Newman Blog

Twitter are notoriously guarded about user information and Twitter usage statistics. In August 2008 I wrote about the Twitter usage figures and Twitter demographics that were available – data from Hitwise and Compete.

As Twitter has grown there is more information available – yet still nothing from Twitter officially and statistics generally do not take account of usage of Twitter tools like Tweetdeck and Twhirl.

via Twitter demographics and usage statistics – data from Compete, Hitwise, Quantcast, Nielsen and Twitterholic.

For all the panels, parties and networking, the best part of SXSW was meeting some truly amazing people. There was an A-List of the “who’s who” at the conference, and many of whom I had met – like Erin Kotecki Vest, Brian Solis, Stephanie Agresta, and the list goes on- and many I looked forward to meeting for the first time.

Here is my list of the top ten Social Media rockstars that I met at SXSW (in no particular order). I believe everyone should meet these influential folks in 2009:

via 10 Social Media People You Should Meet | Pelago, Inc..

747 Emergency Landing – Qantas jet

I read about the explosive decompression on the Qantas flight in the local paper this morning and it the article mentioned cell phone video. Within 10 seconds I was in the plane and could see things for myself. Cell phone video is now nothing really new but it still amazes me that people have the presence of mind to act as media agents and recorders of history even in the midst of catastrophe. This is the first time I’ve really been impressed by this type of footage. Of course it probably pays well to sell that video to Reuters….

Anyone interested in following my project process might be interested in some of the stuff I’m using along the way. If nothing else, it will be interesting, to me at least, to look back on this list at the end of the project to see what worked and what did not. This is the kind of post only a geek could love. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll tell you that WordPress is the best blogging engine out there, but the “blog by email” feature set sucks. What is even worse is that even the rudimentary features that are avilable to make a post via email are totally incompatible with GoDaddy.com web hosting. Something to do with their php config and remote access and whatnot. When I try to execute the wp-mail.php file I just get a server timed out message. I’ve been at it for hours and got nothing… similar to what others have discovered. If anyone out there comes across my message in a bottle about this one please comment.

BTW, I’m also looking for anyone that has any leads on a wordpress client for an MS Smartphone.

I’d like to say I’m a genius, but even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes…. and in my case the nut happens to be a wonderful free/shareware product called GPS Utility. After some forum searchs I came across this application as a way to go directly from my Magellan MAP330M GPS to an ArcMap shapefile format in one step.

It turns out the process is Read the rest of this entry »