The Fast Follow feature is a quick way to follow a Twitter account directly from a mobile phone. It essentially cuts out the computer out of the equation. The Twitter blog explains the feature, “Instead of directing viewers or listeners to their laptops with a URL, you can send them to their phones with Fast Follow instructions.”

Here’s how it works, a host would announce instructions on how to follow an account. To subscribe all viewers or listeners have to do is to send a short text: ”follow [account]” to 40404 (that’s the U.S. short code, Canada’s is 21212)

This would subscribe the user to that Twitter account on their phone. Twitter says this is an easier, more direct subscription method because there’s no URL and no computer to boot up, and unlike computers, most people usually have their phone within reach.

You don’t even need a Twitter to subscribe, so it’s totally open-ended.

I could see this being handy for shows like Best Recipes Ever. I could see Kary Osmond saying “To get this recipe text ‘follow bestrecipesever’ to 21212.”

That’s it.

The balance for broadcasters is that you don’t want to bombard the users with too many tweets. No-one wants to get a hundred tweets a day on their cell or smart phone.

Unfortunately, this only works in the U.S. right now. Boo!

Spark producer Dan Misener decided to do something about that. So he created his own.

As Dan says on his blog “This feed is completely unofficial, and comes with no guarantees.”

You can find the feed here. You can also follow @cbcjobs on Twitter if you’re into that sort of thing.

Thanks Dan.

Say you’ve got a great story idea.

You know it will hit a nerve with the public.

So how do you prove it to your boss?

There are several tools on the internet that you can use to back up your story pitches. They provide a gauge of what the public is concerned about; a way to listen in on the water-cooler conversations.

These tools provide a view of what Canadians are searching for, talking about, and telling their friends. They can also find the best reference material on the web.

Let’s look at them each briefly, and then we’ll look at how to use this stuff in your pitches.

How to Listen in on the Water Cooler

Number 1: Google Insight
Google Insight shows what people are thinking about, by exposing what they’re searching for.

Have you missed the boat on your story? Maybe you’re a bit too early? Google Insight may be able to answer that.

Here’s an example of Google searches for the term “Toyota Recall”. You can see that interest peaked and is now waning.

A similar tool to this is Trending Topics which looks at what’s trending on Wikipedia.

Number 2: Google Trends
Google Trends is a slightly different view than Google Insight. Insight shows you what people are searching for over time and place. Trends shows you what people are searching for in comparison to all Google searches.

You can also use trends to compare different searches. This could be useful to compare different angles on a story.

Number 3: Twitter Search
Twitter Search shows you what people are saying about a given topic. It’s a very powerful way of crowd sourcing story ideas and finding out what people are talking about. It is much more immediate than Google searches. I often find out about breaking news on Twitter’s trending topics before I see them on TV.

Number 4: Delicious
Delicious is a web tool used to save bookmarks. The Delicious Search engine shows what web sites are getting the most bookmarks. Since most people only bookmark relevant content, this search function can be useful to find the best resource material on a given subject.

Number 5: IceRocket
IceRocket is a one of many social media monitoring tools that aggregates conversations on many networks (Twitter, Blogs, etc) into one place. I use IceRocket instead of say Radian6, because it’s free. This is a handy way to monitor a news beat, check out the conversation on the blogosphere or to get a general sense of what’s trending on the internet.

How to Use This Stuff in Your Pitches
You can use the data from these tools to gauge the response to your story idea. For instance another story on the Toyota recall might not be the best idea. Interest in the story is waning. There have been far fewer searches. Unless you’ve got a strong news peg you may want to give this story a pass.

On the other hand there’s been lots on interest in virtual assistants lately. It’s one of the top 10 search terms on Google today. Maybe that’s a topic worth considering.

But these tools are not only useful for testing story ideas. They can also be used to come up with pitches.

The Twitter Search Engine is a powerful tool. It’s like an early warning system for breaking news. It’s constantly providing new story ideas. And it can be used to follow leading thinking on a particular beat.

Frankly I couldn’t live without it.

Is there any tool out there that you can’t live without?

Have I missed something? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

It turns out the solution is very easy, and you won’t even have to call the help desk (hopefully). So after the break is your easy 8-step guide to connecting to a printer in your new work space.

Note: I’m not sure if this works in all CBC centres, I can only vouch for it working in Toronto.

1- Click on the ‘Novell-delivered Application’ on your taskbar (the horizontal bar at the bottom of your computer screen with the Start button on one end and the clock on the other). That should reveal a screen that looks like this:

2- In the left pane click on the CBCSRC directory, and then in the right pane double click on the ‘Printers’ folder. Both are highlighted in blue in the above image.

