Trent Reznor on Digg Dialogg

One of the artists I followed following the release of Radiohead’s In Rainbows albums with great interest was Trent Reznor. He was one of the first major label artists to valiantly step out and take the path that Radiohead had blazed ahead of them.

It’ll be with great interest, then, that I’ll be watching the next installment of the Digg Dialogg series, coming up on next Tuesday, where Kevin Rose will be taking questions from the Digg community for Trent Reznor:

For those of you who aren’t current on Reznor’s career, he is best known as founding member and lead singer for NIN. NIN has sold more than 20 million albums worldwide, winning multiple Grammys. In 2007, Reznor split ties with his record label and is now an independent musician where he releases albums under a Creative Commons license, utilizing technologies such as BitTorrent to promote the sharing of his music. He is considered by the Los Angeles Times to be one of the most acclaimed creative figures of his generation of music. This is a great opportunity to find out what’s next for Reznor and gain insight into the rapidly evolving world of online music, entertainment, and technology.

Should be an interesting conversation.

Pretty Please, Tell Me the RIGHT Way to Twitter

I always love it when people come up and tell me the right way to be using a tool or set of tools on the Internet. I resisted it when Atherton Bartelby listed on Mashable 10 reasons why he will refuse to follow me on Twitter, and I’m likewise irritated today by meish.org’s list of seven things that will earn me an unfollow.

One of the things that makes Twitter, well, Twitter instead of something puzzlingly popular like MySpace or Facebook is the fact that it’s so versatile and used in an endless myriad of ways. People use it to update the world about their cats. People use it as a tool for journalistic reporting or discovery.  People use it as an opt-in chat room. People use it as a link blog. People use it as a mobile group messaging tool.

Bottom line?  It’s versatile.  And you have no business telling me the right way to use it.

Here is her list, abbreviated:

• Endless re-tweeting.
• Posting primarily links.
• Greeting followers with time-based salutations (i.e. “Good Morning”).
• Liveblogging an event.
• Organizing an event via Twitter (i.e. “I’m here, let’s meet”).
• Update-flooding.
• Creating words that start with “Tw.”

Almost all of these edicts irritate the heck out of me, and very few of the actions mentioned bother me at all.  Sure, it’s a bit annoying when you see an update come through Twhirl, and it’s all from one person. I always hated all the Java related trendy language in the 90s, so the Twitter related portmanteaus are no picnic either.

Everything else on this list?  Completely legitimate uses for Twitter.

Re-tweeting is one of the most time-honored uses for Twitter, and social media usage in general.  It’s called link curation. Look into it (ever heard of Yahoo?).

If you’re looking to quickly grow your Twitter followers, start posting useful links.  Twitter started as a status microblogging services. People look at it as their own personal Boing-Boing.

Greeting your followers with a “good morning” or “good afternoon” might be a bit bland for those who don’t say something else substantive with it, but in principle, those that use Twitter as a conversational tool would do well to include these sorts of things in their stream.  It’s a signal to those who also use it for conversation that “hey! I’m here in the big chatroom in the cloud, you can talk to me.”

Liveblogging an event on Twitter is a great way to get attention to something you’re interested in covering. At any given moment, there are at least a few dozen news organizations trying to aggregate information about the event you’re covering live right now. If you simply do as Meg suggests, and post a link to your liveblog, you’re going to get lost in the mix.  If you syndicate your liveblog to Twitter, you’re discoverable.  Sometimes, it’s not always just about who’s following you, but who’s following the topic.

As for an aversion to using Twitter to organize real life events, I’m curious as to whether, if asked, Meg could tell me the origin of Twitter (hint: it was SxSW 2006, and folks used it to communicate the locations of hotspot parties – real life parties, not virtual ones).

…And I know a little bit about arrogant.
Giving me a list of pet peeves that’ll get me unfollowed or not followed in the first place is the height of arrogance. If you’re giving me information that statistically leads to people unfollowing others, that’s useful.  When you offer up a list as gospel, as if you’re Al Gore or something, well that’s just irritating.

