Netizen

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

How To Increase Your Following On Twitter

Image by luc legay via Flickr

Twitter meets my needs in ways Facebook does not. My problem was not that I had long lost friends; there were a few, but. My desire was that I wanted to meet new people. And Twitter is great for that. But then I hit a point when I realized Twitter is a party, but it is also a broadcast medium. I have a TwitterFeed account that feeds three external sources and my three primary blogs automatically to my Twitter stream.

Having 200 followers was no longer working for me. Now I have over 2,000. I want to hit 20,000. I want to hit 200,000. Heck, I want to hit 2,000,000. You do want a small circle that you watch more closely; for that you have TweetDeck. Otherwise your larger following is great a way to make your stream more representative of the people out there.

Image via CrunchBase

I am interested in these people who follow me. Once in a while I will go hang out. I will go to the Twitter pages of tens of people that follow me, and I will read and reply to some of their tweets. Some of those will reply back. We exchange a few tweets. A few of those end up friends. They know who I am. I know who they are. I notice them when they show up in my stream. Many of them link to their blog or website or LinkedIn page from their Twitter page, and when you click on them and read on them, you get a pretty good idea of who they are. These are real people. I have come across some very interesting people this way.

Look at how this seems to work. I cast my net wide. I say hello to many people to end up

Image via CrunchBase

with a few friends. That early hello part is like a politician shaking hands along the campaign trail. I am not pretending to be family to these people. I am just saying hello. Where is the smirk in that?

To many still, after all the Twitter buzz, the online thing is not real. The social media thing is not real. Real is offline. Online is not real. I am a huge fan of offline, I am a huge fan of in person. But it is not either or. Some of these great people I have met online I would never have met otherwise. Some people you meet online, you get to know pretty well, and then you meet them in person. Is that great or what? And then you realize, not only is this real, this is the only way. There is no other way.

Image via CrunchBase

Twitter as a tool to connect with old friends, and make new friends does not clash with Twitter as a broadcast medium. This tool is so simple and so very powerful. Simplicity is power.

Having a ton of followers is my stated goal. Only a few weeks back 2,000 followers sounded like a lot. Now I have it.

So I went ahead and googled up the question. How do you end up with a ton of followers on Twitter?

One way seems to be to be a celebrity, or become one. Many tech celebrities, and media celebrities and Hollywood celebrities are the top followed on Twitter. But you also have to note Ashton Kutcher is not the top grossing actor in Hollywood. His massive following is based partly on his name recognition, but it is also based on the fact that he is an active member of the Twitter community and his followers feel his presence and his love.

So, who goes there?

Kevin Rose: 10 Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers
Twitter Traffic Machine - Increase your Twitter Traffic Follower
How to Find Relevant Twitter Followers
Increase your Twitter followers
How to Rapidly Add Twitter Followers
Twitter Friend Adder - How to Get More Twitter Followers - Twitter ...
More Twitter Followers
Increasing Your Twitter Followers With The Twitter-Traffic-Machine ...
Brian White » Rapidly Increase Twitter Followers by Not Twittering

I say stay away from those that are asking to sell you stuff that will increase your number of followers. But I admit to using a few tools. One is TopFollowed. It has a nonprofit feel to it. You sign up, others sign up. The service helps you follow each other at a steady clip. I think that is how I went from 600 to 1,600 and up. And they don't litter your stream with ads about themselves. Another tool is FriendOrFollow. There are about 100 people I follow who don't follow me back. And that's cool with me. But other than that, if you don't follow me, and I follow you, I will go ahead and unfollow you, or that checks my growth. After you follow 2,000 people, you can only follow 10% more than how many follow you. So you need some legroom to follow new people. I think I already have about 300 more people who follow me who I don't follow. So that is plenty of legroom right there.

I know how to go from 200 to 2,000, but I don't know how to go from 2,000 to 20,000 yet. Here is my guess. You manually follow new people. You give them a few days. Then you unfollow that 80% that did not follow you back. Having to follow and unfollow people one person at a time is a tedious process. That is where TwitIn comes in. You follow and unfollow people in batches. It does not always work for me. But I just followed about 50 new people and it worked.

Twitter has built in many checks and balances. You can only send out so many tweets any given hour, for example. I have hit that ceiling twice the past two days.

There are some of your followers, you want to read everything they have to say. There are some you want to read selectively. At the other end are followers, you are happy if they click on one of your links once, that's fine too. Think of social concentric circles. Not all followers are in the same circle.

