(Note: This post is based on a workshop on twitter presented at Women! Action! Media!, Boston 2009  by myself and Deanna Zandt and a post on Deanna's blog called A non-fanatical beginner's guide to Twitter)

So, what are the twitter terms you need to know?

• Following. These are the people whose tweets you've selected to read; their tweets appear in your "feed" or "stream."
• Follower. This is someone who is reading your tweets.
• The @ symbol. Put this before any other Twitterer's username to refer to them. Why? It creates a link to their profile automatically, which is handy for your followers to track conversations or look at people you're referring to.
• Reply: If you put the twitter name in front of your message, the person you address will see your tweet whether they follow you or not. So will everyone else following your stream. (Ex: @PresidentObama, make sure you eat those veggies from the White House garden, now.)
• @replies will usually also show up the rely section of someone's twitter account. This has to be turned on in the settings, but most people select it.
• Retweet: Rt, RT or rtwt. These stand for "retweet." If you read someone else's tweet and you want to share it, put this before copying and pasting the whole thing, including the original tweeter's username into your tweet.
•  Here's an example, where Deanna retweeted something that Nancy Scola posted: "rt @nancyscola: isn't there something uniquely DC about 1/5 of Politico's "top 10" DC Twitterers not actually tweeting? http://ow.ly/qmy"
• (Via): Instead of using retweet, you can use "via @username" to attribute something that you saw with another user. This is good when you are not directly quoting word for word, but paraphrasing or passing a link along.
• Hashtag: The # symbol. Words that follow # in Twitter are called "hash tags." It's a way of assigning a keyword to a tweet so that so that others can follow the topic.
• For example: When folks were attending the WeMedia conference in February 2009, they would tweet information about the conference and put #wemedia somewhere in the tweet. That way, everyone else interested in news from the conference could easily find and track them via twitter search.  
• DM or Direct messaging. This is a way of sending a message to someone so that only they can see it- like sending a txt message. The person has to be following you in order to receive messages from you, though! (No DMing Jane Fonda or Henry Rollins unless they're following you, ya hear?)
• To do this, you can either go to the person's twitter page (aka, their profile page), and click on the "message" link in the left sidebar. Or, if you're using another device or application besides the Twitter website, you can type the letter d, the person's username, and then your message. I.e., "d randomdeanna let's go to happy hour at abilene later"
• The Find people tab: The Find People tab on twitter allows you to search for people you know, and to import your email contacts from many web based services and  see who you know and then follow them.

This glossary is also available as a downloadable, free white paper right here.
glossary for twitter terms.pdf
 

Deanna Zandt and I did a workshop at WAM! on using twitter and we shared a lot of tips that I realized were worth capturing both for this blog and as a handout for people who'd like one. So, here's a recount of what we covered, tools we talked about and links to note.

Twitter newbie set up tips
Why are you using twitter? And for what purpose? If you're tweeting to share knowledge, build community or have a virtual water cooler, set up an account for yourself. Use your real name, or a virtual name, whatever works.

Tips on setting up your profile
On your profile, make sure you add a web link. People are going to go there and check you out. I've seen people point to a LinkedIn profile or a Facebook page in lieu of anything else, but, clearly, pointing to a blog, a tumblr, or a web site is better--after all, the idea is to provide more data about yourself for people who might want to follow your twitter stream.

Also make good use of those 140 characters you get to put in your bio.  Because twitter is searchable, people will look for specific terms that match their interests. My current twitter bio says:" blogger, urban homesteader aspirant, product developer, consultant & geek."  
Deanna Zandt's bio says: "Je suis techgrrl extraordinaire, occasionally silly & surly, etc. I love pirates. And lamp."

Point here is to remember that people are going to search on terms that interest them on twitter search (search.twitter.com) and phrases in your bio are going to pop up. So add phrases to your bio that reflect your interests--and feel free to change them as often as you want.

Adding a picture
You MUST add a picture to your twitter profile. No picture=Dork=Not real--and not in a good way. Find a picture. And add it. Pronto.

