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Greetings. According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. Senate immigration reform advocates Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham are proposing a mandatory biometric (e.g. fingerprint-based) National ID Card system, and are attempting to brush away privacy concerns as trivial and irrelevant.

Note: I heard back anonymously from a customer of iContact. Are they upset that all their customer's email addresses were stolen? Yes. But they aren't that worried about the impact, because they know that most of their customers will never realize that iContact or their company was the source of the leak. In other words, there is no incentive for bulk mail providers to improve security. An email address, particularly one associated with a particular set of services, is the means by which targeting spammers target phishing attacks. It's the key to password changes, bank accounts, and more. Why are the security standards for email any less than they are for credit cards?

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Case #1—AWeber

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Example of how "de-Latinized" domain names can be subverted

http://bit.ly/6YbTBR  (Dean Collins' Blog)

Dean, the "fun" has only just begun.  Some of us have been warning of
this consequence for ... well ... pretty much since day one of the
concept.

As the character of Margo Channing (Bette Davis) so accurately warned
in "All About Eve":

"Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!"

To say the least ...

--Lauren--
NNSquad Moderator

раyраl.com

I'm not a PR or social media consultant, so what does this do for me?

I know. We probably do not need yet another "why should I use Twitter" post. But, the topic keeps coming up, and there is no one definitive answer, so I thought I would give it another try.

This evening I was talking to Alan Ball about Twitter. We had first met at Hannah Burr's Productivity session at the MassTLC Innovation Unconference, and tonight we both happened to be at Dan Bricklin's TechTuesday get-together. He asked me about the value of Twitter to someone like him, because frankly: if you are not in the marketing or social media space, it is not really obvious how to use Twitter. If your business is communicating and selling yourself online, there is a clear benefit to being active on social networks of all kinds.  Alan, however, is a freelance industrial designer (Alan Ball Industrial Design, Inc.). His customers are usually hardware engineers; they are not likely to be heavy Twitter users. So, why should Alan join Twitter, and more importantly, what should he do once he is there?

Twitter as a golf course.

Even getting people to understand Twitter can be an uphill climb, but Alan mentioned something that Laura Fitton (better known in social networking circles as @pistachio) had said at another session at MassTLC Innovation:

"Twitter is my golf course."

That particular analogy clicked with him. Twitter is a networking tool in the old sense of networking—a way to keep in touch with current and potential business partners in a social setting. (Laura expands on it somewhat here). That's a good way to look at it, but it doesn't change the fact that most of his clients aren't using Twitter—playing golf by yourself doesn't offer a lot of networking opportunities.

Twitter is about reputation.

In my mind, the primary value of Twitter to a business is as a way to build and enhance reputation.

The classic example of this is @comcastcares, a Twitter account backed by one person (Frank Eliason) who spends (as far as I can tell) most of his waking hours answering customer questions for Comcast. He has probably done more to improve Comcast's abysmal customer service reputation than anyone else in the company. He does it by being knowledgeable and transparent. You can watching his responses to customers, and he is very open about network problems, letting you know not only how long until a fix is ready, but why he knows. For example, on 2 October 2008, he tweeted a reply to a customer: "I am not loving your signals, running tests in neighborhood and looks like it could be isolated at your location. I recommend a tech." He also improves Comcast's reputation by being human; one of his tweets from 21 July 2008 reads, "I am home with my 6 month old today because she is sick. I ask our 2 year old if she wants to stay with Dad. She responds NO! GO TO SCHOOL." The human element is something that makes Twitter unique in what has increasingly become an impersonal world of customer support. It is a reminder that you are dealing with an actual human. People's questions are more polite, and more tolerant of any difficulties a service may be having. Companies would do well to not only follow Frank's example on Twitter, but to carry some of those lessons over to their traditional customer support systems.

This approach works for customer support, but there is more to reputation than talking to customers. Reputation is about building a following of people who believe you have something worthwhile to share. I believe this is where Twitter has the most to offer anyone who is not in the social media business.

How do you build a reputation?

One of the first companies I worked for out of school was Apollo Computer. A large portion of Apollo's architecture design and discussion took place on the R&D mailing list. As a new employee (with only one year in the industry plus a highly relevant degree in Anthropology), I was understandably nervous about my skills. I soon discovered the mailing list was completely agnostic as to age, education or background. People would post questions, suggestions, problems; others would respond. If you dove in with a nonsense response, you were ignored (or on occasion, flamed). Fundamentally, though, your reputation was based not on who you were, but how good your ideas were. Twitter provides the same environment, only with a scope which spans companies, countries, and time zones.

