Tuesday, August 11, 2009

To tweet or not Robert Scoble is the one single person who put Twitter on the map. His evangelizing from SXSW a couple of years ago created the buzz. Over the past year or so, he has switched to FriendFeed. Now, he just went back to his blog. Here's his blog post about problems with Twitter. Here's a response from Dave Winer (father of blogging). Like Scoble, I followed everyone who followed me (well, almost, there were the porn "girls" sites that I ignored). But most of my followers were self-proclaimed marketing gurus in "social media" or "search engine optimization." They were just trying to get more followers. To me, it's not the number of followers, but who they are. Take a look at any public Twitter site and you can see who's following. A quick scan is revealing. I've been using Twitter for conversations among people I know. Some point to links to things of interest to me--that's OK. But many are blatantly self-promotional. Or are simply links designed to drive page view numbers. The best use of Twitter was by a guy at a cable company who decided to monitor it for complaints about his company, then do something about it. I haven't heard of any other company doing that, but I hope many do. Otherwise, I'm not sure. Twitter is not an open platform, and the recent demise of URL shortener tr.im reveals additional problems with the Twitter trustworthiness. 7:40:54 AM    comment []

What to believe My wife has decided to become "educated" on a number of issues and topics since her retirement as an elementary school teacher. Not having a background in science, she reads and hears about numerous reports and promptly gets confused. This just happened when a cousin of hers recommended a Website regarding the effectiveness of a cholesterol medication she's taking. So, she had questions. The answer I had for her included: this article was written by an attorney looking for class-action lawsuits; she cites a report, but gives no information about the report--i.e. who sponsored the report, who did the research, how was the research done, what was the population sample, how long did the study last, how did they measure, what were the measurements. Media (your local newspaper for example) is guilty of just taking headlines and ignoring the science. This can lead to quite misleading ideas. Just to show how confusing things can be, I received two email messages at almost the same time yesterday. One from The Conference Board cited a study that unemployment has leveled off for three months. Assuming a slow recovery and that people placed on part-time status will first be brought back to full time before any other hiring is done, it predicts slow job growth. The other message from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) cites a Wall Street Journal article (I don't pay, so I can't see it) that expects job growth. Take your pick. 7:21:22 AM    comment []