Alpha Carter

CarterCole.com Social Media Policy

2010-03-04T21:27:00.000-08:00

This policy governs the publication of and commentary on social media by employees of CarterCole.com and its related companies ("CarterCole.com"). For the purposes of this policy, social media means any facility for online publication and commentary, including without limitation blogs, wiki's, social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, flickr, and YouTube. This policy is in addition to and complements any existing or future policies regarding the use of technology, computers, e-mail and the internet.

CarterCole.com employees are free to publish or comment via social media in accordance with this policy. CarterCole.com employees are subject to this policy to the extent they identify themselves as a CarterCole.com employee (other than as an incidental mention of place of employment in a personal blog on topics unrelated to CarterCole.com).

Publication and commentary on social media carries similar obligations to any other kind of publication or commentary.

All uses of social media must follow the same ethical standards that CarterCole.com employees must otherwise follow.

Setting up Social Media
Assistance in setting up social media accounts and their settings can be obtained from Carter.

Social media identities, logon ID's and user names may not use CarterCole.com's name without prior approval from Carter.

Don't Tell Secrets
It's perfectly acceptable to talk about your work and have a dialog with the community, but it's not okay to publish confidential information. Confidential information includes things such as unpublished details about our software, details of current projects, future product ship dates, financial information, research, and trade secrets. We must respect the wishes of our corporate customers regarding the confidentiality of current projects. We must also be mindful of the competitiveness of our industry.

Protect your own privacy
Privacy settings on social media platforms should be set to allow anyone to see profile information similar to what would be on the CarterCole.com website. Other privacy settings that might allow others to post information or see information that is personal should be set to limit access. Be mindful of posting information that you would not want the public to see.

Be Honest
Do not blog anonymously, using pseudonyms or false screen names. We believe in transparency and honesty. Use your real name, be clear who you are, and identify that you work for CarterCole.com. Nothing gains you notice in social media more than honesty - or dishonesty. Do not say anything that is dishonest, untrue, or misleading. If you have a vested interest in something you are discussing, point it out. But also be smart about protecting yourself and your privacy. What you publish will be around for a long time, so consider the content carefully and also be cautious about disclosing personal details.

Respect copyright laws
It is critical that you show proper respect for the laws governing copyright and fair use or fair dealing of copyrighted material owned by others, including CarterCole.com own copyrights and brands. You should never quote more than short excerpts of someone else's work, and always attribute such work to the original author/source. It is good general practice to link to others' work rather than reproduce it.

Respect your audience, CarterCole.com, and your coworkers
The public in general, and CarterCole.com's employees and customers, reflect a diverse set of customs, values and points of view. Don't say anything contradictory or in conflict with the CarterCole.com website. Don't be afraid to be yourself, but do so respectfully. This includes not only the obvious (no ethnic slurs, offensive comments, defamatory comments, personal insults, obscenity, etc.) but also proper consideration of privacy and of topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory - such as politics and religion. Use your best judgment and be sure to make it clear that the views and opinions expressed are yours alone and do not represent the official views of CarterCole.com.

Protect CarterCole.com customers, business partners and suppliers
Customers, partners or suppliers should not be cited or obviously referenced without their approval. Never identify a customer, partner or supplier by name without permission and never discuss confidential details of a customer engagement. It is acceptable to discuss general details about kinds of projects and to use non-identifying pseudonyms for a customer (e.g., Customer 123) so long as the information provided does not violate any non-disclosure agreements that may be in place with the customer or make it easy for someone to identify the customer. Your blog is not the place to "conduct business" with a customer.

Controversial Issues
If you see misrepresentations made about CarterCole.com in the media, you may point that out. Always do so with respect and with the facts. If you speak about others, make sure what you say is factual and that it does not disparage that party. Avoid arguments. Brawls may earn traffic, but nobody wins in the end. Don't try to settle scores or goad competitors or others into inflammatory debates. Make sure what you are saying is factually correct.

