If I'm Killed in a Terrorist Attack, Please ...

Don't avenge me. Stop the cycle of violence that means an eye for an eye until the world is blind. Don't kill in my name.

Don't hate. There is no such thing as an evil group of people. Only education, communication, and understanding can break down the walls separating us. Don't pass sweeping judgements, just because it's easier.

Don't be afraid. You are safe. The terrorist's strongest weapons are irrational fear and hysteria. Live a normal life. Don't give up your freedoms or your principles for the illusion of security.

Don't mourn for me. Know that I lived a good life. I was lucky enough to be born in one of the richest places in the most plentiful time in history. I was never hungry. Don't think about what might have been, think of what was and what could be.

Do remember me.

You can "sign" this petition by retweeting, posting on facebook, or emailing to your friends. Thanks!

ReTweet




 

Facebook Gets Performance Anxiety, Again

In it's fairly-successful quest to be the "all things to all people" social network, Facebook gets decidedly bent when they get upstaged. As Twitter was surging with the energy of having helped report the start of a revolution, Facebook started experimenting with a Twitter-like real-time public search. Of course, the blog detailing the change used the Iranian Election as an example:

 
This is is the web page version of "look ma, no handlebars" - the oldest son getting jealous when the baby does something cute.
Facebook could be a good general replacement for Flickr and Youtube, but I don't think they'll be killing Twitter, simply because Twitter isn't an incredibly depthly service with hundreds of privacy options. It's open, easy, and you don't even need an account to read it.

Tweet?

 

The "Google Campaign" for Congress. A Win for Democracy.

I haven't been blogging or tweeting much. I'm devoting all my spare time to a position as New Media Director for a congressional campaign.

What I've learned from this experience is that it's possible to run a campaign totally on free Google services. You could use Blogspot to host a domain with unlimited bandwidth, Analytics to track your visitors, Checkout for donations, Alerts to track your name in the media, Docs for book-keeping and management, Google Groups for the mailing list and forum, Youtube for outreach, and Maps and Calendar to keep in touch with constituents.

And it's ALL FREE. If you wanted, you could spend $10 through Blogspot to buy a custom domain; that's your only cost. This says something great about the future of elections, government transparency, and Democracy in America.

Check out our work here. Comments and criticism welcome!

Tweet? 

 

How Many Times Have You Been Favored?

Be kind, Re-tweet. (If you enjoy this)

Google tends to jump on a bandwagon and over-index the vogue site of the day. Not long ago, every search had some emo kid's myspace page showing up in the top ten results. Then they decided to crawl every Youtube comment ever, and we all know how much utility those have. Now, within hours, your every mundane tweet is searchable.

Simultaneously, people are beginning to realize that number of followers isn't the best indication of influence on Twitter. Any idiot can auto-follow and be auto-followed by plenty of other attention seeking "experts" who aren't really "listening." How then, do we truly measure someone's actual broadcast power? By doing what Twitter is all about, listening to what other people are saying.

One way to measure influence is noting how many times a person's tweets have been favored by others. In this disposable real-time world, someone wanting to save one of your 140 character snippets for future reference has a lot of meaning. So, go ahead and Google:

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

where obviously, "username" is you. 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. Me included because until recently, favoriting an update from Tweetdeck was a major pain in the ass. It's also noteworthy that some users automatically favor every tweet directed @ them for future reference, especially before the @replies tab was changed to "mentions."

For some types of user, mentions, replies and retweets will be more relevant than the number of times favored. Problem: Twitter's "real-time" search often misses results, doesn't tell you how many results there are, and only goes back about a month. Wouldn't ya know, there's an easy way to measure this too using Google Search:

site:twitter.com/*/status/ @USERNAME -site:twitter.com/USERNAME/status/

Just fill in the relevant username. The first portion searches through status updates which include the user you're ranking. The second is a control to weed out any references to oneself in the third person. :)

Make sure to click "repeat search with the omitted results" if the option is there and voila - a true measure of your influence. For an added "equalizer," use the advanced search page and limit results to a relevant time frame, say, the last month.

While we're on the subject of Googlefluence. @Ev's Twitter profile has a Google pagerank of 7/10. @Scobleizer also is a 7. Like most users, I'm a 4 (@Oprah is too, but likely not for long), and newer accounts range from 0 to 3.

If you'd think when Googling "site:twitter.com" the top results would be the home page, then the most popular (or linked-to) Twitter accounts, you'd only be half right. The first result is the "What are you doing" homepage (pagerank 9), but the second is a seemingly random user, @beeahna (rank 4). With 433 followers and 972 updates, I'm not sure why she stands out (save for alphabetically.) Using the methods outlined above, she has received 36 mentions and been favored 35 times according to Google. She was also the 14,258,369th Twitter account created. Anyone care to offer an explanation on this?

Thanks for reading. Let me know how you measured up. Next post will be: "Conversation Killers - How Twitter Clients Actually Reduce Usefulness"

 

What Were You Thinking? 1000 Tweets.

About to graduate high school and with the new millennium dawning, I became painfully conscious of time's passage. Memories are fleeting. We've a lot of life to live and much of it is reduced to highlight reels: a photo album, a fuzzy memory, the feeling a song evokes. I decided to make an effort to better preserve my experiences.

I kept a journal. I wrote down my thoughts and feelings, what I was doing, what everyone else was doing. I could go back and re-read this later to gain better understanding of where I'd come from and where I was going. I kept this journal for exactly one day.

It still sits on a bookshelf, mocking me. When I open it, I'm ripped through a decade-wide wormhole.  A few times since I attempted to start again, always with the same result. It's near impossible to sit down and write a coherent history of life, so varied and full of stimuli.

Recently I noticed I'm approaching 1000 Twitter updates. There's lots of talk good and bad about the service, so I decided to go back through my tweets from the beginning, to see if I've been wasting my time or actually adding value by sending five or so updates per day.

We're writing our autobiographies, memoirs, commenting on history in real-time. Some future digital archaeologist with a wicked algorithm is going to understand the world we live in now through our tweets. The shortened links may all well be broken, but the soul will remain. It's only a matter of time before a major disaster is live-tweeted by a large segment of a population. Maybe that disaster will be averted by Twitter, who knows.

It's time to realize that this really is a micro-blog, and start using it that way. You may be answering "What are you doing?", but you may one day look back and wonder, "what was I thinking, then?"


 

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