The report, Who Says What to Whom on Twitter | Yahoo! Research, found that 50% of all tweets consumed are generated by just 20,000 elite users.

For the purposes of the study, they classified Twitter users into “elite” or “ordinary”, breaking elite users into the categories media, celebrities, organisations and bloggers.

One of the more interesting things looked at in the report is the lifespan of content, and what they found with media-related tweets.

“We find that different categories of users emphasize different types of content, and that different content types exhibit dramatically different characteric lifespans, ranging from less than a day to months.”

In its conclusion, the report found that “media-originated URLs are disproportiantely represented among short-lived URLs”.

We also find that different types of content exhibit very different lifespans: media-originated URLs are disproportionately represented among short-lived URLs while those originated by bloggers tend to be overrepresented among long-lived URLs. Finally, we find that the longest-lived URLs are dominated by content such as videos and music, which are continually being rediscovered by Twitter users and appear to persist indefinitely.

That can be seen in this figure, generated by unshortening 35,000 URLs that “lived” at least 200 days, and mapping them to 21,034 domains.

Read the abstract and get the PDF of the report here:
Who Says What to Whom on Twitter | Yahoo! Research

“i removed my follow of @guykawasaki as it just seemed to be twitter spam not a conversation.”

Guy obviously tracks his mentions because within five minutes he replied to Darryl.
You can read the exchange here, and see a screengrab below, but basically Guy didn’t seem to take it to well, for a guy with over 50,000 followers at the time. 21 days later and Guy Kawasaki now has 62,000 followers on Twitter.

I bring it up, because again Guy Kawasaki is being accused of Twitter spam. This time by UK/Europe TechCrunch editor Mike Butcher who, obviously not holding back, told Guy “you have nothing to say”.

A search of @guykawasaki spam or guy kawasaki spam shows a little of what some people are thinking about Guy and his Alltop content in Twitter.
I assume in this post that most people know what Twitter is. Guy Kawasaki was accused of Twitter spam because many of the links being posted in his ‘personal’ twitter account were not in fact posted by him.
They are a collection of links, automatically posted in many cases. You can read Guy Kawasaki’s Twitter strategy here in a Paddy Donnelly interview, and also on his blog, Guy Kawasaki: How to Use Twitter as a Twool.
Guy obviously believes in the validity of that strategy, recently suggesting four pages of just his links represented better value than four pages of personal updates from other Twitter users, in a response to Twitter user Jason Aten. Again, Guy seems to get very defensive about his Twitter strategy being described as spamming.
It also presents an interesting situation where Twitter founder Biz Stone is said to have suggested one way of monetising the platform could be to charge brands for “commercial accounts”. That link raced around Twitter, and I questioned at what point individuals like Stephen Fry or Darren Rowse get tagged as brands in Twitter. All the speculation prompted a reply from Biz Stone on the Twitter blog saying Twitter will remain free.
Guy Kawasaki is one who, clearly, believes the @guykawasaki Twitter account is business, not personal. As such, would he qualify as a “brand”? Again, in responding to TechCrunch UK/Europe editor Mike Butcher, you can see Guy fills his feed with commercial links “Because there is no business model for strictly wit and insight. Twitter is a work, not a diversion.”

This entire post came as a result of seeing Mike Butcher’s tweet asking why Guy Kawasaki did not let the @guykawasaki account simply express his wit and insight.
I unfollowed Guy Kawasaki on Twitter a week or two ago. That’s cool. Following him was my choice, as was unfollowing him.

If you follow me on Twitter, and ever think what I put out is spam, or unwanted, let me know. I claim to Twitter about online journalism and new media, but there’s a lot of blather thrown in as well, for example “Arise, and hie thee to #btub coffee! On my way there now”.
Not groundbreaking.

Image by Nimages DR via Flickr

Originally from my auto-posting daily Delicious links, I have cut this back to just the link I have added comment to. This is in preparation for a blog redesign, where I no longer want posts titled “links for YYYY-MM-DD”. A live stream of Delicious links will also always be available in a sidebar widget and/or stand-alone page.

UPDATE: I have removed the uTag script that automatically changed my URLs. And for brevity, the technical issues with uTag that I address in this post are:

1. If the ad banner is left open after visiting a site, the user continues surfing to other websites, and later closes the ad banner, the browser will automatically refresh to the page first visited by following the uTag link.
2. In the same vein, once the ad banner is closed, using the Back button will simply reload the banner frame, rather than going back to the linking site.
3. A uTag Death Loop exists, whereby a uTag link to another uTag enabled site will result in an increasing number of ad banners stacked on top of each other. Read below for how this happens.

Put simply, uTag is a monetisation strategy for linking. Several sites already provide link shortening services which have become popular chiefly amongst Twitter users, who need a short link because their posts have a 140 character limit. Examples are bit.ly, is.gd, tinyurl.com, to name just a few. The difference with uT.ag is that it aims to pay people for providing those outbound links.

