Rob Gonda's Blog

Twitter is no more, Flutter / Nanoblogging is here

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:56:00 -0400

If you don't have time to microblog, nanoblog!

Free Social Media Monitoring Techniques

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:00:00 -0400

I previously posted why social media analysis tools are important at Take Me To Your Leader, and ever since I’ve been trying a bunch on them and our shortlist includes Visible Technologies, Techrigy SM2, Converseon, and Collective Intellect on the high end, and trackur and BrandsEye on the mid/low end .. I will post a nice comparisson later this week.

However, those are very expensive tools for personal use and small businesses, so what I usually do as a free easy to use solution is set up a bunch of free services and aggregate them using Google Reader.

Start by setting up a folder for the brand you want to monitor, this of course could be yourself.

Next create 7 folders: Must Reads, Blogs, Comments, Message Boards, Social Bookmarkting, Microblogging, and General …

Folder 1 - Must Reads: this folder contains services that I feel pick up a good overview of where your name is being mentioned on the web. This is the one folder that I know if I only have a couple of minutes to spend looking that I have to hit. For this I use Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts.

Folder 2 - Blogs: consist of most user generated content that doesn’t get picked up as news or alert. Use Google Blog Search, Blog Pulse and Technorati

Folder 3 - Comments: pick up comments and opinions of all those users who don’t write full blogs. use Backtype.

Folder 4 - Message Boards: interesting topics here; Board Reader does a good job at following conversations where people often forget to look.

Folder 5 - Social Bookmarking: follow services such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious.

Folder 6 - Microblogging: I used to have twitter search and a few other things in here but I have really been impressed by the Twingly microblog search… or of course, use any of the tools from my Twitter Tools post.

Folder 7 - General: So thus far I’ve been just teasing, I like all those tools but 9 out of 10 times I don’t set any of them up … The quick solution is to use some mass social media search engine such as Serph, Keotag, and my favorite, Social Mention.

I have all this set up and it allowed me to find every tweet, every blog post, every comment about my panel at SXSW the same day they were posted. So try it for yourself, you’ll see how addicting is to find everything that everyone says about you or your brand …

Keep reading take me to your leader for more social media related news.

Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 19:53:00 -0400

I posted a great list of social media monitoring tools at Take Me To Your Leader ... here's an extract.

Brand Overviews

HowSociable? - A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics
Addict-o-matic - A nice search engine that aggregates rss feeds, allowing you to quickly see the areas where a brand is lacking in presence
socialmention - A social media search engine offering searches across individual platforms (eg blogs, microblogs) or all, together with a ’social rank’ score. Whether or not the score is transparent enough to be meaningful is open to debate.

Buzz Tracking

Serph - Track buzz in real time
Google Trends - shows amount of searches and google news stories
Trendpedia - Create charts showing the volume of discussion around multiple topics. Generates cool graphs.
BlogPulse Trends - Compare the mentions of specific keywords and phrases in blog posts (LEFT vs. RIGHT)
Omgili Charts - Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. Mostly from review sites/forums.
eKstreme - blog data is obtained from Technorati and the social bookmarks come from del.icio.us.

Read the full free social media monitoring tools list.

Best Tools to Analyze, Aggregate, and Visualize Twitter Data

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 19:43:00 -0400

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Estimates of the number of daily users vary as the company does not release the number of active accounts. In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million users. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third largest social network (behind Facebook and MySpace), and puts the number of users at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visitors at 55 million.

Find a full collection of the best tools to analyze, aggregate, and visualize twitter data here.

Apple Macintosh 1984 Superbowl Commercial

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:45:00 -0400

Pretty unnerving TV slot from 1984, advertising Apple's first commercially available Macintosh computer. A far cry from the cute Mac vs. PC ads of recent years, this campaign was all about branding Apple as a rule-breaker in computer technology. It may not be a coincidence then, that the raspy Euro-villain on the big TV screen looks suspiciously like Bill Gates.

Durex: Get It On - latest viral video

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:50:00 -0400

Movie Credits

Client: Durex
Title: Get It On
Director: Superfad
Duration: 30 seconds
Agency: Fitzgerald+CO

Multitouch Screen Using Flash +1 Adobe -1 Microsoft

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:57:00 -0400

Adobe Flash is getting more and more popular as the platform to develop multi-touch applications on.

