somehow this blog has gained followers over its semester of use, despite the fact it was just a workblog, mostly full of links. which must mean you guys are interested in the topic of digital citizenship and internet pollution! :)

This assignment is over and I am moving on to part 2… the interesting part where I actually make something from all this research! So head on over to my new workblog (linked above), which I’m sure will turn out much more interesting than this one for you to follow.

and another one.

i wanted to work with classic sayings that we learn as kids when our parents teach us to be good people and appropriate them for teaching twitter users to become good digital citizens.

playing with some visuals for my new focus on twitter users. 

1. What is valuable to YOU, is valuable to others. If you find information online that you feel is relevant, post it. If you come across a quote that you think is insightful, post it. If you had an amazing meal at a new restaurant, post it. If the updates that you tweet hold value for yourself, they’re of benefit to other people in the community as well. And you know what adds even more value to those posts?


2. Links, links, and more links. Let’s use the amazing meal/new restaurant post as an example. Let’s say you tweeted about the meal, but you took a photo of you meal and attached it to your tweet, or attached a link to their yelp page. This is turns your praising of that new found restaurant into information that people can dig into for themselves. That’s real value!


3. You have access to virtually anyone. People, companies are on Twitter because of the open communication it stimulates. You can speak out to whomever you want. You can listen in on whoever you want. Have a complaint, a comment, a recommendation? You have the power to communicate with people you normally wouldn’t have access to. I use Hootsuite to track information that’s important to me, which I can then comment on or retweet. It’s mind-blowing in itself, with a click of a button, you have the ability to enter a conversation with millions of other people around the world.


4. It’s easy to use. Like I said, a click of a button and you’re now engaged in the world of Twitter. It’s that simple. You can put as much or as little effort into your account as you want to. It’s meant to be a tool for discovering information, meeting new people, and broadening your scope of whatever interests you, at your own pace.

“I believe that in order to compete in the global economy, you have to have an online personal brand. After you create that presence, you have to maintain it throughout the course of your entire life, before someone else does it for you. We are living in a world now where visibility creates opportunities and reputation builds trust.”

- from this article on Reputation economy

also by the same author (Dan Schawbel) is this article entitled “5 reasons why your online presence will replace your resume in 10 years”  

“The term “reputation economy” arose to explain that when you edit a Wikipedia entry or upload a clip to YouTube, you boost your personal reputation.”

article is mostly about what the reputation economy means for businesses.

In my feedback session Mark asked why people should care about the issue of internet pollution.

I replied with talking about Tapscott’s “critical turning point” and the disappearing boundaries between the virtual and physical world, and how we shouldn’t pollute the internet just as we shouldn’t pollute the earth.

That is a very hard thing to get people who HAVEN’T read Macrowikinomics to comprehend tho. and i guess that’s my challenge. 

BUT I think I have found a new angle that will help with getting people to care. The reputation economy. I sort of already thought about this, but not in those exact words, when I talked in my proposal about ones digital citizenship becoming more and more important. Most of the material on the topic that I’ve found talks about businesses and how they will sell more/be trusted more/have more influence if they have a good online standing, but I think it also applies to individuals as well, especially twitter users.

Every twitter user wants to gain followers. we want our tweets to have as wide a spread as possible. and if you don’t want that, then you’re not using twitter right, because if you intend for your tweets to only reach your friends, well, thats what facebook status updates are for. (When i first got into twitter and was trying to explain it to people a lot of them said “so basically it’s just like facebook status updates?” and then i generally rolled my eyes and wrote them off as a lost cause.) but, back to the point, in this day and age, our online reputation is important. a good rep means more followers, more spread, more recognition, even more opportunities!

and how do we get a good rep? 

by contributing and sharing quality. by being an involved digital citizen. 

so, essentially, by not polluting.

I think the idea of a reputation economy answers another question Mark asked me in my feedback session: “So what do I get out of it?”

So the main aim of my project is the same: to get digital citizens to stop internet pollution. but now i have the added benefit of this idea being able to offer them something in return: a better online reputation. it’s almost a macro/micro thing.

many services exist that rank/grade twitter accounts. a few i’ve taken a look at are peerindex, twittergrader and klout

on first glance Klout seemed to be the best as it offers lots of statistics like who you influence, who you are influenced by, topics you are influential about and lots more. but on closer look, these statistics don’t seem very accurate. it tells me that i’m influential about homosexuality and itunes (among other, more relevant things) which is strange because i don’t tweet about either of those things very often at all…i also don’t like that it tries to analyse your facebook at the same time. (and as we all know by now, i hate facebook.)

twittergrader doesn’t offer as many statistics, BUT reading their how does twittergrader calculate rankings section is VERY helpful for my project. (i guess its a quality, not quantity thing!)

i won’t bother to repost it all here but the main thing that interests me is that the more engagement you have with users of a high grade, the higher the grade you get. 

going back to Klout, one thing i did like was how they put your account into categories. for example, they called me a Specialist meaning i generally tweet about a certain topic to a highly engaged audience. i thought that was a little odd as i think my personal account would better be called Conversationalist as most of it is @replies! some other categories are Networker, Feeder, Explorer, Socializer, Thought Leader and Pundit. So although i don’t think the algorithm they are using to put accounts into categories is right, the idea of the categories is. 

When talking about quality, not every twitter account is the same, or even intended to do the same job. everyone has a different tweeting style so you can’t compare everyone with everyone… of that makes sense.

when tumblarity existed on tumblr, in your settings you entered 3 words to describe your blog. it was probably the only good thing about tumblarity because it meant that it was super easy to find other blogs you were interested in, and it also sorted blogs by country, so it was great to easily find other NZ bloggers. 

There is a user powered directory called wefollow that i totally forgot about until i looked in my settings just now that does basically the same thing as i was just talking about with tumblr (enter 3 words etc) but in a 3rd party app. (i laughed to see that over 2 and a half years ago when is et my twitter up i put falloutboyfan as one of the words xD hilarious, but i am the top user for that tag!! haha. it’s so funny that i’m not even going to change it; for nostalgias sake.)

An interesting article entitled “I don’t care if you don’t read this article” by Tweetage Wasteland about judging the quality of your contributions online by stats such as ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’