I found some time to finally sign up for a Twitter account, and decided to follow two IABC-related twitterers: Barb Gibson, IABC Chair, and the IABC/Chicago Chapter Twitter group.

Barb’s Tweets included an appeal to contribute to “The Pledge to End Hunger,” a campaign designed to provide meals and raise awareness of childhood hunger. I just visited the website and pledged to support the campaign by spreading the word. The other ways to support the campaign are to donate money and to volunteer at one of many locations in the U.S. working to end hunger.

For each pledge made via the online form, Tyson will donate 35 lbs of food product (the equivalent of 140 servings) to Capital Area Food Bank of Texas. If the goal of 1,000 people taking the online pledge is reached, a semi-trailer will deliver 140,000 meals to the food bank.

I like the way that the campaign organizers have used the Intranet and Twitter to help promote the campaign. Visit the site to read more, take the pledge, and help campaign organizers and Tyson to make a difference for hungry kids.

If you’d like, send me a Tweet: @commakazi

This is the day. Can’t spend much time writing this post, or reading the news.

Anyway, the BIG news is coming via Twitter. Barack Obama is going to release the name of his vice presidential candidate TODAY! On Twitter!!!

Only the people with the 140-character attention spans will know this life-changing news…
for about 30 seconds. Then the news will be spread like wildfire to every traditional news outlet, where the REST of us out-of-touch saps will hear second-hand.

Thirty seconds after it is announced.

I can wait.

I’ve been a fan of the SitePoint(r) online resource company for about a decade, having first stumbled across its predecessor, webmaster-resources.com, and then following the company’s launch of sitepoint.com in 1999. I’m not a professional website developer, but as I’ve experimented with website design and content, I’ve benefited from SitePoint’s free and for-purchase resources.

If you haven’t visited sitepoint.com before, here are links to two recent columns that show the site’s benefits to non-web developers.

The first is an under-the-hood look at Twitter, and what may be causing the service outages that are frustrating Twitter users. I haven’t read this anywhere else. (I don’t subscribe to many other geek-oriented sites, so I might have missed some. A quick Technorati search didn’t come up with anything better than this article.)

The second article was a rant about the CAPTCHA utility that many website use to keep automated robots from accessing sites. But the CAPTCHA utility can be a pain for legitimate site vistors–especially when it insults those visitors.

Read Reddit’s Flawed CAPTCHA: Adding Insult To Injury for more information. I liked one commentor’s point that insults shouldn’t be part of the messaging in utilities meant to block automated robots. The robots won’t read or comprehend the insults. Only humans, most of whom are potential customers, would understand the insults–and they are not the ones who should be insulted.

Maybe SitePoint will become a new (to you) source for web-oriented information.