Be the first to respond to your own mistakes
If you make an error, be up front about your mistake and correct it quickly. If you choose to modify an earlier post, make it clear that you have done so. If someone accuses you of posting something improper (such as their copyrighted material or a defamatory comment about them), deal with it quickly - better to remove it immediately to lessen the possibility of a legal action.

Think About Consequences
For example, consider what might happen if a CarterCole.com employee is in a meeting with a customer or prospect, and someone on the customer's side pulls out a print-out of your blog and says "This person at CarterCole.com says that product sucks."

Saying "Product X needs to have an easier learning curve for the first-time user" is fine; saying "Product X sucks" is risky, unsubtle and amateurish.

Once again, it's all about judgment: using your blog to trash or embarrass CarterCole.com, our customers, or your co-workers, is dangerous and ill-advised.

Disclaimers
Many social media users include a prominant disclaimer saying who they work for, but that they're not speaking officially. This is good practice and is encouraged, but don't count on it to avoid trouble - it may not have much legal effect.

Wherever practical, you must use a disclaimer saying that while you work for CarterCole.com, anything you publish is your personal opinion, and not necessarily the opinions of CarterCole.com.

Carter can provide you with applicable disclaimer language and assist with determining where and how to use that.

Don't forget your day job.
Make sure that blogging does not interfere with your job or commitments to customers.

Social Media Tips
The following tips are not mandatory, but will contribute to successful use of social media.

The best way to be interesting, stay out of trouble, and have fun is to write about what you know. There is a good chance of being embarrassed by a real expert, or of being boring if you write about topics you are not knowledgeable about.

Quality matters. Use a spell-checker. If you're not design-oriented, ask someone who is whether your blog looks decent, and take their advice on how to improve it.

The speed of being able to publish your thoughts is both a great feature and a great downfall of social media. The time to edit or reflect must be self-imposed. If in doubt over a post, or if something does not feel right, either let it sit and look at it again before publishing it, or ask someone else to look at it first.

Enforcement
Policy violations will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination for cause.

Built with Social Media policy Tool

Pingdom.com Free Monitoring and Social Uptime Graph

2010-02-10T14:23:00.000-08:00

a while ago i started using Pingdom to monitor my server's stability... they give you one free account and it has a bunch of way cool features. you can tell it the interval ot check the site (and not just with HTTP Gets) and it will send you SMS when your site goes up and down. i really like the service and will probably start offering it to my clients so i can monitor their onsite hosting or if they chose not to host on our server... whats even cooler is now they have these cool graphs that you can share of your uptime and response time so i created this page so i would have a place ot jump to and see my server's stats (and to tell all you nice people about the great service)

Carter Cole is a hero in Sweden

2010-01-26T19:55:00.000-08:00

Watch the video

earlier i did one of these where i was a guru of social marketing and viral linkbait and heres my next one... im a hero :) watch mine and make your own

Best of SNL Shorts | My Favorites

2010-01-24T12:01:00.000-08:00

Picture A Day of Carter Cole

2010-01-11T13:40:00.000-08:00

not sure who was seen this video but its way cool... the guy takes a pic of himself every day for 6 years. very cool you can see him like growing old but im lazy and theres no way i could rember thats where this way cool site DailyMugShot.com comes in. They will email me reminders and have a cool flash thing to take the pictures... they also implemented these things called landmarks which let you place markers on the images so you can make them line up properly from day to day. Im really excited about mine... just goes to prove that if you wait long enough you wont have to program anything :)

NYTimes promotes personal gripes without ability for commentary

2009-12-29T09:36:00.001-08:00

This is crazy... the frame busting code on NYTimes.com breaks the ability to share sidewiki comments... so articles without comments (like the one i comment on below) cant be argued against. Thats why i published this gripe out here but commentary should always be allowed i would love the author or anyone else to talk with me about this...

in reference to: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/opinion/28raff.html

I’m an SEO guy so I’m always thinking about how Google ranks things by relevance and importance and there are a couple things you need to pay attention to in this article…
“For three years, my company’s vertical search and price-comparison site, Foundem, was effectively “disappeared” from the Internet in this way.”
“Adam Raff is a co-founder of Foundem, an Internet technology firm”