But if you are wary of a shallow followership and shallow online friendships, make the effort. Take time to say hello to new people, read their tweets. Take time to reply to people who reach out to you. Engage in conversations. Click over to their blogs. Read their blog posts. Get to know them. That takes effort and time. But I thought you wanted deeper friendships than mass follow and unfollow. The two don't run counter to each other.

If you are constantly hungry to meet new people, Twitter is one great, big party.

In The News

Bidding adieu to an analog TV CNet
Do we still need the Webby Awards?
$700 for Nokia's new phone. Are they nuts?
Wolfram Alpha rolls out core updates
Red Hat's Fedora 11: So easy you'll forget it's Linux
Spam shrinks after Pricewert shutdown
Microsoft gets Bing bump, ComScore says
Standards for the cloud not what you think
Apple's future in mobile computing
Twitter user says vacation tweets led to burglary
Can Apple beat the too-expensive rap?
Tendril gets cash to build 'energy management OS'
Sprint breaks its sales record with Palm Pre
Safari 4 fast, but only minor tweaks from beta
Report: Novell eyeing open-source app store
Apple: Next Mac OS X unlocks chip power
Apple bashes Windows 7, talks Snow Leopard
Juniper revs Ethernet to 100Gbps
Intel funds mobile WiMax effort in Japan
Make your car a hotspot
Swedish researchers to unravel secrets of solar storms
10 Banks Will Exit TARP BusinessWeek
Blog: Still Winging It on the Bank Stress Tests
Lafley Leaves Big Shoes to Fill at P&G
A Pall Over Palm's Pre
IBM inks $595M services deal with Telstra
FedEx's Anti-Union Drive
How Cloud Computing Will Change Business
Work Visa Bill Threatens Indian Outsourcers
Apple Cuts Prices Strategically
Twitter's Innovation Drought
Apple Launches New 3G S iPhone
Anxious Japanese Are Working Themselves to Death
Research Parks for the Knowledge Economy
A Mexican Technology Park in Monterrey
Singapore's One North
Research Triangle: a Model for Other Parks
Amsterdam: A Smart City Goes Live
Business Confidence Grows in Britain
Recession Will Boost Challengers from China and India
Wal-Mart to Start Outsourcing More to India
Exert Ownership in Your Workplace
Seniors as Entrepreneurs: Their Time Has Come
The Inner City 100: Meet the Fastest Growing Companies
The Car That Could Save Ford
Girls and Math: Blame the Culture, Not Ability
String Theory: Investing in High-End Violins Time
In Japan, Testing the Market for All-Electric Cars
Will Iran's 'Marriage Crisis' Bring Down Ahmadinejad?
Sotomayor's Senate Hearings to Begin July 13
Big Banks to Repay $68B in Bailout Money
Fisherman Hooks Live Missile in Gulf Waters
Britain's Brown Keeps Job, But Problems Remain
Will Dems (and McAuliffe) Buck Tradition in Virginia?
Rosebud! Stella! 100 Movie Lines in 200 Seconds
What if Lincoln Had Used Twitter?
Twitter's Biggest Egos, Exposed
Barack Obama, Stop Ruining My Marriage
Dismay Over Obama's 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Turnabout
Apple Unveils the New iPhone: Hail, O Great One
Why North Korea Nabbed Two U.S. Journalists
North Korea's Grim Prisons: What Awaits the U.S. Journalists?
How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live
Can Computer Nerds Save Journalism?
The iPhone's Next Frontier: Porn
Economic Recovery: Will Corporate Profits Recoup?

Drones Join the War Against Drugs

Stress and Exhaustion May Improve SAT Scores
House Dems Considering Taxing Benefits
Huge Bomb Blast at Pakistani Hotel
Responding to North Korea: U.S. Leans on Asian Allies
U.S., Europe to Partner on Mars Exploration
The Search for Flight 447
The World of Twitter
The 5 Big Health Care Dilemmas
Are Stocks Still Good for the Long Run?
Tel Aviv: Plain Beautiful

Monday, June 08, 2009

Bowling Alone: Another Look At Rajeev Matwani's Death

Remembering Rajeev It is with great sadness that I write about the passing of my teacher and good friend Professor Rajeev Motwani. But I would rather not dwell on the sorrow of his death and instead celebrate his life. ........ When my interest turned to data mining, Rajeev helped to coordinate a regular meeting group on the subject. ...... Later, when Larry and I began to work together on the research that would lead to Google, Rajeev was there to support us and guide us through challenges, both technical and organizational. ..... Of all the faculty at Stanford, it is with Rajeev that I have stayed the closest and I will miss him dearly.