The utag link will provide an ad banner on the target page and, at the end of a payment period, a share of revenue is deposited into a pre-nominated paypal account. The ad banner sits below the normal page content and can be closed if a user considers it too intrusive, but will the banner become more of an annoyance for people than the revenue is worth? Also, if users hate the banner so much they stop trusting or using your links, then you have a serious problem.

So it’s great in theory – a revolution of the link economy. Whereas people linking out to quality content were in the past building a reputation as a trusted resource, the idea is that now you can still do that, but at the same time actually be paid! But there are still some bugs to be worked out that may turn people off, and away from your content.

The uTag blog has listed a few external reviews of their service, while
Pantsland’s Brad Kellet has aggregated a few responses from his Twitter crowd after he asked for their thoughts on the banner ads.

I’ve implemented the code on my site and, as you’ll see, it rewires every outbound link to a uTag link (UPDATE: no longer). I see three main issues with the service. As Hugo Sharp, one of the uTag developers, responded to these bug questions on Twitter (@hugosharp), I present the exchange here.

The uTag death loop I referred to is a possible scenario in which a uTag link to another uTag enabled site will result in an increasing number of ad banners stacked up on each other.

Read the following Tweets in reverse order to see how this outcome, a double ad banner, happened.

So a brief experiment confirmed the existence of a uTag Death Loop, or as @hugosharp described it, a potential black hole.

As my last (top) update mentioned, the experiment was unsuccessful in that I couldn’t loop back to my site from Twitter, because Twitter outbound links open in a new tab or window. However if I linked to a uTag enabled site, which in turn linked back to my uTag enabled site, a loop of following those two links could theoretically result in a never ending stack of uTag ad banners.

If a high traffic site was using uTag links they might expect to lose a proportion of visitors who get sick of the intrusiveness, and apparent unpredictability, of the ads. As I mentioned at the beginning, some visitors may stop trusting your links, or using them at all, because of the banner they know they’ll get.

While you shouldn’t disregard the unhappiness of a proportion of visitors, some people may offset that with the possibility of revenue that the uTag link provides.

Mine is not a high traffic site, so with little to no return on the uTag banner ad revenue the uTag links may have to go.

On Monday I hit 700 Twitter updates since signing up to Twitter just over 12 months ago. Since Monday I have posted another 125+ updates, reaching nearly 300 updates in the first 11 days of September. Excessive?

From my Twitter graph it’s obvious I reached the Twitter tipping point towards the end of August, when I first actually engaged with Twitter – entering the conversation, and the community. Since then it has taken off. At first I followed the people I thought most influential in new media, but my Twitter use increased as I discovered more people in the ICT field in general, particularly in Australia and Brisbane. Twitter uptake in the Brisbane region has grown quite a bit recently – 1400+ who have entered Brisbane as their location – although actual Twitter use is, for the most part, infrequent. By grown, I have only my memory to compare that number against the last time I searched ‘Brisbane’ in Twitter.

So while blog posts and updates have been slow here on the webpage, I have not disappeared off the face of the earth, perhaps just into the murk of the Twitterverse. It’s not a bad place to be though – very good for keeping up, in real time, with the happenings of your industry (if you follow the updates of people and topics you are interested in).

I don’t use Twitter to communicate with family and friends, because most of them have never heard of it and, even of those that have, none of them use it.

As a journalist, Twitter has helped me not just in finding a few stories from people I follow, but has also started to help me find stories on certain topics using searches. I’ll go into that a little more in a later post.

In the meantime, I do have a few other blog posts in the works, and I hope they’ll spruce up this drab page in the very near future.

If you’re from Brisbane and use Twitter, @btub will let you know when there are Brisbane Twitter user meetups. As of this writing I haven’t been to the one that happened since I became active on Twitter, but there is one happening this weekend.

On Twitter I am @earleyedition, and you can see some of my recent Twitter posts in the right sidebar.

To watch the video, go to acidlabs, where you can also see a video of Jay Rosen defining citizen journalism. I would embed, but for some reason embedded video has been breaking my page recently.

I like the live Twitter event coverage (as a personal effort instead of just a pushed RSS feed).
The Twitter account web link was to news.com.au’s in-depth WYD08 coverage page, linking to their What’s on when? page, with an embedded Google map.
Follow that through to the same Google map, full sized, showing, amongst other things, pilgrimage routes, papal motorcade and boat-a-cade routes, and locations for mass.
The creator of that map, news.com.au journalist Alexandra Marceau, has also created 58 other news maps for individual stories. What’s great about creating a map for an individual story is that it’s a mapped record of that story, available through a permanent list of user-created maps.

