I’ve compiled this list of folks in the racing and automotive industry who I was able to find on Twitter. If you think I’ve missed someone, please message me @giberti or leave it in the comments below.
@alliancecars We hope this tool will help you know a few of the cars that are available to see immediately. Things change very fast though so always call before coming.
@Alicia_at_Honda American Honda Motor Co. corporate communications staffer, all things Honda and digital media enthusiast.
@AuctionDirect (Eric Miltsch) Perfecting the online used car industry
@autoinsane News & Reviews for the Certified Car Nut
@autoline John McElroy and the Autoline team provide insider analysis and perspective on the Automotive industry.
@automart Internet’s top dealer-only website looking to help Twitterers in their car shopping experience!
@AutomotiveParts Syd’s Eastside sells used recycled, remanufactured and new aftermarket parts for American autos, trucks & equipment.
@bentoboxx (Joe Neuburger) The most Un-Hip Guy in Hollywood…and I like it that way!
@bmwblog BMWBlog is the house for all the bimmer related news, stories and photos.
@bobbychuck Exploring correlations between social media and NASCAR marketing
@bushautoblog (Adam Bush) Bush’s Auto Blog is an automotive website devoted to bringing you the latest car news and reviews daily. Clean, concise, unbiased and entertaining.
@CARandDRIVER Car and Driver is the worldwide leader in providing objective test results and expert vehicle reviews, and it’s here that you can get the inside scoop.
@CarConnection TheCarConnection.com is the Web’s Automotive Authority, offering a complete editorial source for news and reviews, shopping guides, tips and more
@driftermama I am a mother of a 5 yr old lil girl and a fiance to a funny guy.. I run a few websites, work at JCPenney, do freelance web design, and am a student soon
@driverside Because owning a car is hard, we want to make it easy.
@edmunds Edmunds.com - empowering the automotive consumer. All about cars, news, pricing, research.
@eGMCarTech A blog dedicated to providing our visitors with the latest and most reliable news on the automotive industry along with reviews and live coverage of auto shows
@FemaleRacing All the latest news regarding females in motorsports
@FordCustService (Michael Mc Elhone) We’re here to help. Click the link to submit comments or questions about our products & services. This account is run by Michael Mc Elhone, analyst at Ford.
@FordMustang Celebrating 45 years in the fast lane.
@FordRacing (Susan Pollack) PR person for Ford Racing. Giving you all the latest and greatest updates in the world of Ford Racing
@FordTrucks Durability, towing, hauling & fuel efficiency - the 2009 F-150 has it all. It’s Built Ford Tough.
@george_s The PR guy at General Motors of Canada, and I love cars… what a combo!
@GMblogs (Robyn, Lesley, Wendy, Nuria, and sometimes Adam) the official stream from GM
@gmtruckclub DFW based but World Wide Chevy & GMC Truck Club
@IndyCarSeries News Updates and more. Unofficial Twitter. Made from fan to fan.
@insideline_com Scott Oldham, Editor in Chief of Inside Line, the greatest automotive web site in the universe.
@jalopnik Jalopnik loves cars. Secret cars, concept cars, flying cars, vintage cars, tricked-out cars, red cars, black cars, blonde cars — sometimes, cars just because o
@jeepreviews (Garrett) Internet marketer and Jeep owner since 1995. My current Jeep is a 1998 TJ w/ 4″ lift, 33s, lockers, & some other trinkets. Tell me about YOUR Jeep!
@jill_anne (Jill Anne) I’m a girl who writes about cars for a living.
@kelleybluebook Official Kelley Blue Book Twitter. The leading website for New Car Prices, Used Car Prices, Blue Book Values, Car Reviews & Videos
@KickingTires (David Thomas) Journalist/Blogger at cars.com
@leeTrans I am a car nut with gasoline running through my veins. I am the CEO of a exclusive auto transport co.
@mark_atkinson (Mark Atkinson) Automotive journalist who loves driving them as much as I do writing about them. Also a real video game geek, although marriage
@michaelbanovsky (Michael Banovsky) Auto journalist / writer / photographer extraordinaire
@MissMotorMouth (Michelle Naranjo) Likes cars, dogs & people. In that order. <- in fire save in reverse.
