Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: Weblogs/Blogging (Page 3 of 22)

What I’ve Been Blogging and Tweeting Lately

October 5, 2008 / / 0 Comments

Just a post to catch you up to what I’ve been doing elsewhere online recently, on venues other than this.  First of all, my volunteer/pastime blogging thing over at Minnov8.com included a post a couple days ago on a bigtime conference held here in the Twin Cities last week called the MIMA Summit. Mimasummitpost_3  It was sponsored by, you guessed it, MIMA (the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association). Here’s a partial screen clip of that post, and the whole post is here.

Then, just yesterday, I participated again in the weekly Minnov8 Gang Podcast, this one Episode 9 already. (Wow, time flies when you’re having fun.)  You can grab it off the Minnov8 home page via the link at top center there, as you can see on the second screen clip. Minnov8podcastlinks We talked about a number of topics, including recent confabs in the Twin Cities, the economic times, social media (of course), and, hey, even wine.

Finally, I continue to Twitter all the while — that just never stops! 🙂  I’m including here a recent screenshot of my Twitterstream. But please do follow the whole dang shebang here.  Graemetwitter1008
One cool thing that happened recently is this: I received a rating for my Twitter account of 91 out of 100 from twitter.grader.com.  Wow, that means my Twitter presence is rated higher than 91% of all the other accounts they’ve graded! Nice to know I’m doing something right..

UPDATE 10/6/08:  Meant to say that social media is a part of everything I do now for my clients, and also that I’m quite active in our local Social Media Breakfast organization. Be sure to keep the morning on Oct 31 open, because we have an exciting, nationally known speaker coming to town. [Actually, he was already here for a private gig, and I convinced him to stay over a night…  🙂 ] Watch the "SMBMSP" site above for the announcement later today.

UPDATE 10/9/08:  I see our local media site MinnPost picked up my story on the MIMA Summit.

Why I Haven’t Been Blogging Much Lately: Micro-Blogging!

August 28, 2008 / / 1 Comment

So, here’s a chart that shows what I’ve been doing lately instead of blogging here.  Yep, micro-blogging on Twitter. There’s a free service for us twitterers (or, as some call us, "tweeple") — it’s called TweetRush, and it lets us graph our recent Twitter activity. Pretty cool. Graemetwitterusage_2

So, for you blog readers out there that may have been wondering why I’m so quiet, I’m really not!  🙂  Heck, 232 tweets since July 19th is pretty darn active, wouldn’t you say?  And virtually none of these tweets is about what I’m eating for breakfast, or some lame thing like that, which is what a lot of Twitter detractors think people do there. Darn near all my tweets or "micro-posts" are news items or insights that I think my "followers" — approaching 400 now — would be interested in. Occasionally, some are replies to certain followers, too — though I prefer to do a lot of that privately via what Twitter calls "Direct Message" or DM.  Some people go nuts with Twitter replies, though — almost using it like group email or IM. Letting everyone sort of be voyeurs into their personal, one-on-one conversations. But I find that quite silly, actually, for the most part. I much prefer to use Twitter to publish useful tidbits and, especially, links that open people up to even more connected knowledge out there — and create conversations on the back channel, whether via DM or email. Twitter is having huge implications in marketing and PR. Game changing, as a matter of fact. I even have a friend — a reporter — who’s about to publish a book called "Twitter Means Business," which gets into a lot of that. (He interviewed me and people from about three dozen other companies.)

Do you use Twitter?  Are you following me there?  If not, please set up your own free account, and then click "follow" here: www.twitter.com/graemethickins. If you’ve already been using it, what do you think of it?  Is it changing your online life, as it is mine?

Mixed Messages in The Blogging Landscape (ReadWriteWeb) – And I Weigh In, Too!

