Take, for instance, my recent retweet about a Bertolli’s ad campaign.  @LowbrowKate tweeted the following.

Marissa Tomei is WAY to good for this: http://intotheheartofitaly.yahoo.com/

I couldn’t agree more.  I have been a fan of Tomei since My Cousin Vinny.  She’s way to good an actress to be shilling frozen Italian food in webisode format.  But look at the rest of the cast and you will see the star of the short lived MTV Sports – none other than Mr. Dan Cortese.  So I added some commentary on my retweet.

RT @lowbrowkate: Marissa Tomei is WAY to good for this: http://bit.ly/aFCSJF | Dan Cortese makes sense, though. He needs the work.

Well last night I got a reply from Mr. Cortese (which has since been removed).  Here’s the screen grab from Tweetdeck.

I couldn’t help but have some fun with Cortese.  My reply back?

@dancortese1 No offense, dude. You were great in Veronica’s Closet.

Where else but social media can a two-bit political hack and a D-list TV star interact so freely?

God bless the Internet.

(For the record, I had to Google Cortese to find something he was in other than MTV Sports. I don’t recall ever having seen Veronica’s Closet.  He has apparently done more stuff recently.  Frankly I am jealous that he got to travel through Italy with Marisa Tomei.  Back in the early 90s, many a guy I know would have traded a left testicle for that opportunity.  Way to go, Dan!)

It may be interesting to draw that analogy out a bit further.  It occurs to me that your ISP (and most other companies, frankly) are very much like your significant other.  And on a certain level, that has serious implications for consumer satisfaction.

When you are dating, most of your friends will never hear about how great your bf is on a daily basis.  When he screw ups, however, you’ll tell all your friends.  You’ll tell just about anyone who asks.

That’s actually very similar to your ISP.  Typically, most ISPs have tremendously reliable service. When that service fails – on the voice, video, or data side – you’ll tell everyone.  If the repair guy is late or doesn’t show, you’ll tell everyone you were stood up.  If he tracks mud on the floor, you’ll tell everyone he was a slob.  If it isn’t resolved when he leaves, you will tell everyone he left you unsatisfied.

Since everyone has similar experiences, they’ll commiserate, tell you that guy is just no good for you, you deserve better, it’s just a shame that there are no decent guys is no competition in the ISP marketplace.

A week later when you are browsing freely, cuddled up watching TV, or talking to your mom back home, will you mention that they’re taking care of you today? Will you talk about all the great things they do for you? All the great places they take you?  Probably not.

Most of your friends will eventually grow to think your boyfriend is a big douche who’s always running around and never makes you happy.  How many of them have ever heard you say anything good about your ISP?

The fact is, like relationships, telecom can be messy.  You may not always get what you want.  You may feel you just can’t count on them.  You might think you’re putting a lot of yourself your money into the relationship, and they just take you for granted.

But like relationships, we’ll get through this together.  Let’s just get a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, browse the web, or just settle down to watch Sleepless in Seattle OnDemand.

So without further ado, I’ll throw out the 26 questions I’d really like to ask, but would be unlikely to actually answer myself.

1. Have you ever been arrested?
2. Were you guilty or innocent and what were the charges?
3. Will you ever drink that much again?
4. How much do you hate your job?
5. How many times per day do you pray for an earthquake just to break up the boredom?
6. How many times per day to you hope for the sweet release that only death will bring?
7. Where did you lose your virginity?
8. How much did it suck?
9. If you could go back in time and give that person pointers, would you?
10. If you could go back in time and not be such a whore (or manwhore), would you?
11. Speaking of sex, how many kids do you have?
12. How many did you have on purpose?
13. How many times have you wished you had that vasectomy you joked about in college?
14. If you could have any celebrity killed, which would it be?
15. Would you make it painful or quick and easy?
16. Would anyone miss Lindsay Lohan?
17. Have you ever done drugs?
18. Are you still in contact with the person who sold/gave them to you?
19. Can I have their number?
20. Do you like Internet porn?
21. Ya, me either. How many times per day do you look at some just to make sure you still don’t?
22. Really? That’s a lot! You’re very thorough in your “research” aren’t you?
23. How many drinks does it take before you make really bad decisions?
24. Want to go out tonight for drinks?
25. How much time have you spent answering Facebook questionnaires/quizzes in a desperate attempt to regain some semblance of a connection with another human being?
26. How’s that working out for you?

