Twitter user @ AmandaMooney had a really great idea that she tossed out via her blog, and Twitter...

AmandaMooney: What if every Friday our Twitter community elects a charity we’d like 2 support +We all give at least what we’d spend on our morning latte.

Amanda gave a longer explanation on her blog of how this would look...

Here’s how this could work:

Every Monday, you suggest a cause you’d like our community to support by sending me a message on Twitter or email, Facebook etc and I’ll post them here on ASL.

From Monday to Thursday, we can discuss and choose the cause we’d like to support that week.

On Friday, I’ll post a link on Twitter to a place where we can donate to the cause and we’ll all chip in $5 or whatever we can spare.

I think that this is a great idea, and I'm going to support it.  I think you should too.

-N

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Today I found an amazing blog post that talks about how different Twitter users have more juice than other Twitter users. 

"The Law of the Vital Few" is amongst the most unpopular ideas of the last two hundred years. First framed as a social scientific truth by the early 20th century Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, it states that in all societies throughout human history a small minority of individuals and organizations have held more political, economic and cultural power than the majority. The Law of the Vital Few isn't a popular idea with the majority, of course, because it marginalizes most people making them, at best, incidental players in their own histories. Nor is Pareto's idea particularly popular with elites because it can be used to expose their power and reveal the self-interest of their actions.

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Hugh McQuire a great Cnet interview  with Evan Prodromou the creator of identi.ca, that I think is a **must** read if you use any microblogging service.  It is about opening up the microblogging world, rejecting the ideas "walled garden" sort of set up that exists now.  Here is a clip from that article.

How do you differentiate yourselves from Twitter and the others?
Prodromou: Recent numbers show there are already around 110 microblogging services, and with others that have been announced, there are probably 200 different services right now. What we've seen with other kinds of social software is this kind of fragmentation and we are seeing that now with microblogging where you are on Twitter, and I am Jaiku, and we can't be friends and we can't send each other messages. That's not the way the Internet is supposed to work. We are seeing these information silos happen around microblogging just like we're seeing them in other social media and my goal is to see that not happen with microblogging because I think it's a very valuable kind of communication.

Isn't that where something like Friendfeed comes in, to aggregate all the different services into one place?
Prodromou: Friendfeed is a great way to listen to multiple places, but to me, that's a stop-gap solution where we've got lots of silos, so you can listen to lots of silos. I want one microblogging place, where if I'm on one and you're on another, we can still communicate and still be friends. That's the long-term solution to the problem. It should be up to the services to talk to each other. That's really the difference with Identica. I made the software open source, so you can take the software that runs Identica and install it on your own server. Maybe you're involved with a Web community or you have a group of friends that like to talk or maybe you're in business and you want people in your business talking to each other in the enterprise. You can install the software and tailor it just for your group. I built a protocol called OpenMicroBlogging, so if you take the software and install it on your server, people on your server can still subscribe to other people on Identica and vice versa, so we're no longer having these little silos that are fractured and different from each other.

So will Indentica users be able to communicate with Twitter users?
Prodromou: That's my goal. If we get enough people using these open standards and open systems, perhaps Twitter sees it as a business advantage to join this kind of open network. We've seen that before on the Internet. In the early 1990s, there were lot of silos around e-mail and if you had an AOL e-mail address and I had a CompuServe e-mail address, we couldn't send e-mail to each other. But e-mail became so ubiquitous that even the companies with the biggest groups and users had to allow their users to send and receive Internet e-mail and I think that that's going to happen with microblogging, too. But it means that we have to grow the rest of the system.

Right now I use identi.ca and it is a great service.  I for one would love it if microblogging went the way of email, but I think it will take the involvemnt of a company like Google to make it happen in this day and age. 

Any thoughts?

-N

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Web Pro News recently pointed me to an interesting blog post by Profy about how companies are "gaming" Twitter. 

Profy stated...

