Tweet Media, which earlier today was accessible to some users under their account settings menu asked if they would like to share photos and videos with everyone. Here’s the setting verbiage:

“By default, you’ll only see images and videos shared by people you’re following, and reveal those by people you’re not. Check this box to see media from everyone on Twitter.”

Unfortunately Tweet Media was later removed from all accounts, although it never appeared to be a working release to begin with.

Twitter released the following statement about the program:

“We’re constantly exploring features and settings. What you saw was a small test of a potential consumption setting for inline media. We show inline media on our own iPhone and Android apps.”

Here’s a screenshot of the Tweet Media message witnessed earlier today:

What do you think, is embeddable media going to change the way you use Twitter? Let us know your thoughts about this hopefully soon to be released option.

The posts can be between 150 to 300 words each and must include one photo.

This is a long term blogger work so please be dedicated to commit to at least for a year.

The pay is fixed @ $250 per month. Payment via paypal at month end.

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Please email us at nethead@yahoo.com and let us know why you would be an ideal match to post on blavish.

The desktop apps astronomical rise is all the more impressive when you realize that their download rate is five times higher than their closest competitors.

Throw in 2.5 million iPhone app downloads which generate four million tweets and status updates a day and it’s easy to see who the king of third party Twitter apps really is.

TweetDeck Founder Ian Dodsworth also announced the companies specific focus on the “multi-stream” and “real-time ecosystem” fronts. Basically we can expect TweetDeck to serve more users interests when it comes to the social web as a whole.

However, before investing your precious time and effort into growing a blog you need to have a solid plan to execute and define clear goals for yourself. Here are some excellent tips to help you get started on the right track to achieve your blogging dreams.

Building & Executing The Right Strategy

Developing the right plan for your blog is much like creating a business plan for a company. You need to take into consideration profit and loss, sales and marketing ideas and projections; and short and long-term goals. You don’t need to have a business degree to get your plan together, all you need to do is clearly document what you want to achieve and the resources and other prerequisites so that you are ready to take on your blogging journey in a focused and prepared way.

Practice The Right Techniques

The right techniques are much simpler than most expect. These days, there is no such thing as overnight success in blogging. If in one day you experience a spike in traffic of up to even 200% of your regular volume, you will need to be able to maintain it; and maintaining such an increase will require stable blogging fundamentals that have a solid foundation built overtime. Solid practices such as:

• Consistent posting
• Connecting with others through commenting and social networks
• Building trust & authority by providing great value
• Maintain a professional or respectable online reputation
• Respect others in your niche
• Aim to set trends rather than copy others

These represent the true “magic formula” if there is any. Stop looking for the get rich quick/get traffic quick schemes, these have no foundation and the audience gained through these methods are unpredictable and you have no authority in their minds. Aim for value, then trust and authority; then you can expect sales, advertising deals and other unthinkable opportunities.

Aim High, Very High!

Like the old cliche, “shoot for the moon but even if you miss you will be among the stars;” your level of success in blogging is greatly determined by how far you are willing to go with your ideas. Don’t be afraid to ask the most successful blogger you can think of for help. You never know, that blogger might take you under his or her’s wings and help you to grow quickly by providing unique opportunities for you. Always remember that the blogger who chooses to go a step further, blogs with passion and without doubt, achieves the greatest success and reward.

Breakdown Your Plan Into Smaller Steps

Its very common, especially for new bloggers, to experience information overload. This can be a crippling and discouraging dilemma and the overload is oftentimes experienced when the realization hits that successful blogging is not a walk in the park. It takes lots of writing and innovation, and for the uninspired, quitting seems to be the only option. To overcome this, breakdown your tasks and goals into simpler ones that can be achieved daily or weekly. With this method you’re feeding your soul with consistent success which will be fuel to help keep you going on your journey and give you a clearer and more focused mind.

Never Give Up!

Giving up is about the easiest and at the same time deadliest thing you could ever do with any task or goal. Giving up destroys your confidence, drains your soul and shows the world that you’re just not good enough. Spare yourself the trauma and keep fighting. When you hit that dead end reassess or change your strategies and keep on going. Most importantly, be practical about your blogging goals and never measure your success against another person’’s. It is guaranteed that your success will be more or less and different from the successful bloggers you admire. At the end of the day, your success depends on whether you gave up or not.

