mad dog in the fog

• guardian.co.uk | The Observer: Focus: The Michelle effect
  My favorite reaction from one of the students who was visited by Michelle Obama in London: "Being smart is cool."
  (tags: education barackobama)

• SFGate: What is Biz Stone doing?
  A day in the life of Twitter co-founder Biz Stone
  (tags: twitter)

• The Imposters - We Got The Tweet - Stereogum
  Lots of fakes: @tomwaits, @perryfarrell, @davidgrohl, @benjamingibbard. The list goes on.
  (tags: twitter)

• The 6 stages of Twitter media coverage hell - Computerworld Blogs (via @steverubel)
  "…And now, the inevitable "Twitter backlash" has begun. What does it all mean?

  In a word, nothing.

  The so-called backlash is just the media's knee-jerk pseudo-contrarianism, right on schedule. Obviously Twitter has been clearly overexposed and overhyped in the media, and now reporters and commentators are both slamming their own hype, and, inevitably, attacking Twitter itself.

  My advice: Don't take any of it too seriously."

  (tags: twitter media)

Earlier tonight, I tweeted about the Ellen Show reaching 500 thousand followers on Twitter in just three weeks.

A few minutes later, Robert Scoble liked the tweet on FriendFeed.  Robert routes his FriendFeed over to Twitter, so it quickly showed up on Robert’s Twitter feed…

When I tweet a link, it usually only gets about 20-25 clicks but, in this case, the clicks went through the roof according to Bit.ly.  As soon as Robert liked that tweet, the link that I posted got over 900 clicks in about 6 minutes.

A few thoughts on this:

• A simple Like or Retweet from an A-Lister like Robert can drive significant traffic.  This is hard proof that, with the right exposure, traffic from Twitter can achieve something similar to the Digg Effect.
• The Twitter Effect can be very short lived.  In this case, my tweet didn’t get many other retweets, so the number of clicks quickly went down after about 10 minutes.
• Bit.ly provides great analytics for measuring stuff like this.  Is it useful enough to justify the recent $2 million round of funding?  I guess we’ll see.

• Podcasts | SXSW.com
  Audio from 2009 SXSW
  (tags: sxsw2009)

• ABC News: Social Networking Your Way to a Job (video)
  (tags: socialnetworking jobhunting)
• Artists, Bands and Musicians on Twitter (Google Spreadsheet)
  Impressive list of artists / musicians on Twitter, managed by @gcn1
  (tags: twitter music)

• The Internet Industry Is on a Cloud — Whatever That May Mean - WSJ.com
  “In its broadest sense, cloud computing describes something apparent to anybody who uses the Internet: Information is stored and processed on computers somewhere else — “in the clouds” — and brought back to your screen.

  But no two clouds, apparently, are alike. A company’s backroom mass of servers and switches is cloudlike. So are social-networking sites like Facebook Inc., or the act of buying a book on Amazon. Some clouds, like Google’s email service, Gmail, are public. Others, like corporate networks, are closed to outsiders.”

  (tags: saas cloudcomputing)
• tuaw: SlingPlayer for iPhone submitted to app store
  “It’s something many iPhone owners have been waiting for since the iPhone first appeared 2 years ago. It was on again, off again, will they, won’t they?

  Well, it seems they did. Sling has announced that SlingPlayer for iPhone has been submitted to the app store for approval. The company had previously said the app would be submitted this quarter, and it’s in just under the wire.”

  (tags: iphoneapps slingbox mobilevideo slingmedia)
• Six-Word Reviews of 1,302 SXSW Mp3s by Paul Ford - The Morning News
  (tags: music sxswmusic2009)

• San Francisco's School Assignment System: Forum | KQED Public Media for Northern CA
  Worth listening to if you live in San Francisco and have kids
  (tags: sanfrancisco education)
• Firms Seek Profit in Twitter's Chatter - WSJ.com
  "…in pursuit of revenue, Twitter faces the same challenge that has dogged social-networking platforms like Facebook. If advertisers can tap into its network free of charge, why would they pay the company to do so?

  Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the San Francisco start-up is watching the outside initiatives closely as it prepares to launch its own fee-based services this year, but doesn't view them as competition. "We want to work with those companies that are already making an effort," he says. "

  Mr. Stone says Twitter recently hired a product manager to oversee the development of commercial accounts. The accounts would offer users more features in exchange for a fee, but Mr. Stone says Twitter hasn't set a launch date for them.

  (tags: twitter)

Last week, Twitter started to run house ads on the Twitter home page. Now it appears that they’re running real revenue-generating ads.  Just a few minutes ago I saw a text ad for Tweetie, which is a very popular Twitter app for the iPhone.  They’re also running ads for Twittervision and the recently launched ExecTweets.

It’ll be interesting to see how quickly they ramp this up over the next few weeks.