I've written previously about imposing limits on the number of people I follow on Twitter. Since that post I've raised the limit from 100 to around 150. This is still a relatively low number, especially compared to some in my Tweetstream who follow thousands, or even tens of thousands, of others.

But if you're like me, and aren't logged into Twitter during every waking moment (according to Klout.com I am an "Explorer"), it can still be difficult to separate signal from noise no matter how selective you are about whom you follow. On weekends, or when a deadline looms, I avoid social media altogether. Sometimes—gasp!—I go two whole days without turning on a computer. When I do log back in, there is always catching up to do.

Since Twitter introduced Lists—which allow you to create custom categories of followees, such as "New Yorkers," "entertainers," athletes," etc.—in late 2009, catching up has become easier. I have a handful of Lists, but there is one that I check constantly to be sure not to miss anything. I call it "Offline Friends" and it comprises all the people I follow on Twitter who I also know personally. (I'm sure a snazzier title could be conceived.) After a long social-media fast, these are the people whose updates I want to see. In some ways, it's my Twitter alternative to Facebook, and it works.

If I were allowed only one Twitter List, this is the one I would keep. I'm sure this is obvious to some, but this simple list has had major impact on my enjoyment of Twitter, so I figured I'd share.

Are you following me on Twitter? I'm @noahvail. Stop on by.

To help with this post I brought in a guest blogger, my good friend Greg Gibson, whose Elf Needs Food blog covers videogames, the gaming industry, and movie and book reviews. He's also on Twitter: @ElfNeedsFood.

1. Yahoo! News
I was excited when Google introduced Google News. It made sense to me at the time: Google's engineers are so smart that they can program algorithms that find interesting news much better than people can, right?!? Wrong. When I want a firehose of information, I go to popurls.com. When I want the news of the day, in the way I once might have read a daily newspaper, I go to Yahoo! News. Google News is only good for their keyword alerts. CNN.com gives me a headache.

2. YUI
The YUI library is an extensive collection of JavaScript and CSS tools. Basically, YUI provides everything a front-end web developer/designer needs, short of HTML and content.  Because Yahoo! uses YUI for its own applications, the code has already been tested at one of the most visited sites on the web, it has to work in all major browsers, and it's likely to be supported and updated for a long time to come.

There's no other library that provides a combined JavaScript and CSS solution of YUI's caliber, but even separately, I'd probably use its tools in my web projects. YUI's CSS framework is the best I've tried (Blueprint is pretty nice, too). As for JavaScript libraries, picking one is often a matter of preference. For example, plenty of people love jQuery, which has a great community that creates plugins to extend the library. I prefer YUI, because it has so much included functionality and it mixes in seamlessly with the other JavaScript I write.

Finally, the genius of YUI isn't just the library itself. Yahoo! has stocked the developers' area of their site with excellent videos, examples, and documentation, making it easy to get started with the library -- and providing a path to becoming an expert.

3. Yahoo! Finance
I once had a client who was interested in advertising on Yahoo! Finance. No problem, I thought. I'll just find the advertising contact info on their site, call them up, and I'm sure they'll be glad to take your money. After repeated phone calls and voicemails and emails, I got nowhere. I finally had to call in a favor from an ad agency to get someone's direct line at Yahoo!, only to learn that they have separate departments for handling agency inquiries and direct purchases. I also learned that the minimum ad buy is $25,000—not a huge sum in the advertising world but quite different from Google's $0.01 minimum.

So why is it so hard to advertise on Yahoo! Finance? Because it's been a great site since it launched and they've never relinquished their lead. More importantly, it's where financial advisors and other sophisticated investors go—along with the masses. When you ask investment professionals what sites they visit, the top three are usually CNN, ESPN and Yahoo! Finance. Yahoo! knows they've got a good thing with Finance. They should still pick up the phone, though.

4. Yahoo! TV Listings
    Yahoo! Movie Showtimes
These no-frills utilities are the best at what they do precisely because they're no-frills. When looking up movie times and TV show listings, I just want the information displayed cleanly and quickly. Yahoo!'s TV and movie listings meet those two qualifications better than any other site on the web. (Recently, though, I've found myself using iPhone apps for both these tasks.)

5. Yahoo! Sports
From a sports site, I usually want two things: analysis and in-game box scores (which I usually prefer to animated gamecasts).