When you join Twitter, you generally start by following a few people you heard about online. You can also go to http://search.twitter.com/ to see if anyone is discussing topics you find interesting. As you watch posts from the people you follow, you see half of the conversation, so you begin following some of the people who seem to be carrying on interesting conversations with your contacts. Eventually, you jump into the conversations. The advantage Twitter has over a mailing list is two-fold. First, it scales better: because they are limited in size, many conversations can happen at the same time. Second, people can carry on semi-private conversations which followers can either ignore or contribute to (e.g. anyone following my timeline will quickly discover that my children are attending boarding school this year and that I regularly converse with my oldest about homework, sleep, caffeine, and any other pesky worries a parent has when their child is away).

It is these semi-private conversations that can enhance your reputation. You see someone talking about something. You think you have something useful to add, so you reply. Your correspondent can ignore you, block you (oops!), reply to your post, or decide (usually after looking at your Twitter timeline) that the reply was useful and not a fluke, and follow you. Congratulations! You just improved your reputation. Someone felt what you said had value, and wants to hear more.

Your peers are more important to your reputation than your customers.

Back to the question at hand. How does this help if your customers do not use Twitter? The answer is something that also came up at the MassTLC Innovation Unconference, although in a different context. A number of sessions focused on getting the attention (and hopefully, dollars) of venture companies. The issue is that VCs primarily invest in people, not ideas. They want to know the people they are investing in, but of course that is not always possible, so when they are interested in a presentation, they talk to others in the field and the community. They need to know if you are someone who is trusted and respected by your peers.

When it comes down to it, customers are not that different than VCs, especially when they are dealing small companies. Customers want to know if you have a good reputation. They will find out by searching online of course, but also by using their contacts to see if anyone knows you. Has someone they know on the other coast heard of you, and does that person think you have good ideas? What do people in your field think of you? This is where building an online reputation can make a big difference to your company and your career.

So, if Twitter is your golf course, the people with whom you want to play golf are not necessarily your customers (which is not to say you should not invite them if they do play golf). The people with whom you want to interact are your peers, because it is amongst your peers that you can best build your reputation. (And seriously, interacting with your peers is always good for creativity, whether or not you feel a need to network.) The good news is, if your peers are not on Twitter, you can certainly draw them in—because all these arguments work for them too.

Do not hit the golf course without practicing first.

Finding the proper balance of posting/replies, and social/work discussion is a skill, and it takes time. If you were going to network on the golf course, I trust you would go out and get a few lessons before you get together for a foursome. The same strategy works for Twitter. Your peers and customers are not online yet? Great! You get online and learn the ropes now. As your community grows, you will be the expert who has the necessary skills. You had to learn the right way to communicate by the telephone, and the right tone and frequency to use in email. Twitter is just another communication tool, but as with previous tools, it pays to hone your skills first. If you are in a hurry, talk to someone like Laura Fitton, the leading "golf pro" on Twitter.

About that "micro-blogging" thing.

I am not terribly fond of the term "micro-blogging". Yes, there is an aspect of Twitter that is similar to blogging, and certainly it can be used in that manner. Blogging, however, tends to consist of pronouncements-from-on-high without a lot of conversation. (This can change if you have an extremely popular blog that receives a high volume of comments, but face it, most people do not and never will.) Twitter is more about conversations, discussions, and (yes) arguments. Twitter can be used as a mini-blog, but demonstrating your skills in active conversation will enhance your reputation far more than just posting your opinions.

One final thought.

Do not be shy about sharing your expertise. For every person who benefits from your free advice, there are a dozen more who will remember that you are the go-to person when they need your services.

"I always tell people, your biggest problem in life is not going to be hiding your stuff so nobody steals it. It's going to be getting anybody to ever use it." — George Church

Kee Hinckley with help from Angeles Winesett

I brought this up a while back when Apple first announced the store, but now that analysts are estimating possible revenues of $1+ billion in 2009, I think it's worth repeating.

Once you've gone to the trouble of setting up all the infrastructure necessary to sell, deliver and update applications—why stop with just the iPhone? You've done the hard work, everything else is just incremental costs. The Macintosh is the obvious next step, but there's no reason not to provide Windows applications as well. The market potential dwarfs that of just iPhone software.