CareerBuilder generated all the activity required to make the name of the site the most discussed topic on Twitter on its own. The thing is that the guys behind the website simply configured a few Twitter accounts (each account focused on a particular city) to broadcast all the latest job positions advertised on CareerBuilder automatically to Twitter. This resulted in a few dozens of new tweets posted to a few timelines belonging to different CareerBuilder geographical sections every hour

Web Pro News asks the question (in light of Twitter's statments about cracking down on spam): how is this not spamming?

My answer: I do believe that CareerBuilder is using Twitter as a way to aggregate their content, BUT you have to opt in to see this the content.  It is sort of like singing up to be spammed. 

Nonetheless, this does expose an interesting sort of problem for Twitter's search technology. 

-N

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I think that the VP debates tonight will be good for Twitter.  Why do I say that?

ZDnet reported...

Twitter usage and sign-ups received a healthy boost during last Friday’s first presidential debate for the 08 campaign. The official Twitter blog reports that, despite Friday traditionally being a slow traffic day:

• Friday updates jumped 18.5% from previous Friday.
• Updates during the debate increased 160% compared to same time last week.
• Signups on Friday were up 23%.
• Signups during the debate were up 135% compared to same time last week

Wired also reported...

The number of Twitter users and updates increased significantly last Friday as Obama and McCain took the stage for the first presidential debate, Twitter announced on its blog.

New sign-ups to the microblogging service were up 23 percent from the week before, and up 135 percent during the actual debate from the same time last Friday.

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Profy had an interesting article today about the possible future of Twitter as a tool for making money...

The report talks about the Twitter E08 which is a very dressed up presentation of the Twitter search, which use to be a seperate company that was bought up by Twitter. 

Profy's article talks about how this could be the first example of an attempt to monetize twitter.  The article states...

Any marketer will tell you that it is easier to reach a specific audience when you know where exactly it is. And to any advertiser a niche site targeting potential customers of this advertiser is much more appealing than some generalist site full of information that attracts all types of visitors. And this is why I think Twitter niche sites could very easily be used for monetization - Twitter could launch dozens of such websites, aggregate relevant content to them, make people visit them to read more opinions about some particular topic of high interest to them - and sell ads alongside this content to interested companies.

Besides, because of high concentration of textual content on a particular topic, such niche websites will bring some generic traffic from search engines - and this traffic will also be used to talk to potential advertisers and some of the newly-arrived people may very well convert into Twitter users if they are interested in a particular topic Twitter has a site for (even if they had no reasons to create an account before that).

I honestly believe launching a good number of such specific websites could be a brilliant idea for Twitter and if done right could result in both growth of the microblogging service itself and in turning Twitter into a profitable (or at least generating some revenue) business. The most important factors here are that such niche sites should be focused on a topic that is popular among internet users and generates lots of traffic and also has a number of potential advertisers that could be interested in associating their brands with such websites.

I think this is an interesting sort of observation because un until now many people seem to have believed that Twitter would eventually create a "pro" acount, that users would have to pay for, and would of course have more features than a "standard" account. 

The way that I see it is that Twitter provies a very robust source of text based ata that can show what people are thinking / talking about.  All that needs to happen is someone needs to create a tool that can make sense of the cacophony of text that slams into the Twitter service (and servers) every our of every day. 

I'm sure that Twitter has people working on this, but I'm betting that if someone else comes up with a really killer app than Twitter will just buy it the way that they bought search.twitter.com.  (Solve the problem with your check book.) 

-N

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So today when I look at Twitter I see a Tweet that say...

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Funny

lonelysandwich They should change the symbol for EDGE to stink lines

billpalmer bomb squad blows up three suspicious packages at Philly baseball stadium. turns out to be three packages of hot dogs. overreact much?

Indypodcaster Okay, but ONLY if Ahab is played by Samuel L Jackson ... AND he has the robot arm ... http://tinyurl.com/4e7w3d

templesmith TV show FRINGE: "A psychic office drone named Roy who draws weird Ben Templesmith ripoff pictures of scary death moments" Anyone got pics?

