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Excerpt: I love the Gadget Show with its reviews of the latest gadgets and gizmos. Yesterday’s show treated us to a bit of social media experimentation in which Facebook was pitted against Twitter in an attempt to organise a ‘dance-off’ at Somerset House in London. The rules of the experiment were rather limiting, in that they had less than a week to organise and publicise the event and they were only allowed to use one social media site. Gail Porter, started by using Facebook to contact her seven hundred odd friends about the event and further publicised the event by adding an event…

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Excerpt: I was reading an article by Tom Critchlow on  why we shouldn’t use tiny urls in newspapers. All good stuff, but this got me thinking about how the tinyURL system works? TinyURLs are useful when referring people to sites on Twitter. Clearly we require a mapping which takes a URL and maps it to a unique but shorter URL. Hash tables do this; there is an input and a method of encoding which generates the tinyURL. What could be used? MD5 produces a code that is 32 characters still too long and a usability minefield. Other MD codings are available and MD2…

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Excerpt: Convergence Technology is changing. Every device you buy today has a screen and the ability to do the function of three gadgets you bought last year. This characteristic is known as convergence.   We are seeing convergence in many areas of technology and it is important to consider the effect that it will have on our search and surfing habits. Video – a more accessible medium for some topics. Becoming more important because of YouTube and availability of cheap technology, digital camcorders, mobile phones, broadband speeds, fibre optic networks to the home. Mobile Surfing – proper internet is now a reality for many people…

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Excerpt: As promised, this post is on social media to increase traffic for blogs. Social media is quite a vague term but it is generally accepted to mean any thing from leaving comments in a blog to the large content community sites. A good blog should foster opportunities for communities to interact. Not only does it have a feel good factor that make you want to carry on writing a blog but it also reduces reliance on traffic from search engines and the whims of the mighty Google. The key to success of a blog is to create content that will…

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Excerpt: Having used Twitter for a month or two now, I feel am just starting to get the hang of it. I am not a great conversationalist but I enjoy the constant snippets of conversation that pop-up on my browser like a babbling brook of information. Twitter is supposed to be about what you are doing right now, but it has moved on. It has several roles, it is a human information feed providing up to the minute news on the topics you are interested in. It is has an obvious networking role where you can make new contacts and create new…