Forgot to mention; a month of so ago I got interviewed by Jonathan Cutrell about my thoughts on Twitter – here’s what was said;

Freelance: Jonathan Cutrell

So here we go!

Why do you use twitter?

 Martin Newham

Twitter is naturally social beast by design; it allows a single individual the ability to talk to 1,000′s of people at the same time; and that’s the difference between MSM. AOL etc… of course it all depends if anyone is listening

Freelance: Jonathan Cutrell

Agreed. The last part is completely true, and I wonder if Twitter is so successful because it is so customizable as well; in other words, you follow who you want to follow, etc.

Martin Newham

Yes it’s not until you try a client like twittervision you realise how global twitter truly is..

Freelance: Jonathan Cutrell

And now is the first time I have looked at that. Wow!

Alright, well, Twitter has been called the "telegraph of Web 2.0". How has Twitter affected business as usual for you?

Martin Newham

Twitter is an excellent communications tools as we mentioned earlier, with "re-tweeting" the 140 characters between people information can be "broadcast" very quickly. This was evident when the news of Steve Job’s falsely reported heart attack hit Twitter, and apple shares dropped.

Freelance: Jonathan Cutrell

Very true.

What does it mean for your business to have more and more connectivity?

Martin Newham

Communication between team members is more important than ever now, previously we would all work in a office and we could talk face to face – but with the internet and home working teams have spread out not only across the continent but across the world. Tools such as Twitter allow the "chit-chat" to continue, is far less formal than an email and more convenient that some IM clients.

Freelance: Jonathan Cutrell

And how about communication between you and your clients?

Martin Newham

A lot of my current clients aren’t quite switched on enough for Twitter yet, but I’m trying to train them. Typically a 1-1 is required, so a phone is more useful or Skype VOIP of course

Freelance: Jonathan Cutrell

With the expansion of Twitter through applications and with the creation of sites such as JustTweetIt, how do you think social networking will influence business as usual in the future?

Martin Newham

Twitter expands on a global basis the best and oldest advertising technique; word of mouth – only its digital. I will expect to see more applications, and automated systems that you can subscribe to via Twitter; already RSS updates from sites are pushed into Twitter and people be notified of changes.

Perhaps in the future, for example; Companies will squirt encrypted data into Twitter that you can subscribe to and with an appropriate client the information can be retrieved. Whilst to everyone one else it garbled

Freelance: Jonathan Cutrell

What a fantastic idea!

Martin Newham

Ha-ha, just an idea

Freelance: Jonathan Cutrell

Well, obviously even beyond communication, people can expound on twitter at ground level;

Just as some have done with MySpace with embeddable stores, etc.

Speaking of MySpace, What social networking do you use, beyond twitter? (Blogs, Digg style sites, MySpace/Facebook, etc.)

Martin Newham

I’ve done a few guest posts on Styletime and one coming up on Graham’s site; I have my own blog but it’s more of a personal journal. I have a Facebook page and a Linkedin page obviously Twitter and Digg/stumble/design float to mention a few

Freelance: Jonathan Cutrell

Obviously we all have online "identities" that we probably have even forgotten about! Ha-ha. ok, so, what do you think microblogging’s biggest contribution has been to the social networking scene? We know that WordPress gave everyone the ability to blog, and MySpace gave people the ability to have friends across the world. What has Twitter done, and do you think it will last?

Martin Newham

You mentioned WP & MySpace etc, these are all static (to a certain extent) but Twitter is very dynamic and operates fast! It allows you to talk to large groups of people at the same time and yet have a conversation with a single person if you want to either through the Replies or Direct and private mail.

Freelance: Jonathan Cutrell

Can you give an example of a client or a path to a client that came to you as a result of twitter or another social network?

Martin Newham

Spoke to a friend over Skype regarding a website design for a aerobatic pilot, he didn’t have the skills to do it himself so he asked me and I built the site.

Freelance: Jonathan Cutrell

Interesting stuff.

More of that in the future I imagine.

Who is your favourite Twitterer?

or Tweeter?

Martin Newham

Oh they’re all great, and unique in their own ways — hahaha, I only follow people I find interesting

Freelance: Jonathan Cutrell

How do you receive your news? Like political issues, local issues, etc.

Martin Newham

Mornings and when I’m working at home I generally have BBC News 24 on TV, in the office it would be Twitter/MSM/Skype and an assortment of RSS/Websites

Freelance: Jonathan Cutrell

What is your forecast for Twitter and the microblogging world?

Martin Newham

Twitter is still quite unique and it has a good foothold in the market, I don’t see its imminent end any time soon. The future; maybe more integrated clients for phones, PS3 Xbox, TV’s Fridges – Twitter maybe an idea medium for your washing machine to say "Help! I’m flooding; but I’ve Tweeted a local plumber"

Freelance: Jonathan Cutrell

I really appreciate you doing this interview. First off, any links you’d like to promote? This will be put into an article, and I will send people to wherever you’d like.

Martin Newham

My twitter one is fine, people can find me there.. I would like to see the article once it’s finished

Freelance: Jonathan Cutrell

Yea definitely. It’s gonna mostly focus on the use of these different faculties.

