So I finally got round to updating my twitter background, not that its that much of an achievement to anyone else with even an aota of experience with photoshop.. but for me it was a challenge!

For those of you that are interested the size you need to use is  1920 x 1200, which produces a jpeg around 110k (or at least my one was).

The twitter top banner is 66px from the top of the image, and the best position for the left bar is 25px left, width around 185px.

Hope that helps – and check it out at http://twitter.com/busbyjon

Ok, so last week I was tasked with running some classes on digital media with some of the other departments in work.  Nothing too exciting, just run them through the basics and let them know how to sell our services…. This particular one was on social media.  Now I’ve head alot of speakers talk about writing articles / books before they start writing a talk to help organise their ideas, hence why I’m doing it on this occasion, as not only is social media a rather “new” but its relatively unstructured (some will argue).
Now the more switched-on of you out there will be thinking .. by the time I write this, not only will it probably be out of date, but also, however long I write this (or teach this tomorrow) it still wont be long or detailed enough to cover everything in socia media!  Well here goes;

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xkcd – A Webcomic – Packages

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Twitter On Your BlackBerry

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To anyone thats interested I have 10 crisp new spotify invites!

Grab them quick – this beta music player is hot!

I’ve seen many attempts of companies (especially these car insurance comparison brokers) trying to find new and more “web 2.0″ methods of marketing their services (perhaps web 2.0 isn’t the right phase to use there, but more “viral”).  Perhaps the best pervious example I’ve seen of marketing car insurance virally was the “Ace Driver” game created by the award winning viral gaming company tamba, which recieved over one million visits in 14 days, and allowed a small local car insurance broker to expand from a tiny operation into a nationwide power..

But this new campaign (albiet by a large company with a huge budget) is a campaign just launched by “comparethemarket.com” (no I am not linking directly to their site).   This campaign involved a talking Meerkat discussing how many visiters they have visiting their site looking for car insurance.    Not only did this make quite an amusing advert (although not as amusing as my currently favourate advert “Pablo the Drug Mule“) but they’ve bothered to create the ensure site behind it too – which is fully functional (yes you can *ACTUALLY* compare meerkats, including their various silly hobbies).  But this isn’t without it its uses as an actual marketing campaign.  The site will periodically ask you (incase you weren’t actually there to compare Meerkats) via layer popups that you may be on the wrong site – and would you like to goto the actual “comparethemarket.com” site..  and on top of they provide references in all the usual places (the FAQ, T&Cs etc, mostly to humorous effect).

I for one will be interested to see how many referals comparethemarket.com gets from this silly site – perhaps this will prove that car insureance is not immune to a good viral marketing campaign.   I hope so…

The classic gentleman’s fight club keyboard fight involves two men entering and no keyboards leaving. Seriously this is quite funny – albiet a bit geeky..

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One of my major gripes with facebook has always been the sheer amount of people that use groups to retrieve friends numbers after loosing their phone.  At one point I was being invited to a “XXXXX got drunk and lost thier phone, NUMBERS PLEASE!!” group once a day.

I mean not only were you stupid enough to loose your phone, but you’re stupid enough to create a

The Facebook create group screen with notification

group on facebook, which not only lists your numbers, but those of the individuals silly enough to post their contact details in…! </rant>

Anyway – it seems facebook has finally got wind of all this pointless group creation and has added the following warning to the create group page… advising those of you that are creating a group that you can retrieve your friends numbers by other means!

Left-handed boys underperform at school but enjoy greater financial success in later life than right-handers, studies suggest. They appear to adapt well to life in a right-handed world and end up earning around 5 per cent more per hour.

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This is a great article by the New York Times,  some great tips on making the most out of social networking sites..

http://shiftingcareers.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/taking-the-social-networking-plunge/