The initial folks who stand to lose are places like Kagi and Digital River, who currently provide payment and (in some cases) delivery services for small software vendors. But they don't provide marketing, automatic updates, signed applications, and FairPlay copy protection. Apple is going to roll right over them; but they won't stop there.

See The iTunes Trojan Horse: Selling Applications for more thoughts on where Apple might go.

This paper was written for my 10th grade English class. We were given a choice of topics and allowed to argue either side. We researched the topics and made notes, but the final paper had to be written in class, which left no time for proof-reading or editing down. There was a problem with the file server, so I was unable to save my paper. This version was scanned in from the printed copy, and may have additional errors as a result.

"Backchannel" communication mechanisms like Twitter are going to revolutionize everything from meetings and classrooms, to our day-to-day relationships… but first we have to learn to deal with them appropriately. At SXSW, the Twitter backchannel turned an audience into a mob. The session leaders, not having access to the backchannel, had no idea what was happening, or why the mood of the audience had changed so rapidly.

This is an article about the keynote interview at the 2008 SXSW Interactive Festival. If you haven't heard the details, you can do a Google search on "SXSW Lacy Zuckerberg interview", or read one of many articles such as Wired’s SXSW: 2008, the Year the Audience Keynoted.

First things first.

I am not going to make any comments here about whether it was a good interview, bad interview, inappropriate topic, inappropriate people… that's not the point of this article, nor do I think it was really the reason why the audience at SXSW got so upset. Please keep any comments on topic, and away from the details of the interview. In particular, keep in mind that this was not the only session at SXSW that ended up with an audience verbally attacking the panelists and taking over the session.

At the SXSW Keynote interview, an audience of conference-goers acted unusually; they became a mob. I mean that in the sense (as Dave Winer does in his "Twitter is not a chatroom" podcast) of a crowd out of control—a crowd doing things that individuals would not. This is the kind of behavior generally seen at political events; or meetings where the audience is emotionally tied to the subject matter. An interview or panel that seems off-topic usually gets a few walk-outs and a bad rating in the "What can we do better next year?" survey; not an audience revolt. I find that very interesting, and I have some ideas as to why it may have occurred.

“Where are the yellow comment cards?” - 51 minutes

In the nineteen-sixties, psychologist Stanley Milgram ran a series of experiments which are probably familiar to anyone who has taken Psychology 101. He asked subjects to inflict pain on a person when that person made a mistake on a test. A number of interesting results came out of the experiment, but one variation in particular is relevant here. The willingness to administer shocks increased when the recipient was more remote. It's hard to de-humanize someone who is right next to you. On the other hand, if you can't see them, and don't know them, your emotional attachment is greatly reduced, and you will do (and say) things you would never do in person. This isn't news to anyone who has been involved in an email flame-fest, or posted something online that later got quoted face-to-face. We say things online that we would never say in real life.

“sarah lacey is in love with zuckerberg, me thinks”- 11 minutes
“someone offering me $20 to yell "Beacon Sucks". paying for my night of drinking if I do. I definitely should.”- 17 minutes
“Someone just yelled out, "BEACON SUCKS!" - yes, that's how this is going...u should be here :)”- 18 minutes
“Holy cow, whoever this is interviewing Mark is horrible! I think she is in love with him. Hold on...she might go in for the kiss!" - 20 minutes

Mobs form when individuals feel anonymous, and believe that their feelings and behaviors are shared by others. When the behavior becomes visible, and when nobody reacts negatively to it, the behavior gets amplified, with more and more people joining in. But why would this happen in a technical conference on a relatively unexciting keynote topic?

The blame, of course, has fallen on Twitter, because it was through Twitter messages that the revolt first began to appear. More and more, services like Twitter are being used as "backchannel" communications mechanisms by which the audience can provide non-interruptive feedback to each other, and to the people running the event. In this case, the people running the keynote obviously weren't tracking the backchannel (perhaps "sidechannel" would be more accurate in that instance). Rationally, there's no reason to get frustrated that your Twitter comments are being "ignored" by someone whom you know isn't reading them, but frustration probably did play a role here as well.

One thing that wasn't clear to me in the discussions about the keynote, was whether the Twitter phenomenon was "real", or whether it was just the result of a lot of posts by a few (prolific) individuals. So I decided to see if I could gather up a collection of all the Twitter messages sent from the keynote, during the keynote.

There's a detailed methodology section at the end, but this is the quick summary.

