Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has joined Twitter. Not because he wants to connect with his supporters or try to win over his detractors. Chavez joined, because he said he would, and that’s it.
I doubt that we’ll see much interaction between him and his followers. He’s got 16,000+ followers as of this writing, and he’s following 5 people back.
Welcome to the party President Chavez. Pay attention to what I’m about to tell you:
I hope that you’ll listen to your detractors instead of trying to throw them in jail. You can learn …

In this video, I catch up with Patrick O’Keefe, aka @ifroggy on Twitter. We talk about the presentation that he gave and he goes over one of the most important things for you to avoid becoming an online ______________.

Patrick doesn’t mention it, but some of the communities that he manages are quite large, he knows what he’s talking about.
He gives us some nuggets about how to not look like a __________ whenever we’re in or on community based sites. Go to iFroggy.com for more info on managing online communities.

I’ve been paying a lot more attention to the social media space down south of the US border and beyond.
For the most part, it appears that social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook and making some decent inroads into Latin America.
No, I do not have empirical data for you to use to verify my assertion, all I have is anecdotal data from seeing more and more people tweeting in Spanish and seeing more and more of my family members on Facebook.
I realize that this is not a representative sample, but …

That’s right folks, now you can get real time searches on Google itself. No more messing around with Twitter Search when trying to get the score of a game or when trying to get updates from someone attending a conference or when trying to get traffic updates.
What does “Real Time” mean?
Google is defining “Real Time” as “a few seconds ago.” So, as soon as something is published on twitter or anywhere else, it’ll show up in the search results. Google plans to add updates to the real time search results …

I think that’s what I’m going to call this tool a “Time Suck Portal” instead of monitter.  It’s a free twitter tool that lets you see in real time what people are twittering about.  Actually, let me rephrase that.
It’s a tool that lets you follow in real time what people on twitter are saying about a subject that you’re interested in.  Well, actually, that doesn’t work well either.
Let me try this one more time… you know what, forget it.  Just go to the site, type in a subject in the …

This is the audio from my presentation at Tweetcamp in San Antonio in July 09. The audio is a little rough, so I decided to make it a free podcast instead of something that you had to sign in to get.
It’s about 22 minutes and I talk about Twitter and your search engine rankings.
Leave me a comment and tell me what you think.

There is a common fallacy on Twitter and if you fall for it you’ll likely end up disappointed with your Twitter experience. The fallacy is the “follower fallacy.”
The common wisdom was, or is, that you need a lot of followers on Twitter to be effective. The more followers the better. The more followers you have, the more money you’ll make. The more followers you have, the more famous you’ll be. What this did was create a sort of “arms race” to see who could get the most followers in …

Scott Stratten over at his unmarketing blog wrote a really good post about how businesses can use twitter to engage with clients in their local area. In a nutshell, the point is to stop marketing and start engaging.
Don’t just do a simple search for people on twitter in your local area and then start spamming them. Engage with them, get to know them, let them get to know you and take it from there. Scott advocates the use of various tools to make the sorting and engaging easier. One tool …

I read somewhere that applications and new technology don’t take off unless they have a “killer application” or a “killer app.”  For twitter, you’d think the fact that news usually breaks first on there, or that the first pictures from just about any big news event show up on twitter first (remember the plane in the Hudson?). You’d think that news delivery would be Twitter’s killer app.
You’d be wrong.
Follow me down this path for a moment…
I was thinking about the fact that there are pornographers on Twitter. To me, it …

Have you seen the new Twitter homepage?  I don’t usually log in to Twitter from the homepage since I usually tweet using tweetdeck or Peoplebrowsr, but wow.
The new page pretty much tells you where Twitter is heading. It’s all about the search. Just replace the word “Pentium” with the phrase “search results” in this video. Yes, this song is stuck in my head.

On a more serious note, I do not think that Microsoft’s new search engine “Bing” is a real threat to Google. What I do think is a threat …