from a social perspective.com

This post is a response to an invitation for a more in-depth comment on a post by Balkhis on how to use twitter in order to generate traffic.

Here the other night I was a bit bored for about 5 minutes. Yes, it happens that I am bored even if it might sound strange. I decided to take a look at who was following me on twitter and check them out more carefully. Since I only have about 60 followers the task wasn’t that big of a deal. After all I know who most of them are since I follow them back and know what they are up to.

One of my followers is a guy called Balkhis. When he started to follow me I noticed at once that he was following 14.000 users or something and thus I didn’t pay him any attention. To me it is very clear that when you follow that many, you’re really not interested to listening what others have to say.

Anyways, I decided to check out his blog after all and I found a post called Twitter to increase traffic on your website. In this post Balkhis describes a simple method to how following a vast amount of users will lead to a high number of followers to your own twittering and this having the potential to increase the traffic to the sites you promote, or as in his case, his blog.

The mechanics are quite simple to put it frankly, and I am not the only one with the opinion that when you follow < 1000 users you are no longer paying attention to what others are saying. If you take a look at for example Tim O’Reilly who I follow, he has about 6800 followers, and is only following 170 himself. I guess it’s pretty easy to argue that Tim O’Reilly is a man who has a lot of interesting things to say and thus is worth paying attention to. He also has 170 people that he is listening to. On the other side of the scale we have tradingnothing who follows < 24000 twitterers. Does anyone really think anyone is reading tweets from over 24000 people a day?

Apparently, Twitter themselves take the spam activity seriously. From a post at Getsatisfaction.com I found a post with an answer from the good folks at twitter saying:
We investigate every spam complaint by hand and we’re very serious about stopping Twitter spam on behalf of our community. If more people are blocking an account than following it, you are most likely a candidate for spam investigation.

Needless to say, the topic from the user was: Twitter banned me for Following too many people!

One of the things that Balkhis replied to my comment was the following:
It is called mass advertising. I am not sending anyone any email. Like you said, you got bored and decided to check it, so you were not forced.

And this is exactly what I think is the problem. Its mass advertising on a medium that is so great because it breaks loose from the mass advertising chains. The method is not innovative, nor is it clever. Some does “advertise” on twitter, like Digg. And that is completely okay. I have even set up an account for the media corporation I work for. However, that twitter account does not mass-follow users in order to get their attention.  Twitter is in my opinion a place where you can find what’s actually interesting to you and not be disturbed by other elements. And I did get a mail when Balkhis started to follow me on twitter. One may say that having the “email when someone follows you option” on is my own stupidity. But I am actually interested in knowing who is following me, after all we should have something in common since that person decides to follow me and that is of my interest.

So yes, when the intention to follow someone is just to let them know you are there, and that you have a message, I consider the actions to be spam and thus unethical.

And if you haven’t already, have a look at Ben Lorica’s post On Friends, Followers, and the Top Twitter Users at O’REILLY Radar

Just to give a short heads up: We are still alive. This blog has gone a bit quiet, and so has my personal blog lately. I can only speak for myself when I say that the energy at the end of the day hasn’t been at its peak lately. I guess it has something to do with the summer and so on.

I have however been a bit active at Twitter lately. I kind of feel like a “late mover“ when I say that the medium has taken quite some portion of my attention. It has definitely moved up as one of my primary sources for information and new stuff to read. Instead of following numerous blogs and RSS feeds I look to my twitter home when I have a spare minute for some reading. I still have my RSS feeds there, and I do pay some attention to them, however by following my fellow peers I do get a better grasp of the whole sphere. Also, having my colleagues sharing their best reads on their feed has lead to some discussions and greater information sharing at work. But as I wrote, I feel like a late mover writing this, because this is something you already know.

I have also been trying to gather some information about conferences this autumn, and it looks okay so far. I haven’t cleared any of them at work yet, but when I decide where to go I’m sure I’ll post some information about them here. What I really would like is a common site where one could gather a list of high quality media conferences. I’m pretty sure it exists, I just haven’t found them yet. If anyone is interested in sharing such a list with me or setting up one I’m all keyboards. I know some of the people I have in my twitterfeed travel a bit around on these conferences, however I only hear about them when I see the #randomconference twitter in my feed.

Since the DNA2008 I’ve followed Robin Hammans blog and twitter actions. Today he obviously had a rough day at work (sarcasm) and decided to take a walk out in the rain and show a bit of the English country side.

