Firewall’s Weekly WordPress, Twitter and Web News

Some recent news from around the web….

Kevin Rose, aka Mr. Digg.com (which has been valued at anywhere between $0 and several hundred milion dollars), offers, in a guest post at TechCrunch, 10 tips for increasing your Twitter followers. Besides the fact that I’ve never seen Rose write a guest post, and that he left off the most important tip: be Kevin Rose, it’s a good read. But since only he can be Kevin Rose, you’ll have to make do with his 10 tips and hope you’ll get even a fraction of his nearly 90K Twitter followers. Oh by the way, he’s apparently an investor in Twitter. Did this happen before or after he sold his Twitter competitor, Pownce, to Six Apart?
[Read more…]

January 28, 2009 by
Filed Under: Blog Themes, Twitter, WordPress Tagged With: , , , , ,

Real World Uses of Twitter and Other Twitterbits

Amanda MacArthur has a very interesting list at Mashable of some of the ways that Twitter can be applied usefully in the real world. The list is repeated here, sans details:

  1. Saving You a AAA Membership
  2. Getting First-Hand Reviews
  3. Receiving Advanced Traffic Warnings
  4. Making Travel Buddies
  5. Getting the REAL Weather
  6. Becoming a Super Stalker
  7. Making New Gaming Friends
  8. Receiving Better Customer Service
  9. Becoming More Social

While it is a completely legitimate list, I doubt that the average Twitter user is going to get any of these uses out of it. (For example, I’ve honestly found far more social interaction on Plurk and Facebook with far fewer fans/ followers/ friends, in both cases, than on Twitter.) To benefit the way she’s suggesting, there are a few conditions:
[Read more…]

January 23, 2009 by
Filed Under: Twitter

Using Twitter to Build Blog Traffic

snap twitter
Twitter, the popular micromessaging/ microblogging web service, isn’t just for announcing what your most recent meal was, despite opinions to the contrary. It’s really many tools in one, one of which is a way to brand yourself online. You can then leverage that to build up traffic to your blog.

Key Steps for Building Blog Traffic With Twitter

The first step, of course, is to sign up with Twitter, upload a picture or avatar, and fill out your profile. The profile allows you to link back to your website. [Note: plugins specifically mentioned and/or linked to below are for the WordPress blogging platform.] [Read more…]

January 20, 2009 by
Filed Under: Blog Traffic, Twitter