Mike Flacy

I love infographics.  Part of the reason that I adore The Oatmeal’s comic style is that much of it is in infographic form.  Infographics are a brilliant way of communicating ideas and I envy the graphic designers that have the creativity to make them.  While the majority of infographics are created for fairly dry topics, there are a few designers applying this form of creation to more entertaining topics; many pop culture related.

I’m a fan of new social networks; I really am.  I’m the first to jump on the bandwagon of an innovative social network.   About 6 months ago, I played around with FourSquare.  (For those that are unaware of FourSquare, it’s a social network designed around geo-location; basically informing your friends where you are at all times.)   Beyond geo-location, FourSquare is loosely based around Microsoft’s achievement system for the Xbox 360.  The more times you check in, the more badges you earn.  About 6 days after I downloaded it, I deleted it from my iPhone.

Part of my job is to manage a handful of company brand pages, some more successful than others due to the demographic of the readership.  As I work with Facebook brand pages all day, it has become very obvious to me that the majority of brand / fan pages are clueless when it comes to attracting more fans effectively and efficiently.  Here are 5 reasons why those pages aren’t as successful as they could be.

I use a handful of tech oriented websites on a daily basis (for my job).  Outside of the realm of strictly tech, here are some lesser known, but extremely useful sites that I utilize constantly during my day.

I manage six different Twitter accounts.  While that may seem like an overload of tweets, it’s actually quite simple.  Five are related to the websites I help manage.  (In all fairness, I can’t lay claim to the nickname inception of Twitmaster General.  It was coined by a couple guys at work in jest to all the Twitter accounts.)

Are you familiar with Ping.fm?  It’s a service that allows you to update all your social networks with one click of a mouse.  I thought this was a brilliant idea when I signed up a year ago, but it’s becoming more evident each day that my “lifestream” is molded differently for every social network I belong to.  Occasionally there’s a smidgen of overlap, but I’m typically writing to very different audiences.

• 30 days ago, I was driving from South Carolina to Los Angeles without a full time job.
• 20 days ago, I was on my first interview at a social networking company in Westwood.
• 10 days ago, I was on my third callback interview with a tech company in El Segundo.
• 5 days ago, I had three different job offers in my lap.

I rarely post about politics, but something intriguing on the campaign front caught my eye today. A presidential candidate is advertising in Burnout Revenge. For those unfamiliar, Burnout Revenge is a car-racing video game owned by Electronic Arts.

- Caught this little indie flick with Morgan Freeman and Paz Vega (the female lead in Spanglish). What a quirky little movie!  Freeman plays an out of work character actor that’s dropped off in an predominantly Hispanic neighborhood to study a grocery store manager for a role in a movie.  He latches onto Paz Vega, the girl running the 10 items or less line.

The whole movie is nothing more than a conversation that continues for about 90 minutes.  Freeman and Vega play off each other in a very human manner.  There are nice bits of comedy interspersed in the film as well.

- The Google / United Airline debacle was an extremely interesting technology screw-up this week.  Basically a single person accessed an article, around 1:30 A.M. last Sunday, about United declaring bankruptcy in 2002.  Since it’s a low traffic time for accessing news, Google bounced it to the Popular Stories section on the main Google News page.  Bloomburg picked up the story as new and the ensuing financial panic caused shareholders to sell a billion dollars worth of stock.  The price on the stock dropped by 75% in a matter of hours.  Yay computers!

- If you haven’t seen it yet, watch the political opening for SNL this week.  The remainder of the show is complete drivel, but the Sarah Palin / Hillary Clinton skit is absolutely hilarious.  Tina Fey nails Palin’s look, mannerisms and accent.

I sat in a coffee shop today and browsed the music on a friend’s laptop. I browsed by albums for a while but eventually found Ben Folds new album by an artist search. I queued up the music and sat there listening to the tracks while sipping my Splenda-filled jolt of caffeine.

Of course all I had was my iPhone. The laptop in question was about 578 miles away.

I downloaded the Simplify Media iPhone app a couple days ago for free. (It’s free for the first 100K users and $3.99 afterward.) Install the SM app on your PC / Mac and it uses iTunes, Winamp or just directories to share music. Sync it up with your iPhone and you can listen to your entire music collection without having to transfer it to the iPhone. It streams the music through the net and the quality is superb. You can add up to 30 friends and share your entire music collection online.

It works great on the 3G network or Wi-fi. Don’t bother using it on Edge though. It also downloads album art, lyrics and artist info. One downside is that it takes a really long time to archive huge collections on the computer. If you have more than 5000 songs, go watch a movie while it indexes the music.  Simplify Media is also having some growing pains due to the massive popularity of the iTunes app as well.

I’m also starting to enjoy Stitcher.  It’s a neat app that organizes a ton of podcasts and broadcasts them in a radio format.  I don’t like the little ads at the bottom of the screen though.  It makes the app seem overly sluggish.  I’ll take a few more days with it before sending it to the App graveyard.