1. Searched for all users who mentioned "SXSW" between Thursday and Sunday the week of the conference.
2. Searched for all users who mentioned "facebook", "lacy", "zuck" or "keynote" within a few hours of the event.
3. Manually narrowed down the resulting 4000 messages.

The final result was nearly 2000 Twitter messages, sent by 500 users. I know that some of the messages I included were irrelevant, and I'm sure I missed others. But overall, that comes to an average of close to one message every two seconds! There is no question that backchannel communications were very active during the keynote.

It is my belief that what happened was a combination of standard mob behavior with the side-effects of the behavior observed by Milgram. People sent messages, using the usual level of rudeness that occurs in electronic communication. Those messages were read by people also at the keynote. As the level of vitriol rose in the twittersphere, it also fed back into the people in the crowd. "Surrounded" by other people feeling the same way, the animosity and feeling of anonymity moved from the virtual world into the real world; and a virtual mob turned into a real one.

Is that what really happened? It's impossible to say for sure. Twitter is not a real-time protocol, and people take time to type messages, so it was impossible to directly connect a particular message to a particular time during the talk. Also, there is no way to tell who in the audience saw the messages (or heard about them from a seat-mate who did).

What I have done, is gather up the Twitter messages from the keynote, and overlay them directly on a video of the interview. I used the video posted on Viddler by allfacebook. It cuts off somewhere near the end, but was the most complete version I could find.

The following video is annotated with all the Twitter messages I collected. In some cases you'll have to pause to read them, since they go by too quickly. I grouped together any posts that occurred within one second of each other to make it a little easier to scan. Since I saw apparent lags of up to fourteen minutes between what some tweets described and what happened, I finally settled on a five minute lag for all tweets. So keep in mind that the tweets do not directly correspond to the current scene in the video, and two adjacent tweets were not necessarily written, sent, or recorded at the same time.

Because this version of the video is hosted at Viddler, you can not only comment on my blog, you can also make comments in the video, attaching them to particular frames. Please feel free to do so.

The Annotated Video

Note: The annotations will be easier to read if you expand the video to full size (click in the upper right hand corner of the video).

The Annotated Data

The following charts show the relationships between messages ("tweets"), users, content and time. I have actually done a minimal amount of analysis. Most of my time was spent filtering the data and annotating the video. If someone wants to examine things some more, I'd be happy to turn over the data and my (very) motley collection of Perl scripts.

The charts are all plotted against time, usually expressed as HH:MM and sometimes just MM. All values are the sum of the activity over a minute, or in some cases, five minutes.

Number of Messages Sent and Number of Users

The blue area shows the total number of messages being sent each minute. The red area shows the total number of new users (i.e. those who haven't previously sent a message). I actually have not spent much time examining what happens in the video vs. what happens in the tweets. Does something interesting happen around 45 minutes to cause a spike, or is that a conincidence?

The final total was 512 users and 1857 messages.

First and Last Sending Times (With Count) Per User

The following two charts (attempt to) provide a view of how often and how long people were posting messages. I could have done a standard mean/median/mode chart, but I wanted to include the start and stop times. In both charts the vertical axis represents the time at which someone sent their first message, and the horizontal axis indicates when they sent their last message. (So the diagonal line represents people who only sent one message.) The first chart uses the size of the bubble to indicate how many messages the person sent. The second chart uses the color of the square.

The most messages sent was 65 (by three people). A quick check indicated that the frequent posts seemed to be from people providing a running report on what was happening.

Frequency of Top 50 Words over Time

You'll probably want to click on the image and view the PDF version.

This chart shows how often each word appeared during a given five minute period. The most common words appear on the right. For instance, we can see that the words "audience", "people" and "crowd" grow in popularity over time; probably indicating that people were tweeting about the behavior of the audience as the interview progressed.

Frequency of Top 50 Words by User over Time

This chart addresses the question of whether the messages were being sent by just a few people, or many. Here the value for each five minute period is the number of people who used a word. Where the previous chart counted all instances of a word, even if used multiple times by a single user; this counts only one use per user. The chart appears very similar to the previous one, indicating that the use of the top fifty words was quite wide-spread.

Top 50 Words, Total Frequency, and by User

Like the previous chart, but showing just the totals. The red bars indicate the number of people who used a given word. The blue bars indicate the total number of times the word was used. Again, the usage appear to be fairly evenly distributed.

