Vanity Tools for Social Media Hounds

Recently discovered more vanity tools to help business people measure or monitor their brand. My favorite is addictomatic.com because they have a cute robot mascot.

Here is a list of tools to measure your  brand visibility:

http://www.howsociable.com/  grades you on several social media services (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, YouTube)

http://tweetstats.com Colorful graphs track your (or friends) usage and conversation on Twitter.

 http://twitaholic.com/  Ranks Twitter users according to their followers.

 http://www.kurrently.com  shows you who all is sharing a keyword

http://compete.com/ Fun tool that compares traffic to specific urls. Could be very handy if you are trying to decide between selling on different platforms such as Etsy, Ebay, or Amazon.

http://socialmention.com/ One of my faves, measures strength, passion, sentiment and reach.

So why should you even care?

 Well, branding is important, and beyond that who has not googled their name to see if they come up in the engines? These are just tools that measure your web visibility across different platforms using a wide variety of metrics.  It is important however to not to place too much importance on these measurements & tools.You can be way too obsessive about this stuff and before you know it you have wasted an entire morning searching yourself, and on that note I am signing off for the weekend. Going to go cut glass and make mosaics.

My Heart is Aching

"Pelicans"

photography © Dan Collins

The photo above was shot by husband. A 16 x 20 print of this photo hangs in our living room. It was shot here a few years back at White Rock Lake. We love birds and Dan is very good at capturing them with his camera. Last night I saw the first images of oil covered birds from the gulf and felt so sick to my stomach. Looking on-line today it seems that many volunteers have stepped forward and unfortunately the biggest need at this second in time is a bit of organization and a good plan, both seem to be in short supply. I'll continue to dig for information. I would like to take a week off and go down there to wash birds. I'll see if that turns out to be a good idea.

The Mobile Bay National Estuary Program is gathering contact information here for people who want to volunteer to reduce the impacts of the oil spill. The organization notes that volunteers are not being deployed at this time, but says it will keep volunteers updated. 

Gnome Paper Toy

This little gnome paper toy was created as a Christmas papercraft in 2008. Gnomes were first mentioned in the writings of the medieval alchemist Paracelsus. Hundreds of years after Paracelsus, the idea of the gnome became incorporated into the world of fantasy literature. Although defined in different ways by different authors, gnomes are generally portrayed as creatures resembling tiny elderly men who live underground and who commonly guard a stash of treasure. Today, gnomes have shown up as garden statues and even as a mascot for the travel website, Travelocity. To build a paper gnome of your own go here and click on the link labeled "bastelbogen".

I'm back at the beginning

as if I've gone nowhere

I demand my rose and my pearl

both were lost along the way

look over this cliff

do you see tomorrow receding

beneath yesterday's waves?

every wrinkle of hope

belongs to another part of me

I don't think we can save ourselves

it is too cold, too deep

the world, family, strangers

reside in far off places, rarely visited

by myths and fables

here the spiral moon talks

to a chorus of insects

I envy your silence, your faith.

Architecture For Team up Thursday

Architecture For Team up Thursday
Originally uploaded by artpaw [rebecca collins]

Photography for a flickr group I have been playing around with this year. My image is the barn on the right. My group partner, Kris Hundt chose architecture as our theme this week. It is a fun group and you can use the group theme or create your own. All you need to play is a camera and a shooting partner.

Concept martian hovertank by Michael Fichtenmayer

Check out Michael's model available from MIG productions.









Keywords: Michael fichtenmayer 1/35 scale martian light hovertank resin cast model from mig productions F 35-652

Motor Scooter Papercraft: Honda Motocompo

From 1981 till 1983 Honda produced a tiny motor scooter known as the Motocompo. The scooter was designed to fit in the storage compartment of Honda's subcompact cars. The storage space required for the Motocompo was reduced by engineering in a retractable seat and handle bars. This 1:12 scale papercraft Motocompo was designed by Yasu Tanaka of Japan and comes in three colors: red, yellow and white. The templates for each are available here.