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Shall I tweet it? Shall I blog it?

If you’re both a blogger and Twitterer, when you get an interesting thought you want to share, you have choices.

Do you tweet it? If it’s interesting enough to let people know, then sure – very easily done.

Or do you blog it? If it’s compelling enough, competing with lots of other stuff, and it’s time-sensitive, then yes. I have a list of over 60 blog posts I’d like to write, so something has to be compelling to get in front of that queue.

This decision changes over time. I’ve blogged for seven years, and was slow to get on Twitter because I thought I had plenty on my plate with blogging. Now more and more idea sharing happens over Twitter. Of course, there’s only so much you can say in 140 characters and sometimes you have to flow beyond that. Comments and blog posts can do that – they’re part of the content creation landscape.

I will explore this issue more later. I’m working on a blog/ Twitter framework that will show how they relate to each other.

It certainly seems to be an interesting topic to explore: what is the border between blogging and Twittering?

Twitterboard - a very interesting way of aggregating Twitter conversations on a website - launched in alpha yesterday.

I’ve installed it on this blog to give it a try. You should see a tab on the left hand side of the page. When you click it this will bring up the Twitter thread. I'll give it a whirl and see how it goes.

Twitterboard describes itself:

Tweetboard is a fun and engaging micro-forum type application for your website. It pulls your Twitter stream in near real-time (max 1 min delay), reformatting tweets into threaded conversations with unlimited nesting. Conversations that spun off the original conversation are also threaded in-line, giving your site visitors full perspective of what's being discussed.

The way it works is that tweets on the site are appended with posted.at/ and inreply.to/ short URLs which take people to the conversation. This means that people who see parts of the conversation on Twitter can go to the site to see a single threaded discussion.

That’s influence for you. After The Insight Exchange’s event Twitter’s Impact on Media & Journalism last week, the biggest front page article in The Australian’s media section today, titled Journos mastering the Twitterverse, opening with:

IT'S Tuesday and I'm at a forum on the topic "Twitter's Impact on Media and Journalism", busily taking down the speeches in shorthand. As I do, the business-suited woman sitting on my left is tweeting about me on her laptop.

"This is interesting," she types. "I'm at #timj talk about Twitter and media/journalism. I'm tweeting and the journalist next to me has paper/pen :-)"

Paper and pen? Got me! I do use them. However, I also use Twitter, which is how I caught up with her comment once I was back in the office.

It’s a long article, accompanied by three other articles on Twitter in media. The thrust of the article is about how journalists are using Twitter. It mentions Dave Earley’s list of Australian journalists and news media people with Twitter accounts, and Anthony Dever’s list of Australian media organizations on Twitter.

Presumably from these lists they have compiled a list of prominent Australian journalists on Twitter:

Increasingly, we primarily find content through aggregated influence. In other words, influencers use Twitter, blog, Delicious, Digg, Reddit etc. to highlight the content they find most interesting. Collectively these influencers make this content highly visible, driving at times massive traffic to articles.

A couple of years ago I wrote about Uncovering the structure of influence and social opinion, which drew on research on how just a handful of influencers drive the content aggregation sites such as Digg, and a little later analyzed how influencers and amplifiers had helped one of my blog posts hit the front page Delicious.

These topics will be covered in detail at Future of Influence Summit 2009 - details coming soon.

In January the grand-daddy of the tech news aggregators, Techmeme, started accepting suggestions for stories, by people sending links on Twitter along with "tip @techmeme". The most prominent Techmeme story suggestor has been @atul.

Atul is interviewed in Success Secrets of a Top Techmeme Tipper. The entire interview is worth reading; I have picked out some of his comments on his motivations.

New Scientist has published an interesting article titled Email patterns can predict impending doom, which reviews findings by researchers at Florida Institute of Technology. They, as many researchers, used the email logs from Enron, which have been made available for analysis by federal investigators.

The key finding from the research was that the number of active email cliques, in which groups exchanged emails between each other but not outside, went from 100 to 800 a month before the collapse of the company. This appeared to reflect decreasing trust across the broader organization and increasing stress. This indicates that very strong indicators of organizational health can be gleaned from network analysis.