Rajeev Motwani's death has made me think about a few things at a very fundamental level. I did not know the guy, although I had read about him a few times in passing, had taken pride in an Indian's involvement with something as fundamental as Google: I am half Indian, born in India, grew up next door in Nepal, the poorest country outside of Africa. But had forgotten his name.

Why was he alone? That was the question that struck me, echoed in my mind.

Growing up it was hard if not impossible for me to be alone. There were always people around. The first American city I got to see was Indianapolis. I was taken downtown. My first question was, but where are the people?

At a gut level I always thought of the phrase Third World to be racist. The suggestion is that the so-called Third World is two steps behind the First World on everything. And that simply put is not true.

I went to a school in Kathmandu founded by the British. Every year they would bring along two high school graduates from Britain. They would teach for a year and then go back to college in Britain. I asked one of them after they had been in Nepal a month. So what's the difference? He said he had been in Nepal a month, and he had yet to meet someone who was depressed. That was his tribute to the emotional infrastructure he witnessed.

A few years in America I read online somewhere that Nepal has been the top choice among Peace Corps volunteers during the entire half century of that program's existence.

I once read in an anthropological journal article somewhere that some "tribes" - another racist term - in Africa handled adolescence better than the American society did.

I am

Image via Wikipedia

pretty hard nosed about where I come from. I don't glamorize poverty, I don't glamorize children dying from petty diseases. There is much sexism where I come from. Complaining of ethnic prejudice is almost second nature to me. I wish wealth and broadband upon my peoples.

But Global South is the term to use. Otherwise the same white people who have destroyed the environment over 500 years are turning around to lecture you on the environment. What's wrong in the picture?

Why was Rajeev Motwani alone? Why was Ramanujan lonely in England?

Motwani was in the prime of his life, both personally and professionally.

These questions also tie into my recurring theme at this blog, that the human element is central to the web as technology.

Each Snowflake Is Unique
Hunger, Vision, Money
Google's Newest Venture: Google Ventures
The Human Is The Center Of Gravity In Computing

Rajeev Motwani

From my readings I was aware of an Indian professor at Stanford who had advised the two Google founders, but I had forgotten the name. Today it was like I discovered the Rajeev Motwani name. I was at the official Google mobile blog. From there I ended up at Sergei Brin's blog - I did not know he had a blog, I promptly added it to my blogroll. Brin's blog is not active. He has about three posts, one about his wife, one about his mother, and one about Motwani. That tells me more than anything he has written in his recent blog post about Motwani.

This blog post was going to be about Android, but I will tackle that later.

Rajeev Motwani, Early Google Advisor And Silicon Valley Luminary ...
Investigation pending on death of Stanford computer science ...
Rajeev Motwani - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Google mentor Rajeev Motwani dies in drowning accident - US ...
Probe into Rajeev Motwani's death

From The Netizen BlogRoll

Design It Shelter Competition: Unleash your inner architect
New African countries live on Google Maps
Pro-Rata Still Dilutes VCs
Got an idea to change the world or your local community?
You Won't See The Palm Pre On Me what the user experience might be if there were a keyboard version of the iPhone
A tour of my property I always thought it would be fun for my television crew to film a garden tour at my farm in Bedford.
Elections 2009: What Next for the BJP? If the trends of what happened in 2004 and 2009 are to be extrapolated, India is one election and one party away from creating a dominant political force - much like the nation experienced for most of the first three decades after Independence.
DAY 411(i)

