Tweet and Shout: leveraging Twitter for popularity

The talented Shimon Rura just launched a new service called tweet and shout: music people are talking about. It mines Twitter to find bands and musicians that people are talking about, and provides the number of people and tweets and cross-references with the Amazon sales rank.

What’s refreshing about Shimon’s work is that he admits the service isn’t “groundbreaking or thought-provoking.” But he does point out the interesting things, including the facts that the service provides context to otherwise unconnected conversations, and the fact that the service puts faces to fandom.

links for 2008-05-21

Today’s theme: Excel

Snapshot of JHN with the Excel theme.I switched on Monday to a new theme, Excel, that addresses a few of the issues I had with Cutline. The color balance is much better than with the version of Cutline I was using (which I must say, in all fairness, was a much older version of the theme). I also like the layout, which is a two column layout but which floats the post “trivia” (publish date, tags, categories, etc.) in a separate mini column, leaving just post title and text in the main column.

Things I don’t like:

  • The amount of vertical space consumed by the header region (seems to be a common trend among the themes I’ve tried so far)
  • Need to tweak styles — tags and recent comments run into each other, headings in the sidebar are too prominent, need some custom style work for the Delicious widget
  • The dark borders around images and the big blocky links make the top of the page feel too heavy

But it feels closer than Cutline did.