But is it okay to tweet in church? Churchgoers are more likely to tweet a message live, but how do pastors feel about their congregants using cell phones during the sermon? I looked for a precedent online, and read Anthony Coppedge‘s e-book The Reason Your Church Must Twitter, but the book didn’t deal with the issue.

So I proposed the idea to Ryan Phipps, the campus pastor, and found that it wasn’t an issue. I wrote a statement that I suggested including in the Sunday program, and today Ryan surprised me by tweeting a pic of the printed statement — preceded by a headline that clearly answers my question:

Dawn was taking acetaminophen and hydrocodone for her hypochondria, and shortly after popping a prescribed pill, convinced herself that I was PittGirl.

I hope you weren’t expecting more.

I haven’t seen the research, but I was discussing this same theory with Justin Kownacki at a recent Refresh Pittsburgh meeting. In my own blog reading, I find that I’m more likely to click on a bookmarking link if I’m given only one or two options than if I’m faced with an overwhelming choice of bookmarking sites.

If you’re wondering what I mean by “paradox of choice”, you can read The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, or scan the reviews. If you’re wondering what I mean by social bookmarking plugins, I’m talking about those image or text links at the end of a blog post to add/share/bookmark that post on social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and many others:

The Criteria

Link Options

In Chris‘s case, he only wants a link to StumbleUpon, which gives him the most traffic. Since he knows where people are finding his content, he wants to support them there. And since readers are more likely to click one link than two, he wants to drive his traffic to the best service rather than split it between several, or lose them to overwhelming choice.

“More” Link

However, some readers may have a preferred bookmarking site that differs from the author’s, so my criteria for a social bookmarking plugin is going to include the option to add to other services — a “more” link.

Customization

As a designer, a second criterion of mine is customization — whether through the plugin’s settings or my theme’s CSS and PHP code — since I don’t want the plugin to look the same on all of my site designs. In Chris’s case, he wants a big fat simple button. Since most social bookmarking plugins use small icons, this will probably need to be a custom graphic.

News Feed

Another consideration may be whether the plugin adds links to the blog’s feed or just to the site. I know that FeedBurner’s FeedFlare™ is added to both, but its text images are not customizable, nor aesthetically pleasing IMO.

The Plugins

To find the best social bookmarking plugin based on these criteria, I used Mashable’s “30+ Plugins to Make Your WordPress Blog More Social” as a guide. I chose nine plugins based on that list, and review them here in alphabetical order:

1. Bookmarkify met all of my criteria.
2. Bookmark Me includes an impressive list of international sites, but does not have a “more” option, nor does it add links to RSS feeds.
3. I Love Social Bookmarking displays links in a drop down menu to save on load time. The settings provide good customization from within the admin panel, but to remove the plugin’s logo from your site, you will need to edit the image or your CSS. No RSS or “more” options.
4. obsocialbookmarker was annoying just to install, and wasn’t any easier to set up. The filter which displays services by country seemed nifty, but only gave me three choices for USA. The International option let me choose “Stumble it”, but the rest of the customization options left much to be desired. No RSS or “more” options.
5. Sociable allows ordering of site links, something I hadn’t yet considered, but no “more” link.
6. Social Bookmarking RELOADED was a little difficult to customize, partly because I had to manually un-click each site link that I did not want. No “more” link or RSS feed options made me UNLOAD this one.
7. Social Bookmarks is the plugin that Social Bookmarking RELOADED was based off of, but with different icons. I prefer RELOADED, but would not choose either plugin.
8. SociBook was confusing to set up, and only partly because of the broken English. Customization through the administration panel is limited, but it does provide an easy way to use custom icons. There are no RSS or “more” options, and I couldn’t get the plugin to work on my test site (WordPress version 2.6.2).
9. SocioFluid has a cool factor because it keeps the icons small until the reader mouses over them, similar to the Mac taskbar. A decent amount of customization can be done in the settings page, but no RSS or “more” options, and the plugin didn’t work correctly on my test site.

So which plugin is best?

Unsurprisingly, I found Bookmarkify best met my criteria. It has an excellent selection of links, including the requisite “more” link, and also a link to share the post by email. Most of the plugins I tested include the most popular social bookmarking sites, but if you need a less common site, you may need to find a specific plugin that includes it.

By default, Bookmarkify’s code is included in the RSS, but you can check a box to exclude it from the feed. As far as customization, Bookmarkify’s settings page provides the choice of placement at either the top or bottom of posts, or a custom option which requires template modification. The settings also list all of the relevant style classes to customize with CSS — these do not include the More Box, but by viewing the site code you can find out these classes easily. And since the images are all hosted in the blog’s plugins folder, they can be customized.

The only feature that this plugin lacks is the ability to chose where to display its code within the blog, such as single posts, single pages, home page, excerpts, archives etc. The settings page does offer the PHP code to call the plugin, so presumably this can be achieved by editing the theme’s template pages.

