What updates are suitable for Twittr? And which for Facebook?

With both Twitter and Facebook at my hands now, I’m deliberating where to update which statuses. 

I recently began using Twitter. It all began after a colleague of mine took me to a “tweetup” – a meeting of the Israeli tweetup community, or at least the ones that consider themselves social media experts, and a few others.

Anyway, this tweetup was at one of my favorite bars in Tel Aviv, Norma Jean, so I was highly motivated to go to this meeting – Did anyone say Belgian beers? When I arrived, I was asked about my twitter username. I didn’t have one then, but it didn’t stop me from drinking.

So, peer pressure and a couple of beers got to me to finally register. So, I began tweeting under @yohay. I follow people and they follow me. OK.

At first, I connected my Twitter account to my Facebook account. I thought that if Ill update Twitter, it’ll automatically reach FB, and I can broadcast everybody that way.

But when I got replies in different places, it was confusing. The discussions, sometimes with the same people and sometimes with different people, were messy.

So, I decided to separate the accounts. I post different nonsense on each tool. 

Currently I post weird thoughts on Facebook, and day to day stuff on Twitter. For example, yesterday I wrote on FB “Yohay is in the right place at the right time” and on Twitter I wrote that I’m warming up at home. Well, it was cold outside…

I still prefer Facebook over Twitter – I prefer the structured Status-Comments in Facebook, rather than the non structured list on Twitter.

For those of you using both services, how do you separate the statuses? Are there any rules? Is it random?

Out of the shadows

I haven’t been writing too much lately. The main reason was that my site was declared by Google as a “Reported Attack Site”. Well, this was removed after 12 dark days.

This wasn’t due to a political post they didn’t like or something that criticizes them. As I figured it out, it was probably a spam comment that I didn’t delete promptly.This contained some malicious script that pointed to evil sites. After removing the spam comment, I saw that Google visited my site every day, and since the day of being darkened, the malicious script wasn’t found again.

This had an effect on site visitors from Google. According to my statistics (Google Analytics, yep, Google again), about 50% of my visitors come search engines, mostly from Google. It also had an effect on visitors from Firefox who saw a scary message instead of seeing my humble blog.

In terms of traffic, I used to receive about 100 to 120 visitors every day on days that had no posts published on them, and when Google banned me, it got down to around 20 visitors a day. The numbers went up again immediately after the ban was lifted, before I wrote a new post.

You can see below my visitor statistics for August.

Banned by Google

The days between August 17 to August 26 are dramatically lower than the rest of the month.

So, I got to see, on my flesh, how Google effectively polices the Internet.

Sudden Drop in Feedburner Subscribers

The number of subscribers that Feedburner reports hs suddenly dropped. Here, from a total of 153, it dropped to 92. This includes email subscribers and RSS subscribers to the different feeds I provide.

I’m addicted to statistics. I know that staring at numbers is usually a wste of time, but I can’t help myself. During the last months, I’ve seen the number of subscribers to my blog steadily grow. The subscriber numbers are updated every morning (Israeli time), and I check them out as part of my regular morning routine. This morning, I was disappointed…

Checking out some other blogs that publish their stats, I found that their numbers have dropped as well. I guess that one of the big web RSS readers such as Google Reader, Bloglines or Netvibes suddenly stopped reporting the number of subscribers.

I hope that the numbers will get back to the higher level…

Post post: Beth updates (in the comments) that the drop is related to Google’s RSS readers, probably the desktop reader. Thanks Beth!

Wordcamp Israel was Great

The first ever Wordcamp conference in Israel was a great success! 150-200 people attended the event, that was organized by volunteers.

Wordcamp Israel

All the pictures from Wordcamp Israel 2007. Start slideshow.

Many aspects of blogging and WordPress were discussed throughout the day. The technical issues ranged from installing and basic configuring of WordPress, through a small dip into designing with CSS and up to speeding page loads in WordPress.

The non-technical lectures featured Lorelle VanFossen as the keynote speaker. I enjoyed her lectures, which were interactive, funny and insightful. The Israeli speakers and panelists talked about WordPress as platform for expressing yourself in cultural issues, as well as marketing and knowledge management.

Legal issues, podcasts and even Facebook were also discussed along the day. The only bad thing that I can say about the event was that it was much longer than expected. The last lecture was 90 minutes late. Since I wasn’t in any hurry, I didn’t bother me…

Wordcamp Panel

Except listening to interesting lectures and panels, such events consist of lots of mingling. Since it’s Israel, and most of the participants aren’t into making a business out of their blogs, I can’t call it networking.

Anyway, this time I only revealed one or two faces that I haven’t sen before. All these blogging conferences and parties in the past year or so really made a community out of these independent bloggers. A good community of good people that I enjoy meeting.

Well, enough said. Special thanks go to Tal Galili, Hannit Cohen, and Ehud Keinan for organizing the event. Many other assisted.
If you want to dive into the details of the lectures, just explore the conference’s website.

Going to Wordcamp Israel

This morning I’m off to Wordcamp Israel 2007. It’s actually the first conference of this kind in Israel.

What’s it all about? The conference will deal with blogging issues related to WordPress. It also aims at bringing more people to this wonderful blogging platform. On the other hand, the conference will try not to be too technical. Not only for geeks.

I’m acquainted with the organizers, and I know many of the speakers. My expectations are high. I took a day off from work in order to attend the event.

Anyway, enough said, gotta go. Since the vast majority of the participants write solely in Hebrew, I’ll make my writeup from Wordcamp in English, probably tomorrow.