This was just one of those perfect moments on Twitter. You might like these tips for getting kids to eat salads. You might wonder why I posted this here and not on the more experimental www.Bransieve.com. It’s to demonstrate what a fast and powerful problem-solving tool microsharing can be when you have a unique business process question or need some really specific expertise — fast.

My daughters “S” and “Z” are nearly-3 and 20 months, in turn. I had some iceberg lettuce and the ambition to try them on their first salad. I wrote:

wankergirl Cover it in chocolate sauce!

megfowler
do they like fruit? savoury-sweet salads work well with that age group. lots of juice in dressing, fruit in actual salad.

branchero just don’t use a dressing that’s really sour (like Italian)

TheJennTaFur my Mom put slices of fruit in my salad such as slices of apple or grapes. I loved it with French dressing. Hope this helps!

rahafharfoush you can make it into a person. http://tinyurl.com/66f9xe

JamiInMiami I added craisins and they ate it. Now Girl likes salad & she’s a tween.

MikeG1 : Try offering ingredients separately; I’ve got a couple who love cucumber slices. It’s a start.

Penguin Make it sweet? Add some fruits, apples, mandarin oranges, pears.

akaMonty I just put it on the plate with the other food in smaller portions. I don’t think my daughter ever noticed the difference.

KevinEikenberry and pray… I think your steps are good ones for the salad - what about raisons too?

lalatina ~ cottage cheese, mandarin oranges?

akaMonty Only I didn’t chop it fine, I made it more of a “dipping” style & kept the dressing separate.

ericrank Emeril once said “If you want kids to eat vegs, you have to make them taste good” - For my toddler, that means sweet or cheesy.

The twurl.nl link let other Twitterers see my most recent replies at the time (the tweets you see in this post).

depapel and all of that in seven minutes: that is also incredible.

geekgiant I’d try making “fun salads.” Spinach, sliced strawberries, blueberries,
candied walnuts, feta and a balsamic vinagerette perhaps?

podcastmama Offer diff. bite size veg or fruit, and let *her* make the salad by
tossing in the things she likes. Let us know what she picks:)

hkremer not salad related but have you seen the “new” rice puffs by Pirate’s
Booty? look in the organic section - DS calls them popcorn

hkremer see previous tweet - white cheddar flavored yummy!

pauladrum Great question (toddlers and salads). Got a lot of ideas for my little one. Another thought… Let them help make it.

knackeredhack I hear that if you make a child try a small amount of the same thing 10 days in a row they’ll acquire the taste.

JamiInMiami finished it up with this Tweet…

JamiInMiami and people still question the power of the Twitter. Ha!

PS - We went with chopped iceberg lettuce, olive oil, salt & pepper, a dash of orange juice, and lots of pistachios and carrot bits. No dice, but at least they tried it. And mommy had a yummy crunchy dinner.

This is awesome because if you know me, you KNOW I don’t know a G-D thing about developing, coding or, for that matter, following directions.

YET,

Using NewsGator Editor’s Desk (they are a client) I just hacked together a very awkward-looking but interesting little widget AND made it into a Facebook application. It’s an ugly* little alpha-proto-pre-prototype, but it took me less than an hour with no previous experience.

This widget is showing you the two most “popular” items from each of 6 of my feeds: Pistachio Consulting, Twitter, Flickr, Brainsieve, Qik and YouTube. The popularity data is limited because it is keying off the behavior of anyone using any NewsGator RSS tool to read any of these feeds. In the case of PistachioConsulting.com that means 22 users. The other feeds have fewer - or no - subscribers. But still.

It’s also a Facebook application, should you care to install a funky-lookin box of my content on your Facebook page. (NOTE: I haven’t had anyone test this out yet. I have no idea how it will look or work. YMMV. Don’t Drink & Drive)

But this is PRECISELY what I was getting at last November when I launched Brainsieve. I wanted a way to pull together “best of” content (as defined by how people interact with the content, not what I thought was cool) from anywhere that I was “broadcasting.” I wanted to put it all in one place, and I wanted it to self-editorialize. Meaning, “observe” audience interest and self-select the pieces that are most interacted with.

I realize that FriendFeed, SocialThing and any number of web presence aggregators also come close to the Brainsieve model, but here’s the point: a totally non-technical layperson built this and made it into a Facebook Application. For that matter, the widget above can be lifted and put anywhere. So this nontech chick not only built the tool, but the tool itself self-replicates. UPDATE: It also permits you to email and rate each individual item…

How ya like them apples? I’m impressed. What could you build?

*Believe me, there are way more configuration/beautification options here, I was just going for a quick proof-of-concept.

UPDATE: The Facebook application itself is not the point. Unless you’re an avid fan, or, say, my mother, you probably don’t need a widget displaying the “best of” what I have published on 6 of my RSS feeds. It could be prettified into a “Pistachio Channel” by which you could consume only the most popular things that I post, instead of trying to follow me a ton of different places, or drowning in a “Lifestream” that sends you every item I ever publish. It’s a “sampler.” The ability to read attention data (was the item read, emailed, shared, bookmarked, rated etc?) and sort the RSS feed accordingly is really hot though.

What’s amazing is that I can’t code my way out of a box. There was No. Coding. Work. Whatsoever to build this. Yet you can grab and re-publish the widget, email any item in it to a friend, rate any of the items, subscribe as a Facebook App, etc. etc.

Put differently, you can take ANY RSS feeds, combine them how you like (by popularity or date, # of items per feed, etc.) build a widget and convert that into a Facebook Application without ANY coding ability.

(aka: Tools for Parsing Your Twitter Idea Farm)
Here are some Twitter applications I’d LOVE to use. The more I think about how friggin powerful Twitter has been in my life, the more I want to be able to dig back into Twitter streams and scoop out potentially useful chunks.

