Kickin’ the new year off with a sweet mixtape. My New Year = New Party mix tape features a bunch of remixes of some of my ’08 favs, as well as some new music that I’ve been crushing over this last week. Let me know what you think.

Let’s further expand the Tesla Motors Intelligence Dashboard by tracking some interesting key phrases that Tesla might be interested in. These might include:

• Green technology
• Electric cars
• renewable energy

You should know what to do now.  Add a tab in NetVibes for “Green technology” then add RSS feeds of search results.  If you want to filter that list, send through PostRank before adding the feed to the dashboard.

By the way, another good source of information is Google News.  Not surprisingly, they provide RSS feeds of their search results. 

So far, I’ve posted about how you can use RSS and some other tools to monitor your own brand (or in the case of this exercise, the Tesla Motors brand) by aggregating all of it into NetVibes. But it’s also useful to keep track of what is happening with your competitors. We’re going to use many of the same techniques already covered, but then add a little twist at the end.

So what I do is set up a new tab in my NetVibes dashboard and label it something like  “competitors”.  I recommend labeling your tabs in a very clear manner.  As you continue to add more and more tabs, you want it to be easy to differentiate between them. 

So as Tesla Motors, let’s say you want to keep track with what’s happening with General Motors, Toyota, and Ford.  Of course,  you can add feeds from Twitter and Google Blog Search results just like we did with searches for Tesla Motors.  But let’s say you want to group results for all three auto companies.  Head over to Google Blog Search (or search.twitter.com or another search engine) and search for…

“General Motors” OR Toyota OR Ford

That will provide you results for any of those three auto companies.  Note: if you want to a set of results where all three car companies are mentioned use “and” instead of “or” in the search query.

OK, you can now add the RSS feed of that search result to your NetVibes dashboard.  But let’s go one step further and try to get only the best blog posts from those results.  That’s where the handy PostRank tool from AideRSS comes into play.  Here’s how they describe PostRank

PostRank is a scoring system developed by AideRSS to rank any kind of online content, such as RSS feed items, blog posts, articles, or news stories. PostRank is based on social engagement, which refers to how interesting or relevant people have found an item or category to be. Examples of engagement include writing a blog post in response to someone else, bookmarking an article, leaving a comment on a blog, or clicking a link to read a news item.

What you should do is create an account with PostRank, insert the URL of the search results RSS feed into the “Analyze” field at PostRank.com.  When it is done being analyzed you can apply PostRank filters to weed out only the blog posts with the hightest levels of engagement.  The idea being that posts with high engagment are the ones you need to read.  Of course, PostRank will give you an RSS feed of the filtered results which you can then add to NetVibes. 

And Voila! You now have a single RSS feed that will help you track blog posts about General Motors, Toyota, or Ford.  And as a bonus,  you’ve taken some proactive steps to weed out some noise from the blogosphere.

But with the Thanksgiving holiday in mind, I thought I would take some time go give some thanks.  So here goes.

Thanks to Jeremy from the Cupertino Union School District.  Jeremy is just the perfect client.  Really cooperative, super patient, eager to learn, and an all-around nice guy.  All of our clients should be just like you, Jeremy.  You perfectly emulate the idea of being our partner.  Not our client.

Thanks to Sam Lawrence and his Go Big Always blog. Over the past year, that blog has been my favorite.  I love the combination of snarky satire, humor, and richly valued substance. And no blog that I read on a regular basis seems to have the production value that goes into each post that Sam puts into his.  Just take a look at some of the graphics he includes with his post.  Amazing.  Sam recently had some big change in his life and is going through a less than ideal time.  I wish him well and look forward to when he returns to “go big”.

Thanks to the people at Twitter.  I don’t know why you turned down a gazillion dollars from Facebook, but I’m awfully glad you did.  If my friends ever start super-poking me on Twitter, I’m pulling the ripcord.

Thanks to Holly for being the perfect business partner. Couldn’t do any of this without her.  Even after all these years, working with Holly is a fresh and exciting as it was in the beginning.  And most importantly, it’s a lot of fun. 

Finally, thanks to my family for all the support.  Keturah, Mason and Jude.  I love you all.

• MSNBC’s Live Video
• Ustream’s video feed of ABC News
• election.twitter.com
• RSS feed from CNN Political Tracker
• New York Times Election Results dashboard widget
• RSS feed of Twitter search results for election, twitter, and the votereport hashtag

You can find it here.

