I started using Twitter a couple of months ago after hearing a number of speakers praise the service at the Web Directions North conference in Vancouver.

My first impression was: "So what?" [cue: Miles Davis] Do I really care what other people are doing every minute of their day? No, I don't.

However, it wasn't long before I started to see the value of the 140 character info share commonly called a "tweet." There are plenty of useful tips and pointers I get throughout the day from the people I'm following.

I also see ways that businesses can benefit from using Twitter internally. The informal format of the tweet enables quick, collaborative sharing between co-workers and work groups, and provides relief from email and IM fatigue.

Certainly, the meteoric rise of Twitter is backed by true usefulness, and even the service's continual problems with scaling don't seem to be problematic enough to rock the boat in any serious way. (In fact, the scaling problem might actually be creating traffic-spiking buzz for Twitter.)

I do see a significant problem with Twitter though, and it's on the rise and difficult to control. That issue is "Twitter noise."

While I appreciate learning about twitizens' latest blog posts, their unique solutions to daily problems, and the links and resources they're generously sharing, I really don't want to know what you're eating, when you're sleeping, and what tickles your funny bone. Simply put, tweeting this kind of stuff is a waste of everyone's time, and I'd like to see "professional tweeters" put an end to all the "Good night!" and "I love sushi!" tweets once and for all. The "twitterverse" is growing exponentially and the more we can curb the small talk, the better the quality of the signal to noise ratio will be, ensuring a viable service for more than just a financial quarter or two. Failure to "cut the fat" will result in a stale and stunted has-been, with users bailing out in favor of the next great collaborative web app.

Twitter filtering and threading functionality would be helpful with keeping conversations tightly themed and easier to follow, but ultimately the quality of Twitter will depend on its users and whether or not we have enough self-control to filter out the noise we create–before we tweet it.

There's a new article over at SEOchat.com called Seven Important Qualities for Good Linkbait. Terri Wells presents some good information here, but the design of SEOchat is simply not condusive to reading their articles. Let me explain:

• Way too many ads
• Obtrusive ad positioning
• Article options are not clearly presented. I always have to hunt for the print link. I view the print version because…
• Pagination requires unnecessary clicking. I know it's just about throwing more ads at me! 
• No use of headings. We all know people scan content online. Hook me with some headings!

In case you're interested, the seven signs of quality linkbait are (with hat tip to Wells):

1. Relevant
2. Useful
3. Interactive
4. Unique
5. Comprehensive
6. Visually appealing 
7. User-centric

I hope I've saved you some time wading through SEOchat's version of this article! It seems to me that they've managed to get some link juice here for not following through on some of these qualities (specifically, visually appealing and user-centric.) Perhaps that's another sign of link bait worth mentioning: buck accepted standards of quality.

Here are just a few of the terrible startup names I've come across this morning doing my daily RSS reading:

• Meetro
• Lefora 
• Webook.com
• DimDim
• Rogomo
• Trulia
• Syntagma and Moneyizer
• Kenshoo.com
• Mefeedia
• Sendloop.com
• Sonopia
• Cullensabcs.com
• SellABand 
• CushyCMS
• MeeVee
• Contactify
• Finalcrit.com
• Jodange.com
• Kiwihoo.com 

Seriously, where was marketing?!

YouTube is a video sharing community website owned by Google that offers a unique (and free) avenue to promote your business on the web. Sure, you can put videos on your own website without using YouTube, but then you aren't tapping into the huge and ever-growing YouTube community, which can virally spread the word about your products and services, ultimately driving traffic back to your website–if you know how to put this powerful tool to work for you.

Your Account

Not surprisingly, the first step to using YouTube is getting yourself a YouTube account. Note that you can use your Google account as your login if you already have one. Once you have an account, click "Account" at the top of the page to see what kinds of preferences you can setup, and to explore the tools available to you.

Your Profile

On the account page, there is a link for Personal Profile. Be sure to add some profile information to this form so that your users can "get to know you". (Don't forget that updates to your profile and channel customization can take up to 6 hrs to show up.)

Your Videos

Uploading Videos

YouTube has a comprehensive help section on how to upload videos. If you are uploading videos that are 100M or larger, you will need to use the YouTube Uploader. This is software that is installed on your computer. For additional information, please see this help topic. Be patient while your video is uploading–it can take 20 minutes to upload a 100+MB video! Also, your video will not appear immediately in your account.

Tagging and Categorizing

Tagging and categorizing your videos is an important step that's often rushed, but if done right, will yield benefits you probably don't want to miss out on. For ideas, check out popular videos in your niche and see how they have been tagged and categorized. Don't overlook the fact that choosing less popular categories might reduce the competition your videos have, and may help launch your videos to the most popular or most viewed in your category. With tagging, add as many relevant keywords as you can, and again, see if you can match them to other existing video content. This will help gain additional exposure for your video content.