Conclusion

The Twitter transcript makes it clear that there was an early and constant stream of negative comments flowing from a large number of senders. The lack of accurate timing information makes it impossible to tell for certain whether that was something that started small and spread, or exactly how it erupted into real life. However, it is clear that the conversations in Twitter did lead to the same level of real life behavior and dialog. While it could just be attributed to the general decline of societal mores, I believe my original assertion as to the connection and influence of the virtual and real worlds is potentially valid. It would be interesting to see a more detailed and rigorous study of future events. (Sounds like a good Sociology/Psychology/Anthropology thesis for someone. :-)

Twitter provides a communication channel which augments, rather than interrupts, existing communications. As such, it makes it possible for people to communicate both within a group, and (in structured events) to the leaders of a group, all without disrupting the normal progress of the activity. If that sounds like too much for a panel discussion or interviewer to manage, consider that most reporters in traditional media (not to mention football quarterbacks) have similar mechanisms for receiving information while they work. Whether increased multitasking is a good thing from a quality standpoint is a different issue. For that, look at the research that Howard Rheingold has been doing in the areas of multitasking and backchannels.

The Twitter backchannel can definitely have a positive influence. As a remote observer of SXSW I was not only able to receive ongoing summaries of sessions, but I could suggest questions for attendees to ask, and provide resources to panelists while they were in an active session. The backchannel can provide a low-key mechanism for alerting presenters to issues, offering support, and of course organizing and coordinating group actions. The issue, is how to keep group actions from growing out of control. I believe that requires education (or perhaps just a new generation of users) about the differences between virtual and real communication, and the dangers of transporting emotions directly from one to the other. I believe it also requires responsibility on the part of backchannel spectators.

There is a tendency in online discussions to let flames burn themselves out. After all, it's the virtual world, not the real one. "Getting involved" can be a pain. But as the SXSW events show, the boundaries between real and virtual get thinner every year, and virtual emotions can cause real-world harm. I greatly admire Sarah Lacy's ability to deal with the abuse she has gotten and move on. A reporter has to have a tough skin, but it still can't have been easy. She didn't deserve the abuse that was dished out on Twitter, let alone what happened in the auditorium.

As citizens of the online world, we have a responsibility to step forward when we see people misbehaving. It doesn't take much to tone things down. People need to be reminded that the target of their frustrations is a real person. They also need to be reminded that their persona, though virtual, has its own reputation to think about. The members of an online mob are in fact far less anonymous than those in a real mob. I was rather shocked when I happened to notice that one of the tweets I quoted above was actually made by someone I follow on Twitter. It was more sophomoric than mean, but it still contributed to the overall mood. Finding out who said what during the conference is a simple task for anyone with access to Google. We need to live our online lives under the assumption that everything we say, and everything we do, no matter how private it seems, is going to contribute to our overall reputation. That's a good thing, but it takes getting used to.

“So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses.... That proves something - that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children.” –– Jean Louise (Scout) Finch in "To Kill a Mockingbird"

Finally, when we misbehave online (as we all invariably do at one time or another) we need to own up and apologize. Fortunately, the same attributes that make it easier to screw-up online, also make it easier to apologize online. You don't have to do it face to face, a quick tweet or email message works just fine. If you were at the SXSW keynote, you might consider that.

Predictions

This experience, and the past month that I've spent intensively using Twitter, have led me to a few beliefs about where this all is leading us.

The first one easy. Anyone who runs a conference, panel or large meeting without monitoring the backchannel is simply asking for trouble. Ironically, SXSW did have an official chatroom for the keynote, but that did not receive as much traffic, nor was it being monitored as a backchannel should be.

The second one is longer term. For several generations social networking on the computer has been derided as not having the depth or value of real life social interactions. Tools like Twitter (and Facebook), which blur the lines between work and home, important and trivial, and which deliberately create a malleable and ambiguous set of simple tools ("status", "poke", "what are you doing") are the primitive forerunners of what the next generation will take for granted. The always-on aspects will surely migrate to phones and become a constant part of our online life. The interfaces may be crude, but I am already more connected to the lives of people halfway across the world than I am with my next door neighbors. That knowledge extends from the trivial (I'd love to have dinner at Adam Engst's house, he cooks a lot of interesting stuff) to the critical (Susan Reynolds' fight with breast cancer has led to a wonderful support group and a great funding effort). It isn't a matter of not spending time with the neighbors, it's that I don't have a real-time, ongoing conversation with my neighbors day in and day out! The next generation is going to look back at pre-computer-mediated social interaction and say that we are the ones who had no depth in our relationships.

