I just got inspired for this article here, where Aditya Mukherjee talks about how and why he blogs.I want to talk about that and about why I read blogs - as this is something many people here in germany don’t understand or just don’t want to do.

Aditya Mukherjee tries to get better, develop his way of writing and wants to present his ideas to the world. He tries to keep track of his personal progress. These also motivate me to blog. I’d also give people I know the possibility to read my ideas even when we don’t have real-life contact, as this makes people keep connected. And keeping connected is important to everyone of us. Its not the meaningless facebook-friendship, but the possibility to read, what the other person’s up to. Thats also why I’d love to see more people I know blogging or at least using Twitter. They might think I don’t care about them, but the point is that nobody likes to ask everyday “Hey, whats up in your life?” - and given that you have more than one or two persons you know, its better to have a push- instead of a pull-mechanism to get their updates. When something is important to a friend, I’d like to know it. If he put it on twitter, I get that update. If he even writes a longer blogpost, I still can decide if I’d like to read that thought of if its not important to me.

And writing blogposts isn’t a big deal wither. Okay, it takes some time, and at the moment I can’t find much time to do that either, as I just finished studying and will begin working in a software company tomorrow - and just bought a flat with my girlfriend (well and you have no idea how much time it takes to pick the tiles, the lamination, every bit of the kitchen and get all the bureaucracy done). But writing helps me to order my thoughts and to improve my english. And perhaps someone I happy to hear from me again. You never know.

Same with reading blogposts. I began subscribing to a small number of XML-feeds (from blogs of people I know), but learned some other great blog, that I like to read. Some of them are technical, some are philosophical, some are both. Lately, I posted a blog-link to someone who might have been interested in it, about a management technique that is used in his work and what often goes wrong with it. The response I got was “I don’t have time to read blogs - and this stuff in blogs is all pure theory and has nothing to do with the real world work. And by the way, everyone can read blogs.”

This somehow stroke me. Someone who doesn’t read blogs tells me that everyone can do it. Well, I agree that everyone can read, but reading blogs with content that is about your profession or about stuff you care about is important information for your life. And of course you can’t do that if you don’t take time for it. Some people read the newspaper to know what happens in the world - and they take their time to do that. Some read professional magazines - and also take their time to do that. So whats wrong about reading blogs?

Well, I guess the problem is, that its not really commonplace in Germany to do that. People here are always 4 years behind compared to the trends in the USA - and blogs in Germany are often thought of as homepages where people show off the newest funny stuff they found on youtube. If you’re really picking the good quality stuff, you get much more personalized information than you’d find in any newspaper or professional magazine. The writers are not professional all the time, but who cares? Iknow my posts are not too well thought-out too, but hell where’s the problem? You can skip every blog entry as you could flip a page in the newspaper.

Now back to “everyone can read blogs”: indeed. But not everyone can be patient enough to read blogs, to find blogs that delivers good content and to digest that information in a ways that helps you in your everyday life - or work. Its the same with books. Everyone can read them - but that doesn’t mean everyone takes time to do so. Hell, perhaps it would be better to read books, but if you’re into computers you’ll soon realize that the world changes too fast for books to be cutting-edge.

Well, nevermind. Just a lifesign from someone who doesn’t find much time to blog at this time.

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Robert Scoble (who’s on Twitter about 24 hours a day) did an interesting post about how he uses Twitter today - after he unfollowing a whole lot of people and shutting down his autofollow-bot he still follows about 2k people (about 1300+ that he met and 600+ that he’s interested in). This is one of his accounts that he uses for the “filtered information flood” as I’d call it. All people he follows are from a certain area of expertise that he’s interested in most or people that he’s met and therefore might be interested in their tweets. These people he met are also followed by Scoble on another account.

Scoble tells us that he switches Twitter clients pretty often, and therefore can better filter information by following a certain target group with different accounts. And he also tells us that its pretty impossible to read the tweets of 90000 people anyways.

