When you visit the homepage, you'll see that it specifies "Keep a history of your work, and share it with your team".  You can share your work with your team by entering in the email address your co-workers use for their ididwork account and after they approve you, you'll have a feed showing all of your, and their, daily work accomplishments.  You can also share this information with your boss and choose to have a report sent to them weekly or monthly.  This is all great if you have a small team of people and want to see what projects each person has been working on.  You can also tag all of your activities so you can see what areas you've been spending the most time on.  There are also graphs that break down your daily activity according to your tags.  I think it can be much more useful though, as a way to keep track of everything you're accomplishing throughout the day.

Right now there aren't too many features on ididwork.  I would like to see the ability to log activities from your mobile phone, and a way to share certain activities with certain people.  For example, if I'm planning a party with "Judy", I could create the tag "party" and every time one of us completes a task and tags it "party" it will show up in our shared feed and we'll know what to move onto next.  I know this makes it sound like ididwork is a task manager, but that's not where I'm going with this.  I think of it as a microblog of what I'm getting done paired with the ability to see what people I'm involved with are getting done as well.  To see what I mean, watch the screencast below:

[viddler id=7293a59b&w=545&h=451]

Click Here To Watch Better Quality 2m26s

[via TechCrunch]

In the short period I used it (2 months) I also noticed some drawbacks: its frequent down times, for instance. The sudden disappearance of half of my followers, a phenomenon, which appeared to affect half of the Twitter community last week. The vanishing of part of the archive (@Deeboeks). However, last week the situation has come to a head by the banning of some if its most active users. Why? Because these highly following and followed twitterati were apparently suspected as spammers. Without thorough verification, that is. These addicted Twitter-users were greatly inconvenienced.

@davedelaney: "(from his blog) Take my email analogy and consider how you would feel, or as if someone took your personal journal and address book and refused to return them."

@pfanderson: (from her blog) "Now, two important points. First point, earlier this week I stated in this blog that Twitter is my #2 productivity tool. In other words, this is REALLY important for me! Second point, Twitter funkiness (like Second Life funkiness) is not unusual, so at first I did not realize this was anything beyond the typical. (.....) All kinds of alarms went off. I had just been asked to demo Twitter (among other social techs) at an important upcoming meeting. Wait a week? For them to just look at the problem? Ummm, that could be a REAL problem!"

Well, it isn't bad when spam is banned. Indeed many of the spamming or advertising twitterati are following a huge number of people, but are followed by relatively few. Thus a ratio of 1500:50 sets the alarm bells ringing. But then you must do a second check: of profiles, website links and tweets, of course. A proper check of @davedelaney, @tibbon, @conniecrosby, @skalik, @marjarpanic, @abrudtkuhl, @pfanderson (one of my favorites) @narain (a twitterer I referred to as bringing breaking news about Bomb blasts in Bangalore!!) would have learned that these people intensively use twitter for serious purposes. Quite different from other twitterers that follow a whole crowd, only producing twitter messages like: "want to do X than look at this (= my) website" or all kind of quack. And these twitter-spammers are not banned...

But everybody can make mistakes, as long as you..... right, 3rd problem..... communicate it directly to your customers, preferably before you ban them. And if you faile to do so, ... right 4th mistake.... do you best to fix the problem and .....o.k. 5th really unforgivable mistake .... always give yours sincere apologies!!

Nothing of the kind happened and that is really bad. If I could, I would ban @Ev (Twitter’s silent leader who was enjoying wine and pie while some of his most loyal users were panicking, according to @davedelaney's description) at least for a while. Without checking, without notification, without responding to his frequent requests for help, and foremost without any apology afterwards!!

As far as I know all accounts are back now, but it has cost these people a lot of precious time and has changed their feelings about twitter as a program.

@davedelaney has a poll at the end of one of his post asking:

"Are you having second thoughts about Twitter now?"

66% of the responders gives an affirmative answer.

There are some Twitter alternatives, but as Delaney says:

"Of course my main love for Twitter is the Community (...). Without the people there would be no Twitter. I don't love Twitter, I love the people on Twitter who make it such a vibrant place to be. I don't love Twitter, I don't even like Twitter at the moment - I may even hate them."

