I created this infographic to help illustrate the size of the U.S. debt. The numbers used assume the following: US Debt value of $11,910,000,000,000 (I used the September 2009 value from Treasury Direct) The volume of a dollar bill equal to 0.00112694523 cubic meters which I calculated based on length width and thickness values from various online sources. The storage capacity of one TEU (Twenty-foot equivalent unit) equal to 39 cubic meters (from wikipedia) A per ship container capacity of 15,000 TEUs, which wikipedia says is close to the size of the largest capacity ships in use today. Let me know if you dispute any of the numbers used, or have ideas about better ways to portray information like this. Bigger versions of the image are available on Flickr, feel free to copy or use it!

The emergence of the so-called ‘Social Media’ is a powerful force that is ushering many changes in how information is communicated throughout society. It holds the promise of a new era of citizen journalism where each of us becomes an arbiter of information for the whole, extending the attention of mass media beyond the marketable common denominator defined by the old system. Properly structured, this new media regime could cover very local events, examine very specialized topics, and uncover stories that are inconvenient to the government and corporate interests that currently influence media attention. But there is no guarantee that what will emerge from the unfolding media bloodbath will be an improvement. Social media has long been accused of being a tool for individuals to indulge others’ voyeuristic tendencies, to share the inane details of their lives and spew the minutiae of their day to day experiences upon the masses with postings about the food they are eating, or their pet’s follies. The challenge for those interested in creating a more enlightened social media has been to create services that filter this noise, to mine the chatter for useful insights about what’s on people's minds. By example, Twitter has been a favorite whipping boy for social media critics who lament the ease with which it allows people to broadcast useless information. But Twitter benefits from an unfocussed volume and elegant simplicity. Buried within its fire hose is a stream of consciousness, insight into what’s on our minds right now.  Twitter’s famously small posts simplify the filtering process, a tempting prospect that has driven the ecosystem of third-party tools that have emerged around the core service. Unfortunately there’s also been a lot of development with much less useful goals. Enter Blippy. On the surface, the new service promises to make it easy for individuals to broadcast a stream of what they are purchasing at any given time. Let's put aside the disturbing privacy implications of such an idea for the time being and think about the value of such a service. I don’t deny that there is a potential for mining this data set for interesting trends, but the motivation for contributing to a service like this is what bothers me. It’s the same concern that I have about Foursquare, a service centered around broadcasting one’s location at any given time. If such services become wildly popular, I feel it will be an indication that the market forces crafting the new media regime have no interest distributing content of value, just catering to our egos. One might describe the forces fueling the rise of the Blippy/Foursquare style of social media to be merely a “show me yours and I’ll show you mine” type of voyeurism. What's the harm in that as long as people are opting in, right? Actually, I see it as more of a “I’ll look at yours if you look at mine” narcissism.  Instead of catering to those who create more interesting content, the narcissistic model caters to those more willing to open themselves up, to allow public scrutiny of ever more private activities. I’m as big an advocate for the new media era as anyone, but I see things like Blippy and I fear that the model dismantling dead tree media is a hollow self serving ego machine with little interest in propagating valuable information. Hopefully this is not the case, and we will see an efficient machine emerge. A machine that empowers consumers of information to reward content providers in relation to the value they provide. The nature of that reward may be monetary, but in most cases it will be attention and the influence it bestows. The result will be a media mind that more accurately focusses attention on the things we collectively value. If we are smart and enlightened, social media will reveal just how wonderful we are as a group. But, if we're really just shallow narcissists, it's going to make that plain instead. Either way I suspect that a more social media is a step forward. This whole experiment might be tremendously self-reaffirming. Alternatively, it will arm us with a realistic picture of ourselves, which will be the first step in making improvements.

I've recently encountered a bunch of music that I directly speaks to my inner-geek. Here are some of my new and classic favorites...

Carl Sagan - 'A Glorious Dawn'

A recent breakout youtube hit containing auto-tuned lyrics from Carl Sagen's Cosmos series and Stephen Hawking.

