I ran my most recent Twitter cloud on wordle via Tweetstats. Looks like I'm mostly running, watching, listening, and meeting.

I believe the habit and purpose of tweeting are changing, or at least changing among the people with whom I tweet. Tweeting is useful as either information dissemination or entertainment. Tweets of the mundane sort are becoming less common in favor of purposeful tweets with an audience in mind. While I still do tweet about the mundane during times when I feel like reaching out and letting the world know I'm alive and usually out of some sense of social insecurity, my other tweets tend to pass on information that I think will somehow be useful. These fall into the categories of: some interesting bit of news happening in the world, a funny encounter or OH, or marking some personal milestone that I think people who know me best will appreciate.

I'm still trying to figure out the best way to interact with all of you tweeps out there, so let me know. How would you categorize why you follow someone?

Twitter Micro Markup

Just like the semantic web I think Twitter would benefit tremendously from introducing a micro markup language that monitoring tools could use to pick up data more accurately. It's a fairly hard problem to parse blogs and tag them with semantic and qualitative data. Now think about shrinking that text down to 140 characters and you really don't have a hell of a lot to work with. If we introduce an abbreviated name-value system inside our tweets we can convey a ton of rich information that will be easier to get the message across to the companies and services that anger and overjoy us, events we're attending, observations we make, etc. It's time to take the next step with Twitter.



I think it would be simplest to put an abbreviated 2 letter type code at the start of the message with a sentiment symbol next (+ = good, - = bad, / = neutral), and the subject that you will be talking about. For instance I just got back from a trip to Minneapolis. My flight was delayed again (probably my fourth flight in a row on United that was delayed).

I twittered the following: "RV-UAL another trip, another flight delay on United". In the first 6 characters I know that this is a review of United Airlines and it is negative. Simple, brief, easy for both humans and machines to parse and interpret.

The codes I'm thinking of are:
OB = observation
EV = Event
RV = Review

If it's an event, perhaps the standard could be to create the event in facebook and snurl it for the event subject. what are some others? Let me know what you think!

company blog switch over

We just changed blogging platforms from movable type to wordpress at Collective Intellect, so now we are here. I would say overall the switch was a pretty good experience. It was fairly straight forward to import the old posts and after digging around I was able to quickly hook up google analytics, Lijit, and Twitter Tools. Twitter Tools is pretty cool because you can configure it to auto-twitter everytime you create a blog entry and it creates a TinyURL on the fly for you. Conversely, when you twitter (and you can twitter right from the blog page!) it will either create a blog entry for each twitter or create a digest of your twitters at the end of the day. This is the exact kind of interaction that will make the abundant social web survivable. Teach a man to twitter and he'll twitter for a day, teach a man to integrate twitter with all of his socialness sociality online environment and he'll twitter long after he's forgotten what twitter was :)

The only thing that I haven't figured out is why someone with "author" privileges can't post a picture or a link. I had to set people up with admin permissions before they were allowed. Yes, before you flame me, I'll flame myself for not looking it up in the documentation.

So check out the new CI blog and subscribe. We have some pretty cool stats we're pulling to predict primary results. Look for more of these predictions as well as some pretty interesting analysis we'll be doing around the superbowl coming up this Sunday!