Saturday, February 28, 2009

Meeting with Guy Kawasaki

Posted by Craig on 2/28/2009 7 comments


















The way things progressed was surreal.

At 1:24 a.m. Monday night, I sent this message to Guy Kawasaki through Twitter: "@guykawasaki you should do an Alltop page for @breakingtweets with the different regions and topics www.breakingtweets.com."

A few friends of mine sent a similar message to him moments after in an effort to catch his attention.

Forty-eight hours later, not only had we heard from him, not only had he agreed to put Breaking Tweets on Alltop, he gave it an entire page on the popular "online magazine rack" site: http://breaking-tweets.alltop.com.

Late Wednesday night, Guy wrote this: "'Breaking Tweets' is 2nd to only Mac.Alltop today in traffic, and it's only been live for 9 hours." And shortly thereafter, he announced Breaking Tweets was the top traffic getter of the day.

No. 1 on Alltop on its first day there, not bad.

That's when things really got crazy. I received a private message from him through Twitter that he was coming to Chicago Thursday. He asked if I'd be up to meeting him for breakfast Friday and asked to meet some of the other editors.

And this morning, we met.

The experience at the Hyatt Regency McCormick was just awesome. Guy was so personable, and he took an hour out of his schedule - a whole hour - to meet with us. He gave us tons of great feedback on the site - what he liked, what he thought could be improved, how we could market it, how to promote it, how to effectively use Twitter, and how the content could be improved. I feverishly took notes and have a bunch that I'll type up later so we can start implementing some of his suggestions. And they were fantastic suggestions.

Oh yeah, and he treated us for breakfast.

You know, Forbes.com named him the No. 1 Most Influential Twitterer recently. Now I know why. He tweeted about Breaking Tweets not once, not twice, not three times - six times - to his 72,000+ followers between Wednesday and Thursday. Those tweets were retweeted more than 150 times, and we saw our traffic go up like crazy. He's going to plug us a bit more and we're going to help promote the Alltop page. It's a great connection to have for a site like ours, just getting started.

And if you read this, and I wouldn't doubt you might, thanks again Guy. Really appreciate it.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Buffalo plane crash

Posted by Craig on 2/18/2009 0 comments
Here's "my story" on the Buffalo plane crash that killed 50 people last week and made international headlines. Everyone in the Buffalo area has one, and I figured this would be worth documenting.

It was really ironic because the night this transportation nightmare occurred, I was en route to Western New York from Chicago via Amtrak.

Here's how I found out...I was on the phone with a friend around midnight, somewhere in Indiana or Ohio. I asked her to check the BBC.com headlines for a possible update on my new Web site www.breakingtweets.com. When she said, a plane crash in Buffalo was the main story, I couldn't believe it.

I thought she was joking and asked several times, are you sure? Buffalo is sometimes in the national headlines, but never international. A---what?? Plane crash? It was shocking to me, just as I'm sure it was to many other Western New York natives.

To hear about the 50 lost lives was heart-wrenching, and for it to happen in Clarence Center really blew me away. A home was destroyed, just a few miles from my home. My heart immediately went out to the family. Thinking about it more, I couldn't imagine a plane going into a house in Clarence..just couldn't! It's such a nice little neighborhood.

But what happened the next day was even harder to take. First, I found out that one of those dead, according to a preliminary list by the Buffalo News, was Alison des Forges. She's a Rwandan genocide researcher who lived in Amherst and worked for the University at Buffalo. I saw her speak once at St. John Fisher College, and we read a lot of her work for my class Rhetoric of Hate at Fisher. I really admired the work she did. To know somebody who died in the crash hurt a lot. But for something like this to happen to her, someone who devoted her life to raising awareness about the deaths of innocent people in Africa, it just blows my mind.

Then, I was driving on the Thruway (I90) that night when I passed the scene. I saw helicopters flying around and a bunch of lights in the area. It was really disturbing to see...a very emotional sight. Clarence should not get this type of attention, ever. It just didn't settle right in my stomach.

And finally, when I went over to my parents' house to visit - I learned that someone my mom works with lost her best friend in the crash. There were stories like this everywhere in the Buffalo area. If you didn't know someone in the crash, as I sadly did, you knew someone who knew someone in the crash. Really, just two degrees of separation. That's the type of tight-knit community Buffalo is.

Thoughts and prayers go out to all those who lost their lives and their families.

Friday, February 6, 2009

Here's my card!

Posted by Craig on 2/06/2009 0 comments
I now have a "business card" for the World Wide Web.

Saw this somewhere else and I think it's really cool. Here it is...click around to explore!

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

New Web site covering world news

Posted by Craig on 2/03/2009 0 comments
I have a new Web site: http://www.breakingtweets.com.

If you want to see the latest in world news from a very personal point of view, it's a great place to go. Basically, I scan the popular and ever-growing social networking site Twitter.com for comments on the latest news. I piece them together and form stories, posted only hours after news breaks.

The best part of these initial reactions...I try to select them in the geographic area the news actually broke. For example, a few moments ago I posted a story on Iran launching a home-made satellite. I scanned for messages within Iran itself first. When I noticed nobody was talking about it there (strange but true), I checked elsewhere in the world and pieced together a story.

One thing I'm stressing in this project is interactivity. I'm growing a network of followers from all over the world through the Breaking Tweets Twitter account (@breakingtweets), and send messages back and forth with many of them. I think far too often the media ignores those who actually consume their news.

I've had this idea for a while, and reading over the Australian Open "tweets" (messages on Twitter) the other day finally put me over the top. The fact it was Super Bowl weekend didn't hurt either.

It was going to start as a personal blog. But it seems to be growing into something more. People keep following. Of course that makes a lot more exciting, so we'll see where this goes...
 

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