I’ve activated Bookmarkify on this blog, as seen below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Panacea81, a.k.a. Lauren Luke got her start selling makeup products on eBay, using photos of her eye to show the application of the makeup. When she started getting requests from customers who wanted to know how to properly apply the makeup, it just made sense to do tutorials on YouTube, showing how to achieve different looks using the products.

According to her YouTube channel, Lauren has been a member since June 28, 2007, and at the time of this posting has 120,347 subscribers. A May, 2008 BBC One documentary reported her YouTube ad revenue as being in the thousands of dollars a month.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The most popular UK YouTube user doesn’t edit her videos, because she doesn’t know how. In some videos, we can see her turn the camera off and back on, the realism of the rough cut being precisely what viewers appreciate about Panacea81. It was her realism and enthusiasm for their products that first caught the attention of UK cosmetic company Barry M, who soon realized that she had a unique talent for showcasing their products’ wide range of colors. According to Dean Mero, Managing Director for Barry M:

At first we were just chuffed that an independent reviewer like Lauren loved Barry M so much! As a brand we’re known for our range of colours which Lauren uses beautifully. But then, after we watched more of Lauren’s videos and spoke to her, we realised just what a fantastic talent she had and what a remarkable and empowering story she has to tell.

According to Lauren:

I’ve always wanted to be a make up artist and to make a living from working in the beauty industry. Barry M simply asked me what I needed in terms of support whist allowing me to remain at college to gain my qualifications and to work independently. My sole intention when I started my YouTube tutorials was to help other women like me to feel confident and to look good – whoever they are. I’m not a glamorous make up model and, because of that, women seem to appreciate me more. And it’s lovely to share my videos with them and to give them ideas.

Lauren’s Barry M videos are on the Barry M Tutorials page as well as YouTube, and show Lauren still in her bedroom, still not editing her videos. I’d recommend a condenser mic to cut down on the background noise, but I have to give proper respect to Barry M for not trying to change what Lauren’s viewers like about her.

According to Panacea81′s Twitter profile, she is currently in New York filming with BBC and picking out colors for her new makeup line. Zoom Zoom!

Good background images integrate well with the Twitter profile layout, and better ones look good while doing it. One of the best Twitter backgrounds I’ve seen is on Chris Brogan’s profile, because it accomplishes both while maintaining his website’s branding.

Click on the image above to see what a good Twitter background looks like, or go to Chris Brogan’s Twitter profile to see it live.

Chris uses a different photo of himself than he did for his avatar, which is a smart move. My only suggestion for Chris would be to decrease the leading (line spacing) of the text, since I can’t see his URL and email address on my MacBook at 1280 x 800 resolution (I have three Firefox toolbars open, but that’s probably about average for Twitter users).

I am a social media whore.

Instead of practicing what I preach and creating my own Twitter background image, I’ve decided to sell myself. Actually, after reading Rob Blatt’s post “Selling ads on my Twitter page” in September, I decided to sign up with Twittad and see how much somebody was willing to pay me to use background space that I wasn’t using. Basically, Twittad lets Twitterers choose a duration and price for their profile, and advertisers can then purchase the spots. After researching prices that other Twitterers with a similar amount of followers were asking, I decided on one month for $20.

I neglected to fill out my Twittad profile, and I forgot about it until today, when I got an email that my profile had sold. The buyer? Twittad. I don’t know if my profile finally sold because Twittad is launching a new advertising campaign on their own platform, or if it’s because I have a few hundred more followers than I did when I set the price, but I accepted the ad and set it as my Twitter background:

View my Twitter profile to see this ad live (at least for one month).

As Adam Ostrow pointed out on Mashable, there are a number of problems that Twittad has to contend with, the first of which is that page backgrounds are not clickable and there is no easy way for a third-party service to track any meaningful metrics other than impressions. I don’t expect Twitter advertising to be a major source of revenue for any advertisers, but it is a fun branding platform.

In fact, I’m now considering buying ad space to advertise The G Spod. I think designing a background and choosing the right profile spot will be a fun way to spend my extra $20.

**UPDATE**

I decided to donate my Twittad proceeds to the ASPCA.

Click on the flyer to see a list of content generated at the event, including the afforementioned bloggers plus Fashionista, Mike Sorg, writing and photography by Kim Reed, and the Wrestling Mayhem Show‘s interview with semi-supergroup Western Plains.

Since this Liquid Sundays was also a fashion show, three general groups of people mixed, stirred, but rarely shook. Afterwords, at a late-night greasy spoon while waiting for Nate the cook, JustAnn and I discussed synergy and community. People not mixing is nothing new outside of a baby in a blender joke, but the conversation stirred something deeper.

I was the most interested when Justin hit on something I’ve been thinking about for a while, which is community in a smaller sense: a group or, often termed in retrospect, a movement. In his biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, author Henry James wrote “the best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation.”

More to come…