I was stunned today to discover that a lot of people just don’t “get” the Carrington theme by Alex King and the team at Crowd Favorite. To me it’s a no-brainer why it’s so damn good, and why I’m basing a part of the functionality of my upcoming Vanilla theme on it.

So being a faster talker than a typer, I shot a fast and crappy video explaining my passion. Comments welcome below or here.

 

Seen this before?

It’s the suggested users list that Twitter installed a few weeks back. A brand new Twitter users sees it at the conclusion of their signup process.

@biz explained a few days ago how they go about selecting people for the list, and it’s still a whole lot less than clear and transparent:

We’ve explained that the Suggested Users list is a bit like your local book store’s staff picks but there’s a little more to it than that. Our Chief Scientist developed a program that scans active Twitter accounts for a bunch of key ingredients such as how much of the profile is filled out, certain indications that the account is interesting to others in some respects, and a few other signals.

This program then generates a list of potentially interesting Twitter accounts that myself and some product team folks here at Twitter take a look at for another set of criteria. For example, is the account a good introduction to Twittering for a new user? Does the person or organization running the account have a fairly wide or mainstream appeal? If they are a celebrity or business, have we confirmed it’s really them?

Finally, we’ll do a gut check internally with a couple folks before adding them to the Suggested Users list. The list continues to grow and change although only a subset of twenty accounts are randomly displayed as suggestions during the new user signup process. Twitter is not paid to include accounts in this list. The Suggested Users feature exists to do a job—it makes Twitter more relevant and valuable to users. All that being said, when we find out Oprah starts Twittering for real we may very well put her on the list.

I don’t like it.

This is 2009 man! Folksonomy rules (ever heard of Cluetrain?)! Get with the program.

Here’s my super-simple, “very Twitter” way to do it… a hashtag!

I’m inviting everyone to “get seen” by @biz, @ev and the team and it’s about as simple as it can get.

Seeing how impressively the average Twitter user has got behind the idea of the #followfriday “thing”, I’m suggesting that you use the #ivotefor hashtag followed by the @userid of your intended “suggested user”.

The Twitter crew can do the rest…

So if you want to vote for Guy Kawasaki, say (a notable list “absentee” at this moment), you’d tweet:

#ivotefor @guykawasaki – coz he’s got the same name as a motorbike

Put whatever you want after the userid, but please stick to the format of the hashtag and userid first!

Got it?

Right. Get to it. Let’s see just how much traction we can get with this, and how fast!

Oh, and if you love me (why wouldn’t you?!?!), please follow me… @alicam. And I’ll be sure to follow you back!

 

Today Twitter is all abuzz about Tweepme.com.

There are a lot of people signing up for the service and they’re each sending out an automated tweet announcing the fact. And there are a lot of fellow Twitter users up in arms about the “wrongness” of the Tweepme.com service.

I am very please the Tweepme.com service has come along, because — aside from anything it may or may not achieve for those who have signed up in the hope of gaining lots of followers for no effort — it has caused the Twitter community to throw around (again) the question of what Twitter is actually for. And clearly there is no consensus on that question!

Here’s my opinion, as someone who spends most of the day with Twitter in view — more or less.

Twitter is NOT primarily a conversational medium. I should hope that is not a controversial point, but if you think it is, ask yourself — if Twitter really was first and foremost a conversational medium, why are “conversations” not threaded? Indeed, Twitter makes no effort to make group conversations easy to participate in or visualise. Even a conversation between two individuals on Twitter is only obvious to another person if they use a third-party tool like Tweetdeck (with some customizations).

Further, the more successful you are on Twitter (i.e. the more followers you have and the more effectively you’re messaging out to them) the harder it is to maintain any kind of conversational “flow” with individual followers. The Twitter elite have more DMs and replies than they can possibly respond to. Enough said.

So let’s agree that Twitter is not engineered as a conversational tool. That’s a by-product, as it were.

