The Real Lance Brown

I’m just getting a handle on non-animated stick-like cartoon art (for my webcomic The Little Things), but that doesn’t keep me from being enticed by the idea of making animated cartoons too…

13 Fast And Furious Stick Figure Animations And Tutorials @SmashingApps.

I’m looking to push myself to write more short stories, and the best way I’ve found is to be given basic guidelines/parameters for the story. Namely, a word limit and some sort of jumping off point. It could be a characters, a scenario, a phrase or sentence, or a combination of those or whatever else. (Yes, even a picture, potentially.) Anything to build a story on.

In the spirit of the social media age, I’m asking my Twitter “tweeps” to send me suggested story prompts in the form of tweets. If all goes well, I will solicit ideas each Friday, then spend the weekend working on the story, which I’ll post and announce on Monday (or earlier).

At this point, I’m going to pick my favorite from each Friday’s submissions, and write that story. In the future, I may devise a more random way to choose the “winning” prompt.

And by winning, I mean you win the fact that my story will be based off of your suggestion. Not a huge prize to say the least, but it doesn’t take much to “enter” either. :-) Plus I’ll give you props via tweets and such, and a link with the story if/when I post it on my site. (I may want to submit it somewhere instead.)

So here are the guidelines:

1. Tweet your suggestion on Friday to @FreelanceLance, in a normal-length tweet.
2. Aside from “@FreelanceLance”, your tweet has to include a number between 200 and 2000–the word limit– and a story seed of some sort. That part is up to you.
3. I’ll take suggestions until late night Friday night (PDT), and will announce my pick then and in the morning.
4. At this point, more than one tweet/suggestion is fine, as long as you don’t mind competing with yourself. ;-)

Sound good? I really appreciate you playing along and helping me scratch my creative itch. I hope I can do your ideas some justice!

You can fire off a tweet to me via this link.

Thanks so much! If you have any questions, just post a comment here or send me a tweet.

This is a really great feature, which not only suggests 50 different angles you can pursue with your blog content, but links to a great example for each type of blog, so you can go see how it’s done.

A must-read for blogging novices, IMO. (And all my clients. Yes you!)

Conversation Agent: 50 Content Ideas that Create Buzz.

Free Alternatives to Photoshop With All the Bells, Whistles, Filters, & Layers.

Covers a lot of cool-looking options, but seems to land at the obvious destination: The GIMP.

Paul Castain’s Sales Playbook: Linkedin . . . The Right Way!.

The Problem:

Twitter’s real-time search index is not tracking everyone’s updates, and their people search is not showing everyone either. This has been reported at Twitter support, but they have not posted any news or fixed the problem for over a month.

How to check

To see if you are impacted by this, go to Twitter Search and search for: “from:yourusername”
without quotes, and with your Twitter username instead of “yourusername”

• See the results for my username: Twitter Search “from:FreelanceLance”
• Compare that with my Twitter profile, which shows that there are in fact tweets from me.
• Here are two people with ~8,000-10,000 followers who are in the same boat:
  • Peter Pek: profile |  search results
  • CJ Robinson: profile |  search results
• Actually they are worse off because they have the double whammy: they also don’t show up in People Search, as you can see: CJ Robinson |  Peter Pek
  There are results in both cases, but they do not include those two users. (I’m lucky enough to still be in people search for whatever reason.)
• Update: I just brought a restaurateur friend onto Twitter (@mainstreeteats) and he is immediately not available in People Search. See here.

Lots of other people are having the same or very similar problems, as you can see in this support thread at Twitter (which has been open since June 4) about the tweets missing from the public timeline/search, and this one (open since May 29) about the people missing from People Search.

Why it’s a problem

It’s pretty easy on the surface to see why this isn’t good, but it might not be quite as obvious why it’s a big enough deal to bother doing something about. There are a lot of ramifications for the Twitterverse that spring from this problem.

