#Barbera2

#Barbera2, a set on Flickr.

#Barbera2 or a Twitter Wine Tasting Event

Tomorrow (or probably today when you read this) I will be guest at the #Barbera2 wine tasting event, together with my wife and some friends. Why? How?

Once you fully understand Twitter and you are really interacting anything can happen on/via Twitter. So it came that (on a photo) I recognised a bottle of wine in the arms of an Italian Barbera-producer visiting a Dutch tweep (Twitter-friend) and wine-importer. I tweeted all details of the wine (had a pic of the label on my iPhone) so both men were impressed, as a result the wine producer and I started following each other on Twitter and Facebook.

When some time later the wine producer was in the neighbourhood he drove by for a cup of coffee and invited us for some wine tasting event in May, #Barbera2. Also the Dutch wine-importer would be there... Tonight Samuel, his partner Loes, my wife Maddy and I enjoyed a dinner together and tomorrow we'll drive to Nizza Monferato to taste 5 Italian and 5 American Barberas with over 100 other wine enthousiasts, wine producers, wine bloggers, wine
journalists, etc. and afterwards we'll enjoy a pick-nick in Cascina Garitina's vineyard (if it stops raining). And all thanks to Twitter... and my memory for wine bottles... and the fact I always photograph the label of a good wine with my iPhone ;-)

I'll bring my iPhone and iPad along, so via Twitter and Facebook you can follow what's happening! I even believe there will be a Live Stream covering the event on the Internet, I'll tweet the link as soon as I have it.
here's the link to the Live Stream

For more information on #Barbera2 I would like to refer to the Barbera2 Blog

my Twitter Clients

screenshot TwitBird (Pro) on iPhone

When I started tweeting in April 2009 I did so from my iPhone; I evaluated some Twitter Apps and if I recall well Twitterific was my first favourite. I didn't tweet so much and hardly ever on a PC/notebook, so the twitter.com website was -and still is- somewhat unknown to me. Until I discovered TweetDeck, a nice client for Windows and Mac with some interesting features and a nice look-and-feel (user interface I should say). So from behind my desk my tweets started to become more frequent, I got more followers, causing more tweets, and so on.



TwitBird

screenshot TwitBird (Pro) on iPad

A year ago, beginning of 2010, my twitter frequency shot sky high when I started working in Switzerland, I was a lot away from home and discovered foursquare. The number of followers and tweeps grew and I needed to organise it a bit better. I starting using lists, first too many people in one list, then too many lists until I found the right equilibrium. I now have about 5 favourite lists with my favourite tweeps (although I sometimes forget to update them) and some lists with people I find interesting to follow but who need to be grouped together (in a list). Anyway, using lists I discovered the power of TwitBird (Pro), unfortunately (for some of you) only available on iPhone/iPad. Like most Apps it gives you access to your lists but the power of TwitBird is, is that you can filter already read tweets. So if I first scan my favourite lists, and then start reading my TL with all tweets I can filter the tweets I already read in the lists. This enables me to scan quickly if there's something interesting going on in Limburg or in Switzerland or in any other region, subject that I've created a list or search for and also browse what else is going on in the TL without having to read the tweets I already read twice!

HootSuite

HootSuite screenshot

If only HootSuite would have the same filter-read-tweets-functionality too, it would not be a great tool, but a perfect tool. But it hasn't, but it offers so much more:
*it runs in a browser so all settings are synced on the HootSuite-server, giving you the exact same setup wherever you login;
*tabs and streams: with so many lists & searches TweetDeck was not the best interface anymore, I prefer HootSuite where you can group up to 5 streams together on 1 tab; On a 21" monitor these 5 streams display every well next to each other;
*support for multiple accounts, not only twitter accounts, my personal Facebook account, professional Facebook group and my LinkedIn account as well! And even more if I wanted, but the free version is limited to 5 accounts, and frankly that's enough for my use;
*statistics, it was interesting to see that when I tried to sell my MacBookAir via twitter I suddenly got over 100hits on the URL to the advert;
*in the paid versions of HootSuite you can collaborate on twitter accounts with colleagues, it should be possible to appoint tweets to someone else so he/she can respond/take action. I never used this functionality so so I can't comment on it, but it sounds pretty useful for Social Media active companies.