I believe Twitter is at its core a messaging platform… simpler still, a messaging protocol — a tool to allow one person to blast messages out to a group of “followers”, while at the same time electing to “follow” the flow of messages from certain other people. It’s a brutally simple messaging platform, indeed protocol. In its simplicity is its genius. That very simplicity is what doesn’t force people to use Twitter as a conversational tool. They can most easily use it just to blast messages out to others. Conversations are a little harder to do (well).

It follows then, that Twitter is not a social network (a category of web app that IS designed for conversation and shared activity). So why are people complaining about “spamming”, about cultural no-nos that implicitly assume that all kinds of caveats should be imposed on the nature, number and flavour of messages people send out?!

For example, I have no problem with someone using Twitter to exclusively send out commercial messages. No problem at all. I would however reasonably assume that that person will struggle to get anyone to follow them. And that’s their challenge, but I will not complain that they do not have a right to blast out messages of a commercial nature. They’ll just be lonely doing it, that’s all!

The sooking of many about Tweepme.com seems to center on the complaint that it’s not right to “artificially” inflate your Twitter follower numbers in some “non-organic” manner. Rubbish. Twitter does it! How else do you describe Twitter’s own new member recommendations page?! iJustine, for example – as wonderful a person as she may be — probably doesn’t deserve the 5,000 new followers per day she receives from people who I can guarantee have almost universally never really looked at her Twitter timeline.

I would put to you that the volume of non-organic followers she has amassed amounts to the “gap” between her existing follower growth curve and what that curve would have looked like without her inclusion on Twitter’s recommendation list. And it’s a bloody big gap!

If Twitter should have chosen such a non-organic way to massively boost the follower numbers of a(n arbitrary) select group of so-called “elite” Twitterers — “non-organic” in the sense that new Twitter users are for the most part blindly selecting these people to follow — then it calls into questions the very significance of this organic vs non-organic dichotomy… at least in Twitter’s “official” mind.

I have (had) much to say about how a person should conduct themselves on Twitter… about the tone of voice, the “best practice” approach to building relationships, about strategically complementing other online activities like blogging, etc. But I have nothing much to say about building a following. I say, go for it. Do whatever you can to get as many people following you as you can!

To use a blogging parallel, I advise my clients and students to use “social media” means — like Digg-bait blog posts — to accelerate their SEO activities and gain more links, faster. A client of mine may be selling to the scrapbooking market, say, but for the most part it doesn’t matter where they get (organic) links from… they just need to get a lot of them before they’re going to rank in Google. While I eschew FFA directories and other “dodgy” approaches to getting links, I assure my clients that the sorts of people who will give them those new links — off the back, say, of a promoted Digg story — are not likely to be in their target market, but it doesn’t matter because they’re good for a link, and that’s reason enough.

On Twitter, this same strategic approach means going after followers wherever you can get them. If you “suck” they’ll unfollow you soon enough, but if you don’t suck, you’re getting yourself to the position of a “Twitterer-of-note”, and that’s a good thing. I may sell scrapbooking supplies to women in Australia, but if I have a 50,000 strong Twitter following, I have influence and “reach” and it will only serve to strengthen my more specific and focussed sales and marketing activities to my target market.

Is anyone going to argue with that?!

Yes… I am (almost) suggesting that gaining followers as fast as we all can is quite acceptable. Be very careful arguing me on this point… because a follower is only an “unfair” or “unreasonable” follower if they didn’t want to follow… and on Twitter there is not, nor needn’t there be, any such thing. Unfollowing is easy.

Please let’s not complicate all this any more than absolutely necessary. And leave Tweepme.com alone.

 

Thanks to another invitation from Ian Stewart to take part in his annual blog post looking at the future of WordPress theming. I’m getting more direct and to-the-point as I get older and grumpier… hope you enjoy it!

 

I love this “age of social media”. We’re seeing the “populace” given voice in ways that have never existed before. Here’s an example from today…

In a Guardian article just published, entitled “The ‘continent of smoke’ is still burning“, writer (and Guardian Weekly editor) Natalie Bennett chooses very insensitive timing to discuss Australian urban planning, population, climate and such favourite lefty topics. She doesn’t seem bothered that the search for Victorian bushfire fatalities is not yet concluded, and the large number of irate commenters have expressed their disgust in no uncertain terms.

