Quick'n'Dirty episode 23: TripIt and Twitter lists top talk

Can you believe we just finished episode 23 of the Quick'n'Dirty podcast? Time flies when you're having fun. Or, well, skipping episodes. As my co-host Aaron Strout wrote last week it had been a good few weeks since we'd last podcasted together due to travel schedules and a minor health emergency on my part. But we were back in full force this week with a fun social network of the week, a great guest and a fun point/counterpoint.

We started by talking about CrowdCampaign, a neat crowd-sourcing tool that allows you to ask your network -- or a broader unknown network -- to chime in on queries, or even do contests or other types of voting. CrowdCampaign was recently used during the Web 2.0 Expo in New York for potential Q&A's for Beth Noveck. The possibilities are endless and Aaron and I discuss some of these on the show. CrowdCampaign is brought to us by the brilliant minds at The Social Collective, which boasts the my.SXSW portal among its many impressive projects.

Next up was our special guest, Will Aldrich of TripIt. Will is the company's vice president of product, and he joined us to talk about how the concept of TripIt was developed, how the company has been able to oust Dopplr as a the more popular travel social network incumbent, as well as how travelers can really benefit from the tool. If you aren't familiar with TripIt, it has a bunch of cool travel features, from connecting trips with your friends to see who is going to be in what city when you are, to helping you organize all of those pesky, disparate travel confirmation documents. I would use it all the time if only they had a BlackBerry application. Aaron did a TripIt Q&A on his blog prior to our talking to Will on the pocast, so either give his interesting interview a read or listen to the replay, or both!

As always, we introduced a "featured Twitterer" of the week. The featured Twitterer is someone that we find to be informative, funny and engaging, and someone that we believe more people should know about and follow. This week's was none other than Del Jones, aka @jonesdel, USA Today leadership reporter and all-around entertaining and smart guy.

And finally, we had our usuall point/counterpoint, and on this one we sort of disagreed for a change. The last one where there was absolute disagreement was when we did our iPhone vs. BlackBerry war, which seems to still be continuing in the background of every show. This week's topic was around Twitter lists: are they good for businesses or are they just a big ego stroke? Aaron, as he's usually the more positive one between the two of us, discussed some good uses and examples of Twitter lists. Me, being the pesky cynic, talked about how I don't care much about public Twitter lists and the annoying redundancy they bring. It was a good one, so you're going to have to listen to find out where we ended.

The Quick'n'Dirty podcast will be off the air this week so Aaron and I can eat some turkey with our families, but we will return on Thursday, Dec. 3, with Peter Shankman, the man behind Help A Reporter Out (HARO) and so many other social media successes. Get your questions ready!

Reminder that you can always listen to archived shows on BlogTalkRadio or find us on iTunes by searching for "QuicknDirty."