Stuffleufagus

Update - as of today, 29MAY08 Twitter Track is disabled. I will update this post when it is turned back on.

Twitter has been described as a “micro-blogging tool”. And it is that. It is also a chat client.

And it is an extremely useful research tool. By tracking specific keywords (your company name for example) you can obtain a near-real-time feed anytime anyone on Twitter mentions your company.

First, the “Track” command. According to the Twitter FAQ:

What is tracking?
Tracking is an SMS or IM only feature that allows you to receive all twitters that match a word you’re tracking. For example, if you send track Obama, you will receive all updates that match “Obama.” All updates sent from tracking will begin with parenthesis. You can easily stop getting these messages by sending untrack Obama.

So using track is quite simple. From your cell phone your could use a Twitter Mobile Client and send Twitter a message like “track Microsoft” and you would receive a message every time Microsoft is mentioned. Of course, receiving an update every time someone mentions Microsoft is probably not what you want to do on your cell phone.

And that is where GTalk comes in. GTalk is a Google Chat Client. And it works wonderfully with the Twitter Track function.

And if you have a GMail account (get one here for free) GTalk can also automatically archive all of your “Tweets and Tracks” into your GMail account.

After downloading and installing GTalk (and creating an account) you can now add Twitter to GTalk You do this on Twitter.com by going to the Settings page and clicking on the “Devices” tab.

Enter your GMail address and select GTalk from the drop-down menu.

Click “Save”

You will be prompted to send a unique code back to Twitter from within GTalk

Just type in the code in the GTalk Chat window (after selecting twitter@twitter.com from the user list) and press enter.

Nearly instantly (assuming GTalk/Twitter are both functioning) you will receive a response from Twitter.

Now you are set.

To track something (Microsoft for example), just type “track microsoft” into the chat window. Twitter replies letting you know it heard your request. And as you can see, it took only seconds to get a result.

To stop tracking type “untrack microsoft”.

You can also correspond with all of your Twitter friends with GTalk. Let me know you got this working by sending “@kr8tr - Tracking is set up” or something similar to me!

Of course, for normal Twitter use, I recommend Twhirl - and Adobe AIR-based application that has a lot more bells and whistles for Twitter.

And soon you’ll be able to use Track in Twhirl as well.

Final notes on Track - it does NOT pay attention to punctuation, so Tracking “@kr8tr” is the same as Tracking “kr8tr”. Track also ignores CASE.

And as of now, there is no filtering in Track - so you will get every instance of the word you track, even if it includes words you would rather not see. I expect this to be addressed (at least at the Twitter client level) very soon. In fact, the CEO of Seesmic was interviewed on The Gillmor Gang and committed to adding these features to Twhirl very soon.

written by rob tags: Gillmor Gang, GTalk, Seesmic, Track, Twhirl, Twitter

I was in a Texas Hold ‘em cash game with about 6 other people and I had won 7 straight hands - three of them on the bluff. On the eighth hand I was caught in a really bad bluff. I lost 20% of my chips.

The next thing I did was ask, “OK, what’s my tell? Seven hands I had the top cards and I try a bluff and you see it?”

Nobody said anything, but they were suddenly all wondering if this guy who beat me had seen something. So I started changing slight facial expressions and moving my chips differently. People were looking for tells, and I was giving them to them.

Two hands later I had doubled-up and later I ended the night the big chip winner.

All I did was disrupt their rhythm.

Disrupting rhythm can be a very powerful thing.

written by rob

I was really surprised to find out how much of my bandwidth was being stolen. Yes - stolen.

When you hot-link to an image on someone else’s site you are, in effect, stealing their bandwidth.

Last month I had 632 MB of bandwidth stolen from just one server.

Wikipedia defines Hot-Linking as:

Inline linking (also known as hotlinking, leeching, piggy-backing, direct linking, offsite image grabs and bandwidth theft) is the use of a linked object, often an image, from one site into a web page belonging to a second site. The second site is said to have an inline link to the site where the object is located.

Now Hot-Linking in and of itself isn’t always bad. If you link to an image on one of my sites and have a conversation on your site about the image, or at least my initial post about the image, and you give me a trackback, then I consider that fair use - I am getting something in return for you using my image. I’m getting potential traffic to my site. That is a lot different then just stealing data (and bandwidth) from my site.

But if you just re-purpose my image for you own needs you are stealing my bandwidth (not to mention the image).

So what to do about it?

.htaccess. This is a “magic file” that is very powerful - and it can be used to a) prevent hot-linking completely, or b) replace the “stolen” image with one of your choice.

I implemented b).

So if someone hotlinks to any image on my site, the actual image that is displayed on their site is:

This is pretty easy to implement, and you can read more about it here.

written by rob tags: .htaccess, hot-linking, theft

I get a lot of Google Search hits for this information on SyncToy, so here it is. There is actually a separate executable for running command line options called SyncToyCmd (brilliant!).

Anyway, here is the info.

Usage: SyncToyCmd [-args]
All arguments are optional.
-R Run all folder pairs that are marked as Active for Run All.
-R<name> Run the named folder pair only.
-? Display this help.

Examples:
SyncToyCmd -RMyFolderPair
SyncToyCmd -R

written by rob

I often search my blog to find older posts I want to link to.  My blog has a search field on it, so it is generally easy enough to find what I want.  But why should I have to open my blog just to search it?

With a Mozilla (or Opera) browser (I use Flock) it takes just seconds to create a custom search.

For example, let’s build a custom search for Robert Scoble’s Scobleizer blog.

All we need to do is visit the Scobleizer blog and right click in the Search box on his site (click images to enlarge in a new window).

From the popup menu, select “Add a Keyword for this Search…”.

In the dialog box that opens just type in the Name of your search (in this case, “Scobleizer” and then type in the shortcut you will use from the browser - I used “rs” for Robert Scoble.

Now all I have to do to search Scobleizer is type “rs keyword” in my browser - no need to visit Scobleizer first.  Of course “keyword” will be replaced the term I am actually searching for.  Here’s an example - I’ll type “rs lagesse” in my browser - the browser window returns the Scobleizer pages that include the text “lagesse”.

This can be done for any page that includes a search form - Wikipedia, your own blog, YouTube, whatever.

I found it very useful to create a search shortcut called “img” for searching Google Images.

written by rob