Answer these questions then send this to or tag 20 of your closest friends then prepare for them to be terrified by your answers. Be sure to tag me so I’ll be able to keep track of the implosion of your career for my own twisted pleasure.

At issue is a column by the Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro about the recently announced TV Everywhere plan cable companies are pursuing. In his column Rob writes:

Yes, you read that right: To watch this new batch of TV shows online, you’d have to sign up for a traditional pay-TV plan.

The TV Everywhere idea has been a dream of some media people for the last few years; see, for instance, Mark Cuban’s defense of the idea. But I don’t get it. At all.

Well, my immediate thought is, “You’re right. You don’t get it.” But after that, words fail me.

First, Rob, this isn’t “a new batch of TV shows”. This is the content you’re already paying for, but you’re now allowed to view it online. In order to view Pay-TV online, you need to pay for Pay-TV. That’s sort of the whole point.

Pegoraro suggests that this is like requiring people to pay for a subscription to the Washington Post in order to take a college prep test course. Ummm… No. That’s not at all the same thing. TV everywhere is, however, the equivalent of saying, “If you want to eat your McDonald’s Happy Meal in the park, you still have to pay for the McDonald’s happy meal.”

Next, Pegoraro asserts that incredibly complicated things like “authentication” are way to difficult to comprehend or apply:

Set aside such operational issues as authentication (how do you verify that one person’s a Comcast/DirecTV/Fios/etc. customer and another is not?)…

Ummm… How do you know if someone is a Gmail user or not? Well, Rob, they’re called “accounts”. When you subscribe, they create one. They come with something called an “account number” or a “user name” and a “password”. When you want to access your service online, you type (that big flat thing in front of your monitor is called a keyboard) those pieces of information into a form, click “submit” and voila! You are authenticated.

Pegoraro, again:

If somebody wants to watch video online, let ‘em: Charge them a fee, make money off their attention through advertising–better yet, give people a choice between watching ads or paying for an ad-free experience. But don’t force them to sign up for an unrelated, non-Internet service.

Sure, because the “ad-supported” model is working so well for broadcasters and newspapers. Even YouTube (ad supported video) is projected to lose between $175 million and $470 million this year. Even TV advertising is a failing venture because people are skipping the commercials. Hollywood has begun writing the commercials directly into the script to stave off that practice. NBC recently announced that Jay Leno’s show in the fall will be “DVR-proof” to force advertising on the public.

Do such actions seem like the tactics of a business model that works?

So let’s take a business model that works (a hybrid ad/subscriber model) and force it to pursue a failing business model because you want content for free – content that may cost millions per episode to produce.

As for the comment that you are forcing someone “to sign up for an unrelated, non-Internet service”, that’s still ridiculous no matter how many times you repeat it. This isn’t a non-Internet service. It’s the same service you already subscribe to, you just have more ways to consume it now. However, if you want to consume it, you have to subscribe.

Finally, Pegoraro suggests that media companies should simply give up and make all their media available for free:

Repeat after me: Trying to introduce an artificial scarcity of easily-duplicated content on the Internet does not work. If you set up boundaries that make no sense to your customers, you will simply cede the field to bootleg redistribution of your work. Fighting this principle is like trying to push water uphill–with a broom.

Well, actually, Rob. Most cable content isn’t available online for free – even through bootleg. Some of the most popular shows on cable are HGTV’s design programs. I challenege you to go find a readily available bootleg source of them. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

…

…

Back yet? What about ESPN sporting events? They’re all available for free elsewhere, right? No? What about NFL games? Surely the satellite guys give those away for free and you don’t need to subscribe to get the Sunday ticket, right? No? Hmmm… Well what about HBO’s programming. You can get Entourage episodes for free all over the net, right? Really? Only the old ones that have been released for sale well after the air date?