ESPN is the king of reporting on trade rumors, team politics, and sports-related social issues. These are easy things to write about, because they require little expertise, just access. But the network seems to have very few analysts who really understand -- or even seem to watch -- the sports they cover.

About a dozen full-time basketball writers work for ESPN, only two of whom (John Hollinger and Henry Abbott) are credible hoops junkies. Yahoo's "Ball Don't Lie" blog -- which is just one part of their basketball coverage -- has just as many. And one of those contributors, Kelly Dwyer, is the single best basketball analyst at any mainstream site. He's a fan, he understands the game, and he can write.

From a box score, I just want something up-to-date, quick-loading, and easy on the browser. Yahoo!'s and ESPN's box score formats are pretty similar, but Yahoo! does a better job of organizing data for a quick snapshot of the game in progress. Without scrolling my browser down, a Yahoo! baseball box score features the inning-by-inning score, the team lineups, and a display showing many runners are on base, who's pitching, who's up to bat, the current balls-and-strikes count, and what happened on the last pitch. ESPN's box scores show only the inning-by-inning scoring.

(As a recent convert to English Premier League soccer, Yahoo!'s Eurosport Football site is also the best gameday resource I've found, at least so far.)

Honorable Mention: Yahoo! Mail
Yahoo! Mail was once the clear winner over its competitors—Hotmail and AOL—and then Gmail came along and squashed them like a bug. I dutifully got a Gmail invite (from Greg, now that I think about it) but never made the switch, not completely anyway. The threaded conversations in Gmail are great once you get the hang of them but sometimes there is comfort in the familiar way of doing things, even if Google engineers think it's silly. And since Yahoo!'s acquisition of Oddpost in 2004 allowed them to introduce AJAX functionality, they have had a pretty damn good email client. Gmail is probably better, but to me it's a marginal difference and not enough to make me force my friends and family to update their address books.

Honorable Mention: Yahoo! Personals
I haven't used this site in about eight years, but it did allow my eventual wife to discover me. I can't complain about a 100% success rate.

I moved to Austin in summer 2009, but I've felt it was my destiny to live here since 1986, when the Dead Milkmen's Eat Your Paisley! was released. On "Six Days" the band sings about all the crappy cities they've visited. But the final verse is about Austin:

I loved it in Austin
I wanted to stay
Cheap rent and Lone Star beer
Lots o' places to stay

(Complete lyrics here.)

Cheap rent is a thing of the past but we still have the beer, and so much more. In 2003 I married a Texan (and Austinite of 10+ years), then lived in Seguin, TX for a bit (escaping to ATX every chance we got), spent four years back east, and now we're finally where we belong.

I realize I'm a complete interloper here, but thanks in large part to Twitter and, more recently, membership in the Austin chapter of the American Marketing Association, I'm beginning to feel part of the community. And since I'm a (mostly) silent partner in Grupthink, I felt it was appropriate to build a Grupthink community for my fellow Austinites.

Visit austinites.grupthink.com.

In Grupthink communities you ask open-ended question (i.e. not yes/no) and then allow the community to add, vote upon, and rank answers. Newspapers are beginning to use Grupthink to power their "Best of (City)" issues. It's all a great deal of fun once the community reaches critical mass.

Anyway, if you're in Austin, or if you like Austin, or if you're at least pretty sure you can find Austin on a map, please join in. If you don't want to create yet another user ID you can log in with Facebook Connect.

Thanks. I love you, Austin!  

Some of my colleagues in marketing asked me to share my knowledge of the web—everything from HTML to social media. They think it will help them in their careers, and it will. But I plan to make them suffer.

On your feet, soldiers!

This next drill is even more self-serving than the last. But it's my blog, I am the drill sergeant, and what I say GOES. It is also more fun—although your having fun is the least of my concerns.

You have one week to complete ONE of the following tasks:

1. Earn 50 karma points on Reddit;

OR

2. Earn 50 Grupie points on Grupthink;

OR

3. Post something on Twitter that gets retweeted.

Post proof of task completion in the comments section of this blog post. Extra credit for completing more than one of the tasks.

"You're a musician? What instrument?"

"Guitar-bass-drums. Mostly."

I have some version of this conversation every week. If it's not about music, it's about my career trajectory. You know, the usual path of the film and art major turned restaurant critic turned NYC subway musician who became a marketing manager for a financial services company and also built websites and is now a consultant. (I'm leaving a bunch out.)

