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08/21/2009 By Jason Bean

What's Your Web Persona

I came across this interesting site and made a note about it, but now can’t remember where I first heard about it. So, I’ll apologize in advance for not tipping my hat to whomever shared this with me.

Not sure what the proliferation of thoughts and ideas about personal branding have been coming from lately, but the Personas website from Metropath(ologies) lets you see what your name is being associated with online. You enter your name on the first page of the site and it begins building what looks like a timeline, but is really a bar graphing display of your name with associated topics. Mine is shown above.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Pay attention to the page as it’s building your display because you’ll see different snippets of information about your name flashing before you. Regretfully, I didn’t see a way to re-display this information after it was built.

As you can see, the Personas site scans plenty of different categories of information about you. Go uncover what the Internet is saying about you now. Visit Personas by Metropath(ologies) today.

08/20/2009 By J. Bean

How to Use Twitter Avatar as Google Contact Image

If you’ve been using Google for awhile, specifically Google Chat, then you know each of your contacts can have a contact image specified for them. Sometimes people don’t think about uploading an image for themselves, but you’d still like to have one so you can quickly recognize them when needed.

I thought I’d share this easy way to grab someone’s twitter avatar to use as their Google Contact profile image. It’s very simple.

First, you’ll open the user’s contact profile in your Google address book and click on their blank image place holder. You’ll then be presented with a way to grab an image from a variety of locations.

You’ll select “Web Address (URL)” as your option.

Next, go to their twitter profile URL (https://twitter.com/username) and right-click on their avatar image and select “Copy Image Location” in Firefox. In Internet Explorer, you’ll have to go to Image Properties and then copy the location from there.

Then just paste that URL into the “Image URL” field on the Google screen. You may be prompted to fit and crop the image a bit, but then you can save your changes and even suggest the image to be used by your contact.

08/19/2009 By J. Bean

Importing an RSS Feed to Your Facebook Page

I’m not sure who’s idea it was to make importing an RSS feed into your Facebook page such a challenge, but it shouldn’t be this painful. You’d think it would be possible to go to your page, check-out your settings and add your RSS feed URL to a field and save it. Not so quick.

If you look at my example page above. I’ve clicked on the “Notes” section like I was going to read or add a new note. The problem is there’s nothing available to let me know I can add an RSS feed from another blog or website.

Next I’m going to click on the title of my first note, which is “Find Out What Makes Indianapolisâ€¦ Positively Indy”. Once I do that you’ll see the image below.

Now you’ll notice a new link displayed that I’ve highlighted. Just click on that link now and you’ll see a new screen with a new option over to the right-hand side of the margins as shown below.

Since I’ve already got a RSS feed setup for this page, my box (Shown at #1) is allowing me to edit the RSS feed settings. If I didn’t have one added, it would prompt me with information about adding a blog feed into my page.

Once you get this item setup, you can easily import all your new posts from your website and blog. Comes in very handy for making sure there’s fresh content on your business/fan page. You’d think that would be a good reason for the folks behind Facebook to make this a little more obvious.

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