Allen Lew's Thoughts » The Internet

My Favorite Twitter Tools

Allen Lew — Mon, 23 May 2011 17:42:07 +0000

Twitter

The Twitter ecosystem gets bigger with each passing day and developers are building more and more great tools to use with it. Listed below are some of my favorite ways of using these developer tools with Twitter.

Natter- The official Twitter app for Facebook has not been updated for a while (not for a lack of trying on Twitter’s part either). Fortunately, Natter improves on the official app in a couple of ways. First, it will actually take links you tweet about and put in a Facebook like preview box with a thumbnail as well. Second, Twitter names get translated to real names listed on their profiles, so you don’t show off the @username notation. Lastly, comment replies on Facebook are sent back to your Twitter stream as @mentions from Natterapp, which means you can track your conversation on Twitter. The one improvement I’d like to see from Natter is to have retweets posted on your Facebook profile like LinkedIn currently does. Still, if you were looking for a better way to integrate your Twitter and Facebook accounts, this is the app for you.

Natter syncs your Tweets with Facebook
The Archivist-A project from Microsoft’s Mix Online Labs, The Archivist breaks down data on a particular topic on Twitter. Just type in a search term or a #hashtag and the Archivist will present you with a latest tweet archive for a topic along with a set of visualizations for a given topic such as who has tweeted it the most often, other associated words, what links are associated with that topic, and even what clients are the most popular. It’s great for the marketing person who wants to know how their Twitter campaign is doing or the data geek who’s wants to know more about a meme they saw.
The Archivist
Google Search Twitter-Search on Twitter is limited to about 3 days. However, the partnerships Twitter has formed with Google and Microsoft, you can use their search engines to go back further in the Twitter archive. There are a couple of ways to access it. On Google, you just type the topic and thing click the real time link on the left hand side. However, you can also do site specific searches on Google by adding the “site:twitter.com” operator and that will limit your searches to tweets.

Well that’s some of my favorite Twitter utilities. I’m anxious to hear about yours. Leave me a comment and let me know about them.

My Sergey Brin Photo on Wikipedia

Allen Lew — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 17:12:57 +0000

Sergey Brin article on Wikipedia

My photo of Sergey Brin (cofounder of Google) is now the photo used on his Wikipedia entry. This is the fourth photo I know of from my photo collection used on Wikipedia.

Site Changes for 2010

Allen Lew — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:43:30 +0000

My site

With the long 4th of July Weekend, I thought it was time for my yearly site refresh. After upgrading to WordPress 3.0 (which has a number of advanced features like Custom Post Types and Multiple Sites installations), I decided to make two major cosmetic changes to the site.

I decided to change the site’s theme to Thirty Ten, a three-column version of the new WordPress default theme, Twenty Ten. Like all of the times I change themes, the old theme is still pretty good, but I just felt the need to experiment with a new design. I especially like that asides have been given their own style and that it’s easy to place my own header images (which I hope to do in the coming weeks).
Since I recently joined up with an online advertising company, I wanted to understand more about the business. So I reactivated my Google Adsense account, and decided to place ads on my site and feed. I had resisted putting ads on my site since I first started it (which when I think about it seems odd, since I was making less money then I do now), but it felt right to try this out. We’ll see how this experiment goes.

So check feel free to check out my new web site at allen.alew.org.

My new job at Rubicon Project

Allen Lew — Wed, 12 May 2010 01:58:18 +0000

If you haven’t heard the news yet, I am leaving my current job at the Los Angeles Urban League after a good three years with the company. At the league, I was at times a youth mentor, interview coach, webmaster, and then also found some time to do my regular job of fixing computers and providing technical support as a member of the IT department.

However, I recently received an amazing opportunity to join up with The Rubicon Project, an internet company with a “mission to automate the $65 billion global online advertising industry.” There I will be working alongside their Engineering Team doing Quality Assurance for the Project’s platform. It’s a great new opportunity to work with great new people, but it’s also bitter sweet to leave a place you have been working at for a little while. To all my coworkers at the League, good luck to all of you. And to all my new coworkers at Rubicon, I look forward to meeting all of you.

If you want to know more about the company, I’ve enclosed a Youtube video of the Rubicon Project’s HQ after the jump:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Monetization Models for Video on the Internet

Allen Lew — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 18:38:09 +0000

I had a brief discussion with a friend about making money with Internet video. We looked at a couple of business models for a nonprofit to make money online and realized there were a couple of ways anybody could make some money with Internet video. Here are some suggestions for almost anybody to earn revenue from video on the web:

Take advertising on your site and/or videos. This probably isn’t feasible as a nonprofit (Update: this is possible with a nonprofit), but online advertising revenues will give you a somewhat decent amount of money for the amateur and is the most common video revenue model. In addition to ads on the producer’s website (generally provided by a third-party), most video hosting sites like Youtube or my personal favorite, Blip.tv, allow ads to be inserted before and after videos, and at designated times during the video.
Post the videos (or excerpts) on Youtube and Myspace. As a nonprofit, Youtube and Myspace will allow you to collect donations. For example, take a look at this page from the Anaheim Ballet. They have a donation button on the their page and on each of their video pages with Google Checkout integration. Also, having a Facebook Cause and/or Page as well, as they allow you to collect donations as well. Even if you are intending to sell the videos, having a small presence on these sites can at the very least draw some attention to your videos (and a random donation as well).
Creating an online video store- This is probably the most technically challenging option. It is possible to create an online store that sells video downloads using ecommerce software like Ubercart, a Drupal module for ecommerce, and others like Magento. You can also sell some of your stuff on iTunes and other services using a company like TuneCore.
Post videos online, but sell physical media (DVDs, booklets, etc.) – This is the model now for most television stations, including PBS. For example, the show Frontline on PBS is available online in its entirety, but is also sold as a DVD online, along with teachers guides, and other supplemental materials. You can even have these items made on demand via new websites like Lulu.com that print and make CD/DVDs and books when some one orders them.

So those are just some ideas I had about making money online with video. They are not mutually exculsive items (for example, 1 and 4 are completely complementary to each other). Feel free to also post a comment with any other ideas.

Automatic FTP uploads and downloads using BAT scripts

Allen Lew — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 05:29:44 +0000

How to automate FTP uploads from the Windows Command Line – This BAT script uses the FTP command in the command line and automating the actions into a script. The script can then be paired with other processes (like Scheduled … finish reading Automatic FTP uploads and downloads using BAT scripts No related posts.

Los Angeles Urban League Event Board

Allen Lew — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:37:27 +0000

In a similar vain to the Job Board I built for the LA Urban League, I created an event board using WordPress. The main plugins I’ve used are the Event Calendar for the event information and the Geopress plugin for locations.

Los Angeles Urban League Job Board

Allen Lew — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:15:02 +0000

Inspired by Recruitpress, a job board made with WordPress and a couple of packaged plugins, I’ve just deployed a job board for the Los Angeles Urban League. Basically, I’ve replaced the Secure Form Mailer Plugin For WordPress, used to apply for this job section of each job post, with the cforms plugin, which I felt was a bit more customizable.

How many HTML tags can you name?

Allen Lew — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:29:00 +0000

For me, not that many:

(via Kottke)

Building Websites with Blogging Software

Blogging Scholarships

Allen Lew — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 15:03:46 +0000

Collegescholarships.org is offering a $10,000 scholarship for college bloggers. Like almost everything I see nowadays, I wonder why they didn’t have this when I was in college and was still writing Calstuff (via Read/WriteWeb).