Many businesses are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon at the moment, whether it’s to promote new services or interact directly with their customers on a one-to-one basis.

However, the problem with many companies are the restrictions of firewalls to avoid heavy abuse of social network use by untrustworthy staff members.

I realised this morning you don’t need to visit twitter.com to manage the your Twitter account – there are plenty of other web-based Twitter applications setup which are unlikely to be listed in the firewall’s blacklist, essentially acting as a proxy to access Twitter’s services indirectly.

Here are a few to try out:

Br.st

Very well designed and simple to use interface with additional multimedia functionality.

Twithive

More focussed on lists and channels of activity streams.

Brizzly

The added benefit of connecting with Facebook as well

Seesmic

Web-based version of the popular Twitter desktop application

There are also a selection of web-based Twitter apps intended as mobile web apps but work perfectly well on the desktop, especially in a sidebar of your browser:

Dabr
Slandr
Hahlo

Try a few to see which one you prefer – each have their own perks.

On a sidenote, if you haven’t already, install a “decent” browser like Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera or Safari. All these browsers are far superior to the corporate preference of Internet Explorer and tend to cope better when it comes to web-based apps.

Many of these also have the ability to enhance the browser with extensions and addons to interact with social networks (although you may still encounter firewall issues with these). You may also find that most company policies don’t allow you to install software but it wouldn’t hurt to ask your friendly IT department for some assistance.

Over the last few years, I’ve been using IMDB to keep a record of the movies I’ve watched by giving them a rating out of ten using the simple star rating widget at the top of each movie page.

By rating each movie, I have managed to create quite an extensive history of the movies I’ve seen which is publicly available on my personal vote history page.

The problem I’ve had though is accessing that data elsewhere for use on other websites, such as this blog, Twitter or Facebook profile.

Until now, I’ve been using a service called Dapper which can scrape any accessible webpage for data and output that data as a range of different source such as RSS, Atom, JSON or XML.

The RSS output has actually worked quite well but the Dapper service was quite tempramental at keeping up-to-date, sometimes taking a few weeks to update. It wasn’t ideal for a reliable source.

Well, I discovered this morning that IMDB actually offer a dedicated RSS feed directly from their website of this exact data.

If you have been publishing your vote history to a public page, you can see your feed by appending your unique reference to the end of the URL http://feed://rss.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=[your id].

For example, my vote history would be accessible at http://rss.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=5051158.

Unfortunately, the date saved doesn’t seem to be output as the timestamp for each RSS item but I’m sure a few pokes at the IMDB development team could sort that out.

No doubt there are other personalised RSS feeds available from IMDB such as your movie reviews and favourites. If I find any, I’ll add them to this post.

Maybe now, I can tap into the data and start building some useful widgets out of it.

Update: it seems there is already a Facebook app which taps in to your vote history called My Movies.

URL shortening services are becoming quite popular now micro-blogging services like Twitter have gone mainstream.

Yesterday, I discovered yet another URL shortener service from called u.nu - probably the shortest domain possible for such a service.

Unfortunately, u.nu don’t offer a bookmarklet directly on their website so I created one myself.

Drag and drop the u.nu bookmarklet to your address bar and you too can save even more characters when posting links to Twitter.

Twitter has really kicked off over recent months with it gaining mainstream appeal after Stephen Fry discussed it on Jonathan Ross‘ evening show and now Oprah JUMPING ON THE BANDWAGON.

I’ve been using the service since it’s early days (hence the lucrative 2-letter nickname @Si) and in that time, made some really good acquaintances, moreso in the technology industry.

Being a funky house DJ, I like to keep a keen eye out for others from the house music industry joining the network. Over the last year or so, I’ve managed to find a real eclectic mix of Twitter users from house music, be them DJs, producers, artists, labels and more.

In the spirit of the Web, I thought it would be useful to share some of the people you may want to follow and talk to from the funky house scene.