Refusing to specialize was never a conscious decision. At the time it felt more like dabbling until I achieved competence and then moving onto something else. But I now realize that my "failure" to decide what to do with my life has become my biggest asset. Life is a process of constant adaptation and if I'd stuck with some of my earlier interests at the expense of later ones, at best I'd be a mediocre comic-book artist. At worst, a juggler.

You never know what skills will benefit you later in life. The computer science courses I took in college taught me DOS and Lotus 1-2-3 and nothing about the web. But outside of class I guiltily frequented the pre-web Prodigy network which turned out to be time well spent. As a musician I was never in any danger of commercial success but I learned how to collaborate with other creative people, particularly when I worked with directors and actors at Inverse Theater Company. My writing, most of it doggerel,  was published in a few places but more importantly taught me to operate on tight deadlines. And come to think of it, being able to juggle five tennis balls or three machetes is incredibly dorky but requires significant grace under pressure.

Some call me a jack of all trades, which implies, of course, "master of none." But there's an older, better word for it: polymath. It's not such a bad path to take.       

It was 1987, close to midnight on a warm Miami night. My friend M and I were taking a shortcut home across an unlit golf course. We were about halfway across when we heard angry voices coming from about 50 yards behind us, then fast-approaching footsteps.

"RUN!" said M, and we ran. I had short legs and was wearing heavy combat boots. M quickly outpaced me and disappeared into the night. I was being chased, alone in the dark, and my predator was closing in. This was not going to end well.

I was 15 and had begun hanging around M a lot. He was a skater kid, a freckled blond who wore baggy shorts and flannel. He lived with his mom in a small house in Coral Gables. His mom was never home so M would skip school, smoke cigarettes and listen to records all day. He had an amazing collection of UK-import Dickies records from the late 70s. His favorite band, though, was Social Distortion. He wore their t-shirt under his flannel practically every day.

M did lots of things to get attention. He gave the impression of someone who did a lot of drugs, although he didn't have any money for drugs, and I never saw him do drugs. One time he said he'd been in a mosh pit the night before and someone with a spiked ring had punched him and cut the inside of his mouth. He pulled down his lower lip to reveal a wide slice along the ridge of his gum. It was years later before I figured out that everyone has that "slice" on their gums. He also gave me one of his Minor Threat records (the iconic one pictured here)—hinting that he wasn't going to be around much longer so he might as well. (M survived at least four more years; I last saw him at UM. I was a student; he was just riding a BMX bike around campus, completely unchanged. A Google search today reveals nothing.)

I too did things to get attention. In fact, just that day M had used a Bic disposable razor to give me a mohawk. It was uneven and left large bloody cuts on my scalp. Later, my driver's ed coach would remark that I had a dead ferret on my head. I also had braces and was small for my age. My appearance during this stage of adolescence once prompted a child crossing the street in ethnically diverse South Miami to remark, "Damn, that's one ugly-ass cracker!" Looking back, he had a point, and my haircut didn't do me any favors.

So I'm running as fast as I can, running for my life, even, and it's not fast enough. Someone bigger and faster and stronger than me, who wants to do me harm, is quite literally breathing down my neck. I reach the far end of the golf course, cross into the backyard of one of the houses on the perimeter when a large hand grabs hold of my t-shirt and yanks me to a stop. I'm caught. I'm dead.

He's winded. He's still holding onto my t-shirt but he's doubled over, catching his breath. "I can't believe I caught you," he wheezes. He's big, much bigger than me, but kind of pasty-looking and baby-faced. He's wearing an unseasonable leather jacket and an unfashionable fedora. He's not someone I would ordinarily find intimidating but now that he's chased me across a golf course and dragged me to a stop I'm plenty intimidated. I'm long past "fight-or-flight" having already fled and lost. Now there is no choice but to fight and I am going to get my ass kicked.

Then a funny thing happens. We look up at the house in whose backyard I am about to get pounded. The house has large sliding-glass doors that lead to a bedroom. A bedside lamp is on, and on the bed are a man and a woman, naked, chubby, mid-coitus. My oppressor releases his grip on my t-shirt and for a moment we just stand there, watching, open-mouthed. Then I quietly slip away into the darkness.

