DesignBay is a crowdsourcing marketplace for logo design, web design and graphic design. DesignBay helps businesses get 25 to 100+ designs from designers around the world.  Its mission is to give designers opportunities and to provide businesses with risk-free creativity.

DesignBay is one of 12 exhibitors being showcased at the Webciety section this year at CeBIT Australia 2009. DesignBay are holding a crowd sourcing experiment using Twitter during CeBIT which is a great concept that I hope gets a lot traction.

The DesignBay Crowdsourcing Experiment

The Experiment

Task: Invent a tagline (with fewer than 100 characters) for Australia’’s 2018 Soccer World Cup Bid.  Tagline should summarise why Australia should be selected to host the World Cup.  View the taglines submitted so far here.

Prize: $100 and 1 year of good karma

How to submit: send your 100 character tagline to Twitter by writing a Twitter message that starts with @DesignBay_com #webciety #aust-2018-cup.

Deadline: Midnight 14th May 2009

More details on the DesignBay crowdsourcing experiment

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I’m always on the look out for productivity hacks. Twitter has become a part of my daily routine and something that if not managed correctly can hog your time and attention. Using some Web 2.0 applications, I’ve come up with a process to help improve your productivity for tweeting links, without having to leave your browser – I like to call it, “inline tweeting”

This system will improve your Twitter productivity:

• A lot of tweets from the people I’m following contain a link. Using this process you will save time in posting your links without having to open twitter.com or your desktop twitter application. Tagging with delicious will automatically grab the page title and the links saving you time in writing your message & shortening the URL
• By using twitter I find that I use my RSS readers a lot less. This process forces me to keep a good library of bookmarks in delicious which I can then read on my iPhone in Google Reader
• You don’t have to have twitter.com or any twitter app open allowing you to tweet whilst browsing without the distraction from other messages on twitter

Want to begin inline tweeting? Here’s the step-by-step process:

Step 1: Sign-up for Del.icio.us

• Create a delicious account – link to sign up page

Step 2: Install the Delicious Firefox add-on

• During the signup process, if you didnt install the del.icio.us Firefox add-on you can download it here

Step 3: Tagging your bookmarks

• When tagging a bookmark create a unique tag that will be used for posting that bookmark to Twitter – I use tweet as my tag.
  
• Log-in to your delicious account at delicious.com
• Click on your unique tag, in my case the tag “tweet”
• Click on “RSS Feed for these bookmarks”. This will open the RSS feed for all bookmarks tagged “tweet”. The URL of this RSS feed is important and will need to be pasted in to twitterfeed in the next step.
  

Step 4: Setup your Twitterfeed

• Visit twitterfeed.com
• Login using your preferred method
• Go to Create new twitter feed
• Type in your twitter username and password
• In the field, RSS Feed URL: paste in the URL of the RSS feed for your “tweet” tag from Step 3
• Change the update frequency to every 30 minutes, and to pust up to 5 new updates each time.
• On the Include… dropdown menu, change it to “title only”

• Once filled in, click “Create” and it will be setup!

Now that it’s setup, do some tagging in Firefox with the tag “tweet” and confirm they post to your Twitter account (Note: It takes about 1 hour for the first tweet to appear on your twitter profile)

Tips:

• You can automatically post to multiple twitter accounts by having a tag used specifically for each Twitter account. eg: tweetaccount1 & tweetaccount2 both producing their own unique RSS feed which can then be setup in twitterfeed.
• You can have Twitterfeed automatically shorten your URL’s using bit.ly (my preferred URL shortening service) by changing it to “Shorten link through bit.ly”.

Lastly, the guys at twitterfeed deserve a donation for providing such an awesome service – donate via PayPal.

Follow me on Twitter

I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below. Cheers!

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So you’ve been hearing a lot about Twitter lately. News is hitting Twitter first, before traditional media outlets – the Mumbai attacks were being reported live on Twitter, and more recently the Hudson River plane crash. Twitter is growing fast – according to a recent blog post by Sandra Hanchard, Senior Analyst – Hitwise Asia-Pacific, Twitter’s year-on-year growth rate has increased by 517.9% (w/ending 10 January 2009 compared to the same week last year)

So, you’re convinced you need to be using Twitter – but how do you get started? This post aims to point out some not so obvious things about Twitter, that you just don’t get told.

What is Twitter?
The concept of Twitter is best explained by this great YouTube video – ‘Twitter in Plain English’

What is a ‘tweet’? What is a ‘retweet’?
A tweet is simply the name for the updates that you do on your twitter account. Any time you post a message, that is what is called a ‘tweet’.

A ‘retweet’ is a little different. Essentialy, a retweet is essentially taking someone elses message and then re-posting that message to your followers. By retweeting a message, you are giving credit to the original poster of that message.

To retweet someone elses post, there are 2 commons methods – each achieving the same outcome:

• Simply copy their message and place ‘RT’, ‘Retweet’ or ‘Retweeting’ at the front of the message you are reposting, including that users twitter id – eg: RT @jeremycabral Check out my post on ‘Getting Started with Twitter’
• The second method is to copy their message and place ‘(via @theirtwitterid)’, ‘at the end of their tweet – eg: Check out my post on ‘Getting Started with Twitter’(via @jeremycabral)When you post a retweet, the original poster is notified by receiving a reply message.Re-tweeting is a very powerful tool, and to completely understand how you can use it to improve your results using Twitter I recommend reading this post by @MohsinN .

When posting URL’s shorten them to save characters

When you post a tweet, it’s important to shorten your URL to give you more characters for your message. Past your URL in to a URL shortening service, and you will be given a much shorter URL to paste in to your message.

Here are two simple to use services that are quite popular amongst Twitter users:

• TinyURL
• Bit.ly – cleaner, simpler interface without any ads. You can also create your own account.

Setup a Twitter application for your desktop

I highly recommend setting up a desktop application to get full use of Twitter. They have much more features than just twitter.com. Here are two that I recommend you try:

• Twhirl (my current Twitter app)
• Tweetdeck

Get an iPhone and a Twitter application from the App Store.

Using Twitter on the go will keep you connected and allow you to tweet about something as soon as you think of it. On top of that, there are some great iPhone applications that allow you to upload a picture and even let your followers know your current location. Here are two that I recommend you try:

• Tweetie (my current Twitter app)
• Twitteriffic

Twitter Strategy

If you are using Twitter to gain more connections and create online profile, I highly recommend this Twitter PR Strategy (Thanks to @Problogger)

I hope this post will help to get you started on Twitter – stay tuned for more tips and strategies.

I’d love to hear your thoughts – is there anything I’ve missed? All comments appreciated!

P.S. Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter!

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