In the last two months I almost can’t live without my tweetdeck being open and active on my home computer while I work during the day, I have come to enjoy creating daily twitter poems based on random words people feed me on twitter.  I create one unique poem per weekday and it usually is based off of 9 - 13 random words provided by my twitter followers.  I also am growing rapidly in the number of followers this is in part due to the Entrecard network promoting EC users to also join up on twitter.

I continue to experiment with a new plug-in for wordpress called Twitme, which not only updates twitter each time you publish a new blog post, but you can also see your followers, directly write tweets, view your direct inbox and sent outbox all from your wordpress dashboard.  I will post a whole detailed post about it on Dragonblogger.com after I play with the plug-in for about 24 hours or so and see how it works.

Twitter has actually introduced me to some local people in Arizona a few of which came out to our Rock Show back in November, I have also developed a cadre of regulars who play my twitter game daily and enjoy providing me fuel (words) for my poems.  It is an outstanding social network in its real time ability to instantly talk to people and engage in two way conversations in real time, often you can talk about the latest CNN news stories, or even local news in your city or state.

In the meantime I welcome anyone to connect with me and chat with me on twitter, my handle is @dragonblogger.

-Justin Germino

I have written one of the most detailed posts about how bloggers can use and leverage Twitter, but this post is also about how anyone can use twitter as a social networking tool. I really have become a Twitter advocate and addict over the past week and keep it up almost constantly.

I use it to find more readers for my blog as well as building a network of people who talk about the same topics I usually discuss, like searching for Poetry and following people who write poetry blogging, or talk about NBC Heroes…etc

Go ahead and read Dragon Bloggers Twitter Guide and start getting the most out of Twitter today.

-Justin Germino

In playing with twitter I knew people were working around the default 140 character text limit for twitter. I saw many people using tinyurl version of their blog links and wanted to find out how to do it. Some quick investigation led me to the TinyURL firefox plug-in, where from the Tools menu, you can create a TinyURL from any copied link, or from the link of your current page.

This plugin works great and saves you from having to visit the Tinyurl.com website whenever you want to make a TinyURL.

Here is the link to the TinyURL Firefox Plugin

-Dragon Blogger

A fascinating and what appears to be an addicting website called whereistand.com captured over an hour of my attention today.  I was transfixed with answering and giving my input on every single question where I hadn’t taken a stand on yet.  The concept is simple, issues are posed with “Yes, No, No Opinion” type questions and you merely pick your side on the issues.

The votes are tallied, and you have the option to write extra comments to justify or explain your position better.  I have over 181 Opinions catalogued already on the site on issues ranging from Politics to Entertainment.

It is fun, addicting, and I noticed quite a few people hit my blog and coming from whereIstand.com so it does generate some traffic to your blog, though I am not sure how much yet.

-Justin Germino