I must say that I think the same way. But I don’t have time to be on twitter everyminute of the day (as Scoble and some other “Social Media Guru Expert Evangelists”), so I even have to filter some more. First, I took my ithoughts_de account and only followed people I like to read and who tweet interesting stuff. As I don’t have too much time and don’t want to clutter my timeline with people who tweet way too often (like Scoble) or only tweet a lot of completely pointless stuff (like Ashton Kutcher or Tila Tequila), those get removed rapidly. Following 250+ people is pretty easy to keep up with, if you look for the filtered information of the day. This is the source of knowledge, that will always instantly tell you important stuff - much earlier than official magazines or websites. No matter what, I still get a lot of information in there, so I can’t always be on that account when I want to use my time effectively.

Therefore I set up a protected account for myself, where I only follow people I know personally (one exception). Here in germany Twitter STILL didn’t break through to the usual webuser, so these are only six people (if you leave out doubleaccounts). That I’m pretty sure that only friends can read it lets me also dump my own pointless stuff without much information value there AND I can use it for communication. I also use this account with my iPhone, so if I make a pointless TwitPic I won’t scare away my ithoughts_de followers (that I believe are there for the good links I find and share).

After all, I also set up a follower-bot thats nicely working in the background to build up followers slowly with 3.4k followers atm. You never know when you wanna have that audience around (that might mainly be bots, but who cares - sometimes also numbers count).

New Idea for Twitter.com

I think if you know about Twitter you could also drive this to the extreme and make different accounts even for different topics of interest. Every account could follow some special breed of people and you could tweet your links to the group of people who follow your account dedicated to that single topic. In facts, this is one of the features that twitter should integrate into (premium?) accounts: using their REST approach they could let you divide your stream into topics and also let you assign your friends (the people you follow are called ‘friends’ on twitter) to that topic. This topic-centered URL would look like http://twitter.com/ithoughts_de/topicjava/ instead of just http://twitter.com/ithoughts_de and you also wouldn’t have to set up 100 accounts then. A nice drag-and-drop webinterface could let you customize your topics and sort your friends in there and you could decide if you follow a person or only one (or more) of his or her topics. Some microsyntax like “§topicjava I found a nice Java-related article that I want to share” could work for older twitterclients while Twitter expands their API by one more parameter called ‘topic’, so updated clients could directly post messages into topics.

If you like this idea, please share it on Twitter … lets hope someone at Twitter sees it. They could also do this thingy for their premium accounts. *cough cough … I didn’t say that you must be mistaken*

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1. Do I know the person?
If I know the person, I’ll follow no matter what. Its always fun to read what someone you know thinks or likes, even if he’s only complaining about his mood.

2. What is the person’s following-to-follower ratio?  How many updates were posted?
If its roughly one-by-one, they’re normally using some sort of script that let them leave guys who are not following them. This is not a good or a bad point. If they follow a very big number of tweeps but are followed by only very few, its likely that there’s a follower-builder script involved - look at their updates number or at their updates - if its too few or automated stuff, don’t follow these. If they have a lot of followers but few friends, they most likely tweet good stuff. If they have very few followers, look at the stuff they tweet - maybe they give value but are not on twitter too long.

3. Is the follower really there to engage or to pump up their number?There are a lot of follower-pumpers out there. I run one account with only six updates and a follower script running to see if that works … and yes it does. That account has more than 2200 followers. Many out there ar like this - filter out the automated and you’ll get more value.

4. Does the Tweep have the same interests?

Very important. If he’s interested in the same stuff, its most likly that he’s be of value to you, post interesting links or engage in communication about stuff that matters to you.

5. Are the Tweets of value?

Well thats the most important part anyways. If you gain anything from reading his tweets, then the tweep really offers something to you. And thats where Twitter has its purpose: if you read stuff you want to read, its useful. And believe me, there are a lot of tweeps out there who post interesting stuff.

6. Has the Tweeter engaged?
If there are @replies, the tweep does talk back and might even read my tweets. Thats good for communication of if you need to know somethng. If he also RTs stuff he likes, you’ll get even more info that gets redirected to you - if its good.

Image by magerleagues via Flickr

Well most of you reader will have recognized that my blog was loading pretty slowly. I now decided that I should do something about this. When I thought about my blog and why it loaded so slowly, I recognized that I was loading A LOT OF outbound pictures. I first thought it was only the Zemanta-integrated pictures that took too long to load because of their filesize, but after all I saw something more more slowing: the sociable-plugins POST TO SOCIALNETWORKS-buttons.