How can that be? How can people control such things? How can they possibly defeat the bootleg distribution of their work? Because they don’t make them available online for free? Perhaps.

The fact is, despite Rob’s characterization of Pay-TV as “easily-duplicated content”, it’s simply not true. Look at YouTube. The most popular video sharing site will disable the soundtrack to your video if the audio patterns in the file match copyrighted content. Sure. You could cruise BitTorrents looking for content. And many do. Those sites are constantly defending against their copyright violations and go out of business regardless of the legitimacy they claim (AllOfMP3.com, anyone?).

You can also find websites that show grainy, handicam captured versions of first-run films – often before they appear in theaters. But the quality sucks. Under Pegoraro’s theory, movie theaters should simply give up the fight and make all movies (regardless of the cost to produce and market them) open to the public at no cost on day one. Better yet, just close all the theaters and let people download the movies for free? Heck, the studio could easily make up those $30 million salaries and production budgets by displaying an ad for mortgage caluclators right along side the film, right?

An AdAge article by Jonah Bloom titled Dedicated Social-Media Silos? That’s the Last Thing We Need caught my eye and I took a read. Bloom thesis is pretty sound – when a “new way” appears, people split into two camps. The adherents or adopters of the new way begin to see it as a critical component of future planning and separate from those who do not adapt.

Every time an apparently foreign object is identified… the inhabitants split, roughly speaking, into two parties — those who fear the foreign body and those who are excited by it. The excited annex the object and create their own nation around it. The fearful homelanders breathe a sigh of relief and go back to doing whatever it was they were doing — albeit with just a few nagging fears about the ambitions of the fledgling country being built next door.

I have, myself, led the march of adherents in several instances and find I am still doing so today. I have, for much of my career, seen the “nagging fears“. I sense the derision and skepticism every time my fellow blogger and I walk the halls at our office and hear the “there go the ‘bloggers’ with their ‘Twitters’ and their ‘FaceySpaces”‘.” He and I often wonder if the first media guy at the association heard, “there goes the ‘TV’ guy with his ‘saturation buy’ and his ‘gross rating points’.”

When people sense change, but fear or don’t understand it, they mock it. They make it different.

But the adherents to the new way are no different. Look at my old blog post that I linked above. I sound like a cokcy prick. Only my way can save us.

At the RNC I led the creation of a new Internet division charged with overseeing all things digital. It was, to say the least, a mistake in retrospect. The problem was not one of divisional boundaries. As Bloom argues:

By dedicating resources and attention to the new medium, discipline or, in social media’s case, idea, those who work in the field are able to quickly advance it and ensure that it prospers.

The problem, however, is that the new and old states cannot exist successfully without the other, a fact they realize after they have set up separate and often competitive fiefdoms that barely speak the same language.

Elevating the importance of the eCampaign division at the RNC was beneficial as it made people think differently about the role of the Internet. Over the long term, however, I believe it has ultimately proved harmful because it has created a new layer of bureaucracy. Further, the focus on how to be tech-savvy has, I believe, detracted from the larger mission of how to be savvy.

I am hereby reversing my earlier position that the Internet be given special prominence in your organization or campaign.

The RNC dodesn’t need a division for the Internet, they need people (not a person) in Communications that recognize the Internet’s role as a channel for multiple types of communications. That could be blog outreach, banner advertising, SEO, social media, or countless other ways to move a message or have a conversation.

The RNC needs people in political that understand how these tools can be used for organizing, and more importantly, how the people can be empowered via these tools to organize themselves.

The RNC needs people in finance that understand the difference between revised direct mail copy and good e-mail. They need people who understand SocNets and the way to leverage them to make small dollars add up to big bucks.

Your online media is no more, and no less important than anything else you do. The fact that you can use new media to more quickly attract and reach customers or voters has little relevance if you have no idea what to say to them and no idea what you want them to do.