Do any of these tools exist already? Can you build them? PLEASE let me know. Laura at PistachioConsulting (dot) com. Note, this is not a wishlist for Twitter itself, but ideas for tools & apps in the Twitter ecosystem.

If I were super clever, I’d describe each function in 140 characters or less, wouldn’t I? Sorry.

Download. Twitter is cool, Ev & Sara were a pleasure to meet. I trust & love you the company. BUT. I want my complete database to play with and have as a backup.

Search. I want to search my entire Twitter stream (but just mine or just X’s) to extract stuff by keyword and or thread. Bonus points if the tool threads possible responses, repeats, etc. that may have rippled through Twitter. Using the timestamp, follower status, @reply function and/or keywords could help make that threading possible, couldn’t it?

Import/export. This would give a clean way to pull a mass of Tweets out of a twitterstream and into a text document. I’d use this, for ex., after LeWeb to harvest conference “notes” including session notes, mini conversations, who I met, etc. Sure I can use a search tool to collect all the tweets, but the copy/paste from that is a big old mess. I just want the clean text, please.

Keyword “Notes.” Combining the first two, search and extract, I can quickly pull notes on everything I’ve ever tweeted with “present*” in it. I’d examine how my ideas in a topic change over time, or pull notes for an article, blog post or book chapter fast and easily.

Followee extract (by time period). Another conference fantasy. If I meet someone at a conference I would like to get to know better, I add them on Twitter (and/or plead with them to try it out, so that I can add them.) Would love to arrive home, pull and export the list of people I added in a certain time period.

Command line interface. I want my socnets and social tools/applications (open social, anyone?) to be easily addressed from Twitter. Ex: Dopplr. I book a trip. I tweet @Dopplr Paris, France 9 Dec 2007 to 13 Dec 2007. My Dopplr updates. Dopplr could send me DMs too, when there was relevant outbound info.

Point is, I get to use YOUR app right at “home” where I live (in Twitter). It’s less work for me. Hint: if your social app is less work for me, there’s a better chance I’ll use it. This is also a non-Twitter idea because the same thing can work via SMS and email. Give me a low attention investment & high utility return and I’m yours.

@erator. Analytics tool built along the same lines as TweeterBoard, except it examines your twitter archive for the ideas that got the most responses. (It could factor in which tweets got favorited too.) Includes a “scaling” variable so that if you got 4 responses to a tweet when you had 100 followers, that has the same weight as 40 responses with 1000. Otherwise your earliest ideas get automatically discounted.

[Favorited?: Tell me if any of my tweets, and which ones, have ever been starred as favorites. By whom? This must already exist, right?] Since I drafted this Favotter by @ono_matope has surfaced. Yay @mdy for letting me know. Tool doesn’t scale yet, only tracks the “top 950″ by number of their tweets that have been starred.

Groups. I know there are some hacks for this. Rounding 1,000 followers in Paris made me sit up and take notice on this issue. I need ways to keep a closer eye on closer connections without losing any voices that might have something to say. The days of “keeping up” with peoples’ tweets are long gone, and I can go weeks without “seeing” folks I truly care about because I care about so many. Halp!

Group Twitter streams. @Kosso has an excellent hack from Gnomedex & PodCamp, and he was kind enough to do it again for @peaple, but the buggy Twitter RSS streams can throw it off. The idea is that an account is set up that anyone in the group can post to. It’s supremely powerful as a tool at an event or conference.

Why is so much web content arranged chronologically?

Of all the systems for organizing content, it’s the most arcane. A to Z, one end to the other, linear and dumb. Digital content, folks. Content that’s tagged and categorized and could be indexed and parsed a bazillion different ways. Listed Chronologically. Cuz, why?

I want my media — blog posts, photos, tweets, seesmics, comments, bookmarks — to self sort. To suggest. I want the good shit to surface and the brainfarts to sink. I don’t want to manually dig through and pick my 5 favorite or 10 favorite or whatever posts and build a static page linking to them so you can do the hard work of “catching up or totally ignoring the past” when you come to my blog as a new user. Do. Not. Want.

A. Who the f cares which ones *I* thought were good? To the extent there are readers present, and engaged, I want to know what they liked.

B. The content has a million ways to Sunday to “know” its relative quality - pageviews, manual voting, incoming links just to get started - why can’t I have a dynamic page that “permanently” displays the 10 best ever posts.

C’mon bunky, this woudn’t be hard. Maybe it’s an “internal Digg” widget anyone can install on their blog (or better still, on any of their content) so readers vote up and bury down the best and the worst. Ok, behavior could be horrid, but it’s not like lotsa smart people haven’t tried to figure this stuff out.

Srsly, Chronology? There are MUCH better ways to direct which content consistently sees the light of day and what should filter down into the archival depths. There are tons viable ratings, search and content sorting technologies out there. I want someone to mash ‘em up and build us something to play with!

It’s the Brainsieve. A “quality layer” that could span all forms of personal media. Lifestreaming + a brainsieve would retain, organize and display the nuggets of interest from a person’s outpouring of digital expression.

*As I imagine it, it’s wildly, wildly tunable. Maybe even to each reader. And that’s why Amazon keeps coming up in my mind. They’ve been hacking at this for years. Which content should float? For whom? When? What if reading someone’s blog (archives) could be like this?

UPDATE: I originally posted this on www.Brainsieve.com, the “lab” referred to above. But I want to pull all my actual blogging into the blog fka Great Presentations Mean Business (see next post for more on that), so, reposting it here.

IN THE COMMENTS: Please throw us your examples of “quality sorting” content management systems working out there in the wild, and your comments about it. Ex: Amazon.com has voting & reviews (and related items and other ways of suggesting stuff out the yin-yang).