It’s only been a day or so, but OHHDL has 5,686 followers on twitter at the time of this netfxcafe post, myself included.

Actually, the O seems to stand for Office, as in "Office of His Holiness The Dalai Lama", but none the less, it will be very interesting to watch how they use twitter to communicate with their followers.

I have a life long interest in spirituality, and a long standing professional background in technology. This is fascinating to me on both fronts, especially as I am just now looking for ways to merge these two interests into one career.

More to come on this topic, for sure.

* Update: It’s been, ohhh, about 20 or so minutes since I first posted this, and OHHDL now has 6,229 followers. I would love to see a graph of how the followers number grows for His Holiness The Dalai Lama.

I think there is a common misconception that spiritual people are somehow behind the times, or that the folks that are out front in terms of technology somehow don’t care about such things. What I am finding more and more is that this is far from the case. There is a much better story to tell here, but it is 8 AM on a Sunday here for me… not quite the pondering hour for me.

** Update as of 02/09/2009

According to this news article, Twitter has suspended the OHHDL account “because it violated our Terms of Use regarding impersonation”. Would be interesting to know more about this story.

In a bit of smart but slightly deceiving marketing, this item seems to be hitting the hive mind –>

LeapFrog launches ‘BlackBerry for children’ – Telegraph

After taking a closer look, here are two salient info bits to consider:

• It’s targeted at kids as young as THREE years old.
• It doesn’t connect to the web… from which I gather, it doesn’t connect to ANYTHING.

Seems to me that there was a time, not too long ago, when parents looked for toys for their tots that harkened back to simpler times, sparked the imagination a bit, … toys that brought back fond memories, and that kind of thing.

This is a big step away from that kind of thinking.

Nothing says I love you kid like “welcome to the busy busy world of information overload”.

Or maybe it’s just a way for workaholic parents to reduce their guilt.

I can see it now – Johnathon the father sits at the dinner table pecking away on his BlackBerry, while little Johnny lets his chicken nuggets get cold while playing with his LeapFrom pseudo BlackBerry, just like good ol’ dad.

I had a great lunch yesterday with my friend Frank. Well, the lunch was OK, but the conversation with Frank was great.

He’s been real active lately with Twitter. Additionally, much of our lunch discussion was about social media, RSS feeds, and how to take things to the next level and get a better handle on all of this information flowing in all directions.

So I agreed that I should finally get around to looking into this thing called Twitter.

I have head about it from quite some time, but never really got the feel for it. But after a few days, I am starting to see some of the potential.

Next step for me, of course, was to look for a way to integrate Twitter with WordPress. Seems that there are a vast number of ways to do this… here are a few:

• Twitter WordPress Sidebar Widget a WordPress Widget plugin for your blog as an alternative to the badges provided by Twitter.
• Mobypicture – Mobypicture lets you share postings to your Twitter, WordPress, (and many many more…) from your mobile phone, email or from the web, including pictures, text.
• Tweetly Updater – a WordPress plugin that updates Twitter when you create or edit a blog entry, it uses the bit.ly service for short urls.

Additionally, there are any number of services out there that will pump any ol’ RSS feed into your Twitter account, which would also work well with WordPress, I imagine.

Lots of choices. Although I am new to Twitter, I have been using WordPress for a very long time, so it is a natural starting place for me to go with the plugin approach.

Starting with this post, I am using the Tweetly Updater plugin. Hope it works well!

Other resources:

• I also recommend you take a look at one of Frank’s recent postings on the topic of Twitter: Twitter – The Answer to 2 Big Questions.

• For a huge list of Twitter related apps of all kinds, visit this page: http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps

I am amused that Google suddenly started warning users that ALL websites were dangerous.

Google has, of course, fixed it, and has blamed the mistake on simple human error:

Official Google Blog: “This site may harm your computer” on every search result??

But really now, what other kind of error is there? Even if their search technology messed up, it’s all created by, managed by, tested by… you guessed it… HUMANS.

Oh well, I get the point… but this just goes to show you what can happen when you rely on manually entering data!

Time is money, as they say… so it is hard to always find the time one wants to explore and learn all the different systems that are out there.

I am really comfortable with WordPress. And as I have written before here, I have done plenty of work with the beta version of Pligg.

So where do you go when you need richer content management functionality?

In the Microsoft world, the top platforms that seem to come up include Sharepoint and DotNetNuke. I have worked a bit with DotNetNuke, and am simply not too enthused at this juncture. The module development process seems overly complicated, and the performance seems strained. These are not well tested theories, mind you, but it’s where I am at with it today.

Next up on the LAMP stack would be Drupal, or Joomla.

A quick search of which platform is better turned up some interesting comparisons, such as this one, but many of them seemed a bit out of date. I know a lot can happen with these platforms in a year or two!

On a whim, I decided to look at a few job sites. This may not be a sign of which system is better overall, but one would think it would be a measure of adoption by revenue generating companies…

So here are the results from today:

Site: Joomla , Drupal

Dice: 19 , 46

VirtualVocations:  6 , 6

Monster: 23 , 43

Elance:  135 , 53

Guru: 26 , 11

This adds up to Joomla at 209, and Drupal at 159. Considering all of the jobs available at all of these sites, I am guessing this is nearly an insignificant difference in numbers…

Another find along the way, which I didn’t think to look for… actual job sites dedicated to just these platforms!

• http://www.joompro.com
• http://www.joomlajobs.net
• http://www.joomlancers.com
• http://www.drupaljob.com
• http://jobs.drupalsearch.org/a/jobs/find-jobs

I am leaning towards drupal at this time, as a starting point, but may have to try both out, just to get a feel for the differences.

Wish there were more time in a day!