Before I became “an Internet guru” (not my word choice, but one that I hear when I’m introduced), I was simply a political operative. I did statistical analysis to determine voting patterns and I focused on things like voter files, turnout models, and coalition building.

When I listen to twenty-something consultants taking about the Internet and what it will do, most of that is gone. There is much discussion of the long tail and the crowdsourcing, but little discussion of the offline mechanics of politics – as if every conversation in every diner in America has been supplanted with Twitter.

Now don’t get me wrong. I strongly believe that every conversation taking place at every diner in America is currently taking place online. But for most people, the real world is still their playground of choice. We cannot become so focused on our love of innovation that we lose sight of the core technology at the heart of politics – people.

Just as books changed the way we told stories, radio changed the number of people to whom we could tell them, and video changed the richness of our narrative, the Internet will empower us all to be both story teller and audience. The story, however, is still the same, and no media can claim supremacy. Before we act high and mighty, we must, as Bloom says, look at what we are leaving behind.

Mistake number two (and ultimately a bigger mistake than actually signing up) came in the form of clicking the “See who you know on Naymz” link.

Under normal circumstances, the “who do you know” phase of social netowrk sign up goes something like this:

1. I select the form of my address book (Gmail, Yahoo, etc) and it searches my contacts.
2. It shows me a list of the contacts who are currently members and asks me if I would like to become “friends” or whatever the nomenclature they use may be
3. It then shows me a lit of all the unmatched addresses and asks if I would like to mail them an invite (to which I universally say no)
4. If I say yes, it e-mails my friends an invite (ONCE!)

This is where Naymz does things a little differently.

Naymz will let you connect to other social networks to find connections. I chose LinkedIn. It scanned my contacts and presented a list, just like the others do.

Naymz, however, actually combines step two and step three above. It presents the list, and lets you send your messages. Since I have signed up for dozens of these networks to test them out, and I have never seen anyone stray too far from the steps I outlined, I clicked ok. I failed to notice that Naymz includes a small icon and disclaimer that says only those people identified with the icon are users (very few of the people I know are – even now). It also says you should remove anyone you don’t want to mail. The icon and disclaimer are small enough that I missed it completely the first time through and only found it after I became aware of my original mistake.

Now, I had expected to see a list of unmatched addresses after clicking that button. What I saw instaed was an immediate inflow of e-mail that had subject lines like, “What the hell is Naymz?”

I spent the better part of a day apologizing to people for the Naymz spam and told them they should not take that as an endorsement of Naymz. I told everyone that I was simply testing it out to see what I thought.

Since that fateful day, I have recieved many more messages asking the same question. Until today, I had always assumed that was because they had just opened the original message.

However, upon actually logging in to Naymz today (I was looking for a way to turn off or limit their WAY too frequent messages to me), I discovered Naymz has been e-mailing constant reminders (a la Plaxo) to those who had not replied. It hadn’t simply used my name to spam them once, it was following up with mupltiple requests.

So now my Naymz account is cancelled. If you received a request from me to sign up, I apologize profusely. If you said yes to that request, doubly so. If you didn’t say yes, and have been bombarded by further appeals since, even more so.

I had told some people that I would let them know my thoughts when I got done with my evaluation. So here it is:

I would avoid Naymz like it’s the plague. It combines all the annoying characteristics of Plaxo with the disregard for informed consent typically reserved for malware.

I have deleted my account. That is a rare step for a guy who has littered the Internet with unused SocNet accounts. But I am not stopping there.

I hereby hope and pray that the good people at Naymz suffer the karmic ass kicking which they have rightly earned. They’ll go down with Plaxo and Gator as yet another Internet scourge.

I have, for several months now, seen a string of posts and tweets from these same lefty friends that are either mocking or dismissive of the Conservatives nascent efforts on Twitter. Here’s one example courtesy of TechPresident’s own Micah Sifry.

