I saw this the other day, and thought if San Francisco is so hip to Twitter, and Twitter is free, why can’t the City of Des Moines do the same. Starting last week, the City of San of Francisco supports all 311 services via Twitter, with the help of Twitter CRM tool CoTweet.

Now citizens can send direct messages 24 hours a day to the sf311 Twitter account to report standard non-emergency city-related sightings (like pot holes), request street cleanings, and any other service already supported by the phone or website. This establishes San Francisco as the first major city to adopt a city-wide Twitter program of this magnitude.

City of Des Moines, let’s join the Twitter revolution!

I’ve had several readers ask me for a way to make it easy for them to either send a post of friend or link to it on their Facebook or MySpace account. I’ve had to explain to more than one reader that we’ve have tried to make it very easy for them with the Share This Post button, but it appears a lot of readers didn’t understand what that buttons provides. In this post, I will give some of the highlights and power of this little button.

To begin with, this button is towards the bottom of every post, right above the by line and rating tool. Once you click on it, it opens a small window that offers four main options for a user to choose from. The first two options are for emailing the post, either from looking up an email address in your favorite online address book from services such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL. The second option allows the user to manually enter up to 5 email addresses to send the post to. The third option allows a user to post the article on to their favorite social network site such as, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, and Del.icio.us to name a few. The last option allows the user to quickly just add a link to the post to their favorites/bookmarks in their browser.

Let’s take a look a some screen shots of the tool in action.

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How many podcasts do you currently subscribe to on your iPod?

If you are like a lot of folks we have our favorite podcasts that we listen to on the way to work, on our evening walk or at the gym. Our of curiosity I wanted to see what local Des Moines based podcasts were out on iTunes. To my surprise, I found 29 locally based podcasts.

There’s everything from weather, to political commentary, to humor, to a lot of local religious podcasts from area churches. Well now you can count one more, I made sure that LivingDowntownDesMoines.com is also being published as a podcast. You can check us out by opening, iTunes Store, clicking on podcasts, searching for “Des Moines” and selecting our podcast. Here’s also a direct link for you:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=289749849
 I hope some of you subscribe and listen to our latest articles.

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A couple of weeks ago I posted about our new versions of this site for the iPhone and for other mobile browsers like the Black Berry. Since then I’ve added some even more accessibility options to the site. To start with there’s now a Listen Now button under each post title that will allow our visually impaired readers or anyone else for that matter to hear an individual post read to them.

In addition to the Listen Now button, readers can also choose to subscribe to our podcast and download all the posts for later playback on their iPods.

In addition to both of the listen options, there’s a email subscription service that will automatically mail you an email with the entire post in it each day that a new post is written. You can sign up via the right-side navigation bar.

If you use iGoogle as a home page, you can now have the most recent posts, you can choose the number, to show up as a iGadget for your iGoogle home page. This feature is also available via the right-side navigation bar.

And finally the About Us page has been updated to show the various widgets that you can get the code for and post on your own blogs to follow the Living Downtown Des Moines posts.

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I know a lot of us surf the net from our mobile devices these days, for example, this morning I had a dentist appointment and while waiting, I whipped out my iPhone, opened up my Safari browser and started surfing. An idea came to me, a lot of weblogs and sites are starting to become in a mobile friendly version, I thought “Why not do the same for Living Downtown Des Moines?” This evening I did a little research on how to make this possible, and viola we now have both a standard mobile version, perfect for a Blackberry, Dare or Instinct phone and another version exclusively for the iPhone, complete with a little iPhone favicon.

I’ve added links to both of these on the right-side navigation bar at the top of the page for easy access.

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