Like any app, twitter has a learning curve, and after about six weeks of active use, I feel like I'm crossing the threshold of being comfortable. What have I learned about successful tweeting, aka, rules to twit by? Here goes:

• Personality rules; voice and tone trump URLS
• It's the (cyber virtual) watercooler--ask and ye shall be @ replied
• Little links are useful, but not if every post is twit-linking to your stuff (ugh)
• Twitter is beyond transparency, this is a medium where truly being expressive makes a huge difference
• Feel free to be opinionated, it's not your blog
• Twitter is the small footprint of the Net; if it was a car, it would be carbon neutral.
  

Even in a big world, human impulse is to make it smaller.

Valleywag may make derisive snorts about the "250," meaning the preening, self-congratulatory elitists they imagine as Silicon Valley's blogging core, but the truth is that the early adaptor crowd is really global, not local, and there's more like 3,500  of' em.

Having just spent a week in Israel with a gaggle of geeks, all using EVDO cards to stay connected on the travel bus, I observed a couple of things that I hadn't known before:

a) People from all over the world are talking to one another online, 24/7
b) Many of the people talking have formed strong ties and virtual communities.
c) Twitter is a key tool in supporting a & b, but blogs, friendfeed, IM, skype, email, and flickr all contribute as well.

During my week in Israel, I met folks, like the wonderful Orli Yakuel, who said she started techn blogging because of an influential blogger friend she'd met online, in the US; she and this person exchanged messages daily and had done so for a couple years.

At the same time, I saw Scoble, the most relentless and genial of bloggers, conduct conversations simultaneously with people all over the globe.

And I myself, of course, kept my my ties current and shared info daily with my friends and family in California, my business partner in Boston, and a whole gaggle of friends, family and colleagues in New York (and as I am now doing with a couple of people I met in Israel.)

The conclusion here, of course, is that it is human nature to make the world small.

Fueled by Twitter and skype, distances become smaller, discourses become more informal, and the global village gets larger, pulling us of us into the same virtual town.

Steve Hodson's got a smart post up that presents the point of view that the Mashables, the TechCrunches, the RWWs, the GigaOms have become so big and so pervasive that individual tech bloggers have to either join the or fight for attention to be heard.

As someone who's been blogging since 2003, mostly as a part-time thing, and not as a means to make $$ from writing (though it's definitely helped my consulting), the concept that newer bloggers feel that they have to fight to have a voice seems interesting.  I'm not sure it's true, but I know that there are people who believe it's true, and their experience fighting to be heard is probably quite different than mine,

One thing I've started to see and wondered about are the people who seem to make informal agreements to promote one another, to informally create networks if you will. I don't know that I had ever heard of Corvida/She Geeks until Louis Gray started linking to her relentlessly, along with Steve Hodson and SarahinTampa and ParisLemon /MGSigler  (A quick look at Technorati links suggests that these folks are linking to one another at least 50% more than anyone else is linking to them.)

Interestingly, it turns out that all of these folks are part of a new blogging network called Grand Effect that aims to share ads and boost traffic.And clearly, though they don't seem to have sold any ads yet, the network effect works.  Coming off a week in Israel on the bus with Scoble, Craig Newmark and Sarah Lacy, it's interesting to see folks joining forces--while Scoble's certainly done his share of linking to the uncles, these other folks are more independent sorts; Sit would be fun to hear what Sarah, who's also a journalist, thinks about the fight to be heard .

So, the "real questions" are:
1. Do you have to form alliances to get traffic, beyond what the big sites throw out?
2. Whose rise in the states supports this idea--and whose doesn't?
3. Does it matter, aka, does this kind of recirculation push yet other voices down (and isn't that the law of continuous revolution, anyway?)

I'd really like to hear what you think..either in the comments or on your own site. (And let me just add these people I am talking about are voices I value, so this ain't throwing down no glove.)