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.

The Tacky Techie Conundrum

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.

3 Social Media Offenders Creep into Late Adopter Markets

Corpus Christi is a late-adopter market. There’s nothing wrong with this – we know we’re not Silicon Valley by any stretch of the imagination. It takes a while for technology to trickle down to our south Texas market. Maybe it’s our easy-going coastal lifestyle, maybe it is our geographic location (does technology rely on gravity to reach us?). Who knows?

What I have noticed as someone who has kept her eye on social media for the past two years is that not only has social media use caught up with the average American, but so has the misuse.

Who Rules the Social Web?

A new analysis demonstrates that "Chicks Rule" and analyzes gender balance on social networking sites.

On Twitter, Information Beats Sentiment

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University recently revealed the results of a study which looked into how people were using Twitter to talk about products. Companies, of course, fear what a negative barrage of tweets can do to their brand, leading many to establish Twitter accounts themselves to provide information, customer service, and support. As it turns out, these businesses may not need to worry too much about what the "Twitter effect" can do to their image after all. The study revealed that the number of brand-related tweets where sentiment is expressed is not the dominating force that you may think. In fact, the majority of tweets mentioning a brand are merely casual comments or tweets from someone giving or seeking information. And when sentiment is expressed, it's generally positive.

NYC Anarchist Arrested For Protest Tweets

Welcome to Iran via the Group of 20 protests in Pittsburgh. Looks like an interesting case. Can you use Twitter to point out police movements during a protest? We now know you can be arrested for it.

If it's illegal, will police eventually be able to monitor cell phone traffic in the vicinity of a protest to detect something similar? Someone could cc a pre-arranged list of activists, accomplishing the very same thing. That might be a violation of the law, too, no?