Stuff you may have missed 04/09/09

Twitter commentaries from producers and stars on Fox repeats of Fringe… link here

Google CEO wants to hook search engines up to our brains… link here

He might want to concentrate on keeping Google Calender running first though… link here

Or perhaps retaining staff … link here

Amazon return Kindle versions of 1984 plus a credit… link here

Top Ten Trends on Twitter as of 14:00 today:

• Follow Friday
• TGIF
• #90s
• Michael Jackson
• Snow Leopard
• #uknowufromla
• Ernie Harwell
• AT&T
• Jay-Z
• Marriott

Stuff you may have missed | News Links 03/09/09

A quick round up of today’s Social Media News

Digg have have taken further steps to counteract spammers and SEO Black Hats by adding a “nofollow” to any link they are cannot be certain is genuine… link here

While this may be a WordPress blog, we’ve had our fair share of Blogger blogs. And Google are celebrating the popular weblog platform’s 10th birthday… link here

Mashable introduces us to Tweetsaver. The latest service designed to address the challenges behind preserving your digital legacy… link here

Facebook Mobile celebrate 65 million connections… Link here

Tea leaves knock over Apple Store.

Workarounds | Using retweets to clean up your Phoneboo

Epsom Downs Railway Station: The subject of a spooky AudioBoo

Retweeting your Boos help to better describe and comply them

AudioBoo is great isn’t it? I’ve yet to encounter anyone who has a bad thing to say about it. It’s not the only way to podcast from your phone but it’s probably the easiest right?

For those without iPhone‘s  (and I imagine there must be at least a dozen of us) there is PhoneBoo. You register the phone, dial the number, record your Boo, press hash and you’re done. What could be simpler?

The only drawback (and it is a slight one) is that you can’t give your PhoneBoo a name immediately after recording. The Boo is labelled “I’ve posted a Phoneboo” and that’s it. So if you’ve just seen a Premier League footballer in a chip shop in Leeds on Transfer Deadline Day and run off a quick Boo to tell people about it, they’re not necessarily going to know.

It is possible to change the label manually by logging in to your AudioBoo account and changing the details retrospectively. That’s OK but not always desirable on mobile phone browsers and perhaps a little late once you’ve returned to base used your desktop or laptop. Ideally, you want to be able to aggregate your content in a way that encourages people to listen while you are in the field so to speak.

There is a manual workaround that you can use until your old phone’s contract runs out and you get you’re own iPhone. A process that I happened upon by accident. Last month I went out for a curry and missed my last train. I was given a lift to another station. An eery one platform terminus which backed onto some woodland and someones back yard.

While trying not to think of every Zombie movie I’d ever seen I decided to keep my spirits up by recording a Phoneboo on my Nokia N97. Once I’d posted it I’d remembered that I had changed the settings on my account and my boos were aggregating to the wrong Twitter account. (a shared football account. I’d been at a game the Saturday before and was booing from the match but let’s not get into that). Let’s face it, the best way to get your Boos out there is by linking it to your Twitter ID right? Unfortunately, I was booing in the wrong place.

So I logged into my regular Twitter account using Dabr on my phone, picked up the tweet on my stream and retweeted it. Only while doing this I deleted “RT @SPAOTP I’ve just recorded a Phoneboo” and replaced it with this. The result was a minor flurry of @ replies which made me feel more secure and less likely to join the legion of the undead. The question is, had I posted that in its original form would I have received the same response? I reckon not.

So what I’ve done now is set up my AudioBoo to aggregate to a locked Twitter account that only I follow. From there I can retweet the boo using a mobile phone Twitter app like Dabr or Slandr from my proper Twitter ID and add a more accessible description so my network know what I’m talking about.

There are practical uses for journalists out in the field who don’t (or won’t) use iPhones and are looking for an effective human solution to correctly aggregating boos.

Also, as AudioBoo gets picked up by the the mainstream media, the principal of manually retweeting audio may be desirable if Boo’s are going to be re-broadcast on regulated platforms such as radio or TV. While Booing to a locked account first and retweeting may  immediacy and is perhaps against the spirit of Social Networking, it does allow content to be complied by a third party before it is broadcasted in the event that it contains anything that is likely to upset broadcast regulators such as the FCC or OFCOM. Social Media is changing the face of communications but unfortunately lawyers aren’t going anywhere.