Category Archives: Three for Thursday
Three For Thursday: Twitter Tools
Welcome to my new blog feature – “Three for Thursday.” You may not see an installment every Thursday, but when I can manage it, I’ll be sharing three cool – er – somethings.
I usually don’t like to tweet or blog about Twitter. It seems too meta and there are plenty of experts out there who are happy to do it. This week, I thought I’d make an exception, though, and share three Twitter tools that I use extensively.
For me, Twitter is all about connections. It’s about connecting me to readers who will be interested in my fiction, finding other writers who I can connect with and following experts in various fields that I can learn from. Managing my Twitter peeps (both people I follow and those who follow me) has gotten to be a much bigger task as those numbers have grown. Many Twitter users let their followers and friends get out of control and they have a plethora of spammers in the mix. I try to work diligently to keep this from happening.
1: Twitcleaner. I screen all new followers carefully. I look at their profiles, their tweetstream and often I check their website to see whether they’re a real person or somebody trying to spam or sell me. I try to block all spammers and bots. Not only do I not want to follow them, I don’t want them following me and artificially jacking up my follower count. Some undesirables fall through the cracks, though. Twitcleaner helps me sort them out. Not all people who pop up on a Twitcleaner report are junk followers, but I analyze each and every person who comes up on this report and decide whether I want to keep following them. For example, some people in the “nothing but links” category are just bots that I quickly block, but others are providing useful information in their links – and so I keep those around. While you’re playing with Twitcleaner, be sure to check and see if you’re on a Twitcleaner report and take the necessary steps to clean up your act 
2: Friend or follow. This useful tool will help you see all the people who you follow who don’t follow you back, those who follow you but you aren’t following, and your mutual friends. There are lots of people that I follow without regard to whether they’re following me back because they provide useful information. In fact, at this moment, there are 250 of them. How you use Friend or Follow depends largely on how you want to use Twitter, but there are useful ways of sorting your peeps such as “number of followers” or “date last tweet.” Note that sometimes the sorting doesn’t work properly, so keep that in mind as you’re sifting and sorting your peeps.
3: Untweeps. Twitcleaner will pop up a list of your peeps who haven’t tweeted in over a month. I can easily envision somebody taking a long vacation or having a personal crisis and not tweeting in a month. I like to give people a longer window before calling them “inactive.” With Untweeps, you can specify your own timeframe – I typically use 90 days. Peeps who come up on this list, I will typically block so that we stop following each other, then I unblock them in case they decide to return to Twitter down the road. Again, I do this so that my follower and following lists aren’t artificially padded with inactive users. Note that Untweeps analyzes only people who you are following. For extra credit, you can use “Your Tweeter Karma” to get a list of all people who follow you (who you don’t necessarily follow) who are inactive.
I hope these tips have been helpful. What other useful Twitter tools have you found?
Three for Thursday: Writing Craft Podcasts
Welcome to my new blog feature – “Three for Thursday.” You may not see an installment every Thursday, but when I can manage it, I’ll be sharing three – er – somethings that are cool and that I think you’ll like.
This week’s “Three for Thursday” features three podcasts that I listen to having to do with writing craft. In our short attention span lifestyle, I tend to get distracted from writing craft by, well, anything shiny. Oh, a new post about self publishing? An article about Twitter? No, must focus. I have been forcibly bringing my time and attention back to writing craft because I feel that’s where I need to invest before I worry (too much) about the other things.
I listen to podcasts in the car or while exercising and I find it a very easy way to focus on the content and absorb instruction. If you haven’t tried it, follow the links below and give it a go. You don’t need to have an mp-3 player, you can listen on your computer if you like.
So, here they are:
1: “Wordplay: Helping Writers Become Authors” by K.M. Weiland. This podcast is short but sweet – each weekly episode averages around five minutes. K.M. includes personal updates and tips on a specific writerly topic. And the best part? She also has a YouTube channel with additional writerly content.
2: “The Writing Show” by Paula B. These podcasts are produced at erratic intervals (kind of like my blog posts …) and can be weekly or monthly, but they average 45 or 50 minutes of interesting editing analysis of other people’s writing. Paula will read log lines and then samples from first chapters and provide an in-depth critique. I find this tremendously helpful and it’s terrific entertainment for a long car ride (try to listen to an entire episode at once or else you risk separating a reading from its analysis).
3: “Odyssey: Fantasy Writing Workshop.” These podcasts are excerpts from lectures given at this annual writers workshop. I am just starting to dig into this wonderful content. Even though they are excerpts, the content is still very valuable. The excerpt posted on June 6, 2011 (the most recent at present) is an excerpt from Bob Mayer’s presentation on “The Original Idea.” I find these podcasts useful beyond writing fantasy.
Thanks for reading – I hope you’ve found this “Three for Thursday” to be helpful – let me know what you think in the comments!
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