Your Playlists

See this documentation to learn about Playlists and how to create them. Playlists can contain your own videos and/or the videos of others. Either way, putting playlists together is easy: select clips from the My Videos section of your account and add them to a new playlist, or visit the video you are interested in and click "save to favorites".

The benefit of playlists lies in providing videos that are organized into a niche-targeted context enabling your users to find related content quickly, without having to resort to using YouTube search. In providing this service, you can boost your web traffic without ever even recording a single video of your own! Look for quality videos with a low view count, and you'll help users find content that hasn't already "done the rounds".

YouTube Email and Bulletins

It's not too common for YouTube users to simply stumble across your channel. To help get the word out, YouTube provides you with a number of self-promotion tools, including email and bulletins. With YouTube email, you can reach out to other users who share similar interests and let them know about your videos, or send them thoughts about theirs. Bulletins allow you to create short messages that appear on your channel page, or leave messages on other users' channel pages. Share information about your status, newest videos or anything else that you'd like to broadcast to the YouTube community.

Video Responses

Just like with blogs, you can leave comments on videos posted by others, but with YouTube you can also leave video responses. These can be chosen from your existing videos, or you can create new videos in response to another user's video. Just remember to keep your response relevant, choose your target video well (preferably a high traffic video related to your niche), and respond early to get your video response noticed by others.

YouTube Groups

YouTube groups provide a way for users to discuss and share videos. You can browse groups by category, or create your own group from the YouTube Groups page. Contributing to YouTube groups provides you with a targeted audience to promote your videos to, hopefully attracting users to visit and subscribe to your channel. Joining an existing group provides you with a base of users to interact with immediately, while creating your own group requires you to wait for users to join before you have an audience to promote your work to.

Active Sharing

With Active Sharing enabled, your username and a link to your channel will be displayed next to videos you are watching for 30 minutes, and all of the videos you watch will be added to a "Videos I'm Watching" section in your Profile. This allows others users to discover you and your videos (and perhaps also your website), based on the fact that you share interests and watch the same videos.

YouTube and the YouTube community offers an effective method of online promotion, either through your own video content or the videos of other YouTube users. By putting YouTube's community features to work for you and your business, you have the chance to develop a new and viable source of customer acquisition.

Many Web 2.0-ish sites these days are using Lucida Grande and Helvetica font faces for main body text. I find this really annoying. These font faces are not easy to read on-screen, particularly at 13px. When I come across this, I increase the text size via my browser, which improves the readability somewhat. Mashable.com is a great example of this. Is that text easy to read? No. At least, not on a Windows system. I haven't cracked my iBook in some time. Is this easier to read on a Mac? Why are designers so fond of Lucida Grande? From a usability standpoint, I'm stumped.

Lifestreaming became a popular buzzword in 2007 and doesn't show signs of letting up. While there are several hosted services that allow you to easily create a lifestream (as well as a myriad of WordPress plugins), you might prefer a quick and easy self-hosted solution (like Jeremy Keith's). SimplePie's got you covered!

With just two short PHP files, a SimplePie installation, and a little RSS icon to pretty things up, you can create your own stand-alone lifestream, tying together all the content you're publishing on the web into a single source, enabling your favorite contacts (or anyone else who happens to stumble across your stream) to stalk your every online move.

1. Install SimplePie. If you have any trouble with this step, check out their excellent documentation. 
2. Next, download these files. (These files are a bleshing of Nat Welch's source and Webmaster-Source.com's merge code.) Change the extension on the .phps files to .php.
3. Open the files up in your favorite editor and configure as needed (they are commented so it should be fairly self-explanatory.)
4. Upload the .php files and the RSS icon to your web server.
5. Make it your own: add some CSS.
6. Presto chango, you're lifestreaming!

Here's my lifestream.

If you'd like to setup a lifestream blog, archiving everything in a database, check out Yongfook's how-to, using the Tumblr API and the CodeIgniter framework.

I'd like to include my Amazon.ca Wish List to my lifestream, but had some trouble getting that up and running. (Why doesn't Amazon provide Wish List RSS files?) I found a few sources that helped me generate an RSS feed of my Wish List:

• Technology Evangelist's Amazon RSS Wishlist Generator using Yahoo! Pipes
• Raymond Yee's Amazon RSS Wish List Generator
• edazzle.net's Amazon RSS Wish List Generator

However, I haven't yet figured out how to pull the DateAdded into the feed, making it kind of lame in a lifestream. Andrea Mignolo has it going on though. I'll have to dig a little deeper into Amazon's Web Services documentation to get that sorted.

For more about lifestreaming, see lifestreamblog.com.