Those who follow me on Twitter will know the news already:

Our dog is still missing: Littleport / Ely area, white, black patches, Jack Russell cross, if seen pls call 07740619844 twitter.com/freedimensiona…

— Tom Saunter (@freedimensional) January 8, 2012

There’s been a search out for her ever since, with all five Saunters and some amazing neighbours clomping about in our wellies, flashlights in hand.

I’m pretty sure we’ve thought of everything: we’ve scouring the entire surrounding area (see map); spoken to people all over town; put up flyers and posters in areas of high traffic; we’re leaving a scent-trail back to the house from where she went missing; notified all the necessary authorities and secured some media coverage (Star Radio, Gumtree, DogLost).

As you’ll see, what we need now are some more eyes and ears…

View Larger Map

Four hours ago, something incredible happened. A lady I’ve never met created the Facebook group ‘Help find BELLA‘ and invited some friends.

Since then it’s grown, and now a whopping 128 people have joined. Tomorrow, there’s a search planned for 10.30am in the Littleport area. Truly awesome. Thank you all. We can’t do this without you!

Many thanks indeed, Tom.

A quick recap on my year would look like this: worked hard, learned lots, had fun, met a girl, didn’t blog enough.

For some reason I can’t shake the sense that 2012 will be a sensational year, so I’m fighting through a hangover to make the optimistic promise that I’m going to blog much more, every day in fact.

It could be a photo, it could be a cool video, a gallery, a full post or just a single idea. Either way, it’ll be the stuff that I think will make for an interesting visit.

So keep clicking, and look out for some great stuff on the horizon.

Right, time for a bloody mary, I reckon!

• Sharing loads of great links on Twitter - Trunkly has all of these
• Trying out Google+ to see where the value lies (hmm…)
• Looking for a place to live with Sarah ♥ (any suggestions?)
• Playing with my new Kindle (I’m reading Neuromancer)
• Eating & drinking at some awesome places / seeing friends etc
• Reconfiguring all my Google Reader feeds (more on this soon)
• Watching movies: X-Men [8], Tree of Life [8] and Bridesmaids [9]
• Testing Subscription Options v0.8 (v. cool gradient shit)
• Reading The Authority by Warren Ellis, which is amazing
• Listening to some brand new music, c/o Spotify
• Working my balls off and all that…

Meanwhile, Brand Republic goes and published The BR 200 which is a list of “the best advertising, marketing, media, PR and digital blogs.” They stuck me in at #153, which is cool! Thing is, I haven’t blogged that much, have I? I’ll sort that out, sorry.

BR 200 (OPML)

Meanwhile, as a mark of respect to the others on the BR 200, and to any remaining readers out there, I’ve compiled an OPML list of all the blogs on that list, which you can import into your RSS reader of choice.

There ya go, people! Enjoy all those proper bloggers. Hehe.

He thinks, therefore he tweets.

Some context… I will typically have the odd side project on the go at any one time. Recent examples have included:

• Recategorising all my RSS feeds for mobile, web & iPad
• Linking up Instapaper / ReaditLater / Pinboard & Twitter
• Testing Facebook ads to see if I can drive Twitter followers
• Playing with XFBML, the new Follow button and Google +1
• Sketching people’s Twitter avatars with my new stylus

All of the above would be worthy of a blog post, and that might happen for a couple of them, but there’s been one project I’ve been thinking about for a while that I reckon just needs to be shared, because, dear reader, I need your help!

I’ve been interested in getting the most out of Twitter for a while, and I’ve been certain there is some utility among the network’s parasites: the lowly twitterbot. I’d love to perform an autopsy on one to see how they really work, as there are some excellent cases of these automata being actually quite useful or cool. For example:

• Spotibot – @replies suggested music based on your requests
• Wikipediabot – random links to Wikipedia pages every hour
• Easy Joke - RT’s with “that’s what she said” on certain phrases

There are loads more listed on the Twitter Fan Wiki, and of course there are millions of spambots that behave in similar ways. But I wanted to make something that would be primarily useful to me, and that others might enjoy too.

The idea arose from the need to detect, share and archive truly excellent links, without cluttering my personal Twitter feed. Did you know you can automatically add Twitter links to Pinboard for archiving? It’s a bloody useful way to passively log the stuff that’s held your attention. And did you know you can create a self-hosted archive of all your tweets? I use Tweetnest to this end, where I’ve been logging my personal tweets here. Try searching for something!

Mr. Strategy Bot is just another way to add useful stuff to my own personal content library. But throughout the course of his life, I’d like him to be useful to everyone. Or at least, everyone that works in digital media (you gotta have a niche). So how should I automate him to this end?

In my attempts to pin down what makes these robots work, I found a number of approaches, typically making use of Twitterfeed (a pretty blunt RSS syndication tool) or the Twitter API (way over my head). I needed something that would let me ‘scrape’ the top links from a list of Twitter users, and automatically RT the top five links.

I have totally failed in my attempts, even after a whole evening spent in the depths of Yahoo! Pipes. For now, I’ve had to settle on the manual way. Yep, I’m manually RT’ing the links until I find a better solution, five a day, with a bit of prose each time to help round out his character.

I will continue to research means of automating his behaviour, as I think the idea of one’s own personal virtual pet social robot is a really powerful idea. Wouldn’t you agree?

In the meantime, you should follow him on Twitter here.
He’s programmed to follow back!

The group’s rules are simple:

ONE upload per day.
Each piece must not have taken longer than a day to make.

So with these in mind, here is a slideshow of their submissions, best viewed fullscreen (but it can take a while to load):

So far the group has attracted 2,972 members, who’ve contributed 33,950 unique creations. That’s 11.4 submissions in total, so it’s evident people aren’t being religious about uploading every day, but what the hell.

What I find really interesting about the group is that there is very little conversation – a lowly 97 comments in total – in the main group discussion forum. All of the chatter is around individual works of art (especially the best stuff) . This tells me that viewers and contributors are far more interested in the content than in the delivery framework. Rightly so, I think.

The lesson to learn here is that despite Flickr enjoying a highly creative user base, it is very hard to engage those users with a campaign idea (and I’m not just talking advertising). Flickr just wasn’t designed for community engagement, as I’ve learned on past advertising campaigns that have used it as a platform.

But that’s OK, because people upload great art to the site every day, and the quality of comments that they do attract far outweigh Facebook’s throwaway commentary and (largely) poor photography, any day of the week.