Donagh Mc Sweeney

The final arguments are being made and the last babies kissed as both politicians and campaigners rally for support in the Lisbon Treaty. As of midnight tonight a media blackout comes into force, forcing the key players to take a back seat and see how things play out.

By now all registered voters should have received their voting cards in the post! Along with this comes a leaflet that outlines all the key information contained in the treaty! If you’re still undecided, have a read through it!It might just help you decipher some of the conflicting arguments put forward by both sides.

There’s a lot of cryptic and confusing arguments being thrown around the place. If you want to sort the truth from the lies please visit the Referendum Commissions website for an impartial view on the treaty. By law the Commission is required to be 100% impartial! They’ve created a website specifically for Lisbon which is extremly informative called TheLisbonTreaty209!

Here’s a video from EuroNews that takes a look at both sides of the campaign.

Voting stations open at 7am Friday morning and don’t close until 10pm that night.

I’m voting YES, but whatever your decision, please come out and vote!

With the power of the internet at our finger tips and the rush to distribute information as fast as we can type it, we can sometimes get caught up in the moment and fall victim to the double edged sword that is social media.

Never more was there a better example than an earlier posting by social media guru’s Penn-Olsen. Today site founder Sarah Chong ran with a story proclaiming that beverage giants Pepsi were to withdraw all funding from its advertising campaigns. It was proclaimed that as far as Pepsi were concerned there was no longer a need to ‘tell’ people how good their product was. From their point of view it was a tasty drink and they didn’t care whether people liked their product or not! (Eyebrows should already start to be raised right!)

Well you won’t be shocked to discover that the story was utter rubbish! In fact the source of the story was the American “news satire” website The Onion, a site renowned for its entertaining but non-factual articles (Read the Pepsi satire post). Well apparently Sarah Chong of Penn-Olsen wasen’t aware of this and took the story at face value. Once the gaff was realized (when I notified them) the post was promptly removed from the homepage (but not before I made a quick screenshot).

With the nature of society today it’s always a possibility that you are going to fall victim to a scam or believe a falsified story, but to fall hook, line and sinker to a story that’s so blatantly untrue is just inexcusable!

Such incidents are not uncommon online and if you want to keep that hard earned reputation that you have been working on building for so long it’s vital that you know where your information is coming from! Before you can say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious information is going to be out there on sites like Twitter to a potential audience of millions! It only takes a few moments to verify the how accurate a story is so what not do it?! FYI Wikipedia is NOT a valid source check!

Whether you’re gathering information for your latest blog post, or asking questions to improve your research, it never hurts to double- and triple-check your sources.

Edit: Since posting, the original story has reappeared in an edited format here and has been declared as an attempt at humor. At the time of posting everything was based upon the facts available.

I just came across this gem of a video about the way we use and interact with the social web. It brought a little smile to my face. Enjoy!

Tablet PC giant Archos has just announced that it’s going to release a new windows based version of it’s media tablet, the ARCHOS 9PCtablet.

Boasting an1.2GHz Intel Atom Z515 processor and 60 GB hard disk, it could prove to be one of the most popular products out there over the coming months.It’s also extremely thin (0.68”) and lightweight (820g).

One of the other major points about the tablet is that it’s going to come with a touchscreen keyboard. If Archos are able to pull it off it could become a major winner in the minds of the public! However if it doesn’t, Archos are also releasing a slimline keyboard as an additional addon.

Media tablets in general have been growing in popularity in recent times as their functionality has improved to cope with the high demands of people on the go. Increased wireless speeds also means that being able to surf the internet with a somewhat decent speed is a reliable reality.

The Windows based Archos 9PCtablet goes on sale on October 22nd, the same day Windows 7 is released to the masses.

Wordpress plug-ins are new territory for me. Yesterday one went awry and the blog was down for a few hours. Whoops! It’s a learning process I guess!

There are thousands of plug-ins out there that allow you to customise your blog to your hearts content. They are by far one of the main reasons why Wordpress has become the major powerhouse in blogging circles!

Today I came across an attractive plug-in that allows you add some stylish social icons to your blog. It’s called Sexybookmarks. Every blogger wants to be able to share their posts with the web at large, and this is just the way to do it!

The installation through the Wordpress Admin page is extremely simple. There’s a whole load of social icons you can choose to add to your posts and/or pages such as Twitter, Del.ic.ios, Facebook, Mixx, Newsvine, Digg, etc. It is also extremely simple to understand and customise. You can also choose from a number of different background images that ask the reader to share the post.

One small criticism I would have is that if you’re using the Twitter icon you’ll need to install a second plug-in called ‘Twitter Friendly Links“.Why? By right this should all be contained within the one plug-in.

You’ve only got a tiny window of opportunity from the time someone finishes reading your post until the time they leave. If you want to expand your reach across the web then you need to make possible for your blog posts to be made shareable. It’s also important that you make this an easy and fast process. Plug-ins like Sexybookmarks are just the way to do it!