Check out a post at http://www.multitouch.nl/?p=216 regarding a Summit that will be organized between Natural User Interface and Adobe in 2009 with the main focus on development of multi-touch solutions on Adobe’s Flash platform.

In case you haven’t seen my post on our NUI Group community website regarding that event, please have a look here: http://nuigroup.com/forums/viewthread/3582/

This video was made as a proof of concept of Flash applications running on the tracker of NUI Suite Snowflake.

Spring Actionscript: IoC Framework based on Spring

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:23:00 -0400

The extension is written in ActionScript 3 and is targeted at Flex, AIR and Flash developers. The IoC container and its XML dialect is heavily influenced by that of Spring so it should be easy for developers familiar with Spring to get started with it.

Spring ActionScript contains the following features:

* Inversion of Control container - XML driven, based on Spring
* Reflection API - providing a decent API around describeType()
* Cairngorm extensions - configurable Service Locator, extended Front Controller with command factories, Command chaining, …
* PureMVC extensions - bringing Dependency Injection to PureMVC
* several utilities, assertions, etc

They're also working on the following features, all of which are in an experimental phase:
* MVCS support - providing an architectural framework based on Model-View-Controller-Service
* Domain Driven Design utilities - base classes for entities, value objects, enums, repositories and services
* SqlLite database templates
* Aspect Oriented Programming

http://www.springsource.org/extensions/se-springactionscript-as

The Apple Wheel: Apple's new keyboard-free laptop

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 12:25:00 -0400

The reliable Onion Network has a characteristically brilliant report on Apple's new keyboardless laptop. I'm so getting one!

Happy New Year 2009

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:30:00 -0400

Yet another year flew by, and a great one to come ... stay tuned and keep an eye on my Take Me To Your Leader! blog with tons on new emerging technology, marketing trends, and special focus on social media to come this year.

Obama vs McCain in the Digital Space

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 06:49:00 -0400

Check out this amazing top level analysis at Take Me To Your Leader, comparing Obama's and McCain's digital efforts, including MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, iPhone, Blogs, and Mobile.... Obama clearly dominates the digital spectrum.

Web 3.0 Explained

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:47:00 -0400

Take Me To Your Leader!

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:04:00 -0400

You may have noticed the lack of activity on my blog lately, mostly because of work, but also because I'm because recently launched another blog: Take Me To Your Leader! which focuses on trend watching in consumer behaviors, digital marketing, technology, and social media. I will continue to maintain my blog for the same type of content you're used to reading here, and write more frequently on my new blog about trends, innovation, and points of view...

Some of the recent topics you might like include a full thread on Microsoft's new ad campaign (first Seinfeld ad, Microsoft explains why it's so lame, Seinfeld gets the boot, I'm a PC), or talks about invasion to privacy through deep packet inspection, interesting AIR applications, or the best youtube ads ever.

Hope you like it, and as always, feedback is always welcome.

Vote for me at SXSW

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:37:00 -0400

Last two days to vote for your favorites SXSW sessions.

SXSW is one of the most prestigious music, film, and interactive events. I submitted a couple of panels I hope you find them interesting, and if you do please support me by voting for them; it only takes a couple of minutes.

Panel 1: Emerging trends of Mobile Technology (by Rob Gonda and experts TBD)

iPhone 2.0, Android, Flash Lite 3.0, Streaming Video, Electronic Wallets, … Mobile technology is growing rapidly and becoming an intrinsic part of consumer mentality. Hear the experts discuss the role of mobile in today’s lifestyle, discuss emerging technology, and predict national and international trends.

Panel 2: Rich Internet Applications Death Match (by Rob Gonda, Adobe, Microsoft)

Entertaining and informative event where evangelists from industry top players try to defend their products in a competitive death match. Flash, Silverlight, Ajax, AIR, Gears, Curl, WPF, many familiar names, but which one is the best solution for your particular needs? This intense event will reveal the answer.

Sapient submitted a total of 14 sessions, creating for the first time a huge presence on this event. I also wrote the content of the RIA+SOA and the RIA Security panels.

Feedback, comments, and suggestions more than welcome. Hope to see you there.

iPhone firmware 2.0.2

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:59:00 -0400

Apple has released an update to fix the reception problems with the 3G iPhone, woohoo! I love my iPhone, but constant dropped calls were really starting to annoy me. Just installed this update and will post back my verdict in a couple of day.