Doppleganger week: who is your Facebook celeb look alike?

The literal definition (or at least according to Wikipedia) of Doppelganger is  “In the vernacular, the word “doppelgänger” has come to refer (as in German) to any double or look-alike of a person.”

On Facebook this week, the definition of Doppleganger is something like, “change your profile picture on Facebook to the picture of a celebrity you’ve been told you like.”

Fun, simple and really making quite the buzz today according to Google trends.

So I am thinking back on who I’ve been told I most look like and here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

UFC Champ Brock Lesnar

Encino Man

Or, that really cute bird in Up (who just so happens to also be named Kevin)

If none of these work I can always use the celebrity look alikes generator, FaceDouble.

5 Funny Videos I found online

It’s Saturday, so there’s nothing better to do than watch (and blog about) funny videos I found on the innernets. Enjoy!

Why I love Youtube soooo much.

Drunk guy tries to wear shorts like a shirt

Why Pro Wrestling in Mexico RULES!

Why science is cool.

I would say more than a sewer “problem” more like sewer chaos

And for tonight only, a super-happy Saturday mega bonus video! My favorite comedian, next to Russell Peters of course

Flip Video - the revolution will be in high-definition

So I bought the Flip.

If you haven’t heard of the Flip, check it out - it’s a very simple, high definition video camera about the size of a cell phone. The best part, and why I thinks it’s a game-changer, is that you can buy one for about $200, making the Flip the cheapest, high quality video camera on the market.

But this isn’t a product review for the Flip. Instead I want to share my thoughts on what I think the Flip means to the internet and our day-to-day lives.

According to Flip-makers, Pure Digital Technologies, their product currently accounts for over 13% of all U.S. camcorder sales. That’s over 1 million of these tiny cameras being carried around in people’s back pockets in the US alone (they’ve recently been launched in the UK and Canada). And that, in turn, means a lot more opportunities for people to capture all that is weird, funny and disturbing in this world - in other words, a lot more video of what we (sadly) consider news. This is very cool and for the internet I think it means a heck of a lot more interesting video being uploaded everyday.

So what does this accelerated proliferation in video uploads mean to the way we live?

To illustrate my point, consider the multitude of police beating videos online or the famous video footage of the man tasered by police at an airport who later died. How many more instances of such things will be caught on tape now that people can carry the Flip with them wherever they go, 24/7?

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Making sense of Twitter and Google Pageranks

Why is the Google Pagerank for my Twitter profile the same as Lance Armstrong’s?

So I have a bit of an obsessive personality. One of my latest obsessions is Twitter and another that I’ve for a much longer time is Google Pagerank.

Over the years I’ve found that there are 3 good rules to continuing to see your Pagerank go up:

1. Create good content consistently over time with an eye to using thoughtful keywords
2. Always be on the lookout for new high quality inbound links, and
3. Send Google blogger Matt Cutts a nice bottle of Scotch at Christmas

This is of course a very simple formula and there’s a lot going unsaid in my rules, except for the “Matt Cutts Scotch” rule which is really straightforward.

But here I am with my new Twitter obsession and I’m finding myself at a complete loss as to how Google is determining the ranking score for individual user pages. I’m assuming that the “send Matt Cutts Scotch” rule isn’t applying so I’m looking to the first two and namely the second one, because inbound quality links is a very powerful factor in a page’s Google rank.

So let’s take my Twitter page to begin with at http:www.twitter.com/kgrandia . I have 5 links back to my Twitter account and a Google pagerank of 5 out of 10, I have 1,500 followers and I’m following 1,100 people. I post new “Tweets” on Twitter about 5 or 6 times a day.

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What if your boss wants you on Google Latitude?

Lots of great questions are bubbling around the internet this week with the recent launch of Latitude for Google Maps.