It seems clear that Natalie is not about to win any awards for journalistic excellence for this piece, but I invite you to consider this comment from one Edmund McMahon, which goes to prove that a commenter can well and truly upstage a writer, if his prose is good enough. I submit that Mr McMahon has done just that with an very well crafted, erudite and scathing response. When writing is as good as this, there is no need for expletives or rudeness to “put someone firmly in their place”… just the impressive force of linguistic excellence.

Judge for yourself:

Hi Natalie,

I have read the Guardian and the Guardian Weekly since I was about ten. This is the article which has finally persuaded me it is time to stop. Do you not think it is slightly regrettable to choose the death by burning of perhaps 200 people as an occasion to sermonise against the stupidity of the victims, and to admonish a bereaved society for existing in the first place?

Your article is – as others have pointed out – crass, moralistic, poorly written and grotesquely smug. A core of unexceptionable (if rather dimly grasped) facts, are wrapped up in a rhetoric which caters to a punitive fantasy dear to some Britons who are anxious to displace colonial guilt.

The real Australia (virgin nature and soulful indigenes) must be rescued from the yoke of modernity by the progressive consciences of Clapham! A population of 20 million must be reduced by four-fifths and a modern economy must revert to the harvesting of free-range kangaroos! I do hope you are getting up a petition against these draconian colonial ‘planning laws’ which prevent us colonials from living in a ‘caravan’ or ’small bark humpy’, as nature so clearly intended.

Professor Flannery’s arguments about population and agricultural sustainability (which BTW have been revised several times since you and he last chatted 20 years ago) have a lot of merit. But, as he would no doubt point out, traditional land management practices can only inform contemporary solutions. To propose that Australia can solve today’s problems by reverting to firestick farming is about as useful as suggesting that Britain could rescue its financial system by embracing barter.

Still, thanks for your input. It seems a shame that such insight, expertise and sensitivity is wasted on this expatriate preaching to the converted. Please come home, run for public office, save us from ourselves.

What a delight to read. His polemic takes on a life of its own. This is words as weapons.

So be warned. If you think you have the upper hand as a mainstream media (MSM) journo, you don’t. The social media revolution is upon us and this is the day of the commenter putting the writer in his/her place… and I, for one, love it.

Have you seen other examples of this? How have you seen the “locus of control” in the online conversation shifting from the few to the many, from the MSM to the Average Joe?

 

“The Obama campaign leveraged all the tools of social media to give ordinary Americans access to resources usually reserved for professional campaign operatives.” Genius!

 

The Christmas/New Year break was, in hindsight, not the best time to organize this competition… but never mind! The prizes are still awesome, and the quality of submissions has been really excellent. So we’re into Phase Two (no more submissions will now be accepted) and Guy Kawasaki will receive the list of ten finalists shortly.

In about a week we will announce both the ten finalists as well as the winner. All ten finalists will receive a FREE license of the incredible Market Samurai. Now, if you’ve never heard about this great piece of software you’ve got some catching up to do. It’s hands down the best keyword reseach tool out there and the handiwork of Eugene Ware, Brent Hodgson and team.

If you don’t know much about SEO or keyword research in particular, why not grab a coffee and check out this pretty in-depth chat I recently had with Eugene and Brent, in front of the latest release of Market Samurai… you’ll be blown away by what this program can do.

It normally retails for about USD$150 but our top ten finalists will each receive a fully licensed copy for FREE! A big thank you to the guys at Noble Samurai for their generous gifts.

For the winner — chosen by Guy Kawasaki against criteria of originality, creativity and wow factor — my company, Australis Media, is giving away one year’s free business-grade hosting on the same power-packed server infrastructure that hosts my own blog. This hosting package includes unlimited emails, subdomains and MySQL databases and all the bells and whistles you’d expect. It’s valued at about USD$250.