I loaded custom firmware on my PSP today, much to my own technical dismay. I tried using Gizmodo’s method, but it was complete crap.  I delved into the web and found other means. The PSP is easily the most useless of my portable devices.  Besides Skype, I really don’t use it for much else.  I’m going to try and download some interesting apps tomorrow.  Probably nothing as cool as the iPhone though.

I read an interesting article over at ReadWriteWeb yesterday about the release of Moveable Type 4.2.  Very cool information about combining social networks with the blogging platform.   The Action Streams are a self hosted version of Friendfeed or, to a lesser extent, Twitter.  BuddyPress also looks interesting but it’s still in development.

There is a lovely article about Twitter etiquette over at The Morning News.  I totally agree with the first rule.  I’ve been blocking Twitter spammers since the start.  Zero followers is better than 100 spammer followers.

I discovered TweetDeck yesterday.  The design is ridiculously productive, yet the web keyword feature can easily suck away hours of your life.  I watched the iPhone feed and started firing off helpful replies incessantly.  The outcome is another handful of Twitter followers.  It’s a fantastic tool to find Twitter users with similar interests.  It’s not bad for local connections, but Twinkle is still the king in that respect.

I also came across two moderately funny web items today. The first is Where is Bob? It’s supposedly the tale of a absentee IT manager.  It’s likely a viral marketing campaign of some sort as the writing is a bit too good and the stories are just slightly outlandish.  It’s still worth looking at for a laugh.

The second is a Hulu video of a short comedy called The Line. It’s about a group of crazy fanboys that sit in a line 11 days before some sci-fi movie opens.  There are a couple guys from SNL in the mix.  Jason Sudeikis is particularly funny as the movie theater operator.

I’ve been listening to Chopin all day for some reason.  Dead Polish piano players seem to increase my productivity on the writing front.

I took Chris Brogan’s advice today and beefed up my LinkedIn page a bit.  I added a bit of a summary and linked out to the RSS feed on this blog.  I also wrote a recommendation for a fellow writer.  I’ve really started to notice an increase in networking lately and I’m attributing it to LinkedIn, especially after adding so many contacts.

I’m happy with the blog design for now.  I keep tweaking it every day just a little bit, so expect to see small changes.  I’m also looking to add something new to the sidebar, but I’m trying to figure out what I should toss in there.  I’m really digging the minimalistic look right now, but I’m still missing something.

I also completed a quick video preview of Friend Book for the iPhone this afternoon.  It’s not out on the App Store on iTunes yet and it’s certainly worth checking out when it hits the digital streets.  Click the picture to the left or the Youtube link at the top of the page to watch the 3 minute preview.

I saw a man pushing a baby stroller with a toddler down the road today with his left hand and carrying a running weed trimmer in his right hand. He was either nuts or some sort of Nanny / Landscaper hybrid. Crazy or not, I drove away blissfully indifferent of the Cabbage Patch Kidnapper.

I tend to embrace my apathy. It’s especially fun to invoke during conversations. I’ve noticed that people automatically assume that you are of a differing opinion when clamming up; political and religious conversations in particular. For instance some liberal co-workers at my previous job thought I was a staunch conservative; all from adopting an apathetic stance. Truthfully I’m probably somewhere in the middle, but I don’t see the point in talking about something that I’d have to pretend I had the ability to change.

That’s the real beauty of apathy.  I don’t have to lie to myself about how much I should care about matters of supposed importance.  I get to focus on stuff that’s important to my little egocentric mind instead; work and play perhaps.  Everything else gets deleted from my brain after conversations end.  But on to more social topics…

I added a LinkedIn profile recently for networking purposes.  Seeing how my previous jobs weren’t exactly tech-related, I couldn’t beef up my contact list.  I strapped on my creativity hat and sent a mass-mailing to VGT contacts about adding me.  It will help me keep track of their job-hopping movements anyway.  I got about 60% to add me.  Not too shabby!

I also got in on the Ping.fm beta finally.  For those that don’t know, Ping.fm allows you to send the same status up to mutliple accounts.  For instance, I have it setup to send my status update to Twitter, Myspace, Facebook and LinkedIn.  It works with tons of other services as well (FriendFeed, Xanga, Livejournal, Blogger, WordPress, Pownce, etc…).  I have a beta code if anyone wants to sign up.

I’ve may have fallen into a Mobius Strip of writing endlessly until it’s time to sleep again.  I’m content to repeat that cycle over and over while my bank account gleefully greets the array of dead presidents being added every day.  The lucrative lifestyle makes me want to move again, perhaps up north for a few months.

I’ve been receiving an inordinate amount of Facebook friend requests lately; many from complete strangers.  No matter how many times I passively hit Ignore, they keep firing pleas at me.  Facebook desperately needs to add more options for my possible response.  Speaking of Facebook, the new look absolutely stinks.  It’s slow to load and I have to browse those stupid tabs to read someone’s page.

I’ve been playing around with the Flip Mino for a week now.  The video and sound quality is really excellent for the size of the camera.  It’s about the height of my iPhone, but skinnier in width.  I wish I had the camera when my sister and I filmed our Rock Band session a couple weeks ago.  Unfortunately Mikey and Gerbil broke up after our three day World Tour in Rome, London and Paris.