It’s positively quaint to listen to Republicans murmur optimistically about their “dominance” on Twitter. #polc09, #tcot, #p2

The very first time I saw one, it reminded me immediately of comments I had seen and heard before. They were the openly dismissive comments directed by complacent and cocky Republicans at the Democrats efforts online.

I specifically remember more than a few people, myself included, who watched the rise of the online left with initial derision. As late as 2004 and 2005, I heard things like, “The Democrats and their blogs. How’s that working out for them? All that effort and how many wins has it resulted in?”

Beginning with Conrad Burns and George Allen, we began to quickly see the results of “those blogs”. It’s a lesson we failed to heed early on, and it contributed greatly to our demise.

What we failed to recognize was the infancy of an effort to use new technology to mobilize. It was an effort to build a new network and the infrastructure to disseminate a coherent message.

I have argued that the reason the Democrats never mastered talk radio was very simple – they never had to. In modern politics, the insurgent party will adapt to the most interactive (and the most real-time) technology available at the time. In 1992, having lost the White House, House and Senate, the GOP gravitated toward talk radio. Despite it being a broadcast medium, it was the most interactive medium available. It was adapted to facilitate the conversation about the direction of the party and the country.

The Democrats, rising out of the loss in 2000, had to coallesce around a platform. Talk radio, had the Internet not been available, would likely have become the staging area and the rise of the left on talk radio would have been a near certainty. But a funny thing happened on the march toward the AM dial.

With the Internet, blogs and Meetup became the new polis for the exiled Democrats.

Now you could argue that two data points is hardly enough to qualify my central thesis – the adaption of interactive forums by the out party. But keep in mind that Americans detachment from one another and from in-person communities really didn’t explode until about this same time. Prior to that, most people who were politically active simply turned to their party and its structures. It’s just the last 20 years that have split us from our parties and each other, so we can only look at the data available.

That brings us back to the present day and the Republicans.

Now that we are the out party, we are turning to the Internet to discuss, debate and strategize the party’s future. It is no longer, however, simple enough to label “The Internet” as a monolithic thing the way we did with the Democratic use of the medium. The Internet is no longer about websites as it was with blogs and Meetup. The Internet, as it exists today, is more a generic platform for advanced communication services – whether they are site based, text messages, cellular applications, or anything else.

In the world of converging technologies, Twitter represents the single most interactive, most real-time, tool available. Twitter is mobile. Twitter is rapid. Twitter facilitates deep content (via linking) and fast action (via retweets and viral distribution).

For the Democrats that dismiss Republican testing of many and various models of activism on Twitter, you should watch very closely what’s going on, rather than simply mocking it. Complacency and satisfaction with your status quo is a slippery slope and it’s very easy to fall into the “yes, but what has it gotten them” mindset.

It is likely, I would even say certain, that Twitter, or some next generation concept that builds upon Twitter’s framework, will be a central component of the GOP resurgence. It most certainly won’t happen overnight. However, I guarantee you will – when you find yourself out of power again – be able to trace the roots of your downfall to this earliest of efforts.

Until then, to my friends on the left, let me say two things. First, we’ll keep using Twitter, and you can keep cracking jokes. Second, as long as you do, we’ll see you on the other side, soon enough.

Update: Based on further conversation (via Twitter) about this post, I need to clarify a point. I’m not claiming the GOP is currently “dominant” on Twitter. That was Micah’s reference. I’m simply looking at the tendency for conservatives to adapt to Twitter faster and easier than they have other online venues.

The left’s attitude (represented by Micah’s comment) seems to me to be that the GOP is putting all its eggs in the Twitter basket without doing all the other things that the left did to be successful. My argument is that’s a false assumption. It requires that the GOP mimic the left to advance online. Just as the left bypassed the right’s use of talk radio and went straight on to a different model, I think the right may be able to skip directly past the duplication of the left’s infrastructure by simply making use of what are currently the most advanced communications and mobilization tools. I see evidence that many in the right are developing new models in an effort to do just that.