Conclusion

You definitely have what it takes to become a successful blogger, you simply need to find the niche that suits you, believe that you can achieve and execute a well thought out plan. The internet lifestyle awaits!

Apple is working to calm customer fears, claiming that all location based data is “collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you.” It’s a statement that should seem familiar to Facebook users who were told the same thing months ago, only to find out that their profile information and the profile information of their friends were being shared with advertisers.

Unlike Facebook, there is apparently no way to opt-out of the Apple policy. Actually that’s not totally true, you can refuse to ever download another app for the life of your device and then stay away from the iTunes store, at which point you aren’t forced to agree to the companies new terms of service before proceeding with purchases.

Here’s the full privacy policy change paragraph:

“To provide location-based services on Apple products, Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services.

Some location-based services offered by Apple, such as the MobileMe “Find My iPhone” feature, require your personal information for the feature to work.”

What are your thoughts about a non-opt out service? I’m not a big iPhone fan and this adds fuel to my indifference fire, personally I don’t believe I should have to share my personal information with Apple clients if I’m not using their services at that exact moment. The GAP doesn’t know what I’m doing when I’m not in their store, either should various Apple clients.

We are welcome [sic] that you to join and win Movable Type Theme Contest 2010. Movable Type 5 allows you to create and share your innovative web design by a single theme file. There are thousands of beautiful websites build upon Movable Type 5 already, and now it’s time to spread and share your achievements ! [...]

The winners of the contest will be determined by the contest judges. Each winner will receive:

• 1st place : Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web Premium
• 2nd place : iPad Wi-Fi (16GB)

(Movabletype Community Blog)

I’m of two minds on this. On one hand, linking to the blogs/ sites of competitors is actually a good search engine strategy, provided you’re linking to quality sites, and quality, relevant content. Search engines want to provide relevance of content; they don’t care about your business politics. So linking to topically relevant sites scores you points. On the other hand, profiling your competition could have one of two negative results. Firstly, it could backfire on you. As mentioned above, competitors might be leery of you profiling them. Or, you could do such a good profiling job that you send away clients. Neither one is a win.

Still, there’s an opportunity to implicitly show why you’re better, without actually saying so. If you feel the need to profile an industry leader, make sure that you do a series. Keep everything business-like and neutral, if not positive; leave out the personal stuff. Next, make sure that you have some additional compelling content that you can give away — such as an ebook, report or whitepaper — which not only shows authority in your niche but to which you can link to from each profile post. Have this extra content available for download at the same time that you publish the first industry profile post. Give readers a directive at the end of each profile; suggest that they download the report or ebook to learn more, and that they can contact you with relevant questions.

This approach is more likely to bind interested parties to your site rather than sending them away to a competitor.

Ref: Ben Spark/ a I’m Not a Famous Blogger.

The Problem

One of the problems with having Web content aggregator tools at your disposal like Google Reader, AllTop, YourVersion, or TechMeme (for tech topics) is that you can easily get caught up in cataloging or bookmarking every new post — especially those with breaking news from a few minutes ago. If you do this, yes you’ll be aware of all kinds of breaking news and other trends in the blogosphere, but if your objective is to blog, you’re no closer to your goal if you’re spending hours looking at what’s going on online. Just like the saying “writers write,” be of the mindset that “bloggers blog.”

Nip Idea Acquisition Obsession and Pick a Topic

To make efficient use of your time, develop the skill of choosing suitable topics for your blog posts and get writing. Here are some suggestions to help you filter your choices.

1. Stop searching.

First and foremost, stop scanning your aggregators and adding new items to your list of references. Close your Web browser tabs – or at least the ones with your aggregators. Trust yourself that if you’re reasonably knowledgeable about your niche, you have enough references to trigger some ideas for a blog post.

2. Check your editorial calendar.

If you have one, use it as a filter for your current list of “hot topics”. Maybe something one blogger wrote coincides with an item on your editorial calendar and you can add to the “conversation” of that topic.

3. Check what’s trending on Twitter.

If you don’t have an editorial calendar, see what the trending topics are on Twitter. The new home page makes it easy; you don’t even have to have a Twitter account (though you should).

4. Look at Google Trends.

If you want a more long-term view of popular topics, use Google Trends to compare the search frequencies (on Google) of two or more keywords/ keyphrases.