It’s a good way for me to never want to follow you on Twitter (“Wow, did he just go there? I think he did.”).

Which leads me to the one and only rule I use as to whether I’m going to follow someone (or not) on Twitter:

“Am I interested in what they’re saying? If I am, they get followed.  When they cease to be interesting, I don’t want to follow them any longer.”

I’ve Got an Answer for Media Giants…

Did you see this? Folks from ESPN and the New York Times are being profiled in AdAge as whining about their search engine rankings.

I’ve got an answer for them…

Adapt or die.

Seriously.  Get with the program.  It’s not as if this Internet fad came up on you last week.  Deal with it. Make better content. Cut your costs. Adapt or be killed off by market forces.

Whining just makes you look like a poor loser.

What has Transparency Gotten Us? How About Free and Cheap?

Today, Steven Hodson over at WinExtra challenges the norms of the social media-verse by encouraging a blogger who’s job it is to chronicle web startups not to be an early adopter.

I certainly am not King of the Internets, so I’m in no position to tell Steven or Svetlana the best way to do their jobs.  There’s probably an interesting debate to be had as to whether it’s a desirable trait to be an early adopter in this business or not, but I’d rather focus on a statement that Steven made later on in the post:

Just what is all this transparency getting us anyway? Have we seen any great leaps forward in productivity? Are we actually improving the everyday lives of people with all this gushing about how social media is tearing down old businesses?

All we seem to be shown is really nothing more than a whole bunch of illusions of how conversations are going to change the world and yet I don’t see any changes just a lot of heartache’s across the board. Just where is this changing society and that the social media mavens say is happening?

This is a really great question, and there are a number of directions you can go with the answer. I’m going to choose the route of answering this that involves the business benefits.

Typically, we’re used to businesses that look for ways to cut costs and never pass those savings on to customers.  Somehow, though, the Internet has created a culture of free. It’s generally considered undesirable (or at least uncool) for a company on the business to sell something. 

This has created a world of slimmer than normal margins and economies that only exist in scale.  It has created a need for social aspects to exist in everything.  Transparency and social aspects of your apps are almost a requisite part of your marketing plan – most other forms of marketing are cost prohibitive for the types of apps and utilities we talk about daily.

What’s the benefit to the end user, though?

That one’s simple – sure, a lot of these utilities are completely unnecessary, but just like the groundbreaking apps I talked about at the Inquisitr from SxSW this year, we’re seeing things that aid our lives in ways that weren’t even possible years ago.

 

Rizzn at SxSWi with JustThrive's lead scientist.

Would your paper and pencil ledger from yesteryear be able to tell you, in numbers of visits to the coffee shop, how much money you have left for the rest of the month?  Could it magically leap off your desk at home and put this number in your pocked as you walk down the road, being tempted by the siren that is the corner coffee shop? No, but JustThrive can make those determinations and then send you a text message or email on demand letting you know just that (get MP4).

This is only one answer, and I know that if Michael Sean Wright or Marc Canter gets a crack at this answer, he’ll have a completely different set of reasons as to what it’s done to revolutionize our workflow and lives beyond giving us a set of buzzwords.

Is it Anti-Open to Block Douchenozzles on Twitter?

I love the block feature on most services.  The block feature was what made it possible for me to get all the way to October before bowing out on FriendFeed (something that Robert Scoble and I discussed in Austin this week). I’ve used it from time to time on Twitter.

Yet, as Michael and I are about to discuss on a liveblog this evening, we’re all about the idea of open. Open discussion, open source, open as in transparency … these are all things that are nice and desirable traits in most of the work I do.

Is it antithetical to those goals, then, to block folks?  That certainly seems to be the idea that Think Progress and Talking Points Memo seem to be advancing tonight.