Vision Objects’ Handwriting Recognition in Android [VIDEO]
You Tell Us: Cupcake… Worth the Wait? Tell us below what you think of Cupcake/Android 1.5 now that you have it. ...... I like the camcorder feature and the ability to upload straight to YouTube is wonderful. ...... Gmail improvements are great. The camera is no longer a joke. .... I used to accidentally dial people a lot (from the log). ........ Considering it was everything that should have been on Android 1.0, I'd say it was "overhyped". ...... Eclair will be the real thing, come Christmas 09. ....... Still hoping that the next upgrade brings a lot of fixes and even more new stuff to at least catch up with the iPhone in some aspects. ......... Camera support is also still primitive with no APIs for selecting a camera, inquiring about supported resolutions, decoding preview images, etc. Hopefully Donut will deal with these remaining basic issues. ......... Although this is an operating system, Google have to remember that basic phone features are a requirement, rather than having Flash which will make every page grind to a halt. ....... The improved battery life is the best part by far.uploading to youtube also rocks.I also love the auto rotate,on screen keyboard is cool ......... now it is the perfect phone ........ Android is still 6 - 12 months behind Apple in terms of UI polish and speed. Android scrolling, launching, and interactivity still has plenty of hesitation ......... Android is open-source and backed by Google, which is why I have the G1 and not an iPhone. And, I'm fully confident that with newer processors and newer OS releases this whole platform will eventually lead the field. ....... GPS positioning speed (so slow it felt broken, now it's faster than my GPS!)
Moto Labs introduces Android based home energy use monitor
Android may get a better Facebook app soon
Google Android Ion Phone AKA Magic myTouch 3G Battery Keeps Going & Going
Best. Review. EVER.

5 Palm Pre Lessons for Android
Motorola to introduce Android based smartphones in India
T-Mobile 4G Network Coming With Help From Comcast
Demo of ZAGAT’s ‘nru’
Palm Pre launching with Google Search, Google Maps, and YouTube
Introducing the orkut Mobile App
The importance of being immediate - Google Mobile App now for Nokia S60 smartphones
Places Directory app for Android
Nearby Intersections on GOOG-411
Google Sync Beta - Now for S60
The Iterative Web App - Gmail for Mobile Gets Labels
Remembering Rajeev Motwani His contributions and impact on CS theory community, Stanford CS Dept, and Silicon Valley enterprises and entrepreneurs is unfathomable. ....... As a young graduate student, I remember him working on some of the toughest theoretical computer science problems of the day. ....... Rajeev had an unmatched clarity of thought and perceptiveness that was evident not only in doing research with him but also in the invaluable advice he gave me about career choices and life in general ....... Rajeev Motwani’s work on the intersection of theory and practice inspired not only the way Google processes information, but also Google's core scientific values: we fundamentally believe in the power of applying mathematical analysis and algorithmic thinking to challenging real world problems
Remembering Rajeev It is with great sadness that I write about the passing of my teacher and good friend Professor Rajeev Motwani. But I would rather not dwell on the sorrow of his death and instead celebrate his life. ........ When my interest turned to data mining, Rajeev helped to coordinate a regular meeting group on the subject. ...... Later, when Larry and I began to work together on the research that would lead to Google, Rajeev was there to support us and guide us through challenges, both technical and organizational. ..... Of all the faculty at Stanford, it is with Rajeev that I have stayed the closest and I will miss him dearly.
LRRK2 I have one copy of the fast twitch muscle fiber ...... I carry the G2019S mutation and when my mother checked her account, she saw she carries it too. ..... I have a markedly higher chance of developing Parkinson's in my lifetime than the average person ...... exercise may be protective against Parkinson's ...... Until the fountain of youth is discovered, all of us will have some conditions in our old age only we don't know what they will be. I have a better guess than almost anyone else for what ills may be mine -- and I have decades to prepare for it.
Silicon Valley Grieves Rajeev Motwani's Passing a man who loved entrepreneurs and who would meet with anyone to at least give them advice. Motwani influenced hundreds of entrepreneurs and students, Conway said, and never refused a meeting

Google Developing “Eyes-Free” Android Interface - Video
HTC Hero / Lancaster running Android and "Rosie" UI launching on June 24th?
Google IO Was the Android I Opener Developer Conference
Samsung and HTC rolling out Androids
Status Update
Hack: Howto get root on your G1

Sunday, June 07, 2009

Google Wave: Enormous Buzz

Google Wave has had enormous buzz since it was presented to the world. It has had the technology world abuzz. That was but predictable. But its penetration of the mainstream media has also been fairly massive.

The real mainstream media buzz will come after the product is actually released and the average person gets to fool around with it. Then people will be like, wow. What is this thing?

And then there will be buzz around major developments that will take around the Wave. You will see applications and gadgets built around it.

Google Wave will come to us in waves, wave after wave. There will be a corresponding wave after wave of buzz.

