So after several months of really lovin Twitter, they’ve finally made me sad…really sad. Yesterday, my modest roster of followers went from somewhere in the neighborhood of 140 or so to 81. And the number of people that I was following went from 183 or so to 113. Apparently this is part of Twitter’s way to combat Twitter spammers, those folks that mass follow thousands of Twitter users in hopes of getting a large following so they can bombard them with tweet spam. There’s a post on ReadWriteWeb about Twitter’s new anti-spam effort.

Was this move necessary? I don’t know. It’s pretty easy to ignore unwanted followers. Before you follow someone, check out their profile to see if they seem to be an interesting person to follow before you hit that “follow” button (Lesson #3 on my tips to finding interesting people to follow on Twitter). I’m quite sure there were some obvious spammers that needed to be purged from my followers list. You can easily spot who’s a spammer straight off by looking at their profile. If the great purge got rid of those turkeys then good riddance. But the point is, they didn’t bother me because I choose not to follow them in the first place.

I guess I’m a bit more upset about being automatically removed from some of the folks I was following. I’ve tried to only follow folks I’ve found interesting, so the fact that some of my follows may have been labeled as “spam”. Makes me sad.

Now, I’m not exactly sure how Twitter decided that a certain person needed to be “unfollowed” from whoever’s follow list. All I can hope for is that if you happened to be following me and find that I’ve disappeared, you can visit my profile and follow me again. And hopefully, I can someone find all the people that’s currently gone from my “following” list.

[Update] My followers/following counts are back to normal…thanks Twitter!

Image by Pearsonified

I’ve taken to carrying my digital camera around everywhere I go lately and found some pretty nifty uses for it:

• On the fly pictures for my blog- One of the reasons why I’ve started making a habit of carrying my camera around is that a lot of times I would see something that would give me an idea for a blog entry and I would be cursing myself because I didn’t have my digital camera with me and my phone doesn’t take pictures (yes, I’m one of those die-hards that still wants her phone to be a phone). So now, when I seen something interesting, my camera’s there to snap that quick picture.
• Inspiration- This use will be familiar to anyone who’s seen Project Runway. Have you ever seen something that inspires you to make a new piece of artwork? Perhaps it’s the colors of a sunset, or the texture of a piece of cloth, or the lines of a building. Now that I have my digital camera with me everywhere, I snap pictures of colors, inspiring scenes, or neat looking lines and arrangements. I then print those pictures out and put them on my Inspiration board in my studio. If you’re particularly good at snapping beautiful pictures, you can turn them into prints or little notecards. Check out the link roundup on Photographing Your Work for some tips on how to turn digital images into prints.

  In fact, if your a Flickr user and your photos are particularly good, you may be able to earn a bit of money. Stock photography company, Getty Images, has recently announced that they will be contacting Flickr users about liscensing some of their images for their stock photography clients. Depending on the liscense agreement, Flickr users may get between 20 to 40 percent of the liscensing fee should their image be chosen. You can find out more about this on the ReadWriteWeb site.

• Visual reminders- I got this tip from a website on public speaking called Amazing Public Speaking. Sometimes when I’m on the road I’ll need to remember something, like where I parked my car, words on some signage, or how I packed my show materials in my truck. Now when I need to remember something, I’ll take out my digital camera and snap a picture of whatever I need to remember. Then whenever I need it, I bring up the picture on my camera.
• Digital recording device- I got this idea from internet audio and video expert called Mike Stewart. My particular camera can record 3 to 5 minutes of video. The other day I got my idea for the tax tips blog entry while I was driving. So I simply pulled out my camera (while I was sitting at a stoplight of course), put it on the driver’s side seat, and turned on the video recorder. Then I recorded my tax tips to my camera while I drove. Then when I got home I transcribed what I said into a blog entry. Ready for something neater? I extracted the audio out of the video I made (the actual video only shows the roof of my car), edited it and included it in a podcast. But I wasn’t done yet…I took the edited audio, made a small slide show and combined them to turn it into a video tip which I’ll be posting on SlideShare. Three uses for the price of one!

So do you have a digital camera? What cool uses have you found for it?

Joining Twitter is pretty useless if you’re not connected to anyone. During the few weeks I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve found that it has become a lot more interesting and useful once I found some cool people to follow. Here are some tips on how to find interesting people on Twitter:

1. Follow people you already know- It’s seems obvious, but some of the first people you follow should be the people that you already know. If you’re using an email service like Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, or MSN, you can allow Twitter to search your address book to see if any of your contacts already has an account. It also allows you to send an email invitation to people from your address book to join Twitter if they don’t already have a Twitter account.

2. Browse the followers of your followers- If you already have people following you, visit the profiles of your current followers and see who’s following them. Chances are that you may find potential followers that have the same interests as you.

3. Don’t follow indescriminately- Try to find people that have the same interests as you. Twitter is as much about monitoring as it is about sending updates. You want the people that you’re following to be talking about things of interest to you. So choose the people you follow carefully. Before you hit “follow” button, check out that person’s previous tweets. What were they about? Are they entirely self-serving, are they just talking about what they last fed their cat, or do they provide some interesting information as well? Because of the nature of Twitter, you will get a certain amount of “chatter” that you may not be interested in, but some of the most interesting people to follow will balance that with something useful.

It’s also a good idea to look at the volume and frequency of a person’s tweets as well. How often do they tweet? When was their last tweet? If it was a month or two ago…they might not make an interesting person to follow. By the same token, you may not have the time to follow someone who tweets about something insignificant every 10 minutes throughout the day.