Well we all know that Wednesday was a scary day for all for at 08:30 BST they turned on the “"Large Hadron Collider”. WIkipedia tells us;

The LHC was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and lies underneath the Franco-Swiss border between the Jura Mountains and the Alps near Geneva, Switzerland. It is funded by and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. The LHC is operational and is presently in the process of being prepared for collisions. The first beams were circulated through the collider on 10 September 2008, and the first high-energy collisions are expected to take place after 6-8 weeks. [Source: Wikipedia]

Many people watched the webcams located around the facility with their fingers crossed that all would be fine; but there is more to come at the numerous experiments being carried out continue. Below are two of the primary webcams their main site is here.

• Camera 7: looking at the Underground Experimental Cavern from the Saleve side.
• Camera 8: looking out of the window of the 1st Floor of the SCX building that houses the CMS Control room.

Click here to see what they’re up to now

Been upgrading some web sites for ACM as well as the web servers GUI (Plesk). Backed all the files, FTP’d them back home which took most of the day, cleared down the old site, and uploaded the new version. Hit the update button and 3 minutes later it was done!

While I was backing up the site (yawn) and preparing for the update I discovered TweetDeck an Adobe Air application which works as a TWITTER client. I’ve been using it for most of the day now and its really great!

I especially like the search options where it will monitor the thousands of posts an hour for key words in the picture below “iPhone”, “Drupal” are shown. If you have a Twitter account give it a try…

Windows Live Writer (WLW) is a visual blog editor for Windows. It integrates with most blogging platforms (WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger, and others), allowing you to see how your posts will appear in your blog’s theme, even when you’re offline.

WLW isn’t just another text editor. As a former Notepad coder, I was drawn to WLW as I began to use more photos and embedded content in my WordPress blog. The accuracy of its visual representation and, as you’ll see below, the way it handles media is what’s made it so popular.

Check out some of the video clips and download the tool for free here.

The Technical Preview Has Many New Features

On June 2, Microsoft released a "Technical Preview" to Windows Live Writer. It’s somewhat of a beta release, but you can download it from Microsoft here.  Note: this can likely be downloaded from anywhere, but this version is only available in US English.  I can’t speak of its stability with your environment, but it’s been fine for me with Windows Vista and a WordPress 2.5 blog.

There were two types of updates in this release: those for traditional users of the product and those for developers who create WLW plug-ins.  The following are the updates for traditional users; if you’d like to read about the features for developers, see the official information or Windows Live MVP Scott Lovegrove’s synopsis.

The following list is in order by what I see as having the most time-saving benefits of Windows Live Writer:

• Image Cropping—This was the feature WLW arguably needed most as cropping images is part of many people’s blogging workflow.  Since the new release I’ve had much less use for processing images outside of WLW.  (Note: this only works for images inserted from Insert > Picture.  This is not available for photos pasted directly—but perhaps that will be changed before the final release.)
• Word Count —It’s easy to ramble when you’re blogging; I no longer need to copy and paste between WLW and Microsoft Word to see how unbearably long an article has grown since the word count can be calculated real time, as pictured below in the status bar.
• Border Options—Little aesthetic touches like the rounded corners pictured below can help with the professionalism and consistency of a blog.  Having more options for the borders of images should be helpful for a lot of WLW users.
• Auto Linking – if you regularly link to articles when you type certain phrases then you can configure WLW to automatically perform this task.  In the example below, whenever I type "working remotely," it will automatically hyperlink to the URL listed.

Some other updates worth noting include:

• Image tilting
• Better support for the GIF format (let’s just say working with GIFs was a little messy before)
• Automatic program update checking, as well as a Check for Updates option on the Help menu
• Ability to upload videos directly to MSN Soapbox (Microsoft’s video sharing community) from your hard disk and immediately embed them
• Automatic insertion of curly quotes, em-dashes, and other rich typographic characters (similar to Microsoft Word)
• A quick search box for assigning categories
• Tabs to switch between the source code, visual editor, and preview view
• Alignment commands now work on images (before they only worked with text)

Tweaks for Windows Live Writer

If you’re new to Windows Live Writer or never bothered to poke around within the options, here are a few tweaks to the settings that I’ve found helpful.

For all versions of Windows Live Writer:

• Tools > Options: Automatically save drafts… – this has gotten me out of trouble more than once (it saves your post automatically at a specified interval)
• Tools > Options: Open a new window for each post – this will save you time if you copy and paste between posts (though the Text Template plug-in described below is also helpful for this)
• Tools > Options: Remind me to add categories before publishing – if you use categories, then sometimes you’ll forget to set them.  This warns you if no categories are set when you go to publish.  There’s a similar checkbox for article tags, too
• [editing a picture] > Advanced > Default Picture Sizes – when you insert or paste an image, wouldn’t it be great if it automatically were the same width or height as the images in your other posts?  For instance, maybe your full size images should all be 493 pixels wide and caption images 195 pixels?  To set these options, click any image, select the Advanced tab within the task pane, and then click the icon of the ruler and drafting triangle.