I joined Twitter about a year ago when I started at Mahalo.com, I saw our CEO Jason Calacanis was always "tweeting" updates about the website so I figured it might be a great resource to get news from the boss, since I work remotely. The @jeffhoard isn't anything special, my tweets are pretty lame but I like that I am connected with most of the people I deem important in my corner of the web so it's a great resource for me.

When Kalane and I started Idiocracy Index we thought about the fact that we would be finding more stories then we could ever blog, so we setup a Twitter account to tweet idiocy, and added a huge feed to our blog. The feed is great because it means our website provides fresh information even if we haven't added a blog post. What really surprised me was the quick Twitter response, check out the follower count in less than a month, it's already surpassed my year old account. Join the insanity and follow @iidiocracy

I mentioned some time ago on this blog that Kalane and I were working on a new blog project, well we started Idiocracy Index in January and spent some time tweaking, now we find ourselves posting to it with regularity. The Idiocracy Index! basically it's a great collection of articles and stories that serve as evidence to the dumbing down of our society, we work online in the field of research and the number of Idiocracy Index worthy articles we come across is staggering.

The blog is WordPress but we've also been using the Jing tool by Techsmith,which is a tool that makes it easy for us to take a screenshot and get it up on the blog quickly. It makes posting quite efficient and interesting. In the past you might only put a hyperlink or a quote, now you can take a picture of the screen as you see it....back in the day you'd have to hit "print+screen" > go to paint > save > upload...ugh, I'm glad those days are past us.

Did you hear about the Jackson Five Museum/Slavery Theme Park? Neither had we after we heard about it we archived it on the blog using Jing to take a screenshot. The other beauty of Jing is that it can take video. You have to pay a few extra bucks a month, but with one click you can to store videos you take of your screen, store them or even upload it to your YouTube account. We've been using both, Idiocracy Index has an active youtube channel. We use the provided storage for the videos we know will get removed from YouTube. We can also embed those "Video screenshots." Look at how nice this looks. Sure the audio is scratchy and maybe the quailty isn't HDTVXXX, but it's raw, I like it. It looks even better on the Idiocracy Index Blog.



The last element is a Twitter bar in the side, considering we catch more Idiocracy than we can chew, we'll be tweeting. We keep our followers informed on Idiocracy throughout the day without needing to write full blown blog pieces. If you are on Twitter you can follow us here.

Pretty lame job at updating this blog recently, I've been pretty busy with a couple of other projects.

First as you know a month Mahalo launched Answers, which I've helping with on the moderating side of things as well as offering the odd tidbit of research and knowledge, the community over has been growing pretty good, you should check it out or try it out, here is a video that explains it.



Away from Mahalo Karen and I started our own new blog, it's still in the beginning stages and I'm not really ready to plug it out yet, but if you want to check it out its the Idiocracy Index.