From Think Progress:

ABC News’s Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper is a big fan of transparency. He has criticized the Obama administration for not allowing press during certain public appearances […] But according to several journalists — including David Kurtz of TPM, Adam Serwer of the American Prospect, and at least four other people — Tapper is now blocking them from following his Twitter feed.

Here’s my question: How are the two things connected?

Governmental transparency is one thing – if the Whitehouse team suddenly blocked me from reading their Twitterstream, we might have a discussion.  I have no constitutional right or even an implied right to read Jake Tapper’s twitterstream.  Furthermore, if I’m being ritually antagonistic to the man, I fully expect to be blocked or ignored.

That’s not anti-transparancy.  That’s sanity preservation.

If John Culberson decides to start blocking folks on Twitter, we might have a ball-game.  Talk to me then.

More Accelerator Hits: OtherInbox, Hourville, and Popcuts [SxSW]

You’re going to continue to see a lot of video SxSW updates from me continuing on into the next couple of weeks.  Michael Sean Wright is going to be passing to me at some point around 40-60 hours of live video to sort through, and I’ve got around 4 hours of video that I recorded personally to edit and disseminate.

I found this video, though, from G4.  I would have insisted he put me on air with him since I was right next to him while he was shooting a few of the standups, but I got snagged by the Porter Novelli folks to hang out in their booth for a few.

The three startups they discuss here look interesting, but of the three, OtherInbox has the most buzz. They other, two, Hourville and PopCuts, were uniquely suited to resonate with conference attendees, but I don’t see either of them going mainstream like we see Twitter doing now.

Check them both out, though, they look interesting. For my picks for the win this year, see my post over at the Inquisitr.

Twitter Isn’t Unveiling Premium Accounts [Neverending September]

A trending topic on Twitter right now is “Twitter unveils new,” and the link goes to an article at a website apparently dedicated to humor, tech news, and gaming, amongst a few other topics.

The story, though it’s filed under tech news, appears to be a complete fabrication.  It sounds potentially realistic, though there are some cracks in the satire piece’s poker face towards the end of the article:

The details of the accounts are as follows:

• Sparrow ($5/month) – Users get 145 character limit, 5 extra random followers.

• Dove ($15/month) – Users get 160 character limit, 25 extra random followers, 1 random celebrity follower, auto-spell check, "Fail Whale" T-shirt.

• Owl ($50/month) – Users get 250 character limit, 100 extra random followers, 2 random celebrity followers, 30 minutes on recommended list, auto-spell check, "Fail Whale" hoodie.

• Eagle ($250/month) – Users get 500 character limit, 1000 extra random followers, 3 celebrity followers of their choice, 5 hours on recommended list each month, Twitter Concierge for Tweeting while user is asleep or busy (and more), auto-spell check, "Fail Whale" tuxedo, custom "Fail Whale" page when service is down.

While selling hoodies and tuxedos might be a viable business model for Twitter (I’ll refrain from making jokes here, since I’m ostensibly still in the running to help them make money), but there is no word on this in the Twitter blog, and given the context of the rest of the site, I don’t really feel the need to give them a ring for official comment at Twitter.

It does, though, sorta remind me of the dumb emails that used to get passed around on MySpace (and AIM. and Yahoo. and ICQ). “Pass this message on or your account will be deleted/you’ll hafta pay/Bill Gates won’t give you $1,000.”

I Probably Don’t Have to Say It … [FB Chat Spam]

… but I will.

This will get very old very quickly:

Does anyone at Facebook think before they roll out a feature?

TechCrunch: Facebook Apps Can Now Use Chat To Go Viral
Facebook has just announced that applications on Facebook Platform can now be able to take advantage of the site’s built-in chat functionality, which launched last spring. Developers will now be able to present users with a list of their Facebook Chat buddies, tailoring the list to best suit their application (for example, they could choose to only present friends that already had the app installed).

Please.  I love spam.  Will you spam me?  Please?

Expect this to become the punching bag bitchmeme all weekend long.