Hard N Phirm - Pi

I just encountered these guys a few days ago and it seems that just about everything they have on youtube could easily qualify for this post. This one celebrates Pi...

Monty Python - Galaxy Song

All time classic from the movie 'The Meaning of Life'.

Flight Of The Conchords - The Humans Are Dead

I got to see these guys in concert a few months ago, they crack me up, but I've never seen the HBO show.

"Weird Al" Yankovic - White & Nerdy

Probably the best thing he's done in a while.

Hard 'n Phirm - Trace Elements

This is perhaps my favorite at the moment. Billed as an 'ass kicking country song about science', the thing is packed with references. Every time I watch this I find more details. I wish someone whould make a t-shirt that says: "I'm a deoxyribonucleic asshole!" Let me know what else you think qualifies for the Geek Music genre.

Even as they have released an update to their software today, Apple is still in the process of ceding valuable territory in the nascent digital TV download industry, here's why. The ways consumers access video entertainment is moving toward an internet-based al la cart digital download distribution model. Despite what the cable tv industry wants us to believe, consumers crave the ability to decide what to watch at any moment. The idea of paying someone a lot of money to decide what few programs can be seen at any given time is looking less and less valuable to many who've dabbled in on-demand video entertainment from internet distributors like Hulu. This process will only accelerate as it becomes easier to view streaming content on a television rather than a computer screen. Enter AppleTV. When Apple introduced the AppleTV the potential of the device was obvious despite a feeble feature set and market that had not yet been seriously tempted to change how their TVs received those pictures. A major software update in 2008 propelled the box into the new world allowing the purchasing and renting of video from the popular and increasingly mis-named iTunes Music Store. Personally, I bit this particular apple hard. Driven mostly by dissatisfaction of the ROI on the small fortune I was forking over to Comcast each month, I ditched cable television entirely in favor of an HD antenna/Apple TV meal, with a little Netflix sprinkled on top. The math seemed clear, since I only watched a few shows, even if I had to purchase individual episodes I would be saving quite a bit of money and have more control over my living room's big glowing centerpiece. Over the next 18 months more and more players have slid into the market. Netflix introduced an on-demand streaming service to all existing customers that can even be viewed on a television if you have supporting hardware like an XBox 360 or a Roku. A little player called Boxee put out a software package that ties together video and a social-media collaboration. Despite Apple reluctance to either innovate or market the AppleTV, sales were respectable at times, largely because of the efforts of third parties like Boxee. I recently discovered something that surprised me. Without realizing it, I now regularly pay Apple about the same amount each month that I used to pay Comcast. Pile that on top of the frustration I feel by the lack of new options from Apple and my eye is wandering. That $99 Roku box is looking mighty attractive. If Netflix support comes to the PS3, the combo gaming/blue ray/streaming device would also be very compelling. Please don't misunderstand. I LOVE the Apple TV. Aside from the little white plastic remote control, the device and the interface are fantastic. If it wasn't so good, I don't think I could have been lulled into a state whereby Apple could extract so much money from me. It's just that I need more program options and more control over how to spend my money. Right now it seems like everyone but Apple are trying to provide those options.
Newly release software has a completely new main menu design
Today, Apple released the 3.0 version of the Apple TV operating system. The important updates include a redesigned main menu, support for the iTunes Extras content and Genius Mixes. I've only had a short time with the software but here are my initial impressions: The main menu is functionally well designed, being much more Sony Playstation-ish in layout. The old menu was just fine, but at lease this new one gets some nice artwork from your stored content visible front and center. There is a problem with it though. At lease on my TV, the thin horizontal lines are SO thin, the actually flicker, an effect that is terribly distracting! Also (and this is nitpicking), the typography just feels off somehow. Personally I don;t care a bit about the iTunes Extras Content (like liner notes for albums), and I've never used Genius Mixes (although I suppose it's nice to have). The best thing I've seen is the addition of a menu option for streaming internet radio. I've wanted this for a while. Thank you!. Overall, the update is minor, and unless it is a prelude to more significant additions, the product is still in trouble. I have no way of knowing what else, if anything Apple has planned for the TV. Rumors have swirled around integrated TV sets, DVR functionality and subscription pay models, but so far a price drop and today's update are the only acknowledgments we've gotten from Cupertino that the box even exists. I actually think Apple would be better off yanking the product altogether, rather than letting it languish in such a public way. I can tell you this, it I do jump ship, given Apple's history of ignoring the product, I'm going to be hesitant to jump back, even if they do eventually release a compelling new devise. All of this is a shame from a business point of view. Given their commanding lead in other entertainment markets, and the aura of seemingly 'do-no-wrong' business acumen after successfully pushing high-end products in the midst of an economic downturn, Apple could own this market too. So what should they do? Here are some ideas. Any one of these would be major progress:

