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. This post was last updated January 8, 2009.

1. @AdamDenison (Adam Denison) PR guy at Chevrolet
2. @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.
3. @Alicia_at_Honda American Honda Motor Co. corporate communications staffer, all things Honda and digital media enthusiast.
4. @AuctionDirect (Eric Miltsch) Perfecting the online used car industry
5. @auto123 The Canadian Automotive Network
6. @autoblog from autoblog.nl
7. @autoblogrss from autoblog.com
8. @AutoDefense (William D. Ferreira) Former Automotive Technician now soon to be Attorney – Specailizing in Automotive Defense Law, From Mechanic’s Liens to Administrative Defense
9. @autoinsane News & Reviews for the Certified Car Nut
10. @autoline John McElroy and the Autoline team provide insider analysis and perspective on the Automotive industry.
11. @automart Internet’s top dealer-only website looking to help Twitterers in their car shopping experience!
12. @AutomotiveParts Syd’s Eastside sells used recycled, remanufactured and new aftermarket parts for American autos, trucks & equipment.
13. @AutoPromoCenter Acquire the best car lease deals from all So Cal car dealers & allow car shoppers to find & compare car lease deals. No personal info needed.
14. @autorevo AutoRevo CEO
15. @bentoboxx (Joe Neuburger) The most Un-Hip Guy in Hollywood…and I like it that way!
16. @bmwblog BMWBlog is the house for all the bimmer related news, stories and photos.
17. @bobbychuck Exploring correlations between social media and NASCAR marketing
18. @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.
19. @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.
20. @carbase Dealer website vendor, automotive SEO
21. @CarConnection TheCarConnection.com is the Web’s Automotive Authority, offering a complete editorial source for news and reviews, shopping guides, tips and more
22. @CarMagazineNews
23. @CarMaxChris PR guy learning my way in a New Media world
24. @cars Automotive news from DriversDrive.com.
25. @Carscoop Blog about cars
26. @carsetcinc Let us know how we can improve the used car buying experience. Give us your opinion, good, bad or ugly, we want to hear it!
27. @CarVideos Compiliation of awesome car videos from the internet
28. @dealexpert (Eric Pederson) Less linear, tastes great. Now trending good hearted swerve
29. @DerekRoss (Derek Ross) Motorsports Entrepreneur – Racing Subject Matter Expert
30. @desertdingo
31. @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
32. @driverside Because owning a car is hard, we want to make it easy.
33. @EasyAutoSales Online automotive classified service
34. @edmunds Edmunds.com – empowering the automotive consumer. All about cars, news, pricing, research.
35. @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
36. @egonitron (Chris Burdick)
37. @EngineDemocracy Representing the more than six million Americans who depend on good U.S. jobs from a strong and healthy domestic auto industry
38. @F1
39. @FemaleRacing All the latest news regarding females in motorsports
40. @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.
41. @FordMustang Celebrating 45 years in the fast lane.
42. @FordRacing (Susan Pollack) PR person for Ford Racing. Giving you all the latest and greatest updates in the world of Ford Racing
43. @FordTrucks Durability, towing, hauling & fuel efficiency – the 2009 F-150 has it all. It’s Built Ford Tough.
44. @george_s The PR guy at General Motors of Canada, and I love cars… what a combo!
45. @GMblogs (Robyn, Lesley, Wendy, Nuria, and sometimes Adam) the official stream from GM
46. @gmtruckclub DFW based but World Wide Chevy & GMC Truck Club
47. @gravlguts Cars, cars and more cars!
48. @GriotsGarage Griot’s Garage is the premiere source for auto enthusiasts, car care perfectionists, and garage dwellers everywhere.
49. @GTChannel Cars, cars, cars. GTChannel is all about professionally produced car videos on racing, drifting, testing, impressions and battles.
50. @h2cardadvocate (Greg Blencoe) CEO of Hydrogen Discoveries, Inc. Check out the “For hydrogen advocates only” blog above to learn about how hydrogen fuel cell cars will solve the oil crisis.
51. @hondagrrl (Brandy S) Veteran automotive journalist blogging about family, cars, and travel