My Social Graph is Weird

Just the other day, I just so happened to log onto Facebook, and someone happened to have just installed a particularly clever application for the purposes of graphing your, well, social graph.

What you see above a scattergraph representation of my connections on Facebook, and their connections to one another. The diamond-ish shape in the upper right hand corner are mostly former classmates from high school.  The less dense collection just to the left of them are friends from East Texas.  Many of them are friends with those who graduated with me, but stuck around the area.

The dense blob to the lower left?  That’s most of you.  That’s a conglomeration of New Media fanbois, public relations folk, bloggers, journalists and evangelists.

It’s an odd graph, when you look at it that way, and the emerging graph on the upper right poses an interesting problem for the professional graph on the lower left.

With that in mind, take a gander at this short video that explains this.

Ted Murphy Calls Out Matt Cutts

Ted Murphy raises a great point today on his personal blog in an open letter to Matt Cutts on the topic of Page Rank.

In case you aren’t up to speed on who Ted Murphy is and why Google has called him out specifically as an example of what not to do as a blogger, it all goes back to the first iteration of Ted’s company IZEA – PayPerPost.

PayPerPost functioned on a simple model – bloggers signed up to the program were given a flat fee ranging from a few bucks to as high as a hundred in some cases to write a post that talked about a given sponsor.  Sometimes, to qualify for the payment, it was required that the post be positive.  Sometimes it was simply asking for an honest opinion.

The crux of the matter, at least for the purposes of this post, isn’t the ethics of sponsored posts, but the manner in which the sponsors were linked to.

There’s something called the NOFOLLOW attribute that can be used when linking to someone.  It’s simply there to tell Google’s indexing spider whether or not follow the link, and assign the bit of pagerank to the linked to site from the linking site. PayPerPost didn’t originally have any requirements regarding the NOFOLLOW tag, but now they do, according to Ted:

First I want to point out that we have a strict no-follow policy for all links we provide through SocialSpark.

http://socialspark.com/code_of_ethics

The reason for this is because Google has talked about how much they hate sponsored posts, and have even penalized their own company for creating blog posts that contained links without NOFOLLOW attributes.

Ted brings up an excellent point about tech blog ReadWriteWeb, though, in his open letter:

I still believe the concept of no-follow is absolutely ridiculous. There is NO WAY Google can possibly determine paid links from unpaid links, even if you could where does it stop? I work for IZEA, they pay my salary. I link back to them solely because they are my employer. Should that be no-followed? What about parent companies linking to subsidiaries and brands? Vendors linking to clients? Bloggers who get “review units”, free trips, tickets, etc.

If you are going to try to enforce rules tied to “paid links” you need to look at the very fabric of all inks and the commercial relationship between sites….and guess what? You can’t.

Not only is no-follow a lost cause, it is also enforced sporadically and unevenly. When I mentioned TechCrunch using PR passing links to you (on several occasions) you reached out them personally, you didn’t penalize them. In your recent post you point out an article on RRW, a PR 8 site. Guess what? RRW passes PR on sponsored posts!!

There is a double standard here. If a blogger is signed up to IZEA and participates in their programs, they seem to run the risk of penalization. Why? All major tech blogs do sponsored posts, without exception.

Sponsorship is a great model for curating content. Don’t believe me? Check out this academic community I profiled today at SiliconAngle. Intel is the sole sponsor of this community. Does it’s existence benefit the company? Yes. Are there greater benefits to all of us for it being there? Absolutely – a new crop of developers and chipset engineers is being groomed there. If it weren’t for them, you wouldn’t be reading this and I couldn’t be writing this.

Even closer to home, sponsorship is paying for my trip to SXSW this year, and is bringing you and several publications the stories and experience of the event that couldn’t otherwise be gotten.

So is it the sponsorship model that Google hates? Is it the lack of the attribute? How do they know when a link is paid or not? How do they know if I simply forgot or if I intentionally left off the attribute?

Ted raises serious questions; questions that deserve answers.