5. Pick at random.

If tips #2-4, above, don’t help you, just pick at random. Assuming you have already been selective about what’s in your list of references,choosing a topic at random from the list is far better than wasting time trying to decide what to write about.

6. Set a timer.

If I have a large daily quota of articles and I have a client who needs news-y posts, setting a timer for each post helps me immensely. Sure, I might be able to write 800 words on some celebrity’s passing, but if 200 will do and the priority is to get the news out fast, then I can revisit a longer post later. Think of it as a link-building opportunity: write a shorter post now and link back with a longer post later.

Another area of obsession can be choosing the “right” image for your post. I use Flickr and filter for CC-licensed content. Sometimes certain keywords just don’t turn up the “right” image. If not, use a “first fit” approach: change search keywords and take the first image that works. It doesn’t have to be perfect, else you can easily get caught up in browsing for something “better”. Worst case: browse at most 3-4 pages of Flickr search results and pick the best one from each page. Compare the selections and pick one so you can get on with your day.

7. Write.

Just write.

• Don’t cripple your creativity by mentally imposing minimum word limits for your blog posts. You might have those, but don’t write as if you do. If you learn efficient blogging, there’ll be some time to edit to length.
• Don’t cripple creativity by worrying about SEO. As you become a better writer, you’ll learn to copywrite in a way that gives you good anchor text for both internal and external hyperlinks. But if you obsess your wording for the sake of one or two links, then you need to go back to Tip #6, above.
• Don’t cripple your creativity by trying to write linearly. If something compelling comes to mind, just write it down. You can rearrange sections of your post later. That’s what editing time is for. (Of course, if you have 15-30 minute deadlines for posts, there’s not much time for that. But then that’s a whole different issue. Hopefully you don’t have a client who expects quality in 15 minutes, but if you do, here are some tips for writing effective news posts.)

How do you keep your blogging time in check? Or do you let it dominate your entire day?

Disclosure: I have share options in YourVersion, a real-time Web content discovery engine.

Image: Flickr.

Now while they’re absolutely right about that, and this is definitely a legitimate link-building technique, don’t be so sure you’ll get a lot of sites following through. I know from researching for my own mobile apps startup that while there are a growing number of mobile app review sites, many are either backlogged, some are not interested in mobile web apps. They also mention Apple as a site that features mobile apps. Again, this is true, though it’s not that easy getting featured. (I’ve heard tell that wooing some Apple employees with dinner might get you a contact name for getting featured, but that’s not necessarily true, and you’d have to live in Silicon Valley.)

Some Mobile-Related Link-Building Options

An iPhone and iPad are part of my blogging computing setup, and I think WebTrafficROI’s mobile approach to link-building is still a legitimate and good approach. They give you some mobile Web-specific tips for code to detect when an iPhone/ iPod Touch device is requesting a web page. However, I wanted to add to the conversation, and suggest a slightly broader approach. When it comes to what you can offer in the mobile space, here are some options, possibly overlapping with what WebTrafficROI wrote:

1. A mobile version of your site with the same or similar functionality, but obviously geared towards a specific mobile device, possibly an iPhone. This is the simplest approach and often the least expensive.
2. Offer a native mobile app with the same or similar functionality as your website. There are some things your mobile Web app just cannot do, depending on what smartphone(s) you are targeting. (If you are promoting a blog, offer an app that provides a mobile view of your content. There are some development tools that make this very easy to do, provided your site has an RSS feed.)
3. Offer both a mobile Web version and a native app. Presumably the latter would have additional features not available to the mobile Web version.
4. Offer a mobile Web or mobile native app related to your niche.

For example, I’m working on two iPhone/ iPad apps that I’m hoping to give away in the future. One is for bloggers in any niche, a very broadly-scoped app. The other is Twitter-related but geared to the social media marketing side of things, so it should appeal to web-based entrepreneurs and small business owners. Each app’s release will have a different market but the same objective: build brand presence and back links for my mobile apps startup.

Considerations for Leveraging a Free Mobile App

If you do want to release a mobile app, Web or native, as part of a link-building strategy, here are some things you should consider, especially if you plan to offer a native mobile app instead of a mobile Web app.

