Favored, not Followers for Twitter Influence

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The Electric Outlet has outlined how the shift in followers to favored tweets determines influence. And the best part is, there is a way to measure this through Google searches. Type the following in Google search:

site:twitter.com/*/favourites USERNAME (note the U in favourites)

You might need to click “repeat and include the omitted results” at the page bottom. Surprised by how high or low the number is? Well don’t worry too much – a lot of people don’t use the favorites feature to its full potential.

Are the results surprising?

“Serial Cat Killer” says sorry, still bombarded by blogosphere

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Over at the Philippine blogosphere, a certain John Candare has been labeled as a “serial cat killer” with his post on his Multiply site (in the PH, Multiply is one of the more popular social networks in conjunction with Facebook and Friendster). The original post was deleted, but for posterity’s sake, Rico from Technogra has found the cached version:

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Twig embeds video ads onto your blog

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The guys from VideoEgg have recently unveiled Twig, a form of video advertising that combines pop up vids with a sticky toolbar that hovers like a “twig” above or below your browser’s frame.

Twig looks like the familiar hovering bar we see in several media sites like Digg and Facebook when we click on external links. Although we may have mixed emotions about the implementation of a pseudo intrusive app on our blogs, the model does address the query of advertisers who want a guarantee that their call to action is always visible.
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Facebook hits 200 million users

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Mark Zuckerberg announced today that Facebook hit the 200 million user base.

Growing rapidly to 200 million users is a really good start, but we’ve always known that in order for Facebook to help people represent everything that is happening in their world, everyone needs to have a voice. This is why we are working hard to build a service that everyone, everywhere can use, whether they are a person, a company, a president or an organization working for change.

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Is your blog prepared for Earth Hour ’09?

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Depending on what part of the globe you’re in, Earth Hour 2009 is but roughly 33 to 48 hours away from Saturday, 8:30 PM. The VOTE EARTH movement is a global one hour “lights off kids!” with the primary aim of collecting 1 billion statement votes for policy changes in this year’s Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

What’s important to us though is that Earth Hour ’09 is heavy on social media. YouTube videos, widget downloads, Facebook fan page, Bebo, Flickr, Twitter and FriendFeed accounts can all be found here. They even have a sign up widget which you can embed on your blog.

Crazy thought: If the Internet went down for an hour, what would the world be like?

Twitter gets you fired — the odds greater than blogs?

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You may have seen an article on MSNBC recounting the snowball effect of a single “Tweet” by @theconnor.

So let’s review: The Internet is not your BFF. Everyone has a “My boss sucks” moment. But the prudent know to express this sentiment away from the keyboard because they also have the “My boss knows how to use the Internet” sense they were born with.

Before, it was the blogs that got you fired. I’m going all out by saying that microblogging brings out the real emotions. Writing to rant does take time. Maybe five minutes at least, but that’s still five precious minutes to help you cool down and re-evaluate your moral fiber. It’s different for Twitter and other microblog services, because more often than not, they capture the unfiltered and raw emotions that get translated into words that we will regret. Hey, it gets even the best of us.

So please, before you hit that “update” button, wait 5 minutes.

Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day

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My “day” work is in magazine publishing – the past two years with men’s interest magazines. Over coffee, two friends from the IT industry asked why can’t more women in technology be featured in the magazines (one of them was referring to the lack of “beauty and brains” in model spreads). This does make sense — more often than not, the bikini + pretty face combination seems to work in the mainstream setting. But really, haven’t we had enough of that?
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Tim Ferris wants YOU to donate $90,000 to charity

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Tim Ferris has done the “unreasonable” in his terms. With the recent Tweet to Beat charity gaining 6k++ more followers, Tim is now upping the ante by giving out $3.00 to each and every follower.

tweet2beat

There’s a reason why he’s doing this and it is all about the experience. In the same way that we were exposed to immersions to help out our community back when we were in school, Tim wants us to experience the gratification of giving the $90,000 ourselves — that’s $3.00 each.

He has outlined very detailed steps to make the donation (the first stage of gratification), and show that we made the donation in our Facebook timeline (the second stage of gratification).

Dvorak says ‘Newspaper publishers are idiots’

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if you’ve been listening in on the last week’s episode of TWiT, John C. Dvorak gave a compelling commentary on exclusivity of news with today’s media.

Dvorak’s column for PC Magazine last Friday was based on the notion that the New York Times is considering a pay to read subscription model for the news. He adds that most of the news we read is syndicated anyway — there really isn’t a lot of relevant news items happening within your thirty mile zone that’s actually published. Almost everything is syndicated!

The Internet added comparison shopping to the mix. Want a story about the baby stuck down in the well? How about 3,000 stories about the baby in the well?

Pretty soon the public began to notice that 2,975 of those 3,000 stories about the baby in the well were the exact same story, with the other 25 being rewrites of the exact same story. Then came the revelation. “Hey, these newspapers are all doing the exact same thing! Why do we need so many of them?” [Dvorak]

The future of print isn’t with newspapers. It’s probably with books. Oh and yeah, maybe with the small community papers that prints exclusive news relevant to your little town.