Saul Bass was a graphic design who revolutionized movie titles and opening credits.  The 1955 film The Man With the Golden Arm was distributed to theatres with a note atop the reels that said “Down the houselights before the opening credits.” In that age, the houselights typically stayed up as the movie got started.

His work became even more famous in Hitchcock films like Psycho and in doing the logos for United Airlines and Bell Telephone in the 60s and 70s.   In the 90s, he began collaborating with Martin Scorsese on film titles for Goodfellas, Cape Fear, and Casino.

His work heavily influenced the opening titles for Steven Spielberg’s film Catch Me if You Can and most recently, the opening titles of the TV show Mad Men are definitely inspired by Saul Bass.

Here’s a few title sequences I thought I’d share with you. 

The Man With the Golden Arm

North by Northwest

Psycho

Cape Fear

Casino

This time it’s Boombox – a site for mp3 mixes we built using the Opentape server.

It’s no secret that I’m a massive fan of the mix tape.  Anyone who grew up in the 80′s has made many a mix tape in their lifetime.  But now, music distribution has evolved.  MP3′s are now the most popular medium amongst my circle of musical friends and we’re storing our libraries on iPods/iTunes.  Sure, I was making CD mixes and sending them around on a fairly regularly basis. But more efficient mechanisms for sharing mixes and new tunes from your library has been sorely needed for a few years.  There have been many attempts from services like Mog, Live365, and Last.FM (all great services for reasons other than building mixes, by the way), but none have hit the mix builiding sweet spot.  That’s why Muxtape was such a major discovery. It made mix building and sharing extremely simple.  It had only two flaws.  First, it was missing a bulk uploading tool.  Second, it was such an obvious target for shutdown.

Enter Opentape.  Clearly influenced by Muxtape’s interface and design, its self-hosted nature also successfully adds an FTP element into the song uploading process.  Bulk uploading? Check.  Time will tell if deployments of Opentape can escape the wrath of music industry takedown. 

Anyway…the first Shiny New Toy mix on Boombox, is a simple one.  Side 1, track 1.  It’s my response to Rob Gordon’s Top 5 Side 1′s, Track 1′s list in High Fidelity.

Enjoy.

Anyway… Now in it’s thrid year, WordCamp anticipated the all the new attendees by holding it at the super new UCSF campus in Mission Bay. It was the first event I’ve been to there and I can see why I see more and more conferences fitting over this space. It was unreal… you would have never know that you were surrounded by traffic, freeway entrances and warehouses. The only real hint that you were in SF was that you could see the tops of downtown buildings and AT&T Park from the courtyard. There was definitely a lot offer this year. The event was split into 2 tracks this year, one for typical users and another for developers. And since I’m a little of both, I had to separate myself between the two. It did get a little difficult to choose at times… like was I really suppose to go to a session about secure coding when Ben and his LOLcats were talking upstairs? Sorry Mark. Anyway, I saw that John Pozadzides was taping everything so hopefully that is out soon so I can catch up. There was also a Genius Bar (like Apple) to help people with their WP questions. I didn’t help out this year, but it looked to be a success so maybe next time.

Some other highlights:

• Lorelle insisting we continue to break WP – Lorelle is so amazing, I’m so glad we have someone like her in our community. I’ll do my best!
• Andy and the state of BuddyPress – I can’t wait for this to come out later this year
• Matt and the state of the Word
• Crazy Horse, 2.7 and WP user testing – I’m not really convinced eye tracking was necessary but Matt said they got a good deal and the results look great.
• Chuck Lewis, the SEO Rapper’s Exclusive WP Rap

Things wrapped up with a great party at Pete’s Tavern – Tron and Hackers on the screen, Heather and her DJ skillz, and of course my fav… free Guinness. All in all it was great to catch up with new friends and from what I remember I some how voulenteered to help out with WordCamp Hawaii so stay tuned on that one.

WordCamp returns to San Francisco next Saturday, August 16 at Mission Bay Conference Center.  WordCamp is one of my favorite tech events of the year mainly because of the wonderful folks in the WordPress community that attend it.  If you are interested in blogging and all the other possiblities of the WordPress platform, WordCamp is an event not to be missed.

Unfortunately, due to some recent happenings in my family life, I’m not sure I’ll be able to attend.  But Holly will be there, so definitely connect with her to if you want to hear more about Shiny New Toy, some of our recent work with WordPress, and what you should do with half a cow.  

We’re also hoping to have a relevant announcement in advance of WordCamp.  Something we hope will be warmly received by our friends and colleagues in the WordPress community.  Stay tuned.