My problem is that I cannot understand why he would want to leave a city that fits him like a glove. I will now summon the power of Blogdar, the relatively unknown Norse god of blogging, to convince him that he should stay.

Mr. DM

In the direct marketing and interactive space(s), you will be hard pressed to find a person with more high quality, actionable ideas. My old boss used to say that he hated sales. He wanted to put a dollar in the vending machine and have a client fall out. We all know that that is a sales pipe dream, but if you were to ask for that sort of scenario for ideas, well that’s Greg.

Boston’s Got it Goin’ On

My question is whether the North Carolina market can offer enough to keep him occupied and challenged professionally.

• Boston is fast moving
• Boston has agencies that manage big, multi-channel campaigns.
• In Boston, Greg has insight into Direct, Digital, TV, Radio and Analytics projects.
• Greg has a huge client and colleague network in Boston and New York.
• Greg is a huge fan of the Red Sox, Patriots and Celtics and loves to get to a game with his friends and colleagues
• Greg enjoys a good poker game now and then. There are no casinos in North Carolina (that offer anything beyond video poker), but Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun are in his backyard since he’s practically living on the Cape right now.
• Greg’s friends are in Boston.
• Who will coach Boston in the newly formed World League of RB2000?

Blogging is a highly useful tool for formulating ideas and arguments. Sometimes when you get things out of your head and into a forum like this, you can see the error of your argument and it frees your mind from focusing on a particular topic. The variable that I have left out of the equation is that Gregory Ng, above all, is a family man and this move, for a lot of reasons, is really good for his family. Am I happy that he’s leaving? Hell no. Am I happy for him and for his new opportunity? Of course!

Good luck Greg. I will miss you.

What does it need?

It is really useful now, but I have a few ideas for how I would take Twitturly to the next level.

• Larger “windows” or a user controlled timeline ala Google Analytics.
• URL trend lines
• Aggregation of URLs by individuals or groups of individuals.
• Drill up: Aggregation of URLs by site, drill down to specific URLs

Windows of Time

This allows users to specify a larger window of time than 24 hours. It allows them to track what has been popular for a given time period. I would like to see tabs that say 24hours (the default), 1 week, 1 month and 1 year. If the system can handle it, ideally we would be able to choose a time frame between A and date B and be given the list.

URL trendline

Building on the Windows of Time idea, a user would be able to see a graph of the popularity of a URL within that time window. It would also be cool if they could add more than one URL to the graph, ala trendrr. One could argue that you can do this via compete.com, but that is only for URL home pages. This would allow us to compare specific URL and their popularity on Twitter.

Aggregation by Popular People

What are the most talkative people in twitter talking about? I would like to see the URLs from

• The 10 top most popular by followers.
• The top 10 people who follow the most people.
• The top 10 people with the most tweets.
• The top top people who receive the most @s.
• The most popular URLs by everyone that I am following.

URL Drill Up

This would be a drill-up to the home page. It would scrape everything off of the URL after the first slash. This tells us how popular places Youtube, Google, Digital Before Digital and Yahoo are in aggregate and then we can drill down and see what the most popular articles/stories/features are.

What would you add to Twitturly?

Stepping back: Direct marketing guru and Internet junkie, Gregory Ng, introduced me to twitter. After a couple of days of use, I got the general gist of it, but I really wanted to figure out what I could learn from it. After all, this was really close to my dream of being able to work all day mining AIM or MSN conversations and then return home with my 6 friends to our dark haired princess who washes our clothes and makes us supper. I just want to learn how to serve you better. I promise I am only quasi-evil!

So I built a little MySQL database and PERL script that started storing tweets from people that I felt were influential on twitter. People like Paul Kedrosky and Chris Brogan. I soon discovered that this was the wrong approach. While it’s interesting and helpful to get the opinions and most commonly used word pairs of the experts, it is the twitter population at large that can help you tell a story about what is happening in twitterland. You can use one of the many cool search tools like Summize to get a buzz

pulse, or you can use some of the cool first generation analytics apps, some of which I mention below.

The Twalaxy’s Attempts at Buzz Measurement

• Twitterverse

  is a twitter tag cloud that shows what is happening within the last 1 to 10 hours on twitter. You can set it up to look at one word or two word phrases.

• Intwition

  is a cool tool that tells you the most popular links on twitter for the day. It also tries to suggest what will be popular dude to its hotness within the last 8 hours, and it also gives a 5 day summary.