Setting up a Twitter account for your organization or project
You can have multiple twitter accounts, for yourself, for different personas, or different projects. Each one can have a unique user name and/or a unique (or the same password). It's better to have a unique user name for an organization or project than to use your personal twitter account; that way your own digital identity stands independently--and persistently--from your current work and focus.

Protected and open updates
Everything you post to your twitter stream is public and index able unless you lock your tweets and make them private. This means that someone who is not following you (i.e. importing your tweets into the twitter stream of their twitter account for a specific user name where they appear as you post them) can still see your tweets by searching search.twitter.com on your user name, or typing your username into the twitter.com URL (ex:  twitter.com/susanmernit). In other words, twitter is not private unless you lock your updates--On the other hand, it's very hard to participate in the conversation if you lock your tweets.

Following people-and being followed back
The way you build community on twitter is to follow people and have them follow you, then have a conversation via the tool. Here are some ways to find people to follow:

The Find people tab
The Find People tab on twitter allows you to search for people you know, and to import your email contacts from many web based services and  see who you know and then follow them. However, you don't need to follow everyone you have ever exchanged email with; be more selective.

Searching on an interest or keyword
Another way to find people to follow is to search on keywords that interest you. Whether you are searching for "board member" or "reproductive justice" or "social media" or "micro-donations" you will get results, tweet by tweet. Check out the links to those posters; you will find people who share your interests and concerns; follow the ones that interest you.

Some, but not all, will then follow you back.
Search Google for the name of someone you're interested in and see if they have a twitter account.

If you search for "Susan Mernit" + twitter, my twitter account comes up. You can click to that link on twitter, get my user name, and follow me. Delightfully, this system works as well for people who have accounts using other names (like randomdeanna) as for "real" names. (Try searching for Deanna Zandt + twitter and see what comes up, just for proof it works.)

Click on a name in a tweet or retreet
Serendipity and exploration are tools to use. As you see references to other twitters in your stream that seem relevant, check them out. There is no stigma to following someone you do not know, quite the contrary.

Getting started and jumping in
Deanna has a great post about getting going with twitter right here.
Some of the highlights of her post about what to say (and do read the whole thing):

Here are some methodologies you can try out:

• Pure professional. You're an expert in your field and you want to share this with the world. Pick a couple of "beats" and focus your twittering on those beats. Find other folks tweeting about these topics and have conversations with them.
• Pure personal. Your cat is hilarious, you're thinking about moving to Wisconsin, you're on your way to Miami for a much needed vacation. You get the idea here, but do try to keep your audience in mind as you post some of your life's minutiae. I'm guilty of posting weird stuff, for sure.
• The blended model. This is the way to go, and what ultimately makes Twitter so interesting, in my opinion. If I wanted to know people's political analysis only, I'd go read their blogs. There's a humanizing effect of reading about a distant colleague's child's first words, or seeing that people you think are on top of the world have bad days, too. It creates empathy and insight. When I tweeted that I'd had a really rough, emotional weekend once, I was surprised to see which followers spoke up to say, "Hey, we're with you." And it helped further complete a picture of me for them, as well.

Also remember that Twitter is a conversation. One of the joys most everyone gets out of it is talking to one another. Reply often (remember your vocab? the @ symbol is your friend!) to your followers and people you follow. Use Twitter as a two way street, with many, many lanes going both directions.

The toolz
What tools do we like and use? In addition to Twitter (at twitter.com), which of course is your starting place, there are lots of other tools to enhance or modify your twitter experience. Some of the ones we currently favor include the following:

• Socialtoo:  Sign up for a free account that will report on twitter follow and unfollow stats via email updates, also use to create automatic follow-backs if you like.
• Twitpic: Great too to take photos with your cell phone camera or camera and then post to twitter, viewable web site.
• Qwitter: track who unfollows you and which tweet it happened after..
• Twitterfall: Twitterfall gives you a way to follow tweets on a specific topic in a constantly refreshed, almost real time basis. This is a great tool for tracking breaking new stories or conference updates. You can select both a term or a hashtag and a location and sort geographically as well.
• Tweetdeck: This downloadable client allows you to create and view multiple twitter streams at one time, by sorting them into groups. Great for high octane twitter scanning, overwhelming for many folks.
• Backtweets: Search for web links at twitter 
• WeFollow: twitter directory created by Digg founder Kevin Rose. Add yourself and your #hashtags to a category.