If you’re not familiar with Latitude, in a nutshell it allows you track your friends whereabouts on Google Maps using the GPS system built in to their mobile device. Your friend has to allow you access to do this of course. You send them a request to track them and they have to accept before you see anything.

You can imagine the “big brother is watching” conversations that have ensued since its launch.

For me, because the service is only available to those you allow to track you, I see some much more practical ramifications of Google Latitude. For instance, what if your boss sends you a request to track your movements on Latitude? After all, it’s the company’s phone and why should you be worried about anything if you are where you say you are?

So do you let your boss follow you? And what does it say about you if you refuse the request?

I posed the question to friends and Twitter followers over the last couple of days and they had some great ideas:

Some said accept the request, and then:

1. Courier your phone around the world
2. Buy another phone and leave the work one on your desk
3. Turn off the GPS function
4. Destroy the GPS function

Someone suggested a very practical approach:

“Ask for what purpose, and if it’s for work hours only? And ask if you can follow him back.” (I think this is the best one)

Others said they would pretty much tell their boss to shove it:

1. “Just say no.”

2. “2 words: hell no. I’m already on your payroll and you want to know what I do in my free time? Forget it.” (my second favorite idea)

And finally there was the poor soul who requested to follow their boss on Latitude and, “my boss refused to let me follow him.”

So what do you think? Latitude could definitely make things awkward around the office.

Now what about when your girlfriend pings you wanting to track your every move on Latitude!?

Thanks to all the people that helped me write this post by offering up their thoughts, including @theJLV - @mkuplens - @exitpass - @illied - @jstoub - @julesjulesjules -

My Twitter and Re-Tweet traffic rules of thumb

I’ve been on Twitter now for about a year and spent enough time watching the referral traffic to my blog posts to start to nail down some general rules of thumb on how much traffic you can expect from the micro-blogging phenom.

In general, I’ve found that I get about 6 (yes, 6) unique visitors within an hour of posting a short, catchy descriptor along with my URL.

That’s 6 unique visitors from a single post on my Twitter feed and I have 1,500 followers right now and have had over 1,000 for about 6 months.

So, I would say a good rule of thumb would be 1,000 followers = 6 unique visitors. I have also found that the same rule can apply for re-tweets (when one of my followers, reposts the URL on their own Twitter feed).

So 1,000 followers = 6 unique visitors + 6 more for every Re-Tweet. It just so happens that a quick look at my most active followers, shows that most have around the same number of followers as me, so this Re-Tweet factor makes sense. This multiplier effect can actually be pretty significant if you start with 6 and then get 40 Re-Tweets that’s 6 + (6 x 40) = 246 unique visitors. Not bad, when you consider that it takes about 15 seconds to compose the twitter post and hit submit.

An interesting thing that I also noticed over time is that posts that are directly related to Twitter on average get about 10 unique visitors, versus the usual 6.

For example, this post on my Twitter feed - “My top ten tweeters not on Twitter, what do you think? http://reque.st/1687″ - referred 10 unique visitors to my blog. I haven’t written too much on Twitter, so this one is still in the “strong hunch” phase.

These numbers might sound a little depressing, I’m sure you spent a lot of time building a great Twitter profile in the hopes (at least in part) that it might end up driving some nice traffic to your site. 6 for every 1,000 followers doesn’t sound like much, but it actually is a lot.

As I mentioned, drafting a submitting post on your Twitter feed takes about 15 seconds. Those 6 visitors take a micro-second to get. Compare this to the hours it takes to work on the perfect Digg-bait post, only to see it shrivel and die on the general submission page and zero traffic back to your site.

With the way follows are set up on Twitter those 6 visitors are also the types of people who are genuinely interested in your blog post and for me at least many of my followers are fellow bloggers. So if one of those 6 write a post on their own site, that’s a HUGE pay-off for very little time investment.

And finally, remember the rule of 6 is per one thousand followers, so if you have 10,000 followers, plus 100 Re-Tweets that’s a good bit of of highly targeted traffic for doing very little. I would also assume that the 6 per thousand rule would also increase as you become more influential on Twitter and followers in that range.