• Release a more powerful box, or one that is easily upgradeable. The current AppleTV's anemic processing power limits the ability of third parties to add desperately needed functionality like Netflix Support.
• Ditch the AppleTV box and release the AppleTV operating system as a software package for the Apple Mini. The Mini is practically just the device described above already.
• Buy Boxee. Layer on a good UI and release a truly innovating device. Someone is going to do this eventually anyway, but Apple could really make this work given its expertise at crafting the user experience. Boxee is a great idea, but terribly implemented at the moment.
• Create an App store for the AppleTV so third party developers can make this into something even if Apple itself doesn't want to spend the resources to do so. The model has worked great for the iPhone.
• Add gaming functionality. The iPod Touch/iPhone would be a perfect input device for a new class of games built for the TV.
• Add a subscription paying model for programming or perhaps innovate some type of new hybrid advertising model.
• How about just plain marketing the AppleTV. I cannot fathom why the marketing machine that is Apple has never released a single ad for the devise. How about creating a commercial or two for (gasp) TV?

Ok, you already know what is going to be number one, but there are plenty of other reasons that this archaic communication system needs to be chucked in favor of something better. 10.) Terrible Software Whether it was Outlook, Lotus Notes, Mail.app, Thunderbird, or one of their special needs webmail equivalents I have never encountered an email client that didn't annoy me with interface peculiarities, hog too many resources or eventually find some new way to loose data. Has there been a single significant interface advancement since we moved away from Pine and the command-line? I don't know why there is so little motivation to innovate in this space. 9.) Lack of Portability When you change jobs, you probably lose your email. When you change internet service providers, you probably lose your email. Hell, when you change computers or even just email clients, you probably lose your email. And, how exactly should you archive your old email so that it's accessible? 8.) Group Interaction is a Pain Ever try to collaborate on a project with a large group of people in different cities? The cc's, re's, the duplication and talking over one another--what about the ever expanding (and ever indenting) discussion path growing like a weed from the bottom of your messages? What a mess. 7.) File Management Sucks The worst part about collaborating on work over email is document management. The inefficiency and lack of formal version control while duplicating and throwing around attachments wastes time, productivity and bandwidth. 6.) It's Cumbersome, Unreliable and often Slow Why is it that no matter how many times I've set the SMTP whatever to point to the right server, it eventually needs to be reset? Is this attachment too big? Someone sent me something huge so I have to wait to see my new mail while it downloads. Why did that bounce back? Oh, you're going to attempt to deliver 3 more times? Has that ever worked? Should I wait or just fedex a thumb drive? 5.) Lack of Easy Security Why do I have to be an ex-NSA sig-int analyst to figure out how to send private, encrypted email communications? Shouldn't this just be a preference I can set, say a checkbox next to the 'send' button? Better yet, why isn't this just the default method for formatting communication? Forget the government conspiracies, how about just plain old business security? Security is also the problem that I have with web-based email services like Gmail. I shouldn't have to sell access to my personal communications just to get a reliable product. 4.) Bloat My local Entourage database for about 2 years of email exceeds 16 GB. When that fails, as it seems to do every 6 months or so, the program rebuilds it by creating an entire duplicate database. This takes hours, slows everything down, requires a full re-download of all the data, and doubles the storage space eaten up by the program. I discovered that the space can be recovered by deleting the original corrupted file, but why exactly did I have to DISCOVER this? I shudder to think about what is happening on the server side. 3.) Corporate/Consumer Abuse Exactly how many of these damn newsletters do I have to unintentionally subscribe to because I didn't notice the opt-out checkbox when ordering a Chia Pet from the sock puppet? 2.) Formatting Ever try to create a compelling email newsletter for Chia Pet enthusiasts? It's an effing nightmare. It's like designing web pages back in 1996, but worse because the general public now knows what a good web page should look like. Inconsistent implementation of HTML and CSS standards pretty much guarantees that the email is going to look like crap for 40% of the audience, and be un-readable for about 10%. 1.) Spam That Nigerian Prince and Viagra have pretty much doomed the entire technology. I've never met a filter that really works which pretty much means that if I don't already know you, or I'm not expecting it, I'm not going to get you email. Maybe that's a good thing. So is Google Wave going to save us all? Probably not, but I'll report on my findings when I get my hands on it. I'm still awaiting my invitation email.

