Twitter may give Google a run for its money. Twitter's one more way, though, that Google knows everything about you. Speak now, and Google listens.

That may not be good for business. Yours, not Google's.

In the past, IM conversations and text messages were private.

Now Twitter has made text messages public.

Kathy is a 26 year old married woman from Gray, Maine, USA.

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Member since Aug 29, 2007

I live in a little town in Maine with my husband and some furred and feathered friends. I write for a website dedicated to good news and profiles of inspiring people and organizations called Gimundo. (Sign up for the RSS feed here, if you're so inclined.) I share some of our stories here, along with tons of other interesting stuff I come across while looking for material. If you're in the mood for good news, just check out the "gimundo" or "good news" tags on my page - you'll feel better, promise.

How Can Twitter be used to promote a blog? In this guest post Chris Brogan sheds some light on the topic.

Twitter is a lot of things to a lot of people. For some, it's a virtual water cooler. For others, it's a great way to get answers to questions. Since I started using Twitter, I have more than doubled my blog traffic over the last several months, and I can tell you how.

Idiocracy is a disturbing movie about marketing leading to a dumbing down of society. In many ways, marketing seems to be heading down that path.

Using Twitter today made me further appreciate something Nick Carr mentioned, that as we use computers more we begin to think and act like computers. Short bursts. Logical but detached. Devoid of context. Always engaged in something, never fully engaged. Doing whatever is in front of us, etc.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Linux, Microsoft, Open SourceAfter nearly 15 years of development, the WINE project is scheduled for the landmark 1.0 release. As with most open source programs, it is hard to sit back and say "ok it's done". The work will always continue, but at some point the program at least accomplishes the original, or in this case, realistic goal. The WINE website now has posted a list of programs that are planned to work properly, constituting the 1.0 release.

Thinking about quitting your blog? Dee Stewart examines some way to give it a new lease of life.

Thinking about cutting the plug on your blog?

I almost did last year after I found myself busy with other projects, my Adsense and Chitika checks were waining and especially after I noticed that many of my blog friends had shut down their blogs or were barely using them. At first I wondered was I kissing a dinosaur? Should I stop blogging and move onto something better?

Filed under: Internet, Web services, web 2.0

Whether you use Twitter or not, you might want to check out Tweet Scan, a Twitter-based search engine. Basically, what Tweet Scan lets you do is search Twitter's public timeline for snippets of text. There are at least a few reasons this could come in handy even if you don't use Twitter:

Have you ever wanted to have a copy of your favorite blog to read offline?

WebCopier, a program that downloads entire Websites to your computer, certainly hopes so. The software will save an entire dot com to a hard drive, allowing you to view and print the contents at any time.

Should bloggers be worried about such a program? I mean, this seems to make it awfully easy for someone to grab years worth of valuable posts and do whatever they want with them. Sure, a content crook can sit there and copy and paste (or print) every blog entry; where there's a will there's a way. But at least those methods might discourage people because of their time-consuming nature.

In a recent conversation here at The Blog Herald, Chris Garrett asked a very good question:

What do you do when your well known brand doesn't match with your business?

He cited Wendy Piersall's eMom brands as a good example of an online brand that started as a blog and is now expanding into a full media publication for both moms and dads.

There has been a lot written about how companies are using social networks sites like Facebook and MySpace to screen prospective candidates even before the interview process begins. There has been a lot less written about how companies can use social media to recruit new employees. Enter Affinity Circles.