During the past few weeks, Twitter has been down or out due to stress. To learn more about Twitter scaling issues read this interview by Jesse Stay. When a service goes down, users will complain. And if happens a lot, they may move on. There was much speculation as to whether they mover to Jaiku (with its newly minted Google money), or Pownce, BrightKite, Tumblr, plurk or FriendFeed.

Want to listen on Twitter? Use Tweetscan and type in key words. Don't forget to add the search tool.

Danielle Brigida put together this excellent slide show on how to use tools like Digg and StumbleUpon (not humans) to drive traffic. Love the dogs!

Speaking of Digg and dogs .. watch Kevin Rose's dog do some tricks on QIK.

See the full version here.

NpTech resource sharing and conversations are getting more and more distributed. This past week there was a lot of Twitter chatter in different nooks and crannies in NpTechosphere. Here's a brief summary:

Send in the Twitter Clouds

The NpTech Tag Summary went on hiatus to give some space to rethink, reinvent. It came back last month in a new format and aggregation process. Conversations are getting more distributed and it is getting increasingly difficult to use tagging to discover, aggregate, and summarize them. I'm moving beyond monitoring the NpTech tagged items and meta feeds to incorporate nuggets from micro media sources, nptech bloggers, friend feeds, and networks.

Photo by SpacePotato

The NpTech Tag Summary went on hiatus to give some space to rethink, reinvent. It came back earlier this week in a new format and aggregation process. I'm moving beyond monitoring the NpTech tagged items and meta feeds to incorporate nuggets from micro media sources, nptech bloggers, friend feeds, and USG. The summaries will be briefer, focused on a social media theme or a social media question related to practice. Inspiration may come from outside our silo and together we'll remix it ..

Marnie Webb's monthly Twitter usage tracked over the past year and half created with Tweetstats.

One of the above is the actual cover of "Visualizing Information for Advocacy" - a must read booklet from Tactical Technology Collective.

NpTech Conversations

So, you want to build a MashUp? Take the NetSquared Mashup Challenge!

Drew Bernard has a review of a new guide by the good folks at Tactical Technology Collective called "Visualizing Information for Advocacy"