I recently got selected to be on the alltop website under the “Twitterati” section. I would like to thank Dana Franks for recommending me. I did not ask to be here and I have no idea what I did to deserve this, but it’s great! It is a honor to share the same page with a few of those I identify as Internet Celebrities such as Chris Brogan, Leo Laporte, Guy Kawasaki, Chris Pirillo, iJustine, Zefrank, and Gary Vaynerchuk.

In many ways being recognized on Alltop is forcing me to focus more on my ideas for Geek Hot. It’s nice to have a little encouragement from the community to follow my dreams. I have some good ideas for this site. Let’s hope I can pull them off!

For any of you who have been following the colorwars on twitter, zefrank has asked for suggestions on a new challenge. Here is my idea for the next colorwars challenge:

My idea is basically around the idea of playing Capture the Flag. I was trying to think of something that could best involved the team as a whole and allow the team to work together towards an ultimate goal. Capture the Flag will require a lot of strategy and organization to really get anything accomplished.

Here is a suggested way Capture the Flag could be played:
1. Each team needs to create a flag of a certain size and post it to the colorwars website for reference.
2. Each team needs to select one person to lead the team and to hide the flag somewhere publicly on the internet in a blog, forum, newsgroup, etc (hopefully this can be done easily). The image must be referenced by a webpage and can not be a hidden image on a website.
3. The team leader will need to report the location of the flag back to the colorwars website.
4. The flag will need to be validated by the organizers of colorwars.
5. Teams will search the internet for opposing teams flags and when it is found, post the link to the colorwars website which will verify if the link is a flag.
6. Capturing an opposing team’s flag will take the team out of the competition.
7. Last team with a flag still standing wins!

On a side note, hiding the flag on the internet as a whole might take a long time to find the flag, however, enforcing the flag to be placed on one of a 1000 or so suggested websites might speed the process up.

Go OrangeTeam!

Kristy from craftster has posted this wonderful wonder woman jumper. Also included on the site is a small tutorial on how to make it. Good work Kristy!

Lifehacker has an interesting contest for the coolest cubical. Apparently the winner gets a $500 amazon gift certificate. For anyone who works in cubicals, this is an interesting read.

I am clueless as to the purpose of this site. If anyone can help me understand its purpose, I would be very appreciative!

http://internetisseriousbusiness.com/

THANKS!

P.S. This is a “Rick Roll”

Twitter is a microblog and social network that is quickly changing the world by enabling people to communicate to the internet using any cellphone. Twitter is a very convenient and a simple way to send a message out to the world without a computer present.

Unfortunately, after a short time on Twitter, you can find it to be extremely annoying. To deal with this I have created 10 Twitter tips that can fix your love romance with Twitter. Following these tips can make your life and everyone else’s life with Twitter better. A little compromise isn’t so bad!

Following these 10 Twitter tips will help you: Keep your followers, Keep your sanity, Detach yourself from the web, and Save your life!

The Tips:

1. Setup Twitter to use your cellphone. This allows you to bring Twitter with you wherever you may be and makes Twitter handy.

2. Use Twitter as it was intended to be used. Send messages pertaining to the theme “What are you doing?”

3. Follow as many people as you want, but only mark the people to be notified of new tweets if you actually want to receive tweets from them on your cellphone. Allowing tweets to your cellphone from everyone in the world will eventually drive you crazy.

4. Use a program like twirl or twitterific when you are at a computer to receive tweets that you do not want to send to your cell phone.

5. Use direct messages (the ‘d username’ command) when replying to another user’s tweet directly.

6. If you absolutely must reply to someone’s tweet publicly, make sure to start the tweet with an ‘@username’. This will allow Twitter to filter out tweets if they are not relevant to user receiving it.

7. Setup your Twitter account to only send you tweets for the “@ replies to the people you are following”. This will filter out any tweets that do not belong to you. You can find this on the Twitter Website under Settings -> Notices.

8. Keep the number of tweets to under 3 a day.

9. Make your tweets matter! Only post what you feel others would be interested in reading.

10. Use a URL shorting website such as tinyurl, rurl, urltea, urlthat, or snurl to shorten the length of a URL when posting a link to another website. This will allow the URL to fit into the 140 character tweet limit and make it easier for those using a cell phone without a web browser to type the url into a computer.

Google is well-known for their long drawn-out “Beta” applications that seem to take years for the applications to finally be considered stable applications. It seems a trend has slowly been making it’s way to all of the new Web 2.0 websites out there who also want to call themselves “Beta”. The irony is that the term “Beta” is slowly transforming itself in the mind of internet users from a term that once stood for “not good enough” to a mark of quality.

2008 is definitely the year for Web 2.0 beta. Browsing around the internet this year makes one feel the internet is ramping up for its next big release. The amount of sites that proudly proclaim themselves as “Beta” seem to be skyrocketing.

Will this trend end or will all sites from now on be considered “Beta” indefinitely? I guess we will just have to wait and find out. For now, If your interested in tracking all of the beta websites out there, there is the Museum of Modern Betas. They even have a top 100 list if you’re interested in seeing the most popular “Beta” websites.