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Real Time Journal - Days 3/4

I took a screenshot of the Twitter page for NeuroNow yesterday around midnight. Here it is:

All the numbers are looking good. I left TweetAdder running yesterday while I was out of WIFI and EVDO contact  - who knew that was possible :-) - and look at the numbers today:

The tools I set up yesterday to tweet, follow people that followed me, and add new followers that might be interested in NeuroNow seem to be doing a good job. I'm also getting a bunch of Direct Messages (DMs), which can mean that I've picked up some spammy followers. TweetAdder will allow you to automatically send new followers a DM; I'm not planning to use that feature for NeuroNow.

I'm not going to change any of the settings for TweetAdder for the moment, but I am going to go back and add some more neuroscience blogs that I have been following for awhile. AllTop.com is a great way to get started, but I want to put a little more personality into the tweets. 

This time I'm going to use Google Alerts to add tweets to NeuroNow. Start by going to Google.Com/Alerts and log in using your new google email account info. I'm going to make a search for "cognitive enhancers" and see what Google can do.

Your page should look like this:

When you accept that info, you will now get a dialog something like this:

...And now, all you need to do is click on the feed link and put it on TwitterFeed.com. It will look something like this:

So, now I'll get some tweets about a particular kind of query used by Google users - and I can post them to my Twitter feed automatically! Let's see how is works tomorrow.

the iofy platform: the future of spoken audio

In 2005 we were working on the next generation of the iofy spoken audio platform. The company had been successfully selling our first digital spoken audio on websites like PimsleurDirect for a year or so, but we had a lot of work to do, and there were some pretty dispiriting things going on - like the Sony Rootkit scandal.

About that time, I came upon Fred Wilson's post on the future of media:

1 - Microchunk it - Reduce the content to its simplest form. Thanks Umair.
2 - Free it - Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it. Thanks Stewart.
3 - Syndicate it - Let anyone take it and run with it.  Thanks Dave.
4 - Monetize it - Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk. Thanks Feedburner.

Fred's vision of how media should be was clean and refreshing, and it was what we wanted to do. We wanted to make spoken audio content an intelligently chunked, non-proprietary, syndicatable, monetizable citizen of the net.

Three years later, we are finally completing a solid platform; where we can enable people to enjoy spoken audio in a way that goes with the grain of the Internet (courtesy Paul Graham). We've gotten validation from publishers, resellers and distributors: now we need to show consumers a good time.

I'm looking forward to talking to people about this at the PLA in two weeks. See you soon!