People who are not included in Twitter’s search index:

• are not indexed at hashtag-tracking sites like hashtag.org and wthashtag.org
• are not included on other sites that rely on the search database:
  • Specialized sites like (for example) 311 Tweets or industry-based directories
  • General Twitter tracking sites like Twitalyzer (which won’t add you to its index unless it can find you in Twitter’s)
• are not able to really play along with fun hashtag games, including #followfriday (plus #coolbandsmadeuncool, #1stdraftmovielines and so ons)
• are not able to really participate in important and/or topical hashtag threads (like #iranelection
• are not able to include themselves via the self-indexing function of hashtags (i.e., #tlot) or using event-based ones (like #nctweetup)
• in many cases, can not be found by name via Twitter’s people search
• can not be found in searches based on keywords
• in many cases, can not be seen when they @message someone, unless that someone is already following them
  • result: people can be giving props or thanks or saying something negative, and the @target of those words is not made aware of it
  • another result: people can be asking questions or trying to communicate with “big people” (celebs, etc.) or companies, and not be heard, and not be aware that they aren’t being heard
• are not able to enter contests or promotions that are hashtag-based (and may not even know it – see the Moonfruit example).

The bottom line is that until the search index is fixed, a large population of twitterers being arbitrarily excluded from a lot of the functions that make twitter so cool and useful. Not only are they at a disadvantage in trying to grow their network and spread their message, they are unable to do everything they could be doing for and with the Twitterverse–which does a disservice to everyone on Twitter, and to the natural organic growth that should be occurring in the community there.

The worst part about this is that these “hidden” folks have a much harder time even getting this issue out there, since they can’t hold a hashtag-based awareness campaign, and in many cases can’t be heard by the “influentials” on Twitter in order to get the word out. And Twitter seems to be pretty silent on this issue.

So it’s up to everyone to realize that this problem affects all of us on Twitter, and to demand that they make addressing this problem a top priority.

NOTE: Yes, I know Twitter is free, but let’s not kid ourselves: the people who created and run Twitter are going to make a great deal of money, and it is the “twittizenry” that has brought about the growth and momentum to make that the case. We are the value in Twitter; and I’m pretty sure the people who run it know that.

We just need to let them know what’s important to us. In this case, ending the second-class status that has been applied for whatever reason to some unknown population of Twitter users. Or to put it less dramatically:

Dear @Twitter: Please solve your search index problem. (Plz RT)

Ideally, they will respond quickly and let us know what’s up, and we won’t have to apply much pressure. They may even have a solution in the works, and all that we need to do is get some loud enough voices to ask them what’s going on.

That’s where you come in.

What to do:

• Tweet about this problem and spread the word so that everyone knows about it. (Include @Twitter in your tweets, but don’t start the tweet with it.)
• Start a #fixTWsearchplease(or something like that) hashtag campaign and try and get it into trending topics
• Ask twitter celebrities and influencers (people with big/loyal followings) to spread the word and to directly pursue Twitter themselves.
• Get in touch with groups and sites that depend on Twitter search or hashtags. Everyone who uses hashtags to organize tweeters is impacted by this.
• Check to see if you are included, and if you aren’t, get suitably perturbed about it. Tell people of your perturbery. Perturberate profusely. Also pontificate and/or pronounce, if needed.
• If you find that you or anyone else isn’t being indexed, post a message at Twitter’s support forum : here if your tweets are missing from the main search, and here if you are missing from people search. (Starting a new ticket seems to be a waste of time, as they just send generic auto-replies, according to multiple accounts.)
• If you notice someone else isn’t included, let them know. The more people who know they are being impacted by this the better. Ask them to help spread the word.
• If you have extra time, you can check to try and find high-reach twitterers who are not being indexed. They have the best chance to bypass the imposed silence and get the word out directly. And they will have motivation to do so. (Also see above about places and tweeps who rely on hashtags/search.)
• Publicly tweet to @Twitter about this. Examples:
  • Dear @Twitter: Please Fix Your Search! http://bit.ly/lInXj (Plz RT)
  • Your search isn’t working right, @Twitter! Can you tell us when it will be fixed?
  • I’m not in @Twitter’s search! What’s up with that, Twitter? http://bit.ly/lInXj
  • My friend @myfriend’s not in @Twitter’s search! What’s going on, @Twitter?
• When tweeting the word about this, be sure not to start your tweets with “@”-someone, or it will be hidden from most people’s timeline. You can just put a dot in front of it if you want; this will make sure people see that this is being talked about.

If you have any other ideas or know of a better way to get the search fix moving along, and/or get Twitter to be more forthcoming about it, please post them in the comments below. (But if you know of someone missing from search, make sure you post about it at Twitter’s support ticket (here and/or here first.)

While walking in the woods at night, I recorded this commentary about finding joy in unlikely places (or, more to the point, things). It’s just over 14 minutes long. Enjoy!

