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.

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.