Daily Archives: August 25, 2009

Send Your Best (Sendyourbest.com), a newly-conceived online community designed to cheer on friends and family as they achieve milestones, is currently accepting beta testers while prepping for a late 2009 launch.

Created by David Goldman after his close friend, Kathleen was diagnosed with breast cancer, Send Your Best was initially a simple one page website that Mike Coulter built where Kathleen’s friends and family members could express well wishes and give her encouragement. Alternately Kathleen was able to give regular updates to the group that was rallying behind her. With the power of the internet in hand not only did Kathleen receive regular pep talks and ‘atta girls from those closest to her, she heard from people she hadn’t heard from in years and also received hundreds of well wishes from people she’d never met.

“After seeing how much this simple website lifted Kathleen’s spirits and made her battle a little bit easier, Mike and I realized that if this could help her then it could help thousands if not millions of people worldwide,” explains Goldman. “Kathleen is, thankfully, fully recovered and doing well.”

Send Your Best is not only geared towards those who are fighting illnesses like cancer but also to anyone working toward a milestone be it an educational goal, a marathon and so on. The scope of cheerleading Send Your Best can provide is as wide open as its users are creative. Unlike other social networking sites where you create your own page, with Send Your Best your friend or family member creates a page for you. Designed to put people in contact with others dealing with the same struggles and triumphs, Send Your Best also connects those who need help with those who are there to give it. It’s safe to say that everyone can use a support network at some point in their life.

Send Your Best Team

David Goldman

A professional photographer with over 13 years of working in the music, celebrity and advertising worlds, Goldman is the founder of Send Your Best. Not long after relocating to New York in 2005 from Los Angeles a very close friend of his was diagnosed with stage 3 advanced breast cancer. No longer living in LA and feeling somewhat helpless as to what he could do to help his friend David came up with the idea of Send Your Best. Originally for his friend, it quickly became clear through all the positive feedback and great support gleaned from the site that it would be a crime if he did not do everything in his power to make it a reality for anyone in need.

Eythor Ernstson

A software and marketing professional with 10 years of experience in entrepreneurial and startup environments, Ernstson is a partner of Send Your Best as well as the lead web designer for the site. Born and raised in Iceland, Ernstson moved to the US to explore opportunities but ended up settling in Toronto where he and David struck up a friendship. After a few brief conversations, Ernstson realized the potential that Send Your Best has on positively impacting people and joined the effort to make it a reality. Aside from working on Send Your Best, Ernstson runs a consulting firm out of Toronto and Huntsville, Alabama.

Mike Coulter
An LA-based Art Director and Web Designer, Coulter is a co-founder and the lead web developer for Send Your Best. He was born outside of Baltimore and after graduating from Penn State in 1985 with degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering Coulter moved to California. Passion intervened and Coulter sidestepped engineering for his love of music and dreams of becoming a rock star. His band Lifter was signed to Interscope Records in 1993 and released one record. Mike found a permanent home in the film industry as an Art Director for television commercials co-mingled with a second career in web design and development. He lives in Eagle Rock with the love of his life, his dog Calvin.

Adopt-a-Pet.com launches “TwitterACritter” campaign with help from Kevin Nealon, Alyssa Milano, and others

Adopt-a-Pet.com, North America’s largest non-profit pet adoption web service, announces the official launch of TwitterACritter, a new social media campaign that uses Twitter to spread the word about adoptable pets in shelters.

On the campaign web site, www.TwitterACritter.com, pet lovers can select one of the 130,000 homeless dogs, cats, and other pets listed on Adopt-a-Pet.com and tweet a link to that pet’s information.

“TwitterACritter is a fun, easy way for people to actively save the life of a shelter pet, even if they can’t adopt one themselves or afford to donate,” says Abbie Moore, executive director of Adopt-a-Pet.com. “Homeless pets are powerless to promote themselves to potential adopters, so it’s up to those of us who love animals to lend a hand, and a set of thumbs, and tweet about them. In these difficult economic times, when so many pets are being relinquished to shelters, they need our help more than ever.”

Already the campaign has gotten a boost from several celebrities who have participated and encouraged their Twitter followers to do the same. Since the TwitterACritter feature became available two weeks ago, Kevin Nealon, Alyssa Milano, Denise Richards, Kristin Chenoweth, and several other celebrities have taken up the cause and tweeted links to shelter pets listed on Adopt-a-Pet.com. According to Moore, “In each case, immediately after the celebrity’s tweet, hundreds of their followers tweeted homeless pets as well. . . and their followers tweet, and so on and so on. The celebrities create an avalanche of compassion.”

“The bottom line is that if enough people see a shelter pet, that pet gets adopted. There is no better way to expose shelter pets to as many potential adopters as possible than through Twitter,” continues Moore. “It’s no exaggeration to say that a single tweet can save a life. Imagine the impact it would have if everyone tweeted just one critter a day!”