Network analysis by Advanced Human Technologies of top executives in global corporation

Today I was at Twitter's Impact on Media & Journalism run by The Insight Exchange. It was as usual a fantastic event with great insights – I will be digesting and musing on the conversations and ideas for a while, and will incorporate these into future frameworks.

Below are quick on-the-fly notes from the event. Check out the Twitter stream #timj for the rich conversations from the event. For my own thoughts on the topic read my post from last week on How Twitter impact media and journalism: Five Fundamental Factors.

Here are my notes from each of the presenters – taken on the fly but hopefully a reasonable representation of what they said. Some of the presentations will be put on online in audio and hopefully transcription so will post links when they’re available.

Mark Pesce (@mpesce)
He begins by quoting Bob Woodward:
"Social media? It's noise. Twitter? Facebook? It's all a diversion. Good reporting is always going to be about hard work; about waking up every morning with the thought: What are the bastards hiding today?"

One of the most interesting issues regarding Twitter is its impact on the media and journalism. The Insight Exchange is running a lunch event Twitter’s Impact on Media & Journalism in Sydney on 23 June which promises to be extremely interesting, with insights from among others Mark Pesce, Renai Lemay, Paul Colgan and Corrie McLeod (click on the names to see pre-event interviews of the speakers by Beth Etling) as well as in-depth discussion by all participants.

Below are some of my thoughts on the topic. As an introduction, in the ABC TV segment below Mark Scott, Managing Director of ABC and myself are interviewed about the role of Twitter in media. Mark emphasizes that people want a trusted source for their news, whereas I point to the value of Twitter in breaking news. At the time I wrote more about these different viewpoints on Twitter and media, noting that Scott's stance "just takes us back to the traditional view that news is only news once a journalist has reported it."

I see Five Fundamental Factors on how Twitter impacts media and journalism:

1. Twitter’s role in breaking news

Sysomos has just released extensive research on Twitter use, filled with all sorts of fascinating information, such as 72% of Twitter users have joined since the beginning of this year, 53% of Twitterers are women, and marketers are 50 times more likely than normal people to follow over 2000 people.

I am always interested in comparing countries, so I pulled out and analyzed their statistics on where Twitter users are located to calculate the proportion of the population that are use Twitter. I used the Sysomos data on Twitter usage, the ever-handy Nationmaster for population figures, and a combination of the recent http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2009/04/at_current_grow_1.html combined with Sysomos data on recent growth, as well as our own estimates.

The US is in the lead, not surprisingly, though by a far lower margin than even just six month ago. The global growth of Twitter has accelerated recently, making usage in a number of other countries not far behind that of the US. The English speaking countries - Canada, Australia, UK and New Zealand - follow close behind, with Norway the stand-out in non-English speaking countries, together with the Netherlands and Sweden. The figures suggest Twitter is a truly niche interest in other countries, including France and Germany.

Techcrunch has updated its analysis of the valuation of the major social networks globally, based on new usage and advertising spending figures.

As last year when I did the same analysis, the most interesting part of this for me is the relative advertising spending per internet user across countries, and the very strong differences in what are sometimes quite similar economies.

The relative ranking has changed little from last year, though the absolute figures have fallen significantly. Internet advertising spending has essentially been flat over the last year or so, while there has been a solid increase in the number of users.

There is some great content on the Enterprise 2.0 Conference blog, including video interviews with J.B. Holston, CEO of Newsgator and Stowe Boyd. These give a flavor of some of the great content we can expect at Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston on June 22-25.

I’m due to have a call with J.B. Holston soon in which I will be very interested to hear his views on what I call the ‘RSS Enterprise’. He has some great insights in this video, including on the current pace of uptake of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, and the legal issues relating to privacy in different countries. A summary of some of the points he makes in the interview is available here.

Last night we had a conversation with Juliette Powell in Sydney. A small group of local digerati gathered for an informal conversation on social networks, taking advantage of Juliette being in Australia for the first time as she tours the world promoting her new book 33 Million People in the Room.