Further reading:

On Dave Delaney's blog (August 3rd) : 5-reasons-why-i-hate-twitter. Very balanced: he also gives 5-6 reasons why he loves Twitter; some alternatives mentioned as well)

An account of the banning adventure :can also be found at the blogpost of @pf anderson: twitter_banning.html and on here slideshow on Flickr

****************************************************************************

Eerder promootte ik Twitter als een microblogging-dienst, omdat het zo'n rijke bron is van sociale contacten, nieuws en ideeen. Zie bijvoorbeeld de berichten: Twitter as a modern tamtam en "Forget Hyves go Twitter".

Maar in de korte periode dat ik het gebruik, ondervond ik ook enkele nadelen. Twitter is bijvoorbeeld herhaaldelijk niet bereikbaar ("down" , "upgrading" of te zeer belast). Vorige week verdween ongeveer de helft van mijn fans (en ik heb er al zoveel), maar "gelukkig" bleek ik niet de enige te zijn. Soms verdwijnt een deel van het archief, bij @Deeboeks bijvoorbeeld: "Al mijn tweets van voor 6 april 2008 zijn uit 't archief verdwenen". Maar vorige week was toch wel de klap op de vuurpijl. Opeens waren de accounts van de meest actieve twitteraars verdwenen. Waarom? Ze werden kennelijk van spammen verdacht en zonder staving verwijderd. Dat bracht behoorlijk wat ongemak met zich mee, daar dit juist mensen zijn die Twitter veel gebruiken en er deels ook afhankelijk van zijn. Voor @pfanderson: is Twitter is haar "#2 productivity tool". @davedelaney: "zegt het als volgt:

"consider how you would feel, or as if someone took your personal journal and address book and refused to return them."

Natuurlijk is het bannen van spam niet slecht. Als de verhouding following/followers 1500:50 dan moet er wel een belletje gaan rinkelen. Maar dan moet je vervolgens het e.e.a. checken: profiel, evt. website en natuurlijk de aard van de tweets.
@davedelaney, @tibbon, @conniecrosby, @skalik, @marjarpanic, @abrudtkuhl, @pfanderson (een van mijn favorieten) @narain (die het nieuws over de aanslagen in Bangalore bracht!!) zijn intensieve en serieuze gebruikers. Dat kun je in één opslag zien.

Iedereen kan fouten maken, maar je moet natuurlijk wel goed en tijdig communiceren met je gebruikers, alles doen om de fout te herstellen en vooral achteraf je excuses aanbieden. En dat is allemaal niet gebeurd.

Wat zou ik graag Twitterbaas @Ev (die alleen twitterde dat hij heerlijk genoot van wijn en quiche terwijl zijn klanten in paniek waren en om zijn hulp vroegen) het zelfde lot doen ondergaan: account rucksichtlos verwijderen, niet op de hoogte brengen, niet reageren en niet helpen. En natuurlijk al helemaal geen excuses aanbieden!!

Ik geloof wel dat alle accounts nu weer in orde zijn, maar het heeft deze mensen wel veel ergernis bezorgd en hun gedachten over Twitter veranderd.

@davedelaney heeft zelfs een poll gezet onder zijn Twitterbericht met de vraag:

"Are you having second thoughts about Twitter now?"

66% van de mensen die hierop gereageerd hebben zegt ja.

A key element of the challenge to persuade those who control the budgets needed to invest in these activities is caused by where responsibility or the drive to utilise this medium is often placed. In many organisations Social Media strategy and projects sit within on-line marketing or technical development. Often those involved in social media are being asked to show how their activities are directly generating leads, let alone the challenge of demonstrating page views of replies someone focusing on social media has posted to other peoples blog posts - and therefore have no visibility of page views. Social Media in a B2B environment does not work in such a simplistic way.

If Social Media activity was driven by PR would the method for measurement be different? Many companies monitor blogs and engage with influential bloggers, is this not what PR teams have done for years with influential journalists?

With a number of bloggers having as many if not more readers than many journalists should more effort be focused on engaging with them? When a press release is issued if it is posted on a microblog and then receives coverage how do you measure who was responsible for what elements of any success?