Now, what if you’re using Twitter as a means to promote yourself and/or maybe to bring more traffic to your website? Wouldn’t you want to include more people and not less? Not necessarily. Not everyone will be interested in what you do, so gathering a huge group of followers that won’t eventually visit your website is just a waste of time. It’s just like I stated in my series on marketing through social networking, you’ll get better results if you concentrate on people that’s likely to be interested in what you’re offering. So do a bit of research before you start following.

4. Follow those who follow you…within reason- On Twitter, it’s usually good form to follow the people that’s following you. But be careful! There are some that try to use this common courtesy as a means to gather large numbers of followers so they can spam them with unwelcome commercial messages. Again, don’t be indescriminate when it comes to following people on Twitter…it’s okay not to follow someone if they seem to be trying to spam you.

5. Use the search function to find followers- Twitter has a search engine that allows you to search profiles and tweets. So if you type in the word “art” you’ll find all of those Twitter profiles, usernames, and tweets that contain the word “art”. Be aware that this is a kind of scattergun approach to finding followers, but it can be a good way to start if you’re at ground zero.

There’s also a interesting service called Summize that allows you to search Twitter conversations. If you type in the word “crafts” you’ll get all of the Twitter conversations that contain the word “crafts”. I actually like this service a bit better than the Twitter search.

So if you haven’t checked out Twitter yet, you can go to the Twitter website…and if you sign up for an account and need someone to follow, check out my Twitter profile and follow me!

So…I’ve been using Twitter for almost a month now…and I must say that I’m finding it very useful. If you’re not familiar with Twitter, you can check out a previous post I did about it.

I’ve found Twitter to be a great way to drive traffic to both my websites and my blog. Every time I put up a new blog post, upload a new video, make an update to my website, or add to my Etsy store, I’ll send a tweet about it along with a direct link. Since I’ve been on Twitter I’ve noticed an increase of subscribers to my blog and to my mailing list. There was one tweet that I posted that resulted in 5 new subscriptions to my newsletter all in one night.

Now, I also try not to make all of my tweets just all about me and my websites, I also try to post links to useful news and websites as well. You find out very quickly that people that do nothing but “tweet their own horns” on every single update are very tiresome. Just like I wrote about in my series about social networking…it’s all about giving as well as and taking.

Twitter also makes a great networking tool as well. I’ve meet a lot of artists using Twitter, and I’ve been introduced to a lot of new work, websites, and information by simply monitoring the tweets from the people I’m following. Part of the value of Twitter is not just in sending tweets, but in monitoring the tweets of others…especially if you’re careful to follow interesting people. Because you can also send direct messages to people that are following you, you can hold conversations with the people that are following you. Through my conversations on Twitter, I’ve found a couple of artists to interview for Interview Tuesdays, and I’ve also got an offer from another blog to write a guest post.

There’s also a lot of great tools that you can use with Twitter too. I already wrote about how you can use Jott to send tweets. There’s also a number of tools that you can use to send tweets without having to go directly to the Twitter website. I now mainly use Twirl to send updates and to monitor the tweets of those I’m following. Another service that I’m using for posting links to my tweets is called Tweetburner. Tweetburner is a link service for Twitter that shorten long links to short ones…a really important service when you’re limited to only 140 characters per tweet! As an added bonus, you can also track how many people click on your links…and Twirl is also integrated with Tweetburner so you can shorten your links directly in Twirl (can you tell I really like Twirl?).

Another cool service I’ve recently discovered is called Twitterfeed. This is service that allows you to hook your blog up to your Twitter account so that it automatically sends an update every time you add a post to your blog. Now Twitterfeed is a neat service, but it’s not perfect. I have found that it sometimes misses posts, so be sure that you keep an eye on it. If you have a Wordpress blog installed on your website, then there is a plug-in called Twitter Tools that can also send tweets to your account every time you put a new post on your blog. I haven’t tested it yet, but since all of my blogs run on Wordpress, I think I’ll give it a try.

So, that’s my experience with Twitter so far! Intrigued? You can sign up for a free account at the Twitter website…and while you’re there, check out my Twitter profile and send me a tweet!

This weekend, I finally created a Twitter account. I’ve known about Twitter for I guess going on two years, but this is the first time I’ve actually ever created an account. And so, now I’m in the process of playing with it.

What is Twitter? Basically it’s a form of “micro-blogging”. Really micro. About 140 characters micro. You have your own homepage where you post updates called “tweets”, which look similar to blog posts. People can also subscribe to your Twitter page and follow all of the “tweets” that you post to your page. However, unlike blogging, you can also post tweets directly to other people on the Twitter network. So in a way Twitter can also be a form of conversation as well.

Like I mentioned earlier, your posts or “tweets” can only be about 140 characters long. So there is no long drawn out posts on Twitter. Your messages are short and to the point (unlike this blog post). In your tweets you can tell people what you’re doing, post links to interesting things you’ve discovered, pretty much anything you can think of.

You can post updates in a couple different ways. You can log on to your account at twitter.com and submit your tweets there. You can also add your cell phone number to your account and update via text messaging. There’s also some software that you can download to your computer that allows you to post tweets and monitor the Twitter stream without having to go to the website. Right now I’m testing out twhirl and Twitterrific.

Plus, if you have a Jott account, you can post to Twitter by calling Jott and recording a message to your Twitter account. The Jott service transcribes your voice message and posts it to your Twitter stream. It even provides a link where people can hear the actual voice message that you leave. If you’re not familiar with Jott, check out the previous post I did about it.

I’m still in the process of playing around with it…but I can tell you that it’s pretty interesting so far. I’m already thinking of a couple useful applications for it. So stay tuned. Meanwhile, check out Twitter…and if you’re feeling adventurous open an account (it’s free!). If you’re already on Twitter, check out my Twitter profile and send me a tweet!.