This post is prompted by the Birmingham twitter “community”’s reaction to what some saw as unethical and “anti-social” behaviour on joining twitter [edit: as the guys from Artsfest say in the comments below, it wasn't an official account. It's now gone.] by the local council’s yearly arts festival, um, artsfest. In short, upon (laudably) starting a twitter account, they (either by bot or someone with a sore mouse finger now) started aggressively following people starting with locals, and it seems radiating out through their contacts lists.

They ended up with around three thousand followees (many very unlikely to be interested in a UK-based arts event) — the sort of thing that gets you a high ranking on twerpscan (this a screengrab of Pete Ashton’s):

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• Following thousands of people (people unrelated to your niche especially) is not only pointless (you’ll get blocked by people that otherwise might have followed you, your message is useless to many of those people) , but will get people’s backs up. Not a great first impression.
• Even if the twitter account is for an organisation (anonymous, or multi-authored) people need to see that it has personality. Bot-like behaviour isn’t useful — if those thousands of people followed you back, could you hold meaningful conversation with them?
• Twitter is made up of mainly tech-savvy people, pushing your PR message (that they could get from your blog or other channels if they wished) at them is SPAM-y behaviour, it’s shouting, duplicating and attention grabbing. Although there are many people that autopublish their blog links to twitter, the sort of people that will follow your tweets will normally be able to follow your blog on its own — what twitter is great for is additional more ‘personal’ information, nuggets that are exciting or interesting, but not worth a blog post.
• Re-tweeting your main message after each @reply (or aside) is wrong — those following you will get that message repeatedly, SPAM. Very few twitter users will find themselves at your page on twitter, and the tweet at the top is not your “most important message” it’s just the most recent.
• You need to interact, if people send you an @message or a direct message you should respond. Can you listen to thousands of people’s tweets? No, of course not, so don’t follow people unless you need to interact with them. (Using a bot to auto-follow people who follow you could be a time-saver tho’).
• Use tools like summize hashtags.org or tweetscan to keep an eye on conversation about your product, organisation or subject area (you can get RSS feeds of all of your search terms). This isn’t eavesdropping, it’s all publicly shared information, and if you see conversation (negative or positive) then you have a conversation opener with those people talking about you. You may learn some really useful things about how you are perceived — and be able to genuinely help people (always popular!).

Ariel Waldman on crossposting with social media:

Recently, there has been a rash of one-size-fits-all services that aim to provide a solution to “managing” various sites like Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Jaiku and Facebook all at once. As with most of my rants, they begin on Twitter and then trickle their way into a blog post - and if you’ve seen some of my tweets, you have seen my personal distaste for these services and the people who use them.

Like me, she sees it a spammy, rude and a little needy. More people are making this moral choice to talk only when they’ve got something to say — which can only be a good thing.

Hat duly tipped to Stowe Boyd, who’s in agreement.

Tweetmeme was one of the first services to check Twitter for links, and collect popular ones — sort of an automatic Digg. It’s been a noisy, if good, way of seeing “what’s hot right now”. But today, most of the links were like the one above.

Maybe we’re seeing some of the reason behind all those spammy twitter acounts?

Twitterfone is a new (beta) service that intends to let you tweet by phone — set yourself up and when you call a (national rate) number and leave a message it should transcribe and tweet it for you. I’m having a go:

I said: “Is twitterfone capable of recording and transcribing a Brummie Accent?”

Twitterfone tweeted: “”It’s just a turnkey voice recording transcribed in the boomy (ax?)”  — you can listen to the audio on their site, I’m not sure the line was great but I think they should have got “twitterfone” at least.

I’ll keep trying, if you see garbled nonsense in my twitter stream bear with me, I may not be drunk. reQall (the other voice to web service I’ve tried recently - it does calendar entries, notes etc) seemed to fare better.

Birmingham City Council progressively decided that they would livestream their local election results, which was more of an invitation than us politically-interested twitters needed to provide a ‘backchannel’. Having decided to base round the hashtag #brumcc (a few test tweets fired off as people voted in the day), it all kicked off around 10.25 with a very geeky moan about the format for the streaming (Windows Movie Player) and the standard of the the sound (there was a problem with the gain on the wireless mic I think).

The actual conversation bounced between pub-style debate, willful surrealism, and the kind of listening and reacting to the actual words that microblogging really helps — collating the “did he really just say that?” factor between other viewers rather than waiting for the host to pick the politician up.

Four hours of it made us all flag, but it really was a worthwhile experience and in two years (when the local elections come around again) I really hope the council harness the conversation in some way too. It doesn’t have to be twitter (which, considering the UK local elections borked it, may not be around) but it was really powerful - and if publicised widely could be really useful.

I did something quite strange and possibly annoying for anyone who follows me on twitter today. I tweeted a very-piecemeal book “review” of Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. It wasn’t my idea - it was Paul Bradshaw’s and I’d be surprised if he didn’t do a much better and more interesting job (I fact I know he did because I was following his tweets).

I did it mainly as an experiment, and also because from the bit I’d already read (and interviews with Clay) I knew that there were a lot of thoughts to share in there.

I learned, I think:

• That I can’t type consistently one-handed (put down the book when you’re trying to communicate, man).
• Communicating ideas as you have them not only forces you to to think concisely (as twitter’s 140 char limit does too), but helps separate points out.
• That I’m knackered, I’m not sure I’ll be doing it again - more from the force of thought than anything else (I could tweet something that long with less concepts and mental power need, but not a book like that again).

Sorry to anyone I annoyed, back to more normal tweet levels from now on.

I will not use twitter, tumblr or my facebook news feed to announce a new blog post.

Who’s with me?

[EDIT] I also vow to keep twitter and Facebook statues separate. (Thanks Si, although that’s a harder one).

The reason is that I don’t want to contibute to the “background noise” I describe here.

• The Charms of Wikipedia - The New York Review of Books - "Pop-Tarts are a "flat Cookie." No: "Pop-Tarts are a flat Pastry, KEVIN MCCORMICK is a FRIGGIN LOSER"

With people barely having a thought we don’t in some way publish to the interweb there’s continuous chatter about information overload. I’ve always been of the opinion that I’d rather have all the information there was, leaving it up to me to pick what I wanted and what to ignore. It’s this that leads me to never ever getting my feed reader down to less than 2000+ unread items (most of these are flickr photos tagged “cat” or various vanity searches for my projects).

So, given that the background noise is of my own making, why would I complain about too much information?

Well I’m not complaining as such, I just think there needs to be a solution to the problem of getting the same information twice from different places. A technical one may do, but I’d rather a sort of moral code.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, with people pushing their blog posts through their tumblr or twitter accounts, or into their Facebook posted items – this is information that I want, but I’ve subscribed to the blog I’ll find it there. It would be fine if the sources were just different ways of receiving the same content, but there’s other unique stuff mixed in - I like my contacts personal tweets, or their randomly tumbl’d web content, so I get the blog posts again. You end up skim reading everything, so I’m sure I miss things I’d like to have known.

I signed up for FriendFeed this week, more to claim my online identity there that through any desire to use it at the moment, but is it just another way to push the same content? ReadWriteWeb listed 35  ways to stream your life, albeit that some of them are rather hazy, I’m just thinking that I’d rather cherry pick what I care about from different people.

• Googlebomb Watch - Site that tracks Google Bombs