While there has been much breathless speculation about the threat that Twitter poses to Google’s iron grip on the search market, I haven’t seen many specific ideas about how that would work. By now we all know that searching real-time content is an increasingly valuable resource for information, but its utility seems to be limited to certain kinds of information like breaking news events and consumer product reviews.  It certainly doesn’t appear to be as flexible a mechanism for locating the wide range of content that traditional search has been since the inception of the world wide web. The most intriguing speculation that I’ve read about the future of search has been this post about the notion of ‘PageRank for People’. In essence, the idea states that the current algorithms that govern the ranking of search results are inadequate because they rely too heavily on the location of the content being listed. Since Google relies on the volume of inbound links to judge the value of content, it favors content posted in popular locations. The thing is, a piece of good content is just as valuable if it is posted to ‘Bob’s Blog’ or the ‘New York Times’. The solution that was proposed, was a system that factors the ‘reputation’ and ‘authority’ of the content’s author when ranking search results. Just how to calculate these numbers, though, is the tricky part. One answer might be Twitter. There are two aspects of Twitter that need to be changed. Both the ‘Retweeting’ and ‘Hashtag’ behaviors need to be provided as official features of the service. That means the mechanism for these actions needs to be separated from the 140 character text string of each tweet. That is to say, we should lose the ‘RT’ syntax and make the identity of the original poster some form of metadata that exists outside the post itself. Likewise, tags like those currently labeled with hash-signs ‘#’ should be saved as metadata separate from the actual tweet. With those two changes, searching the web could become a lot more useful. Here’s how it would work: When I publish a post to Twitter, I should have the ability to tag that post with semantically accessible identifying labels. Each post associated with a given subject (as described by the label) potentially contributes to my ‘authority’ about that subject. Now, when someone retweets my post, they are in essence endorsing what I have said and contributing to their own ‘authority’ about that subject. If there was a scoring mechanism that assigned, say, one point for each endorsement, then you've created a system that establishes quantitative values for ‘authority’. Imagine it this way: For each retweet, additional points are cascaded up the tree. That way the original poster is always given the most credit for contributing the idea, but those that help propagate it are given credit as well.  Authority is defined by the community, not the individual. It should be pointed out that for each subsequent retweet, the poster will have the opportunity to revise the tagged metadata, either adding more detail, or removing labels they believe are not appropriate. That way, the system guards against abuse by so-called trend-squatting. Now, once we start getting values assigned for Twitter users’ authority on specific topics, search engines can start factoring this in to their rankings. So, content authored by an individual with higher authority for the subject of that content are favored over others. Content authored by organizations might be scored, in part, by the collective authority of that organization’s members. It would create a tremendous upward pressure to contribute value to the community. For some industries, I imagine that one’s scores in this respect would become a factor in employment decisions or compensation levels. Now,  what I’ve described would need to be only one part of the search ranking algorithm. As described by the original post, there are many other factors that should be considered. Additionally, the scoring mechanism described above is probably far too simplistic and vulnerable to abuse. For example, one complication that could make the system more reliable would be to consider the reputation of the endorsing party when assigning a value to the score that their retweet provides the original poster. That way, it is more valuable to get retweeted by individuals with more authority. Note that ‘authority’ as I’ve described it is an entirely separate metric from ‘popularity’, which is defined by the number of followers that a user has. There would be many additional side-benefits of such a system. For example, much of what is posted on Twitter are links to content elsewhere on the web. A robust labeling function would turn Twitter into a tagging system for the entire semantic web. Here is a related discussion.

