Have you been asked the question “What is Twitter?” or “Why would I join Twitter?”

Several people have said it to me, including grannymar.

So here’s your answer in a nice video format - Twitter in Plain English:

Based on a few recommendations on Twitter over the last week, I decided to try and have a play with Tumblr.

Tumblr themselves link to Wikipedia to explain exactly what they do:

A tumblelog is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.

I’d been looking to change up http://ellybabes.com* away from the basic, crappy looking HTML that I had originally created there. Tumblr provided me with an easy way to collate my online life, by pulling in my blog posts, Flickr photos, Del.ic.ious links and Twitter posts. It’s nicely arranged by date and it’s going to be something that will be cool to look back at in a few years time to see just what I was up to on a specific day.

Tumblr can pull in any RSS feed and info from many other sites and you can also add snippets yourself manually. It’s look is highly customizable, so you can make it look and feel just the way you want. I have great hopes for this tool and I hope that they keep developing it more in future.

* Don’t worry, my blog will stay at it’s original home: http://blog.ellybabes.com for those who just want to follow my posts and not be bogged down by everything else in my life!

Interesting Argument About Global Warming - Watch more free videos

Nothing to be said - just watch!

Spotted over on Bill’s Blog, a neat and easy way to display the countries and US states that you’ve been to during your life.

I’m hoping to bring my total up this year with a planned trip to Vietnam (yes, eagle-eyed readers will spot that I was supposed to be there a few weeks ago, but it’s been postponed due to family issues and work problems) and the Euro trip for our honeymoon will add Austria, Italy, Monaco and Luxembourg and I’ll try and swing the Vatican City when I’m back in Rome in October…

Make your own map and ‘future travels map’ over at TravBuddy!

One of the best daily comic strips on the net in my opinion just started flying back into my RSS reader yesterday. It’s been a break of several months for ‘Being Five’, but Georgie’s back!

© George Sfarnas

Lots of people are blogging this week about the new Monopoly All-Ireland edition and encouraging people to vote for their counties as only 22 of the 32 counties can appear on the board.

So I headed over to the site yesterday to cast my vote for Antrim, where I was born and bred… and i have to say, it’s an awful site!

Eoghan gave a well-received talk at BarCampDublin last weekend on basic web usability - making your sites easy to use and navigate and using standard conventions for links etc. Well I have to say that the monopoly.ie site breaks them all!

First things first, I arrived there simply wanting to vote. I scanned over the page quickly (image below) and the following three things came to mind…

1. My eyes didn’t even register the boxed links on the top left (boxed in yellow on the screenshot).
2. The first thing I really registered on was the ‘Vote for your county’ section (boxed in pink), so i ran my mouse all over there, but nothing in that area is a link!
3. Finally I returned to the top image, this was actually an animation that took about 3 secs to load and run (boxed in blue).

So where was the voting link? Study the image below and then scroll down to see the answer…

Yes, the main voting link outside of the menu bar was the little red sign at the end of the animation:

What the hell? It doesn’t even look like a link!

This morning when I clicked on the voting link all I got was a database error… They seem to have fixed that now, but I have even more problems with the site, to be honest…

On the next screen they ask you to vote by clicking on your county on the map… When the map loaded, I was presented with the following screen - see how pale and difficult to see the close button for the overlay instructions is?

Finally, I get to the voting screen and I am required to enter my details - name, email address, age… I go to type my email address and look what appears when I try to type the @ character on my keyboard…

So suddenly my keyboard input has switched to American? Oh come on Hasbro!

Finally, I chose not to vote in the end… Just as I was about to click the cast vote button, I noticed the following text:

I have read and understood the terms & conditions, & agree for the information to be shared with a 3rd party.

What freaking 3rd party? I don’t want my details passed on! So I clicked on the terms and conditions link and what did I get? A page cannot be found error!

So please don’t vote and don’t provide your details to this company - god knows what will happen to them!

This post talks a lot about Twitter - If you haven’t heard about the ‘latest internet phenomenon’ then click here to read a good definition.

For those who don’t like clicking links, Twitter is a new web service that is like mini-blogging - it allows you to post a short message of up to 140 characters to a webpage and then automatically sends this to people that have chosen to ‘follow’ your life. The updates can be sent via IM, web or to your mobile phone.

It’s interesting seeing excerpts from people’s lives, whether they are simply feeding the kids, saying that they are not feeling well or announcing good news in their lives. I haven’t yet seen anyone posting from the bathroom or announcing their illness (even if Robert Scoble did use it to announce his wife’s pregnancy!), but when big news breaks, it’s twittered very quickly!

In the same way as blogs, we have to ask the question, just how much of our lives should we share online? Do we really want to know when someone is breast-feeding the baby or going for a dump?

I’ve caught myself several times over the past few weeks about to ‘twitter’ something that I probably shouldn’t -mostly when angered by co-workers or enamoured with my fiancé…

Blogging takes longer and most people usually re-read their posts before hitting ‘publish’, but with twittering it’s much easier and faster… and like everything on the internet it’s all archived for posterity. I wonder how many people will twitter something ‘in anger’ and later regret it?

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m part of a virtual team in work, with 2 members and my manager in three different states of the US and 2 of us in Ireland. 95% of our meetings are done over the phone, so we’re well used to viewing documents from each other via NetMeeting or Communicator.

One of my team members is also colour blind so we have to be careful about how we mark up our documents (such as colour-coding items on a spreadsheet) and how we refer to items in our documents (e.g. you can’t say ‘the pink items’). He can tell strong primary colours apart, but shades of pink for example look the same to him.

I often wonder what it would be like to be colour blind, so when I stumbled across this post during the week, I found it quite interesting!

After spending a week driving around the Phoenix metropolitan area, had you asked me several days ago, I would have said that ‘Google is my best friend!’. Now, I’m not so sure…

When you’re in America, Google really is all powerful. For example, I searched for the name of a restaurant that I went to 6 months ago, because I wanted to bring some work colleagues along. Below you can see the results - in a lovely expandable section it gives me the address of the restaurant, phone number, a location map and a link to click to get directions.

These kind of results are perfect whether you live locally or are a visitor to the area, it makes life so much easier.

In comparison however, I’m back at home this week and needed to get directions to a wedding cake maker in Clonsilla (I’m in Lucan) so I can pop over for a tasting. Click on the image below to display it fully - notice anything wrong with that picture???