To learn more about TwitterACritter and to see photos of celebrity participants, visit http://www.TwitterACritter.com. You can follow the campaign at http://www.Twitter.com/TweetACritter

About Adopt-a-Pet.com:

Adopt-a-Pet.com (formerly 1-800-Save-A-Pet.com) is North America’s largest non-profit pet adoption website, helping over 8,000 animal shelters, humane societies, SPCAs, pet rescue groups, and pet adoption agencies advertise their homeless pets to adopters for free. Adopt-a-Pet.com displays photos and descriptions of adoptable pets to over 1.5 million people seeking to adopt a pet each month, and is funded by the passionate pet lovers at Purina and North Shore Animal League America. Aside from being able to adopt a dog or adopt a cat, Adopt-a-Pet.com visitors may now also adopt a rabbit, horse, bird, reptile, amphibian, fish, farm-type animals and other small pets.

Faculty Focus, a website for higher education professionals, today announced results of a survey on Twitter usage and trends among college faculty. The survey of approximately 2,000 higher education professionals found that nearly one-third (30.7 percent) of the 1,958 respondents say they use Twitter in some capacity. More than half, (56.4 percent) say they’ve never used Twitter.

The findings, available in the downloadable report Twitter in Higher Education: Usage Habits and Trends of Today’s College Faculty, show relatively strong adoption rates among higher education professionals. On the other end of the spectrum, the results also reveal a large number of faculty question the value of using the micro-blogging service in an academic setting.

Key findings of Twitter in Higher Education: Usage Habits and Trends of Today’s College Faculty include:

21.9 percent of respondents say they are “familiar” or “very familiar” with Twitter.
Of those who use Twitter, 21 percent say they “frequently” use it to collaborate with colleagues; 15.6 percent do so “occasionally.”
Of those who use Twitter, 7.2 percent “frequently” use it as a learning tool in the classroom; 9.4 percent do so “occasionally.”
71.8 percent of current Twitterers expect their usage to increase this school year.
20.6 percent of current non-Twitter users say there is a “50/50 chance” they will use Twitter as a learning tool in the classroom in the next two years.
12.9 percent of respondents say they tried Twitter, but stopped using it because it took too much time, they did not find it valuable, or a combination of reasons.
Depending on how they answered the question “Do you use Twitter?” respondents were asked a unique set of follow-up questions. The 20-page report released today provides a breakdown of the survey results by question, including comments provided by survey respondents when available. The comments further explain how they are using Twitter, why they stopped, or why they have no interest in using it at all.

Although the majority of faculty do not currently use Twitter, their reasons are varied. Many questioned its educational relevance and expressed concerns that it creates poor writing skills. For others the reasons boiled down to the simple fact that they either don’t know how to use Twitter, or don’t have time to use it.

“One of the more interesting findings from the survey is the high percentage of faculty who use Twitter, even if they’re still experimenting with the best ways to incorporate it into their courses,” says Mary Bart, content manager for Faculty Focus. “What also became quite apparent was how strongly Twitterers and non-Twitterers feel about the technology.”

The majority (55.9 percent) of people who took the survey are professors or instructors, with another 4.3 percent who designated themselves as online instructors specifically. Nearly one-fourth (23.6 percent) are academic leaders, such as department chairs and deans. Sixteen percent selected their role as “other” and this included individuals in faculty development, academic advisement, instructional design, marketing, admissions, assessment, and library services.

The survey was conducted in July and August 2009. An email invitation to participate in the online survey was distributed to Faculty Focus subscribers, as well as to select in-house lists of higher education faculty and administrators. Faculty Focus also notified its Twitter followers of the survey via http://twitter.com/facultyfocus.

To access the full report: Twitter in Higher Education: Usage Habits and Trends of Today’s College Faculty visit http://bit.ly/4cjCh0 or http://www.facultyfocus.com/.

About Faculty Focus

Faculty Focus, a resource from Magna Publications, is a website dedicated to the academic issues at the forefront of higher education today. Developed for teaching professors and academic leaders, the site features innovative strategies, best practices, and fresh perspectives for creating a better teaching and learning environment. Visit http://www.facultyfocus.com/

Tewspaper, an online newspaper without writers, has launched with coverage of five major metropolitan cities – Baltimore, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City. Tewspaper scours social media websites such as Twitter and filters messages down to breaking news. One of the local sites, Baltimore News, brings algorithmically filtered news to people in Tewspaper’s home town.

Tewspaper is neither endorsed nor sponsored by Twitter or other social media websites; the company uses publicly available APIs to connect with social media sites and find relevant data. One of Tewspaper’s innovations is a system of filtering through the obscure and finding the relevant news on social media sites. For example, Twitter alone has over 2 billion messages, and is growing by thousands of messages per minute. Tewspaper makes it easy to find out what is happening now, in an organized, succinct, and accessible fashion. It is an ideal way for the Internet generation, who text and tweet, to view the news at their rapidly moving pace.

“We began by limiting the news to trusted authorities on Twitter. From there, we are working on an algorithm that can find additional breaking news from anyone on Twitter and other websites as it happens,” said Jared Lamb, the creator of Tewspaper.

Another obstacle Tewspaper had to overcome was the limited content it could locate for each story. To solve this problem, the website automatically matches images to related stories. Tewspaper determines the optimal image to display for every story based upon the author, subject, headline text, date, links, and other context.