Those new models have not yet become “dominant”. My central premise is, however, is that many on the left and right seem to believe we must embrace the left’s status quo. I, on the other hand, believe our salvation will not come in duplicating their model, but in creating a new paradigm for our own activism.

My problems have to do with Meghan McCain as a pseudo-celeb trying to force her views on people. It’s the same problem I have with people like Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian telling me what to think – people who have achieved nothing in life other than being born well.

Her latest appearance on The View was much like her written rant about Karl Rove – exaggeration, fabrication, and utter mind-humbing rot coming from a woman who would be unemployable if she weren’t the daughter of a former POTUS candidate. She has never met a truth she couldn’t stretch.

I joined Twitter a few months ago…

No, you didn’t. You joined six weeks ago. You know how I know that? Because you tweeted it on March 7.

We need to take Twitter back from the creepy people.

The creepy people who have been on Twitter for months or even years longer than you have? That’s right, Rove was on twitter two months before you were? What’s next? Are you going to demand we take America back from those creepy Native Americans that live near your parents’ house in Scottsdale?

Let us, instead, look at who contributes more to Twitter. Karl Rove has 43,000 followers and follows 40,000. That’s right. He actually listens to just about as many people as he talks to. What about you, Meghan?

Followers: 26327
Following: 68

Sixty-eight? I have followed more than 68 people completely on accident! How do you have 26,000 followers, but only listen to 68 people? It’s clear you don’t give a shit about the opinions of more than 99.7% of the people interested in your drivel.

Sometimes [Karl Rove] takes questions; other times he talks about his appearances on cable news and other shows. But he doesn’t say anything substantive.

Oh… so we should judge the two of you on substance. Ok… Surely, for someone with a lot to say, you must really put some thought provoking content up on Twitter, right?

I have a very exciting meeting today and the only dilemma is what to wear.

I remember some frito pies and I feel like I ate a lot of chicken patties and jello growing up 2, I loved my cafeteria!

I used to have the hugest crush on Eminem when I was in high school and he still looks hot in his new music video!!

Howard [Stern], I would so go on your show (but I would go on in a suit and keep my clothes on)

Now compare that to Karl Rove:

Please take time 2 read at least 1 of the interrogation memos. I’ve posted them on my website here > http://twurl.nl/b7iiik

Polling News & Notes: The Internet’s Growing Role in American Politics (PDF Download) http://twurl.nl/xm0eon

Politicians ignore tea parties at their peril. http://jijr.com/hehc

Wow! Clearly Meghan’s is a superior intellect. Why talk about foreign policy, trends in American politics, and political activism when you can talk about clothes, not taking your clothes off, jello and eminem.

(Meghan then goes on to pump up her dad’s use of Twitter and how it’s all him. Of course, this is the same guy that told us he couldn’t use a Blackberry because of his arm injuries. So which is it? Is he an invalid who can’t work his own thumbs, but wanted to keep a finger on the nuclear trigger? Or is he a twittering fool?)

Now, like I said, I have no problem with Meghan’s criticism of the GOP. She’s right on many counts.

What I do find tremendously offensive about her is the the fact that trashing the GOP seems to be more of a routine she performs to keep the media spotlight on herself. Now that dear old dad is no longer running for office, how can I keep people’s attention. I’ve got it. Rather than try to be a constructive voice, I’ll just kick the GOP while it’s down. That should get me on camera.

And don’t, for even a moment, think I am a big fan of Karl’s. For all his recent embrace of the Internet and jumping into the discussion, I have seen firsthand his real disdain for that discussion. I don’t buy his bullshit at all.

However, given a choice between the hypocrite and the ridiculous preening of the media whore, I had to flip a coin…

…and Meghan, you lost.

That’s a hard concept to grapple with, but in many ways it’s true. At South By Southwest yesterday, the panel tackling online privacy the panelists spent a great deal of time discussing online privacy within our current framework for such discussions – “my data is me”.

One panelist went so far as to suggest that your metadata had an assessable value. He suggested that you should have full control over it and went so far as to suggest that you should be compensated for its use.

