Documentary on Leo Laporte and the TWiT Network

IMG_6495

Leo Laporte is without a doubt, my favorite tech pundit out there. I met Leo in August of 2008 when I was visiting my future Best Man in San Fransisco. Jacob graciously drove me up to Petaluma, CA to visit Leo's studio where Leo was gracious enough to talk with us for an hour or so on a Friday afternoon. Well, the folks over at EGuiders.com have filmed a short little documentary about Leo as a part of their 3 part series on New Media. I thought it was very well done.

Flickr Set of images from when I visited the TWiT Cottage.


What Are Twitter Lists & Why I Think They're a Big Deal

Twitter has begun rolling out Twitter Lists to a limited number of users, starting yesterday (Oct. 16, 2009). When I noticed several of my followers discussing this, I went to check my own twitter profile and was presented with the image above. I did not notice the "don't tweet about it yet" message until after I'd already done so, and a follower pointed this out to me who also had lists enabled. Soon thereafter, tons of Tech blog's were posting about it as well, so I am going to take the liberty to follow suit.

First of all, I am very excited by this feature and look forward to the near future when all users have this enabled. In short, I've wanted a native Twiter feature such as this for a while now, since I feel in love with Tweet Deck & Nambu's "Groups" feature within their Twitter clients. I've sort of limited myself to following around 400 people because I've found that after much more than that, my Twitter stream becomes very hard to keep up with without checking it constantly throughout the day. When I used to use very-unstable-and-crashy Nambu and then very-bloated-and-inelegant-non-mac-like Tweet Deck, I loved the ability to group people I follow for easier filtering of their content. Brizzly, the web-based Twitter client that I recently got an invite to, has a 3rd party feature built into their app which enables similar functionality. After using all three of these clients, I've found myself using Tweetie for Mac once more (and eagerly awaiting Tweetie 2 for Mac). According to Tweetie's developer, Loren Brichter, Tweetie 2 for iPhone and the upcoming Tweetie 2 for Mac will both support the Twitter Lists feature nativley. So what are Twitter lists?

This is an example of a list I made last night. This list simply contains all people that I follow on Twitter whom I know to live in the Washington D.C. area.

As you can see on the right, the amount of people on this list is the amount of people this list is following. The amount of followers this list has, is basically the amount of people who've subscribed to this twitter list.

At first, I was hesitant to press that Follow button as I was not sure what would happen. Would I suddenly start following this lists of 200 tech bloggers that Scoble created? Alas, no. It simply subscribes you to that follower list. Those followers' tweets do not automatically appear in your twitter feed unless you follow the members individually. Subscribing to a list simply saves it in the right-side-column of your twitter profile page. When you click one of these bookmarked lists, you can then see the tweets of the people who are on the list.

Twitter Lists can be public or private. While I keep a private list of 'essential' Twitterers that, when on a busy day, these are the only people I really care about not missing any of their tweets. This list has around 20 people on it. So as to not hurt anyone's feelings, it's a private list. No one can know that they didn't make the cut. Public lists, however, are why I think this will really take off. Follow Friday? Twitter's Suggested Users List? Both concepts are now obsolete. Now anyone can play the role as social curator and group interesting people together in any way want all while sharing these lists with anyone who may want them. This is going to be big, if for no other reason, providing an easy mechanism to share followers.

 

 

Off to South by Southwest (SXSW)

All my bags are packed and I'm ready to go.....

I'm heading to the airport (Reagan/National) in just a few minutes to catch my flight from DCA to Houston, to Austin for the spring break of geek conferences, SXSW. I'm incredibly excited at all of the panels that are going to be available for me to attend in addition to all of the conference parties that happen each night (especially the Bigg Digg Shindigg).

Nate Silver of fightthirtyeight.com is the keynote speaker for Sunday.

Merlin Mann (43folders.com) and John Gruber (daringfireball.net) are doing a panel together on Saturday, called "HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility".

Gina Tripani of Lifehacker will be sitting in on a panel called Curating the Crowd-Sourced World.

One of my personal heros, Lawrence Lessig, will be doing a panel called "Politics, Technology, and Pop Culture."

These are just a few I'm most looking forward to. I could go on and on, listing the 20 or so on my personal conference schedule, but names such as Andy Baio, Daniel Burka, Brian Cain, Andy Carvin (NPR & local DC techie), Ana Marie Cox, Jonathan Coulton, Felicia Day, Tara Hunt, Guy Kawasaki, Tom Merritt Kevin Rose, Alex Albrect, Robert Scoble, Christina Warren will be sprinkled throughout the panels over the course of the conference. Representatives from all of the major web companies/orgs/presences will be on hand to meet with, talk to, discuss, etc.


Now can you see why I'm excited? Well - look at the time. Off to the airport!