Some of my colleagues in marketing asked me to share my knowledge of the web—everything from HTML to social media. They think it will help them in their careers, and it will. But I plan to make them suffer. I set up server space to get them started (the single nice thing I will do for them during this boot camp), but, particularly if you have a web host (I recommend Modwest), you can play along at home on most of the drills. If you're willing to sweat blood, that is.

Drill #1

You have 24 hours to complete this task. Do not ask anyone—especially not me—for help until you have fully Googled the problem on your own.

1. Download and install a free FTP client. Log in using the protocols I emailed you. Create a directory named whatever you want in /htdocs/www/bootcamp/. (This is your personal directory. You'll see that I have a directory named "sarge.")
2. Create a second directory within your personal directory. Name this one "images."
3. Find a picture of someone, preferably someone you know, doing something stupid. (We are going to ridicule this person publicly.) Upload the image to your /images directory.
4. Next, open a new document in Notepad or Wordpad or SimpleText (not Microsoft Word).
5. Go to this this page and copy the source code into your document.
   
6. In your document, change the code so that page title, headline, and text say something different, and so that it references your image instead of mine. 
7. Save your document as "index.html"
8. Upload the document to your personal directory. 
9. If you did everything correctly, your web page will appear at www.avenuedmedia.com/bootcamp/name-of-your-personal-directory/
10. Post a link to your page in the comments of this blog post.
    

I don't find Facebook addictive or even interesting.

I check Facebook once or twice a day and skim updates from friends and family. It's nice to know that individuals with whom I share varying degrees of closeness are still kicking. But that's about all I get out of it: Confirmation that certain people are still alive. Surely there's more to it than that.

The writer Corey Doctorow argues that the subtext of the banal musings posted on Facebook is "I am thinking of you, I care about you, I hope you are well." Maybe so, but Facebook more often feels like a waste of time than any other social media in which I participate. Something about the platform encourages banality. Which is strange, because, unlike Twitter, Facebook was developed as a gated community in which only people you select can see what you post. (Facebook's recent ghastly changes to their privacy defaults are a topic for another post on another day.) So why the hesitation to post anything meaningful?

(Full disclosure: the majority of my posts on Facebook contain maps of where I have ridden my bike. If it can get more banal than that I'm not sure how.)

1. Facebook undermines conversation. Sure, you can post something, and dozens can comment on it. But it's a free-for-all, like a verbal spitball fight from opposite sides of a large room. The spitballs never connect midair; they just go splat. Since every comment becomes a non-sequitur, people tend to post comments that can stand on their own, bearing little relevance to the original post.
   
   
2. The "Like" button. Is there anything lazier?
   
   
3. Its attempts to be more like Twitter. Even as a late comer to Facebook I recognize that it ain't what it used to be. The Wall, which was once the main selling point, is now subordinated to the News Feeds and Status Updates. (Related: Can anyone explain to me the difference between the two?) At least when you posted on someone's Wall you were attempting a personal connection. Now Facebook functions more like Twitter, except, let's face it, your circle of friends and family isn't nearly as interesting as the strangers you could be inviting to your dinner party on Twitter.

How do we fix Facebook? We don't. You could thread the comments, add a "dislike" button, scrap the Twitter-mimicking. But Facebook's management has made clear that it doesn't want to be fixed. It just wants to monetize you. Time to move on to the next hot social media phenom: picking up the phone.*



*Yes, I know this makes me sound like a smarmy old git. But it's in line with one of my New Year's resolutions to acknowledge special occasions more. I plan to achieve this through snail-mail cards and phone calls and, for the bigger ones, actually planning in advance for once. Because I know something important is being lost when we resort to e-greetings and Wall posts.     

 


  

When Sarah and I worked at a small-town newspaper, we ran a column that asked local citizens to name five guests, living or dead, whom they would invite to a dinner party. Jesus, Elvis, and George W. Bush were the most popular choices.

What does this have to do with Twitter? When people complain that they don't "get" Twitter, that's it's all noise and what-I-had-for-lunch minutia, I describe the way I use Twitter: I treat it like a party with carefully handpicked guests—like Truman Capote's Black & White Ball.

Here's how I do it:

First of all, I limit the number of people I follow to 100. By being picky about whom I follow, I force myself to seek a diverse group of interesting human beings from different walks of life. I might one day follow 200 or maybe 500, but I will never follow thousands of people. I'm pretty sure the only reason to follow thousands of people is to try to get thousands of people to follow you back. Today I have only 72 followers. While I would like to have more, I want people to follow me on the merits of what I post, not just because I am following them.