Finally, here just 30 of the impressive submissions we received…

Between now and when the finalists and winner are announced, I’d love you to drop a comment below and tell us which one of the above is your favourite, and why. Of course, If you find another Twitter page which you think is a stellar performer, you can link to that one too

(Note: I am aware that the Problogger Twitter page and a number of others were created by a professional design company that specializes in this kind of thing, but since I didn’t specifically ban “commercially created” entries, I feel they need to be included on merit as much as any other entrant. Sorry if you disagree.)

 

If Intense Debate was worth purchasing, why, months later, do barely any Automattic staff blogs use it?

 

I’ve had a massive two weeks since Christmas, working feverishly on Vanilla and it’s at the stage where I need the help of hard-core WordPress devs to polish it up for a public beta. Links to the Git repository and discussion group are here.

 

Well, I’d like to think I’m a generous guy, and I’m in a festive mood, so why not!

Because I run a few important websites (important to me, anyway!), I’ve got a really nice server setup with the amazing guys at MediaLayer. In fact, it’s kinda cool. My server is hosted in the largest datacenter facility in the USA (maybe the world)… in the heart of New York City, alongside Google and other heavies. But I digress…

The server is running a nice control panel and is all set to go for people like you and me who run WordPress (and other) blogs, except I don’t have near enough of my own to do it justice. So here’s my Christmas present to you…

I’m going to give away a full year’s free business-grade hosting to anyone who signs up for my Internet Marketing Masterminds program between now and midnight December 25th (the end of it!). That’s about $200 worth of premium hosting in one of the best locations, on a beefy server, running a fast and juicy LAMP stack… all ready to go with your WordPress blog, or whatever else you want. The hosting plan comes with unlimited emails, FTP users, MySQL databases and loads of data allowance and storage… what you’d expect. If you’re a normal blogger or small business, it will be perfect for you, and it would be my pleasure to give that to you for free, for all of 2009.

If you haven’t heard of my Internet Marketing Masterminds program… where have you been?? This is a training program that’s running throughout 2009, covering all the hot topics in social media marketing, and specifically targeted at the small business owner and marketer. No… this is not a course for the get-rich-quick crowd or affiliate marketing junkies. You guys are well served elsewhere. This is a course for the 94.5% of small- to medium-business owners the world over who have not yet properly taken advantage of the Internet to drive traffic, sales and brand awareness online.

Want to get a taste for it? Then just go over to my company site at www.australismedia.com, sign up for our (very occasional) email newsletter — no spam, we promise — and we’ll link you straight over to a 45min presentation I recently gave at a business summit. It’s great viewing, and it gives you a great foretaste of what we cover in the program. We’ll also cover:

• How to get onto the front page of Google fast!
• Twitter and “micro-blogging”
• Facebook and social networking
• How to do online video and make it viral
• How to start a blog and write great content
• Measuring ROI and maximizing your returns
• Plus loads more

If my maths is right, you’ve got just three days to grab this offer, of pass it on to any small business friends you know who have been bothering you to learn all this Internet marketing stuff.

Bonus Offer for Smart Marketers

Did I mention I’m in a giving mood??

Now, you might not need my course, but you might know someone who does. Simple! Just email me with the name of the person you referred to my course, and if that person signs up between now and the end of Christmas day, I’ll also give YOU a free one-year hosting contract too! That’s a free year of premium hosting for nothing more than a referral to our Internet Marketing Masterminds program! Do be quick to get those referrals in

The Clock is Ticking… Hurry!

My Christmas gift offer is good from now until midnight at the end of Christmas Day, so please hurry! Ben — my business partner — and I would love to have you be part of our Masterminds program. We have an amazing bunch of participants already gathered, and 2009 is going to be a year of working together to achieve great things… what you’d expect from a mastermind group!

Check out my introductory videos, full curriculum outline and more on the official page of my company site.

Whether or not you or anyone you know takes advantage of this, I do hope all my readers have a great Christmas/Hanukkah/Ramadan/whatever break and a moment’s rest before 2009 is upon us!