(This list is in alphabetical order, not in order of preference.)

1. Andi Durrant (DJ/Producer)
2. Andy Caldwell (DJ/Producer)
3. Axwell (DJ/Producer)
4. Bassmonkeys (DJ/Producer)
5. Beatport (MP3 supplier)
6. Beat Thiefs (DJ/Producer)
7. Bob Sinclar (DJ/Produver)
   
8. Bonnie Bailey (Artist)
9. BT (DJ/Producer)
10. Calvin Harris (DJ/Artist)
11. Cevin Fisher (DJ/Producer)
12. Chocolate Puma (DJ/Producer)
13. Chris Lake (DJ/Producer)
14. Crystal Waters (Artist)
    
15. Davidson Ospina (DJ/Producer)
    
16. Duane Harden (Artist)
    
17. Erick Morillo (DJ/Producer)
18. Daft Punk (DJ/Producer)
19. Dave Aude (DJ/Producer)
20. Dave Seaman (DJ/Producer)
21. Dave Spoon (DJ/Producer)
22. David Guetta (DJ/Producer)
    
23. Defected Records (Label)
    
24. Dirty South (DJ/Producer)
    
25. DJ Cruze (DJ)
26. DJ Justin Johnson (DJ)
27. DJ Lou Lou (DJ)
28. DLG (DJ/Producer)
29. D.O.N.S (DJ/Producer)
30. Fedde Le Grand (DJ/Producer)
    
31. Felix Da Housecat (DJ/Producer)
    
32. Fierce Angels (Label)
    
33. Funkagenda (DJ)
34. Galaxy FM (Radio station)
35. Graeme Park (DJ/Producer)
36. Grant Nelson (DJ/Producer)
37. Hatiras (DJ/Producer)
38. Havana Funk (DJ)
    
39. Hed Kandi Radio (Label)
    
40. Hed Kandi America (Label)
    
41. Hott 22 (DJ/Producer)
42. James Talk (DJ/Producer)
43. John Digweed (DJ/Producer)
44. Junior Sanchez (DJ/Producer)
45. Juno Download (MP3 supplier)
46. Kaskade (DJ/Producer)
47. Lars Behrenroth (DJ)
48. Lenny Fontana (DJ/Producer)
49. Mark Doyle (DJ)
50. Mark Knight (DJ/Producer)
51. Mike Van Loon (DJ)
52. Ministry Of Sound (Label)
53. Miss Divine (DJ)
54. Miss Lynsey (Artist)
55. Mixmag (Magazine)
56. Mowgli (DJ/Producer)
57. Mr Groove (Label)
58. Nic Fanciulli (DJ/Producer)
59. Om Records (Label)
60. One Phat DJ (DJ)
61. Paul Harris (DJ/Producer)
62. Paul Velocity (DJ)
63. Pete Tong (DJ)
64. Phuture Phunk (DJ)
65. Refix (DJ)
66. Richard Grey (DJ/Producer)
67. Richie Hawtin (DJ/Producer)
68. Roland Clark (DJ/Producer)
69. Sander Kleinenberg (DJ/Producer)
70. Sebastian Engrosso (DJ/Producer)
71. Sophie Ellis Bextor (Artist)
72. Soul Harmony (DJ)
73. Soul Heaven (Label)
    
74. Soundcloud (Website)
75. Steve Angello (DJ/Producer)
76. Steve Porter (DJ/Producer)
77. Strictly Ryhthm (Label)
78. Toolroom Records (Label)
79. Track It Down (MP3 Supplier)
80. Traxsource (MP3 Supplier)
81. Vivie Anne (DJ)
82. Xpress Beats (MP3 Supplier)
83. Young Punx (Artist)

This list will probably grow over time as and when new artists, producers or labels appear on Twitter. There are bound to be some jumping on a bandwagon and disappearing soon after but there will also be those who stick around. It’s up to those who follow them and make conversation that will make a difference though.