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Using his N95 cell phone and qik.com he streamed the whole stroll, commenting the scenery and even took directions where he should walk next (left or right) from the viewers. I found it to be a quite interesting and funny experiment to follow.

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He is currently still out walking when I’m writing this so if you’re quick you might get to follow the rest of the session.

On Sunday i’ll board the plane from Oslo to Brussels to attend the Digital News Affairs 2008. I’m really exited about the agenda this year. There are a lot of video related talks which I have worked a bit with the last half year. So it will be very interesting to see what others have to say about the topic.

Also, there are some sessions about news and communities/user generated content. As some of you know this is one of my favorite topics. One thing is for sure, I’m going to have a real issue with deciding what stream to attend on the second day.

If all goes according to plan, ill post some here during the days, but I won’t make any promises.

I haven’t been to Belgium before, so I’m a bit exited about that as well.

Originally posted at christoph.no and republished with permission.

TV2, the Norwegian television channel has created a group on Facebook to help the launch of a new football show.
The football show aimed to cover the Female football of 2008 airs on the 9th of april. The host is the well known Carsten Skjelbreid and they are going to have some new experts that “is as of now secret”.
The interesting thing is that the show still has no name, and they use Facebook to get ideas. The members of the group are encouraged to send in their proposals.

Originally posted at christoph.no and republished with permission.

All over the web you may see ads that have identified your location and either display an ad in your language or about the country or town you are in. The best examples are probably when foreign newspapers use Google Ads and display ads for flights and whatnot from your position to that country. I do believe that they have an especially good effect, not that I have seen any data on that. But, it’s a theory.
On the other side, here is a treat for those of you who understand Norwegian. The images below are from an animated ad about working permits in the US. However, it doesn’t seem that they have used any consultants to get the Norwegian text right.

DVD Jon is at it again, now with a pretty idea of software that I instantly think is a good idea. If it work that is…
I just had a few minutes to play around at work today, but hopefully after a few days I’ve gotten around to test it a bit more thorough.

doubleTwist is still a bit buggy. It crashed once after only 15 minutes and when I was accepting a friend request from another user by e-mail it said that I had rejected the invitation.

As of now when I try to send a request to that user I only get a notice that we either already are friends, or a request has been made. Silly Jon, that’s correct but it still doesn’t help us! I am also not the only one who has experienced that issue (In Norwegian).

Because of this issue I haven’t been able to test it properly at work, no one has the time now a days to play around at work, do they?

The software also works kind of slow, and each time it has to pull up a list or something the whole program stalls.

However, what I do find really exiting is the way they utilize Facebook with their application that allows users to interact directly with their friends through already established networks. This is also a subject where I am a strong believer.

I’ll keep testing it, because the idea feels sound. Just hope ill get some friends I may try to send stuff to.

Originally posted at christoph.no and republished with permission.

Today suddenly felt a need to visit some of my bookmarked sites. I really seldom use the Bookmark function, however when I do, it usually something I need to check back on later.

That’s when I came across a blogpost by Andreas Lunde about SimplePie. What SimplePie does is that it lets you set up a aggregation of several RSS or Atom feeds to a custom feed. It’s really neat and if I had known of its existence some time ago it would really solve a lot of problems I’ve had earlier. I haven’t gotten around to test it yet, but I suspect I’ll be using some time to figure out something neat I can do with it.

Surfing on the SimplePie site lead me to another neat tool. Flog Blog. It’s as simple as a RSS application for Facebook. I have experimented some with tracking traffic from Facebook to see what works and not. However a RSS application never occurred to me. I’ve set up a Feed from my blog to my FaceBook profile and I’m pretty anxious of how it works.

Originally posted at christoph.no and republished with permission.

The last two posts [1][2] on this blog have been made from my cell phone with ShoZu. I stumbled upon the software while checking what was available of new software to my phone.

The idea is simple (don’t you just love simple ideas?) it uploads your media content taken by the cell to different services. These services include Facebook, YouTube, LiveJournal and Wordpress. It also geo-tags your images if you have a GPS on your phone.

I have been looking for this kind of software for a while. The built in Flickr thingy that comes with my phone has served well in terms of Photos, however Videos is something that hasn’t been covered by this application. I have only tried to upload videos directly to my Wordpress installation, and that didn’t work as I had hoped. It only made a link to the video file. I want it presented as a Flash movie!

Hopefully there are some settings somewhere, just when I get the time to explore it some more. But so far it looks nice, and I suspect it will come in handy!

Originally posted at christoph.no and republished with permission.

Thanks to apple for making train rides suck less!

Originally posted at christoph.no and republished with permission.