When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans three years ago, I was stranded in the upstate of Louisiana without my most basic tools. I was there for several weeks with only dial-up Web access and a borrowed computer to help me out. Yet, I managed to update my online diary twice a day during my evacuation and continue to operate my then-newest site Plagiarism Today.

Now, three years later, I find myself in a similar position. As I am writing this, I am evacuated for Hurricane Gustav while tending to a new blog, Inelegant Solutions (see link above) and several older ones. I also have to worry about writing jobs and consulting work even though my computers and my files are mostly packed up.

However, this time around, I am better prepared. Not only was the evacuation more smooth, but I am better able to maintain my presence online despite barely being able to see the Web.

However, making that happen requires a great deal of preparation and taking several steps before anything happens. For bloggers who want to keep writing no matter what, I would strongly urge the following steps. read more

Over at his excellent Home Office Warrior blog, Grant Griffiths outlines 10 Must-Have Twitter Tools for the Home Office Warrior. Here’s a couple examples from his list:

• My Tweeple can be used to make informed decisions when it comes to following people on twitter. You can use it to see who is following you and who you are following. And with a simple click, you can follow, unfollow, or block people all in one place.
• Quotably is another way to follow the twitter conversations. What I do like about this service is that it puts the conversations in what appears to be threads. This is actually one feature I am hoping twhirl adopts soon.

Last week, Chris Brogan wrote a post outlining fifty business ideas on using Twitter for business. Some of his ideas included:

• Twitter breaks news faster than other sources, often (especially if the news impacts online denizens).
• Twitter gives businesses a glimpse at what status messaging can do for an organization. Remember presence in the 1990s?
• Twitter brings great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn (if you look for it, and/or if you follow the right folks).

Valeria Maltoni weighs in with some great ideas on how to use Twitter for business over at Conversation Agent. One great idea is:

Try new ideas in a space where you will likely receive feedback.

The concept of being in beta is great to test whether there would be resistance to offerings and why. Although the number of Twitter users is relatively small, it is a much bigger crowd than just the one customer who bought something custom from you and thought it was a good product. Before you go ahead and make that a product, find more than one way to test its marketability.

Both posts have great ideas on what to consider and how to implement twitter in your business.

Jaiku is down right now, but it might be a good thing that it is. Jaiku Invites blog reports that Google is moving the microblogging service that could have been a serious Twitter contender to the Google Apps cloud setup. This could mean a number of thing, one being that we’ll soon be able to get internal Jaiku-ish communication within Google Apps, but the most prominent result of this should be better uptime.

It is my opinion that Jaiku could’ve taken its share of users from Twitter, as well as given other social web sites and app a run for its money, with its very lifestreamish take on microblogging. However, the site never got the push it needed, and it feel marginalized to me. Fun fact though: In Sweden, where I live, Jaiku is the microblogging site.

Many bloggers take some time at the end of their day and clean out their “pipeline” with a Speedlinking post highlighting some of the better items that they read throughout the day - but simply ran out of time to post.

Here’s a great example of a Speedlinking post from Problogger’s Darren Rowse.

Darren’s post covers 11 different topics that he discovered through reading feeds, skimming Twitter and looking at other websites & news sources. Having looked at all 11 topics in Darren’s post, I’d say that 7-8 of them were great reads that I enjoyed and learned some new knowledge from.

I remember back in the hey-day of Blog Network Watch, we would often have so much incoming news that it was difficult to post it all with an appropriate level of commentary. We’d end the day with a “Remnant” post covering the news that we simply couldn’t get to — it was our own form of speedlinking.

Do you speedlink at your blog?

Twitter wants us to know that they are trying to fight the spam hitting them. In a blog post, they outline how they combat spam, highlighting three different areas:

• Suspended Accounts which is really a better internal admin tool
• Community Powered Alerts which is really better analyzing of spam blocking by users
• Dedicated Personnel which is hiring more people to manage the spam problem

Sure, the explanations above might be my interpretation, but I believe it pretty much sums it up. This is all well and good, but what calms me the most (had I been upset, that is), is how Biz Stone wraps up the post:

There is no magic wand we can wave or switch we can flip to make it all go away. Spammers will keep finding inventive new ways to advance their motives and harm user experience and we’ll keep shutting them down and slowing their progress. We just wanted to make sure everyone knows that we are taking spam seriously.

Thanks for not bullshitting us, Biz! To be completely honest, spam isn’t such an issue for me (on Twitter). Then again, I’m not re-following everyone following, so I’m probably not that easy to get to for the spammers.

Shel Israel, formerly of FastCompany.tv, has written a great post outlining 7 tips for new Twitter users over at his Global Neighbourhoods blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

3. Celebrities don’t count. You can always start by getting followed by a few celebrity Tweeters like Scoble, Calacanis and Loic. But they give you no credibility at all because they simply follow everyone. Their purpose is to be a new media star and it works well for them. But is that what you want from Twitterville. Those of us who have been around for a while see no value in their being listed at as Followers, because they follow everyone.

Shel’s tips aren’t anything profound - but they do represent a good guide for someone new to twitter who is looking to make the right impression.

Everyone has been trying to figure out the future business model for Twitter - BusinessWeek believes that it will be advertising - and soon:

Yet, putting such personal conflicts aside, I predict Twitter will begin selling ads outside Japan, which is no doubt a usability test. American users will see banner ads soon, and don’t be surprised if your message on dining out gets side-saddled with an ad for a local restaurant. And to be fair, Microsoft’s deal valued Facebook at 100 times its then-$150 million in estimated revenues. Similar hyperbole could turn Twitter’s $28 million revenue potential into a $2.8 billion valuation.

But response rates will be low, since other social media, such as Facebook and MySpace, have fared poorly selling stuff to their users. It seems social media users are too busy being social to pay much attention to ads. As marketers see poor results, they will move their ad budgets to other, more responsive ad media. The social media value bubble will be pricked by reality.

The article covers a number of possible revenue streams for the short-messenging service used by millions worldwide… but in the end predicts that they will be acquired by a company like Google or Microsoft as a “hood ornament” to their other services.

Have you searched for comments about you or your blog on Twitter? Have you ever wondered what people are saying about you?

There is a lot you can learn by searching Twitter and monitoring popular keywords and topics. For following trends, it’s invaluable.

How to Track Keywords and Search Terms in Twitter

There are a variety of ways to track what people are saying about you and other topics. Twitscoop tracks the most popular keywords on Twitter, and features a search option. It returns a summary of the latest tweets with those terms. You can click a link to get a chart displaying the frequency and timing of the search term, giving you a visual image of the rise and fall of specific terms on Twitter. read more

Michael Arrington calls for a Fake Follow feature on Twitter, and similar on FriendFeed for that matter, so that he can stroke people’s egos. What? I actually makes sense:

[...] there are a lot of people who for some reason are greatly offended when you don’t reciprocate a follow/subscribe on Twitter or FriendFeed. When this happens (and it happens a lot), you have a choice - deal with the fallout (”that guy is such a jerk”) or just friend the person and avoid the pain.

I’ve had some of those myself, and I think Arrington i pretty spot on with the need for a less friendly follow on Twitter. It just becomes too much to handle, both for yourself and, I suspect, for Twitter when you’ve got 300+ followers. Or wherever, it probably depends on who you follow too. The story notes that Twitter “might” adopt something like this, and FriendFeed’s got features coming out to cope with it.