mark-elliott.net

Via the Collabforge blog

A question I’m often asked by clients, friends and people just passing by on the street is, ’so what’s the big deal with Twitter anyway?’

This is of course a great question - that is, how is Twitter different than Facebook or any other social networking platform and why should one dedicate their precious time to learning and engaging with yet another web community?

There are a few reasons why Twitter is a big deal, but from my perspective, the primary one is that,

Twitter spreads ideas like air travel spreads the flu

Simply put, Twitter spreads ideas by liberating them from the ‘Facebook social graph’, enabling them to quickly and effectively leap across networks. This is due to the fact that when you post a message to Twitter, it is sent to the entire 19 Million strong network.

So effectively, the tweets of all 19 million Twitter users are thrown into one big heap and then sorted after the fact by followers, or, by hashtags. For example, this allows one to follow the tweets associated with a specific conference - here’s the tag for one I recently attended using: #ccisumit - or discover people interested in and providing information surrounding social media marketing.

While it’s true that most messages you send will be read by those following you (i.e. they get your message in their ‘inbox’) the fact remains that your ideas are open for anyone to discover through a vast range of third party tools made possible by Twitter’s API (and this is something you should be well aware of when using Twitter - unless you are using a ‘Direct message’ (D), you words can be discovered and read by anyone and everyone).

Once discovered, your message can be remixed through simple copy/paste/edit, and then ‘re-tweeted’ (RT) back out to the entire network, and of course to the network of those following the re-tweeter. To give an example, my modest network of 414 followers gives me a second-order reach (those who follow my followers) of 5,928,649. That’s a heck of a lot of people who will receive my ideas should my followers decide to re-tweet them.

So there it is, Twitter spreads ideas like air travel spreads the flu - which makes it a tool like no other when it comes to discovering ideas, news, information and importantly, the people behind them. The flip side of this of course is that you can leverage this tool to spread your own ideas, and if they are contagious, then you just might infect the world…

Last week was pretty intense, here was my schedule:

Sunday 26 Apr - New York

After a very cramped 24hr flight I arrived at JFK in New York and while I was tired, I was buzzing with excitement…

Monday 27 Apr - New York

The view out of my hotel window when I woke up (Madison Square Gardens on the right side of the street one block up):

That evening I appeared on Doug Rushkoff’s radio show, Media Squat on WFMU in Jersey City. Here’s a link to a podcast of the show - I appeared in the first half hour or so just before Joanna Harcourt-Smith.

It was fantastic to meet Doug, he is an amazing guy with a good deal of achievements to his name, and on top of that, he’s a very friendly, genuine, passionate and intelligent guy. Unfortunately things moved so fast in the studio that I forgot to get a picture, but I did get a shot of this odd if not tragic sculpture in Jersey City near the studio (NYC in the background).

Tuesday 28 Apr - New York

I had the great fortune to be asked to present at the OpenGovNYC meetup in DUMBO, Brooklyn, and to facilitate a workshop exploring the idea of ‘policy sprint’. It was a really great group and notes were taken in the Sunlightlabs wiki here (thanks Matt and Marquina for scribing!).

Me in action (my presentation on left screen, and Twitter backchannel on right):

Enraptured audience I’m sure :-):

Workshop underway:

My wonderful hosts (Matt Cooper-Rider, Marquina Iliev, Britt Blazer and some other strange guy):

Thanks to Noneck for the tech help!:

Wednesday 29 Apr - Washington DC

This day was fairly stressful, that is until I arrived at the Sunlight Foundation. I caught a train from Penn Station in NYC to Princeton NJ where I rented a car and drove to Washington DC, and due to cockups/delays with picking up the car, I arrived in DC just in time for rush hour with my presentation being at 5:30pm. After finally finding a parking place and bolting headlong up to the offices, I was greeted by a beer, pretzels and a very interested and warm bunch of folks - thanks to Conor Kenny (senior editor for OpenCongress.org) for organising!!!