These two quotes make me believe that this is just another bitch from a website owner that doesn’t understand how or why Google penalizes sites but I will still run through the points he made and explain why Google has that behavior

If you use webmaster tools Google will tell you about imposed penalties and allow you to ask for reconsideration… the only reason Google doesn’t tell you if you are trying to game the results in an unfair way and giving you the information would allow you to manipulate the results more effectively. Google’s battle cry is “Don’t be evil” so the fact that they impose penalties is only to improve the quality of the results and help users experience. In fact Yahoo has the ability to promote some results to the top of the SERPS editorially (rather than through an algorithm) basically overriding their ranking system… Google doesn’t have this ability at all they can only impose penalties for spammy or unfair practices… The reason Google sites rank so well for their industries is not because they are put there but because they are doing users a great service and therefore they have massive linking profiles and tons of high quality links.

Now lets take on his point about “universal search”. Universal search helps the user experience… rather than punting users to another website of questionable trust and content they show you the best results right on the search page, effectively saving you a click. Bing does the same thing they show you the results that are relevant from a trusted source rather than sending you off to somewhere else of questionable value. Vertical search helps the user therefore Google implements the practice

And then there is a bitch about Tom Tom stock dropping… sorry that Google does so many things well and is kicking ass but if they have a better product it is totally fair that they put it out for users. Just because some other company is already doing something doesn’t mean that you cut all the other competition… are we going to stop Bing from truing their hand at overthrowing Google because Google already does so well?
Then he tries to bring in the FCC saying that we need “neutrality” just like we have the net neutrality fight going on right now… sorry they are a company providing a free service and they are trying to help the users not hurt them. Just because you company was hurt because they didn’t understand SEO and were probably engaging in unfair practices and breaking Google’s TOS

This is just another bitch session from a guy who doesn’t understand SEO and is complaining because he couldn’t figure out how to not be evil…

Im not affiliated with Google in any way (although id love to be they are a great company)… psst Google give me a job :)

i am an evil genius | lost... found... and beaten

2009-12-27T21:48:00.000-08:00

so i lost the evil genius game and then found it again and i just wanted to comment how awesome it is... i heard its way cheap (like $2.50) on steam. i have a bunch of cool screen shots of the game i took and me launching my doomsday device but for some reason the api key flicker gave me is dead

Im a geek aparently... and i love to share... online anyways :)

2009-12-18T12:14:00.000-08:00

Im a geek so this way cool geek chart is kinda cool to me... ~~i had to turn off my twitter updates because it was overloading with like 90%~~... ok i wasted some more time on stumbleupon and digg labs so im a little more rounded in my chart now... says something about my volume of tweets but i encourage everyone to go put in their social profiles and get their own chart...

To get your own go here...

the flying trash project

2009-11-29T10:50:00.001-08:00

this is the flying trash project... we had some extra helium so we made 4 trashbag balloons tied some messages to them and let them on their way... ill be posting the results here as they come in so check back and hopefully someone will find the messages

1)

no results yet...

2)

no results yet...

3)

no results yet...

4)

no results yet...

bring it on stalkers... now you can know where i am at all times! playing with Google latitude

2009-11-23T19:00:00.000-08:00

I already have a bunch of automatic tweets set up and such so i dont really feel like my privacy is being violated when im using google latitude . there are cool services that i can set up to alert me when im near friends and most of the time im just home so its really not a big deal to show my location on a map (at least for me). these kind of constant updating services are really cool i believe they will change the way we socially interact but what i have found even crazier is how they know where i am... apparently some smart people go huh you know the SSID and MAC address of wireless access points really doesn't change all that much so if a bunch of people drove around everywhere mapping where different ssid are then you wouldn't even need GPS we could calculate your position based on the strength of different access points around your laptop and if we add this technology to cell phones then they can find and map even more access points (by crowd sourcing) for us so we have the ability to locate a phone by GPS, cell tower or by SSID of a nearby access point and constantly update our location on the website. yahoo had this service a little earlier than google i think yahoo used skyhook wireless. Google doesn't say how they did theres but i assume its much of the same stuff so if you want more details on how they do it check this out

its a pretty cool service and if you dont mind people knowing where you are i think i could be a great way to meet up, interact and chill in this awesome new interconnected world...

