researchers had to research, designers had to design. These days, things are more complicated. Over the last few years at The Atlantic, I've played a part in hiring several dozen young digital journalists--into new jobs, thanks to our web expansion, or into open slots created by departing employees. The upshot: Today, everyone is an editor in chief. This transition from vertical job descriptions to horizontal job descriptions is perhaps the most profound change in newsrooms that are full of change. As an industry, we've come to the point where we are asking a lot of relatively inexperienced twentysomethings, perhaps too much. But the new world prizes other skills, too. And then there's speed.