1. Partner up. You can partner with other bloggers to help cut the cost of development, or if the scope of your app is broad enough, you might even partner up with a mobile app development studio (I’m partnered with two). In fact, you may need to partner if you don’t want to go through the effort of registering with Apple or Palm or Google, etc., as a developer — which in some cases costs money. The cost of using an app development studio can be defrayed by bartering your writing services, or offering advertising, or something else entirely.
2. Target one platform. I might be biased but I’d say go with the Apple iPhone OS platform, which includes the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. (As a starting point in your research, you might want to check out SplashPressMedia’s AppleGazette blog and my CallStyle blog. I’ll share other links in the future, as appropriate) While the Google Android platform is gaining ground, the problem as I see it is fragmentation, with far too many handsets with different screen footprints.
3. Go beyond free. If you’re giving away a free mobile Web or native app, great. But consider a paid premium native app with additional features. This might be one way to pay for development costs. You might not make a profit directly from the paid app, but if you achieve your objective of building back links, which in turn bring indirect revenue, then you’ve succeeded. Don’t forget that your blog can be your marketing vehicle.
4. Brainstorm your app. Be sure of your objectives for the app. Who is the target user? What will it do? Will you support it by offering upgrades? Why are you creating it? For the latter, be completely honest with yourself. Just like web designers were giving away free WordPress themes in hopes of getting backlinks to their site, it’s okay if you’re doing this for the for the purpose of link-building.
5. Have a marketing plan. Oh you didn’t that “they” would just come if you “built it”, did you? Create a list or spreadsheet of all the mobile sites that might feature your mobile app. They don’t have to all be about mobile apps or smartphones; they could be niche-specific. Have a press kit for your app, and include screen shots or links to video, a description of the app, your intent, your contact info, and whatever else is appropriate. Then systematically contact each site and offer them interview time, if they want it. While you are waiting to be covered (don’t necessarily expect a response to your email), move on to the next site in your list. Promote your app in Facebook and Twitter.

This is a very nutshell overview of how to leverage a mobile app for link-building. If there’s enough demand for covering more mobile topics as they relate to blogging and building an online presence, I’ll do so. I do have a couple of mobile-related posts up my sleeve for the near future, so keep an eye out.

Via: WebTrafficROI.

Yep, a revolution… because of bad code.

So what went wrong? Besides “defective” flash cards, there are problems with the source code of the AES, which include the following:

1. Improperly terminated database transactions.
2. Source codes are not properly commented. “The Ballot Production source code modules as submitted on 8 Feb 2010 did not have within themselves one single comment or internal documentation.”
3. The software inventory provided by Smartmatic is inadequate. One software “contains a solicitation for beer” for the software’s creators, which brings into question the software credibility.

You can view the entire list here. Now, any programmer worth his salt knows that these are all very basic “problems”, easily avoided with clean, well-written code.

Number 3 on the list,

“contains a solicitation for beer” for the software’s creators

was a particular LOL moment for me, but more immediately obvious was that this is lazy coding.

I’ll admit that I’ve been guilty of writing lazy code in the past- which brings me to my post today. We may not be working on source code for an entire country’s National Elections, but as programmers we should always be striving to write the best code possible: clean, well-written, and as bulletproof as possible. This means no lazy code, whether you’re writing XHTML or PHP, and whether it’s for your Aunt Betsy or the Pentagon.

Tips for Writing Good Code

Comment.
You want to document your code well. See number 3 in the list above? I would be upset, too, if I was submitted code without a “single comment or internal documentation”. And it’s not just for others, it’s for yourself. For an excellent guide on commenting code, read these successful strategies for commenting code. At the same time, don’t comment self-explanatory code.

Write Meaningful Code.
My regular readers already know how I feel about this. Write code that makes sense, and try not to be too cryptic. For example, get_main_ingredient () instead of main_ing ().

Optimize Your Code Properly.
Lazy code is often bloated, a surefire sign that the coder didn’t optimize properly. Well-optimized code can make a huge difference in the performance of your application. At the same time, the keyword here is “Properly”- because there is the danger of over-optimization. Knowing what to leave in is just as important- maybe even more so- as knowing what to take out.

Check, Re-Check, then Check Again.
When you’ve written similar code over and over again, and a deadline is looming, it’s easy to “forget” to check your code. But there’s really no excuse not to. For web documents such as HTML and XHTML, for example, there’s the W3C Validator- and, my recent favorite, Ideone, which lets you compile and run code online in over 40 programming languages. Oh, how I love the Internet!

What are your tips for writing code?