man technology is scary :)

Carter Cole's LinkedIn Profile

2009-11-23T13:31:00.000-08:00

Carter Cole

playing around with the linked in embed api they just released a new api today for external sites ot use and ive requested access... i want to make something to mash the twitter api to linkedin connections i think it will be cool to see how many of your connections have twitter, follow you and how many you follow

tricks and tips for monopoly city streets | embeddable badge and special toolkit

2009-11-05T22:06:00.000-08:00

oh noez! i logged in and saw this message today...

so it looks like the game will be ending so use these tools while you can...

original post:

so ive been playing monopoly city streets [read my first post here] and its quite a strange game if you start to do well at all then you are targeted for tons of hazards an it makes it hard to play the game. it feels like they are forcing turnover of streets in the game but i understand its required to keep it moving and growing. but when the game first cam out the was lots of cheating and hacking going on in the game but hasbro has cleaned up alot of it so its pretty cool now but ive always been slow building and navigating the game so... i decided to make some tools for the game. the first thing i did was fire up wireshark and watch all the http traffic for the game then built a proxy fro the json calls and whala my very own dashboard for managing monoply city streets but it was still hard to build and i was having some trouble getting build locations and constructing them so ive turned to the monopoly city streets clan they have this great toolkit that gets injected into the page running the city streets game.
See the demo video below

to use the tools you just need this link you can right click and copy it then paste it in address bar while in game (my preference) or you can do the bookmark thing and add link to your favorites (detailed favorite method explained)

and they have a new database of a bunch of the streets
and im making my own but here is an img badge that you can use...

heres how you generate your own...

and the last thing i want to leave you with is a Pro Tools section of a monoply streets forum

their form manager allows you to query all the json apis of city streets and see the results

ill be releasing my dashboard and embeddable HTML badge soon so keep checking back

How to verify your Google profile name

2009-10-29T19:48:00.000-07:00

I am Carter Cole

Google says so...
My Google Profile

And Check out my cool embed code for Google profiles...

Its pretty easy to get your name verified. just head on over to the name verification page on knol and follow the process

you can use either a Credit Card

or your Social Security Number

and thats it you get your name verified on your Google profile and if you want to embed your Google profile like i did

<script src="http://cartercole.com/gpicons.asp?user=[username]&type=2"></script>

Google Voice | voicemail with your existing number

2009-10-27T15:50:00.000-07:00

edit:
im going to brag a little here this page doesnt get many views but it has been way cool to have gvoice as my default voicemail but... i wanted to share how cool google is because i also was one of the lucky ones to get the free Google voice business cards

this was the icon you had to sign on at the right time to see and then they sent you the cards...

read the rest of the article if you like it was way easy to set up and it works great!

i was reading the Google Voice Blog post about using Google Voice with your existing number so i thought id make a quick blurb about what it means and how easy it was to do(at least with verizon) Basically it allows you to use your google voice number for your existing numbers voicemail(so its not full gvoice on your cell).

heres the article about how to set it up but

it was really easy to setup it only took 2 steps

1)

first you select your carrier...

<

2)

then you type it in your phone and it send...

and your done!its that easy. some thing to note... you should make sure your voicemails are all cleared because if you dont then when you try and dial your voicemail(*86 on verizon) it will ring your google voice number and you wont be able to clear the voicmail message from your phone

you may also be interested in my post about the google voice invites i have

i bet this guys science checks out... enter the wormhole

2009-10-23T20:17:00.000-07:00

the first is the Flight through a Wormhole

hes got a way cool video going in and out its alot like the wormholes in Eve Online

then he does some cool stuff talking about approaching a blackhole. he seems to take everything into account (comment if someone knows its wrong) but it seems way cool to me id check it out but this diagram