Download this post as a white paper right here:
Twitter tools that work for me--and tips for beginners.pdf

(Note: This post is based on a workshop on twitter presented at Women! Action! Media!, Boston 2009)

Net-enabled social tools have enabled new models for grassroots activism and community building, and they have changed how we function in society -- how we communicate globally and locally, how we form ties and how we organize and connect.

What's tricky about deploying social media today is not access to the technology, but the knowledge of how to deploy it across multiple platforms.

This 309Social media for social causes white paper.pdf is meant to take some of the fear and confusion out of the question of whether to use these tools or not. An accompanying resource guide and detailed case studies provide a tool kit for using social media to promote, brand and organize around an idea, movement, program or campaign.

There's a brief of the paper here, from the WeMedia conference

The full white paper, 28 pages long! is here
309Social media for social causes white paper.pdf

Here's what's in it:
•    Introduction
•    What do we mean by social media?
•    Lifestreaming
•    Money and mobilization
•    How to use social media tools
•    The Case Studies
•    Knight News Challenge
•    Women Who Tech Telesummit, 2008
•    Q&A with Allyson Kapin, Women Who Tech
•    Twestival, 2009
•    Q&A with Amanda Rose, Twestival
•    COMMENTARY by Lisa Wiliams : What makes a social media campaign stand out?
•    Resources: Web 2.0 Products and what they are
•    CHART; The social media ecosystem, or the virtuous circle of multiple tools
•    What do I get started with?
•    Sources & Citations
•    About the author

I will be posting the sections of the paper individually as well. Hope you find them useful.

"My life has been a series of well-orchestrated accidents; I've always suffered from hallucinogenic optimism. I was broke for more than 10 years. I remember staying up all night one night at my first company and looking in couch cushions the next morning for some change to buy coffee. I've been able to pay my father back, which is nice, and my mother doesn't worry about me as much since I got married a year and a half ago."

--Twitter co-founder and CEO Ev Williams, reflecting on his past in the NYTimes.

Mr, Tweet, a service that recommends people to follow on twitter based both on who follows you and on mapping your own social network and twitter connections, launched a few months ago as a bit of a lovely one trick pony. The brainchild of Ming Yeow Ng and Yu-Shan Fung, with assist from Stanford Professor Andreas Weigend, Mr. Tweet started quickly adding features based on user response.

Now, 4 months from launch, Mr, Tweet has 76,000+ followers and a hockeystick growth curve on twittercounter, adding 800-1,000 new users a day.

I've become a big Mr. Tweet fan, so it's great to see this leap--one of the reasons I like the product and continue to use it is that they are responsive to customer feedback, so it keeps getting better, which, in turn, keeps my interest.

so yesterday I flew from San Francisco to New York. Getting off the plane last night, I headed to baggage and then out into the terminal. Since it was late, I'd reserved a car; the fellow was there with a sign for me.

"Hi." I went over.
"Tim O'Reilly says hello," he replied
"Huh?" I was confused. Did this guy just drive Tim O'Reilly?
"A man got off the plane, saw my sign, came over and said "Is that Susan Mernit? Tel hr Tim O'Reilly says hi.'"

"Oh!" I started laughing, and as we walked to his car, I just thought, Hey, you don't always need twitter.

Kevin Rose, digg co-founder who has 88,000 followers on twitter(right in line behind #1, President Obama) has a post on tech crunch about how to get more out of using twitter--
Some highlights:

• Get into suggested users (inside the find people table) with Lance Armstrong and the real Britney Spears.
• Put links to your Twitter profile everywhere--mine is twitter.com/susanmernit (hint, hint)
• Use twitter hashtags to mark your interests, location, restaurants, etc. How to  is here.
• Follow the top twitter users
• Use tools:TwitterCounter to see you how many new users you're adding per day,  Qwitter to see what tweets people leave after.

Susan sez: These are all good ideas--for more on using twitter, especially if you're a newbie, check out Chris Brogan and Nate Ritter.