I am enthused by the amount of chatter about Return On Attention (ROA) and Return on Relationship (ROR) that I hear from Social Media proffesionals and on the internet. Measuring ROI for Social Media should be an evolution of what was used to measure the success of PR together with, where possible; measurements of page, audio or video views, followers or fans, buzz on blogs and microblogs, coverage including links back on other sites and details of the sites that embed your content in theirs where quality is worth far more than quantity.

What is difficult to measure is what will happen to orgaisations that do not engage in Social Media. Those who do not will pay a price when they have to attempt to catch up with those who had the vision early on to invest in Social Media.

The other key consideration is that if you do not invest in social media and utilise it to engage with current and potential customers somebody else may on your behalf. How much could that cost you.

In a rapidly evolving medium, developing Social Media strategies and measuring Social Media is challenging and like the medium itself time consuming, though we have to do and work out what works best for both the engagement and the measurement.

A Twitter conversation about measuring B2B Social Media

When I started writing this post I added to twitter that I was writing it and within seconds was messaged by @briannranca here is the conversation:

@wellbelove attempting to write a blog on Social Media B2B ROI - not the easiest of tasks

@briannranca i personally think all talk of ROI specific to social media should be put on hold. still too early, but what can you do?

@wellbelove I agree, however trying to persuade those with budgets that we should engage in this activty without a ROI model aint happening

@briannranca yeah, unfortunately that's the world we live in...it's all about the numbers

I agree with Brian regarding it being too early to agree a measurement for a B2B ROI model for Social Media and those of us championing the opportunities that social media offers organisations to engage with their audience need to discuss more the 'do nothing' or 'do nothing till we have to' scenarios - and the enormous risks that these involve.

The discomfort of a mammogram can drive some women to avoid the valuable screening, occasionally with dire consequences. Now a new procedure, dedicated breast computed tomography (CT), promises to take the pain out of breast cancer detection. In the cone beam breast CT scanner, which was first developed at the University of California, Davis, a woman lies face down on a special table with one breast suspended through an opening. A CT scanner rotates around the breast, collecting data that are reconstructed into a three-dimensional image. The total dose of radiation is the same as in a conventional mammogram. Since 2004, the UC Davis researchers, led by John M. Boone, Professor and Vice Chair of Radiology and Professor of Biomedical Engineering, have scanned 160 women with their prototype scanner. In early 2008, the researchers began operating a second prototype device, into which the researchers have incorporated a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner. The PET scanner tracks the metabolic activity of a tumor, if present, so the hybrid CT/PET breast scanner would allow clinicians to, among other uses, precisely localize and monitor the response of a tumor to chemotherapy, determine the extent (or staging) of tumors, and help guide radiologists conducting biopsies.

The clinical trials show that the scanner "is better than mammography for mass detection," Boone says, while "offering improved comfort to the patient and a better three-dimensional understanding of pathological lesions when they are present." The scanner, however, is less efficient than regular mammography at detecting the tiny clusters of calcium (or microcalcifications) that can sometimes signal breast cancer. This is because it uses X rays at higher energies than do mammograms, reducing the contrast of the images and the ability to distinguish the calcium clusters. "Thus, we are not making the claim that breast CT is "better" than mammography-yet," Boone says. The research was described in the talk, "Dedicated Breast CT Imaging of the Breast," presented July 29, 2008 at the 50th annual meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.

High Court rejects Niketa’s plea to terminate pregnancy.

The Bombay High Court on Monday rejected the petition filed by Niketa and her husband Haresh Mehta, along with their doctor Nikhil Datar, seeking permission to terminate her pregnancy, now in the 26th week. The foetus was diagnosed with a complete heart blockage when she was in the 24th week of pregnancy. The couple wanted to abort the child for fear it would suffer for life. A Bench consisting of Justices Khandeparkar and Ahmed Sayyad said there was “no categorical opinion” from medical experts that “if the child were born ..., it would be seriously handicapped.” Moreover, there was no provision in the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971, to end pregnancy after the 20th week. Only in exceptional cases of danger to the health of the pregnant woman could abortion be allowed, said Justice Khandeparkar. In this case, “no exceptional case has been made out.” The judge said the issue here, however, was one of future health risks to the unborn child, and not to the mother. A second medical report submitted by a committee of experts, on the court directive, said there were “least chances” of the child being seriously handicapped. In its first report, the committee spoke of “fair chances,” an opinion which was equivocal and therefore led to the directive for a second report.

