Various Musings (Twitter etc.)

Posted on February 26, 2009
Filed Under Blog, Tech | 8 Comments

OK, this is going to be a catch all for a few unrelated thoughts.

First Twitter. I’ve been getting in to it. (Want to follow me? I’m ClarkGoble on Twitter) I’m still learning the etiquette. One thing I’ve noticed. If you DVR shows the chances you’ll read a spoiler are pretty high on Twitter. (I accidentally found out who won Top Chef this morning)

I’ve also found that following folks who Twitter politics are the least interesting. I follow a bunch: liberal, conservative and libertarian. It’s just not a medium that works for politics. It’s like the worst aspects of sound bite culture magnified.

The most interesting people to follow are the technologists and foodies. There are quite a few chefs online and following them is pretty interesting. Lots of interesting links I’d not have found on my own.

The big thing I’m still unsure of is how many people to follow who follow me. I notice a lot of people follow me as soon as I start following them. Sometimes that’s nice other times I’m never quite sure how to respond. C’est la vie I guess.

Also a lot of people are saying that the whole blogging wave has crested. Perhaps in some ways. However I think what’s happened is that in politics, media and so forth you have some established blogs that are getting all the traffic. It’s much harder for new blogs to generate a lot of traffic. I also think a lot of people got burnt out on blogging. Why I don’t think it’s a fad the way some Internet things are is that it really does allow communities to form along narrow topics. Look at philosophy or science blogs. It allows people to get into a conversation that they otherwise never would be able to. And frankly philosophy blogs are going out of “business” all the time – often because people graduate or simply have a period where they don’t have time.

The nice thing about blogs for technical discussions is that you don’t have to follow them closely the way you do a mailing list. Most mailing lists are dead. Although there are a few I’m on still doing well. While blogs took out many mailing lists what mailing lists do provide is privacy that blogs never could. So you can look like an idiot in a way everyone won’t see.

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Comments

8 Responses to “Various Musings (Twitter etc.)”

I think that what some people who encounter fail to recognize is that not everyone reads every update. You dip in to the stream when you have time and if you are following the right number and mix of people, you’ll often find something of value or of entertainment or a piece of info that may help you network with that person in the future.

I also like that you can have conversations with people that you don’t really know — it’s much more loose than Facebook or LinkedIn.

But then again, I mainly follow pr people (esp. higher ed folks), journalists and social media gurus so the value is immediately easy to find. The kind of people that are Twittering are the kind of people that I want to connect with and that discuss topics directly relevant to my job and interests.

In terms of following back, I judge mainly by two things 1. their last 40 tweets or so. If 30-90% of them are interesting I generally follow back and 2. their profile — those that bother to post a brief bio and link to a website, blog or linkedin profile are much more likely to get followed back than those that don’t.

Also: I’m morriswm on Twitter.

That’s what I’ve been doing as well. For instance most of mine are foodies, since that’s related to my business.

3 Michael Dorfman on February 28th, 2009 6:48 am

I have to say, the idea of Twitter makes no sense to me. Is there that much that can be said in 140 characters that is actually worth saying? Just asking this question takes more characters; I can’t imagine a satisfactory answer that takes fewer….

Just pithy sayings or links. It’s sort of halfway between a blog and IM. I thought it would be worthless myself initially. But it’s actually worthwhile surprisingly. The trick is finding interesting people who are saying stuff.

5 Ivan Wolfe on March 1st, 2009 11:44 am

Perhaps in the future I will Twitter.

But right now, I consider myself to be so uninteresting, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to follow me. And I don’t have the time to do more than check a dozen or so blogs a day, anyway. I really don’t have the time to chase down thousands of tweets to see if there’s anything worth seeing.

But I’m sure that someday I will be assimilated. Resistance is futile, after all.

Ya. Even a couple of months ago I thought that way Ivan. The only reason I even starting paying attention was that I’d set up an account a long time ago and then people found out I had one and started following me. (Blame Steve Evans) I figured I ought start saying something if people were following and start following to see what was worth saying.

I ended up following a bunch of chefs and the like and it’s been quite useful.

7 Wm Morris on March 2nd, 2009 7:21 pm

I think that with both Twitter and blogs, you need to learn to skim and filter and save for later. For example, looking at the stats in Google Reader, I generally “read” less than 20% of the items that show up, and of those I probably only actually read read 15-20 a day. A few I star for later or if I want to save to refer to later I e-mail the item to my Gmail account with a tag (e.g. username+tagname@gmail.com). The starred items I try to get back to on the weekend when I have 20 minutes or so.

I’m not saying I don’t spend more time on blogs and Twitter than most people — I’m in PR, it’s part of my job. But it became amazingly easy to manage when I got everything set up so that I could easily skim, save for later, or file.

Yes, that’s a good point. Skimming is the heart of making blogs and twitter relevant.

Originally my sidebar was where I kept posts I meant to go back to. I need to start doing that again.

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