The flood of activity surrounding the turmoil in Iran on Twitter the past few days has got me thinking about ways to make the platform more useful when big news events occur. Much has been said about how this episode is demonstrating the failure of traditional media, as real-time media has now become the main source of breaking information in Iran. There is no doubt that Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and the like are now a very important resource, but I think it’s important to recognize what we might lose if we completely throw the CNN model overboard. Important services that traditional TV news outlets provide include: intelligent filtering of the raw data stream, and a format that makes commentary accessible. TV news coverage does these things well, in that there are news directors who prioritize information, and a presentation format that weaves background information and editorial content together in a digestible package. These piece have been notably absent from the ‘coverage’ provided by #IranElection. Here is an idea that occurred to me, for a specialized blogging platform that would allow anyone with sufficient passion or knowledge of an event to produce their own live news coverage of a story, broadcast it to the web, and take advantage of all these amazing real-time media tools. Imagine a website, let’s call it Anckr.com, that you could go to when a story breaks. If you wanted to provide real-time  news and analysis of the story, you could log in via Oauth with your Twitter credentials.  You would then be presented with an administrative interface where you could set variables like: The Headline of the story, a friendly looking URL and a hashtag for your news coverage. You would then have the opportunity to tweet directly from this interface with commentary on the event. In addition to your regular Twitter feed, your tweets would show up on the public facing news page that you’ve generated (pictured below in section ‘A’). In this respect, you would be serving as a news anchor for the story. As anchor you would have the opportunity to populate your news page with real-time content from many different sources. For example, any relevant photos or videos could be embedded into section ‘E’. You could also display relevant news feeds from traditional news outlets there (if they are bothering to provide coverage at all). This section could also provide space to display a feed of viewer beedback, that could be populated by tweets from viewers who have tagged their posts with the hashtag for your coverage. If you wanted to provide more compelling updates, there could be a section of the page that allows you to display a live video or audio stream of yourself (section ‘D’) providing commentary. Relevant hashtags could be displayed easily (section ‘B’), providing links to more conversations about the event. Most importantly, there would be a section where you could provided a moderated feed of miro-blogging content (section ‘C’). The Anckr interface would allow you to follow individual tweeple who you believe are valuable sources. For example, you could have a feed for ‘witnesses’ of the event, people tweeting from the scene. Or, you could have a feed comprised of knowledgeable commentators. Now, I could imagine traditional news organizations using a branded version of this sort of interface. Alternatively, anyone who chose to start a page, could become their own ‘reporter’. Since no one can provide 24 hour analysis by themselves, it would be cool if there was a mechanism that allowed you as the anchor, to hand off control to someone else of your choosing, kind of like how BNO news does now on Twitter. All of the tools for creating such a website exist. I’ve listed some of the resources above, including: Twitter, FriendFeed, UStream, YouTube, Flickr, TweetCloud and Paratweet. Thesea re just some examples, but I’m sure there are many others. The closest thing that I’ve found is almost.at, which is very cool, but more of an automated filtering service. If you are aware of anything like what I’ve described above, please let me know. If I had any free time, I might build this myself. Since I don't, I hope someone gives it a try.