Twestival: Feb 12, 2009
The ability of people on the inter-webs to organize themselves and spread the word--about causes, brands, news, issues, people--just keeps evolving. This self-organizing process is one of the reasons I am so excited a bout Twestival, a fund-raising effort that supports charity: water,  a series of projects to support clean drinking water for people--especially students--in developing countries.

Taking best practices from BarCamp, local Net2Tuesday and local Tweetups, as well as inspiration from some of the effective fundraising done by Beth Kanter and Laura Fitton (@pistachio) on twitter, Twestival will tap the energy of volunteers and twitter users in 100 cities to create decentralized events, all on the same day (Feb 12th) that will align real world meetups with online donating via TipJoy. simultaneous event streaming around the world (!!), and what will be a huge awareness-building post-event ripple of inevitable documentation on flickr, youtube and blogs

Bonus link: Beth Kanter, "Twitter As Charitable Giving Spreader: A Brief History and Meta Analysis of Fundraising With Twitter.

Speeding back into old skool linking, I have to say not only is this piece by Atherton Bartelby on Mashable a delight, his own blog, Curious Affairs, looks like another find. (God, it is such a pleasure to read someone who can actually write!!)

Bartelby posits that the "follow fail" happens when someone follows you whom you would never follow back cause they're boring, or callow or NOC.  "This is the person whose follow on Twitter," he says, " you simply cannot bring yourself to return."

So what are the gaffes that make someone not want to follow you back? Read the whole thing here--but here's a prized quote (I prize it):

"For me, Twitter is not a shallow popularity contest, it is about forging interesting connections and conversations with other people. My Twitter followers are far more to me than a simple follower count: they are friends, they are colleagues, they are collaborators, they are peers, and they are sources. To follow someone in return whose only intent is clearly to acquire more followers would be to devalue the esteem with which I hold my other followers."

I know it's a safety thing, but I hate the fact it's going to be against the law to text while driving in California starting tomorrow. Safety rules, but my guilty pleasure during traffic jams is to read and twitter, both of which are about to become illegal.

There's a super-detailed article in the LA Times that lays out the law(and links to the PDF of VC 23123.5 (b)--but the short version is you can't text, browse the web on your phone (!), or do any email or messaging of any type.  At all times, you have to be in full control of your vehicle, which means keeping your nose out of that screen. (Susan sez: Using your GPS does not count--and there are no laws about doing any of this on your bike.)

Can you park your (still running) car and text/browse/post? Yep.
And if you're parked and the engine is off, these new laws do not apply.

Fines? Similar to making calls without a hands-free device while driving- first violation, $20; subsequent violations, $50--plus  local court costs and program fees. Not exactly pretty (I am already imagining the stake-outs on Palo Alto streets; the cops there are expert at catching and extracting fines from drivers who break the rules.

Loic said we needed search by authority and now we have it in the new twitority. Search on topic and sort the results by number of subscribers.

The wisdom of the crowds is always right? Marketers rule, correct?

I know I am a certified troublemaker because I have NO INTEREST in checking tweets again followers and popularity. For mass market concensus, I have google, yahoo! buzz and the top tech bloggers, who circle one another relentlessly with  minute variations on the same ideas (for the most part).

Folks, I want to find the edge cases. I want to read the fringe dwellers, the outliers, the folks who think different, not the same. I want the Ezra Kleins before they go big, the Corvida's before chasing fame hit. I want the bloggers who influence the influencers and the people who make the look at things afresh.

I am glad Loic got what he wants so fast, and I am sure I will visit twitority again, but I want something different--and a helluva lot more interesting.

"We are a land of idiots. Idiots care about who is following them. Idiots care more about celebrity news than science. Or technology. Or geeky stuff.

Idiots try to rank things based on who has the most followers. Idiots can't be bothered with thinking about adding value like Tim O'Reilly or Jay Rosen, all guys who teach you something in nearly every tweet and who I can't remember ever caring about how many followers they have."

--Robert Scoble, a wonderful person and amazingly hardworking blogger who is right that it all comes down to the split between conversations and sharp marketing for some people and that the most followed people do not neccessarily stand as the thought leaders.

Okay, so was it evil to ask Mr.Tweet to recommend twitters for @winstonthedog to follow?

