Pumpkinspun’s Musings

Hey Knitters…  confused on how to search for other knitters, or other things happening in the “Twitterverse”?

There are LOTS of neat tools out there that can help you find other knitters,  find out what other folks are knitting, find out about the latest knitting videos folks are talking about.    I took a few screenshots of three helpful tools you might want to start with. You’ll want to click on

Twitter Search - here I took a screen shot of two searches I did,  one for the word “knitters” and one for the word “knitting”:

Maybe you’ve heard of folks “tweeting” about words with a # before the word..  perhaps a discussion of something like #Stitches… what to do?  Throw it into the Twitter Search and be part of an ongoing conversation.   This is a great way to find other folks to follow as well!

Another Twitter search tool that you can use that updates itself in real time after a number of seconds is TweetScan

Here’s a sample search I did with this service.  Once you do a search, hang out a bit (on the real search, not the picture)  and watch it update itself:

Now.. ready to ramp it up?   Try TweetGrid!   You can follow 4 or more searches at a time, and see them update live…  in this example I put in 4 separate terms related to knitting.   It’s a bit overwhelming at first, but this is a great way to follow a bunch of search terms at once -  it’s a big picture so I’ll give you the direct link:
http://www.pumpkinspun.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/twitknit-tweetgrid.jpg

(added 1/30/09) I found this interesting people directory of folks on Twitter by interest areas, profession, all sorts of categories: Twellow A search on knitters here yields pages upon pages of very detailed info.. great if you’re looking for folks to follow:

So knitters (and spinners and weavers and you name it..) - don’t be afraid.. dive into Twitter and start poking around! I’ll follow this up in a week or so with some more suggestions on how to get the best bang out of Twitter.

Awesome weekend…. I attended my second Podcamp since July, this one down in Philly.

I guess you can count me in the camp of folks who were happy that more SEO (’Search Engine Optimization’, for the non webbie tech folks) topics were added, and as a full time web developer, I was truly grateful.

On Saturday I attended the SEM on Shoestring Budget session in the morning, presented by Beth Harte and was grateful the conversation that developed during the session, and for the chance to hear what attenders had to add. I heard about a new book, called “Groundswell“, which will be useful to me to add to my conversation with clients as I try and convince them WHY they need to pay attention to social media.

I briefly met Li Evans who had so many interesting things to say about SEO and was appreciative of her input on both the first session of the morning, and her presentation on Social Media Do’s and Don’ts session.

Two sessions on using Twitter, including “Social Media for Business and Being a REAL person” with Annie Heckenberger, and another by Howard Greenstein which was more a general conversation about Twitter. Both were very entertaining sessions as well as informative. Annie, thanks for the candy lipstick!

The Viral Marketing, Strategy, Implementation and Results session with the guys from Pandemic Labs was very interesting, and although I’m not a video person, I learned a lot from it that could be useful to a few clients.

I also had a chance to meet Wil Reynolds and Simon Heseltine in the Small Business Site Clinic session.. where I learned that we’re doing some things right with the sites we design, BUT that there are a bunch of pieces we need to pay more attention to, for natural search engine optimization on the sites we code. And that we need to partner with a few SEO firms who we trust on sites. As a designer, I don’t have time to be a full time SEO expert, and even though I try and keep up on all the changes, I was so glad to meet some SEO experts that I feel I can recommend. Thanks, Wil and Simon!

I was sorry not to be able to attend the Sunday sessions, and wished I could have cloned myself somehow, but with a 5 1/2 hour drive home, it wasn’t in the cards this time out.  I hope to get to meet many of you again….thanks podcampers!

So much more I could comment on.. perhaps in coming days/months, but since I have work to get to, I’ll close with this: Web folks.. do some googling on Podcamps… and get to one near you. They’re not all about podcasting! And artist friends… if you’re the least bit techy, think about going to one of these events. You’ll learn alot, meet many interesting folks, and have a great time.

I’ve gone and done it… got a new web host, as well as a new blog. Stay tuned.. the look will be changing once I figure out the best way to redesign for Wordpress. The brain can only deal with so much at once.

I’ll be adding new categories and links in the coming week, I hope. The knitting and recipe blogs are still up, just not linked from here yet. Hopefully I’ll also be resurrecting some old posts from my former blog, so stay tuned!