Thanks to intrepid research reported by the Harvard Business Review, we can now point to something that supports common sense: the number of followers of a Tweeter is largely meaningless It also alerts us to the (some would say) cynical ‘sell pans to the gold miners’ approach some ‘operators’ use to make money by promising [...]

I continue to find Twitter such a fascinating laboratory. It’s like fast-forwarding time, like those speeded up hot-house films, and exaggerating the human condition, in so many ways. Trends, memes, flame wars … cool! The sheer number of eyeballs involved (naturally) draws the whole spectrum of homosapiens — from the Valley Girl celebrity culture to [...]

Poor Simon Edhouse. If this isn’t viral yet, it will be. IMO. “If deal goes ahead there will be some good money in it for you.” – How many times have publishing and design professionals heard this line? “The project I am working on will be more successful than twitter within a year. When I [...]

Wow. Can this be the future? Microsoft paying News sites to BLOCK their content from Google? (… while, presumably, allowing it to show up on MS Bing)? OK, it’s still just a rumour. Here’s the CNN story and this quote from Lance Ulanoff in PC Mag‘s “online news ice age” what-are-they-thinking?’ reaction — which resonates [...]

There’s a ‘phoniness’ that plagues the internet. (Peter Steiner’s famous 1993 cartoon “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog” has become axiomatic). Wikipedia suffers a scandal when it’s exposed that some phoney posing as a ‘learned academic’ has been pasting content into the wiki — which, I guess, compared to the fake surgeons that pop [...]

Tweetness and light as Fry ends Twitter spat Monday Nov 02, 2009 by Tom Peck The Independent Stephen Fry has apologised over a Twitter tiff that saw him threaten to quit the microblogging service. Even by the speedy pace of life in the twittersphere, it was one of the shortest break-ups in history. After being [...]

I’ve always thought when facebook and twitter got mainstream the kids would leave for somewhere ‘cooler’… as happened to MySpace. Now Miley Cyrus (1.1 million followers) has [reportedly] bailed on twitter… too trivial, too intrusive, too demanding, too ADHD-inspiring would be my guess. Watch her rap yourself, and observe her own entertaining ‘explanation’… Twitter followers [...]

Credibility, celebrity and their effects… Stephen Fry, whose Twitter followers now number 770,000, recently spiked sales in a book he liked… A book of short stories has leaped up Amazon’s book charts to become second only to Dan Brown after Stephen Fry endorsed it on his Twitter feed. Early today (10th September), the actor told [...]