When we are moving around solar masses we could redirect jets of energy and light from all around to be like masters of the universe to see the stars as they look from around the galaxy

classic knight rider on #hulu

2009-10-20T19:37:00.000-07:00

so ill tell you how it was after i finish it we will see if it lives up to what i remember

carter cole's websites a list of all my projects

2009-10-17T07:17:00.000-07:00

so in case not everyone had gotten the word these are my 2 blogs and website

Alpha Carter This is like the random funny things that didnt make the tech blog or were for something else

Carter Cole's Main Site This is where i used to host most of my contact it has the Carter Tomorrow Fund its for a good cause

then is Carter Cole's main blog about technology and programing

and rememberer there is really only one Carter Cole on Facebook

oh and my linkedIn profile

so thats all the sites i own right now ill be updating this with new sites and information as it becomes available

2009-10-16T22:45:00.001-07:00

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

has great linkbait and viral marketing content

Google giving out Voice Invites

2009-10-13T13:44:00.000-07:00

edit:
so i finally got some of those voice invites those google geeks were mentioning. i currently have 3 invites left comment below to claim one...friends get first dibbs so be quick

i was reading the post here on the Google Voice Blog and we should be seeing invites to people who already have voice accounts (like me) so ill be giving the invite to anyone who comments below (this will prolly happen sooner then wave invites) with priority given to people i know

the google voice invite screen:

so feel free to use the cool google voice gadget below to give me a call if you have any questions...

Why Doesnt Google Maps also do routes inside buildings?

2009-10-13T10:58:00.000-07:00

So i was reading this this on the official google blog about building maker but the question i have is can you do this...

I recently saw an article about a company that was going to do "google maps inside buildings" (but it wasnt google so i left the article) but what if you made this building maker do floor plans? now i havent tested it yet but i have used sketch up so im assuming its like an extenton of that ill add more once ive had some time to tinker on the buildings

but wouldn't that be cool? google local center verifys a building is yours now you can upload a floorplan with room names and everything and google will do simple path finding and give you directions inside the building i think its very reasonable project to take on and would allow for even more traffic to google so iono some google engineer should reply and tell me what yall think. is this in the works already?

google wave invites for my friends

2009-10-12T12:19:00.000-07:00

edit: Ive got some invites! friends first still but there are 11 left... first come first serve

so there will be a post on my main technology blog about what i learn / figgure out for wave but i finally got my invite! woohoo i have no idea if it had to do with me begging Google for an invite but i need friends to use wave with me (to use it for its whole point collaboration). so if you know me and want an invite please leave some part of your info so i will have it below. i guess if others who want invites give enough of a sob story i will pass deal with that too but friends will receive priority so start the fighting

~~Edit (Sorry for the false alarm):~~ now i have some!

Google wave invites wont be going to new invitees you should go to the sign up

you would probably be best checking the links i have listed here that has all the invite pages

google wave

Seth(thats my son)'s new kitten Scarlet

2009-10-11T13:39:00.000-07:00

Now if i can just come up with a good lolcats for this picture

today barcodes were

2009-10-07T07:37:00.000-07:00

In honor of the invention of the barcode today and jumping on the Google bandwagon here is the history of barcodes along with some bar code generators

generator 1

generator 2

generator 3

cursebird stats gadget | put twitter curses on your blog

2009-10-07T07:11:00.001-07:00

cursebird is a nice twitter app that does one thing... track people swearing on twitter. By pulling the feeds from popular expletives then we can generate trending stats for all the cursing on twitter. its that easy and because you really want your visitors to know that the word "bloody" is up 10 % i have plans to add some ajax ability to it currently it only loads once

i really haven't cursed that much

oh so i got permission to post the code so just drop this on your page

<script src="http://cartercole.com/curses.asp">
</script>

and it will drop the cursing stats on your page

i added some css classes to the output

the .curse-wrapper is a div that holds the other .curse-word div (1 for each word)

carter cole is a social media expert lolz

2009-10-06T07:11:00.000-07:00

Like my badge? its link bait from SeoMoz but honestly i don't know how it qualifys you as an expert? o well i think it looks cool and it has the favorite icons from a bunch of sites so its gotta be legit :)