The dumbest tweet ever? A major Twitter mistake

As an advocate and evangelist for social media and Twitter usage for business and individuals, I’m a big believer in the power of transparency and authenticity.

However…

It’s essential that you always remember anything you publish anywhere on the internet can, and will, be found.  Even if you’ve got privacy settings enabled, I’d still only ever publish the same things I would happily say in front of my family, colleagues and boss (luckily by being consistently open with them throughout my life/career, there are few times when it would become an issue, and I’ve built up a reasonable amount of trust).

I had a little sympathy with James Andrews, when he managed to slur the entire city of Memphis en route to speak about social media to a company based in Memphis. (You can read his own response)

But the current hot story is mindnumbingly stupid (especially in the current climate):

Someone offered a job by Cisco posted the following tweet:

‘Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.’

(Sadly the account, @theconnor, is now private, ruling him out of Tweet of the Week).

Within hours he got a reply from Tim Levad – Cisco channel partner advocate:

Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.’ (Original here)

Info via I’m Not Actually a Geek.

And because I can’t resist:

failboat

On newspapers, advertisers and social media

Russell Davies has a great post on ‘newspapers and all that‘ which looks at the current debate on the future of newspapers and asks where the advertisers/media planners are hiding during the discussion.

As he outlines the reasons why they’re not particularly active in the debate, it echoed my own thoughts – not just on newspapers and magazines, but also about social media. Consumers have jumped all over social media/social networking (175 million+ on Facebook, 133 million+ blogs, Twitter growing fast, Wikipedia essential etc), and celebrities, direct sale companies and media businesses are all getting there pretty quickly – but it’s all being slowed by the reluctance of the majority of advertisers and media planners to adapt to new ways of working, new measurements and new metrics.

Image by fatboyke on Flickr (CC Licence)

Image by fatboyke on Flickr (CC Licence)

Which means the people that will spend money, and the routes to them are evolving quicker than the money which will fund it, and that situation is the slowest one to change.

The enduring power of a good mash-up…

I dashed out in my car at lunchtime to run some errands, and while I was rushing around, this famous song was being played on the radio (it’s not the official video due to all the Youtube, PRS, music industry and other licensing restrictions.

But the lyrics forming in my head, and the video being pictured in my mind as I drove along was actually:

There’s probably a lot you could imply about original creations, payment mechanisms, and music industry copyrights etc…

I’ll just sit here chuckling and thinking about the quote on a T-shirt I bought from the National Gallery (is it just me that thinks their website is shocking?) recently – ‘Bad artists copy, Good artists steal’ – Picaso.

Guy Kawasaki and Alltop launch personal MyAlltop pages

After a year of aggregating feeds on a pretty large range of topics, Alltop has released personal MyAlltop pages.

MyAlltop - personal alltop pages

MyAlltop - personal alltop pages

What was nice was that existing Alltop users like myself got an email from Guy to give us the chance to secure our usernames before anyone else turned up.

And it’s a reasonably nice and easy set-up – register, log-in, and then visit any existing Alltop category, and simply tick which feeds you wish to include on your own page – then order them by dragging and dropping.

(For reference, this blog appears on Social Media, my Twitter account is on Twitterati, and my other blog, 140char is on Twitter)

And there are now accounts for Dan Thornton, BadgerGravling, TheWayoftheWeb and 140char on My Alltop – although so far, I’ve only had time to add my own feeds and will have to dedicate some time tonight to aggregating my favourite sources to the TheWayoftheWeb and 140Char accounts.

But why?

What’s interesting to me is why they’ve launched personal aggregation – one reason is probably the number of feeds in each category has become a little overwhelming. Guy Kawasaki is claiming the service features 31,000 sources on 550 topics already.

Obviously there is also an SEO benefit in having hundreds of people linking to their personal pages, and it means the service is more likely to get repeated fresh links as people add to their personal pages.

And it might boost usage as some people will prefer their personal aggregation over the category pages.

Plus, bearing in mind Alltop currently serves display advertising, there’s suddenly a lot more real estate being created, promoted and potentially becoming popular.

But:

I’m hoping there are more reasons for launching this new service, in addition to those listed above – otherwise it might not really fly.

As others have rightly pointed out, public and personal aggregators already exist – Netvibes, Pageflakes and iGoogle for starters. Plus options such as Google Reader, which also offers shared items (My shared items are here).

(Incidentally, Marshall Kirkpatrick has been posting some interesting stuff on Netvibes)

And then there are the popularity based aggregators such as SocialMedian, more semantic options like Twine, and the old school (e.g. Digg).

In addition, MyAlltop is hampered slightly by only allowing feeds already listed to be included, and not having any search functionality – meaning you need to skim through some fairly big pages to find your own feeds and any you know/might think are on there.

So what could there be?

Some people might find it slightly simpler to aggregate existing Alltop feeds than on rival services – particularly those who don’t necessarily already know a load of social media bloggers ( for example), and have their RSS feeds in other services.

Then there are the future possible options to include other feeds, display the selection as a widget, flag up favourite posts, perhaps group invidual posts around topics/questions etc, etc.

But from a quick brainstorm, I’m missing what really makes MyAlltop stand out at the moment – so I’m hoping you’ll give me some ideas to include?