So what about TweetDeck? After the Xth crash of AdobeAir, missing mentions (some mentions that I saw in TwitBird in my iPhone just didn't display in TweetDeck), responding to the wrong tweet because the mouse pointer/cursor suddenly decided to select another tweet then the one I wanted to respond to I gave up, found HootSuite and that's where I am today.

TwitBird on my iPhone
TwitBird and HootSuite on my new iPad2
And HootSuite on my Windows/OSX PCs/notebooks!

What do you use and why?

Festa degli Asparagi - RT21 & Club41 n.3 Bassano del Grappa

Festa degli Asparagi - RT21 & Club41 n.3 Bassano del Grappa, a set on Flickr.

pictures of the "Festa degli Asparagi" yesterday (Sunday, April 17th 2011) organized by RoundTable 21 and Club41 N.3 from Bassano del Grappa

Venezia 16-4-2011

Venezia 16-4-2011, a set on Flickr.

pictures, impressions of our trip to Venice

create your own "newspaper"

I hardly don't read newspapers anymore, well not the way I used to which was folding page by page, quickly scanning the bold headlines and sometimes reading the first lines and maybe an entire article. But today there's Twitter! Important and less important news is brought to me by tweeps (people you follow on twitter). Anything from yesterday's bomb at Moscow airport to the 123rd glimp of the iPhone5. Sometimes it is brought to me by a serious journalist, a news channel or just a friend with an even nerdier interest in gadgets as me. Important, funny, useful and useless news, it's all there for me.

Since 140 characters are usually not even most of these tweets contain a link to a blog, a newssite, a YouTube video, etc. When travelling I just bookmark this links for later. I use ReadItLater which is integrated in my iPhone's Twitter-client and is integrated (via a Plugin) into my browsers on my laptops and PC. ReadItLater offers me the possibility to read the complete news-article, watch the video on a larger screen when I want to. 

Today a suggestion to one of the journalists I follow, @italiansweep a Dutch correspondent in Italy, led to a discussion with another tweep about the impact of my suggestion. So I started to search for an easy and fast solution, to prove I was right. My suggestion (to the journalist) was the following "why don't you share the most interesting articles you come across with us, and why not make a paper.li-like newspaper from it". I presume that as a foreign correspondent part of his day is filled with scanning the local (in this case Italian) media for interesting news. News that could be interesting for his home-country (the Netherlands in this case). Sometimes this results in an article for a newspaper, a blog or a video-item for an news website. Sometimes even an entire documentary. But many times he will read interesting news but decide not to use it or it is rejected by his clients (newspapers, radiostations, etc). But I am personally very interested in what @italiansweep considers interesting and would like him to share this info with me and others. Of course he  needs to oblige certain rules (copyright etc), but pointing his followers to interesting content is no problem. 

Okay so far the background, now to my solution. I've created a 5 step manual:

1. go to ReadItLater and register;

2. download and install one of the ReadItLater plugins into your browser(s), this adds a button to your browser allowing you to add an URL to your RIL-list;

( 2b. if you use a smartphone, add the App there as well and/or add it to your twitter client allowing you to save links included in tweets )

3. go and collect articles, pictures, video's... in other words: CONTENT and bookmark them to your RIL-list;

4. go back to ReadItLater, login and check the result, maybe delete some content; 

5. register for the RIL-Digest and share this with the world like I did, here is my public ReadItLater-list in Digest presentation

so from now on publishing your "newspaper" is nothing more then bookmarking interesting articles, et voila, they are added to your RIL-newspaper (Digest). Of course you regularly have to delete older content to keep it dynamic and clear!