That prompted me to tweet the following:

Your individual information has no value. Only in aggregation does it gain value. Nobody targets “you”. They target the characteristic.

That led to a bit of chatter on Twitter and some discussions with people there. Most of those forums weren’t really sufficient for really fleshing out the idea, so let me explain.

First, you should understand that the comment was made in the context of privacy and targeted advertising. My friend Paul actually took the concept in a completely different direction and has been pondering the value of individual Twitter content versus the collective. It’s an interesting take, and one I’ll think on. For purposes of this post, however, I’m talking about targeted advertising and your personal data.

You golf. You eat at various restaurants. You travel. You buy things. You have credit cards for certain stores. You are a collection on indivisual characteristics. In typical psychological analysis, those personal characteristics could probably be described as the self. The “self” is very important to our conception of the world.

In the world of digital advertising, however, the self is irrelevant. Those characteristics are meaningless. Unless you are buying very, very expensive luxury goods, there is a high degree of probability that no advertiser is targeting “you”. No advertiser will run an ad campaign with the sole purpose of getting “you” to buy their product. There is simply no economic benefit to limiting your audience to one person.

They are, instead, targeting a collection of characteristics that you happen to have, and characteristics you share with many, many, other people. Your concept of protecting “your” metadata, then, is illusory. There is nothing of value to protect.

How can that be, though? Advertisers will pay a premium to reach me based on that data. So clearly my metadata has worth.

I’m Unique, Just Like Everybody Else.

Advertisers devlop a profile of the person likely to buy their products. That information is matched against consumer information databases. If your profile happens to match those characteristics, those advertisers will deliver an ad unit to you.

However, they’re not delivering that unit to “you”. They are delivering it to a random identifier in a database which matches a random set of variables they found important.

The problem is our sense of our own identity is tied inextricably to that random set of variables. When people use it to communicate with us, we fell manipulated – we feel like big brother is watching us.

I followed up my first tweet with another that read:

A noble goal would be to get people to divoce their concept of “me” from the individual characteristics that comprise that.

I say “noble” in the sense that we hamper our ability to get the most out of the digital world when we cling to these antiquated notions of “self”. The benefit of the digital world comes from the aggregation of data, information, and creation. We recognize the wisdom of crowdsourcing movements and creating in a collaborative environment, yet we resist the aggregation of information for the purpose of making advertising more efficient.

I, for one, welcome a world of targeted advertising. I may never (at least until I’m 50 or 60) have to watch another Viagra or Cialis ad. I may never see another dancing mortgage calculator.

It is ironic that the value of your personal data, and your control over it, was argued at a conference on digital media. The panels at SXSW spend a great deal of time discussing corporations and the fact that they must give up “control”.

That takes many forms. PR practitioners must give up control of their message. Intellectual property holders must give up control of their creation. Network owners must give up control of their networks.

Despite this, we cling to the notion of “our control” of our data based on the flawed notion that it has value – on an individual level – to anyone but us. As I said, our metadata has no value in the singular. It is only in the aggregate that the information means anything to advertisers.

So yesterday morning on my way past her office, I stopped to talk to a coworker. She mentions that she just signed up for Twitter. But, she explains, she hasn’t done much with it since she’s not exactly sure what the point of it is.

Twitter is Every Conversation Taking Place Anywhere in the World

In a nutshell, that’s it. If someone is talking about anything – from a good book they read to an interesting article in a magazine, from doing the dishes to the political situation in Darfur – that conversation is taking place on Twitter.

I like to refer to the Internet as the digital water cooler because I see it as a place to have any discussion. Unfortunately for actual water coolers, they are place and time limited. You can only have discussions with the people around them while they’re there. That puts restraints on the people available as well as the topics you might cover.

The Internet has none of that. You can consume and produce your part of the conversation at your convenience. You can read blogs, leave comments, form communities or anything else on your own terms. Twitter is the ultimate representation of that.

Twitter is Egalitarian

On Twitter, you can say whatever interests you, but you will be saying it to a very small audience because Twitter is an egalitarian society – everyone starts with zero followers.