Below are the unedited notes I took during the conversation, reflecting what was said by the participants. It was a fascinating discussion, with just a few fragments captured here.

Notes from Conversation with Juliette Powell

After her book came out Juliette got invitations from around the world, including from X Media Lab for a keynote and mentorship program in New Zealand. There were limited opportunities to connect with her peer mentors in the busy schedule, so the only way to connect was online – the brief initial contact will be followed up on social networks.

Fantastic news! Juliette Powell, author of the freshly launched book on social networking 33 Million People in the Room, founder of The Gathering Think Tank, and leading broadcaster and media entrepreneur, is coming to Sydney for the first time next week.

To take advantage of this there’ll be an informal gathering:

'Conversation with Juliette Powell'
27 May, 6:00pm-7:30pm
Bar 77 (Mezzanine), Grace Hotel
77 York Street, Sydney

Juliette will share some thoughts on her book and where social networking is heading and then it will open out to conversation.

Juliette is particularly interested in learning about the implications of the National Broadband Network for her next book.

Everyone is welcome – just turn up.

Feel free to let other know. Event hashtag is #jpsyd

Juliette will be available for media interviews while she's in town

Juliette Powell and 33 Million People in the Room
Check out the website for Juliette's new book 33 Million People in the Room. It includes free excerpts, including an analysis of Obama’s use of social media in the presidential campaign.

Also see the Wikipedia entry on Juliette for more on her fascinating journey.

Here are a few of the fantastic reviews that Juliette’s book has received:

Today we launch our Influence Landscape framework! Click on the image to download the pdf.

This continues our tradition of creating frameworks to elucidate where things are going, including extremely popular visuals such as Future of Media Strategic Framework, Future of the Media Lifecycle, Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Framework and many more.

The Influence Landscape framework is launched in a Beta version that will be refined and developed over time, as influence is now one of our major research and content directions.

Tomorrow 19 May The Insight Exchange runs The Power of Influence luncheon in Sydney, which will cover how to create value in the emerging influence landscape. We are also preparing our landmark Future of Influence Summit (evolving out of the Future of Media Summit), due 1 September - details very soon!

A few quick comments on the framework:

DRIVING FORCES:
A wide array of forces are shifting value and attention to the influence landscape and from traditional media, advertising, and marketing.

A review of what had happened to the Web 2.0 poster-children prompted me to review what had happened to the companies featured in my Web 2.0 Landscape dating from May 2007. This was one of the elements of our Web 2.0 Framework which has now been downloaded over 150,000 times.

In the diagram below the green circles indicate the companies have been acquired, while a red cross shows the company has joined the dead-pool. (This was a quick review so I may have missed things - let me know if so.)

If you compare this with the review of the companies in probably the most famous overview of Web 2.0 logos and companies below, my list seems to have been quite a lot more successful, I suppose since I was selecting these as representing a particular aspect of value creation rather than being randomly selected.

[UPDATE:] I've just worked out that this means 32.7% of the companies in our list have been acquired in the last two years, which is pretty significant turnover.

Yesterday ABC Radio National's Future Tense program did a special feature on the future of conferences.

Beth Etling, CEO of The Insight Exchange, was one of the three panelists interviewed, along with Matt Moore of Innotecture and Katie Chatfield of Jack Morton Worldwide.

You can listen to the future of conference program here as a podcast.

It provides a great overview of where the events industry is heading, with some excellent insights from Beth and the other panelists, particularly on the specific things that The Insight Exchange will be doing to push the boundaries on the industry, making events that are far more valuable to participants than traditional models.

In particular there was a great discussion on the role of blogging and Twittering at events. This is something that event organizers must understand and work with effectively to add value to conferences. Beth also spoke about the role of online community building before, during and after events. This is about combining the rich value of face-to-face interaction with the potential of online discussions.

If you want to experience real innovation and value-creation in events, attend The Insight Exchange's inaugural event, The Power of Influence luncheon, in Sydney next Tuesday!