3- Now you should see a new right page that looks like the image below. Double click on the ‘Printers’ icon.

4- Double clicking the ‘Printers’ icon will open a web page that may look something like the page below. Click on your location (if it’s listed). If your location is not listed this guide will not help you, call the help desk (1-866-999-7888).

Depending on what your new desk number is (for example 4F300), click on the link on the right pane or the left pane of the web page. To determine where to click, find out your desk or office number, it will be something like ’4F300′, the second character of that number is your zone. So for me that’s ‘F’, therefore I would click on the left pane link because I am in Zone F.

5- Click on the link will open a new web page like the one below. Find the printer that is closest to your desk number and click on it. So for example I would click on the 4F103-B printer, since it’s close to my desk which is 4F300.

6- Once you click on the printer you’ve selected, a message window, like the image below, will pop up, click the ‘Yes’ button.

7- Now you should see another pop up window that looks like this. Let this window run until it’s finished and all the checks are green.

8- When it’s finished, if everything worked, you will get a confirmation message informing you that your printer was installed successfully, click ‘OK’.  Your new printer should now be installed and working.

http://www.cbc.ca/news_archives/YYYYMMDD.jhtml

Be sure to substitute the “YYYYMMDD” with the actual year, month, and day you’d like to look up. For instance:

http://www.cbc.ca/news_archives/20010911.jhtml

There’s even a shortcut to this on the CBC News page — it’s near the very bottom-right of the page. Pretty nice touch, considering nearly all other national news outlets charge you to read content older than a month or so.

The page you see in the news archive is just a “snapshot” of what www.cbc.ca/news/ looked like at some point during that day. If you want to see all of the news that was published on a particular day, you can use the searge engine: type the follwing search query in: “inurl:story/2001/09/11″ (without the quotes) This will return all news stories written on September 11, 2001.

Shelly Sorochuk, a CBC Radio AP in Vancouver, asks:

I was wondering if you knew of any way to search the internet–ie. using Google–to find stories specifically relating to Canada and Cdn things? Is there an easy way to search international papers for stories that talk about things that are Cdn?

There are a couple of ways to restrict your search in Google to Canada. The easiest way is to add

     site:.ca

to your search term (remember both the colon and the period). So, for instance, if you wanted to search for articles about shampoo but only wanted to get a list of pages within Canada, you’d type this into Google:

     shampoo site:.ca

You can restrict your search to specific web sites, too, by adding the domain name after site:. For instance “shampoo site:cbc.ca” will get you pages on the CBC.ca site with shampoo on them.

One other way, if you’re looking for more newsy items, is to do your search at http://news.google.ca and add the word “canada” to your search term. For instance, on that site:

     shampoo canada

Are you a CBC employee with a nerdy question? Ask me!

Let me know if this kind of thing is helpful.

P.S. These facts are not, in fact, a secret. That was a cheap ploy to get you to read this.

Q Hi Tod, here’s my question: I keep Groupwise open all day and every time someone sends me an email, it pops up a stupid little message telling me who it’s from. I find them really distracting. I know I can turn the Notify program off, but every once in a while it’s helpful. Is there a happy medium? Signed: Ticked-Off by Pop-Ups.

A Dear Ticked-Off, there are a couple of things you can do to help quiet Groupwise down. First, the pop-up function is a separate program from Groupwise itself. It’s called Groupwise Notify and it runs in your “System Tray” (the little region to the left of the time in the lower-right corner of your screen).

Take a look at this picture:

If you right-click on that Groupwise icon, you can click Exit to make Notify go away until you reboot next. If you want it gone for good, remove it from the Startup folder of your Start Menu. But you asked about a happy medium. So instead of clicking Exit, click Options. You’ll get a screen that looks something like this:

Here, you can change how often Notify checks for new mail for you. A lot of people have this thing set for every minute. No wonder they’re going batty! Set it for five minutes. Or 30. You may also want to reduce the amount of time the little window stays open, by changing the number in the box below.

But there’s an even better trick. Here’s how you can keep the pop-ups silent unless you get a high-priority internal email. Click on the “Notify” tab on the top and make sure that only the top two checkboxes are checked, as in below:

If you don’t want the Ding noise, take the checkbox in the second box out. Now, you’ll only get a pop-up from Groupwise when someone from inside CBC sends you a high-priority email. Much easier on the sanity.

Any ideas for secret nerd tips? Email me.