While there is a class of people that are obsessed with the number of people who follow them, I think they miss the larger point. I think the much more relevant number on your stats is the number of people you are following.

It would say more to me that you follow 10,000 than it does that you are followed by 10,000. Twitter is a pull technology. I have to actively choose to pay attention to you. I believe the important number is the count of people you choose to listen to, not the number you can talk to.

Frankly, I don’t follow a lot of the “high value” Twitterers. I don’t buy that they have more to say.

As an example, look at this list of the 10 most influential tweeters in DC.

@PJRodriguez and I were discussing the list over lunch yesterday. He pointed out that @barackobama and @algore are almost completely without merit on this list. Why? Barack’s Twitter account has had nothing to say since the day before the Inauguration. Gore rarely tweets at all, and when he does, has little of consequence to say.

The Politico’s argument for including them is ridiculous – “that spigot could be a powerful communication tool should he choose to turn it back on.” By that standard, people not actually on Twitter could be counted as influential because of the unrealized potential of their influence. If Jesus returned to earth and started tweeting, he’d surely be #1, so why isn’t he on their list?

But What Does This Have to Do With Listening?

To me, listening is more important for three simple reasons:

• I listen to people who listen to others – I could honestly care less about David Gregory, and much of that is because David Gregory could clearly care less about hearing from me. He has 72,000 followers, but only follows 84 people. Are you really telling me that out of 6 million people on Twitter, only 84 of them have something interesting to say? It’s elitist and bullshit.
• I find that most people are interesting at least part of the time – I follow as many people as I can, and keep Tweetdeck running on a separate monitor. I scan it frequently throughout the day. I do so because I am constantly finding items of interest and engaging in interesting (to me at least) discussions with people about randowm topics. I would probably spend more time on the public timeline, but it’s a bit too overwhelming.
• The information I get from “low value” Tweeters is generally more interesting than what “high value” tweeters offer – Many “low value” tweeters talk about things they find interesting. Many “high value” tweeters talk about themselves.

Are You Saying There is a “Right” or “Wrong” Way to Use Twitter?

Absolutely not. That would be like telling people there is a right or wrong way to be interesting, or to be friends, or to think. Use of Twitter is as individual as the users. I hate seeing comments like this one:

For normal humans, though, there is really no need to follow more than a few hundred people.

That’s douchebag-speak for “I don’t follow more than a few hundred people, so if you do, you must be defective.” It’s the same braindead logic that inspired this article.

The clinical psychologist Oliver James has his reservations. ‚ÄúTwittering stems from a lack of identity. It‚Äôs a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity…

[A]grees Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist and director of research based at the University of Sussex. “Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognise you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won’t cure it.”

That’s such a boneheaded thing to say. Do you apply the same logic to talking to friends? Do I only have friends and talk to them to stave off my own insecurity? If that’s the case, what does that say about these pseudo-intellectuals and their cocktail party circuit? Are they just circle-jerking each other to feel better about themselves?

Ok. The answer to that is probably, “YES!”, but you see my point.

What Twitter Is To Me

I made earlier mention of the digital water cooler and the fact that it is time and place limited. What exactly do I mean by that?

In the real world, I could pop into the office next door and talk to a co-worker about my hobbies and my interests. Or I could talk to my neighbors and the other parents at my kids’ school.

But there is a good chance that my interests won’t be their interests. There is a good possibility that their interests will bore me to tears.

By using Google Alerts or Twitter Search, I can find people talking about things that interest me. Bands that I like, hunting tips, movies, politics… whatever. When I want to talk about these things, I can join a conversation with others who share my interests.

That conversation could be with someone a half a world away, who I may never meet, but I will find fascinating anyway. And for the duration of that exchange, they may be the most fascinating person I know.

That, to me, is the power of Twitter. It is the ability to make deep, and yes likely brief, connections between people on meaningful topics. It serves to remind us that we’re not alone, and we all have something interesting to contribute to the human conversation.