Obviously, you say, but I’ve been in the habit of giving a quick search-generated map reference link to online for a news story, one that simply points to the intersection where said news event took place, for example. That’s not a permanent record, and doesn’t extend the news into the “user-generated content” section searchable within Google Maps. Creating individually annotated news maps is something I’ll consider doing from now on, time permitting.

It would also be much better if I could mash up a geotagged rss feed with Google Maps to automatically show news down to the street, or at least suburb, level. That’s something I would still like to work on, again, time permitting.

Mind you, somebody much smarter than me is probably already doing that.

Personally, I like the idea of geo-tagging content so that readers can get a map view of their news across the city, state or country, and then be able to pick out what news to follow in feeds based on particular regions.

I’ve been experimenting with Yahoo!Pipes in trying to do that with news content that hasn’t specifically been prepared to be ‘locative’. It’s certainly time-intensive experimentation while I teach myself, and is yet to yield the results I’d like.

The list linked to by Paul Lamb is by LoJo connnect, who are also conducting a survey of news outlets and their offerings/experiments in locative media.

Via:
Paul Lamb at MediaShift Idea Lab

A New York Times article last week tried to explain the future of news distribution by describing how ‘the young’ share news online via social networks.

SMO, or Social Media Optimisation, is one of the most important stories of the new media campaign – for several reasons.

1. MSM (main stream media) are beginning to understand that social content distribution is a serious threat to their current distribution methods
2. MSM in the main were disrespectfully late in adopting SEO, and
3. It’s only now, well into the Facebook boom, that people are starting to take notice of the value of SMO.

While SEO, Search Engine Optimisation, will remain very important to news gathering and searching methods, it could soon be superceded by a much more important player in news distribution channels and strategies – Social Media Optimisation, or SMO.

How do people share information online? How do they find it? How does social media facilitate this?

What the New York Times article shows is the acceptance, if only partial, of the concept of SMO – that news is no longer force-fed, it is now shared, social, viral, and word of mouth.

Young people expect to see video with campaign stories
New York Times
“And they’ll find it elsewhere if you don’t give it to them, and then that’s the link that’s going to be passed around over e-mail and instant message,“ says Huffington Post’s Danny Shea. Brian Stelter writes: “Younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading the Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.“
via Romenesko

Like it or not, for traditional news media the news is a commodity that must sell. For it to sell and make money, it must be traded, clicked, monetised, and advertised. When content went online, MSM (mainstream media) very slowly caught up to the idea of SEO – making content user and search engine friendly.

Arguments from MSM – and let me be brutally honest here – dinosaurs, have been that using SEO techniques in news media is simply bowing to a digital master. Many in MSM have for too long bucked at what they call ‘writing headlines for a machine’.

That argument represents a fundamental lack of knowledge about how the future of information distribution will be shaped, and does not bode well for the necessary rapid uptake of SMO – integration with Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Stumbleupon, and numerous other variety of social networking startups.

People use the internet to search for information. When doing so, people looking for a story about the conclusion of the divorce trial between Heather Mills and Paul McCartney would most likely use the search terms, heather mills divorce, or paul mccartney divorce, or heather mills paul mccartney divorce, or even add the word settlement to any of those searches. They will not search using a print headline like “Damnation of Her Ladyship“ or “Lady Liar“, from the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror respectively, both on March 19.

People use a search engine to find what they are looking for, so writing page or article titles that assists them to do that is by no means writing headlines for a machine – it is writing headlines that will help real people find information using a machine.

But as MSM has only recently grasped the importance of doing this, and just as they catch up and start optimising content for search, the rules of the game gradually begin to change again.

MSM need to not be left behind this time. News in the new world of digital media is shared. Social media is word of mouth advertising. Social media is recommending a product to a friend, and whether that be viral video or a news story, it is a link to content of mutual interest, shared among a community of friends, a seperate community of family, another community of professional contacts, and innumerable other communities that gather around hobbies.

That MySpace, or Facebook, may be the flavour of the social networking month and gone tomorrow as another new social networking site enters the friend-swapping fray, is no good reason to neglect to stay in the game. If you’re only just starting to embrace MySpace as the skyrocketing Facebook begins to face new competition from bebo, you’re two full lengths behind the leaders.

The only saving grace for MSM in the past is that they have generally formed a pack that lag behind the innovators. Be warned though, as soon as your competition gets a clue and embraces the reality of online content sharing and community building in their news distribution strategy – you’ll find out just how lazy you’ve been when you lose community respect and relevance.

When the editors and owners hit the panic button and ask, “What the hell have you been doing? We’ve been left behind!“ – What will you say?

Integration is not just newsrooms. Integration is leading innovation, or at the very least keeping up with it.

Traditional media no longer control the news distribution channels.
Seed your content. Link out. Allow your video to be embedded, linked to, displayed elsewhere.