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

An accompanying drinking game, if you like: Take a drink every time I say “amazing”. Just make sure you don’t have to drive anywhere…

Web site company Moonfruit is having a contest on Twitter where people are encouraged to include #moonfruit in their tweets, with each such tweet being an entry into their random daily drawing. Problem is, Twitter’s search index is not properly tracking everyone. For example, my tweets (those with #moonfruit or without) have not shown up in Twitter’s search index for almost ten days. So is Moonfruit using that faulty index from which to find their pool of #moonfruit contest entries? My attempts to find out (by tweeting questions to @moontweet, who seems to be answering other questions freely) have been unsuccessful. So I went to their website and sent the following message using their contact form:

Hi,

Your @moontweet person seems to be ignoring my inquiries, and I’m just wondering if you have figured out some way to deal with the fact that unknown thousands of people’s tweets are not currently indexed by Twitter search. (See: http://ow.ly/gnUE)

Perhaps you are using some other index for your #moonfruit contest; again, no one has replied to my many queries. But if you are using’s Twitter’s own search index, then you are essentially defrauding a huge number of people, who are being told by your contest page that their #moonfruit tweets are entries in the contest, when actually they are not.

If you are using Twitter’s search index, and if there is a known problem with that index, then you are unfairly taking advantage of the many people who are promoting your company with no possibility of winning a prize for their efforts. I believe that is something that should be addressed by you. And if not by you, then maybe the Twitterverse can decide what to do about it for you.

Given how quickly your @moontweet person has chosen to reply to others’ tweeted questions, I have concluded that I am being ignored by them. And of course I don’t show up in Twitter search, so my protests and queries are unheard by most. But if I don’t hear back from you on this issue, I am going to take measures to bring it to very public light. I really don’t like the idea that you have all these people tweeting ads for you 24/7, and a big chunk of them aren’t being tracked and don’t even know it.

Please tell me I’m wrong; tell me your contest index shows the #moonfruit tweets that I posted as @FreelanceLance. That’s all I want to know, that mine and others’ entries are actually being treated as entries, as your contest promises.

I would appreciate a reply to this email as soon as possible. Thank you.

-Lance Brown
lance@lancebrown.org

The mission:

To compile a list of three hundred and eleven 311 fans who are on Twitter, and make it easy for other 311 fans to find and follow them!

Options:

• There is a site called NinjaFollow that will let you mass-follow folks, if they are in a comma-separated text file. (Though I don’t know if they are trustworthy; we may need to seek out another way to do bulk following.) So if we get all the usernames, we can make a text file so people can literally follow all 311 311 fans in one shot.
• We can also make a list that links to each person’s profile individually, if people want to explore the 311 that way.

The toughest part will be collecting the 311 311 fans (with them preferably being good people for other 311 fans to follow). The simplest way to collect them is for 311 fans to self-identify and ask to be on the list. (The more complicated ways involve searching 311 Tweets, and using Twitter search, etc.)

So let’s make this easy – send the 311 lovers you know that are on Twitter here. And if you are a lover of 311, post a comment letting us know your Twitter username or Twitter URL. If you get on the list, we’ll send you a tweet when the “Twitter 311 311″ reaches 311, so you can follow your fellow fans en masse. :-)

Thanks for your help!

Be well, be free,

Lance Brown
@FreelanceLance on Twitter

The Twitter 311 311 so far (not in any particular order):

1. FreelanceLance
2. prettcooljewel
3. mavro311
4. DeannasLuvn311
5. KarenAnn311
6. jessLove311
7. gus311
8. Dubmatic311
9. ExcitableJen311
10. charleen311
11. travis311
12. j311stp
13. appliedscience
14. WILLYloves311
15. MikeO311
16. * You? *

Add yourself by posting a comment below with your Twitter username or a link to your Twitter profile.

NOTE: 311 fans with public Twitter accounts may get added to this list without being asked at times; if you want to be taken off the list just let me know  at lance@lancebrown.org.

P.S. – Please don’t ask to be added to this list if you’re not really a 311 fan, or if you intend to spam the people that follow you. Thanks!

This is an excellent interview with the owner of an electronics hardware supplier who has gotten has employees to blog as a central part of his social media and marketing strategy. The lessons he has learned could serve almost any business that is unsure about taking “the plunge”.

Rick Short Explains How to Turn Staff Into Prolific Bloggers.