Hi Scott,
I really start to dig your podcasts. Have you seen Snapvine? I attempted to "voice blog" today. If you have time check it out and let me know what you think.
Thanks for sharing about buying your new MacBook Pro. I am still undecided which model to get but it looks like leaning away from iMac.
Talking about anonymity and haters. I have been subjected to a some what similar or maybe worse via Yahoo! Answers. But at the end of the day it is impossible to not leave any traces. The bottom line is when you engage in stupid activity you tend to make stupid mistakes.
Is the plugin you talk about by any chance called TDO Mini Forms?
I use gTalk as a twitter client but only for tracking keywords. I find it works really well - just like the stock ticker you describe. It doesn't matter if I miss stuff for 3 days because it is just a news feed.
I use Twhirl for conventional Twitter but only follow 26 people because I am a fussy so and so.
For really important people (friends), I explicitly read their FriendFeed streams to catch all the stuff I care about.
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