I mean, it makes me sad that my own usage of Mr. Tweet seemed to be a one-time thing.

Given that Mr, Tweet hasn't added features yet that check in with me at future times and recommend more people to follow (and that is my #1 feature request), I decided to reviist Mr. Tweet on my American Bulldog's behalf.

So, here's what Mr,. Tweet said about Mr. Winston's recommendations:
winstonthebulldog should follow his followers steve gillmor, leolaporte, george kelly,
deannazandt, Dobromir Hadzhiev, johanthedog, susan bratton, nick starr and stellaunathecat.

(Susan sez: This is an august and witty group, but there's only one dog, what's with that, Mr Tweet?)

And as for the influencers Winstonthedog should follow, according to Mr, Tweet, the top folks on the list are @kevinmarks, @laughingsquid, @elisac, @jerrymichalski, @jdlasica and @micah. 

No dogs in that  pack, Mr, Tweet, tho some of these fellas do bark.

Susan sez: Hey, since you're a machine, can't you classify the social graph to include refers to twittering dogs? Come on, now.

Louis Gray has written a hilarious piece--here's a snippet:
JosephOfGalilee: AFK for a bit w/@MaryofNazareth. Headed to Bethlehem. #caesartax

JosephOfGalilee:@MaryofNazareth says no baby tonight. But can't be long now.

MaryofNazareth: Off to Bethlehem! Hope we find a good inn. @JosephOfGalilee waited until last minute. #caesartax

MaryofNazareth: Bethlehem is a zoo. @JosephOfGalilee says @InnKeeper1 claimed "no room". Uh-oh.

JosephOfGalilee: No room at the inn. @InnKeeper1 and @InnKeeper2 both. Kill me now. @MaryofNazareth not looking happy.

Susan sez: Of course, if you a) understand this (including the #hastags), and b) think it is funny,  you need to be spending the holidays off the computer, just like I am doing (not).

happy holidays everyone.and enjoy your time online--and off.

There's a blogosphere meme circling around this month that can be described as "do lifestreaming tools such as friendfeed and twitter ruin perfectly good blogger's traffic, authority, ideas?"

Mike Arrington says tech blogger Robert Scoble is an addict who needs an intervention so he'll return to his roots writing perceptive pieces on his blog;--"all that content is just really forgettable, compared to a good thought piece that people refer back to over time. There is no direct way to monetize any of that content, which is something that a full time blogger with a family really needs to think about."

Scoble replies that he;s happy with his time investment, both because of the greater number of followers and the richer conversation and because he's increased his information & news sources.

The always pragmatic Steve Rubel chimes in " As personal branding becomes a weapon in a down economy, look for blogging to make a return run."

Of course what's interesting here is not what an insular circle of high-tech white guys have to say about one another (we get way too much of that already). It's the questions about what place blogging has in a world where the insta-pop corn of twitterstreams and friendfeed communities can be darn near irresistible (like Scoble, I love both friendfeed and twitter.)

I'd side with my new friend Francine Hardaway and say that blogging is incomparable for the following:

• Writing longer, more reflective thought pieces (we're talking over 140 words here as long, people),
• Writing across niche communities to broader and more inclusive audiences
• Sharing personal voice and perspective in a more sustained way
• A means to establish voice and reputation

However, where I think twitter and friendfeed excel over blogging is in building the sociable web in almost real time.  There is no other medium that can give me names of restaurants in Cleveland and chances to meet virtual connections outside of lifestreaming (Facebook, twitter, etc.). The  lazyweb is unparalled  when put to use in the twitter stream, and the loud, messy joy of the twittersphere is infectionous.

But, it ain't blogging. And if you are a writer at heart, you have to blog. My guess is for Scoble, what we've talking here isn't compulsion, but goal-setting.

--After all, if your wish is to be a fundable brand, a one mand band of product,content, output--what you need are hard, targeted numbers--numbers on a scale that lifestreaming totally provides.

No slam on blogging from Robert, just a wish for community--and a way to use engagement, aka community--to justify dollars.

