frjohnsen’s posterous

I'll admit it right away: I'm a Windows fanboy, so testing Ubuntu as a work platform less than two weeks after the launch of Windows 7 seems a bit weird. Anyway, I like to have the ability to choose and customize, so last night, I decided to dual boot, with the intention of not having to say the following sentence in the next month: "Nope, I can't do that. I'm using Linux."

I read quite a few stories about 9.10 being buggy, but decided to go for the new version anyway. So here's the story in handy bullet style:

• Downloaded Ubuntu 9.10 in less than 20 minutes from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download.>
• Installed from Windows 7 RC with Daemon Tools Lite, which was smooth and took about 15 minutes. No complaints so far.
• Rebooted into Ubuntu, and that was it. A less-than-a-minute update from Update Manager, and I was up and running.
• I use Twitter pretty actively and need my Tweetdeck, which requires Adobes Flash, but this did not pose any problems. Tweetdeck is now up and running.
• Downloaded and installed Dropbox for Linux, which now is syncing my almost full 2 GB free account.

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It's been years since I last attended a proper concert, and back then, even bringing a cell phone to the arena was not allowed. And a camera? Forget about it! 

This Sunday, I saw MUSE in concert. Great show from a great band, but what struck me was how technology has changed the experience. A few
points:

• The arena, Oslo Spektrum, had an open wireless network, "muse", available for everyone. 
• A few people, granted, not many, tweeted before, during and after the show, and posted pictures to their Facebook profiles, thus instantly  spreading the word. 

This photo was taken at the beginning of the show. How many cameras and iPhones do you see?

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Sometimes, I don't have the time or energy to write a post of my own. But when I read, and share, a few stories on a daily basis, I figured I might as well share those posts here as well. So here are my recommended posts for this weekend:

• How to blog
• What Does Your Twitter Avatar Say About You?
• Amazon and Zappos, PR2.0?
• HOW TO: Translate Your Tweets
• Quid Pro No
• Facebook: Who you know; Twitter: What you know
• Three Great Articles on using Twitter for Business
• It Doesn’t Matter if the Client is Ready for Social Media

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At some point this week, some 70 of my 1,600 or so followers on Twitter "disappeared." I, along with a lot of other tweeple, wondered what happened, and now Twitter gives us the explanation:

For some time, the follower and following counts we display have been incorrect for some folks. We’re soon to push a change that will address this issue. This means that the count you see in your sidebar should match what you see on your follower and following pages.

However, a consequence of this change is that follower counts will drop for some people. In particular, those with large followings may see significant changes as we correct for spam accounts and data inconsistencies. No legitimate followings should be affected—we’re just cleaning up artifacts in the system.

Now, I wasn't aware I had that many spam-followers, but I guess Twitter's right. And I'm not missing any obvious contributors either.

Have you lost a lot of followers, and a were they all spammy? And by all means, if you're not a spammer, feel free to follow me...

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For a while, I've been trying to find a way to put my followers on Twitter on a world map. With an open API and a bunch of other mash-ups, you'd think this should be a breeze, but I haven't been able to find a good solution.

Until now. Foller.me launched in June, and digs deep in your Twitter stream to extract some interesting data.

You input a Twitter name into the searchbox and hit enter. Foller.me gets access to the profile of that user via the Twitter API, scans all the public info and the latest 200 tweets and builds up three tag clouds: topics, #hashtags and @mentions, all based on the user’s recent activity. In addition, you get a nice little Google map where your followers, at least some of them, are marked.

I suppose I should mention that this service seems very much in beta, and I did have to try a few times to get it to work.

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