Inventive ideas for using twitter - stock feeds and alternative websites

The trouble with web pages is that they stick right there on the net. You revisit a website and nothing seems to have changed. Except maybe for the blog. SEO advice is to maintain a blog so that Google will be constantly challenged by your addition of new content.

I have three main blogs, plus two or three others on the side. Often, I don't have the time to think through what to write. Sometimes, I'm just not inspired.

Hey ho twitter, although I conclude many of my days having to admit that I haven't had a single, brilliant, original idea to share with the twittersphere.

I love the interaction on twitter. I pick up stories and useful links to tips. I can ask questions. I can reply to questions. It doesn't really take up that much of my time. Tweetdeck runs quietly in the background (I turned off the sound alerts) while Twhirl also enables me to post and monitor content as well as upload a twitpic.

I'm not a mobile net user, because I spend so much time in front of a computer, that I want to get away from it while I'm out. There are other things in life.

But I was impressed by a twitter use that was tweeted today. An article in today's Washington Post describes how you can set up your Twitter account to follow market news. Surely better than having to download a desktop ticker. And you would be able to follow your customised twitter stream on your net enabled mobile.

It had to happen. I came across the profile of someone else who has revised the home page of his website to consist entirely of his twitter updates. Too busy, one presumes, to write something truly rational or descriptive about his life and work. So far, it details travels to meetings in exotic locations.

I'm always wary of people who list meetings as their principal activity. There is precious little evidence of anything useful coming out of meetings. All those summits that statesmen go to? The discussions have been held in advance by subordinate ministers and officials who phrase the final communique. If no-one is present at a meeting to minute its content, who knows if there is an effective outcome?

Mind you, I was wondering how to incorporate a FriendFeed page into my website yesterday. I haven't sorted it out yet, but Facebook friends will be able to click the appropriate tab in my profile.

SOSIUS - online networking tool for business

I might, at last, have found the app that will enable me to establish a working, user-friendly, social network for East Midlands' Speakers Club.

I found out about Sosius from scanning my RSS feed for Gulf News. Fancy that. I had to read something published in the Middle East to get the lead.

It does everything that I had hoped Google Sites would do, but incomparably more efficiently. The only hitch is that I have to persuade other people to sign up in order to use it.

East Midlands' Speakers' Club hopes to charter into full Toastmaster International status in July. A gradually increasing number of us meet on the 1st and 3rd Mondays of each month to support each other in our bids to become more confident and interesting public speakers. We shall be able to set up our own website under the auspices of Toastmasters only once we are chartered. Meanwhile, we have a Facebook group which I use to remind people about meetings and to create more awareness of the club.

East Midland Speakers came into being as a result of my erstwhile colleague, John Cox, wanting to join Toastmasters himself but being aghast at finding that the nearest clubs were either in Birmingham or Leeds. That's a lot of travelling for a quasi-social event.

We are social, despite following precise guidelines for meetings, speeches and time-keeping and Toastmaster International programmes of Competent Communicator and Leadership. It's definitely a new group of friends.

But back to Sosius. The sign-up process is pretty painless, and membership is free providing you use no more than 200Mb of online storage. You can collaborate with an unlimited number of other users.

The dashboard is an instant guide to what you can do, with inbuilt calendar, content and template creation tools (eg blogs, web pages, documents) email, site customisation, workflow management and so forth. You can even use SpinVox which converts your spoken words into text entries.

It has also introduced me to XFN and FOAF which I'm going to have to look into more thoroughly, since these are technologies which will enable you to create your own friends' network from any pages which link to people you know.

An East Midlands Speakers Club on Sosius would enable us to share information, log our progress through TI programmes, advertise meetings - generally creating a community.

Sosius really does seem to offer the facilities for innovative groups with online members to collaborate and work together, but oh my, most people I know don't live online like I do - yet. And many still don't find these online services sufficiently intuitive.

And oh the eyebrows that rise high when I mention using Facebook for networking! Get real. Social networking apps are powerful.