With the release of my first Tutorial Series product taking up much of my time last week, and the day job bearing down a bit this week, putting together a collection of quality (quality is key) links hasn’t been easy. In fact, I missed the Links post last week; which doesn’t do well for my attempts to start a tradition my readers can count on.

Which leads me to my revised plan for Friday Fun Links. I will continue to make Fun Links posts and they will be on Fridays, but not necessarily every one. At this point, I just don’t have enough time to make any guarantees. I’m still shooting for every week, but I know distractions will come and until this site pays the bills (not there yet!) I can’t overlook responsibilities. I’m sure you understand.

Anyway, this week’s Friday Fun Links Post is centered around Twitter in the news. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of Twitter articles lately, and there’s many more I’m sure that you haven’t seen before. I gathered some of my recent favorites and you can read about them below. Then be sure to follow SiteRoast on Twitter.

Twittering Cat Boasts 500k Followers – Sockington is becoming a very famous cat now that he’s got a Twitter account. His antics are chronicled in a first-person tone and are so entertaining he’s being billed as the Garfield of the 21st century!

6 Steps to Alienating Everyone on Twitter – A tongue in cheek look at the wrong way to use Twitter. It’s funny because I see some I follow doing these exact steps and it bothers me a bit. Maybe this article is on to something.

Twitter, Working to Make Money, Won’t Use Ads – Everybody knows it. Twitter founders are sitting on a gold-mine. However, they have yet to capitalize on it. This article explains their thought process and how they eventually intend to cash in on the microblogging site’s extreme popularity.

Can Twitter Save ‘My Name is Earl’? – Probably not. But the response from the Twitter community regarding the cancellation of this (apparently) popular show is pretty impressive. Read the article to find out how you can join the campaign.

Twitter Dating? – This way you only have to listen to 140 characters worth of your dates boring interests. Now that I think about it, they might be on to something here!

Chick Flicks Summarized on Twitter – Genius! Save hours of your life! Instead of spending two hours watching that boring romantic comedy, read the Twitter version and move on with your life.

I Found My Job on Twitter – Further proof that Twitter is useful for so many things beyond the typical ‘What are you doing’ commentary.

Twitter Causes Brain Damage? – This is just what I’ve been waiting for – a little Twitter controversy. You know you’re relevant when people argue about you.

Twitter has definitely taken the world by storm. It’ll be interesting to see how long it lasts. I don’t see it ending anytime soon, though.

Now, 20 some-odd years later, he’s still continuing to impress but instead of resisting becoming a werewolf, he’s resisting giving in to the horribly debilitating disease known as Parkinson’s. Ever the optimist, Michael is holding out hope that they will find a cure for his illness in time to help him as well as the many thousands who are also affected.

In doing his part to help find a cure, he started The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research in 2000. His foundation takes a very aggressive approach to raising money for research and has already funded more than 142 million dollars.

The foundation website – www.michaeljfox.org – has an extensive amount of information including facts about Parkinson’s Disease, what living with the disease is like, and how you can help find a cure.

In case you missed it, there’s also a link to the very inspiring story ABC did on Michael, “Michael J. Fox: Adventures of an Incurable Optimist”. I watched it when it aired a couple weeks ago and found it to be very inspiring.

When so many celebrities are using their public appeal to spew venom and promote themselves shamelessly for a few extra bucks, it’s nice to see someone like Michael J. Fox putting himself out there. He’s on a mission to find a cure for the disease and he’s willing to do whatever he can to help – even if that means letting all of America see him candidly living with Parkinson’s.

If you’re interested in finding out what you can do to help, visit www.MichaelJFox.org.

Anyone who would like can create a prediction which becomes a bet when someone accepts it. Each side then chooses a charity that the other will donate to if they win. Each bet is carefully documented and detailed so there’s no arguments. The bet must go at least two years from the time of agreement and much be societally or scientifically important. There are other rules as well, but you get the idea.

Although I haven’t placed a prediction or taken a bet yet myself, I’ve been amused reading some of the current and completed predictions. I was reading a few that made me a little concerned, though. For instance how badly does Mr. Rees want to win this bet?

Most of the bets on LongBets.org will spark some thought if nothing else and make you ask the question “How will Mr. Keane collect if he wins?”

I doubt anyone has ever had a better understanding of how much humans lack intelligence than George Carlin. His wit and sarcasm would be even funnier if part of us weren’t concerned he might be right. It’s entertainment that keeps us listening and masochism that keeps us laughing.

Anyways, George Carlin was the one to say it, but Overheard in New York decided to prove it. This site is a user-submitted collection of ridiculous conversations that were overheard in NYC (hence the name). I gotta say that this is one of the funniest yet disappointing websites I’ve ever seen.

While reading through some of the posts I started to convince myself that they were made up, in hopes that people weren’t that stupid. It’s my nature to give the human race the benefit of the doubt and consider us intelligent, and I probably always will, despite continuous proof otherwise. Finally, I decided they were probably true simply because I don’t know who could make this stuff up. That and because the editors page says so.