Twitter was the first social-media service that captured my personal interest. Up until I dove into the twitterverse, I had maintained only an academic relationship with likes of Facebook, Delicious and others, spurred mainly by the necessity of understanding such services in relation to my job as a marketer. Since I bit the Twitter apple (or as some might say, drank the cool-aid), I’ve become a believer in and active user of many related and competing products. Twitter, however, remains my favorite for one basic reason, it’s simple. Everybody who participates is basically doing the exact same thing. As a consumer this appeals to me because  this makes it easy to process the incoming steam of content. As a developer this appeals to me because it makes it easier to dream about new ways to harness all the activity. By contrast Facebook is encumbered by numerous layers of piled-on features. I enjoy the service, because it does a good job of keeping me in touch with people I care about, but I constantly feel like I’m fighting it. Strange notices show up in my inbox from applications that I don’t remember subscribing to, configuration interfaces are numerous and hidden in inconsistent places. I never really feel in control of the thing. It reminds me of MicroSoft Word, which is a great Word processor buried inside a morass of tacked-on features and inconsistent dialog boxes. I’ve wanted to push the envelope and find ways to derive more and more value from micro-blogging in general, and despite my crush on Twitter, I’m more than willing to entertain alternative services if they can do a better job. While the rivalry between Twitter and Facebook is well established in pop culture (think of it as the web’s version of Mac vs. Windows), the simmering war between Twitter and FriendFeed is more interesting (think of it as the web’s version of Mac vs. Linux).  FriendFeed is a bit like a swiss-army knife for social media, a universal connector between  your various identities be they on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious or whatever. It is smartly acting like a parasite on Twitter’s back allowing users to pull content from and publish content to the more popular service. The value-adds that FriendFeed provides are: sophisticated search and filter options, up-front forums that can be spawned directly from any piece of content, a content endorsement mechanism that can be tapped to aid filtering, special interest groups, and many other features. Friendfeed also offers a nice actively flowing interface that automatically updates content on your page without requiring refreshing. There is no doubt that FriendFeed has a lot to offer and I get the sense that the service is developing the same sort of devout, passionate and evangelical user-base that drove much of Twitter’s early success before the likes of Oprah jumped on that bandwagon. Many quietly harbor the desire to see FriendFeed fulfill the promised social nirvana that they feel Twitter has failed to provide on its own. Most are polite about it though, as they rightly recognize that they need Twitter as a source of new recruits until they reach their own critical mass. The problem with FriendFeed, though, is that it is not simple. There are so many options that in the short time I’ve spent with it, I can’t help but feel that I’m not getting it yet. It’s obvious to me that they recognize this problem, as they have done a pretty good job of simplifying the interface for people like me who are just getting started. Allowing you to add new components to your personal interface as you discover them, rather than throwing everything at you at once. That, along with the reverential rhetoric from the FriendFeed faithful that it is a fantastic tool for social media power users will keep me going for a while longer.  Perhaps a more troubling problem for FriendFeed in it’s quest to topple Twitter, is the nagging feeling that I have, that I might be spreading my social capital too thin by supporting my identity on both services. That is to say, it’s more work to follow both services simultaneously. Now, I could just adopt FreindFeed as my sole proxy interface for Twitter. But there are a couple problems. At the moment there isn’t a nice iPhone app dedicated to FriendFeed (that I am aware of), and about 50% of my interaction with Twitter is via my phone. Secondly, I’m frustrated with following links inTwitter posts that lead not to the teased blog article or Youtube video, but instead to the poster’s FriendFeed landing page. FriendFeed uses this page as the staging ground for any discussion that might arise surrounding this post, which is a great idea in one sense. But, in another sense, it’s not terribly different from the linkjacking abuse that we often see in social bookmarking communities like Digg. As a twitter user, I hate these links, which are often masked by the URL shortener. It’s bait and switch and I don’t want to subject my Twitter followers to that. Furthermore, the FreindFeed community is not big enough yet to justify abandoning Tiwtter altogether. This was most recently demonstrated to me when civil unrest was breaking out in San Francisco over the Prop 8 ruling. Twitter was all atwitter with live reports from the scene and FriendFeed was full of, well, links to Twitter. This week we saw the first glimpse of a new service that might trump all of the above. Google introduce a new communication platform called Wave that hopes to revolutionize the way we interact, perhaps even replacing dinosaurs like email and instant messaging. They even demonstrated a tie-in to Twitter called Twave, but the new platform could provide an opportunity for third parties to get a foothold and compete with Twitter.  The Wave application looks like a jumbled mess, the kind that would make Microsoft proud, but Google is smartly opening up the platform to allow developers to make their own apps for the system. I can’t wait to see what someone with Apple’s design discipline will do with it. We’ll have to wait. In the mean time, Twitter is growing rapidly and this is a blessing and curse. Today I saw estimates that they may have acquired 32 million users so far, a three-fold increase in the space of about a month  and a half. Who knows if that’s true, but the environment is changing. One need only look at the trending topics to see it. This past week hashtag-centered discussions about frivolous titillating confessions like #3wordsaftersex and #liesgirlstell consistently dominated important discussions like Prop 8 as mentioned, and the trouble in North Korea. It’s no revelation that people are interested in sex, and no surprise that as Twitter grows, it is more accurately reflecting what the public at large values. But I think there are some simple changes to Tiwtter that will help satisfy all aspects of our collective personality. The tricky part about designing such changes it so avoid mucking up the beautiful simplicity that makes Twitter so good. Here is what I would do: Twitter should add once piece of meta-data to each twitter post. This would describe the nature of the post as (perhaps) one of the following:

• Personal
• Editorial
• News
• Promotional

I think these descriptors make sense, but there may be other I’m missing at the moment. This could take the form of a drop-down box beside the Text input field. By allowing users to tag their own posts, readers could filter searches and trending topics for the types of content they desire. A reader should be able to set individual filter setting for each user they follow if they choose. That way I could read the smart opinions of a political pundit without bothering to read about the Sunday outing he took with his kids. Likewise, that pundit will feel free to post reports about his personal life without worrying about alienating his professional audience. There is of course no guarantee that posters will label their content appropriately, and no doubt malicious posters will attempt to abuse the system. But those abuses will only hurt the poster in terms of credibility and the number of people that pay attention to their material. This does make Twitter a little more complex, but I think it is an acceptable trade-off considering the benefit. Twitter certainly has a tricky task ahead of itself.

Topics include: Twitter TV, Trending topics, and the Twitter Apocalypse.  ThotCast ep 7: The Comeback Episode or Subcribe the podcast feed directly. OR get it from itunes

The web is replete with social media experts spouting off about how you can get more out of Twitter, and this post is no exception. I don’t claim that the following tactics will light a path to Twitter nirvana, but I can say that my own personal experiences have shown me some success in this area. If you are in fact interested in improving your experience with Twitter (and why would you be reading this if your aren’t) you need to try new things, assess how they are working, and repeat. No one set of instructions will work equally well for everyone so you need to be flexible enough to adapt to your own circumstances. If however you need some specific ideas, here are some of mine:

The first thing that you need to do is identify what it is you are hoping to get out of twitter. I think that the fundamental appeal of the service, that is, the product it is actually selling us is the sense that people are listening to us. That feeling that we are important and influential. Most people measure this success merely in terms of the number of followers they have, but that is a poor metric. It is illusory because it doesn’t measure the number of people that are reading what you post. There is no way that anyone with any kind of life is actually paying attention to what their tweeple are saying if they follow a thousand or more of them. I don’t know about you, but I’m not satisfied speaking to a large crowd if they aren’t paying attention.

If sheer the number of followers is all you are interested in, your task is easy. All you have to do is follow a large number of people and many of them will follow you back. That’s all.

If however you are interested in cultivating a group of folks that actually care about what you have to say, and will actually read your tweets, your task is a bit more complex. You need to embrace your role as an editor of information for the mob and improve the product you put out. As a twitterer your job is to produce value for the twittering masses. Whether that value is informational, entertainment, or something else, people want to listen to those that provide something useful for them. In many ways, you are parsing the information you consume and regurgitating the good stuff for your audience (citizen journalism indeed). With that in mind, a good way to improve your output is to improve your input. So, lets break it down into two tasks:

Task 1: Improve your data intake

I’ve stated many times that one of the main tasks with making Twitter useful, is managing the signal to noise ratio. The biggest enemy to getting a clean signal is weeding out all the crap, and there is a lot of crap on Twitter. Here are a few suggestions:

• Aggressively prune the list of people you follow on twitter: Twitter isn’t about friending people, your relationship as a follower is not an endorsement of any kind of social relationship. Likewise, unfriending someone is not an insult to the target. It is not rude to unfollow someone. Twitter is about information, not friends. The friend thing is what Facebook does really well. On twitter you need to relentlessly remove those folks from your list that are not providing value to you. You should be spending as much time considering who to remove as you do finding new people.