@motorphilia (Aaron Manley Smith) Philosopher, Artist, Business Owner, Rouge Evangelist, Theological Anarchist, and working hard to make the world better for you.
@MotorTorque I am an online automotive site based in the UK. I also like SEO, SMM and green stuff.
Televisions are always a hot topic for holiday purchases and this year is no different. I was reviewing my Google Analytics numbers for AF-Design this morning and saw the annual spike in traffic to my television size calculator. This calculator is something I cobbled together one afternoon 3 or 4 years ago when trying to determine the amount of space a screen was going to take up. Surprisingly, every November and December, this page becomes one of the most visited pages on AF-Design. This year the spike is a little higher, probably due to the impending digital TV conversion. As such, I’ve created a minor update to the page to include optimal viewing distance for the screen size being calculated. Calculators of this nature are hardly complex to write, but apparently there’s a market for explaining them. Perhaps one day I’ll re-write the calculator to make it more flexible. Until then, enjoy shopping for that new set.
RSS feeds fail when you subscribe to multiple feeds covering the same general topic area. Consider Alltop’s coverage of Social Media. There are a lot of great stories provided by a huge number of great blogs, but what is the community currently buzzing about? The Zeitgeist for the vertical is missing. Each blog has it’s own tag cloud, but what about the industry as a whole? I wrote about duplication of stories before in my post about the Social Media News Glut. However, the real problem is with RSS or, more specifically, how the current generation of readers uses RSS. Readers are essentially dumb clients providing lists of content based on a time stamp within the feeds to which the user has subscribed.
Google News, breaks this read and regurgitate mold and provides an aggregation of stories based on their content. However, as a user, you can’t create a list of authoritative blogs you want aggregated into a single feed - the personalization and customization is missing. I want the alltop blogs for Social Media blended with a Google news engine providing all coverage of a topic as a series of news items and related stories. I want to get into the long tail of Social Media coverage. Even at this level, duplication still occurs and so grouping of stories would save me time.
The difference between this and Google News as it exists today, is my ability to provide content areas that I find interesting. So I can mix my Social Media news in with my PHP news to get a news source that’s highly specific to me but without duplication. The technology to do this isn’t new. Twitscoop for example attempts to tame the twitter beast by seeing what emerging trends exist and generating a tag cloud for popular terms. Google Trends does some similar work as well. Since the technology already exists, it seems almost trivial to generate an RSS reader that aggregates similar stories. I suspect an online tool, perhaps even Google PageRank, could provide some level of sorting to determine which blog is more authoritative on a specific topic, providing the best version of a specific story, while including the ability to drill down to each original source if the reader is so inclined.
Google may be heading in this direction already with their News product. Customization in the recommended for and geographic sections is evidence of this. However, I can’t add my list of feeds to the Google news engine.
Today I am working on modification of an FB application to permit installation on “pages” in addition to profiles. Facebook has switched (several months ago) to using 64bit integer values for id’s site wide. In the code I use sprintf to create stored procedure calls and couldn’t figure out why the values the the database weren’t matching up with my expectations… the following code would output 536035818 instead of the much larger 30600806890 value I expected. Clearly this is a 32bit vs 64bit.
Since updating to a fully 64 bit platform and so on really isn’t an option, I needed a work around. I composed a quick test for my value and ran it. The test as you can see, it provides output for each of the valid substitution types in sprintf.
This results with the list below. Obviously floating point numbers and strings are the only way to handle these bigint values. A simple drop in value is of course to swap %s for %d as needed, but you lose some type catching which may cause security issues. Instead, I recommend using %0.0f which will suppress the decimal portion - keeping the int an int - while keeping the numeric type checking intact.
Watch this TED video of Neil Gershenfeld entitled The beckoning promise of personal fabrication. Neil says, “it’s over”. He also discusses fungible computer resources and how the study of Computer Science restricts the promise of advancement of computing and science. I was particularly impressed with how he sees technology and advancement being driven from the bottom up instead of the top down. I think we see some application of computer resources on a pay per drink model being implemented in the cloud, however, his talk goes further and looks at computing resources being material and even atomic in nature which is where the real future lies.
MySpace has a good post explaining why you can’t use relative links within OpenSocial applications. If you’re building for the OpenSocial container and trying to make valid HTML apps, watch out for this one. I’ve written the following in a lot of applications and suspect that others have as well. The #na below will cause problems, despite being valid markup.