Links

andydiggle Everyone! Go download PJ Holden's iPhone/iPod Touch comic: http://tinyurl.com/4qjr4p

Pistachio pretty outrageous, non-PC, kind of funny, oddly true Sarah Silverman's Schlep video: http://tinyurl.com/3n8zh4

LDpodcast ok- retweet- this is just ridiculously funny http://tinyurl.com/3n8zh4

brianwood U.S. breaks Posse Comitatus Act: http://www.salon.com/opinio...

jowyang: on Facebook 20% vs MySpace 67% US internet market share (visits) http://tinyurl.com/4rlpq2

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Best AM Tweet

lonelysandwich Listening to a young man in a hot pink checkered t-shirt passionately expound on high finance. There goes my world view.

Funny

bud_caddell If I were super rich I'd keep Paul McCartney in a little birdcage next to my throne to thrill me with his minstrel skills.

lonelysandwich I guess I can see how Governor Palin could be considered "hot" on a scale of 1 to 2.

Akula I think Apple should enlist Kramer to do Mac ads.

bobgoyetche: Thought of the day: if AirCanada and Bell Canada merged, the whole planet would be annihilated in a huge cloud of suck

Interesting

mattcutts I would like to read a book with the first sentence "All I have to do is stay alive for a few more hours..."

brianshaler Overheard: "Go outside! The graphics are amazing!!"

Smart

timoreilly Retweeting @rjray: What worries me most about Palin, is whether she's an indicator of the type of Supreme Court nominees McCain would make.

Links

chrisbrogan Have you seen Lizzer? http://lizzer.com/ . Kind of interesting. Might be good for people still unsure of their html skills.

DorotheeRH Retwt @kadavy: New Media Camp Chicago discussion: Why are advertisers reluctant to align with comedy content: http://snipr.com/3r7jy

stevegarfield Retweeting @acclimedia: How to Blog by @hotdogsladies. A must view. http://tinyurl.com/5jbyqj

timoreilly Comparing Obama's and McCain's Technology and Innovation Agendas (pdf) http://tinyurl.com/3mg4kx

stevegarfield I just created a new group on flickr for ATM Envelope Art. http://tinyurl.com/569bo7 Join in!

chrisbrogan KyleFlaherty does a great job showing how to track the pain on Twitter: http://bit.ly/2JyYYD

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One of the ways that a friend of mine who works from home described Twitter is "It is like the water cooler where you can go and talk with other people when you need a break from your work." 

I think this is a great way to describe one of the many ways that Twitter connects people. 

Even though I don't work from home I take many Twitter (water cooler) breaks through out my day.  Some people might believe that those breaks prevent me from being productive, however I find (and I'm only speaking for myself here) that they make me more productive.

Why is that?  Because Twitter is something that gives me a glance of what people are up to.  Updates are limited to 140 charactes.  Reading blogs on the other hand is something that makes me less productive, because they are longer, and I often feel compelled to leave long comments on them. 

I guess I see the differences like this

Twitter = water cooler.  Breif periods of talking about this and that, then I return to work.

Blogs = going to a coworkers desk, and engaging in a long and involved conversation. 

Does anyone agree or disagree?  Please comment.

-N

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I know that many other people have talked about this, in many different ways, and that some people might be sick of hearing about / reading about it... but I' going to add my voice to the many today here with All-A-Twitter.

One of the great things about Twitter is that I can use it as a tool to see what is really going on in the world. 

Today I'm using Twitter Search to track what is up with with Hurricane Ike.  I love doing this because it gives me a idea of how normall everyday peple are being affected by this strom, in ways that no other tool that I know about can. 

What I'm cerious to see is if Twitter will keep moving as fast as it is now when the storm makes land fall... Part of me thinks that it will as people in places like Huston (which is NOT being evacuated even though it looks like Ike is going to beat the shit out of it) will use Twitter to tell the world what is going down at a pace of 140 characters every few seconds. 

However, part of me thinks that when the strom doing a Twitter update is going to be one of the last things on their minds. 