Possible Google Wave Applications And Innovations
Google Wave Architecture: Designed For Mass, Massive, Global Innovation
The Google Wave Architecture
Google Wave Ripples
Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Of Waves And Tsunamis
Google Wave: Wave Of The Future?
Google Wave: If Email Were Invented Today

From The Google Blogs

Google Wave team heads to Google Developer Days in Asia
Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build?
Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

In The News

Google makes a new wave and transforms the browser guardian.co.uk Eich's scripting language was first called Mocha and then LiveScript, but wound up being called JavaScript. ....... the web has evolved from a publishing medium to a programming platform, which is one reason why many malware attacks now come from malicious scripts embedded in pages. ........ Gmail, which uses a development of JavaScript called Ajax to enable a web-page to interact with a distant server without ever moving away from the page ...... steady accretion of Gmail features like instant messaging, audio - and then video - chat, and so on. ...... until the end of last month we were still unsure about where all this was headed. ...... The product's name allegedly comes from the Firefly TV series, in which a "wave" was an electronic communication. ....... Files of every description - text, movies, audio - can be dropped into a wave, making them accessible to everyone. There's spell-checking and translation on the fly. You can replay everything that's happened within a wave. And it all happens in your browser...... the scale of Google's ambition ..... the browser has become the platform. And that's big news.
Ray Ozzie: Microsoft is not threatened by netbooks, Google Wave is ... VentureBeat “In reality, I don’t know what a netbook is,” said Ozzie ....... “We’re always going to need an operating system. . . . The experience on top of that OS is what’s changing.”

Microsoft's Ozzie Damns Google Wave with Praise eWeek as a complex application Google's latest attempt to move into the application space is so complex as to be "anti-Web." ....... little more than a Web-based version of the Groove collaboration software that Ozzie built when he founded Groove Networks after leaving IBM's Lotus business unit. ....... if Google will assume the intellectual leadership for collaboration on the Web. ....... collaboration on the Web will require a more modular approach in order to be sustainable across a large number of users. Microsoft is employing such an approach with its Live Mesh technology, which ultimately may not yield as rich a collaboration environment as Google Wave or Groove, but will prove to be more usable across millions of users. ......... both companies have been reduced to the equivalent of political parties that accuse each other of being "un-American." ....... Ozzie said his focus will remain firmly on a "three screens in the cloud mode'" that focuses on how PCs, televisions and mobile phones all become integrated across a common set of federated cloud services

Microsoft May Bing Google as Wave Grabs Market Sci-Tech Today
Google Wave - the New Facebook? Gerson Lehrman Group character-for-character transmission, the ability to integrate pictures, maps, emails, instant messaging, games ...... has most of the functionality of the Facebook platform but takes it a step further.

Google's new Wave is much more than an application Gerson Lehrman Group a platform and protocol that will enable a new breed of social and collaborative applications. ...... accelerate the adoption of Google Apps for businesses ...... a significant boost in productivity over current email systems ....... one more reason to migrate from a premise based email and messaging platform to Google's hosted solution.

Google Wave: Why it's so good and enterprise software is so bad CNET News Google has no incumbent enterprise products to which it must pay obeisance. ....... And so Google Wave is born, while Microsoft continues to churn out tired retreads of Exchange/Outlook, IBM gives us Lotus version 10,001, and Oracle works furiously to tie its collaboration products into its existing suite of heavy, "enterprise" software. ......... few break the mold and start again on what computing means, as Google has done with Wave. ..... some of the best Wave innovation is yet to come, as significant parts of Wave will be released as open-source code to encourage add-ons, extensions, and other derivative works

12 Reasons Why Google Wave will Change the Web Black Web 2.0 Google Wave is the shiniest new thing that everyone is talking about. ...... You can embed a Wave on any blog or website. This isn’t just a view of the wave, but a completely interactive interface to the wave. You could use this as a chat room on your website or maybe even to replace your commenting system on a blog. ...... spell check much smarter. Instead of being based on a simple dictionary, it’s based on the entire web ...... Just add Rosy to the wave and you suddenly speak any language you’d like. Your comments or blips will be translated into the native language of whoever you’re talking to. ....... We won’t have to wait for the Google developers to implement new features and functionality. ...... This will either be one of the greatest things that’s happened to the web, or an epic fail.