I’m noticing an increasing number of blogs are no longer providing links with a commenters name. While in itself a downside for folks trying to make themselves known through commenting, it does seem a good way to cut down on spam. A tip for folks looking to self promote through commenting, be sure to add a brand to your username and have good content to link to.
Looking at sites and tools like Earth, FreeBase, MediaWiki and DBpedia for inspiration, clarity and vision. Would love to hear about any other sites people have played with that provide wiki like front ends to structured data.
This last year I’ve become increasingly aware of smallish media companies, one or two employees, that seem to be trying to eek out a living by simply commenting on social media trends, this blog occasionally included. I’m not sure how much of this is due to new companies sprouting up or just my own awareness and understanding of the marketspace. The question for me becomes how many sources can cover the same news? Main stream media often takes a bias slant on stories, covering politics or other topics from a conservative, liberal, centrist, libertarian or whatever slant. The coverage of the social media space is far to narrow and doesn’t often lead to differentiation based on ideologies.
Regardless, I think we’re reaching gluttonous proportions and are in danger of becoming an echo chamber, described by Shel Isreal and Robert Scoble in Naked Conversations. Social media is definitely a huge portion of the future technology scene right now and it deserves coverage - but I think we’re covering it too much. I’m watching multiple blogs cover the same news within a few minutes of each other and that’s the part that scares me.
Consider the following post from Facebook about birthday notifications. It was picked up by Inside Facebook with commentary on how it may impact applications providing similar services as did TechCrunch and allfacebook. The saddest part is that none of them are adding additional value. None of the coverage is ground breaking or adds any real value to the experience.
Want more proof? When the fbFund winners were announced it was picked up by nearly everysitecovering Facebook news. This is actually news worthy, thousands of dollars are being given away! However, with coverage like FaceReviews near regurgitation of Facebook’s announcement and list of winners, I’d say we’re in danger of becoming spam sites. Thankfully some sites are actually reporting on the apps and adding value to the conversation.
I suspect we’ll be seeing consolidation of these blogs soon as those sites that add value stay afloat in troubling times and the others either switch focus to their real strengths or wither and die.
Last week I was traveling on the east coast and staying with a friend while working from the road. About 4 days into my trip, my Blackberry went haywire. If someone called me, the call history would immediately delete the entry. When I received an email, if I didn’t do something about it within 6 hours, the message would disappear - and horrifically end up in the trash folder, ready for deletion, on the IMAP server. The last and most tragic piece was appointments I added to the calendar just vanished when I sync’d back up with my laptop.
As panic set in about lost appointments, messages and calls - I discovered the culprit - applications. As a social media junkie, I’ve installed a number of applications, many I use almost daily, but some far less often. Applications like Yahoo! Go have been replaced with a native Flickr app which better provides the functionality I was using. A test run of tinyTwitter to replace TwitterBerry that failed and a host of other applications left the system with very little available memory. On top of that, I’d been using the native BlackBerry version of Google Maps extensively to figure out where I was and where I was going throughout the trip building a huge cache of local map data that I could review while in subways. What finally tipped me off that the system was out of memory, was when I attempted to install the MySpace application and was told there was insufficient space. I deleted a few applications and all was well with the world.
Two come to mind after this experience. First, I wish I could install apps on the 2Gb media card I have in the phone, like I do with photos. Second, some sort of notice about low main memory would have been a nice! I’m chalking this one up to a learning experience and if I’ve missed a call or appointment - you might want to call me again.
Televisions are always a hot topic for holiday purchases and this year is no different. I was reviewing my Google Analytics numbers for AF-Design this morning and saw the annual spike in traffic to my 
RSS feeds fail when you subscribe to multiple feeds covering the same general topic area. Consider 
Today I am working on modification of an FB application to permit installation on “
Last week I was traveling on the east coast and staying with a friend while working from the road. About 4 days into my trip, my Blackberry went haywire. If someone called me, the call history would immediately delete the entry. When I received an email, if I didn’t do something about it within 6 hours, the message would disappear - and horrifically end up in the trash folder, ready for deletion, on the IMAP server. The last and most tragic piece was appointments I added to the calendar just vanished when I sync’d back up with my laptop.