“But they are very small! Filesize = extremely unimportant?” Indeed. But each of these elements with a src-Attribute makes the browser perform an HTTP-Request, and browsers don’t do too many of those a time. Especially if they’re on different hosts, like all those socialnetwork-sites.

After all I think every “good” social networking site has their own means of posting good stuff (like the Digg and StumbleUpon-Toolbars or one million clients and browserplugins for Twitter), so I decided to just remove them. If you like my posts, you’ll Tweet them or Stumble them anyways, even if I don’t put two million buttons on my page, I guess. Hmm …. so few pictures … I have to post some more content now I assume.

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How would my perfect twitter-client look? Well. Lets begin with: it should load quickly! Everything should be organized into streams like in Tweetdeck. All streams should be closable and reopenable with one button per stream (button should be invisible when stream is open). Stream width and textsize should be controllable.

One stream of direct messages, one stream of @replys. One main stream. Custom streams should be easily configurable. I want groups (as such a stream), where I can see the tweets of Tweeple configured for that stream, so I can actually read the tweets from the people I know personally or those that interest me most. Filtering a stream should be possible, I’d love regular expressions here but I don’t think that this will be done. Twitter searches should be configurable as a stream.

The UI should make viewing linked videos possible or listening to linked postcasts without going to the web. Shortened links should be fully shown if you hover them and be opened in a browser if you click them. As the client needed to decrypt a lot of links, it should also be able to show me all the links it can decrypt in another stream, this time ranked by the most tweeted link. #topics should be highlighted - clicking on it would generate a search-stream. It should be easy to see if the Tweeters you see tweets from follow you or not. A click on their pic should send you to their twitterhomepage in a browser. Twitterusers should be numbable - making their tweets and links not appear in any streams, if its not an @reply or a DM. I’d also love if tweets containing links that I already visited get filtered out automatically - this would seriously cut down the noise.

I want multiple accounts to work. I in fact would love to have an iPhone-App that onyl shows me tweets I didn’t already visit in my workingstation-application - and vice versa. And I want it to be a feedreader too. It should be possible to view feeds till a certain (configurable) length of characters, and a link to their online version if they’re too long. I’d also like some automatation, so you can make a Tweet from a feed.

Well … as you can see I want a lot of stuff. Perhaps this can be an inspiration for someone who has the time to make a superb Twitterclient. Oh … you should also be able to tweet after all.

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Some corporations fear that their employees might tweet something that hurts the corps reputation. And you should too! Most young adults that use twitter or a blog don’t think much about the consequences. Whatever you say/tweet/post might be available to the whole world forever - indexed by seach engines - and for everyone. This includes future bosses you might have, girlfriends and collegues. So if you post something that might be causing a bad reputation to you, try to take it off the net as soon as you realize it and just hope that it didn’t already spread around! Blog entries can be deleted, tweets can be deleted and most sites you post something onto give you the possibility too. Just do it before others recognize it and copy-paste it forever. And hope that the search engines won’t cache it forever.

Image via Wikipedia

Its now the fourth wave of attacks on twitter … the Mikeyy-worm not only infests all users that watch an infected Tweet via the web interface, it also laughs about Twitter. Beside links to infected profiles, it tweets “Don’t blame mikeyy, its twitters fault” or “Twitter hire Mikeyy” … a clear statement, that Twitter’s programmers don’t seem to know enough about cross-side-scripting.

How does the worm work? Easy: Cross-side-scripting (XSS). The name of the account closes the Tag with “> and then opens a <script>-Tag that uses JavaScript to include itself into the name of the watching logged in Twitter-User. This works, when the code is executed by a browser, which happens as soon as you use the web interface of twitter - as the name of the Tweep is shown there.

Image via Wikipedia

How to solve this? Twitter needs to filter all user-entered forms from malicious JavaScript-code when its submitted to their server … basic knowledge one should guess. Well, and they need to strip the Script from the existing infected Tweets. Till that happens, I’d advise everyone to not use the web interface of twitter but stick to other twitter-clients.