My Opinion: Which a lot of medical types in India will share, is that the couple & their doctor made a mistake in approaching the court.

Britain has given the green light for an oral antibiotic to be sold without prescription for the first time, in a move that pushes back the barriers to self-medication. Patients aged 16 years and over will be able to buy the azithromycin pill, sold as Clamelle by Icelandic drugmaker Actavis, to treat chlamydia, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said on Wednesday. It is designed for use by people who have tested positive for the sexually transmitted infection and have no symptoms. The drug will also be available on an over-the-counter (OTC) basis for their sexual partners.

My opinion: Probably not a good idea. But who am I to say that when one can get almost any non-narcotic drug unofficially OTC (without a prescription) here in India.

Step 1: Spam Your Followers to Death

Blogger Josh Chandler decided to share links upon links of coverage during a recent news event. The result was Josh getting spanked for this clusterf.. er, debacle:

in all fairness to Josh, he's owned up to it. Bravo. But other egregious examples remain, like this little retweet maven posted up on Andrew Mager's blog:

For those of you who are unfamiliar with re-tweets, they're basically just a copy and reposting of what someone else has said. Mager's convinced me to stop this practice, since watching this is about as painful as sitting in a 400 degree oven while simultaneously being present as the IRS audits your 2004 tax return.

Step 2: Be a Fake

Seth Godin, speaker and marketing book author has his own blog, and recently showed up on Twitter as well. Some followers became immediately suspicious when they noticed Seth wasn't engaged in conversations and wasn't following other (a big no-no on Twitter). It turns out "Seth" wasn't the real deal, but rather an imposter who simply link posted from Seth's blog.

Needless to say once "Seth" was exposed, he was dropped en masse. By the way, the lack of following and conversation us to our next point..

Step 3: Don't Interact

Here's a question for you: are you wondering if Washington is out of touch with citizens and voters? The following screenshot should eliminate any doubts about this politican:

Other candidates actually follow (even if in just a token way) and engage. The hilarious irony here is that the Hillary-in-drag on Twitter follows and converses with zero people, and yet somehow posts this:

"This has always been your campaign, and there's no one I want to hear from more than you."

Fail.

Here's another example of how software as a service provider NetSuite engages its customers on Twitter:

The last post was 4 months ago? Now, I'm a big fan of NetSuite since I worked there for a number of years, but using Twitter as a link to your webpage is soooooo 1999 (link swapping was the hot ticket back then). Predictably, the NetSuite account attracts an industry groupie gangbang of resellers adding zero value to anyone looking to have a meaningful discussion of CRM and ERP adoption strategies:

My favorite is the utterly B.S. sounding "Value Chain Group".

Compare this to how more innovative companies like Virgin America, Aria Systems (who I currently work for), JetBlue, and Comcast use Twitter to really get to know their customers, and you'll see what I mean.

non-lucid drivel, aka images by jeri, has lured me in to her web of plurks. the plurkiverse, so vast and wide, is ridiculously entertaining.

here, you can see snapshots of my existance. there, you can plug in to a real time feed of my daily comings and goings, like a freaky little bits of myself junkie.

aren't you just dying to know what i might be doing at 8:49 am, 2:43 pm and, say, 7:38 pm?  what i'm having for dinner?  what i think of the current primetime network hdtv offerings?  what package just got delivered?  think of the excitement!

if plurk and wordpress were better friends, then i'd have a nifty little widget like the on you see here, somewhere in my sidebar.  but they aren't.  and wordpress isn't trying to make any new friends.  so you'll just have to settle for the ugly rss feed of my plurks.

so now i invite you, gentle reader, to plurk along with me.  see just what the plurk i'm plurking about at: http://www.plurk.com/user/bitsofmyself.

Looks like the NYT missed my recent review on coffee consumption and liver cancer. Additionally, while the Swedish study mentioned in the NYT article found no connection between coffee, tea or caffeine consumption and breast cancer, a study published in May 2007 suggests that caffeine may protect against breast cancer in women that have a BRCA1 gene mutation.

