Quantify and then Qualify Your Social Media Relationships
Corvida has an awesome post on Chris Brogan’s blog called Decreasing Our Connections While Increasing Our Networks. The basic rundown of the post (which you should go read) is her exasperation over the amount of “friends” she has over various networks and the lack of a deeper and real connection. This conversation surfaces quite a bit when I am speaking to groups of people about social media. Where do you draw the line on relationship building in the social media environment?
Do Congressional Partisans Use Twitter More? Better?
With the help of Klout.com, a web service that analyzes Twitter usage and influence, I've been looking at the full list of Members of Congress using the tool, looking for potentially interesting relationships in the data. With about 125 House Members now using Twitter (roughly 2/3 Rs and 1/3 Ds), many of them on a daily basis, there's a rich data set to look at. I've uploaded Klout's rankings of the House Members to ManyEyes, so if you want to entertain yourself by finding out where your favorite congresstwitter rates, go ahead.
Our Culture (high and popular) is usually created by people who are happy with the systems the world has given them. Magazine editors don't spend a lot of time wishing for better technology. Opera singers focus more on their singing than on microphone technologies. Novelists proudly use typewriters...
...If you take a look at this chart, you can see the danger anyone who introduces new technology faces. While you'll attract Les Paul and the 37Signals guys, you're more likely to attract spammers, scammers, opportunity seekers and others that will bring our culture down as easily as they'll bring it up.