Methodology

• Searched for all users who mentioned SXSW between Thursday and Sunday the week of the conference (4068). For this I used the Terraminds Twitter Search API with a filter for the correct dates.
• Searched for all users who mentioned "facebook" (256), "lacy" (80), "keynote" (290) or "zuck" (111) between 1pm and 4pm on the day of the interview.
• I then took the list of 4232 unique users from the previous searches, and gathered every message they posted between 2:05pm and 3:15pm. (I initially gathered more, but then narrowed it down to those times as my best guess for the start/end times of the interview, as well as the most likely lag time for tweets.) The Terraminds search doesn't do per-user searching, so I used Tweetscan. Tweetscan doesn't provide an API, so I screen scraped the results.
• Narrowed down the resulting 3562 messages by splitting them into two groups. The first group matched the previously searched keywords (2039), the second did not (1523). I scanned the first group for messages that didn't look like they belonged (wrong topic, different session). I scanned the second for things that I might have missed. Those were quick scans and sloppy. The end result was to remove 66 entries and add 30.
• I should note that there are several things I didn't do but could have. That includes searching for additional keywords, and also checking the communication chains. E.g. If user @a sent a message to @b, then I should check @b's messages as well. I also did not include the Meebo transcriptsin the results, although that would be easy to add.
• The final result was 512 users and 1857 messages. (One user was removed in post-processing, when I realized that "twitgeistr" was a bot that simply reported on keywords that it found in the public stream.)
• I then spent an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to subtitle the video, including attempts at two different sub-title formats. The final solution involved Final Cut Pro and programatically generated XML files that specified text-effect overlays with differing offsets depending on the number of lines. If anyone at Apple wants to write a bit more documentation on FCP XML files, and provide a few more examples, that would be just fine with me. The annotations have all @user references changed to "@", and all links replaced with "[LINK]". The data is public, but I see no reason to make it easy to embarrass individuals.
  
• The keyword processing is also done with a Perl program. Lingua::StopWords was used to remove common English words from the list. Lingua::Stem was used to stem the words (e.g. make "improve", "improves" and "improved" all map to the same word). Stemming exceptions were made to ensure that the words in the top fifty were all spelled correctly (stemming programs don't really care if the result is a real word, only that the mapping is correct. "improves" normally gets stemmed to "improv"). In addition, I added some other common mappings. "sarah", and "lacey" both map to "lacy". "mark", "zuck", "z" and "zuckerburg" all map to "zuckerberg". "fb" maps to "facebook", and so on. I also added some additional stop words. I tossed "just", "like", "now", "can", "go", "got" and a number of other words that were very common but which didn't really carry any emotional content.
• The same Perl program generated the XML files, as well as a set of tab-separated data files for processing by DeltaGraph. DeltaGraph is a very powerful charting software (particularly if you are dealing with data sets with missing data), but some better (dare I say, "prettier"?) defaults and an updated UI wouldn't hurt.

If anyone is feeling particularly masochistic, I would be happy to package the whole mess up and make it available for download. Let me know.

Postscript

All the data gathering and analysis here were done by myself and for that, and any of the errors that are inevitable in such a rushed project, I am solely responsible. However, I'd like to thank a few people who contributed, knowingly or unknowingly.

• Jeremiah Owyang, Robert Scoble, Marshall Kirkpatrick and Dave Winer all discussed in detail what was happening, and why, on Twitter and on their blogs.
• Howard Rheingold is doing some very interesting work on backchannels and multitasking. His tweets on the daily progress of his Virtual Communities/Social Media class are quite interesting and relevant to this discussion.
  
• At a recent Boston Tweetup someone from the SOURCEBoston group suggested that I do a word analysis; a suggestion which added several days to the project, but was definitely worth it. Unfortunately I don't remember who it was, let alone their name.
• Also at the Boston Tweetup, Dmitri Gunn reminded me of the name of the other SXSW session which had a Twitter dustup, "Social Marketing Strategies Metrics, Where Are They?" (apparently that's what the audience wanted to know too) which in turn led me back to Jeremiah's excellent article on the different sessions where Twitter played a role.
• Dan Byler gave me feedback on a preliminary version of this article and brought up the mob scene in "To Kill a Mockingbird".
• Brett Peters reminded me that I hadn't gotten around to proving my claim that it wasn't just a few malcontents; thus sending me off to create two more charts just when I thought I was done.