The thought that just crossed my mind was that if I were with a bunch of people I did not know who had all been evacuated to a school or something, I'd try to create a Tweet-up... is that messed up? 

Here are a few interesting Tweets about Ike...

millsda2 Houston=Tina Turner ........ Come an get me Hurricane Ike!!! And put some stank on it!

Sheridan Is it ironic that my daughter is on her way into this world at the same hurricane Ike is descending or does it just feel that way to me?

argusleader: Update: 'Certain death' predicted as storm surges toward Texas: HOUSTON � As a gigantic Hurricane Ike.. http://twurl.nl/ntkdke

INFECTEDPB503: CNN: Some residents in single-family homes in coastal Texas face "certain death" if they do not heed Hurricane Ike evacuation orders

ikefeed: Photo (Flickr): Latest Satellite Image Hurricane Ike 09/12/08 12.15pm GMT http://tinyurl.com/4wqsng

It is strange to see so many Tweets talking about people facing "certain death" if they stick around for the storm, then to see lots of Tweets about how people in Huston will be sticking around. 

Thats it for now. 

Take care Twitter heads.

-N

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So today when I woke up and started to see what the world had done when I was asleep I saw this Tweet

timoreilly Retweeting @johnbattelle: Updated on whuffie, twitter, matt cutts, and sugarrae http://battellemedia.com/ar...

I cliecked the link at the end of the Tweet and now I know about something that before now I had no idea about. 

~1~

So here is what happened:

In this post Rae Hoffman asked the question "Did Twitter lay down for Google?"  The well written post starts like this...

Did Twitter lay down for Google?  Or do they just not trust you? As you may have heard, Twitter recently decided to “nofollow” links left in the “bio” section of user profiles.

The “web” link has long been a nofollow link, but the bio links passed popularity until Dave Naylor exposed it, which alerted Matt Cutts (a Google engineer) who sent a tweet to @ev (a twitter founder) about Dave’s forementioned post and *poof* bio links were nofollowed.

Now I had no idea what the hell "nonfollow" meant.  I know I'm a nerd and I should have known, but I did not.  Sorry. 

For all of you who may be like me let me explain this "nonfollow" stuffs:

• "nonfollow" is a tag that can be put on links.  If this tag is on a link than search engines will not index that link.  i.e. It does not help push the page being linked to up in the google search results.
• Every link to a web site is like a vote to make it closer to the top organic search result in google.  If a nonfollow tag is put on a link it makes that vote not count.
• Nonfollow tags are put on things that are expected to be spam.  

I'm sure that we all have been exposed to bots using Twitter as a way to spam, so we might ask why this is a ig deal?  Here is the (well my) answer:

• People build a good rep (wuffie) by linking to things that other people find intereting.
  
• People can do this via their blogs, and now by microblogging sites like Twitter.
  
• The more good stuff a person links to the better their rep (the more wuffie they get), and the more people will link to them pushing their little place on the web up in the organic search results. 
  
• This is a very GOOD system. 
  
• When people attempt to mess with this system, bad things happen, they can sort of break it.
  
• Bots have attempted to mes with it, so Google has had to mess with it to stop the bots from messing with it.
  
• But by basicly treating all Twitter users as evil spam bots Google has over messed with the system and thus broken it by through their attempt to un-do the damage the bots casued.  

Rae says this better than I think I can in her post, and on via her Twitter:

Now, as I sat there thinking about all of this happening, I became increasingly annoyed by one question. Why? Why would Twitter, or Google (and I don’t care which) think that a profile link, be it in the “web” section or the “bio” section from my Twitter page should be nofollowed? So, I asked:

• @mattcutts curious as to your reasoning that this link http://tinyurl.com/6hxmaj SHOULDN’T count? imo, profile link shouldn’t be nofollow
• @mattcutts unless of course, Google can’t figure out which Twitter pages have true value and which are owned by bots…
• @mattcutts Y says my tweet page has 1700 links, all cause people like the content *I* am putting on it… now, I ask you…
• @mattcutts why on earth should a link from my profile back to my core site where people can find more from me be nofollow?
• @mattcutts *I* gave this twitter page content, *I* got this twitter page 1700 backlinks, why should *I* not benefit from it?