From The Netizen BlogRoll

What is that number again? Transcribing voicemail accurately is not a small challenge because no two people pronounce the same word exactly the same way and because background noise and mobile phone line quality can vary dramatically.
Keyboard shortcuts & Search Operators
Archiving now available in your inbox
Helping you fight Phone Spam
Accessing GrandCentral after upgrading to Google Voice
Tips on upgrading
Moving to Google Voice!
Getting Started in Free and Open Source over 80 talks in five tracks of Open Source topics and a 24-hour hacker lounge for code sprints
Improving Freenet's Performance
Web Storage Portability Layer: A Common API for Web Storage
Support for Mercurial Now Available for All Projects Hosted on Google Code
2009 Google Summer of Code™ Celebration at Beijing LUG
Happy Birthday, ICU!
Report from Day 2 of the Linux Storage and Filesystem Workshop, April 6-7th, 2009
Zurich Open Source Jam 7
Google Update Releases Update Controls
Spreading the Summer Love in Chicago
Barcode your bookshelf with Google Books Matt Cutts .... Using a simple USB-powered barcode scanner, Matt shows how you can easily add your books from off your bookshelf at home to the My Library feature in Google Books.

What's in a logo?
Books Are Full of Visual Gems: Old School Transportation edition!
Books Are Full of Visual Gems: Sea Creatures edition!
From the Mailbag: Illustrating your point with a book
Drop Everything and Read!
The Bodleian's treasures, available to all

