Intel has published social media guidelines.  There is a lot of common sense in here — write what you know, be respectful, be honest.  But then again these kind of things get written to help define what that common sense is.  The guidelines cast a very broad net over employees — if they identify themselves as Intel employees then these apply.  So if their Facebook profile lists their Intel affiliation I guess it applies.  Makes sense from Intel’s perspective, and a good cautionary notice to employees.

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A picture is worth a thousand words — and sometimes even a thousand words aren’t enough to get a point across. An awful lot of discourse in our culture is text based — blogging, twitter, text messaging, email, most powerpoints, white papers, check lists — all text based.  But text is not the only way to organize and explain ideas.

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Packt publishing has a growing WordPress library — next in the series coming soon is the 2.7 Cookbook.  WordPress really lends itself to easy little bits of configuration and coding to make cool things happen.  Lately the WpRecipes blog has joined my newsfeeds list, and I’ve picked up a couple of good ideas there.  Which does bring up the point as to why you’d need a book when so much is available on the internet already.   Call me old fashioned, but I still find books darn convenient.  And its summer, so you can take it to the beach.

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Twitter’s open API is spawning all sorts of related products and services — many of them with silly names.  TweetDeck, Twibble, etc.  But despite the silly names it seems to me that a large part of Twitter’s success is related to how useful these offshoots are, and how much better they make the Twitter experience.  And for the conference space now comes Twubs.  It is in beta now, but it looks like the conference services will carry some charge in the future.

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With Leo heading off to college we’ve been talking laptops.  His new college recommends Dell — our school does too.  And while we’ve found Dell to be very reliable, for this personal purchase I’m looking at Acer.  I caught an ad a recent Wired Magazine and their 8 hour battery life claim caught my eye.  They’ve got some other cool features too, like the multi-gesture touchpad.  There’s not much of a warranty, but when you can get this all for under $600 maybe that’s not such a big deal.

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Ever watch the tech geek on a crime show take some grainy, shaky, fuzzy video footage and clear it up to reveal a license plate or other details.  Now you too can apply these techniques to clean up your own cell phone video.  vReveal offers a free 30 day trial of its $50 software — sorry Windows-based computers only.

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