While I was at the IA Summit I sent out ALOT of tweets. The final tally was somewhere around 360, and I only lost ~10 followers with all that activity. The challenge when I returned home was getting all my tweets organized and in a digestible format. Luckily, Yoni (twitter) has built an amazing tool that helps for people that take their tweets and turn them into blog posts.

His tool takes just two inputs, a username and a hashtag(s). Using these inputs, it pulls out any tweets that user has made that contain the hashtag(s) and cuts the hashtag(s) out of the results. Some additional features include reversing the order, exporting as an excel spreadsheet, or exporting as html. The excel format wasn’t very helpful for me, but I image others find it very useful. I prefer the html export, this allows me to just copy and paste between two windows.

Bottom line anyone that uses twitter to keep notes or provide live coverage of an event for people should us this tool. Here is the link to the Tweet to Blog tool, and several twitter based tools: http://twitter.infinityplusone.com/

The final track that I attended was given by Whitney Hess (twitter), and was by far one of the most inspiring and influtential tracks of the IA Summit. Her message was simple, to be a success and be part of a community you have to get involved. The following are my tweets from her session:

http://thisisindexed.com/ Takes complex problems and talks about them in simple lines

It is bullshit to say that you can’t change the world if no one knows your name.

“Your voice and your name can be decoupled — that one CAN make a diff behind the scenes” – @KathySierra

Unless you practice your talents and share your knowledge you will never be a rockstar.

Can you explain why you are important in a single sentence? If not than that is something you need to work on.

Know what your strengths are and your weaknesses are. Accept your weaknesses and build on your strengths.

Having a blog is about sharing your expertise, it doesn’t help keeping that knowledge to yourself.

USE TWITTER – that is all D

Share your ideas and opinions, find people that inspire you, communicate with them. Find your voice.

Don’t be a lurker on twitter, you need to engage and bring value to the group

Google is your resume, your online presence is out there and people will find it.

You are a representative of the community, if you make yourself look bad you make us all look bad.

You don’t have to be an extrovert to network, some of the best connectors are introverts.

Connect with everyone on LinkedIn if you meet them personally they deserve to be on there.

There is no reason to be private on any social network, make yourself public.

Use twitter to network, use your real name, fill out the one-liner, link to your blog.There is no reason to protect your tweets

Think hard about what you say and what that says about you.

No matter what social network you use link back to your blog, use the same email address, and use the same usernames.

Seek out events, no matter where you live there is a community there. You just have to find it.

How to overcome shyness? Have a goal that you want to accomplish before meeting people.

The best thing to do is just walk up to someone and say ‘Hi’, if you do this you are networking

Always have a card to give someone, even if you just meet them in passing.

Follow up with everyone that you meet and solidify the relationship that you started.

Find out what people are working on, learn about their work. You are able to reach out to them for help in the future

In the end we are each other’s resources, we can’t be everything and we need to know who to go to for help.

Exude Confidence – “If you think you can or think you can’t, you are right” Henry Ford.

3 types of confidence – about yourself, making others feel confident in you, and helping others find their own confidence.

Which of these three are you good at? Identify that, but try to build up the other two.

Act ‘as if’ you are worthy. Doing that will eventually make you worthy.

Be willing to walk away if you find yourself surrounded by negativity. Remember that not all feedback is negative.

Admit your mistakes, learn from them and move on.

“God gave us two ears and one mouth to use in proportion” – unknown.

How to become a leader? Organize events, mentor others, give feedback and recognition, connect the dots.

Call Mentorship going out for coffee if it makes you feel better.

All this is about communicating hope, optimism, and enthusiasm. Take that in and share it.

We are helping each other get to a better place. So in the end don’t feed the trolls. Ignore the haters.

There are no rules, she is just making all this up anyway , but you need to follow your gut.

Go forth unafraid @whitneyhess

‘I think a lot of people want to be modest” – @whitneyhess

“You can put better stuff out there on your blog than my mom.” – Whitney Hess

Following the advise that Whitney puts forth, anyone should be able to become a vocal advocate in their field. She shows how tools like blogging, Twitter, and LinkedIn can be used to get yourself out there and how best to use them. If Whitney wasn’t able to get someone to go out and starting blogging, twittering, and connecting with like minded folks I don’t know what would.

Evangelizing Yourself

View more presentations from Whitney Hess.

One of the biggest challenges I have had getting started with blogging is coming up with topics that haven’t rehashed over and over again. I have tons of ideas that pop up in my head, and thanks to Google Tasks I have been able to keep up a decent number of posts in the hopper. Every now and then, I still struggle to come up with meaningful content to post out there for the world.

A solution I have been trying, and have had some success with, is see what my twitter network wants to hear about. Here are the tweets I got last week when I opened myself up to all my twitter friends:

@barrykirk – Barry Kirk

@nathanverrill – Nathan Verrill

Obviously, this post has been inspired by Barry’s tweet. It does raise the question though, does crowd-sourcing my blog posts out to twitter make me lazy?

Personally, I don’t think so. If there is one thing I am good at, it is having a conversation with someone no matter what the topic is. I don’t want my blog to be just another brain dumb of my views and ideas, I want it to be an on going conversation with my readers. By crowd-sourcing the topics on my blog, this just a way for me to starting a conversation with the community. I have devoted this blog to posts about Interaction Design, Web 2.0 Stuff, and Fatherhood (going to be a dad in about 4 months.) All of these topics have deep and extensive communities, with tons of content already in existence.

My method of interjecting myself into the overall conversations is to see what my peers want to hear about, or maybe what my response would be to something they have written. If successful, I see this as a great way to keep myself involved both in my blog and the community of Interaction Designers, Web Guru’s, and other dads out there.