Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

Hey, I’m alive and stuff like that. :)


10 Mar

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Rambles, Random | No Comments »

Wow,

It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a month since I have last updated this blog.  Not really sure, its crossed my mind a few times, and I’ve even logged into wordpress and done some plug-in updates.  Oh well I guess. Its life in some way shape or form

What’s new you might ask?

Not that much really.  I’ve been spending my time slowly but diligently working on my class projects, mostly for WDMD 480.

We are starting to get a handle on what all needs to be done. One client’s site is almost ready to go, waiting on a module that we are building to make the site look cleaner, and then fix the content up a bit and it should be ready to go.

The other site is a little bit of a nightmare.  We are converting a Joomla! 1.0.x site to a 1.5.x site.  It’s not a very easy change, and on top of that we are redesigning the site.  I’m still trying to decide the best upgrade path from taking their data, and or just starting from scratch.

Ironically that is where I am now, Sitting in the computer lab working on some prototype designs and what ever else is on my to-do list that never ends.

I guess I should be off to work on that some more.

If you want more of a snapshot of what is going on with me, and my never-ending rants, be sure to check me out on twitter.com/freekie

Cheers for now,

Corey

P.S.

Things should start picking up soon on here for postings I hope :)

GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle and Branding


08 Feb

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Rants, Raves, School | No Comments »

Tonights ranting is on: Trademark and branding

Over my winter session of classes, my professor introduced us to a website. It was more so to show us how social media and random websites can have such a larger following then even our local papers.  We compared our Stevens Point Journal, to GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle.com

Alexa's Reach of Google*4 and UWSP

As you can see, GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle has a higher daily reach then even UWSP, and even a lot more than the Stevens Point Journal.

GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle’s idea was quite simple.  It was 4 iframes on the page each pointing to Google.  You could resize the windows; point them to other sites and a few other pretty cool tasks.  I made a comment to Professor Krause, about wondering how long it would take before Google complained about the use of their trademark.  The site clearly didn’t alter content or gain anything from the users, however because of the domain name, it does violate Google’s trademark claims. We were not sure how long it would be, but figured Google would likely find it soon enough.

Today during class, I went to GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle to do some side-by-side searching, to find a note from the site’s author saying the site was going to be taken down because of a take down notice that they received from Google.

I am going to miss the site, because it did come to be pretty useful.  Trademarks and branding are important to a person and company.  From Google’s side, if they don’t protect their trademark, they risk losing it.

It brings me to a new point as well.  I’ve gone by the nickname Freekie for most of my “Online” life.  I’ve moved away from it slightly, using CoreyRants.com instead of my old Freekie.net.  Mostly because the projects I’ve started on freekie.net have never worked, and Corey Rants seems to be more about what I blog about. Rants, raves and other stuff that happens in my life.    I’m thinking of possibly switching my twitter nickname from Freekie to Corey Rants.  It would create a single online presence, but haven’t decided what I want to do just yet.

I’ll keep you all updated as I progress on the Twitter handle.

Feel free to stop over to GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle.com and write the author a few well wishes.

–

Edit

–

Professor Krause also wrote about this, check out his take on the topic.

Customer Support on Twitter, and Good P.R. AT&T’s new ride.


03 Feb

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Rambles, Raves | 1 Comment »

In Class we’ve discussed how more and more companies are taking an active role in social media. The best example that comes to mind is the @ComcastCares Team. If you tweet about them, odds are you will get a response asking if they can help. This has had mixed results in the past it seems, but it’s a little nifty to get a response from a big company saying that they actually do see you, the little person.

Last night, I tweeted, asking if anyone has ever forgotten to hit send when waiting for a text message. In replying to a follower, I wrote that my phone randomly switches to SOS (Emergency Calling only) mode quite often and needs a power cycle to fix it. I tagged my tweet #att #fail.

When I woke up in the morning, I had an @reply from @ATTCustomerCare “@Freekie Hi, I’m with AT&T and saw your tweet. If you DM you contact info, I can reach out to try to help. I’m following. Thanks!” I thought that it was pretty cool, however did wonder where this was when I had phone problems in the past. So, I followed them and sent my phone number along in a Direct Message. A few hours later, I got a voicemail from AT&T’s Social Media Department. He explained who he was, and why he was calling me. While I haven’t had a chance to call them back, it was pretty cool to actually get a response and know that they have an actual department to handle such things as twitter. I do wonder what else they monitor, if it’s face book, or what else. Apparently they have a presence on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and even YouTube. It is a pretty impressive list.

I think that it is very important for companies and even people to watch what is said about them on twitter and other social media places. Doing a quick google search usually finds you a good place to start. Search.twitter.com allows you to look over tweets that have been sent as well. I have a few of my frequent searches as an RSS feed and have it into my RSS reader. I think it’d be worth checking out for most companies to keep their tweeters happy. Good PR goes along way on the internets (sic).

Corey's Rants

A Web Developer's rants, raves and randomness.