• TwitterBuzz and even better: Twitturly

  Twitterbuzz is a link aggregator. It shows the most popular links on twitter. It aggregates the primary URLs and then allows you to drill down. The only problem with this is that it aggregates tinyurl, dwarfurl, snurl etc instead of following them to the actual link which would be far more interesting. It also is not setup to capture and display double-byte characters so Chinese tweets are not legible. <a href=”http://twitter.com/waynesutton/statuses/808211269″>@waynesutton just turned me on to Twitturly </a> which I think is even more compelling because it DOES follow the links and has a really slick look and feel.

Twitterverse 2.0

These apps are cute like and they do give us a flavor for what is happening, but what happens if we do more than make a cute app for the sake of saying we did have a cute twitter app? How about some natural language processing to tell us if the message is positive or negative. How about we apply that to a brand? Consider a new competitive product release like the (fictional) Dunkin Donuts Strawberry Cheesecake Latte and (you know you want it) Starshmuck’s Raspberry Ripple Espresso. How about a compete.com-esque tool that allows me to enter the products and gives me a trend line showing the positive or negative buzz about the products?

Even better would be an aggregation of these, similar to what is happening on Trendrr but using natural language processing to care for abbreviations, related works and the like. Trendrr is a great first step and I think could prove to be a bridge to the Twitterverse 2.0.

I will be keeping my bananas peeled on these developments. Tweet me with or comment with others! @schneidermike.

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This is what I tell people when they ask me my name. Still, about a third of them decide that they like Mike better and start off with a “nice to meet you Mike.” This fills me with temporary wookie-style rage. Fortunately, I rule at suppressing my inner Chewie.

My mother named me Michael Schneider. If it were up to my father, my name would be Wolfgang. He thought that it would be cool to call me Wolf or Wolfy. This is probably the only thing my father and Eddie Van Halen, who DID name his son Wolfgang, have in common. Schneider is a name of German origin. It means tailor. So you can imagine that Michael Schneider is a fairly common name. There are some pretty interesting Michael and Mike Schneiders out there too.

Mike Schneider is a TV personality for ABC. I can remember watching him in the late 80s and early 90s anchoring the early morning news program: ABC World News This Morning. He also had a soft political career and now is with Bloomberg TV. I actually majored in mass communications for a semester. I wanted to be a radio jock. My dad convinced me that business was a better major. I should have majored in Computer Science, but MIS and Accountancy have served me well.

Mike Schneider is a quarterback for the Youngstown State Penguins. Interestingly enough, I was born in Youngstown, OH. This is a fact that I do not often share, primarily because Youngstown is one of Ohio’s 2 armpits. Anyone care to guess the other? Sorry @gregoryng, I think @chrisbrogan tweeted in first. Yes Chris, the answer is Toledo.

Michael Schneider is a TV editor for Variety Magazine. He claims to have taught himself to read the TV guide. I found that funny because I used to memorize the TV week in the News Herald every Sunday. I memorized the plot summaries for every show that was on before I went to bed. This Michael also created the “famous” Facebook “Michael Schneider Project”. He has friended about 100 Michael Schneiders and counting.

The first Michael Schneider in a Google search wrote A Beginner’s Guide To Constructing The Universe. “In this book you will find something that cannot be obtained elsewhere, a complete introduction to the geometric code of nature, written and illustrated by the most perceptive of its modern investigators.” Sounds really important and complicated Michael! This Michael and I share a love for Math. He seems to love it more though.

There is also Michael Schneider the concert pianist and Michael Schneider the Georgia Tech student and photographer.

Another Michael Schneider is a state senator in Las Vegas. He can participate in the moustache fighting league. His tag team partner would be the Easter Bell of France.

Michael T. Schneider is special effects wizards who works on some of Hollywood’s hottest movies like August Underground’s Mordum and The Wickeds.

Michael A. Schneider is an attorney who works on technology transactions.

This Mike Schneider is a professional poker player. He won a million bucks in a tournament. We both really love poker. I would join the World Poker Tour as well and win a million dollars of my own, but I do not want to cause confusion for Mike Schneider fans. I’m all-in when it comes to consideration.

There is a Michael Schneider who is a Major in the US Army. Another Michael Schneider is a film maker. This Michael Schneider is a clinical psychologist.

Which one of these am I? I am the computer geeking, strategic consulting, digital marketing, football (soccer) loving, hockey playing, Chinese speaking, social medi-ing, advertising, father of 3. I am THE Michael Schneider. Welcome to digital before digital!