Archive for November, 2008

Leaders on Twitter

admin November 20th, 2008

leader As of the time of this post, Twitter has around a million members.

Many members’ tweets are minimally beneficial to readers… an example would be, “Just brushed my teeth and am having breakfast.”  Such members are ordinary Tweeters.

But there are some Tweeters who are real leaders.

How do you recognize a real leader? Simple: you look for certain traits. Here they are:

  • Real leader trait 1: S/he responds to your “@” messages and direct messages :-)
  • Real leader trait 2: All his/her tweets are not promotional
  • Real leader trait 3: S/he has more than 1,500 followers
  • Real leader trait 4: S/he has a good website
  • Real leader trait 5: You benefit from all her/his tweets in some way or other
  • Real leader trait 6: S/he has a photo posted in her/his profile
  • Real leader trait 7: S/he tweets at LEAST 4 times a day and tweets EVERY day (holidays excepted)

So who, at the present time, are my real leaders on Twitter? Here they are:


bullet_2_s1_red  Dr. Mani, pediatric heart surgeon and Infopreneur. Dr Mani’s Website

bullet_2_s1_red  Mari Smith, foremost Facebook expert of our time. Mari’s Website

bullet_2_s1_red  Willie Crawford, amazing Internet marketing expert. Willie’s Website

bullet_2_s1_red  Deborah Micek, new media marketing and political consultant. Deb’s Website


These people have all the traits I listed above. It’s pleasure reading their tweets and communicating with them. Follow them on Twitter, you’ll be glad you did.

So who are your real leaders on Twitter?

If you let me know, I’ll sample their tweets, and if they meet the above criteria, I’ll even update my above list of leaders with their names!

Cheers,

Converting Scanned PDFs into Text

admin November 3rd, 2008

pdf-to-text Converting scanned PDFs into text is a frequent requirement for anyone in the content creation business.  Up till now, one would have to search for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to perform this function, and often this could involve an expensive purchase.

Of course if you use a PDF that has been generated by one of the several PDF makers available (as opposed to a scanned PDF), it can be simply converted back into text using a program like Adobe Acrobat Professional . 

But now Google has added this function to its stable of free tools.  There is only one qualification to use it: you have to be able to upload files from your desktop to a website.  That should not be a problem: if you are interested in converting scans into text documents, you probably have a website already and are used to uploading to it.

Upload your scanned PDF to your website (so that it has an HTTP address).  Wait a while, usually one hour tops, for Google to spider the PDF.  Once it spiders the PDF, it also performs OCR on it. 

Once you’ve done that, enter the search term “site:abc.com/pdf filetype:pdf”, and you will see that Google has made your PDF document available as HTML.  Copy what you see on the screen and pasted wherever you want.

Try it for yourself and see (and let me know the results if you have the time)

To your great online life,

lucky

Technorati Tags: ,,,