Back to the party metaphor: What is different about Twitter, compared to most parties I've been to, is that with Twitter it is easy to eject boring, unwanted guests and replace them with more interesting ones.

The other nice thing about Twitter is that it's okay to be a wallflower—or better yet, a fly on the wall. I often go days without tweeting, but I check Twitter constantly just to see how the conversation is going. Because my "guests" are people I know personally and/or they are interesting and/or useful to me, there is always something worth eavesdropping.

So whom do I follow? Right now I am making the transition from full-time employee to self-employed contractor, so my tweetstream is dominated by people in my field and city who provide job leads, tips for freelancers and the like. But I also follow tennis players (@andyroddick, @clijsterskim), politicians (@billwhitefortx, @BarackObama), entertainers (@SarahKSilverman, @geneweingarten, @pennjillette), bloggers (@anildash, @dooce), and a few who have made a name for themselves via Twitter alone (@shitmydadsays, @sween,  @mktgdouchebag). And of course, friends and family (for as long as they stay interesting anyway).

In the last couple months my austere Twitter approach has netted me one job interview, one brunch meetup, two or three web services I now consider essential, loads of entertainment and the occasional belly laugh. Could I do it better? Of course I could. My follow list is constantly evolving with the goal of finding the 100 (or 200 or 500) most interesting human beings in the world. This will only get harder—and more fun—as more people sign on.

---

You can view everyone I'm following here. I'll attempt to sort these out into lists one of these days. And don't forget to follow me!

This is a fairly typical night for us. I have not slept soundly in six years. I don't expect to until both kids are long gone.

8 PM Both kids asleep. Hallelujiah.

10:30 PM Lights out for Sarah and me. Sarah falls asleep pretty quickly. I toss and turn like I always do. Finally start falling asleep when...

11:30 PM Charlie lets out a wail. I fly out of bed to stop him before he wakes Ava. I put my hand on him and he falls back asleep in his crib. I head back to bed and toss and turn until drifting into an uneasy sleep.

2:30 AM Charlie unleashes a scream that peels paint off the walls. I bolt out of bed on autopilot, my eyes still closed when I reach his room. This time he's wide awake, screaming "Mama" and "Daddy." This is the scream of "Even though I'm almost two years old, I didn't eat any dinner, and now I'm starving, and what are you gonna do about it?" Answer: Give him milk at 2:30 a.m. Like a newborn.

Now Charlie is in bed with us. There is no point trying to force him back into his crib. He used to snuggle against Sarah so that I barely noticed him in our bed, but now I'm his preferred victim. He wedges against my back, leaving approximately 8" of mattress on which to lie. Still, I manage to sleep until...

4:30 AM Sarah is shaking me awake. "Ava!" she says. I'm so tired I think she is actually talking to Ava until I realize that she is telling me that Ava is screaming her head off, which she is. Sarah and I have a tacit agreement that I get up for the majority of these episodes because I can function on about 2/3rds the sleep that Sarah needs. It's a plain fact and I harbor no resentment. So off I go to Ava's room.

Upon entering, Ava instantly composes herself and says, "Daddy, I am screaming for two reasons. One, my stomach hurts. Two, I had a bad dream."

"Rest is the best thing for your stomach," I say.

"OK. What about the bad dream?"

She has me there. I am too tired for conversation. "Snuggles from Daddy," I admit.

Ava sets about rearranging approximately 8.5 million stuffed animals to give me more room. I curl myself around her like a question mark and go to sleep on even less square footage than I had in the bed with Charlie. Every time I shift to get comfortable, Ava grabs me and begs me not to leave. Normally I can convince her that she just needs another million animals in her bed and she'll be fine, but again, I am too tired for conversation. I sleep intermittently until...

6:30 AM Sarah enters the room and says she needs to get in the shower. Charlie is still asleep in our bed and can't be left alone. Relishing the idea of 20 minutes in a king-size bed and only a toddler to share it with, I head back to our bedroom, ignoring Ava's protests. Charlie has somehow managed to stretch himself horizontally so that he occupies 80% of the bed. The other 20% is occupied by our smelly cat, Lucie. It's a bad idea to wake either one of them, so I wedge myself in and stare at the ceiling until...

6:50 AM Ava wanders in. I extract myself from my two sleeping companions and lead her into the kitchen to make breakfast. The day has begun.