Photography, art, things that occur to me.
Every day at baby school they give us a report of Conrad’s day. Here’s an excerpt from today:
He was in a sweet mood – hugging and kissing all morning. He is really understanding our words more. Another child was falling and grabbed onto Conrad. I told him to help the child. He looked upset at first and I tried to explain that the other child was falling. And Conrad helped him and gave him a hug. SMART BOY!
Don’t bother spending a lot of time and effort on a cool Twitter background. People viewing via a netbook or mobile device either can’t see it, or it’s compressed. If you’re going to make one, look at the design on a small monitor to see what actually shows up.
And don’t forget your profile info in Twitter itself. That’s the first thing I look at when I’m trying to decide whether or not to follow someone “especially on this small screen that requires me to take my fingers off their hard-won position on the tiny little home row and scroll down to be able to see much of anything.”
That info also shows up when you mouse over a Twitter username in your follower list, so that can be just as valuable, if not more, than what you put in the sidebar of a background.
Take a look at your photo, too. People may well be looking at that on a tiny screen. Is your photo tight enough that people can make out your face? How will it look if someone is viewing it on a mobile device and it’s roughly a centimeter square?
I’ve also learned that you should test drive any potential netbook for at least half an hour before buying, because this itty bitty keyboard is still driving me nuts.
No matter how active you are in social media, there’s probably someone out there who makes you feel like a cloistered misanthrope. I’ve met four of those people in the last couple of weeks: Wayne Sutton, Jeff Cohen, Kipp Bodnar and Ryan Boyles. I’m not sure it’s possible with the tools readily available to me to calculate the total number of online presences among the four of them. It makes me wonder what they’re doing that I’m not “caffeine megadosing? voodoo?” or, more likely, what I’m doing that they’re not “watching TV, sleeping”.
Kipp and Jeff came to SAS on Tuesday to discuss what we’ve learned so far about implementing social media into our communications. It was up on the web by Thursday. And they both have day jobs. It took me longer to write a 200-word post about it than it did for them to do it.
Here’s part one of the interview:
David Thomas, SAS Social Media Manager, Part 1 from Jeff Cohen on Vimeo.
Originally posted to Conversations and Connections, my SAS social media blog
My netbook arrived today. It’s an Asus Eee 901. I spent a couple of weeks looking at reviews, and went to Best Buy to try out the keyboards to see if I could live with the size. I read a lot of owner comments, and like all reviews on the web, they tell you every range of opinion you can imagine. Lots of people said the keyboard was too small, others said you get used to it.
I’m wondering right now if I’m going to get used to it. At the moment it feels nearly as painful as the post I typed on my iPhone.
And of course, as soon as it arrives, I get two new pieces of information. First, I read Robert Scoble’s review, which doesn’t even mention mine.
Then I read a Facebook comment from a friend talking about how much he loves his Dell Mini 9 Hackintosh, which was another direction I briefly considered, but I realized I didn’t really want this to turn into a hobby. I purposefully chose the Linux version because I didn’t want to be tempted to add a bunch of programs that would slow the whole thing down, like my three-year old laptop that I curse daily for being so slow. If I had the Windows XP version with the 160 GB hard drive, I’m sure I’d end up installing iTunes at some point. And then we’re back to wanting a faster machine.
So far, I like it. The Andros Linux OS is very simple, as the reviews said. I also read how to install Ubuntu, so maybe I’ll do that when I get bored. The machine is incredibly small and light, and I can imagine it will follow me around. It also feels solid, and it’s pretty quiet. In fact, silent. I also installed Google Gears, which apparently will let me use Google Reader offline, so on my upcoming flight to Heidelberg I should be able to catch up on my “1000+” unread RSS feeds.
I just wish I could hit the damn backspace key.
