D.C. Tweets About Politics, Does the Rest of the Nation Care?

One glance at a map that tracks trends on Twitter by region shows that politics dominates D.C. area tweeting, but does the rest of the nation care?

Trendsmap, a site that keeps tack of "real-time local Twitter trends," shows that D.C. tweeting is consumed with topics such as healthcare reform, Afghanistan, and economic growth.

Terms like "Pelosi," "Democrats," "option," "political," "#healthcare," "unveil," "growth," and "Afghanistan" are among the most popular topics in D.C. today. 

10 Rules for Blogger Outreach

Because I’m doing a blogger relations training on Friday, and because everyone loves a good Ten Rules piece, let’s do…Ten Rules for Blogger Outreach

1. Know Your Targets

How do you know whom to pitch if you’re not following the right folks in the first place? Before you reach out, get to know who’s writing about your field, and if possible get to know the kinds of topics each author seems particularly fired up about. Even on big sites such as Huffington Post or Daily Kos, different authors tend to cover their own favorite topics, and if you don’t know who writes about what, it’s very hard to…

4 Emerging Trends of the Real-Time Web

There is a lot of hype surrounding the real-time web, and much of the feeding frenzy reminds me of the RSS space four years ago — though there is a lot of potential, there is also a lot of noise. How do you navigate through it all and which developments should you be paying attention to? What are the emerging trends for companies and entrepreneurs to watch for? Here are four real-time web trends that I’m tracking.

Please share in the comments any other real-time trends that you think will be big. 

Trick or Tweet? Malware Abundant in Twitter URLs

As many as one in every 500 web addresses posted on Twitter lead to sites hosting malware, according to researchers at Kaspersky Labs who have deployed a tool that examines URLs circulating in tweets.

The spread of malware is aided by the popular use of shortened URLs on Twitter, which generally hide the real website address from users before they click on a link, preventing them from self-filtering links that appear to be dodgy.

Pittsburgh is 1st City with iPhone App

Ask not what your city can do for you; ask what your iPhone can do for your city. Starting today, Pittsburgh became the first U.S. city with its very own iPhone application, iBurgh (free, iTunes link), which allows Steel City residents to use their devices to snap pictures of civic embarrassments and hazards and upload them directly to municipal public administration.

The Very Basics of Blogger Outreach

This has been said in various forms by many before, but as I keep seeing bad examples in action, here you go: The Very Basics of Blogger Outreach (Mallard Style!). This is based mostly on my own experiences doing outreach for clients as well as when I managed online influencer outreach efforts for a group at Microsoft.

How to Use Facebook: 5 Tips for Better Social Networking

Having said that, there's no doubt that Facebook is a powerful social networking tool. So how can you best utilize it and find the good apps? In this post we aim to find out. We'll be focusing specifically on social activities, rather than the many other potential uses of Facebook (work, brand management, etc).