Open up your mind and say, ahh...

One way to keep great content rolling along on your blog is to have a few posts ready to go ahead of time. Every time I get a moment to sit down to write, I try my best to get two or three or four posts ready. I do as many as I can at one setting.

WordPress makes this very easy. Go to where you hit the publish button and look just above the blue button:

Instead of “publish immediately,” just set it for the day you want to publish the post. Note that I wrote this post on June 23rd, but you’re not seeing it until the 26th. I did this because I knew that I had a bunch of busy days ahead, so I set up a bunch of posts to launch in the morning without me.

The Benefit

The benefit of doing this is that a busy day doesn’t swamp my blogging. The benefit of this is that I can think through what I’ve got posting when, and tweak it, to make sure that I’m covering the topics that matter to me. The benefit of this is that I can plan my work instead of just reacting.

Travel Into the Future

Sometimes, you get to sneak back in and push out a post even further, because something more interesting hits. But having a few extra posts ready means that you can do more for your community while not pulling your own hair out.

Getting into the habit of writing two posts instead of one at a time is a great habit. It will change everything for you.

So, are you ready?

Photo credit alexkerhead

Initial reactions to the iPhone 4 have been pretty spectacular, with an estimated 1.5 million units sold during the first day and lines that lasted hours, but what was reception like on Twitter? While we know that the World Cup and President Obama topped the iPhone 4 pre-buzz, we still wanted to take a look at some deeper Twitter analysis.

Real-time social media tracker Trendrr was nice enough to offer us some data of the iPhone 4 and also AT&T over various periods of time.

Trendrr’s analysis covers both quantity and sentiment analysis, and we’ll examine those data points.

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iPhone Tweets By the Numbers

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Looking at the data on mentions of “iPhone” from November 2008 to the present, a few points really stood out. First, we should note that as of right now, Trendrr does not have full data for any days after June 22, 2010. We have hourly statistics (see below), but not full data info for an entire day.

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Note the two gigantic spikes in the graph. The first occurs on June 17, 2009. This was the day that the iOS (or iPhone OS) 3.0 software was released. The next spike was on June 7, 2010, the official announcement of the iPhone 4. On June 7, Trendrr says that 653,000 tweets containing the phrase “iPhone” were sent.

Next, let’s take a look at an hour-by-hour examination, which started on Saturday and ran through the 25th.

Again, note the big spikes throughout the day of the 24th, with the phrase “iPhone” peaking at 55,537 tweets per hour.

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AT&T and iPhone Sentiment Analysis

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We find sentiment analysis really interesting, and the figures for the iPhone 4 offer some food for thought. While some have expected the overall net sentiment to be positive, the results are actually quite different.

Sentiment started out more positive than not for the term “iPhone,” but negative remarks started showing up on Monday, June 21. At that time, 25% of all tweets about the iPhone were deemed “negative.” However, this was before the iPhone 4 started to arrive to users, so we’re not really sure what contributed to the negativity, other than overexposure, perhaps.

The negative tweets died down again, and we started to see more positive tweets on June 22 and June 23, with positive and negative mentions in roughly equal amounts on Wednesday. Here’s where it gets interesting: 28% of the iPhone-related tweets on June 24, 2010 were negative. How many of these negative tweets were related to long lines or sold out stores, we don’t know.

As of today, June, 25, the positive tweets have edged past the negative tweets once again.

Moving onto everyone’s favorite whipping boy, AT&T. AT&T is not a popular company. In fact, it’s an oft-cited reason that people don’t get an iPhone. Still, looking at the data that goes back to May, it does look like the company had a few bright spots.

We’re not really sure why AT&T had such big spikes on May 22, 2010 and June 6, 2010, but those are the only two days the positives outweighed the negatives. Not surprisingly, on June 15, 2010, the day the iPhone became available for pre-order, AT&T had a 35% negativity percentage. Maybe it was the failed activation system.

The negativity cooled down a bit, but as of June 24, 2010, the negative tweets had reached 44%, according to Trendrr.

Does this data match what you’ve been seeing on Twitter? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Ever since the new version of Digg was announced three months ago, it has undergone a lot of revisions and caused a lot of turmoil. In that time, Kevin Rose replaced Jay Adelson as CEO, reportedly unhappy with the direction Adelson was taking the company and the product.

The New Digg is almost here though, and we have access to the preview. We’ve been playing around with the new interface and its many features, and we’ve compared them against both the “old” Digg and other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook .

Here are our first impressions of the New Digg:

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Digg Has a Suggested Users List

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When you first log onto the New Digg (New.Digg.com), you’re presented with a couple screens. The first one is Digg’s version of the suggested users list — a hand-picked list of people and companies to follow on Digg. The list includes everyone from Kevin Rose to The New York Times to Mashable , and it categorizes their accounts based on topic area.

Twitter spurred a lot of growth and created a small set of power accounts with its suggested user list (SUL) — at least until this year’s changes. Still, these types of lists help new users get started, and acquiring fresh users is something Digg needs to do.

Even if this hand-picked version of the SUL isn’t sustainable, it should give the company a boost in terms of new user engagement and retention.

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Adding Content Is Much Easier

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One of the first things that struck us when we finally got to the new Digg homepage was the prominence of the “Digg It” option. It looks and feels like the Facebook Publisher box. Whenever you enter in a link, it imports the title, finds images from the link, and lets gives you write a description and choose a topic. After that, all you have to do is click “Digg It,” and the link is broadcast to the Digg universe.

There are some other nice features about the new publishing box. For example, if you put in a link for a story that’s already been submitted, it will alert you to the fact and display the Digg information for that specific link, complete with sharing tools and a Digg button. It’s also a ubiquitous box: you will find it on many of the other pages in the New Digg.

Clearly, Digg is placing an emphasis on getting people to add more content and articles to the social news hub. As we’ve reported before, there is an option in the New Digg to link your RSS feed to your Digg account and auto-submit your posts for the community’s consideration.

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Discovering Content

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Content discovery has changed in the new version of Digg. There are two tabs on the top left of the interface: My News and Top News My News is the default homepage for all users. Unlike the current version of Digg, where content bubbles up from the overall community, the new version focuses on content coming from your friends and followers.

The new homepage no longer shows who submitted a story, but instead focuses on which of your friends dugg it. Even the sidebar focuses on how many of the people you follow have dugg a story, rather than whether or not a friend of your submitted it.

We welcome the change. It democratizes the site a bit more by reducing the need for publisher to hit the front page of Digg in order to generate any traffic. We saw content with between 16 and 150 Diggs on our personalized feed of news.

However, long-time Digg users don’t have to worry. “Top News” is just like the current version of Digg, focusing on the top content from the collective Digg community. You can even sort top content by day, week, or month. There seems to be a minimum Digg count to appear on the week or month Top News charts though, as we only saw three news items between the two tabs.

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Interface

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The overhaul not only focused on the algorithms and content discovery, but also on the interface itself. It’s definitely faster, cleaner, and more social. In our tests, we found it incredibly simple to navigate and a pleasure on the eyes. Unlike the last version of Digg, this is something that new users can quickly pick up and understand.

It’s not perfect, though. Search still needs some work. For example, we found the exact same content from Mashable when we tried to resort by “Most Recent” or “Best Match.” Hopefully this is a small bug that will quickly be resolved.

Overall though, the New Digg is a remarkable improvement over its predecessor. It keeps much of the old look and feel of Digg, while giving it a much-needed refresh and emphasis on the social graph. Expect the new version to launch for all users very soon.

Avoid stamps.com.

How is it that a sleepy, conservative organization like the postal service ends up licensing its brand to a company that can’t resist every honey pot scheme and opt out technique in the book?

I needed to send a package today and figured I’d try them out. Visited the site on my Mac, got all the way through registration, entered my card to pay for stamps and then (and only then) did I find out their software doesn’t work on a Mac. Of course, they knew I was on a Mac but didn’t bother to alert me early on.

Now they have my card, but hey, it’s the USPS, so I trust them. Just for kicks, I call in to ask about the Mac compatibility issue. It turns out that by entering my card to pay for stamps, I’ve agreed to pay them $15.95 a month. Forever. And ever. Or until I notice.

I go online to cancel my account and discover that you can’t cancel your account online. You have to call them. Oh. (The people on the phone are friendly, for what it’s worth…)

Can you imagine this sort of thing happening at a store? Or in a sleepy government office?

They told me that they have 400,000 paying customers. I wonder how many of them are paying a monthly fee without realizing it…

Can I suggest three simple principles for ethical dealings online:

1. When charging someone, tell them exactly what you’re charging them for, on the page itself, not buried in a link.
2. If you’re billing someone monthly, send them an email every month to tell them you’re doing so. If that’s going to lead to people quitting, the answer isn’t to avoid the email, the answer is to make your service more valuable.
3. It should be as easy to quit something (even a free service) as it is to join it.

There’s something about the mechanics and arms-length nature of the web that just begs companies that know better to treat people in a way that they’d be humiliated to try face to face.