It’s been a long, yet quick road from the the time when Loopthing was just a simple concept to what it is today. Development of our business social network is continuing every day and it’s exciting to see it grow.

On April 7th of this year we launched the site in beta mode which allowed us to show what we’d developed to the world at large, while still working on features in the background. There’s been some ups and downs but now I’m glad to say that we are planning an Official Launch on October 20th. It’s an exciting milestone!

The official launch of the site will be accompanied by Loopthing’s first business application. I’ve mentioned these applications in passing to a number of people over the previous months and October 20th the first of these will be revealed. The business applications are something which I believe will really catch the imagination of many businesses and be of great benifit!

As well as the hustle and bustle that comes with preparing with for such an event, we are also holding out first seed funding round. It’s that time of the game where we are happy enough with how things are progressing that we are looking for some extra capital for the company. Such seed funding will give the project that extra push. You can see more about this over on the Loopthing blog.

Keep your ear to the ground for some more announcements over the coming weeks.

When it comes to social management apps, TweetDeck is by far miles ahead of the rest. From its beginning as a Twitter app to its evolution as a social media “must have”  it’s been an invaluable resource. Personally, I couldn’t manage without it!

With Twitter now firmly embedded in social activity online, TweetDeck has become the primary way of interaction for many. According to Twitstat, the British start-up is now second only to Twitter itself when it comes to methods of accessing Twitter. It’s a truly remarkable success story for the company that was founded only two years ago.

The team behind the scene seems to be under no illusions about what they need to do to stay at the top. There are a number of competitors out there such as Hootsuite and Seesmic looking to topple TweetDeck from its perch, so TweetDeck need to keep their users satisfied if success is to continue. Thus, this month the app got a host of shiny new features to whet the appetite of the social media enthusiast.

So what’s new?

With the release of TweetDeck V.0.30, there were a number of small and not so small updates to the service. The TweetDeck directory is one of the major new extensions to the app. The new service is basically Tweet Deck’s way of showing you users and tweets in categories that are of interesting to you. You can search categories such as News & Politics, Business, Technology and Travel. From there you can select a subcategory. If you like the topic, you can then add the ‘Group’ to your TweetDeck app. The one problem that I have with this is that you’re never told that by doing so you are actually added as a ‘follower’ to all those currently in the group. There’s no notice/warning that this is going to happen until you see visually all the people being added. It would work much better if they simply added a column to the app with all group members and then I could choose who I wanted to follow. That’s a big Fail in my book TweetDeck!

Photographic tweets made easy!

One of the other updates that caught my attention was the photo upload feature. You can now simply click and drag any picture on your computer and drop it into the comment area on TweetDeck.  After you do this you get an image preview, and then you get the option to upload it to a TweetPhoto, TwitPic or YFrog.  It’s an extremely fast and efficient method of adding photos to tweets! For now the default upload service is TweetPhoto, but this can be changed to TwitPic or YFrog via the settings. How other providers are going to react to TweetPhoto being elected as the default is yet to be seen but after the saga that happened over at Tr.im earlier this year when Bit.ly was made default URL shortner, someone is bound to be unhappy with the developments.

MySpace! Really?

With the new release, to my surprise, came the integration of MySpace. The first question that came to mind when I saw it was be frank, why? MySpace has been for some time, and still is, lagging way behind the rest of the Web2.0 social web. It’s been struggling to keep up with the lightening fast growth of Facebook and Twitter and is now thought of in a somewhat negative light. It’s become known as a place for aspiring musicians to upload their songs and try getting a following more than a place for social interaction, an association TweetDeck could do without.

Good idea, bad idea

There are two other, small updates to TweetDeck with V.0.30. The first involves the extremely important URL shortening. You now have the option to auto-shorten you’re links immediately rather than waiting until after you send the tweet. Before this addition the problem of dead link often occurred. You’d write you your tweet and add a link to the shortening area below. Then when the link was added if there wasn’t enough room you’re link would become a dead one leading to nowhere. It’s something that was both annoying while also looking unprofessional. Now thankfully you can see the length or your tweet with a link before you ever send it.

The other change to the service is one that has created a new annoyance for some, while being embraced by others. It’s to do with the minimization of TweetDeck to the taskbar on our computers. Before, when you clicked the ‘X’ to close the app it actually closed fully. Now when you do so, instead of closing the app minimizes itself to the taskbar. Why the development team decided to introduce such a feature is questionable, but why they haven’t included an option to over-right this through the settings is inexcusable. Plenty of apps work in such a fashion, but 99% of them allow you to change it to your liking. Annoying users won’t do them any favours now will it!

I do like TweetDeck!

Looking back at what I’ve just written, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that I don’t like TweetDeck. Not true! It’s an app that I thoroughly embrace and use in my daily activity. It does have some minor flaws but you can put this down to its ambition and constant evolution as it strives to better itself. For anyone out there new or old to Twitter and social media, TweetDeck is a must get that will simplify your life!