Now you can imagine the nice bit of traffic Top Twitter users like Robert Scoble are generating for their posts.

But, hey this is just my rule of thumb based on a year of observing traffic referral behavior. I haven’t had the time to do any actually data analysis, so if these numbers seem way off I would stand to be corrected.

What have your observations been? Do you have any Twitter traffic rules-of-thumb?

Oh, and please follow me on Twitter if you’re interested in this type of information, I would love to get to that 10,000 mark someday!

Why Newspapers are Failing Online

There’s been a lot of stories lately about failing newspapers. In fact, in late December, 2008 the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that the internet is now used as a news source by more Americans than newspapers.

In order to survive newspapers are re-doubling their efforts to gain presence online and remain relevant.

And, apart from a few standouts, most newspapers are not doing a very good job of it. I want to share a brief, but very enlightening experience I had with one newspaper outlet that is just not getting it, The Syndey Morning Herald. Now it might seem that I’m picking on the Herald, and I kind of am, but there’s a huge number of other newspaper websites that are making the same mistakes.

So let me set up the situation.

A leaked Australian Defense Department report  was obtained by some intrepid reporters at the Sydney Morning Herald.

It was a very juicy story. So one of the bloggers on DeSmogBlog, a site I manage, wrote up a quick post based on the Herald story. So far so good. But I thought that the post would be a lot better if I could get a copy of the actual secret military report. The report was nowhere to be found on the Herald website.

So now you know the background and based on this and my attempts to get a copy of the Defense report I’ll share with you what I think are some very good reasons newspapers are failing online.

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My Top Ten Tweeters not on Twitter

(Photo credit: Lost Art of Blogging)

While I think all the people on Twitter that I follow are awesome, here’s the ten people that I think would be the coolest tweeters (with the help of my twitter friend @uncleweed):

1 to 5 are literary giants. Who else is more capable of saying amazing and profound things in 140 characters or less?

1. Haruki Murakami, Japanese writer of multiple international bestsellers, including Kafka on the Beach and the Wind Up Bird Chronicles.

2. Salman Rushdie, needs no introduction.

3. Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipau ( V. S. Naipaul), the 2001 Nobel Laureate for Literature.

4. Douglas Coupland, famous author and chronicler of Canadian culture.

5. Stephen King, think about it, those would some seriously messed up tweets!

The next five don’t really fit any single category.

6. Robert S. Mueller, the head of the FBI, tweeting about undercover spy-ops (yes, I know they wouldn’t be very undercover if he was tweeting them).

7. Robin Williams, just tweeting spontaneous random funny things all day.

8. Neil Patrick Harris, but only if his life is exactly how it was in Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.

9. J.J. Abrams, maybe the Executive Producer of Lost would slip up an tweet the ending!

And last but not least:

10. Martha Stewart, just dropping tips on how to clean the hot sauce stain out of my t-shirt and a new recipe for pistachio crusted white fish.

So those are mine (and @uncleweed’s), who would you suggest? Either leave a comment or tweet at @kgrandia.

5 very funny online videos (take 3)

Enjoy!

Ya know that litte strap on the Nintendo Wii control? Use it:

Ah,ah,ah,ah Dude looks like a lady:

Um, yah funny:

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Do you like Google’s new favicon?

I thought something was looking a little different online today.

I don’t know about you, but I’m on Google pretty much 24/7. So I am wondering what you think about Google’s new favicon?

According to Google the backstory is that it was inspired by a design submitted to them by a computer science student named André Resende, at the University of Campinas in Brazil. If that’s the case, then I think it’s a great new design and I’m happy to look at it. Now if it was in fact designed by a bunch of social psychologists to make me click on more Google ads, then…

Thoughts? Like it? Hate it? Don’t care? Leave a comment telling me what you think.