http://www.twitscoop.com/ – real-time chronicling of Twitter, including “trending topics”

http://www.tweetfeel.com/ – this site tries to characterize tweets around a positive or negative vibe

The Google mashup map regarding the Portland explosion

http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/03/29/29readwriteweb-boom-tweets–maps-swarm-to-pinpoint-a-myste-34026.html?src=tptw – a good writeup in the NYTimes on the PDX boom

http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-split-up-the-us.html - the fascinating mapping of Facebook data

http://www.stocktwits.com/ – using real-time Twitter data to help stock pickers decide buy or sell

http://flixup.com/ – can Twitter or other social networks predict which movies will do well, and which wont”

http://www.fanpageanalytics.com — use this site to analyze the health of your Facebook fan page

http://media.twitter.com/ – Twitter’s new blog to help media companies use Twitter better

http://twitter.com/twittermedia – Twitter’s new account to help media companies use Twitter better

http://twitter.grader.com/ – Grades the quality of your Twitter account

http://twitalyzer.com/ – Grades the quality of your Twitter account

http://socialmention.com/  — let’s you track the reputation of your brand as it’s noted in the social web

http://foursquare.com/ – the new geolocation social network and game

http://www.checkinmania.com/ – a mashup of place-based data (recommendations, for instance) gathered from place-based social networks

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/twitter/twitter.php – how the National Weather Service wants to use social networks to help it gather storm reports

http://www.rtdna.org/pages/convention-events/full-convention-coverage/tuesday–april-13–sessions/news-leadership-in-a-socially-connected-world.php  — coverage of this session from RTDNA.org

http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-split-up-the-us.htm – the fascinating and fun mapping of Facebook data

http://www.fastcompany.com/1607273/exclusive-facebook-data-guru-speaks-about-why-facebook-threatened-to-sue-him?1270609084 - a profile of Pete Warden, who built the above map, and who wanted to help Facebook scientifically analyze all its publicly-available real-time data

http://www.youtube.com/ibmadvertising#p/u/2/LWvT4cJS1RM - IBM pitches itself as a real-time-web analysis company

http://www.youtube.com/ibmadvertising#p/u/4/tp7cIOIaN0o - another spot by IBM

http://www.stocktwits.com/ - using Twitter to analyze the real-time web, and perhaps predict stock performance

http://flixup.com/ - can Twitter predict box office success?

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/03/google-tv.html – Google TV, coming soon

http://connectedtv.yahoo.com/ – Yahoo gets into the TV business

http://www.tvnewscheck.com/articles/2010/04/13/daily.18/ - details about the mobile TV coalition announced today

http://mashable.com/2010/04/06/location-history-infographic/ – funny infographic detailing the history of geolocated data

Google mashup of the PDX boom mystery… crowdsourcing in breaking news

http://www.wtvr.com/about/station/videovault/ –WTVR’s video vault showcases the value of curated content, even if it’s not news any more

http://www.rtdna.org/pages/convention-events/full-convention-coverage/tuesday–april-13–sessions/2010s-top-digital-content-tech-trends–what-news-leaders-need-to-know.php – Coverage of this session from RTDNA.org

All the while I’ve been checking out personal-branding sites like chi.mp to see if there’s a way to cleanly identify myself online and point people to all the places they can find me. But I never liked any of the implementations of these sites well enough to switch from what I already had.

Until I found Magntize. It took me about 15 minutes to create my new home page at chip.magntize.com — very simple, very clean, very professional. I like it a lot. So now I’m just going to point my chipmahaney.com domain name over to my new Magntize page, and let this new tool represent me.

I’m using Magntize’s free version, but for $9/month (pricey in my view), you can enable additional features: more design skin choices, and a resume-upload tool. I’ll stick with free because on this site, “free” works just fine.

 There’s a nifty web tool that creates these images for you – you can do it yourself.   Yeah, this picture may look like me minus 20 years, but I swear I couldn’t find a feature on this tool to make me look more age appropriate.   So I guess I’ll be “forever young” on my WANTED poster.

Things have changed quite a bit, haven’t they?

I decided, though, I needed to reclaim some online presence for myself — my own space for my own brand, such as it is.  I’ve never been an artist or a programmer.  I’m a content guy; I can write.  I wanted some place that I could publish a stream of all my posts everywhere else, as well as a place I could write longer-form material (like this post).

There’s something new out there called microblogs (actually, Twitter is a microblog at 140 characters a post). But I’m talking about something a bit more robust – specifically competing services Tumblr and Posterous.  Both are admirable and interesting attempts to create platforms for blogging and social networking.  But neither one did what I wanted to do.  My Tumblr page replicates some of the experience you’re getting on this site, but I found less flexibility and fewer features.  My Posterous page is more simple.  Posterous is all about making it easy for you to post something to the site, no matter what kind of device you’re using, but it’s not as easy to aggregate outside content on your Posterous page.

So I’m back to an old friend Wordpress.  I’m aggregating a life-stream of what I post in the middle column, via my Friendfeed.  That Friendfeed stream incorporates what I post on my Facebook and Twitter accounts and the social-bookmarking site Delicious.  The bookmarks are great for clipping interesting stories I find on the web, and saving them to read at a later time.

I’m an online guy.  I need an online space where the content is current and useful, and where I can learn and experiment with design and code, beyond what I know how to do now.  Here’s that site.  Your feedback is always welcome here.  Post a comment, or send me an e-mail at chipmahaney@gmail.com.

July 8, 2009 is also 7/8/9, which means there will be a second today when it’s 12:34:56 on 7/8/9.  (Actually there were will be two of these seconds, but we’ve already missed the first, just after midnight.)

Here’s what you do:  At that very second, 12:34:56 on 7/8/9 (today!), take a picture of yourself and post it online.  Facebook, Twitter, your own blog!  Note your location and what you were doing!  That’s it!  We’ll have a single-second record of what everyone was doing!  My friends at WCPO.com in Cincinnati are collecting and posting local photos, so if you’re in town, that’s where to post!