How to find out if someone is following you back on Twitter

I was trying to determine if one of my colleagues was following me back on Twitter and ran across Doesfollow.com.  Doesfollow offers a very simple interface that allows you to add Twitter handles to answer the question: Does _______ follow _____ ?

You just enter the twitter handles to get results like this:

There’s also a “funny” option for humorous and sarcastic responses.  This simple tool could be very helpful if you are looking into any Twitter user’s  specific connections.

I have gotten over Lady Gaga not following me back.  The President, @barackobama, does.

Originally posted at Joe Spake’s Weblog

If you like Flickr for archiving your photos and for exploring the work of other photographers, both amateur and professional, AND if you love Pinterest, here’s some good news.  Flickr has added a share button to share directly to Pinterest, and the deal struck between the company retains attribution for photos pinned.  AG Beat sums it up in this post.

If you aren’t familiar with sharing images from Flickr, here’s a short how to screencast:

Originally posted at Joe Spake’s Weblog

For a while last year it looked like we might lose  Delicious, the King of online bookmarking and my favorite curation tool, as owner Yahoo did some strategic re-arranging.  Delicious was bought by the founders of Youtube and is now rocking on as good as ever.

So what is Delicious?

Think about how you arrange files on your computer:  perhaps that MS Word document is filed in a sub-sub directory of my documents like  C:\….\MyDocuments\business\correspondence\john_smith_ltr.doc.  Delicious allows you to organize Internet content in the same way.   If you find a blog post you want to save, you simply paste the link into delicious, assign one or more keywords and the article is saved to a specific URL – for example:  http://delicious.com/joespake/socialmedia/  will take you to the articles I think are interesting enough to save.  There are lots of possibilities for sharing with this simple format, and as a bonus, Delicious lets you generate an RSS feed for the sub-directory.  Wanna subscribe to my social media saves? just go to http://www.delicious.com/v2/rss/joespake/socialmedia.   Watch this screencast to see how easy Delicious is to use.

And what does curation do for me?

Having significant information at your fingertips is important if you blog, speak, or are in any situation where you would want to share information.  You can use your curated items to archive your great work or the great work of others, and you can use the keywords to drill down to the most specific levels.  If you are selling Xwidgets as part of your inventory, you might have a keyword for Xwidgets where you curate the latest and greatest articles from the Web on that topic.  You could just forward the link (like my link above) to get your customer up to date and establish yourself as an expert.

The old saying “a picture’s worth 1000 words,”  has held true through the ages, yet many small business don’t see the real value of publishing pictures of their products and services.  Whether it’s a cleaning service, custom manufacturer, realtor, or provider of very specialized services, a picture of what you do, make or sell is almost always more appealing and memorable that a paragraph or more of descriptions.

Seeing what happens in a cotton gin is more interesting than reading about it

Flickr is the best online photo management and sharing application; and it’s free.  You can also upload videos and manage them in the same way as your photos.  Google has a long way to go with their photo system to catch up, but that’ a topic for another post.  I will leave it to you to explore Flickr’s simple interface.  You may even want to upgrade to the PRO version as you become a heavy user.  You can even make all your images private, and still use all the great Flickr management tools.

For me, Flickr’s best feature is Sharing.  Not only can you share individual pictures, galleries or slide shows to the major social media platforms but you can post directly to your blog/website, directly from Flickr. Simply link to your favorite blogging platform, Blogger, WordPress, etc. in the options, the locate a photo you want to add, and one click posts on the blog of your choice.  I seldom have to do anything with my Memphis photoblog,  except add keywords.  Posts come straight from Flickr.  Here’s an example  photo post to this blog.

This quick screencast will give you an idea of how easy this process is.

Whether you are a business person or an individual proud of your photography, a photo blog is a very effective way to showcase your work  and get your message out there in a visual medium; and Flickr makes the process a breeze.

Related articles

• Adding A Flickr Slideshow To Your Blog (everything.typepad.com)
• Quick & Easy Flickr Integration For Your WordPress Blog (pressography.com)