Oh, twitter, I love thee, how do I count the ways? In a burst of year end enthusiasm, programmers and analysts alike have done a push on state of the twittersphere data.
HubSpots's got a Technorati-inspired State of the Twittersphere PDF, and flip kromers got  interesting data extraction/spreadsheet/database material.

Some stats from Hubspot:

• Twitter is dominated by newer users - 70% of Twitter users joined in 2008
• An estimated 5-10 thousand new accounts are opened per day
• 35% of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers
• 9% of Twitter users follow no one at all

Data from a  scrape of the twitter friend graph by Phil'flip' Kromer

• about 2.7M users
• 10M tweets
• 58M edges
• 219,000 #hashtags
  
• full metadata on users and relationships
• calculated pagerank for users

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4439/State-of-the-Twittersphere-Q4-2008-Report.aspx

Is there something about hard-bitten NYTimes reporters that makes they go all gooey everytime they stumble across--and then write about--anything Web 2.0-ish?

Gushiness is the only thing I can think of-besides needing to fill column inches--that can justify the latest breathless wet kiss for @themediaisdying, a twitter stream of insider-y, media-= bistro like news about media layoffs and collapses (oh yes, and the fact media reporters are fascinated by their own industry).

My snarkiness here is because while the 3,000 followers themediaisdying has garnered in 3 weeks is commendable (as is their strategy of messaging every new person who signs up and asking them to invite all their friends as well), there are people--marketers--on twitter who have 10 times this traffic--and no Times reporters seem to be writing about them.

Why not write about Chris Brogan, who, with 26,250 followers, seems to be turning into the Jimmy Stewart of the interwebs?

Or the super clever Merlin Mann, with 32,000?

Or the  appealing Veronica Belmont (38,000)?

Of course, none of them are focusing on the crash and burn of the media industry, which @themediaisdying covers extremely well. But the size of their audience ain't the news, honey, not in this world.

Last February, when Yahoo! did its last big layoff, Ryan Kuder live-twittered his layoff, followed my  twittering and blogging my dismissal.  Our public transparency made the news, much to our surprise--some people felt it was a first time that let go employees didn't slink off and instead shared openly.

Today, as the world watches, Yahoo! is doing another big layoff, almost 12 months later. Only nobody is surprised by the tweets and blog posts about what's going on. What's more typical this time around is the tweet from just let go Brit @BenWard, who wrote "Totally fucking laid off. You could say that I'm not very happy about it. You would be right to say that." and had at least 20 people twitter advice and job help within an hour.

Even more pointedly, it's almost a media sport, with what feels like at least hundreds of people tracking tweets and posting stories.

Even with the poor economy and all the other companies' cuts, the reaction to the Yahoo! layoffs shows that we've clearly tipped into another universe, one where America is (finally) embracing high-touch communication and transparency and where getting laid off is something that happens, even if it sucks.

I've been an avid blogger for the past five years, but it's never been something I made money with directly. The blog was great to bring me into a larger community, help me get consulting gigs, and speak truth to power, in a small way, to my bosses at Yahoo!. But now that I am almost a year out in self-employment land, with one start-up sprint under my belt and a big push happening on the second incarnation, I'm well aware that I've got to think about what I do to cover my expenses starting in March (when a current project winds down).

That train of thought led to me wanting to understand whether my blog, which I've always written for fun, could actually make me any money. It also led me to think about how un-oriented toward increasing my traffic, growing followers or building a brand I've been in the past few years.  Sure, I'm out there,  but I don't try to build traffic the way some folks do so well--and, on reflection, I felt that made me a little too, uh, old school?

So, what did I do?
A)    Reviewed colleagues in my niche: Went back over some newer bloggers I liked and reviewed how they positioned themselves: louis gray & corvida, in particular.

Also took a more critical look at techcrunch, readwriteweb, and gigaom. Informative, but didn't see a lot I would change on my blog. Just motivated me to post more often.

B)    Revisited the twitterverse. I also took a long, hard look at how I used twitter--and how other people--with far larger followings--used it.

 Bingo! Light bulb went off in head!

After reviewing the twitter style of folks like chris brogan(21,000 + followers), Scott Beale (21,000 following) and Pistachio (11,000+), the realization suddenly hit--these folks are doing great micro-blogging, delivering ideas and links in their tweets (Uh, duh, what was it about twitter I was somehow missing?)