Uma startup Norte Americana chamada 12seconds lançou um serviço de microblogging através de vídeo. Este serviço permite aos utilizadores recorreram a uma web-cam ou um telemóvel para gravarem vídeos com uma duração até 12 segundos e estes são automaticamente divulgados aos utilizadores que subscreveram o seu canal.

Ler o artigo completo AQUI

......

Eating fish may thwart silent brain damage.

Older adults who regularly eat fish may have a lower risk of subtle brain damage that contributes to stroke and dementia -- as long as the fish isn't fried -- researchers reported Monday. In a study that followed 3,660 adults age 65 and older, Finnish researchers found that those who ate more fish were less likely to show certain "silent" brain infarcts -- tiny areas of tissue that have died because of an insufficient blood supply -- on an MRI scan. The tissue damage is considered silent, or "subclinical," because it causes no obvious symptoms and can only be detected through brain scans. It can, however, raise a person's longer-term risk of having a stroke or developing dementia. Among older adults in the current study, those who said they ate tuna and "other" baked or broiled fish at least three times per week were one-quarter less likely than those who rarely ate fish to have subclinical brain infarcts at the study's start. Fish eaters also tended to be less likely to develop new infarcts over the next five years. No such benefits were linked to consumption of fried fish, however, the researchers report in the journal Neurology.

This should come under the Medical News of the Obvious section.

Kids' meals at popular fast-food restaurants deliver more than a quick lunch or dinner -- 90 percent of them have far more than a meal's worth of calories and many are loaded with fat and salt too, according to a report released on Monday. The Center for Science in the Public Interest -- the group that took the fun out of movie popcorn and Chinese takeout by revealing the fat and calorie content of such treats -- said it is difficult to find anything remotely healthful for a child to eat at several restaurant chains. "Nearly every single possible combination of the children's meals at KFC, Taco Bell, Sonic, Jack in the Box and Chick-fil-A is too high in calories," the group said in a statement. CSPI examined the menus at 13 popular restaurants that promote children's meals. "Ninety-three percent of 1,474 possible choices at the 13 chains exceed 430 calories -- an amount that is one-third of what the Institute of Medicine recommends that children aged four through eight should consume in a day," the group said.

Children often get more than two meals' worth of energy in a single visit to Brinker International's Chili's restaurants.

It rated privately owned Subway the best. "Only a third of its Fresh Fit for Kids meals, which include a mini-sub, juice box and one of several healthful side items (apple slices, raisins, or yogurt) exceed the 430-calorie threshold," CSPI said.

I declare that I am not in anyway associated with Subway - Vijay.

Psychiatrists in the United States are trading in the analysis couch for a prescription pad, according to a study released on Monday that found fewer psychiatrists offer psychotherapy. The shift to briefer visits for medication management, reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry, appears to be linked to better psychiatric drugs and pressure from managed care companies, which offer richer financial incentives for brief office visits.

"Psychiatrists get more for three, 15-minute medication management visits than for one 45 minute psychotherapy visit," said Dr. Ramin Mojtabai of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and formerly of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, where he did the research. Various forms of psychotherapy, either alone or in combination with medications, are recommended to treat depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder and other psychiatric illnesses. Yet Mojtabai and colleagues, who analyzed data from national surveys of office-based psychiatrist visits from 1996 through 2005, found a significant drop in the number of office-based psychiatrists providing psychotherapy. He said just 29 percent of office-based visits to psychiatrists involved psychotherapy in 2004-5, down from 44 percent in 1996-97. One major impact is that patients who need to receive psychotherapy must get it from other professionals, if they get it at all, Mojtabai said in a telephone interview.

A gel designed to protect women from the AIDS virus made using Gilead Sciences' drug Viread could protect men from infection during anal sex, British researchers reported on Tuesday. Tests on monkeys showed that a gel made using the drug, known generically as tenofovir, may prevent AIDS transmission when applied rectally. The macaques pre-treated with rectal tenofovir gel up to two hours before being given a monkey version of HIV were partly or totally protected from infection, also rectally, Dr. Martin Cranage of St. George's University of London and colleagues reported.

