Indent four

I’ve been doing quite some research on social media the last few weeks as we’re preparing a workshop at our company about social media. Apart from reading a lot of blogs and articles I’ve also found some books and just read another amazing account of causality reversal.

The human brain is excessively focussed on causality. If we hear a loud ‘bang’ here at the Zest Office we look outside at the road to see where the cars are that have collided. To clarify causality: Us looking outside the window does not cause car accidents in Hoogvliet the Netherlands. You can still drive safely past our offices. Two cars are having an intense hug, this causes a loud sound, we hear the bang and look outside. Cause and effect.

Now I’m reading a chapter on using Twitter and the author has done some research on thousands of accounts. One of the astonishing results is that “Certain titles in your bio tend to lead to more followers.” Marketers and Entrepreneurs have more followers than students and nerds. The use of emoticons like should also be discouraged if you are keen on attracting more followers.

Could it just possibly be that entrepreneurs and marketeers tend to have a larger network than other people, are more focussed on delivering interesting and regular content and that people who use smilies in their bio’s are less serious about their twitter accounts in the first place. Those attributes (quality of tweets, larger people network) cause the higher number of followers. Another effect of you being a student is that you mention that fact in your Twitter bio.

But to say that you should avoid mentioning that you are a student or use smilies because that tends to give you more followers, the holy grail of attention on Twitter? Not really.

With Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil tool you can stream audio from any Mac application to  speakers that are connected to an Airport Express, not just from within iTunes. It’s a pitty that you need these wireless basestation just to stream audio and the people at RogueAmoeba thought just the same: they released the free Airfoil Speakers addon: install it on a Mac, PC or Linux based computer and you have an extra output for Airfoil. And recently even an Airfoil speakers for Iphone/Ipod touch was released. Unfortunately good old iTunes still ignores Airfoil Speakers. Why hasn’t apple released a system preference or sharing option for this? I mean, if they can do it for MacBook Air DVD drives, why not for an audio output…..

So alls well that ends well with Airfoil. Not quite. I still had one major issue. Airfoil Speakers always play to the default System Audio output. You can set it in System Preferences if you have more than one audio interface, like an iMic or extra audio card in your Mac Pro. There was no way to select an extra audio output in Airfoil Speakers.  Why would I want this? If I can redirect Airfoil Speakers to my iMic and hook that up to my stereo set I can at the same time use my default audio output for application sounds, and the occasional game. And I can stream music from my MacMini media hub to several Airtunes/Airfoil speakers setup throughout the house (the kitchen, the hobby room, you name it) without having to buy Airport Express basestation when there are already computers in the room.

So I asked the Rogue Amoeba crew for an extra option to select audio output. I got a confirmation that it was an interesting feature. Then it became silent fore a few months. And with a recent update (3.3.4, but it might have been added in 3.3), there it was….  a shiny new pull down selector. Thanks RogueAmoeba!

Apple released the wonderfull iTunes Remote application, called ‘Remote’. You can control an iTunes Application running on a mac in your local network over WiFi. Also integrated into  ‘Remote’ is iTunes DJ. Everybody with an iPhone can request new songs and/or upvote songs currently in the DJ queue. Greap app.

My iTunes library is on our MacMini home server so I can play the songs in my library everywhere. But when I’m working on my laptop I don’t want to start iTunes Remote on my iPhone just to skip a song on the MacMini. And there’s the catch. I can start iTunes on my laptop and I can see the shared library on the MacMini, but I cannot control DJ. Where’s the iTunes Remote app for Mac OS X?

Fortunately: there is a cool open source app iTunes Remote Control, iTRC in short. I had already used it to control iTunes remotely for my ‘normal’ library, but it also works with iTunes DJ: it’s just another playlist that is filled automatically. And now I can skip iTunes DJ suggestions. Jay!

Update october 6th 2009: Unfortunately iTRC does not work with the latest iTunes 9.0.1