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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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 things to make your Twitter.com life easier

If you’re like me and use multiple social media platforms (Facebook, Digg, Twitter, blogs etc.) for work and play, then you’re also always looking for easier ways to use and integrate all of them.

Twitter is one of my favorites right now and I’ve been experimenting with all sorts of Twitter apps, userscripts and plugins to try and keep my “Tweet Time” in check. Here’s a few that I found make Twitter easier and more fun to use:

(oh, and take a minute to go to my profile and hit follow if you want my sage advice sent direct to you on your Twitter feed from time to time)

1. Twitter automatic URL shortener: far and away the simplest and best Twitter add-on. It does exactly what the name says, it automatically shortens, even when you paste them in and they go over the 140 character limit. So if the character counter says -45 in bright red after you paste in a URL, just hit submit anyways and it will be shortened automatically. Note that this is a userscript, so if you don’t have “greasemonkey” for Firefox just go here, download Greasmonkey add-on and read the very straightforward instructions. If you don’t have Firefox, then… well, you can download that here.

2. Twitter Berry: I’m a devout Blackberry user and I will never convert, especially since I found the TwitterBerry application. Very simple to use and great way to waste time away on the commuter train home. Best part about Twitterberry is that it works on your data network instead on your SMS text messaging service. To download Twitterberry, just email yourself this URL: http://orangatame.com/ota/twitterberry/ and then click on the link in the email message on your Blackberry which will send you to the download page and the instructions.

3. Friend or Follow: just type in your user name and find out who you are following on Twitter that has not reciprocated and followed you. I use it about once a month to cull the list of people I’m following down to those who are following me in return. Friend or Follow also tells you who’s following you, that you are not in turn following.

4. Twitter Facebook App: going on Twitter and answering the “What are you doing” and then clicking on over to Facebook and answering the same question in my status update bar is kind of redundant. Actually it’s not kind of redundant at all, it’s the exact definition of redundant. Instead, you can just load the Twitter Facebook app so that everytime you Tweet on Twitter it will automatically update the “What are you doing right now” section on your Facebook profile. Very cool and a good example of how mush easier life would be if all these social media platforms opened up their information to allow for such easy cross-pollination.

5. Tweet This Wordpress Plug-in: if you are blogging on Wordpress, I found that that the Tweet This Plug-in is by far the best if you want to include a button on your posts so people can easily tweet your posts.

So those are my very favorite and they’re the only ones that I found truly useful. But that’s just me. There’s hundreds of other Twitter applications on Twitter Fan Wiki Apps page to choose from so have at it and let me know what other gems you come across.

One Big Ass Salmon

That’s one big salmon found in Battle Creek

5 Easy Ways to Create a Personal Sweet Looking Twitter Profile

I’ve been getting a few questions lately about my Twitter account and how I gave it a personalized and professional touch. I would like to say that I toiled away for hours coming up with the perfect profile, but honestly it took me about half and hour or so to dramatically improve the look of my Twitter profile by downloading a free template and then making it my own with a bit of work in Photoshop.

Here’s 5 great Twitter templates you can use personalize and professionalize (is that a word?) your Twitter profile.: (for those of you who don’t have Photoshop, I’ve included a couple solutions for you as well)

1. For a clean and professional look, go to Frabrice Epelboin’s blog and check out his Photoshop template for Twitter that he makes a available as a free download. This is the one I tweaked and changed up the colors etc. and use for my Twitter profile.

2. For a bit more of a cool kid look, check out the Twitter profile template free for download at Dra Studios.

3. For those of you that don’t have Photoshop here’s a great collection of 25 Twitter templates where instead of uploading an entire template you can upload a single image, alter the color settings and give your profile a somewhat unique identity. The downside is that you can’t add in your personal information, but for a lot of people who use Twitter for fun instead of a marketing tool this is a really easy way to a add a little somethin-somethin to your profile.

4. Check this one out for a fun, yet kind of professional Twitter profile. You can download this Twitter profile template from this page - there’s also a few others you might like. For this one you’ll also need to use Photoshop.

This guy even made a video about his “TwitterBacks” website.

5. For another non-Photoshop solution for creating a personalized Twitter background, here’s a few more generic, yet way better than nothing Twitter profile options. You’ll notice that some of the ones on this page are simple image files that work well proportionately with the Twitter profile page. To do this yourself, just find an image you like, maybe grandma with her ten cats, and upload it as your profile.

I uploaded a few images to my Twitter profile and found that a good image size if you want to go this route is around 8.5 inches width (1279 pixels) by 4.7 inches height (710 pixels) and a resolution of 120 pixels/inch.

If you don’t have any good grandma/cat images laying around you can always check out Flickr for some cool creative commons images (make sure you add artist attribution to the image) or go to an image site like iStockphoto and search the millions of royalty-free high-end images for sale for around a dollar or so.