I then decided where to put my chips: twitter--and increased, more topical blogging.

So, first I started consciously shifting my twitter style and topics; as a long time blogger,I didn't find that too difficult.
Then I started posting blog entries(once again), 3-4X a day.
I pushed myself to do that last post at night about something relevant, and to add my two cents if I had relevant thoughts or a back story.
.
In that spirit, I wrote a post that commented on the pending Yahoo layoffs; part of that post was then picked up as John Paczkowski's Quote of the Day, which got my post out there.

At the same time, Fast Company put an article that quoted me as a Web 2.0 expert on their home page; I added my twitter links and a welcome to my site when that went live. And that put my blog out there, along with my lifestream feeds.

Results? On Nov 24, I had 949 twitter followers; today, Dec 8 , I have 1,025--the biggest jump in my history.
 
How does this fit with following social capital?

Creating information with value leads to people following you, and/or clicking on links, which in turn increases followers, unique visitors and page views. Which, for some people, leads to enough ad revenue to pay for a couple of lattes every week (right now, that would be me) and a sense that it is possible to learn something new, every day.

I am going to keep playing with making the blog and my twitter stream as useful as possible to people who read them, will continue sharing the backstory on these experiments as well.

What could happen over at twitter when you add Rael Dornfest--someone who's created and edited a superb book series (O'Reilly Hacks), built one of the first RSS readers (Meerkat), working on the RSS spec standards and then went on to found a cool little company values of n that built Stikkit: Little yellow notes that *think*. 

Now the man's going to join forces with Ev Williams, Biz Stone and other smart people at twitter; my product development head is bursting with speculation about the cool direction twitter could go in (and thinking multiple products people, one at a time...). And of course the dude's an engineer....

TechCrunch broke the story and the twitterverse is humming with the news.

"As to the rest of the wannabees, it really is true that if you haven't done it, that is: been intimately involved growing a social web app from prototype to Internet-scale on a UNIX stack, then you really don't know shit. (I know more than my fair share of people that have, and I didn't see any of them posting armchair bs on the comments)."

--Upcoming co-founder Leonard Lin, writing about scaling twitter and the general brouhahaha.

Susan sez: Check out these links as well.

• joestump.net » Blog Archive » It's not the language stupid

• I'm Going To Scale My Foot Up Your Ass - Ted Dziuba

• random($foo): Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition

• Liminal Existence: Scalability

• Scaling Twitter » SlideShare

1. 
   

So, I'm starting to engage in some very specific shifts in behavior, which I want to talk about, both as a means to better share my thoughts and output, and as a way to kick off some talk about how information sharing and discovery is shifting.  Here's the deal:

1) The best place to see what I am writing/talking/thinking about right now is friendfeed. You need to ask to follow me, but if you're not a bot, a link farmer or a spammer, I will approve you.

Why friendfeed? A couple of reasons:
a) FF is an aggregator. This means that since I am doing alot of clipping and commenting and throwing it into  delicious where I can save the info and get it again later, you can see all that there pretty easily. Since my delicious use means  I am not posting as many interesting links on my blog, if you care FF is the place to go.
b) You can comment on items there that you can't comment on on delicious as easily--in other works, the ff interface supports us having a conversation, which is one of the critical points, right?


2) Twitter is a way to escape the echo chamber and  sample voices/people.

I pruned my twitter stream a day ago. to make room for some new voices. I just went and got a bunch, mostly tied to an area I am going to spend time in over the summer. It was amazing how much I learned about the area--and about some interesting people to follow--by using the twitter location search- good way to suss out digerati in a new place.

3) Blogs are longer form and my  virtual ADD is getting worse (but I still love blogging).
I still love blogging, but so much of what I am doing right now is boiling down to snippets, and ff and twitter are good tools for that.

On the other hand, I could never write this post in either medium.

So, question for you all: How are social media tools shifting your discourse?

"got tons done today, feel much less overwhelmed, loving my new basecamp to do lists, almost through a couple of the big hoops."

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.
  

Interestingly, I'm finding that twitter is in the lead as the most compelling guilty pleasure.