And that last tweet is something everyone should really be looking at. My personal twitter page has 1700 links, 1500+ followers, contains over 7000 tweets and is a toolbar PR of 5. Last I checked, I got all those links. I wrote all that content. All those people were following me as a person. I developed that link popularity. Why on earth would I not deserve ALL the benefits (including that in the form of a profile link) from building up the value of that page?

If Google is the one who wants that web link nofollowed because some twitter profile pages may be automated bots or spammers, then it is time they realize that THEY are responsible for determining which of those individual pages is authoritative, trusted and legitimate enough to pass link popularity, by a method other than demanding that other websites and social networks change the ways they do business to help Google stop links being used as a form of currency and to manipulate their algorithm - an issue Google and Google alone created and profited from.

The rest of this post is really amazing, but I don't want to cut and paste all of it here.  So, please go read the restof it!  (For real people it is a REALLY good post).

~2~

Google's guy Matt Cutts posted a reply on his blog, which was also very well written, where he explains how this all came to be.  (Again I did a cut and paste of a bunch of Matt's post, BUT NOT ALL OF IT.  So, go read the whole thing.)

The short answer is that back in July I saw this post http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/twitter-backlink-tip.html . David Naylor was pointing out that Twitter intentionally nofollowed links in the “Web” part of a Twitter profile, but that you could embed a link in the “Bio” field that would flow PageRank:

Dave’s blog is read by a bunch of SEOs, including quite a few blackhats, so it was pretty clear to me that Twitter might get hit by spammers who jumped onto Twitter just to get PageRank, or by bots who signed up a ton of accounts automatically trying to get links.

I wasn’t sure of Evan Williams’ email address, so I took my best guess at two of Evan’s emails and dropped Evan a quick note pointing out Dave’s post and that spammers might start attacking Twitter soon because of this. Because I wasn’t sure of Evan’s email, I also sent Evan a Twitter saying “@ev, dropped you an email about (the post that Dave did)” That was all in July, and I forgot about it.

Evidently just in the last few days, Twitter changed that Bio link to a nofollow link. A few thoughts:

...By the way, I totally support if Evan wanted to lift nofollow for real users in some way, but I figure that Twitter probably wanted to protect themselves against spam as a first step. Given that a month or so after I dropped them a note, Twitter hired a full-time spam person, I’m not surprised if Twitter was starting to see more spammers show up and wanted to take strong action to push back on spam as a first step--if Twitter got gummed up with spam that would be bad for everybody. Perhaps down the road they’ll look at ways to keep flowing PageRank to real users while not opening themselves to a spam attack. I would imagine that they have pretty good signals that would let them separate (most) real users from (most) bots/spammers. So Twitter could take steps such that most users would still get PageRank by removing the nofollow on sufficiently non-spammy users.

This is a good post, an interesting post, and a post that make me really see Google's side here. 

But, I still think that there should NOT be a "nonfollow" tag on the links in a Twitter users profile.  To understand why I want to jump back to Rae's post, and her Twitter account.  She asked @ev a few interesting questions and explained why she asked them.  

~3~

@ev question, why did you agree to nofollow the twitter profile link? do you not feel your users should benefit from their participation?

@ev I can’t see a logical reason you would feel the need to do that, except for fear of what happens to your own site if you refuse

If @ev truly feels he can’t trust his users, then why is he taking the link popularity I’ve built to my profile at Twitter and using it to help the core Twitter site in the search engines.

Now other users went on to point out a few things, such as the fact that the majority of Twitter users wouldn’t even know what nofollow was or that getting a link isn’t the reason we use Twitter.

But here’s the deal. Just because someone doesn’t realize that you’re denying them a benefit of their work while taking the benefit for yourself doesn’t make it OK.