Was Benedikt Köhler mit der Liste der Corporate Twitter für den deutschen / deutschsprachigen Raum initiierte, betreibt Jonathan Kash im großen, internationalen Stil , auch wenn in seiner kontinuierlich upgedateten Liste bis jetzt überwiegend US Firmen und Marken vertreten sind.

Auf seinem Blog Fluent Simplicity veröffentlicht er den Twitter Brand Index, den er in verschiedene Kategorien wie Media, Events, Publishing, Retailers, etc. unterteilt hat. Alle twitternden Unternehmen, die in den Index aufgenommen werden wollen, sind aufgefordert, Jonathan die entsprechenden Daten (Twitter Account und Kategorie) zu schicken.

(via The AppGapp)

Technorati Tags: twitter - corporate - brands - unternehmen - marken - microblogging - micropublishing

One of those trunks will probably be Ping.fm, a service that posts your microblogging entries to all the various services you have accounts on.

There are also various attempts to solve the reverse problem of reading updates from various different social networking sites, such as Socialthing! and FriendFeed.

Facebook

It is reasonably safe to say that the successes of Facebook will not last forever, simply given the fate of every other such web fad in the past. As Rasmus Fleischer said here (in Swedish): "Facebook is not a place, it's an event".

Photo: avlxyz (Licence)

Facebook is keeping up surprisingly well with new trends in social networking, this said mainly in reference to their update a couple of weeks ago, which switched the focus of the site strongly towards dynamic content fed into each users news feed. (Possibly under influence from FriendFeed.)

However, Facebook has a couple of problems that I think will speed up its demise, as better alternatives appear.

Broadcast communication on Facebook is not done in realtime. When you do something, it shows up in other people's news feeds after a time delay, varying greatly in length. True realtime might not be required, but the delay has to be short and predictable.

The other problem is unreliable propagation of broadcast communication. You don't actually know which of your actions will show up in your contacts' news feeds. This can be worked around in some particular cases, like by sending personal invitations to events. In any case, this makes the actual news feed near useless as a way to communicate information to your contacts.

Yes, you can send personal messages instead, but that is intrusive. One wants to be able to create a news entry that you know will be propagated to all of your contacts that wants to receive entries of that type from you. As it is, that might or might not happen, at some undetermined time.

In short, you want to be able to configure Facebook to let you know when, for instance, a contact of yours create a new event. You don't want to maybe get informed about it later.

Solutions and alternatives

Ping.fm and Socialthing! doesn't really solve these problems, as they are not social networking sites in themselves, only a way to interact with several other services from one location. However, they do let you do that in realtime to the same extent as those other services do.

FriendFeed is a sort of combination social network, RSS feed aggregator and microblogging site. It can broadcast items from your RSS feeds, and there is an API under development that can hopefully be used to integrate it with for instance external calendar applications to plan events.

A big advantage of FriendFeed as opposed to Facebook is that you can subscribe to your feed via RSS or e-mail, making sure that you get all the news items you should get, and that you only have to read them once.

The extract the article discusses, AKBA or acetyl-11-keto-beta-boswellic acid, is one of four pentacyclic triterpene acids isolated from the oleo gum resin of Boswellia serrata. AKBA inhibits 5-lipoxygenase, the key enzyme of leukotriene synthesis. AKBA also inhibits cellular proliferation in colon cancer cells, induces apoptosis in prostate cancer cells and is cytotoxic for meningioma cells.

A herb known as "Indian Frankincense" can reduce the symptoms of arthritis, US researchers have suggested. Extracts from Boswellia serrata, a similar species to the variety famous for its role in the Christian nativity, were tested on dozens of patients. Those who received it reported better movement and less pain and stiffness. The herb has been used for thousands of years in Indian Ayurvedic medicine, reports the journal Arthritis Research and Therapy.

café au lait
chicken, apple & brie paninis
dark blue nail polish
chocolate glazed krispy kreme doughnuts
naps on the couch
scalp stubble
vicoprofen fog
cloth diapers
long phone calls to faraway friends
my sleeping nugget
plurking

German doctors have succeeded in transplanting two complete arms onto a 54-year old man in what their hospital said was the world's first operation of this kind.During 15 hours of surgery, a team of 40 medics attached the arms to a farmer who lost both his arms in an accident six years ago. The patient was well, the hospital said on Friday.