Today, I am officially announcing the launch of the Geek Hot Moblog. A moblog is basically a “mobile blog” in which a blogger can post content from his or her mobile phone or smartphone. I own an iPhone with a pretty nice camera on it and an unlimited data-plan, that I don’t use enough of. The iPhone combined with the Flickr mobile tools makes a pretty good tool for moblogging. Flickr and my iPhone have given me the ability to photocast and I have plans to document interesting events that happen in my life as they happen.

On a side note, I am traveling to New Orleans with a group of friends this weekend by train. I will be photocasting my trip, so stop back by and check my weekend’s progress.

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.

For those of us with a short attention span behold: The Steve Jobs 90 Minute Keynote (in 60 Seconds)

The social networking site ImInLikeWithYou has released their version of tetris called Blockles a few days before Christmas 2007 as an early christmas present to the world. The fast-paced multiplayer game is a great addition to the ImInLikeWithYou website, who’s goal is to create a social networking site that fosters making friends by playing games and interacting with other users.

I would keep my eye on ImInLikeWithYou. Their website has definitely raised the bar for social networking sites from here on out.

Note: Close any open applications you have running before entering the ImInLikeWithYou website. The website pushes flash technology to the limits and is extremely resource intensive. You will find the site locking up on you if you do not. It locked on me and I have a MacBook with 1GB Memory and 2GHz Core 2 Duo.

So, I finally jumped into the wonderful world of blogging. Blogging is something I have been wanting to do for a while now, however, I was unable to because of my hosting provider. I am happy to say I have found a new hosting provider, Linode, and I am in LOVE with them. Linode specializes in linux Virtual Private Servers (VPS) and are reasonably priced. For those of you who are unfamiliar with a VPS, it is basically a really fast server that several virtual machines share time on. Most collocated servers are underutilized and VPS take advantage of this by sharing one server with several people. This reduces the total cost of having your own server tremendously. You can also do anything you want to do on a VPS that you would on a collocated system.

A VPS will scale to your needs. I started with Linode’s bottom line package called ‘Linode 360′ for $19.95 / Month. If I find I need more space, it is really easy to increase my VPS’s resources, such as Memory and Disk Space, to what I need from within Linode’s control panel. I imagine the upgrade will only take a couple of minutes to setup, instead of hours if this were a collocated server.

The ‘Linode 360′ Package Includes:
* 350 MB Memory
* 10 GB Disk Space
* 200 GB Transfer / Month
* $19.95 / Month

Linode also gives you a control panel which lets you control how your VPS is setup and control it. You can reboot your VPS at any time, add memory, and add more disk space. This makes a VPS a very scalable solution that should be able to grow to fit any infrastructure needs in the future.

Screenshot of Linode’s Control Panel