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.

The Formula One calendar commences in Sydney, Australia next week. If you already knew that, chances are you’ll be quite interested the latest addition to the KickOff series of sports calendar web apps…

F1 Calendar is a quick way to check Formula One race times and dates for the entire season, either on the website or directly from your own calendar application.

Similarly to the previous KickOff services (which include Six Nations Kickoff, Euro Kickoff and World Cup Kickoff), all the dates and times can be downloaded straight to Outlook, iCal or even your iPhone - basically any software or mobile device that can recognise the industry standard ICS file format.

Not only can you download the race times but - if you’re software or hardware allows - you can subscribe to the remote calendar file which will automatically update as and when any changes are made to the schedule.

F1 Calendar also introduced full support for world time zones, changing all the times to your local settings. It also remembers your recent selections so you can go straight to the upcoming times quickly and easily.

Not only that but we’ve also allowed a level of customisation to your calendars: you can even decide whether to include just the race times or the qualifying rounds as well.

Working with Andy Higgs this time round - an amazingly talented web designer & developer - we approached the project with a relatively simple design, targetting the typical demographic who are interested in Formula 1. By incorporating the existing grey and red image associated with racing, it established a familiar look for the intended audience.

Focussing on the core functionality as getting the data quickly and easily, the most prominent feature was the Download and Subscribe functionality. We didn’t want to isolate the users who just wanted an online reference though so the schedule list had to be present and simple to understand. Each event focussed on the actual race but the user could easily drill down to qualifying times by clicking on the event title.

It was great to collaborate with Andy on this project as it was the first time we had worked together since meeting at The Multipack several years ago. Andy was a joy to work with, showing huge enthusiasm for the topic and real initiative throughout the development process. No doubt I shall work with him again on future projects.

If you like F1 Calendar and find it useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious or any other social network you’re on.

There is also a dedicated @f1cal Twitter account so feel free to follow us for updates or send us any suggestions.

Red Nose Day is happening this coming Friday.

For those who are complete unaware of the event, it is a huge charity event organised by Comic Relief and fronted by the BBC that uses comedy to raise money for worthy causes in Africa and the UK.

The concept was founded by writer and director Richard Curtis (famous for films like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill as well as hugely successful TV series like Blackadder and The Vicar of Dibley) and has gone on to be one of the most successful charity events in the UK.

Anyway, the online presence for Red Nose Day has really come into itself this year - they have setup Twitter accounts, Bebo, Facebook and MySpace pages as well as Flickr and YouTube pools.

In an attempt to raise even more awareness for the event and to show your support, I have created three Red Nose avatars based on the three noses available to buy this year.

Feel free to use them as your own avatar around the internet. I’ve used it as my Twitter, Facebook and Flickr avatar as they are my most used websites but you can use them wherever you spend most your time.

The images are 32-bit transparent PNGs so should look good on any background.

Buy a Red Nose from their website or at participating Sainsburys or WH Smiths. It’s only £1 with 85p going straight to the charity.