If that’s not a bad enough representation of the human race, those in charge of Overheard in New York decided to expand. And they did. There are now five “Overheard” sites and they’re no more promising for people than OINY (That acronym is short for “Overheard in New York” in case you see it on some sneakers somewhere and don’t know what it means).

If you’re in the mood to feel really good about yourself, here are those other “Overheard” sites.

• Overheard in the Office
• Overheard at the Beach
• Celebrity Wit
• Overheard Everywhere

It’s true. Although reading these sites for 15 minutes will make you start feeling like this guy, the mathematical fact is half of us are more like her. How’s that for a dose of “feel-good-about-yourself”?

Rachel’s Challenge is a website in memory of Rachel Scott. Rachel was killed during the shooting spree that left 13 innocent people dead, and captivated millions across the country who wondered how anything like this could ever happen.

Her site isn’t just a sad, cry for me site (though it may make you do that anyway). Instead, it carries messages of hope and love and strives to pass on lessons of kindess and compassion to as many people as possible.

You can really see the grasp Rachel had on the bigger picture in her school essay. From this writing, as well as many journal entries, Rachel’s family put together a powerful presentation that has moved celebrities, politicians, presidents and thousands of students and teachers.

In order to spread their message the team at Rachel’s Challenge travels the country speaking to students and teachers in grades K-12. The website is a hub for learning more about Rachel’s Challenge. My wife’s school had Rachel’s Challenge present to them and she says it was the most moving experience she’s ever had. Whenever you can get an auditorium of 500 junior high students to be completely silent for a full hour, you know you’ve gotten their attention.

Check out Rachel’s Challenge at www.rachelschallenge.com.

SITE DESCRIPTION

AskMen.com is, as it’s tag line states, a free men’s online magazine. Amazingly, the site has attempted to, and has been pretty much successful at placing all the information found in a full, print magazine right on its homepage. Of course you’ll have to link through to get to many of the articles, but for the most part the magazine’s table of contents is available at all times in the left sidebar.

The site is very colorful and filled with photos making it appealing to the eye. And, being a site for men, knows exactly how to get their attention. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a photo that’s not of either a beautiful woman, a car, or a famous athlete or musician. This, of course, keeps the men coming back, and AskMen does a great job of refreshing the content on a daily basis.

The sidebar is split into about 13 different channels, ranging from dating and love to health and sports, to power and money. Each channel has its own homepage and on the homepage is an archive of helpful articles in that topic. The archive goes back months, maybe years, so there is no shortage of information available.

In addition to the regularly added articles are daily features such as gossip of the day, joke of the day, and gadget of the day.

ABOUT ASKMEN.COM

On their about page AskMen provides a history of milestones the site has reached. According to their summary, the original concept for the site was created in April of 1999. Less than ten years later, the site’s header boasts 5 million readers a month (though at the time of this review, their actual statistics were more than 6 million per month). They’ve been able to build such a faithful following by sticking closely to their mission to “offer men candid advice, that is useful practical and entertaining”.

Some of the statistics available (at the time of review) on the about page are amazing:

• Visitors average 4.5 minutes on the site per visit
• 13 million readers have bookmarked AskMen.com
• AskMen.com has 34.58% of the market share for those interested in content related to men’s lifestyle, ahead of Maxim Online (17.09%), FHM (6.85%), and Men’s Health (5.62%).

WHAT WE LIKED

AskMen offers fresh content, interesting thoughts and ideas, accurate facts and research, and plenty of high quality pictures of beautiful women. From the onset this site seems to be a man’s dream. And after further review, we weren’t disappointed.

The topics are right on for what men like, and the articles are interesting enough to peel a guy’s eyes away from the famous Top 99 Women lists long enough for him to actually read them and get something out of it.

A favorite feature of ours is the best of the week listing on the right sidebar of the home page. This widget has the week’s most popular articles listed for easy access. More links to recent articles can also be found at the bottom of the home page, under the heading sections and recent articles.

Most importantly, AskMen has daily updates, which is typically uncommon for magazine sites. They benefit with continued traffic, and users benefit with enormous amounts of quality content.

WHAT WE DIDN’T LIKE

In order for AskMen to include as much as they have on the homepage, they had to sacrifice somewhere.  Unfortunately, they chose to make the content column relatively small. When you’re reading an article, the content is bordered by ads that are nearly as wide as the white space where the article is. It’s not way too small, and actually reading is sometimes easier if the column is smaller, but the ads along the right hand side can be a bit distracting.

This problem is nicely offset by the dark background on the navigation bar (left side) and the dark ads (right side), making the content column stand out a little bit more with its white background.

THE FINAL WORD

If you like the popular newsstand men’s magazines and/or you’re a male, you should definitely make visiting AskMen a habit.

www.AskMen.com