52. @HorsepowerHeels (Erica Ortiz) Drag Racing Gal taking on the big boys at 200+mph
53. @ImportRPM
54. @IndyCarSeries News Updates and more. Unofficial Twitter. Made from fan to fan.
55. @insideline_com Scott Oldham, Editor in Chief of Inside Line, the greatest automotive web site in the universe.
56. @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
57. @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!
58. @jill_anne (Jill Anne) I’m a girl who writes about cars for a living.
59. @JoeSimpson (Joseph Simpson) Writer, designer, social observer. Focus is cars, auto industry, mobility and cities
60. @kelleybluebook Official Kelley Blue Book Twitter. The leading website for New Car Prices, Used Car Prices, Blue Book Values, Car Reviews & Videos
61. @KickingTires (David Thomas) Journalist/Blogger at cars.com
62. @kitcars (James Martell) Publisher of KitCarConnection.com and site devoted to kit car aficionados.
63. @LawMotors Sioux Falls Used Car Dealership. Offering sound-proof cars at thousands below others. Internet is Internet.
64. @lessoctane
65. @leeTrans I am a car nut with gasoline running through my veins. I am the CEO of a exclusive auto transport co.
66. @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
67. @michaelbanovsky (Michael Banovsky) Auto journalist / writer / photographer extraordinaire
68. @MissMotorMouth (Michelle Naranjo) Likes cars, dogs & people. In that order. <- in fire save in reverse.
69. @motorphilia (Aaron Manley Smith) Philosopher, Artist, Business Owner, Rouge Evangelist, Theological Anarchist, and working hard to make the world better for you.
70. @MotorTorque I am an online automotive site based in the UK. I also like SEO, SMM and green stuff.
71. @mpgomatic (Daniel Gray) where mileage matters …
72. @MustangEvo (Brent Wilson) MustangEvolution – Ford Mustang Community
73. @nascarinsider The dynamic duo, giving readers the inside on all things NASCAR. Feel free to drop us a question or comment!
74. @oneighturbo Your #1 site for all things VW, Audi and Porsche!
75. @OutDrive OutDrive – Autos with a twist
76. @PriceMParts Your Performance is Our Priority
77. @RaceDrive Motorsport directory
78. @RaceRemote RaceRemote Motorsports Media Network
79. @redracer (Kevin Kennedy) Racin’ (PR) and baseball (fan) Fool. EVP at PCGCampbell Marketing and Communications
80. @ridestory Love talking and writing about cars.
81. @ScottDeYager (Scott DeYager) Leading the social media efforts for Toyota in North America.
82. @ScottMonty (Scott Monty) Head of Social Media at Ford Motor Company
83. @SpeedFreaks Motorsports Radio & TV. REDEFINED.
84. @sportscar The lifestyle website for vintage, sports and collector car enthusiasts.
85. @StarAuto (Jim Even) Service manager at Star Auto Authority in suburban Chicago. Your vehicle service experts. Photography guru. Love to cook. Alpaca farmer wanna be.
86. @stergios Car Information Junky
87. @suzukiofwichita Fast, Fun, Stress-Free Car Shopping…
88. @TeslaMotors The official Tesla twitter
89. @tg_news Car News from Top Gear Magazine
90. @therealautoblog We obsessively cover the auto industry
91. @toyotanewsroom Official Tweets from Toyota USA
92. @volvo1800 Very into Moto Guzzis, Aermacchis, MG Midgets + now, again, after many years Volvo 1800s
93. @VolvoXC60 Meet the car that stops itself! The New Volvo XC60 is on the “From Sweden With Löv” Tour.
94. @wreckedmagazine The best magazine/website about Drifting on the Internet

Names and descriptions taken from Twitter profiles.

UPDATE: 12/23 – BIG thank you to @MissMotorMouth for the great list of folks to add.

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.

$big_int = 30600806890;
$format = "%d";
$new_string = sprintf($format, $big_int);
print $new_string;

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.

$big_int = 30600806890;
$type = array("%b","%c","%d","%e","%u","%f","%F","%o","%s","%x","%X");
for($i=0;$i<count($type);$i++){
        print $type[$i] . ": " . sprintf($type[$i], $big_int) . "\n";
}

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.

%b: 11111111100110100000111101010
%c: ?
%d: 536035818
%e: 3.06008e+10
%u: 536035818
%f: 30600806890.000000
%F: 30600806890.000000
%o: 3774640752
%s: 30600806890
%x: 1ff341ea
%X: 1FF341EA

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.