China: Shanghai pride festival
Robin song and Mysterious Raven
Steller's Jay, contemplating inconveniently placed suet
21st century statecraft: texting for Swat Valley refugee assistance
StripeyWatch final: RIP
Democracy and transparency as human rights per Obama
New! The FDA transparency blog
UPDATE: Help Iraq/Afghanistan Vets: Support stop-lossed troops
(repost) Mona Eltahawy: "The Happy Muslims Who Confuse You"
The craigslist Foundation nonprofit boot camp
Future of news: "trust is the new black"
Alec Ross: more about 21st Century Statecraft For the first time in its history, the State Department is conducting international relations by encouraging online interaction between individual Americans and foreigners.
A few words about the future of media
Real results from the Open Government initiative: next steps
San Francisco recoverySF.org
New! San Francisco 311 customer service Twitterized
breaking: FDA transparency task force
Some reflections on "lightweight governance" by Josh Skolnick If Obama can get us to trust government like we trust Facebook -- that is, to trust both it's power and it's empowerment -- he'll go a long way toward defanging Reagan's old anti-government arguments. If he does that, he'll set the groundwork for an entire generation to trust government again.
Bearing witness: the transformation of American government
The Library of Congress blog
Natalie, Roxie, and also Cong. Gabrielle Giffords
Serious about health care reform "Pardon the interruption," came a voice as Stewart talked. "This is the Air Force One operator. I have President Obama on the line."
Sum of all fears
Kickstarting a 7"
Term Sheet Manners
Open Platforms and Innovation It was the Japanese who would destroy us in the '80s; now it's China and India. ..... Patents and degrees matter a lot less. Imagining something and then coding it up is what its all about these days.
Time Puts Twitter on Cover, at Vanguard of American Economy That it drives the American economy. In fact, Twitter is the new GM! ....... America might not make actual things any more, but at least we've learned to occupy our time talking endlessly and unprofitably to one another, in an entirely massless location, about which other entirely massless things deserve our time and/or increasingly worthless borrowed dollars.
When a 'Chosen' Tibetan Lama Says No Thanks
How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live
Introducing America's First Black, Female Rabbi
Why Nice Guys Should Finish First — but Don't
Racial Attacks Trouble Indian Students in Australia
The World of Twitter
How Twitter Will Change The Way We Live (in 140 characters or less)
10 Ways Twitter Will Change American Business
The TIME 100: The Twitter Guys by Ashton Kutcher
Come see how I hay my fields
The Leap Of Faith I was on a call yesterday with another VC who asked me why we made our investment in Zemanta last summer. There's a blog post I wrote up that explains our thinking at the time, but I did not point him to it. I explained that we had a gut instinct about the technology, market, and team that made us think there was a substantial opportunity in allowing people to "write smarter."
Is Twitter A Substitute For Set Top Box Data? if TV viewers can be understood, segmented, and targeted in the way that Internet users are, the TV experience and the TV advertising business can be transformed ...... Unlike traditional ratings or second-by-second set-top-box information, Twitter has rich qualitative information that reveals motivations behind viewers’ surfing. ....... Twitter can be used as a panel that once it is large enough (and maybe it is already) that can produce much of the same data that is currently locked in set top boxes and controlled by the cable companies. ..... The Internet is disruptive and reminds me of that fact every day.
The Free Music Business name for a business model that uses free as its foundational element - ie freemium. ..... Scarcity works great for physical goods, but crumbles in a digital world. ..... Free music will be a better business than paid music ever was. ...... what we’ve learned is more people want the music than are buying it. Should we try to convert them, or sue them? Is music failing, or is the SELLING of music failing? ...... The print companies went free, accepted advertising dollars instead of subscriptions, plugged into Google for traffic, and the money is now pouring in. ......... On top of the content layer is the "discovery/nagivation" layer that makes even more money than the content layer online. ........ iTunes isn't a discovery/navigation layer. It's an online version of Tower Records, but it's worse. ...... Services like last.fm (social networking), pandora (personalized radio), the hype machine (music blog search & listen), and playlisting services like project playlist and iMeem (which is being sued by Warner Music) are examples of this "discovery/navigation" layer. ......... Imagine if Google was a paid service. It wouldn't be driving a lot of traffic to anyone would it? ....... lala.com is going to try an ad supported free version of an "on demand" service. ........ we will have an abundant free music business where all the music is available to everyone and discoverable via search and social discovery ....... eventually the music owners will be better off taking an ad revenue share than a per listen payment ....... File based music has to exist today because there is no good mobile broadband internet solution. ....... almost every song ever recorded is on the Internet somewhere. ...... Free music is going to be a great business.
Our Web Site Is A Blog
Hacking Education The ubiquitous connectivity and very low cost of content production and distribution seems to enable the unbundling of key components of education. ........ He relies heavily on the networked community of editors as sources of knowledge and expertise and as models to aspire to. ....... In theory, Gepetto could have learned video editing in school. In practice his school was not equipped to teach it. He found content, help, a social life, and even credentialing (as others linked to his work) on www.animemusicvideos.org. ........ I used the art school to make a fake ID to go to MIT. Someone said [college is] expensive. I said no, it's free, you just won't get credit for it. ........ A byproduct of the disaggregation of education will be to weaken the authority of schools, but the bigger challenge may be to align their cost structures and business models to remain competitive in a hyper connected world. .............. we should work to drive the marginal cost of education to zero. ....... zero, plus bandwidth. ........ Information goods lend themselves to being created, distributed and consumed on the web. It is not so different from music, or classified advertising, or news. ........ we teach only two courses, business and information technology. ......... You need to know English, you need to have a computer ....... deliver a limited, but valuable education to an important segment of the global population for free. He will ask them to pay only for testing (accreditation). .......... someone with access to a computer and a desire to learn can learn a lot on the web. ......... how to be obsessed with things ....... And I just immersed myself to learn as much as I could. ......... the idea of game based learning. ........ kids that have struggled in traditional schools do really well with some of the work we have been doing around game-based learning. ......... they get crushed by the organizing efficiencies of the Internet. ......... the education industry may soon face the same challenges that currently confront the music industry and the newspaper industry. .......... the cost structures embedded in the education industry's current business models may be very difficult to support in the face of competition from hyper-efficient, web native businesses. ....... home, church, and school. ......... over time.... all of it got stuck back in the school. ........ If the transition from the current high touch, but high cost, learning environment to an efficient peer produced learning network is as abrupt and brutal as the transition we are witnessing in the music and newspaper industry, the social consequences are likely to be a lot more severe.
Product v. process journalism: The myth of perfection v. beta culture aying to our public: Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know, what do you know. ...... We who publish must learn how to say what we don’t know at least as well as we say what we know. ...... journalism as beta ...... the byproduct of the means and requirements of mass production: If you have just one chance to put out a product and it has to serve everyone the same, you come to believe it’s perfect because it has to be ......... Newspaper people see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers see their posts as part of the process of learning. ........ bartenders break more glass because they handle more beer, so journalists who traffic in facts are bound to drop some along the way.
DAY 410 there really is no substitute for passion.
Blog Past: Emerging Enterprises and Emergent Networks April 2002: As employees and enterprises go online with a PC on every desktop, online clusters of enterprises and people will give greater voice and power to the group hitherto which has mostly been only partially connected to global networks. This may be as unimaginable as the prospect of a million bloggers was a year ago. But it is a future which is rapidly emerging at light speed.
VCs Generally Retain Pro-Rata Rights
Entrepreneur's Social Fabric
Twitter Tech Communities
Save our rainforests clever campaign built around a frog - which the Prince, his sons, Harrison Ford, Pele and Daniel Craig among others, have all been filmed with.

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