• Follow searches, not just people Using Twitter’s search engine to find people tweeting about topics you’re interested in is the first step. But, did you know that the search engine provides an RSS feed for every search you perform? Just click on the orange RSS icon in the top right of the search results page. You can bookmark or subscribe to these feeds with your web browser or feed reader. Also, many Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Nambu allow you to save searches and list them in the same manner you can group your followers.

• Follow groups As stated above, Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Nambu make it easy to assign the people you follow into groups. I’ve found that it is often useful to create groups based on my initial motivation for following a person. So, for example, if I encounter an especially insightful tweet in a search result, and I find that the person’s bio or timeline is compelling because they are an expert on topic X, I’ll add them to my ‘topic X’ group.  I also have a small list of people for whom I want to read everything they post, so I place them in my must read group.

• Use ‘favorites’ as a bookmark for tweets you want to follow up on I find that most people aren’t even aware that Twitter allows you to label individual tweets as ‘favorites’. This action lists them in a separate list until you actively remove them. I find this to be useful especially when I encounter a tweet that links to something that I don’t have time to read at the moment. I essentially mark it for follow up attention, then remove it when I’ve completed that action. This works really well when accessing twitter from my phone, when I almost never have time to go off and read an article.

Tasks 2: Improve your data output

Keep in mind that your audience is not a static thing. People are hoppin on and off board the follow bandwagon all the time. At any given time, only a small percentage of your audience is actually paying attention to their own twitter stream. And, more and more people are getting your tweets via searches and other means. The result is, the group to whom you are speaking is different in the morning, during the workday, in the middle of the night, and so on. There are ways to take advantage of this. First…

• Classify your tweets There are different kinds of posts that most people make to twitter. For example, there’s the classic lifecasting tweet (“This sandwich is good.”), event based editorial (“I think that guy on TV right now is full of it!”), news link (“XYZ, inc. is buying QRS, inc. read about it here…”), real-time reporting (“we just had an earthquake!”) and so on. Some tweets are time-dependent, meaning that there is some value in putting them out right now, but many aren’t. Think about it, does your opinion about last night’s episode of LOST have to be posted right now? By thnking of your posts in this fashion, you can tailor your stream to the audience that you have at any given moment.

• Schedule your tweets in advance to accommodate your audience To make that tailoring easier you can queue up your tweets in advance. This has several advantages. You can write your witty posts when you have time, say in the evening after work, and have them sent out at appropriate times. So work related insights and links can go out during the day, when co-workers are likely to be paying attention, and more personal stuff goes out in the off hours. If you really wanted to get tricky, you could even time your geographically relevant tweets to accommodate the time zone when interested readers are more likely to be paying attention. To schedule your tweets you need to use a third party tool like FutureTweets.

• Retweet, but try to add value Most are already aware of the advantages of retweeting interesting content as you encounter it. But it’s often more valuable to add in your two cents. That is, repost the essence of the original post (a link to a blog post for example), but give your own opinion about it, not the original poster’s. Of course, give credit to the originator, but instead of using the ‘RT’ or ‘retweeting’ protocol, use ‘via’. For example, “That full of crap guy is full of crap, read for your self here… (via @poster)”. That way you give credit, get attention, but don’t put words into the mouth of the original poster.

Hopefully we will see Twitter and third party developers create tools that make these tasks easier. For example, the scheduling service needs to be built directly into Twitter in my opinion. I’d also like to see services start using more sophisticated measurements of twitter value than simple ‘number of followers’. If you want to follow me, I'm @rworkman. I also produce a weekly Twitter news podcast called Thotcast (itunes link).

BTW, the title of this post is a reference to this guy, who cracks me up every time I see this…