July 27, 2008 / / 1 Comment

Here’s the RWW post. Excerpt: "There has been a lot of discussion recently about the changing face of the blogging landscape. On one hand many bloggers have turned to the likes of FriendFeed and Twitter to express themselves, instead of their blogs. On the other hand we have a group of professional blogs that are becoming more and more like ‘old media’."  See my lengthy comment (#7) — what do you think?

read more | digg story

Is Twitter Affecting Blog Frequency? An Excellent Discussion…

May 26, 2008 / / 2 Comments

A question keeps popping up for me: is "micro" blogging (as in Twittering) affecting "macro" blogging (as in what you’re looking at here)? I say it definitely is slowing down the frequency of regular blogging, because people are just spending so much time on Twitter — well, the rabid early adopters, anyway. But many of these happen to be long-time bloggers, too. So, Twitter’s bound to have an effect on how often they blog.  I also touched on this in a post a few weeks ago: Blogging Less, Twittering More.
But then I saw a discussion on FriendFeed a few days ago, which you see here in the graphic. [Okay, it took me a few days to post it because I was Twittering….and FriendFeeding.]  Twitteringcutsblogging_2

The comments to this post certainly tell the tale, confirming my own suspicions. By the way, I don’t know any of these people, including the poster, Veronica — but, yes, through the magic of Web 2.0, they’re all my "friends" now… 🙂

The original blog post that Veronica dugg on Digg was this one from Ryan Block, the editor-in-chief of Engadget: Does Twittering Mean You Blog Less?

By the way, if you want to keep up with me on Twitter, just go here and follow me: www.twitter.com/graemethickins.  And to subscribe to my FriendFeed, go here: http://friendfeed.com/graemethickins. There quite a discussion now going on amongst the digerati as to whether FriendFeed will overtake Twitter, with all the downtime and scaling problems the latter is having.  I even questioned in a recent tweet whether FriendFeed might be bought by Google (which would be interesting, since it was founded by ex-Googlers).

What do you think? Do you like one over the other? Have you even tried either one? Does any of this matter, or it is all just about the kool kids trying to find the next fad?

Can Twittering Add Value?

May 13, 2008 / / 4 Comments

Apparently so, based on two recent studies.  In the first, I’m once again honored to be included in a ranking by the Technobabble 2.0 blog, which is written by Jonny Bentwood, an analyst relations guru at Edelman PR in the UK. His latest ranking is called the Top Analyst Twitters (Micro-Bloggers).  Topanalysttwitterslogo
Earlier this year, my blog was chosen (for the second time) as one of his Top 100 Analyst Blogs, and now it’s great to be recognized in this newest ranking — at #18. As Bentwood said in his latest post, "It is not a massive shock that the people who have scored highest are the same as those who use blogging to great affect."

Technobabble’s methodology for its Twitter ranking was based on four data points, which were then weighted. Topanalysttwitterslist_2
The data points were 1) number of followers; 2) number of updates, which is what posts are called on Twitter; 3) conversation, or how many people have engaged in conversation with each analyst; and 4) "Technobabble points,"  the only personal, subjective measure in the algorithm, said Bentwood, with those scoring the highest in this category "having frequent, relevant, and high-quality content — asking questions, posting links or commenting on discussions." The following weightings were then used to come up with each analyst’s score: Followers=30%, Updates=15%, Conversations=30%, and Technobabble Points=25%.

In an earlier study, a few weeks ago, Louis Gray asked What’s Your Twitter Noise Ratio?  He said this in his blog post, explaining how he came to do his study: "I feel there are different categories of Twitter users, from those who
have a listening audience, measured by a high ‘followers’ to ‘updates’
ratio, those who are engaging, seen with near equal ‘followers’ and ‘updates’, and those who are more noisy, with a lot more ‘updates’ than
actual ‘followers’."

He explained how he did his analysis: "Taking a look at 48 Twitter users I either
follow or engage with, I found the average number of ‘tweets’ per ‘follower’ was almost exactly 1, measuring at 1.02. But the ratio of
updates to followers varied widely, from the sleepy 0.06 to the firehose-like 9.75."  I left a comment on Louis’ post, noting I was very glad to see, upon calculating my tweets-to-follower ratio, that it was 4.84, ranking me quite high in his "Converationalists" category.

In another article just published today, How Valuable Are You on Twitter?, Daniel Terdiman of CNet examines the topic from some other angles, including Twitter coverage of the China earthquake, and citing the opinions of other some leading observers and Twitterers in regard to measuring the value of this new micro-blogging medium.

What do you think?  How do you use Twitter?  Is it valuable to you?  In what ways?

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