This is a dman good point. 

~4~

In the end this is where I stand:

I think that I understand why Google & Twitter are doing what they are doing, and I even think their intentions are good, but in attempting to fix a problem I believe they have made the problem worse.  (The road to hell and all of that...)

I don't want a "nonfollow" tag being put on links to my main site in my Twitter profile.

Will the "nonfollow" tag being there stop me from using Twitter?  No.  So, I guess I don't care about it all that much huh?

-N

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~Best Tweet~

mattcampagna The man in the first couple to enter the mile-high club was also the inventor of the Auto-pilot... Think about it.

runner up...

scottsimpson Fantasy Hacky Sack Update: I pick first in the draft! Woo-hoo! Totally going with Skye Pickens-Alfredo, Dartmouth '11. Mad bag skills.

~Quote Tweets~

brianwood "The greatest enemy will hide in the last place you would ever look" - Julius Caesar

chrisbrogan The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that He did not exist

hotdogsladies "It's nice to pretend to be important; but it's more important to pretend to be nice." ~ Dale Carnegie, 1937

~Political Tweets~

kathrynjones Obama Campaign Raises $8M In Less Than 24 Hours (The RNC has raised $1m since Palin's speech.)

templesmith Sarah Palin seems to be giving the mainstream US media the clap.

pourhadi Had a dream last night that I met Palin and joked with her about her "alaska is close to Russia" foreign policy experience. No joke.

ChefMark Someone at CNN is going to be fired. They just ran a lower third that said McCain wins DEMOCRATIC nomination

~Tweets with Links~

davefleet What do you think of BackType? @vasta isn't convinced: http://is.gd/2cZ9

NukeHavoc Nerrrddd fiiigghhht! http://tinyurl.com/6gh3h3

cspenn New blog: Social media and new media are NOT the same thing. http://tinyurl.com/5swodo Your comments appreciated!

~Tweets that start with @neilgorman~

andreamercado @neilgorman If you did have a fohty of tea, you'd hafta drink it out of a brown bag, you know that, right? And, spill some fo yo homies.

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So in about one hour (from the time I'm posting this) @geordifilo is going to start to post a story that will be written in / on Twitter.  I advise you all to start to follow him. 

-N 

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I found this little web app that can be used to search identi.ca and Twitter.  Good stuff.

-N

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msullivan If Palin is an expert on Russia by osmosis, I guess I'm an expert on China, 'cause if I were to dig a hole thru the centre of the Earth ...

toddtyrtle @msullivan I'm a mullah *and* a priest because I live near a church and a mosque!

msullivan @toddtyrtle LOL! By that reasoning I guess I'm a St Hubert BBQ chicken. Or is that Forhorn Leghorn?

neilgorman @toddtyrtle @msullivan because I spend so much time near a computer with an internet connection I'm an expert on fucking everything!

I think I win :)

-N

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~Best PM Tweet~

rstevens If I had a hammer, you better believe you wouldn't know until it was too late.

Runner up was...

andydiggle It looks like my hair caught fire and someone tried to put it out with a live weasel.

~Other Interesting Tweets~

wizardElite Everyone should have at least 30 mins a day & get their daily dose of healthy daydreaming.

p0ps Talking with a co-worker, I realized not everyone knows that Google Reader serves as an excellent Podcast Player. I follow 16 of them on it.

HoboZero Made the questionable decision to share my D*Con pics with my coworkers...they either think I am awesome, or they've lost all respect...

~Tweets With Links~

zefrank k. vaction's over...maybe you can help me get back to work: http://tinyurl.com/69y7at

Sorry this was short.  Today is a really busy day.

-N

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Ok,

I use Twitter a bunch of different ways.  The main factor deciding how I use Twitter is where I'm at when I use it. 

TweetDeck:

If I'm at home, or at a place that has Wi-Fi than I use an amazing little application called TweetDeck.  I like this method of using Twitter the best and if I could use it this way all the time I would.  Here are some of the reasons that I like TweetDeck so much.

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