We explored many of the challenging and subtle nuances of Web-based collaborative consultation and policy generation and once again due to the frenetic pace, I didn’t get any pictures :-(…

Thursday 30 Apr - Princeton University

Thursday I hightailed it back up to Princeton for the conference start in my very comfy rental car:

And I arrived at last:

The conference, City Planning, Civic Participation the Internet at Princeton University launched with a dinner, then a screening of Us Now a good primer documentary about how Web 2.0 is opening up opportunities for the public to self organise and engage with government and governance issues in general.

Friday 1 May - Princeton University

My presentation was first up for the day with a panel discussion following. It was great to get it over with so I could focus all my attention on the many fantastic presentations and folks amassed at what turned out to be a fantastic conference.

Here’s a picture of the panel discussion I sat on with John Geracy from DIYcities and Nick Grossman from The Open Planning Project who also gave fantastic presentations.

Here’s a few highlights from the conference - not all of them, just one’s I happen to get pictures of!

Edward Andersson from Involve that provides:

Adrian Holovaty, founder of EveryBlock and a lead developer of the Django web framework:

Bill Schrier, Chief Technology Officer, Seattle who gave an inspired presentation and made me hopeful for the future of the adoption of innovative technologies for city infrastructure. Robert Davis, siting in the picture, also gave a focused presentation on Toronto’s experience as leaders in social media adoption:

John Wonderlich, Policy Director for the Sunlight Foundation lead a great discussion on and around their many inspiring projects:

Saturday 2 May - Princeton University

Saturday consisted of a few workshops, the first presented a $200 (if I remember correctly) desktop touch screen solution made by bolting a Wii remote control onto a data projector - very cool!

Then Christian Madera the conference organiser led a session on Web tools for planning (well done for putting together such a successful conference Christian!!!):

And then we wrapped things up with a lunch. Here Wansoo Im from Verticles Interactive Maps is showing off his great community history and mapping projects:

Sunday 3 May - Princeton University

Before heading back to Melbourne I even got a chance to do some sight seeing around Princeton University - a beautiful campus indeed! Here’s a few of my ‘moving stills’ inspired by having high definition video on my camera:

Even the student admin building is grand!

I’ve met a lot of amazing people and learned about an equal amount of amazing projects and programs going on in the US. I think this next year with the Personal Democracy Forum and O’Reily’s Gov2.0 conference coming up, 2009 will have set the pace for the open gov race…

It’s been way too long since I’ve posted, but I’ve been run off my feet with new Collabforge work!

Of course I can’t complain, but I’ve been working through weekends for a few months now, which is less than fun when I’ve got two luvsuckers at my heals!

Hope everyone has a good holiday season and here’s a few pictures!

We just got the boys a ‘twin desk’ - I have no idea how old it is, but it has has holes for ink wells (lower left circle)!

We went to the zoo for the first time without the pram - it felt like such an achievement.

Two’s company!

As part of One Web Day (a global event to celebrate and take stock of the value the web provides humanity) Future Melbourne took part, with Melbourne’s Lord Mayor John So as the 55th One Web Day ambassador, as well as hosting a event to communicate our experiences to those who are in positions to effect change in our local government towards participatory governance. It was my honour to be the keynote speaker for this event, talking about the wiki-base collaborative environment designed and built by my outfit Collabforge, as well as the experience of taking part in one of the world’s first large-scale collaborative endeavours for local governance. Here’s a video of my presentation:

It’s been a busy few months for me and have taken on a few new projects which I hope to talk about soon. Till then, peace out.

I made a brief stop in Howard Rheingold’s beautiful garden office while passing through San Francisco in early July ‘08. He interviewed me for his vlog on the topic of stigmergy and the recent City of Melbourne wiki my company CollabForge designed and developed. (Too bad I look as exhausted as I was - traveling with 2yr old twins is way harder than I ever imagined!) Afterwards we went on a splendid walk on Mt. Tamalpais - great views (despite smoke from forest fires) of the SF bay.

click to watch on Howard’s site